Quiring Celebrating 75 Years in Business

Quiring General, a general contractor in Fresno, is celebrating 75 years in business. First founded in Reedley by Ben Quiring in 1947, Quiring General started building custom homes in the Central Valley, and eventually moved into residential construction. In the early 1980s, Ben’s sons Paul and Greg Quiring shifted its focus to commercial construction.

Paul and Greg both serve as board members, with Greg acting as vice president. Since then, the company has built a strong reputation with clients, as well as many familiar projects across the Central Valley including the Community Cancer Institute in Clovis, The Vineyards California Armenian Home, the Trinity Community Church of Clovis, the Fresno Pacific University Culture and Arts Center, and much more.

Since the mid-1980s, Quiring General has specialized in construction for the senior living and health care industry, as well as multifamily homes, which it continues to this day. Quiring General President and CEO Josh Sherfield, that not only is it rare for a construction company to be in business for over seven decades, but to also be building towards the future.

“A lot of construction companies are started by entrepreneurs, privately held, and run for a while,” Sherfield said. “When the entrepreneur decides to retire, the company retires.”

In the case of Quiring General, Paul and Greg brought the company to a point where they wanted to keep their father’s legacy alive, and make sure the business lasted well into the future.

One reason Sherfield said many construction companies don’t last as long as Quiring is because by the time they start to retire, that’s when they start thinking about succession planning. But he said by then, there is no time left to plan because they are ready to find their exit strategy.

With the planning process for a successful transition starting in 2012, and since Paul’s retirement in 2019, the company is now in its third generation of leadership and managed by non-family members, successfully making the transition to a business run by family to one run by key employees leading the company forward.

Sherfield took over as president in 2019 and then Covid happened — “perfect timing,” he said. There were projects that experienced delays, were postponed, and sometimes even cancelled.

Sherfield said that management was sympathetic with their clients, as the Covid-19 pandemic was affecting everyone. There needed to be solutions that worked for everyone.

Sherfield said that even before the pandemic, resource and material shortages and price increases were part of business, but the team tries to maintain the best solutions for clients and provide value.

In some cases, the team at Quiring provides daily updates for prices, especially for materials such as lumber.

Though the labor crunch for virtually all industries was felt hardest since the start of the pandemic, Sherfield said that the labor shortage has its roots in the Great Recession.

“You had so much of the workforce leave the industry in those years, and you had school programs in universities and career technical education schools downsize, which took years to recover. Ever since then, we have been in this growth phase in the economy — building, building, building for many years — but the labor force has never caught up,” Sherfield said.

Labor availability is still an issue, but Sherfield said he is happy to see more of a shift in schools to promote careers in the technical trade industries.

Currently, Quiring is busy with construction projects in the health care industry, multi-family residencies and affordable housing projects throughout the state. Mixed commercial and office-type projects are always on the queue, and there have been more religious based builds for local faith organizations.

In 2019, Quiring opened an office in Pleasanton to have a closer relationship with clients outside of the Central Valley.

This allows the company’s workers to live in the area they work in and cut down on travel time and costs for both clients and the team.

Sherfield said that the company will keep on striving to provide the highest quality and value to its clients to make it another 75 years in business.

“We want to grow so that we can support our clients on their projects and provide the Quiring Experience on more projects, and to provide opportunities for our staff to grow,” Sherfield said.

Frank Lopez | The Focus | The Business Journal