Blog

Let me introduce myself: I’m the new guy. Not just around VPCS, but around the construction industry. Until recently, I was one of those annoying Silicon Valley creatures who’d spent the entirety of his career in technology corporations. In the Valley, I was the go-to...

I’ve been thinking a lot about change – both in our firm and in our industry. Around here, we’ll soon be saying goodbye to our longest-serving employee, Pete Norgaard, who is gearing up for retirement. Pete joined Van Pelt Construction Services way back in 1999 and...

The Van Pelt Construction Services family extends its warmest wishes to our clients, colleagues, partners and friends during this holiday season. We are grateful for the many ways in which you enrich our professional lives and we look forward to building with you to...

It’s that time of year again when people take a moment to reflect, express appreciation and give good old-fashioned thanks. Here at VPCS, we have a lot to be thankful for – individually and as an organization. In the spirit of the season, we asked our team to share a...

We’ve all heard the adage that you shouldn’t mix business with pleasure. This is certainly solid advice in certain contexts. But I believe there’s great value in building professionally appropriate personal relationships with clients. It’s the kind of intangible that...

There's been a push in recent years for public agencies to move from the traditional Design Bid Build (DBB) delivery model to approaches that do a better job of serving project owners. For years, school districts and other public entities relied on the DBB delivery...

Precision is always important in the construction business, but those of us who work on hospital projects understand the critical nature of what we do. In the healthcare segment, doing our job well can literally be a matter of life and death. We know this, we abide by...

On a recent visit to one of our job sites, I noticed something that struck me as pretty profound. We were getting ready to pour concrete for a large foundation on a sizeable project that had been designed and planned – and was being built – with the help of very...

When my brother, Mike, and I opened VPCS in 1996 and printed our first-ever capabilities brochure, we promoted ourselves as “experienced construction and project managers.” Back then, that was an apt and accurate way to describe us. But in the 21 years since, we’ve...

As of this writing, I’ve been a member of Team Van Pelt for just over a year. And what a difference a year can make. I was brought onboard last April when Mark and Mike Van Pelt asked me to help with what was then a single assignment: to oversee the installation of...