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Enterprise Innovative designs make Burkett & Wong valuable team players

When Robert Burkett and Frank Wong struck out on their own as structural and civil engineers in 1971, their first big project required innovative design, Burkett said.

It was the Bay Scene condominiums on Gresham Street in Pacific Beach. The five-story reinforced concrete building over subterranean parking was unique at the time because the bearing walls, which would carry the weight of the structure, were randomly located around the building.

It was a change from a typical building where bearing walls on different floors are placed directly above and below each other, he said.

The architect wanted the bearing wall system designed differently because he was seeking more flexibility in designing the building, Burkett said.

Burkett and Wong developed a way to analyze the structure and produced an economical design.

That big project was the first of many. Other local construction professionals said innovative and economical structural design is the hallmark of the Hillcrest-based engineering firm.

Burkett, 64, said the method they developed to design the condominium structure has since been used on dozens of other projects.

The most recent big design project for Burkett & Wong is Park Loft, a 390-unit residential loft development by the Douglas Wilson Cos. of San Diego at Island Street and Eighth Avenue in Downtown. KMA Architecture & Engineering of San Diego was the architectural firm involved in the project design.

Burkett & Wong also did the structural engineering for Sunroad Corporate Plaza on Eastgate Mall in University Towne Centre. The company did structural design for three, four-story, 95,000-square-foot buildings over approximately 27,500 square feet of underground parking each. Also included in the project were designs for two parking structures, one 153,000 square feet, the other 50,000 square feet, Burkett said.


Growing Firm

What began as a two-man firm has since grown to 50 employees, 11 of whom are shareholders, with gross income of $5.8 million in 2000, Burkett said. They are ranked 21st on the San Diego Business Journal’s list of the top 25 engineering firms. Burkett said in recent years they have concentrated on improving profitability and aren’t too interested with increasing the size of the company.

Frank Wong left the company he co-founded in 1982. The Wong name now on the sign is Steve Wong , no relation to Frank , a vice president who joined the company in 1977.

He runs the civil engineering, surveying and land-planning department at the firm. Burkett said there are six principals at the firm, although only two of them have their names on the sign.

Timothy Yeun, 54, president, another managing principal, runs the structural engineering department.

In the company’s two-story, 8,000-square-foot Hillcrest office building is a completely networked system of personal computers with Internet access and e-mail capabilities like that at many other engineering firms these days. While computers are used for some of the design, a lot of the work is still done by hand by the staff engineers, Burkett said.

“A lot of our design still takes an engineer to do analysis by hand calculator,” Burkett said.

Among the company’s equipment are several personal digital assistants, which are used to take notes and make sketches in the field. There also is the latest computerized laser-surveying equipment. Redlin said the equipment speeds up the surveying process by automatically turning a certain number of degrees and “shooting” the distance between the machine and a prism pole. The equipment usually costs 2-1/2 to 3 times the cost of traditional equipment and is still a relatively uncommon tool for surveyors, she added.

The firm also maintains an office in Las Vegas with three permanent employees, to develop forensic engineering business there. At the present time, the company has no plans to open any more offices.

“We try to share our success with our employees,” Burkett said.

“That includes stock in the company, profit sharing and a pension plan,” said Wong, 56.


Retaining Employees

The firm puts the equivalent of 10 percent of each employee’s salary into the company pension plan. Medical insurance is provided. There’s a bonus plan for salaried employees, and hourly workers also receive bonuses.

Burkett said employees receive supplemental medical reimbursements. The firm has employees on the staff who have put in as much as 28 years with the company. Burkett said this is proof the company’s benefit program works in keeping employees in an industry where retaining them is usually a problem.

“We try to give our employees every tax-advantaged benefit we can as well,” Wong said.

When the firm first started, Burkett and Frank Wong had already worked with many of the architectural firms in San Diego. Consequently, business development for the new company was easy, Burkett said.

“I just went back to the architects and said, ‘We’re in business for ourselves now.'”

Penny Redlin, the firm’s marketing director, keeps in touch with the company’s past clients, architects and government agencies to develop repeat business.

“The fact that we have a good, established name in the community gives us a lot of referral business as well,” Wong said.

Burkett summed up the company’s design philosophy:

“Our goal is to provide state-of-the-art engineering that’s functional.”


Bigger Picture

Burkett has seen a dramatic change in the San Diego development community over the past 30 years.

“When we first started, San Diego was a provincial place with a very closed business community to outsiders , to the point that an L.A. contractor would have trouble winning a job here and getting good prices from the local material suppliers,” Burkett said.

“But in the 1980s, the locally based savings and loans went out of business and the one-man development firm disappeared to be replaced by publicly traded stock companies that had lines of credit with major East Coast banks, insurance companies and pension funds.”

The change has made a lot of big construction projects possible, Burkett said. Where four- to five-story office buildings used to be the norm, now the buildings are at least eight to 10 stories tall.


Condo Conundrum

The construction defect liability crisis of the 1980s also curtailed the number of condominium projects, Burkett said. The fault there was that contractors built apartment buildings and then sold them as condominiums. An owner occupant is going to be much more concerned about quality than a tenant or an investment property landlord, he explained.

“We would turn out a set of plans, but the contractor wouldn’t follow them,” Burkett said. “When the lawsuit hit the fan, we were sprayed along with everyone else, and although we successfully defended our designs, we became very cautious about condominium projects. Our criteria now is that before we get involved we have to know the developer is committed to producing a high-quality project.”

Don Blair, a principal in KMA Architecture & Engineering of San Diego, is enthusiastic about Burkett & Wong.

“We’ve worked continuously with the company for 28 years, and at any given time we probably have six projects going with them,” he said. “We’ve probably done well over a thousand projects with them and had very good relationships with both their structural and civil engineering departments.”

Burkett & Wong’s employees are team-oriented when working with other firms, he added.

“Their attention to detail and customer service are two of the things that have kept us working as a team with them all these years,” Blair said.

Tim Stripe, co-president of Grand Pacific Resorts of Carlsbad, echoed Blair’s praise of Burkett & Wong. The firm did the engineering for his company’s last three resort projects. He first did business with Burkett & Wong in 1992.

“We had a problem with the Coronado Beach Resort and had to do some modifications midway through the construction project,” Stripe said. “M.H. Golden Construction referred us to Burkett & Wong, and one of the engineering firm’s principals, Timothy Yeun, did such a good job of helping us we haven’t used any other structural engineer since then.”

Burkett & Wong’s staff is good at anticipating potential design problems. They’re also quick to call back with answers, he said.

“They anticipate problems and are very good at estimating what the most cost-effective way is to structurally design a building,” Stripe said.

Burkett & Wong did the structural engineering for Grand Pacific Resorts’ Seapointe Resort, Grand Pacific Palisades Resort , both in Carlsbad , and also the structural engineering for the rehabilitation of the Carlsbad Inn, he said.

Rod Wright, a principal of San Diego-based Sillman-Wright Architects, has worked with Burkett & Wong for nearly 30 years.

“They are fabulous to work with,” Wright said. “They are real team players.”

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