Say the difficult thing early
If a drawing will not hold or a number will not survive, we say so before the contract is signed. It is the cheapest thing we do.
The story
Two carpenters
and a stubborn
principle.
Arden & Vale started in 2005 in a rented bay off NW 18th Avenue with two framing crews, a used excavator and a rule the founders wrote on the shop whiteboard: tell the client the truth before it becomes expensive.
That rule cost them work. Twice in the first year they walked away from tenders because the drawings would not hold — once on a bank building with undersized footings, once on a hotel where the fire shaft had been drawn in the wrong place. Both clients came back years later. Both are still clients.
What changed over two decades is scale, not character. We now run projects up to $220M, we self-perform structural steel and concrete, and we carry $50M in surety capacity. But the whiteboard is still there in the Portland office, and the same people still sign off on the numbers.
We have turned down more work than we have taken — deliberately. The company stays around 90 people because past that, superintendents start reporting to people they have never stood on a slab with. That limit is the reason our on-time record is 98.4%.
We are employee-owned. Thirty-one superintendents and estimators hold the shares, so the incentive to cut a corner for a margin has never been strong.
“Anyone can pour concrete. The job is knowing what happens on the eleventh of the month, eighteen months after you signed the contract.”