Merger Spells Success for Falcon Alaska

By David A. James

hile the global COVID-19 crisis wreaked havoc on businesses all over the planet, it also created opportunities. For example, when AXYS, LLC and Wirtanen Custom Homes joined forces to create Palmer-based Falcon Alaska, a design-build contractor working in both commercial and residential construction, it provided the owners with new options.

“If the pandemic hadn’t happened, we probably wouldn’t have merged the two companies,” says co-owner Grant Hendrickson.

Although Falcon Alaska is a new name, the people involved and business operations have remained largely the same. Hendrickson and co-owner Steven Wirtanen have a long history together. Friends from a young age, Hendrickson worked for Wirtanen Custom Homes for more than ten years while it was still owned by Steven Wirtanen’s father. The younger Wirtanen and Hendrickson launched AXYS in 2013 to “chase the commercial market,” he says.

The two companies maintained a close working relationship through the years. During that time, Wirtanen took over the family business from his father. AXYS, meanwhile, mostly focused on public projects, with structural concrete evolving into a specialty.

Hendrickson says he and Wirtanen had discussed the idea of merging for several years, as both companies were design-build specialists, but it never got beyond the discussion stage until labor shortages during 2020 and 2021 began disrupting Wirtanen’s operations. Because Hendrickson and Wirtanen were partners in AXYS, Hendrickson knew of and helped solve the difficulties Wirtanen was having finding subcontractors for various jobs.

Hendrickson says he would tell Wirtanen, “Let’s just send one of our crews over there.”

The merger was formalized in January 2022, bringing the best of both companies under one roof.

“Falcon Alaska has a strong project management department,” thanks to the Wirtanen side, Hendrickson says, “and AXYS brought a strong labor side, along with a specialty concrete department.”

That combination proved perfect for one of Falcon’s first big contracts: working on the slab and other aspects of an enormous heavy equipment and vehicle storage and maintenance facility in Wainwright, on the Arctic coast.

“We were told this summer it was the largest concrete pour on the North Slope outside of Prudhoe Bay,” Hendrickson says. It was “quite a logistically challenging project to get where you’re actually even pouring concrete.”

Miles Totten, project superintendent for Olgoonik Construction Services, which Falcon subcontracted through on the Wainwright project, says Falcon’s quality work was on display when Hendrickson’s crew showed up last summer.

“What was apparent instantly was they had developed a plan before they hit the ground,” Totten says. The workers broke into groups upon arrival, he recalls, each knowing “what they were going to do and how they were going to do it. And they just took off. They hit the ground very well prepared and organized.”

Hendrickson says success is a combination of advance planning, hiring the right people, and providing them with quality equipment.

“It’s a clean job site, clean language, and young, energetic guys who want to be there,” he says of his crews, who perform precision work with leading edge technological instruments.

“We use a Topcon Total Station for all of our concrete layout,” he says, explaining that the surveying units use computer-assisted design, or CAD, files to show workers where, on the footprint, everything in the plans will be located.

“By removing the need to map out the footprint with tape measures,” he says, “human error is nearly eliminated.”

It also speeds up the process.

While structural concrete accounted for about half of Falcon’s workload in 2022, the design-build general contracting side has also been busy. Besides the custom homes being built, some high-profile jobs the company has completed are the Alaska Brain Center in Wasilla, Bleeding Heart Brewery in Palmer, and a rebuild of the Palmer High School swimming pool. Falcon subcontracted with H5 Construction on the Winter Rose Townhomes project, also in Mat-Su, where they worked on a concrete bridge, townhouse foundations, and a water treatment plant.

Falcon has added positions to keep up, including a complete design team highlighted by an architectural designer, senior draftsman, and design director with more than twenty years of experience in luxury homes. By having an architectural and interior design team in-house, Falcon is able to offer a turnkey, client-centric approach to building that’s unique in the industry.

“I would say that about 60 percent of our work is residential, and 40 percent is commercial. And multi-family kind of falls in the middle of that,” Hendrickson says.

The efficiencies and reliability he and Wirtanen have been able to create through their merger has made Falcon Alaska attractive to both the general contracting and subcontracting markets, Hendrickson says. It’s his employees, however, that he saves his highest praise for.

He says, “We’ve been really fortunate because of the amazing crew we have, and we seem to attract people of our same core values.”