Page 6 - Graypvine August 2021

Jacob Vehslage and Laura Vergara. They are
South Atlantic Office
with Brett Goode
Senior Vice President,
South Atlantic Office
As we continue to work our way through the
pandemic, it’s been refreshing to safely welcome
customers back into our offices, attend crucial
meetings in their shops and to be a part of some
customer events. A milestone for the South Atlantic
team was receiving the invitation from the Kershaw
County Economic Development group to attend the
July 8th historic announcement of the new turkey
6 processing facility for Prestage Farms. With 300
new jobs planned, this announcement is Kershaw
County’s largest investment announcement since
1960. Our team was chosen a year and a half ago
as the design-build partner for Prestage. Like many
of Gray’s projects, getting Prestage ready for the
official announcement took many months of long
hours with the South Atlantic team working through
design concepts, traversing the ups and downs of
commodity pricing Prestage was experiencing, and
joining in conversations with Kraft-Heinz: another
Gray customer and the end customer for Prestage
products. Our team was patient but diligent to
ensure we delivered the best concepts for this
highly automated, first of its type of facility in the
U.S. We talk about family a lot at Gray, but I would
be remiss if I didn’t mention what a key factor the
Gray family culture was to winning this project. I
have consistently heard from Ron Prestage that
Gray stands apart from our competitors because
of our people and our strong culture. So, a huge
congratulations to the Gray Prestage Farms team
for securing another great project to add to our food
and beverage resume.
With project execution at full speed, in addition
to filling up the pipeline with proposal activity, we
continue to add to the South Atlantic team. Please
join me in welcoming the following new team
members: Eric Tanguay, Evan Drose, Javad Suggs,
Larry Hightower, Zachary Cohn, Jeff Earnhardt,
great additions to our project management and
design teams.
Gray Architects &
Engineers
with Dowell Hoskins
President
Since April, we have welcomed fifteen new team
members to the Gray AE team. Needless to say we
have been busy on a number of Food & Beverage,
E-commerce Distribution and Manufacturing
projects and have a number of great opportunities
in the sales pipeline. And, speaking of sales, we
have hired our first business development manager
in AE, Rick Wheeler. Rick is a licensed structural
engineer and recently moved to Lexington from
Tampa, Florida with his wife and 5-month-old son.
In order to execute some of our design production
work more efficiently, we have re-engaged an
offshore design firm located in Mumbai – they have
been a tremendous resource for us and also have
one of their team members located full-time in our
Lexington office. Although COVID delayed many
of our Gray AE Pay-It-Forward activities, things
seem to be on the rebound and we have recently
completed an effort to create bags of necessary
supplies that can be given to homeless people we
encounter during our daily activities. Lauren Rose
and Samantha Veitch did a great job leading this
effort. I’m looking forward to ending the fiscal year
in a great financial position, and with so many great
opportunities on the horizon, our backlog going into
next fiscal year should set us up for success.