Architects Adjust to Focus on Wal-Mart

One office, two locations.

Spend much time at the downtown Bentonville offices of Scott&Goble Architects PC and that phrase is an evident description of the company’s viewpoint on how it does business.

It isn’t, however, an entirely accurate perspective. In addition to the Bentonville location, which first opened in 2003, SGA was founded in 1995 in Tulsa and still maintains its main office there. But it also has a third location in Berkeley, Calif., which opened in 2008.

Still, the company believes strongly in the combined efforts of its employees in Tulsa and in Bentonville.

“Even this week,” Chris Young recalled to a recent visitor, “more than one person was here every day from Tulsa. We have people who [work] in Bentonville who are in Tulsa. That’s just our culture. It’s how we do work.”

Work that’s been done by SGA can be found in every state but Alaska and Montana and the firm currently has 374 active projects.

But make no mistake. There is but one reason why SGA dispatched Young to establish a more permanent presence in Bentonville, where 18 of its 97 employees now work full time.

The answer isn’t all that surprising.

“The catalyst for the move,” said Young, a vice president at SGA and the director of the Bentonville office, “was a soft request by Wal-Mart that a local presence could prove beneficial. By all means, we responded.”

Wise choice. Like so many vendors who flocked to Northwest Arkansas during the last decade, the promise of enjoying a relationship with the world’s largest retailer wasn’t something to ignore.

 

Background Material

When SGA was founded in 1995, it was under a different name. Dale Scott and Suzanne Taylor were the founding principals behind TaylorScott Architects.

“And like most architects opening their doors, they just wanted to make payroll,” Chris Goble said. “That was the sole objective: to do some work that would be interesting and exciting and, ultimately, profitable.”

Goble is the president and CEO of SGA, a promotion he received in 2008. He became a partner in 2001 — the name changed to SGA in 2004 when Taylor retired — and for the last decade has helped the firm become an industry leader in national programs, prototype development, management and maintenance, and sustainable design.

Of the firm’s 97 employees in all three offices, 27 are licensed architects. Five of those work at the Bentonville office.

“We’ve grown a lot since 2004, and even recently grown quite a bit,” Young said. “Two years ago, I wouldn’t have thought I would be at 18 [employees].”

There was no work with Wal-Mart in the early going, but work done with Sears and its National Tire and Battery stores helped start the wheels in motion.

Goble did, however, assist with the expansion of hangar 5 at the Rogers Municipal Airport-Carter Field in 1996. The hangar serviced Wal-Mart Aviation.

Because of those early successes, and through employees who had previous relationships with Wal-Mart through previous employers, SGA was approached in 1997.

“Of course we jumped at the opportunity,” Goble said.

 

A ‘Waiter’ for Wal-Mart

SGA engaged with Wal-Mart for the design of a single, freestanding Supercenter. That project was successful and has led to a variety of services SGA currently provides.

Can that be directly attributed to having a presence in Bentonville? Hard to tell, Young said.

Having a local presence wasn’t presented as a requirement, but the close proximity has certainly given them a leg up in understanding what their client wants.

“I would say that we have met expectations; I’ll leave it up to the client to see if we have exceeded them,” Young said. “I can say that we are providing more services today than we were in 2004.”

Wal-Mart declined a request to be interviewed for this story, but knowing it has the power to pick and choose whom it wants to do business with, the project numbers paint a picture of a client that is anything but dissatisfied with the services it is receiving.

Since its first involvement in 1997, SGA has had a hand in almost 600 projects for Wal-Mart, its No. 1 client.

Goble chose not to open up SGA’s books, but he did reveal that Wal-Mart projects have grown to be responsible for 60 to 65 percent of the firm’s annual revenue.

The services provided run a broad spectrum, including site feasibility, prototype development, construction management, sustainability and post-construction work.

And it would be impossible to deliver, Goble said, without the presence in Bentonville.

“Can’t imagine working with Wal-Mart without the office there,” he said. “We likened this to being a waiter. Being able to walk across the street to our client to discuss needs [and] issues, taking the order from Wal-Mart and bringing that back and helping to direct and prioritize so we can service them better. It has been incredibly important to our long-term success.”

Goble also noted an important component of the evolution of services offered by SGA to Wal-Mart, as it relates to the Bentonville office, is the remodel program.

Wal-Mart has more than 4,000 stores in its “domestic fleet” in the continental United States, Goble said. They remodel 500 of those each year.

“Now, we play a small part in that program,” he said. “But the request was made to keep that program separate from the single building and expansion programs, and we made the decision to execute the remodel program in the Bentonville office. We support that through our Tulsa office. Having that local presence was a key to growing that office over the last few years.”

Driven by its work with Wal-Mart and attracting other large-scale clients including Kohl’s, Lowe’s — the reason for SGA’s California office is to better serve that company’s West Coast region — and Sports Authority, SGA has tailored its focus to retail volume architecture.

When recruiting potential employees, Goble makes sure they realize that.

“The world needs architects who want to work on churches, hospitals and those things,” he said. “That’s not us. We can do those things, and we do, but our focus is on retail architecture and customer experience and the things that help those businesses be successful.”

 

Expansion Plans

When Young was dispatched to Bentonville to open an office, it actually was in the summer of 2003. He and a couple of others from SGA rotated through from Tulsa, but it wasn’t until January 2004 when Young relocated permanently, there was a signed lease and a physical presence on the third floor of a three-story office building at 105 N.W. 2nd St. was established.

“We didn’t really have a vision, other than having a presence here would better serve Wal-Mart,” Young said. “Looking back, I don’t know how we did what we did before without being here.”

To accommodate the growth, the initial space of 1,621 SF has been renovated twice, pushing further down the hall of the third floor to occupy 2,295 SF in July 2006, and then further to 4,320 SF in April 2009.

A third expansion — spurred partly because the office workforce has increased 38 percent during the past year— is scheduled this July when SGA will take the rest of the floor, giving its employees 6,527 SF of space.

“We have 18 people in there and some are in workstations that are squeezed in,” Young said. “This will give everybody a better work station.”

While the original purpose for opening a Bentonville office was to better serve its most valued client, SGA has also been involved in other local projects, including fire stations, schools and churches.

Some examples include Eagle Heights Baptist Church in Bentonville (constructed in 2006) and the Benton County Sunshine School in Rogers (2008).

“We’re here to service Wal-Mart, but we want to be good community members,” Young said. “We don’t do a lot of work in the community, but these projects help us do that.”

For those two design-build projects and more than 40 others from 2003 to 2006, SGA partnered with Clinard Construction Management Inc. of Bentonville.

Goble and Bob Clinard, the owner, first met in the late ‘90s working together to design hangars for Ozark Aircraft Systems in the initial days of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Highfill.

Mark Clinard, vice president of CCM and Bob’s brother, said there was a time his company would contract with SGA for the majority of its design-build projects.

“Gosh, at one time it was to 100 percent,” he said. “They’re top-notch. I would put them up there with the best we have ever worked with.”