Banking on KC – Bill Bundschuh of PRETECH Corporation
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Kelly Scanlon:
Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. Do you ever wonder where the stuff goes when you flush the toilet or where the water on the street goes when it rains? Our guest on this episode may know a thing or two about that. His name is Bill Bundschuh and he's the co-owner and president of Pretech Corporation, a family-owned company that's been providing precast concrete products for a variety of industries since 1993.
If I'm doing my math right, Bill, that means you're celebrating 30 years in business this year. Congratulations.
Bill Bundschuh:
That is correct. 30 years on 4th of July weekend.
Kelly Scanlon:
There's going to be a party all over America thrown just for you, right?
Bill Bundschuh:
We will have some parties, yes.
Kelly Scanlon:
Okay, so let's talk about Pretech. Most of the time when people see big construction projects going on, they're focusing on the buildings or the really highly visible components of the project. But at Pretech, you're building that foundation, a lot of the stuff that we can't see. Tell us about what a company like Pretech does and how precast concrete is used.
Bill Bundschuh:
We're a precast concrete company, which that means that we manufacture concrete structures at a facility under a controlled environment and then deliver them out to the construction site for the contractor to put into the ground. Got two main advantages. One is, like I said, it's a controlled environment. Our quality control procedures allow us to make a little bit better product than they could probably make out in the field, and the other is is the schedule of the project. We can have the structures built, sitting in our yard, ready to deliver when they're ready for them out on the job site.
Kelly Scanlon:
The alternative would be to create those components right there on site, which then you're subject to the weather and other circumstances that might be going on at that site.
Bill Bundschuh:
Exactly. A lot of times there's products that they can't make out there, such as concrete pipe, which we make. There wouldn't be any mechanism for them to make it out there. They can make the other products, your inlets and some manholes, different things like that. However, it's much more efficient for us to make it. We have machines, we got overhead cranes, we have lot of trained people, assembly lines, things like that that make them much more efficient.
Kelly Scanlon:
How did your family get into this industry back in 1993?
Bill Bundschuh:
I always knew that I would get into construction some way, shape, or form. My grandfather had a concrete company and a bricklaying company out in Minneapolis, Kansas, and I'd worked for him during the summer since, I don't know, I was about 10 years old. I'm sure I was more of a pain than anything else, but I always knew I wanted to get into that kind of field. Got an engineering degree at K State and then ended up working in some different construction companies. Then went to work for a precast company in Topeka. I had a tremendous amount of the responsibility and very limited authority, so I figured if I'm going to deal with the contractors and everything, I might as well try to make some money at it.
I convinced my father and father-in-law to lend me some money, which by the way, they were worse than any bank. Shoot, Dad would even lend me money to make the interest payments to him, but I had to let him know a couple weeks ahead of time, and this was back in the time where you couldn't just sit at your computer and send money. He was tough at as far as that and really upset me at one point but I realized he was trying to teach you, you pay your bills. You pay your bills, you take care of them. That interest payment was due to him on the 1st, not the 2nd.
He also wouldn't lend me money unless I had a partner, somebody else. He knew I could build anything, but at that time didn't know anything about business. I conned my brother who was just graduating from college to join me, put the business plan together, and we had to keep reworking it because Dad wouldn't lend me as much money as I thought I needed to begin with. But after we got into business, he did lend me a bunch more later and then kind of the rest is history. Conned a brother-in-law to come out here and run our pipe operation when we put that in '04. She had two brothers and my brother-in-law, now I got my daughter, my son, and my myself.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah, so it really is a very family-owned, controlled, oriented business, and I suspect that you also treat all of your associates, and you've already mentioned your relationships with your contractors, but your associates, you probably treat them like family too.
Bill Bundschuh:
Yes, we look at our employees, that's our most valuable asset. All the big national companies, international companies, they can buy a lot better equipment than us, but they can't get better people than we do. I put one of our guys against 10 of theirs. We take care of them. I've always got an open door policy. We help guys out whenever they need it. We got great guys. During the COVID deal in order to help out local businesses and to help out our guys, we would have food trucks come every Tuesday and Thursday. We'd bring these different food trucks and sometimes we just actually had it catered from different pizza joints or something like that. We helped the guys out by having lunch for them and then also, like I said, help other businesses out. People are our biggest asset, our best asset.
Kelly Scanlon:
Since we can't see it above ground most of the time, give us some examples of some of the projects you've worked on.
Bill Bundschuh:
Well, the biggest one everybody's probably real familiar with right now is the Kansas City Airport, the new airport. We did all the underground structures, all the piping and the reinforced concrete box culverts for the airport, which when you don't see a bunch of water standing on a runway, it's because it went down the inlets that the engineers designed in through the pipe, down into the reinforced concrete box culverts, down into the stream, eventually to the river. Of course, it also, there's structures that contain some of the rainwater that would've had your de-icers and things like that. That's a totally other system that then they treat that before they allow that to go into the streams.
Kelly Scanlon:
You've got the airport and the streetcar, I believe?
Bill Bundschuh:
The streetcar is another one we've done. We're working right now on the current, which is the women's soccer stadium. We've done a lot of the retaining walls you see around bridge abutments. We'll do that, that's something we make that's above ground, like at the gateway down at Highway 10 and 435. We also built the tunnel for 69 highway going south off of 435, right at Quivira, it's a 48 foot span. I think there was 88 pieces. It's a nice tunnel that would've taken quite a few months for them to build out in the field, whereas we were able to build it a lot quicker at our facility.
Kelly Scanlon:
These are obviously major projects and this local company, Pretech, has been winning these big marquee projects like this away from much larger national and even international competitors. What's your secret?
Bill Bundschuh:
Our two largest competitors are international and a international company, actually the two largest in the world, construction materials companies. Our secret is we build relationships with the contractors. We try to give them what they value. It's an interesting thing. This may sound small, but we answer the phone, we do not have voicemail, we return phone calls. But basically build that relationship and find a solution, find an answer. We need to be the contractor's least problem out there. Like a good buddy of mine, Jim Kissick, that has passed here a few years ago, but of Kissick Construction, he would always tell me, he'd say, "Bill, I'd write you a bigger check, but by the end of the year, you've saved me a lot more money than that check." It's just value that we find for them, the relationships.
Kelly Scanlon:
You're currently the chair-elect for the National Precast Concrete Association, and the reason I bring that up is because interestingly, I read that the precast industry is a major economic driver. Explain why it's considered to be such a vital part of the economy.
Bill Bundschuh:
Precast concrete, like we talked about, is a very efficient way of building infrastructure and then we always hear in the news, and we heard a big bill that our Congress passed here a year or so ago about the infrastructure rebuilding and where the stormwater goes.
Years ago, he used to have the sanitary and stormwater go together, so they were combined sewers that they're separating, so it's really big. There's a lot of money being spent on the infrastructure. Well, precast makes it more efficient, that makes that money go further. The National Precast Concrete Association actually was started in the sixties by a bunch of precasters that wanted to interact with each other, learn from each other, exchange ideas, even guys in the same market, they would get together. They came up with quality control programs to make things more consistent. They actually have a certification program that you have, well, it helps out the DOTs because they don't have to have an inspector in your place all the time. They have surprise inspections, tremendous amount of things. The interesting thing is here, a year ago, the NPCA trade show was here down at Bartle Hall, and it'll be back again in 2026.
Kelly Scanlon:
The NCPA, the industry association, was formed to really create the standards for the industry and then to continue to educate in order to increase the credibility and quality.
Bill Bundschuh:
That's a big part of it. There's all kinds of classes from everything on where to place the lifting hooks to why you vibrate the concrete this way, why the cover on the steel has to be this. Along with economics, how to run the business. There's a tremendous amount of educational programs that NPCA puts on, and it's a great association.
Kelly Scanlon:
You've been in business 30 years, I'm sure you've seen ups and downs, and at one point you were really leveraged in the residential space. Tell us about your experience and how it really led you to diversify, which has put you on even more solid footing.
Bill Bundschuh:
Before the housing bubble burst, probably 60% of our business was in the housing, which would be the inlets, the pipe in manholes for a private housing developments. We probably did probably 60, 70, maybe even 80% of the southern Johnson County expansion sewers from the late nineties through when it all crashed. We went from in '08, 60% of our business was in the housing to '09, zero was in the housing. We had to do a tremendous amount of things, cost cutting. I didn't want to lay off the guys because then you have to train new guys. The state of Kansas actually has a partial unemployment program that allows us to work guys three days and they can get two days worth of unemployment. We split our crews and people worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and we had a big pour day on Wednesday, and that allowed us to stay open. Tremendous amount of cost cutting. The other thing is we had to expand our products. We went from about 10 products, whereas now we have maybe 150 different products, a tremendous amount more customers, and we've expanded our market. We ship to a lot larger area now than we used to.
Kelly Scanlon:
It forced you to diversify. I know in times like that, when you talk to entrepreneurs, you don't want to go through it, but the ones who are able to come out the other side like yourself, it is such a great, not just learning experience, but typically the business is better off for it. In your case, you say you now are 150 different products and a larger footprint, and it made you stronger.
Bill Bundschuh:
That's exactly right. Adversity makes you stronger. We went from '93 to the end of '08, growing about 15 to 20% every year, never had the downturn so when the downturn hit, it really created some problems. Here again, like I said, I'm an engineer, so I don't know how to manage. I have struggled managing people, had to learn real quick exactly how to do things and to diversify, became a imperative that you do that. Had little things happened all along, would've been better prepared, but it just came one big, like a good old Kansas tornado, just about wiped us out, but had a lot of great employees, great suppliers, great suppliers, contractors that paid us early, suppliers that allowed us to pay them late. A lot of good local companies that really helped us out.
Kelly Scanlon:
You've mentioned you're on an expansion role. You've opened up markets in Iowa, in Nebraska, and you've just recently purchased a large production facility there in Tonganoxie, Kansas. What's been driving that growth? I know there's a lot of infrastructure money available, but there's other companies that have had access to it as well and aren't growing like you at the rate you're growing. What's driving that in addition to the money that's available now for these projects?
Bill Bundschuh:
Well, it's a number of things. One is the reason we went up to Omaha, there was a precaster from up there that came down to Kansas City for the sewer separation program, and we wanted to show them that highway 29 runs two directions and so we went up to Omaha and found out that the concrete market in Omaha is a great market. There was a lot of needs that weren't being met so we went up there and started supplying product. Here again, like we talked about, the expansion of the infrastructure. The separation of sewers, that's a real big deal there. Of course, contractors we met up there, took us up into the Dakotas, over into Iowa, and then quite frankly, the reason for the additional facility down here, we bought it out about 20 miles west of us out in Tonganoxie, was our production area needed to grow, and we were landlocked where we were at. Tried to purchase ground around us, but nobody wanted to sell the ground, so we purchased that facility. It was accelerated a bit by the highway 69 lane expansion. We're doing the sound walls, and that's the first thing we're going to be putting in this facility, something we were going to do anyway, but that just kind of accelerated us purchasing that.
But the biggest thing is the money out there for infrastructure and then our relationship building. We don't just go in and just throw you numbers. We're going to go in and find out what you want, what's important to you, what's important to the market, how we can help you, because we want to be your least problem. If you got to worry about your precast, then we're not doing our job.
Kelly Scanlon:
Where do you go from here? You have a new generation of family members in the business now. You very briefly mentioned them at the start of this conversation. How does that factor into your succession plan and your ongoing growth?
Bill Bundschuh:
Well, yes. I still have one of my brothers in the business, the other one's out, and so is my brother-in-law, and now I've got my two children in the business. My daughter runs our business office. My son is the vice president of operations, and then my brother, he's running a new facility out in Tonganoxie. However, we work the succession out, we're going to keep it in the family. We're going to keep it to the next generation. I'd like to be around when I'm 75, but not have to do anything. I'll stick my nose in there, stir it up a little bit, and then go fishing or something. But having family is, well, you can trust them. You can trust your family so you know where it's going.
Kelly Scanlon:
As we wind up here, I know you're a St. Louis guy. What brought you to Kansas City and why'd you stay here to run your business here?
Bill Bundschuh:
Went to school out of K State to be an architect, and then I switched to engineering, moved to Kansas City, worked for a couple of good companies here, knew I wanted to stay. It's so much easier to get around in Kansas City than St. Louis. Streets go north, south, east, west, and the people are so much friendlier. I would go out and run on the roads, used to be a runner, and people here in Kansas City would go out of their way to bring a hose out to you or bring you a glass of water or something during the summer when it was really hot. It's such a friendly place here in Kansas City.
Kelly Scanlon:
Couldn't agree more and that's carried on into your business relationships as well.
Bill Bundschuh:
Yes, I think so. We build relationships. We don't bid every contractor out there. We bid on people that we want to build relationships with. It's our responsibility along with theirs to build a good team and build a good project.
Kelly Scanlon:
Well, Bill, thank you so much for your time today, really appreciate you sharing your story, and wish you the best of luck.
Bill Bundschuh:
I appreciate you having me on, and I really enjoyed talking to you about our business.
Joe Close:
This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Bill Bundschuh for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC. Precast concrete usually isn't the first thing we think of as we go about our daily lives, yet as a part of the infrastructure for large projects, it provides the basic foundation for everything that gets built. Likewise, relationships are the foundation of Pretech's business. Bundschuh emphasizes that cultivating and maintaining relationships has fueled the company's growth as much as the quality of their products. "Do what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it and do it right," is his motto. For generations, Country Club Bank has committed to deepening relationships we've built throughout the greater Kansas, City area. We strive to keep our clients and our community first. That's not just a strategy, it's who we are. Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on you, Kansas City. Country Club Bank, member FDIC.