On Air: The Art of Industrial Real Estate — Episode 26
Host: Hello, hello — welcome, listeners, to episode 26 of On Air: The Art of Industrial Real Estate with Team Jensen. Today we’re excited to have two friends from Tempcon joining us — Luke and Connor. Thanks for coming on with us.
Luke / Connor: Of course, glad to be here.
Host: It’s been a couple episodes since we’ve truly cracked one open, so Stuart’s excited to get back into the Martin City beers. Before we get too far in, wanted to give you both a chance to introduce yourselves and Tempcon a bit — I’m sure a lot of folks have seen your trucks and vans around town.
Luke: I’ll start — I’m president of Tempcon, been here almost five years. I moved out in February of 2020, and my family moved in March, spring break, right in the middle of COVID. I remember it vividly — we were living in a Home2 Suites over in Prairie Fire, touring the middle school my daughter was going to attend, right after the Utah Jazz situation ended the NBA season. We toured the school, and she said, “I don’t know if we’re even going to be here tomorrow,” and sure enough we were doing remote learning shortly after. It was shock and awe — trying to come into a company I was tasked with growing and now lead, without meeting anybody in person, trying to build culture with barely any work to go around. Definitely an interesting start.
Connor: Connor Smith — joined Tempcon in 2020, just a few months after Luke. I was previously a mechanical engineer at Branch Pattern, a consulting engineering firm downtown, for 12 years. I came on as the in-house engineer at Tempcon and have since moved into leading our preconstruction department — handling bids, developing relationships with general contractors, and looking for negotiated work opportunities to get in the door first for whatever a client needs on the air conditioning side.
Luke: Funny story about Connor and how we first ran into his engineering work — we had a project, the Lawrence Police Department, and ran into an issue with rooftop air handlers that didn’t have enough room for airflow in the parapet. We pulled up the drawings, and there was an engineer’s wet stamp on there — I looked at the name and realized I recognized it. It was Connor Smith. Turned out that was one of the last projects he worked on before joining us, and one of the biggest wins in our backlog at the time.
Luke: Some background on the company — Tempcon started doing restaurant service, founded by Jerry Bane in 1995. He built it working 16-hour days on roofs in the middle of winter servicing restaurant equipment, slowly building it up. He brought on a couple partners, including Gary Danner, who came on about 10 years before me — he had a construction and engineering background, similar to Connor, and that’s really how the design-build, design-assist project side of the company got started, since service alone is high-margin but low-revenue. Jerry realized that to grow the platform, he needed the contract project side to get volume. In 2018, one of the company’s best years, we did about $28 million in revenue; during COVID we only did about $21 million — a tough year — but we’ve grown significantly since. This year we’ll do about $54 million, so since Connor and I came on, we’ve more than doubled the size of the company. Service is doing well, we’ve got a great team, and the culture’s really strong now.
Host: That’s exciting. Did it take a while to build back that sense of company culture after the pandemic hit?
Luke: About two and a half years. The tough part about coming in fresh, tasked with professionalizing the company and building a growth strategy, is that a lot of homegrown folks are used to a certain way of doing things, and change is hard for people. As slow as I thought I was moving, it felt fast to them — like, “Is this really the company I want to be with?” I was asking for spreadsheets and they were used to paper job folders everywhere. It was brutal in the best way — they just hadn’t been trained on how to manage or run a project or go after service opportunities strategically. On top of COVID, we were overmanned on the installation side even before the pandemic hit, and once shutdowns happened, we had to reduce manpower regardless. I was viewed as a bit of a “reaper of death” — a change agent, whether the reasons were right or not, and that’s not always seen as a good thing. The culture was pretty negative for those first two and a half years, until some of the more negative folks moved on and we started bringing in people with a fresh mindset who were open to trying new things. There’s not always a right or wrong way, but you have to be willing to try something, or you’re not willing to grow.
Host: And that growth wouldn’t have gotten you to $54 million doing things the old way.
Luke: Exactly. Our average project size used to be under $500,000 — it took us two and a half years to get above that, and now we’re just over a million, thanks in large part to Connor’s local contacts and networking ability, since I came from Colorado without that base. I think the project that really got us noticed regionally was Kansas City Current.
Host: When was that awarded?
Luke: That would’ve been around 2021, maybe spilling into ’22. The question was simply, can you guys do it? We changed how we submitted proposals — instead of just a basic PDF, we professionalized it with manpower loading plans and other details larger companies typically include, to show we had the experience and capability. We hit a rough patch mid-project and had to course-correct, but finished strong, and that gave J.E. Dunn enough confidence to give us a shot on the American Royal, which is now a $24 million project — about five times larger than anything we’d done before. The first half, the barns, is nearly done, and we’re waiting to kick off the arena.
Host: A couple big wins like that can really open doors. And for team culture, having a high-visibility project like Kansas City Current probably helps a lot — people get to point to it and take pride in having helped build it.
Luke: Exactly.
Connor: I help lead our business development, which ties into culture too — Luke brought a lot more frequent team outings to Tempcon. We even have a committee for it now — a summer party, a holiday party (they’d always had the holiday party), branded team-store credit for everyone. All that culture stuff leads to stronger teams, which leads to good projects, and it snowballs — people are happier and more positive at work, and winning big projects makes that even easier.
Host: Connor, I’ve seen other shops bring on an in-house engineer like you — seems like a critical piece for growth. How much of a change was it moving from consulting at Branch Pattern to something more hands-on?
Connor: I enjoyed it — you don’t know what you don’t know. I was happy at Branch Pattern, but there’d be long stretches managing a team of 10 to 12 people, working toward a final deliverable like the 100% construction documents, and then not really seeing much beyond that, since construction starts after and that’s when you actually find the problems in your documents. I actually caught an issue once, red-lined it, sent it to the team to fix — but the contractor installed it wrong anyway, and then the GC turned around and said, essentially, “You’re supposed to know better,” even though there was a signed and sealed set with my stamp on it. I never got the chance to verify the installation myself. My life’s gotten a lot better being able to pursue the work I want, especially negotiated work, and to have more control over the drawing set — it’s more fulfilling to be truly part of it, rather than just managing a team. Having an in-house engineer also helps our reputation at project closeout — if a design issue comes up, we can often catch it early or already have a solution in hand, without needing a formal RFI or dealing with change orders.
Host: The earlier you can catch things, the better it makes you look and the better positioned you are for the next job.
Connor: Exactly — and it helps just being in the field more, seeing the guys work directly rather than going back and forth on assumptions. That goes a long way, and it’s part of why the pandemic was so tough — you’ve got to get people in a room, face to face. I can make all the cold calls I want to tenants with an expiring lease, but standing in front of them in their space, they tend to tell you more than over the phone.
Host: Something I’ll give Luke credit for — when you guys were looking at your new facility, I thought it was cool how you had your team come in and give input on the plans, using everyone’s knowledge and perspective for a more well-rounded solution.
Luke: That first two and a half years, there was a lot of me just dictating things, which wasn’t received well. I went through some professional coaching, and our CEO, Gordy, suggested it after a tough couple years. One thing that came out of it was — you’ve got to get buy-in, “win the locker room before you get the locker room.” Make people feel like it’s collaborative, that they have input and counsel into decision-making, not just direction from the top. We hadn’t done this before, but after our budget process wraps up each January, we now do a strategy session. Last year’s session produced our vision — an acronym, KLEIN — committed to Limitless Innovation, Integrity, and a mindful pursuit of being the best. It came out of a meeting with all our department heads about what’s important to us — things like the team store and hats people love.
Host: [banter about a rock-climbing image in Luke’s email signature, assumed to be Colorado-related]
Host: Connor, tell us a bit about your background before Tempcon.
Connor: I grew up in south Kansas City, near 120th and Wornall. Went to St. Thomas Aquinas, then looked at University of Miami, almost had a dorm picked out, but the out-of-state tuition changed my mind. My counselor pointed me toward K-State for engineering — I did the architectural engineering program, took a lot of shared classes with the construction science students, and honestly vibed more with them than the traditional engineering crowd, since it was more about organization and management than pure conceptual thinking. Stuck with engineering anyway, came back to Kansas City, worked at what was then EMG Group (now Branch Pattern), and was planning to eventually move to their Denver office before life happened.
Host: Do you have siblings?
Connor: Two sisters and a brother — older sisters in Northwest Arkansas, and my brother’s out in Belton starting a small hobby farm. [light banter about animals — a horse, a mule, a pony]
Host: Luke, tell us about your background in Denver before Tempcon.
Luke: I went to Colorado State for mechanical engineering initially, but switched to construction management after a semester — didn’t fit with the engineering crowd. Graduated during the boom years with job offers across the country, including here in Kansas City, San Francisco, and Georgia, but went with RK Mechanical in Denver, a subcontractor, mainly because the person who interviewed me was personable rather than overly rigid. Started as a project engineer and moved up over 19 years — assistant PM, PM, operations manager, division manager for their seal division, then VP of Operations managing the Colorado and Wyoming large-projects region. Went through an Executive MBA at DU along the way, partly because I had tunnel vision on one side of the business and needed to understand the totality of running a company — I’m a very black-and-white person, and that program taught me to work better in the gray. I eventually left RK, was “Mr. Mom” for a year under a non-compete, did some consulting — including helping build out a space for a brewery I’d invested in, West Flanders, down in Colorado — before interviewing around and landing here in Kansas City.
Host: As a Broncos fan among mostly Kansas City natives — what’s your experience been like adjusting to life here?
Luke: It’s a contrast — growing up in the foothills near Boulder, I could walk out my door and go hiking. Kansas City’s recreation is different — more lakes, which we didn’t grow up doing, so we still long for the mountains and do ski trips. But the quality of life here has been significantly better in other ways — more space, less traffic, more farm roads than highways. My kids are 16, 14, and 11; my daughter’s looking at colleges, including CU Boulder, University of Connecticut, and Miami. Kansas City’s been a wonderful place for our family — people are friendly, and even with my Broncos allegiance, it’s mostly been good-natured ribbing given how the team’s performed the last few years.
Host: [extended lighthearted conversation about the Broncos, Chiefs rivalry, family football banter, and Colorado sports memories]
Host: What’s in the pipeline for you guys heading into 2025?
Luke: We’re trying to get involved with the Berkley Riverfront development — hoping to help budget that project, though we don’t yet have it locked down. It’s at least got first-phase funding and earthwork moving. As for site-specific challenges near the water, contractors have to navigate certain property-line and insurance requirements, but the actual development hasn’t crossed those barriers yet. More broadly, the election year and high interest rates really slowed bidding activity across the city the last six months, though we’re starting to see it pick back up. I’m on the board for the Lee’s Summit Chamber of Commerce, and there’s a lot in the pipeline out there — Panasonic-related growth, a proposed ice arena and amusement-park concept near 119th, plus a lot happening in Olathe, including a Mattel-branded attraction. Development’s just slow right now, but there’s a backlog waiting to break loose, especially with more hospitality investment tied to the World Cup coming to town.
Host: Have you guys done much data center work?
Luke: Very little, given our size — strategically, Tempcon focuses primarily on sheet metal, air conditioning, heating equipment, and refrigeration/DX piping. We don’t currently do hydronics — chillers, boilers, cooling towers — or plumbing, which is part of our growth strategy for next year. We’ve got significant capital expenditures planned to expand our shop into plumbing and pipe fabrication, and the new facility will be a big selling point for showing customers and partners we have the capacity and capability.
Host: Are you actively recruiting for hydronic expertise as you head into the new space?
Luke: We’ve already brought on two guys the past two weeks doing hydronic and plumbing work.
Connor: I’ve had them sitting next to me talking through designs — I can draw the detail all day, but installing it is a different skill entirely.
Host: How are you approaching recruiting more broadly, given the trend toward trades over traditional four-year degrees?
Luke: From a management perspective, we focus on young managers — regardless of whether they know the trades coming in, since what a four-year degree really demonstrates is the ability to complete assignments and manage a schedule, which matters a lot for project managers. Pittsburg State’s been a good feeder program for us. On the field side, we’ve partnered with the Career and Technical Education program through the local school district — bringing in 8 to 14 high school students, sophomore through senior year, as interns each of the last three years, and we’ve hired roughly half of them. We’re starting something similar with Lee’s Summit now. We also started an apprenticeship program — this coming May will be our first graduating class of six; we had 18 enrolled last year and 36 this year. We’ve also raised install-side wages about 20% since the end of 2022, and service-side wages about 40%.
Host: That’s a real win-win — you get an early look at these kids and help mold them, and by the time they’re full employees, they already know your culture and take real pride in it.
Luke: Exactly — there’s a career map where a field guy can see a path all the way to director of operations. It comes full circle back to culture and ownership.
Host: [brief aside about shop tour security and pride in the space]
Host: Curious about the highway-cap project downtown — any air-mechanical work there that a team like yours might get involved with?
Connor: Probably some in the tunnel sections — likely smaller jobs, just fresh-air intake and exhaust, similar to what you’d see in mountain tunnels. If there’s a park with a shelter or restroom included, there might be a small mechanical scope there, but overall it’s probably mostly a civil project.
Host: [conversation about the future stadium site possibilities and continued sports banter]
Host: Well, given you’ve been heavily involved in one of the only recently built stadiums in Kansas City, maybe that positions you well for whatever comes next downtown.
Luke: That’s right — even if it’s years out, I’ll start budgeting now.
Host: [extended personal conversation about skiing/snowboarding trips, family vacations in Colorado, and how Connor and Luke connected through a ski trip hosted by a vendor partner]
Host: Before we wrap up — what’s a good way for folks to reach out about a project, and what are your growth plans for the future?
Luke: TempconKC.com has an email contact link, or find me — Luke Chambers — on LinkedIn. We’ve got openings across the board, from 17-year-old apprenticeships all the way through senior PM and sales roles — we’re always looking for talented people who care and want more out of their careers. My personal goal over the next five years is to double the size of the company again — double each division in sales and service, expand our service operations, get into data centers, and build out the hydronics side using the new space as a catalyst. That’s going to take a lot of talented people, and we try to show that through incentives — we run a profit-sharing program, and on the technician side we’re close to union scale without the dues. Compensating people well is a big deal to us, and we’re trying to listen more as we keep growing.
Connor: LinkedIn or email both work for me too — happy to help point people in the right direction on budgetary needs for basically any GC project.
Host: Kudos to you both — one of your competitors actually called recently asking why we weren’t renewing with them, since you two found our very first office space, then our second, and now our third. One of our former landlords wasn’t thrilled we didn’t ask him to help find alternative space either, but I think we made the right call working with you guys.
Luke / Connor: Appreciate that — we look forward to continuing to work with you.
Host: Excited to see the new space help catapult you into new capabilities — sounds like quite an HVAC system going into it.
Luke: We’ll see how it goes — it’ll be great.
Host: All right, thanks guys — that’s a wrap on episode 26. Give us a follow, and thanks, listeners.
