Rosendin Electric : Electric Empire

THE 21ST CENTURY

Modernity isn’t always better. Technology, the scope of projects, the geographic pull of clients, and the greying and retirement of both craft labor and management pose substantial challenges for those within the electrical contracting industry. 

“We’ve been fortunate that aside from the COVID-19 pandemic or recession, we haven’t been forced to react too much aside from demand, serving our customers and people. Maybe that’s based on our ability to execute and strive, but we don’t take it for granted.” 

That doesn’t mean Rosendin could and will stand still. 

“In the past 104 years, we’ve designed and built just about everything humans use, live in, or need. Oftentimes, the projects we are asked to take on are unique or pose substantial completion difficulty. We’ve worked on a wide range of project types, including hospitals, airports, extensive commercial developments, venues, museums, critical infrastructure, data centers, and so much more. We’ve become leaders in this industry through our ability to execute in a sector for decades, allowing our people to become true masters in a particular field or building type. It provides a dual benefit of allowing our teams to build what they love, or should they want a change, we can offer a geographic or building type move.” 

Throughout the last 10 years, Rosendin has grown into a leadership position in the data center and clean energy markets in the US, while continuing its work in healthcare, transportation, high-tech manufacturing, venues, and first-of-its-kind or culturally and commercially unique projects. 

The company serves its customers with highly complex construction projects and provides the knowledge, scalability, quality, and safety needed to successfully bring these ideas to life. Rosendin sits proudly on the cutting edge of technology and development within the industry, boasting dedicated innovation, industrial engineering, and development teams that keep up to date in the modern environment. 

This covers its own internal systems and platforms, robotics, means and methods, and the entire gamut of tools, systems, work, and kits that support the end result. 

Rosendin’s ability to solve difficult problems isn’t limited to its building work; innovation is at the core of the company’s culture. 

When faced with not having a project control system suitable for the subcontractor industry and the projects of the size and scope Rosendin is asked to undertake, it invented the Rosendin Management System (RMS). When examining the industry, the company found it should and did build its own project system that integrates estimating, procurement, design, modeling, planning, safety, and scheduling. It’s foundational. 

“Like many great ideas, the solution was rooted in frustration and lament. RMS was conceived over a beer with my colleague Fred Meeske, a peer of mine at Rosendin. When lamenting that there wasn’t anything suitable for Rosendin or firms like us, Fred decided to take this on.” 

From scratch and a dead start, Meeske and his team delivered RMS four years later. 

“We’re about done, and we’re delighted with the results. It’s a great example of how we work in, with, and around technology in our business every day,” prides Mazzetti. 

TODAY’S CHALLENGES

Safety also remains a huge focus for the company, as with tens of millions of craft labor hours delivered per year, a lot of people count on Rosendin. 

Supporting its dedicated and hardworking employees is a priority for the company as they bring the intelligence, talent, and skill required to make Rosendin one of the country’s finest and longest-standing electrical contractors. 

Additionally, there’s a very uncomfortable but necessary topic in construction today, as mental health and suicide rates among construction workers are very high for any industry in the US. 

“We often talk about the work, but we never talk about the conditions our folks work in. We have 50 and 60-hour work weeks. Solar farms in the desert or tidewater region of Texas with heat indexes consistently over 110 degrees Fahrenheit are the norm for our people. The work is physically demanding and requires mental focus. People aren’t numbers nor a commodity,” Mazzetti stresses. 

“One of Rosendin’s foundational values is ‘We Care’ – you have to walk the talk. Rosendin will deliver over 14 million direct labor hours in 2024. Safety and the mental health of our teams is vital to our success. We used to say we wanted everyone to go home safe; now I say I also want you back with us tomorrow in good stead.” 

Suicide rates in the construction industry are 75 percent greater than the general male population in the US. Mental health and job site safety are critical to Rosendin. The company measures it, and as a leader, is evaluated on this. Rosenden is pleased that its incident rates have decreased this year, and it remains vigilant on everyone’s mental health. 

By standing up as a united front to raise awareness, breaking the mental health stigma, and offering support for those within the industry, the company is working toward building a strong, healthier workforce where every voice is heard and every life matters, as safety goes beyond the job site. 

As part of this article, Rosendin implores the construction industry to redouble its efforts on job site safety and the mental health of its workforce.

LEGACY BUSINESS

Having been working at Rosendin for 20 years and helped its customers achieve their maximum potential in mission-critical, renewable energy, and complex commercial construction spaces, Mazzetti has a proven track record of delivering plain-spoken, optimized solutions that magnify a client’s total return. 

“What’s been an interesting arc for me in the last 20 years is that my work at Rosendin is not limited to just design, construction, or executive operations. Oftentimes, we validate investments for the financial partners who are backing some of our largest projects. We’ve also been fortunate enough to have helped entrepreneurs start up several companies foundational to the data center industry, Meta, Digital Realty Trust, Compass Data Centers, and Vantage Data Centers, amongst others. In every case, we’re helping these founders and investors bootstrap their outfits as their surrogate real estate, design, and construction operations. We still work for every one of these clients today,” Mazzetti insights. 

Like many in design and construction, Mazzetti is a legacy in the business. His father had an engineering business in San Francisco, and he subsequently fell into it from there. 

“Design and construction were a part of my life from an early age, and the business was part of dinner table conversation,” he expands. 

He knew from the get-go that he was either going to pursue a career in construction or advertising due to a survey he took in high school – the latter of which was to the great horror of his parents, he recalls. 

An early introduction to this vast industry proved fruitful for Mazzetti, as he has become one of the world’s acknowledged data center experts and has taken several industry-leading data center companies from start-up through rapid expansion and into a steady flight of success.   

His career spans several of the seminal events in the industry, including the birth of Meta and Open Compute standards, the emergence of Digital Realty Trust and the data center real estate investment trust (REIT) industry, and the inception of Equinix in the 1990s, alongside being one of the six principal authors of the ANSI/BICSI 002 data center standard. 

“I began working for my father at Mazzetti and Associates in 1986 after I exited the military. I built the firm from a single office/discipline shop to a national firm with leadership in healthcare and data centers,” he expands.   

“I’ve been working in the data center space for my entire career; my college design thesis was the old Schwab data center in San Francisco. I love the building business and can think of nowhere better for me to operate.”