Construction Business Review

Dallas Underground
Bringing Ease and Efficiency to Underground Construction

The underground construction engineers encounter numerous challenges such as anomalies in construction documents, permitting delays, bid-price restrictions, and coordination and communication issues. These challenges restrict the pace of the engineers and slow down the entire project. Jeff Dean, a construction management expert, observed these difficulties in the underground construction arena and aimed to alleviate them. In his bid to find a solution to these problems, he founded Dallas Underground, an underground wet utility installation company in 2011 for water, sanitary sewer, or storm water systems. The company, having tasted its early success in the area of school construction for underground utilities, has expanded into the commercial and multi-family residential projects over the years.

Dallas Underground has its branches spread out in different areas and understands the difficulties burdening each of these streams. The company brings ease and efficiency to the underground construction sector with a well-defined process that begins with bidding. It uses multiple bidding platforms where several general contractors or developers post bids for the construction practice. The team at Dallas Underground monitors the bids regularly and finds the best opportunity to work on. Once Dallas Underground is selected in the bidding, the firm negotiates a contract with the general contractor or the developer.

The company then proceeds with the submittal process, where it submits some of the material to be used in the project for approval with the architect, engineer, and the state city standards. With that, Dallas Underground follows through the actual performance of the project and makes sure to meet the deadline or even beat it. As the last step, Dallas Underground moves to the closeout process, where it puts maintenance bonds for the city and gets final acceptance.

We started with the mission to become the preferred underground utility installer in north-central Texas, and have grown to achieve revenue of about $25 million a year

With this streamlined and well-defined workflow, Dallas Underground has scripted several success stories. Elaborating on the same, Dean recollects the company’s association with one of the largest general contractors in the country. The client was working on a church project in Dallas wherein a storm-drainage of significantly high cost was installed as a part of the design. As the client realized the design wasn’t going to work effectively, they bid a redesign of about $600,000. At this point, Dallas Underground stepped in to quickly help them get a co-effective outcome by providing its expertise and value engineering and saved around $400,000 for the client.

Today, Dean looks back at many of such projects that Dallas Underground has completed in the past decade long and expresses, “We started with the mission to become the preferred underground utility installer in north-central Texas, and have grown to achieve revenue of about $25 million a year.” With a high spirited team of experienced construction professionals and pipe layers, Dallas Underground also looks maintain a satisfied client base and envisions pleasing the customers in each of the projects. With its customer-centric approach, the company has come a long way in the underground construction segment earning faith of its clients. The future too looks promising for Dallas Underground as the company seeks to continuously increase its revenue and emerge as a preferred partner for developers and contractors for underground construction.