In 2008, Hardaway Construction was hired to build the North American home office and warehouse complex for international Food Equipment company, Franke Foodservice Systems. The development is situated on approximately 40 acres along Highway 41 near the Smyrna airport. LEED Silver Certified, the office building is a 103,700 SF two-story steel and glass structure and the warehouse is a 122,000 SF one-story concrete tilt wall building.

Hardaway recently re-connected with Claudia Synnatzschke, director of facilities for Franke Management, LLC, to take a look back on this award-winning project.

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What was your favorite part about the FRANKE project? Any project highlights or experiences you remember?

I think that the whole project was just really interesting to me. I had no experience with this, which everyone knew. But after a while, they all became very good at explaining things to me in an easy way. One thing I remember was about paint. They were trying to explain that the paint would be reflective and used crushed glass to make it that way. They called it “fairy dust” to make it easier for me to understand. I’ve been calling it fairy dust ever since, and it’s been fun to watch people react when I ask for it.

Please explain how you saw and felt Hardaway Construction improved the project.

It’s hard to go back into details now, but we received several awards for it. And I think Hardaway got an award - the Excellence in Construction award. So, that said, it definitely stood out.

Hardaway also had a big portfolio. When we originally picked contractors, we had no idea how big the project would get, so we had two or three companies we looked at. After a while, we realized how big it would be and knew Hardaway was of a size that could handle such a project.

Do you remember if any specific employees from the Hardaway team helped the project succeed?

David and Steve, the project manager and superintendent, were both great to work with. They were very professional and organized, which helped me not know what I was doing.

We’ve had other projects and locations built by other companies, and their project management was almost non-existent. I always appreciated the Hardaway team, but having somebody else who was completely disorganized and could never come up with a solution made me appreciate them even more. That helped a lot in making the project successful.

What did you find was most valuable about the project process?

The quality was good, and Hardaway certainly kept an eye on that. It is a high-quality building, and everybody who comes in, even today, is still blown away and says it’s such a great building and such a nice place to work.

Overall,  the experience that a company like Hardaway can bring to the table was the most valuable. If you do this all the time, and this is the 10th building your company is putting up, it may not mean as much. But for us, as our first building, it meant a lot to us.  

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