TCI Manufacturing, which offers complete plant builds in addition to standard equipment, has worked side by side with Liberty Construction for about five years on turnkey projects around the U.S. Through FreedomBuilt, TCI and Liberty Construction engineer, fabricate and install turnkey projects for producers.
To learn more about the collaboration and what’s driving project activity, P&Q caught up with Kelan Moylan, vice president of sales at TCI, during this month’s ConExpo-Con/Agg.
P&Q: What TCI builds is very much custom. How does that tie into the turnkey work you’re doing and reflect what you’re showing at ConExpo-Con/Agg and your overall approach?
Moylan: It’s a good question, because as you look around, we are not going to ever build that again for any other customer, right? It was made for that site, that customer and that application.
There are hundreds of those around the country right now where they don’t want to open up a brochure and say, ‘I guess I’ll go with this option here,’ because it’s the closest thing they can get to it.
It’s like building a house: If you really want a true custom house, you don’t necessarily want to look in a brochure. You want to grab ideas, and then you want to start with a blank sheet of paper and have it built for your lifestyle and what’s going to make you thrive over the next several years.
We’re just showcasing more of what our capabilities are and trying to engage with the customers out there who are looking for a solution instead of just a product. I think we’re more built-to-suit as opposed to built-to-configure.
P&Q: Who is the target customer on a custom build?
Moylan: It could just be a customer asking, ‘Is the industry making money?’
For the last few years, it’s been a battle to get pricing. The producers are finally making some pretty decent margin because the pricing has been accepted in the industry. And now they want to reinvest to make their operation better. That’s where we like to come in.
If they’re saying, ‘we’ve got this money and we want to put it to good use, get an ROI on it,’ it could be bolting on to their existing system with a tertiary circuit, or replacing some of the old haul trucks with a conveyor system because it’s just going back and forth.
There’s still a lot of maintenance and potential safety issues. Some people are going toward conveyors to haul material and get more of a continuous feed. It’s really just about solutions to keep improving ROI.
We’re in a very favorable spot, because producers are in a favorable spot from a quarterly earnings standpoint. They’re making money, and they want to reinvest that money. That’s where we like to come in and talk about what success looks like with the money they want to invest into their operation.
It could be making more chips, increasing tons per hour from 600 to 1,000 tph, or adding three more products to a portfolio that could serve the market – or help serve data centers in certain areas.
Those data centers take a lot of aggregates. Producers are excited about that, but they’re also nervous that they don’t want to go all in with one customer either.
In some high-demand areas, producers want to take care of their normal customers. But they also want to take on the big projects, too. So we’re trying to help them get ahead of that over the next two to five years.
P&Q: What does the TCI turnkey process look like from idea to execution?
Moylan: Our overall goal is to be among, if not the easiest company in the industry, to do business with.
When you’re talking about complex projects, producers aren’t looking for extra work. They’re looking for somebody that can come in and help make them better without having to do a lot of heavy lifting. It starts with a customer having an idea.
If they’re a bigger producer, their engineering team might bring something forward and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ If it’s a smaller, family-held company, maybe they don’t have that and they come to us with a sketch saying, ‘This is kind of what we’re thinking.’
