Jeffrey Beard Head of Design/Build Institute of America

Jeffrey Beard said he first struck upon the notion of forming a national organization promoting design/build in 1991 while he was working at a contracting firm in Washington, D.C.

Ten years later, Beard has moved from his role as executive director to front man for the Design-Build Institute of America. In April, he replaced James Broaddus as DBIA president and chief executive officer and took over the institute's outreach efforts.

Beard said that in the early years of DBIA, he spent his time working to attract contractors to the concept that design/build is an equal and, perhaps, superior delivery method to any other process in the field.

His idea gained attention and even support after he penned a report about design/build on federal projects, he said. All of a sudden, builders began talking to him about the idea and design/build gained momentum.

He said he spent two years trying to get his employer and other associations to create the DBIA, but it just wouldn't work. So Beard quit his contracting job in 1993 and teamed up with seven different contractors, based everywhere from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, to kick-start the institute.

Since starting the DBIA, Beard has expanded its roster from the seven founding members in 1993 to more than 900 members today.

With his organization on solid ground and a new title next to his name, Beard said he is ready to look to the future. Daily Reporter staff writer Sean Ryan touched base with Beard for this section to get his take on the status of the DBIA, its potential for growth and the chances for design/build in the public sector.

Our primary role is to develop best practices rules for design/build business owners as well as for clients.

Contracts, performance specifications, requests for qualifications and requests for proposals -- a whole series of tools we're looking at to make this whole process not an afterthought but something that you consider up front.

All we're asking here at DBIA is put us at equal footing so an owner can make an informed choice.

The owner should have all these things on their decision tree. They should have negotiated, most qualified, best value -- all of it.

Owners should have all these things available to them, and they don't because of all these self-interests from general contractors to architects to engineers. Architects and engineers and contractors have carved up the design/build pie the way they've worked it the past 75 years into design/bid/build.

Say you have a bread machine that you and your dad worked on for 40 years, but if somebody said it is no longer as profitable as it has been and you have to share the profit with a designer, you're not going to want to do that. And I understand that.

We've been working primarily with the federal government since we're a national organization. But where we have a big enough constituency in a state, we go in and argue for agency preference because the agencies prefer design/build, but the legislators have to vote on it.

We're aggressively trying to make sure all the states have design/build legislation on the books. The feds already have it. There's a major provision in T21, the (federal) highway bill that allows design/build on highway projects. So we're really pushing the (Department of Transportation) to give us the regulations on that so it can be implemented. It's like, 'Let my people go.'

We're very confident because design/build is a very good delivery method that if it were on equal footing, people would choose it.

We at first were just a national organization with national members, but since then we've moved out to more midsized companies who were interested in design/build, regardless of whether the project is worth $50,000 or $500 million.

That way we can get the team players all at the table to talk together, because architects don't build buildings. It takes multiple discussions. It takes the team. It's much more fun when we can go at this together. That's the beautiful thing about design/build.

It's made considerable inroads in the industrial process because you have entities that work with a strategic alliance that make it their business to understand the business of the manufacturer. So the customer is really appreciative of their efforts.

All the other organizations represent that.

Where is it now? Those numbers are very hard to figure out. Let's say it's about one-fourth of the total nonresidential building dollars today. If you include all the things we stand for, I would make a prediction -- this is just me personally -- that by 2015, 50 percent of the work or more is going to be design/build.