Case Studies Region: Midwest

Foresight and serendipity add up to a winning formula. So it would seem in suburban St. Louis where a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant is being expanded by 40,000 square feet just four years after its completion. That facility in Chesterfield, Missouri, proved its worth while manufacturing and testing the quality of a COVID-19 vaccine with its […]

After starting her career in construction project management and then getting into real estate and facility management, Kristine Fisher realized the areas are often segmented at companies. She noticed that some organizations only focus on repairs and maintenance rather than taking a comprehensive corporate real estate approach. She says this approach creates more efficiencies, higher quality […]

Though located in bustling Minneapolis and performing well, by the early 2010s, EVEREVE’s flagship location needed to update its in-store experience. Opened in 2004, it no longer reflected the company enough to be considered a flagship by design, Kari Ihle explains. She adds that many of the other nearly 80 locations at that point better […]

These visits can make for a long morning. Getting off the elevator, it’s hard to find your specialist’s office, and things don’t get more familiar as you walk down the hallway. Inside the office, there are forms to fill out, and other patients are withdrawn as they try to read the paper, fiddle with their […]

When a city’s storm water system gets backed up, it’s only a matter of time before the problem makes itself known. For City Club Apartments, a backup of rainwater in Royal Oak, Michigan, led to the flooding of 60 units in one of its buildings last summer. As the company’s regional facilities director, Kyle Hough […]

McKinley Avenue once wove its way through Ball State University’s North End on a gentle curve approaching and crossing the bridge over Duck Pond. Now that curve has become a traffic circle fronting new residence and dining halls, buildings that are just part of the growth at Ball State, notes Kelly Knable, the university’s director […]

Kathy Makino-Leipsitz says she was inspired as a teenager while reading “Nothing Down,” a book about buying real estate with little or no money down. But she admits that she didn’t foresee her business path going the way it did. Makino-Leipsitz bought her first duplex as a college freshman with the $2,500 she saved from […]

“See a need and fill a need” may very well be Kathryn Bielefeld’s career mantra at Shoe Sensation Inc. It’s certainly a principle that has guided Bielefeld to the position she has today as the director of new store construction for the Jeffersonville, Indiana-based family retail shoe chain. Beginning as an intern in 2011, she […]

It might’ve been the chancellor’s house at one point, but don’t quote him on that. All Keith Stewart knows for sure is it was built sometime in the 1950s—not surprising, given the modified ranch’s dated look and spartan features—and that it became the University of Illinois Springfield’s on-campus childcare center purely by default. Over time, […]

It’s a fact of construction life that the bosses have been bemoaning for years. Though the trades are teeming with opportunities, there’s not a rush of young men and women to be electricians, mechanics, pipefitters, masons, painters, plumbers, carpenters and all the other vocational roles so necessary in bringing a blueprint’s intent to fruition. As […]