Innovating Legacy: The Gates & Sons Story of Building Beyond

The family started there legacy as contractors, basically building what we know as Denver, Colorado. Does Leagueate senior, the patriarch at that time, as he started to invent a few products to make their lives easier as contractors. A lot of that stuff quickly caught on. And before you know it, he's going away from building buildings to building machines that help make these widgets that make the job site work. Brilliant innovations of of Gordon Gates. And even as I look at us today, gates and sons is a family business that's really focused on innovation. Our solutions involve everything from residential foundation to, retaining walls, light commercial foundation walls, all the way to high rise office and residential structures, and and some of the the things we're doing today are stadiums and arenas and theaters. One of the biggest challenges we've seen over the last few years is much larger and more intricate concrete design. Gates has been able to address that concern by listening to our customer's need and introducing products that make it easier to build these large structures and build these intricate, complex designs more easy. As a company that's dedicated to innovation, that that's been a long standing facet of what we do is to innovate not only in our manufacturing processes, but in the products that we make. And this is a a more primitive old school version of it is, is this camlock bracket, which was used to lock up a loop end tie. And so you'd insert the tie into the form. That that idea, which was probably in the forties, spurred almost every forming system that we carry today. And we continue to pivot off of that into our future. Last summer, we had a contractor that needed a scaffolding solution for his column forms at the last minute. We were able to develop a solution within a couple of days that provided a method to attach our scaffold brackets to his column forms. We were able to provide the contractor with the solution that he required, and put a new product into our lineup. It was a win for both of us. All of Gates's forming systems are wood based systems. A lot of other systems have metal. What this allows is for customers to easily modify forms to fit the job as opposed to changing the job to fit forms. Our forms are custom designed and built for each particular job. A lot of our competitors are modular. And their forms come in specific shapes and sizes. One of the things that I feel gates does very well is our production departments are able to manufacture accessories in a very timely fashion. As far as innovation, we're always trying to create new products, not just for this creation of new products sake, but to solve problems, and the direct needs of our of our contractors. Like, when you think about what are the most important moments in our history, it's this invention of different things or thinking of it a different way. And so exciting to carry that forward into our future.