The East Lansing offices of the
Kincaid Building Group bespeak youth and creative thinking. They’re tucked near the
Campus Village Communities on Michigan Avenue, just west of the campus of
Michigan State University, so the conference room is wedged in with young Spartans shooting pool, lifting weights and grinding out rounds on stationary bikes.
Desktops in the spacious, open office are supported by chunks of polished, corrugated culvert pipe—recycling as décor.
The company’s owners, Ryan Kincaid and Ryan Henry, are both in their 30s. Their seven-person company is the product of two very different men. But family, a shared faith and a philosophy of preserving the planet has given their lives and company congruence.
“They are a model to emulate and a wonder to watch,” says
Gene Townsend, a fellow local green developer.
Contrasting ColleaguesRyan Henry—or Henry, as he’s been called since grade school—sprawls in a chair to tell his story, his dusty work boots propped up. His ruddy complexion belies hours outside overseeing jobs and racing from appointments to job sites.
Ryan Kincaid, on the other hand, is the friendly executive, mixing casual attire with high-end concepts. He reads documents all day.
Surprisingly, Henry is the city guy, living in a 90-year-old house in one of
East Lansing’s historic districts. He hits the books at night, completing a degree in management and organizational development.
Kincaid lives in the country near Bath, MI, in a house he had built five years ago.
Both Ryans were nominated for the “
Ten Over the Next Ten” award, bestowed on young professionals predicted to contribute significantly to the Capital community over the next decade.
And contribute they have.
The designer/builder duo’s firm was selected to manage the
$2.2 million retrofit of the three-story Cedar Street School into the Old Town Medical Arts Building. They have two other prominent projects in Lansing:
Riverwalk Theatre’s expansion and the $1.5 million
AnnaBelle’s Pet Station project at 600 S. Capitol. In East Lansing, they are working on
CareerQuest Learning Centers’ office building and a commercial property in Campus Village. They also just finished renovating the recently opened Technology Innovation Center in downtown East Lansing.
Add one more to the current project pile—the $700,000 renovation of
Calvary Lutheran Church on St. Joseph Highway in Delta Township—and you have to wonder how these two alike but very different lads arrived in such a prominent position.
Rise of The RyansBuddies since the second grade, Henry and Kincaid took divergent paths out of the same small town of Owosso, MI.
For Henry, sitting in high school classrooms was a grind. Right after graduation he joined the
U.S. Marine Corps in an engineering battalion, heavy equipment platoon—working with 11,000-pound forklifts, two-ton backhoes and bulldozers big enough to move buildings.
While moving dirt grounded his early resume, it was the values he absorbed from his military duty that he prizes.
“The Corps shaped who I am,” Henry says. “Respectful of fidelity, service, duty, honor. But that jarhead, macho stuff didn’t take.”
“Hoo-rah Marine—that’s Henry,” jokes Kincaid.
By contrast, Kincaid was in architecture classes at
Lansing Community College (LCC) at the time, and working on the side for a local architect. He soon shifted gears to project management, learning on the job with
Wieland-Davco,
Rockford Construction, E.T. McKenzie and
Studio Intrigue projects.
Five years out of high school, Kincaid had incorporated his own business, running it out of the apartment he shared with his Owosso High School sweetheart and wife, Jessie.
Kincaid started nagging Henry to join his endeavor. But Henry was reticent, having watched his own family’s business troubles—his grandfather owned a fleet of lumber yards, shoe stores and investment properties.and worried how business might conflict with he and Kincaid's friendship.
“Boundaries get blurred,” he says of family businesses.
Henry had also enrolled in LCC, married, and helped start the non-denominational Christian church,
Living Hope Vineyard, in Lansing. He was chairman of the board and assistant pastor, and spent two years in the part-time Vineyard Leadership academic program, gaining entrepreneurial skills like “vision casting,” he says.
Henry did not want to risk fracturing his friendship with Kincaid. So he went to work in the Lansing offices of the global engineering firm,
Tetra Tech. He worked with contractors on project oversight, testing, public relations, road work and the city’s
Combined Sewer Overflow construction project.
But the talk of joining forces continued.
Sharing in StewardshipIn addition to their friendship and rapport, Henry and Kincaid shared a Christian faith that would drive their eventual company’s environmental ethic—a belief in the stewardship of natural resources, including land, water, and even energy sources. So when they began to talk seriously about what a partnership might look like, forming a green company was paramount.
Basically, that meant “our work must be for the greater good,” says Kincaid. “Everything here we do and touch should emulate goodness in the things God has given us, and we should share,” he says.
Henry and Kincaid joined forces in 2003, committed to spreading the word about environmental stewardship.
Remembering the misunderstandings in his family’s business, Henry required everything be written in their partnership agreement.
“No handshakes,” says Henry.
Their niche is design/build projects—major renovations of urban developments, and guiding clients through the myriad of governmental incentives, such as historic and brownfield tax credits.
“We’re really about brown on green development,” says Kincaid. “Taking an existing building and site and renewing it with green principles.”
They were members of the group that recently founded the Mid-Michigan chapter of the
U. S. Green Building Council. Kincaid is the president, and Townsend sees him as the group’s father figure—the one showing the way.
The results are evident in projects like the Cedar Street School rehab. Early on, the clients were faced with the choice between the standard forced air HVAC system and a geothermal system.
Geothermal costs more up front, but it is guaranteed for 15 years—and you don’t have to buy gas, Henry explains. The geothermal system will pay for itself in five or six years, so if you’re leasing a space for ten years, you will essentially have free heat and cooling for half of your time there.
The owners went for the geothermal system.
“That means saving beaucoup bucks,” says Kincaid.
Tough marketHow will Kincaid Builders manage in the current uncertain economic times? The same way they made it through 2005, when the marketplace was the worst in decade, says Henry.
They re-tooled, building a company using the practices of the best large corporations and incorporating them into a small, nimble company.
“We were just too young to know better,” Henry says. They have a lot of work lined up for next year, he says, but in the end, theirs is a hand-to-mouth business.
“But we don’t have a choice,” he says, adding this apt gambling metaphor: “We’re full in. Our stack is pushed out.”
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Gretchen Cochran is a Lansing freelance writer. Recently she wrote a
story for Capital Gains about entrepreneurs in Mid-Michigan retrofitting old school buildings.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography.
Photos:Ryan Kincaid (lft) and Ryan Henry in the Cedar Street School
East Lansing’s Technology Innovation Center
Kincaid and Henry in the Tech Center
Cedar Street School
Work on the former school location
All Photographs © Dave Trumpie