Green Country Interiors offers metal stud and drywall services throughout Oklahoma.

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Construction managers and general contractors in Oklahoma count on Green Country Interiors (GCI) for their metal stud and drywall needs because the 29-year-old company is known for its ability to keep projects on schedule, President Billy Tobey says. “We work real hard at becoming and staying focused on what we are doing and also on how we are doing,” he says. “We can work well alongside other trades and we try to work together as a team when the project gets behind schedule.

“Because so many projects in the commercial market have real tight schedules, this characteristic of focusing on schedules is important to contractors,” he stresses. “We try to always do everything that we say we will do. We definitely try to please the people that we work for, by not only giving them the quality within our work that we believe they want, but also by trying to achieve and, whenever possible, to beat the scheduling goals they have for their project.”

Impacts of Growth
In 1992, David Hannagan and Gerald Carter, the owners of GCI, offered Tobey a partnership in the company.

“I was the president of a competing drywall contracting firm and they had the insight to realize the strengths we would have in joining together,” Tobey explains. “So I was brought into the company and my role was to grow the company.

“They were a little older than me and definitely wiser as they were looking toward the future,” he says. “They wanted to ensure that the company would continue on, even after they retired. That was their long-term goal, to make Green Country Interiors an ongoing venture.

“Dave and Gerald came to me with an offer that basically said, ‘OK Billy, here’s your vehicle. We’ll give you the key and here’s a credit card,’” he explains. “‘So, fill up the tank and take off.’

“But you know, I thought they said, ‘Here’s your race car, Billy, now let’s go racing, boys,’” he says jokingly. “None of us envisioned what was to come but at least they were very open-minded to the growth that came.

“From 1979 to 1991, Green Country’s annual revenues averaged somewhere maybe in the $1 million to $2 million dollar range. Today, however, our revenues are maybe 20 times that amount,” Tobey adds. “The market was right and the conditions were right. We started increasing at a steady rate of about $3 million per year, starting in 1992.

“We were very fortunate to have had steady growth [in Tulsa] for the past 20 years. That was a one of the big factors in our continued growth.”

Also at this time, the company focused on keeping an adequate and ever increasing size in manpower. The company employed 30 to 40 people before 1992, and today, it averages around 600 tradesmen year round. “We may have around 25 to 30 people that are assigned to an average job,” he estimates, “with some jobs requiring 200 men.”

The increased manpower also allowed the company to expand its services. In 1995, GCI began offering exterior stucco and EIFS services.

“It was a trend that was happening, not only in our area but in a few other markets, to where the drywall contractors also did exteriors,” he explains.

Its work force is also the main reason it is able to keep projects on schedule, he explains. “We are able to help the general contractor complete projects at a faster pace,” he says. “And this has been a growing trend in construction. If we had a large commercial project, it normally took two years to complete. Now the schedules on these same projects have a time of maybe a year-and-a-half.

“The biggest reason for our growth has been that we always seem to have right amount of workers available and this helps us get more projects,” Tobey says. “It’s something that contractors consider in making a decision on which company they decide to use. The emphasis we’ve placed on keeping a large work force has helped us land more jobs.”

New Roles
When the company was first founded, it mostly did interior work. “These days, we do much more than only interior work,” Tobey says. “If you look at metal stud framing for instance, this trade has evolved from the early days of mainly getting used in interior wall systems only. Now, heavy gauge, metal stud framing has become the primary choice with most architects and engineers when they are designing an exterior wall system.”

It started offering exterior services to meet the demand in the market. “The contractors we work for basically begged us to get involved with exterior finish systems, due to the problems they were experiencing because of the limited number of exterior contractors available to them,” he says. “So now, we install many types of finishes on the exterior of buildings, such as plaster, stucco, cultured stone and EIFS.”

It also recently expanded into the Oklahoma City region. David Borchers, a partial owner and senior project manager, oversees many projects in that area.

“This is some new territory for us,” he says. “We want to be very careful that we are able to provide the same kind of service that we have in the Tulsa area.

“That makes us to become very careful and selective [our projects], but I am very excited about the prospects that we have in this new market.”

“It has been pretty cool to see so many changes in commercial construction over the years,” Tobey recalls. “Participating in various roles within these changes has been very rewarding to our company. At GCI, we absolutely love what we do and almost every day when we come to work, it seems to be a new day because there is generally something that is just a little different than it was the day before.”

High-Profile Projects
Green Country Interiors is currently working on two high-profile projects. One is the 350,000-square-foot Downstream Casino Resort for the Quapaw Tribe near Quapaw, Okla. The first phase of this project consists of a casino gaming and restaurant building that will open July 4, and a 240-room hotel, expected to open this coming September.

The second phase includes expanding the casino floor as well as adding conference rooms, a second 400-room hotel and other amenities. The gaming floor area in Phase I is about 80,000 square feet and more than 50 percent of additional area will be added when Phase II is completed. “Even before we finish the first hotel, we are scheduled to begin work on Phase II,” Tobey says.

The company’s scope of the project is $15 million and includes EIFS, exterior work, installing metal studs, drywall, installing an acoustic ceiling, column covers and some trim work, Tobey says. The first phase is 25 percent complete.

The project is unique because it’s in three states, he adds. The casino is in the very northeastern part of Oklahoma, the parking lot is in Kansas, and the highway that leads to the facility’s driveway is in Missouri.

The casino and hotel will be completed in 14 months. Originally, the first phase was scheduled to be completed in August, but Green Country Interiors was able move the completion date month earlier, Tobey says.

The company is also involved with the construction of the third and final phase of the Boone Pickens Stadium for Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. The final phase involves enclosing the last section of what was an open stadium to become a state-of-the-art, 65,000-seat  football stadium. The company’s scope is more than $7 million and includes an EIFS and metal skin in much of the exterior as well as installing the metal studs, insulation, drywall and acoustical ceilings. This is the largest university that is close to Tulsa, Tobey explains. “It is very nice to be able to see it finally become a stadium similar to [nationally-known universities],” he says.

Manhattan Construction is the construction manager for Downstream Casino and Flintco Construction is managing the stadium project. Green Country has work-ed with both companies since its inception. On both of these projects, “We were one of the few subcontractors hand-picked by the construction manager to become part of the team from the budgeting process all the way to the building process,” Tobey says. “They hand-picked us because of the emphasis and effort placed on the both the schedule and on the quality of the scope of work we perform, and it was very important [for them] that we would be able to be involved from day one to work on their project within parameters.”