DEVCO Development & Engineering is not just another California startup. It’s a young company with a precocious understanding of what it takes to succeed. Its maturity lies in the life and work experience of the three native Californians who partnered to form the company.
Chad Decker is a former professional baseball player and real estate maven. Donnie Thomason is a former Navy medical corpsman who subsequently started a successful mortgage banking firm. The third is Nick Rossi, a seasoned tradesman whose decades of experience in belowground construction are the fulcrum of DEVCO’s early success.
The partnership of the three men stemmed from a lunch meeting between Thomason and Rossi in which Thomason sought to collaborate with Rossi in a new enterprise. Decker already was sharing office space with Thomason in their mortgage, real estate and property development ventures. Subsequent discussions among the trio of businessmen led to the launching of DEVCO.
“Donnie and I ran businesses and were involved in property development,” says Decker, the company’s chief operating officer. “Nick is the one with the expertise.”
Rossi is also DEVCO’s chief financial officer.
A Statewide Approach
The company is headquartered in Temecula, a city situated between Los Angeles and San Diego and an economic suburb of each. Yet DEVCO is not a “local” company in any real sense, nor a regional one. Its targeted market is all of California.
“We’ve worked down south near the border. We try to cover it all,” Decker says. “We have some partners in Northern California who work with us on projects there.”
Such partnering with other companies helps explain how DEVCO can take on widely scattered projects with a relatively small fleet of drills and vac trucks and a total of 12 employees. Decker says the company’s pricing structure helps it compete with local companies at the other end of the state.
And what is the mainstay of the company’s business? Horizontal directional drilling and hydroexcavation work. “From our experience, they go hand in hand, depending on the municipality where we’re working and the job itself. Right now, our work is split about 50-50 between those two services,” Decker says.
Consequently, virtually all of DEVCO’s revenue stream is generated by those two offered services. Its pipe bursting and sewer line repair services are largely still being marketed. “Though we have the experience to do them,” says Decker.
A project in San Diego for the state Department of Transportation illustrates the firm’s drilling and hydrovac capacity. The effort involved running a line under the on- and off-ramps of a freeway and across a corner of San Diego State University.
“We expected to directional drill the entire site but ended up trenching much of it with a hydrovac unit because of unexpected conditions,” Decker recalls. For one thing, an older roadway was discovered buried beneath the freeway, which precluded drilling. The abundant presence of cobblestones and boulders in the soil also thwarted drillers.
“In that situation, we ran into things we didn’t expect, but we found a way to get the project done,” Decker says. “Our working motto is to always find a way to complete a job as soon as possible.” In this case, completion took two months and depended heavily on Rossi’s 20 years of hydrovac and directional drilling experience.
Other daunting jobs include one Rossi remembers on a Northern California property that offered limited access. “Equipment had to stay in the front of the residence,” he recalls, “so we had to string out vacuum and pressure washer hoses, and Visqueen to protect the driveway — all so we could complete a 10-foot-deep, 80-foot-long trench that crossed over a sewer main.”
Sounds like a headache. “That type of job is satisfying because we overcome hurdles and can see the results,” Rossi says. “We like the challenge. The projects are satisfying.”
A Unique Model
DEVCO Development & Engineering is building a name for itself as a belowground utility and construction services company. Its new-company approach is a little different than most: working the entire state rather than establishing itself in a smaller market before expanding; and emphasizing only two of its services — hydrovac and HDD.
The business model is by design.
“We quickly realized when we got together that there have been a lot of things done the same way for a long time,” Decker says. “Really, things in the industry have been done the same for 25 years or so. We love taking a different approach to growing a company, innovating, moving the needle a little and giving clients more opportunities.”
This approach has, among other things, resulted in DEVCO taking on jobs that are more difficult than usual, jobs that other contractors tend to shy away from.
One reason the company is able to do this is because of the professional background of its ownership. Thomason, the company’s CEO, brought into DEVCO an A contractor’s state license, which permits contracting of underground work. Decker has a B license for contracting aboveground construction work.
“Consequently, we can build just about anything,” Decker says. “The combination of licenses sets us apart from competing contractors and is a marketing strength. It’s definitely an advantage to have both licenses.”
What this means for DEVCO is that HDD and hydrovac work — though absolutely instrumental to the company’s early success — may at some point become just two of a suite of services offered to DEVCO clients. A hint of what might be coming can be seen on the company’s website. Under the landing page banner are listed the following categories of services: trenchless technology, site development, roadway construction, residential construction and environmental.
While the company is presently not equipped to build roads, nor construct houses, the intent is to gear up for these and other tasks as quickly as a client requests it.
“What this means is that we’ll be able to do a little bit of everything,” Decker says. “We can offer a turnkey project service for clients, not only for drilling, but for things like building or repairing roadways. We’ll be able to do it all without the clients having to find a contractor for each piece of the project with three pricing markups.”
The company’s current fleet of equipment is three Ditch Witch HDD rigs (a JT10, JT20, and a 130 hp JT25 with 27,000 pounds of thrust and pullback force), two trailered Ditch Witch hydrovac units (each with 12-cubic-yard capacity), and a dump truck. Rossi says he has worked with multiple brands of equipment through the years but prefers Ditch Witch because the machines are durable and well-supported by dealer and manufacturer.
On the vacuum excavation side, DEVCO uses Paradigm units from TRUVAC by Vactor Mfg, Inc. The Paradigm comes equipped with a 6-inch vacuum system, extendable to 14-feet, 6-inch reach and a 210-degree rotation, and a positive displacement blower rated at 15 inches Hg and 2,200 cfm. The debris bodies on the trucks are 675-gallon capacity. The water pump is 8 gpm at 2,500 psi.
One of the advantages to the Paradigm units is that they come in either a Class 6 non-CDL version or a Class 7 chassis.
So far, the company has not had any difficulty finding operators for the machinery. Under Rossi’s tutelage, vendor programs train them “the DEVCO way.” The company also uses the U.S. Department of Defense’s SkillBridge program to transition military veterans into DEVCO jobs. One of the partners, Thomason, is an Iraq War veteran.
“We have found it very rewarding to train veterans to become members of our team,” says Rossi.
A Fluid Future
DEVCO Development & Engineering is an infant company becoming a grown-up one as quickly as opportunities present themselves. Looking back on the progress of the company so far, Decker says the partners wouldn’t do anything different if a do-over were possible — not even the “oops!” moments.
“The challenges we faced were learning experiences,” he says of such moments.
And where are such learning experiences leading the company? Instead of talking in terms of a five- or 10-year plan, Decker speaks of growing and maintaining a level of professionalism with clients until, in a few years, the partners might weigh buyout offers.
Then again, Thomason and his wife have three sons, and Rossi has two sons, notes Decker. “It may be that one or more of the boys will choose to get into DEVCO and continue to grow the company.”
