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Jerry Sylvester was in the construction business and spent many hours working with scaffolding. When he found himself between jobs, he realized his knowledge and experience could be put to use as a business owner. So, in 2001 he founded Empire Scaffold.
Within a decade, Empire Scaffold grew from its original location in Monroe to include nine branches, reaching into Houma for primarily offshore operations, and across state boundaries into Texas, Alabama and Tennessee.
Empire was acquired by Sunbelt Rentals in January 2011 for $38 million.
The scaffold business continues to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary. The founder now works as regional manager, and the Houma branch is recognized as one of the top coastal scaffold providers in the business.
Scaffolding in one form or another has been around for as long as someone has needed to reach areas unattainable by standing on a ladder. Whether for constructing buildings, working maintenance on offshore rigs, washing windows on skyscrapers, rewiring lighting or creating giant artistic masterpieces, the right scaffolding is available.
“When we started this company, we thought we would have 50 people and just stay up around Monroe,“ Sylvester said. “Well, it started to grow and now we have over 1,000 employees and all kinds of jobs. I also had a lot of help and investment partners.”
Scaffolding in its basic definition is a temporary platform constructed so other people in different trades can do their work. Projects can be small with minimal expense involved or extravagant, costing thousands of dollars and requiring crews to work around the clock to meet deadlines.
When the customer’s job is complete, a scaffolding crew returns to take it all down and redistribute parts for other jobs.
Sylvester said that the company once built a scaffolding structure at the cost of $50,000 so a Federal Aviation Administration beacon at the top of an existing tower could be changed.
As a scaffold expert, Sylvester said that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been a key factor in making this dangerous career less threatening than it had been in the past.
“Used to be they did everything unsafe [on job sites requiring scaffolding]” Sylvester said. “Now there are rules and regulations on how scaffolding is erected. There are rules on weight loads and wind. In the long run having the safety measures is cheaper as far as incidents and insurance.”
Materials account for 15 percent of a scaffolding job’s cost. The remaining expense comes in having trained and cleared crews. Various elements play into estimating a scaffolding job, including if the project is built from the ground up, or suspended from overhead.
“Building from the ground tends to cost more because there is more labor and materials,” Sylvester said. “There are so many variables and many different types of scaffolds.”
Some jobs are designed and mapped on a computer to determine materials needed and angles necessary to reach the customer’s needed specifications or objectives, and the size of crew needed on location.
While 90 percent of Empire Scaffold’s work out of its Houma branch is marine industrial in nature, the company does take on select commercial jobs.
“[We] wanted to perform maintenance to the pool skylights that are located directly above the indoor pool,” Quality Hotel owner Rene Claudet said. “We contracted Empire Scaffold in Houma on building scaffolding that would meet all the safety needs for the project and work around the challenges of the location. The final result was an amazing piece of work.”
“There are many ways you can use scaffolding,” Empire account manager Danny Duet said as he worked with his laptop computer on a scaffold design for a specific job.
In addition to basic scaffold building, crews working offshore undergo specialized safety, rescue and survival training. “They need to know what to do out there if somebody falls,” Duet said. “There are so many different ways you can use scaffolding. It is more complex than people realize.”
Sylvester and Duet said while scaffolding work might not be a popular career option to young people, there are many with the aptitude to make it a good fit. They also warn that the physical demands of working in this field can end an assembly job by the time a worker is 30.
“I wish the general public could understand the true hard work involved with building scaffolds,” Sylvester said. “Physically, some of the stuff we do is so hard the work is almost inhumane. It is brutal.”
“If you plan to stay in the business, you better look ahead at what you are going to do,” Duet said, “but there is usually a supervisor job ready if you are.”
The scaffolding experts said that costs of jobs range with the job and can carry price tags from $500 to $5 million.
“These guys can make up to $100,000 a year building scaffolds,” Sylvester said. “This is one of the few crafts where a person can move up as fast as he is ready to.”
