Commercial Contractor Spotlight

IMS Masonry is one of the largest masonry contractors in the Western United States, and they include among their projects some of the largest ICF projects in the United States. President and owner Heath Holdaway has been with IMS Masonry since 1998 and an owner since 2004. He has more than 25 years of experience in the masonry and construction business. 

“We started out as a traditional masonry contractor, which is typically handling brick, block, stone, and masonry, for either the structure of the building or the facade,” says Holdaway. “But we’ve also been doing ICFs for 20 years now. The reason that we wanted to educate ourselves about ICF is because it’s very similar to the type of work that we do with masonry — stacking units up, filling them with concrete, making sure the walls are plumb, all that kind of stuff.”

The company also does a lot of pre-cast construction, stone cladding, and interior finishes. The company’s based in Utah, which is where the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is based. A lot of the projects the company handles are temples and other large facilities for the church. “That’s really given us the ability to work everywhere around the nation,” he says. “We’ve worked as far away as the West Coast, all the way to the East Coast. We have a project coming up in Maine, and we’ve done work in Connecticut and Vermont.”

The types of projects that IMS Masonry undertakes are not only large in size, but also complex in their requirements or aggressive in scheduling. Many of the large projects are higher education, complex health care facilities, or sports arenas, and military and other federal government work. “With the push on energy efficiency, ICF is becoming a very popular form of construction,” Holdaway says. 

Historically, movie theaters have been a good source of ICF work for the company. “ICF is popular in demising walls in theaters, because of the sound transmission between theaters that are right next to each other,” he says. 

They’ve also built a lot of schools out of ICF, particularly in recent years. Over the last two years they’ve built five different ICF schools in Utah. Overall, ICF accounts for about 20% of the company’s work. Holdaway says the company is usually working on two or three large, complex ICF jobs out of about 20 ongoing projects at any given time. 

Getting Started On Large jobs
The company’s been in business since 1989, so their growth into large jobs took time. Most masons or contractors are small, single owner operations, with the same person doing a lot of different types of work. Instead, Holdaway says they structured IMS Masonry differently. “We built the company with a different type of organization, so we were able to build a business versus building a company that’s out there performing one job at a time.”

Holdaway got into masonry “haphazardly,” he says, out of high school. “A friend’s father-in-law had a small masonry company and there was an opportunity to just get to work as a laborer. That’s the one thing about construction and especially masonry — with little to no experience, there’s a lot of opportunity for higher starting wages and for growth.”

Holdaway says he took advantage at every opportunity to learn and grow, and was able to advance quickly. Holdaway had a good opportunity to come to work for IMS Masonry in ’98. It was much smaller then, and shortly after joining, Holdaway began estimating and he and the owner focused on growing the business. In ’99, he was offered a partnership. “I bought half the business from him and then we ran the business together for quite a few years as 50-50 owners,” he says. Holdaway bought him out about five years ago.

“When we take on a big job, the way we approach it is looking at it as if it’s five smaller jobs,” Holdaway says. “We try to break it down so it’s manageable.” Approaching a large job as a single large job can make it overwhelming. One nuance, he says, is understanding the manpower and the scheduling needed to complete a very large job. “It’s not just a handful of guys doing one job at a time,” he says. “With a big theater or a school that’s going to have an aggressive schedule, you’re going to need 40 or 50 people on that job alone. What takes the additional planning is making sure you’ve got the right man-power allocated for it and the right leadership to make sure that you can oversee all those guys.”