Coming to America

Coming to America

A British-born construction guru now working on the Gulf Coast finds flaws in how American developers track a project's finances.

Dave McCulla fancies himself an expert on figuring out how to stretch tight construction and building budgets, skills learned by lean necessity. His 25 years in the business include working on cost feasibility studies and crisis management for projects such as armories the British government was building in Northern Ireland; medical facilities going up on the Kuwait-Iraq border and construction of U.S. Army camps in Bosnia.

The British-born McCulla met his match, though, when he began looking at the finances behind many American construction and development projects. He has been working in the U.S. since 2000, initially as an engineering consultant and project surveyor for Siemens Westinghouse, a Germany-based power generator company

Last summer, McCulla founded International Construction Consultants, a Lakewood Ranch-based firm that focuses on a variety of commercial construction development services, including one of McCulla's specialties: Cost-risk analysis.

"The cost side isn't monitored as strictly here," says McCulla, 51. "Over here, it's all about money in, money out. People should be more concerned about the cost specifics."

In England and in several other international sites, any project McCulla had a role in went through an exhaustive financial evaluation before the first brick hit the ground. "Within the first three months," McCulla says, "we would know down to the penny what we would make, and then we would re-check it."

McCulla doesn't see that type of devoted detail to the numbers when it comes to the finances behind U.S. based projects. He does however, give the final products he has seen high marks, especially when he considers that American builders - surprisingly - usually have much more bureaucratic headaches then their British brethren.

By trade, McCulla is a certified quantity surveyor, an essential job for any construction project in England, but one that has no equivalent in the U.S. The job of a quantity surveyor in the U.S. would be like a combination of a lawyer, engineer, project manager, estimator and purchasing agent. It takes several years of specialized schooling to become a quantity surveyor.

Despite McCulla's experience with the British building system, there are some good reasons to be living and running a business in the U.S., he says, specifically the Gulf Coast. McCulla and his family first discovered the area on a vacation to Lido Key in 1995; they bought a vacation home here soon after.

McCulla then settled on Lakewood Ranch to live and run a construction consultant business, saying the building and development boom of the past five years provides significantly more opportunities then he would find in England and even many other U.S. locations. That holds true even with the residential slowdown of the past year.

McCulla grew up with dreams of being a star football player, not a construction expert. He was on his way, too, making the roster of an elite junior team as a 16-year-old. But he broke his ankle that season and soon after, he began focusing on school, not sports.

And in addition to globetrotting on various construction assignments, McCulla has had a brush with celebrity, or in England, near-Royalty: He was born on 9 Madryn Street in Liverpool - the same house where Beatles drummer Ringo Starr was born.

-Mark Gordon