Sear-Brown plans to move to new headquarters

The Sear-Brown Group plans to move its 40-person corporate staff to a new, leased headquarters at Meridian Centre in Brighton.
The move-planned for completion by April-comes as the architectural and engineering firm passes the 1,000-employee mark and has expanded beyond the capacity of its two local facilities.
The 1,000-worker figure represents a near doubling of Sear-Brown’s national employment in some five years, Chairman and CEO Michael Triassi said. The company’s Rochester employment has increased some 50 percent from roughly 200 to 303.
Revenues over the period grew annually at a rate exceeding 20 percent, Triassi added. Gross revenues last year were roughly $72 million.
Sear-Brown several years ago constructed a second building on the Brighton side of Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, and adjacent to its Metro Park headquarters. But that building now is full and the firm continues to hire architects and engineers at a rate of eight workers a week, Triassi said.
The firm hopes new Meridian Centre space will ease its space crunch for the foreseeable future, spokeswoman Marti Mueller said. Much of the current hiring is at offices outside of Rochester.
Sear-Brown, a full-service architectural and engineering firm that several years ago added a construction division, has its headquarters here, but 17 other offices are scattered around the country. Eight of the offices have opened since 1995.
Triassi said the firm’s recent rapid growth is partly a result of a booming economy, but also because of careful positioning. He hopes that strategic effort will protect the company if the economy slows sharply.
In 1996, the employee-owned Sear-Brown reorganized operations, creating new business groups and re-engineering to link workers at scattered offices so that the groups could operate companywide.
The business groups are water and environment, commercial, industrial, transportation and schools.
The firm also picked up several new clients who have been key to the firm’s expansion, Triassi said.
One of the most important additions has been CVS Corp., Triassi said. Sear-Brown parlayed a few jobs designing new Rochester-area CVS drugstores into a regional relationship that now has Sear-Brown in a contractual relationship with the retail pharmacy chain as CVS’ preferred store designer for the Northeast.
Sear-Brown is working on some 600 new CVS stores. One of the Rochester firm’s new offices is in Rhode Island, where CVS has its headquarters.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers have been another revenue booster, Triassi said. Sear-Brown performs design services for new facilities and also designs and certifies manufacturing lines for regulatory approval.
This work was added last year after Sear-Brown acquired a Long Island architectural and design firm, Sikorski Engineering Associates Inc., that specializes in such work. The acquisition added clients such as Pfizer Inc. to Sear-Brown’s roster.
The work for pharmaceutical firms has led to assignments in South America and Europe, giving Sear-Brown an opportunity to edge into international markets, Triassi said.
School design and engineering, long a mainstay for Sear-Brown, also has fed the firm’s growth. New York schools over the past few years have built a raft of new facilities, he said. While this state’s mini-boom in public-school building is winding down, Pennsylvania is at the leading edge of a program to replace outdated school facilities.
Sear-Brown sees no sign the vigorous construction market of the past five years is slowing, Triassi said. Reports of higher manufacturing inventories and weaker sales point to a possible economic slowdown, however.
The architectural firm projects growth in 2001 at a more modest 10 percent, Triassi said. But company leaders said expanding into relatively “recession proof” market areas such as retail drugstores and pharmaceuticals has cushioned the firm to ride out any downturn.

1/19/01 (c) Rochester Business Journal