What’s in Your Roller Coaster?
This spring, Kings Dominion amusement park unveiled the Intimidator 305, a new
giga coaster being billed as the tallest, fastest roller coaster of its type on the East Coast. Many people will be interested in hearing about a coaster named for the late, great Dale Earnhardt. But (sigh) perhaps only a handful will be excited to know who performed all the MEP engineering, electrical construction and fall protection services for the project.
Welcome to the world of Jon Loftis, President of Industrial TurnAround Corporation. It’s the same old story. ITAC, a design/build engineering and construction firm, does all the great work, and the client gets all the glory. Yet Loftis wouldn’t have it any other way.
“If we’ve done an engineering or construction job correctly, the public probably won’t ever hear about it,” says Loftis, a 20-year veteran of the company. “That’s okay, because we don’t mind getting our accolades in the form of repeat business.”
And ITAC gets a lot of that, across a variety of industries. They count universities, biofuel plants across Europe, and NASA among their clients. Not surprising from a company founded on innovation.
Innovation Fuels Growth
ITAC began in 1988 with a novel concept: develop a model of design/build turnkey work—a single source of responsibility clients could come to for all of their engineering and construction needs.
“The competition is often very focused on one specific area. ITAC has grown by being diverse. We’ve added capabilities all the way through engineering, being multi-disciplined—and the construction crafts, as well, in house,” says Loftis.
As a result, ITAC is very vertically integrated. The company can do a turnkey job on an industrial manufacturing site from beginning to end, all the way through commissioning and startup. And clients today prefer to have a single point of responsibility. But it wasn’t always this way.
According to Loftis, clients in the late 80s and early 90s were skeptical about placing that much responsibility on one firm or one contractor. “It took us a while to establish this model to the point that clients felt they were still in control of a project even when while ITAC had so much responsibility for the details.”
Another way ITAC has been a real innovator is by championing “minimal essential engineering.” This revolutionary concept upended the belief that engineering has to be exhaustively labor and detail intensive.
“Minimal essential engineering is a different approach in that you develop excellent engineering at the least cost,” says Loftis. “It minimizes the design time and paper associated with engineering, but it still performs optimally. We believe we’ve done some great things to establish this approach in the marketplace.”
Strength of ITAC’s Family of Services
When you ask about ITAC’s growth over the past two decades, you’ll hear about the strength of ITAC’s “family of services.” This almost certainly refers to the company’s wide range of capabilities. Yet it’s much more.
At ITAC, “family” starts with the employees. Their talent, experience and depth are what make ITAC as strong as it is.
“We try to treat each other like family,” says Loftis. “Through thick and thin, we’re working together to figure out how to get a project done and deliver what the client is looking for.”
The company also makes it a point to deliver on behalf of its employees. ITAC is a place people can come to not just for a job, but for a career. “We hire a lot of ‘A’ players. If you do that, you have to keep them challenged, and you have to give them a future.”
This makes for an exciting day at the office for ITAC employees. Roller coaster included.