Eagle Span structures spreads wings

Unique product offering brings booming market

With age comes knowledge. But all the knowledge in the world won’t quell Jerry Curtis’ curiosity. And as the years tick on, Curtis, 57, sits at his desk, researching and planning, carefully crafting his new company’s next move.

Loveland-based Eagle Span Steel Structures Inc., the nation’s only manufacturer of folded-web steel beams for metal building construction, is Curtis’ brainchild. But company president and CEO Curtis isn’t a construction-industry veteran or even an engineer. His tryst with Eagle Span’s unique folded steel design came by chance, out of curiosity.

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For 24 years Curtis toiled in the banking industry. But finance left his creative thirst unquenched. So, in his free time Curtis would build things, almost anything. He erected stables for his wife’s horses, assembled a working dump truck and even pieced together a small airplane.

In 1997 the Roosevelt, Okla., native left banking for an “early” retirement and a reunion with the country lifestyle of his childhood. Relaxation was never an option, though. There were too many things to learn and too much building to be done.

To start, Curtis fashioned a horse farm, stretching heavy red-iron beams across a dirt oval for an arena. It was his first steel structure, and he wasn’t impressed.

“Red iron buildings are very dark,” he said. “Horses are triggered by darkness; they don’t like dark places.”

The building was structurally sound, but besides darkness, it had other problems. The sharp iron beams curved inward to meet the roofing, pushing a bare metal edge gradually toward horses and people. To prevent injury Curtis had to lace a costly wall around the perimeter, 10 feet in from the beams’ terminus.

He mused that there had to be a remedy to the building’s woes. But throughout the American equestrian community, red iron was the standard. Still, he wondered.

Then, during a dinner conversation with a group of visiting Australian acquaintances, Curtis’ curiosity paid off. When queried on his profession, one of the Australians pulled a photograph of an airplane hangar from his breast pocket. It was a steel structure like Curtis’, but its interior was a lustrous white and its edges lunged straight up to meet the roofing supports.

“How does that structure hold up?” Curtis wondered.

It seemed too weak by traditional standards. A lack of snow loading could be the building’s saving grace, he thought. But the strength of the stiff Australian wind eroded that theory.

“I thought about that picture all summer,” he said.

Then, when his curiosity was too much to bear, Curtis boarded a plane for Australia, leaving “on a whim” to see the novel steel structures with his own eyes.

Curtis was dazzled by the Australian design. Creating lighter and safer beams for about the same price as traditional structures, the technique was “something that America needed,” he said.

The technology, created in the 1970s, is simple. Like a piece of paper, when steel is folded it becomes markedly stronger than the original flat sheet. Knowing that, the Australians folded thin sheets of steel thousands of times to fill each beam, resulting in a product that can shoulder more weight with less material than red iron.

“I saw something there that wasn’t here,” Curtis said, “and it was completely superior.”

Drawing on his frustrations with equestrian facilities and concluding that people, like horses, don’t like dark places, Curtis decided to bring the Australian idea home to Colorado.

Curtis’ short-lived retirement was over.

The design seemed like a natural click into the $5 billion steel-structures industry, offering a new structural alternative for warehouses, airplane hangars and manufacturing sites. With no previous engineering or commercial-construction experience, however, Curtis was intimidated.

“I was so petrified when I thought, ‘Why am I so smart to do this?'” he said. “‘Why aren’t other companies doing this?'”

Essentially Curtis was a new player in a 100-year-old industry; he feared the reception of his new technology by the old economy industry.

His doubts were soon quashed when an overwhelming wave of support swelled among Front Range builders. After inviting 50 contractors to examine the folded-web technology, Eagle Span was set in motion. Within a year the company had done more than $1.5 million in business, covering Curtis’ out-of-pocket capital investment.

“A lot of companies are building pre-engineered steel buildings, then painting them white,´ said Jon Cook, the president of Beacon Builders who worked with Eagle Span to build the 90,000-square-foot Budget Home Center in Longmont. “Eagle Span already comes white and it’s just as strong. Plus they’re a local company and you always get something out of them when you need it.”

Eagle Span is more than a local company, though. Doubling his revenues each year, Curtis markets pre-engineered structures across North and South America.

“The benefits of the products are apparent,´ said Rick Roesner, Eagle Span vice president in charge of marketing. “The only thing slowing our growth is capacity and awareness.”

Awareness is coming as Eagle Span leaves its previous years of simple Internet marketing behind for a more aggressive approach. With three full-time engineers, a chief estimator and full sales and marketing staffs, the $6 million company is ready for growth.

“Keep growth reasonable,” however, is the mantra of Eagle Span’s frugal president who continues to operate in a competition-free environment. “We stay on top because we’re a fundamentally sound business, debt-free like the old days.”

Still, despite his prudence, Curtis’ curiosity continues to blossom. And as he waits for results on his patent application, he is working with researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia to streamline his product.