Business View Magazine | March 2019

151 time, and it still didn’t come down. They actu- ally paid us $50,000 to remove the building off the shake table and they never had to do that before – not with wood or any other structures. So, that’s a pretty good endorsement.” Not only do Superior Wall Systems’ structures stand up better to environmental hazards, they help get construction projects completed more quickly and with less manpower. Smith ex- plains: “I’ve been in this business for 33 years, and I’ve never seen an economic boom like this – particularly in Los Angeles. It’s created a shortage of manpower and, with that short- age, it’s prompting us, as an industry, to find new ways to get stuff done faster with fewer people. And the pathway to that seems to be through pre-manufactured paneling systems. In the past, we’d put scaffolding around the structure and then we would hand-frame each stud in place; we’d put the exterior sheeting on there; and then we’d start to put the plaster system over that. With the pre-manufactured system, we take these wall segments and we fly them up onto the side of the building and the building is pretty much done as we’re putting these panels in place with probably a third or a quarter of the people onsite that would normally be there. So that’s reducing the pressure that we have in trying to obtain enough people to build a building; it’s lower- ing our insurance costs because we have a much smaller risk with less people onsite; it’s lowering our payroll, while we’re still able to capture the same cost per square foot for the buildings; so it’s become a sustainable market