From Family Roots to National Renovations: Jeff Forrest on 50 Years of Winter Park Construction

Quinton Comino: Hey everybody. Today, I’m sitting down with Jeff Forrest with WPC—stands for Winter Park Construction. They’re known in the Florida area for being a fantastic builder. This podcast is a ton of fun. Jeff is great to talk to.

Quinton Comino: I feel like I could just talk to him for hours. There’s a ton to learn from this. We go over everything from company culture to multifamily housing, just kinda cover a very broad spectrum. He’s got a ton of stories. Tune into this. It’s gonna be fun.

Jeff Forrest: Yeah. My name is Jeff Forrest. I am CEO of WPC. We’re a Central Florida-based general contractor. Company’s 50 years old. I’ve been here for forty-six of those fifty years. So I’m considered one of the old guys in the group here. I’ve got a great bunch of young people, but it’s been a fun ride for the last forty-six years. It’s a great story both for myself and for the company.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. And you’re based here in Florida, so it’s been a pretty wild ride.

Jeff Forrest: Yeah. For sure.

Quinton Comino: Now your operations are solely in Florida?

Jeff Forrest: So our ground-up work is based in Florida. We try to stay within about two and a half hours of Central Florida. So Jacksonville is not too far away for us. Certainly east and west—Daytona, Tampa, that kind of thing. Our renovations division in the hospitality market—all over the country. This group, we’re in Nashville right now doing some work. We’ve been in Chicago, Wisconsin, Vegas—you name it. The renovation piece, the team travels well.

Quinton Comino: So would that be one of your bigger departments?

Jeff Forrest: Great question, by the way, because we have been known in Central Florida as kind of a multi-unit builder. Early in the early days were a lot of hospitality work and timeshare because there was a lot of timeshare construction, hotels, etc. We got into the multifamily business. A lot of people know us today as a multifamily builder. It blew up. The market blew up, and then it literally blew up like it’s nonexistent.

Jeff Forrest: But renovation, especially in the hospitality business, especially in the timeshare—what I call vacation-part business—is a great market for us, and we’re looking to grow that even more.

Quinton Comino: Okay. So just bringing things up to making it look like 2025 modern—

Jeff Forrest: All throughout the United States. Might be. And we just finished a wonderful project in a little area called Lake Nona here for a company called Tavistock. It was lots of products like Courtyards and Residence Inn, Marriott products—have to bring up to brand standard. And maybe it’s every five or ten years, they change their signage or their lobbies or their check-in spaces. And that’s become a great business for us where we can go into these projects and bring them up to brand standard.

Quinton Comino: Okay. And so housing—that’s really what you’re looking at. Anything to do with housing or vacations or what have you—it’s not necessarily commercial.

Jeff Forrest: Yeah. No. You know, we do commercial work. I like to say we’re—you know, when you’re a contractor, you just think you can build anything. What we’re really good at is multi-unit construction and multi-unit renovation. That fits that category of hotels, timeshares, student housing, senior living, multifamily. And it has become our niche. It’s what we’ve gotten really good at.

Jeff Forrest: A production-based company is where the building stays still and the people move. Whether it’s renovation in hotel rooms, etc., or building an apartment building, we’ve gotten really good and efficient at doing it.

Quinton Comino: Wow. And you haven’t even really found the need to go much farther. You said two and a half hours from Central Florida.

Jeff Forrest: Now we’ve gone farther, but usually not as successful because one of the reasons why we think we’ve maintained a good reputation of providing a quality product is that we have a lot of control mechanisms in place. So you wake up in the morning—if you’ve gotta drive three or four hours or hop on a plane, you tend not to put yourself in those positions as frequently. Where if you have to drive a couple of hours—myself, executive team—it’s much more effective, much more able to get onto those jobs and make sure they live up to our expectation.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. So quality is big for you then.

Jeff Forrest: It’s a big deal. You know, reputation in the construction business is tough. You gotta do a good job. You gotta get it done on time, and you gotta be competitive. My brother used to have this saying: good, fast, cheap—pick two. We like to try to provide all of those if we can, but the reality is we’ve gotta be competitive in the marketplace. And when you’re shutting down a hotel or a bank of rooms in a hotel, you’ve gotta get in and out because that’s revenue lost. For us, it’s about how do we put ourselves in a position to be efficient. And so quality is a big part of the equation, certainly schedules as well.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. That would be. So how many crews do you have then? How many employees?

Jeff Forrest: So we’re at 45 employees. And give or take, about 15 of those would be based in our corporate office here in Central Florida. And then we have the balance kind of spread out on multiple jobs, whether it be ground-up jobs or renovation projects.

Quinton Comino: So then how many of your employees are W-2 and you pay them to swing a hammer and you tell them when to clock in and clock out? And then how many are 10-99 or subcontracted—they install the windows, you handle the framing, sort of thing.

Jeff Forrest: So we are a management company in the sense that we have supervision, project management services, project executive services. All of our WPC staff members are employees. And then we go out in the market to electricians and plumbers and mechanical contractors and painters, etc. And all of those are vendors. So we don’t self-perform anything. We just manage that group.

Quinton Comino: Wow. But you have to really trust your vendors then. You have to trust those contractors.

Jeff Forrest: No question about it. And so it’s really very important that we vet those. And it’s also important that we’re using subcontractors and vendors that can finish the work, not just start the work. And we’ve got great relationships. When you’re a company that’s been around this long, you have an opportunity to develop relationships with wonderful companies in all the areas of construction. So it’s a key part of our business. No question about it.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. You said reputation is so important. And it really is for construction because it’s not like some of these construction companies don’t really have an online presence. Or they don’t really focus on that online presence. It’s not like you can look up “pizza place near me” and you see thousands of pizza places. You’ve got great contractors, but they’re maybe not online in the way that we interact with the online world right now. And so reputation is so, so important. So how do you vet those subs that you’re using? Who does that? Is that a person? Do you give them a job to try it out? How do you make sure that they’re gonna be the quality that you need?

Jeff Forrest: Yeah. So we have a qualification statement where a subcontractor has to fill that out. And you’re looking for lots of things. One, you’re looking for credibility in their work. And so who have they worked for before? How do we contact them? And to make sure—much like hiring an employee, you’re getting their resume and you’re seeing who they worked for. So economics are really important. Vendors have to have stability. They have to have good bank accounts. They have to understand what it takes to manage cash flow, and so we go through that process with them. And it is a lot of word-of-mouth. To your point, there are very few vendors that have a great online presence. I will say that it’s improving certainly as the generational gap that occurs in our industry.

Jeff Forrest: The difference between you and I and age is fairly substantial. I’m 62. So I grew up in a digital age where we embrace that. And so one of the quick stories—this logo, this WPC—wpc.com is a three-letter URL. It’s very hard to find. We were the first general contractor in the United States to have a URL. The first general contractor in the US package. Nineteen eighty-nine, nineteen ninety—my brother captured that. And so super cool. I actually own this URL and the logo myself personally and lease it back to the company, and I’ve been offered a lot of money for that. But the point of that is we started really early, and when the opportunity presented itself, we have a team of people that help us with our marketing and our online presence. And my son kind of heads that up right now—not only is he the president of the company, but he’s handling our business development and our marketing.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. Jeffrey. But he probably doesn’t go by Jeff.

Jeff Forrest: Well, you know, when you holler Jeff around here, there’s four of us—my son, myself, and a couple of our employees. So we have to say—so when all—I have a grandson named Jeffrey too, so put us all in the same house and you call our name and everybody’s turning. But it is Jeffrey or junior—Jeffrey junior. Lots of people who—and he grew up here. Just like me, he grew up here. So many people in this company have known him since he was a pup. And now that he runs the place, he’s the boss.

Quinton Comino: There you go. That’s so great. So it’s a family-run business. Was it your father who started it?

Jeff Forrest: My brother started the company. 1974. And I went to work for him in ’79, so I celebrated forty-six years in June. My dad did work at the company for a brief period of time. He was at Buena Vista Construction, which is—kinda cool—with Disney. I was a Disney brat, I guess you’d call it. Born in California but raised here in Orlando into Disney World. My dad retired from Buena Vista Construction. He came to work for us for a while before he retired as a carpenter, and he was a craftsman in the group. My brother was the entrepreneur. I got to learn from both my brother and my dad, and was very fortunate to have both of them to teach me how to bang nails pretty well and run a company pretty well.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. You have to know both because you need to be able to identify that contractor doesn’t know what they’re doing unless you know what you’re doing.

Jeff Forrest: You have to be a good businessperson in this industry. There’s no question about it. And I was very fortunate. My brother was a wonderful businessman. He’s my brother, and to be associated with that by itself is impressive. But the fact that he owned and ran multiple businesses in a lifetime—passed away five years ago in October.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. I read that. I’m sorry about that.

Jeff Forrest: Yeah. No worries, man. That’s a part of life. And we were thirteen years apart. But he was a great role model, a great partner—we were partners for seventeen, eighteen years as I became an owner in this company. And so I was very, very fortunate.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. It’s amazing. I work with my siblings as well. One of my siblings in sales, another one does our IT, our website, and some others throughout in different departments. So it’s very valuable working with family because you can trust that person. They think like you. There’s just so much synergy there. Not that you can’t get that with just someone who’s unrelated—you certainly can—but it’s just a dynamic.

Jeff Forrest: Yeah. It’s an interesting dynamic. No question about it. My son and I are exceptionally fortunate in that we’re so close—a very rare relationship where father and son are as tight as we are, seeing each other every day, spending time, going on vacations together, playing golf together. I’m just this much better ahead of him with golf—not a lot. He’s catching me, but I get to play more often. He has to work harder.

Quinton Comino: That’s true. Now that he’s running things, he’s the president.

Jeff Forrest: That’s still good. And I see that in my own father where he thinks—well, I think the way he thinks. And so when we sit in meetings together, I already know where he’s going with something.

Jeff Forrest: It’s lined up. And it helps so much and it is not a lot of people have that.

Quinton Comino: It’s valuable and it’s great for the company. When you have people on the same page with the same vision, you can really go places.

Jeff Forrest: For sure. And he’s more analytical. I’m dyslexic, by the way. So I grew up with a different mindset of how you go through the world and how you see things. And he’s very analytical—he’s smarter than I am. I say that all the time. But I say that in the sense that he digs deeper into things than I ever did, which is fantastic when you’re running a business.

Quinton Comino: Correct.

Jeff Forrest: My other two partners—Sam, which my son just turned 37—Sam’s in that range. And Sam’s a construction guy, operations guy. So Sam is a guy that’s gonna go out to the job site and make sure everything is built correctly. Jeffrey’s gonna be the one that sits here in the office and make sure this business is run very well and has done an exceptional job. Both of them have done a wonderful job, and my partner Kevin Corrado, who I’ve been fortunate enough to work with now for thirty years as my COO—that’s kind of how we worked. Even though I knew construction very well, Kevin was the guy out there making sure that they did a great job.

Quinton Comino: So then where did you fit into the picture? More of the visionary?

Jeff Forrest: Well, when I got into an executive role mid-nineties, I started to think slightly different. My brother and I had two different world views of things. I was a communicator. I was the guy that was gonna go out, sell ice cubes to Eskimos. And I was also a kind of a branding guy, market guy—love that process of communicating what this logo meant and protecting it and making sure we put it on the right things. And so when it came to vision, it was really about what the company looked like to the external world combined with creating a culture internally where people wanted to come to work. The hardest thing to do is get people to come to work and enjoy themselves.

Jeff Forrest: We’ve been so fortunate to have people that have worked here for twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five years. I celebrated forty-six. We have one employee here, Larry, who celebrates forty-seven years this year. So we’re right there tagging team. So that metric of success where people wanna stick around has a lot to do with the culture. And we’re not a company and not a business—but the reality is we work really, really hard so that people enjoy having to come to work in a very difficult business. And so I think where I added value the most in those days was focusing my energy on what are we gonna look like, how are we gonna be presented, and then how do we make sure people enjoy coming to work.

Quinton Comino: Because I noticed on your website it talks so much about the quality of the workplace and your employees enjoying working. And you have some programs even that I thought were really interesting—programs for losing weight, for quitting smoking, getting people into the gym. And so having people for decades and decades—how do you do that? There’s so much value in having someone for years and years and the relationships that develop. What are you focusing on to establish that?

Jeff Forrest: No. I mean, it’s a lot of things. I love having fun doing stuff. The one thing that I think people will remember me for is the idea that I’ll surprise people, and I’ll look for volunteers to go do a project. And then we’ll load up on a bus, and we’ll go to Universal, and we’ll go hang out. And so the idea that we create an environment where people are engaged—there’s a lot of golf around here, we’ve got a putting green in our corporate office here. You mentioned the health component—one of the best ways to have a long-term company is have healthy people. And no better way to set an example than myself. Right before I turned 60 years old, I made a list of the 10 things I wanted to do when I was 100. And I went out trying to find people to help me do those 10 things.

Jeff Forrest: Creating a healthy environment in the workplace creates great mental health, great physical health. People wanna go to work every day. Part of it is setting a good example. And I’m a prankster. I have a good time. I can walk around this office at different times and scare a few of the employees on a pretty regular basis, but the reality is it’s a combination of things. It is lots of little things that come together, and people just appreciate the fact—I come in this office every day whenever it is, I walk around to every single desk and say hi to everybody that’s here. Part of that is just to get a gauge on how they’re feeling, seeing how they’re doing. I never accept “fine” as a good answer. Somebody tells me they’re fine, I’m digging in. I’m gonna find out what’s going on. But the reality is I’m just looking to make sure that they’re enjoying themselves, that they’ve got everything they need to do their jobs, and seeing how the kids are or the grandkids or whatever the case may be.

Quinton Comino: Yep. You learn so much just by walking around and listening and observing. You learn so much about the person, about processes going on, what’s going well and what isn’t. You learn so much simply by walking around.

Jeff Forrest: Yeah. Right on, man.

Quinton Comino: So how—when did you start to identify the value of culture? Was that something you understood right away?

Jeff Forrest: Well, I think it came from a lot of different interactions that I had with various people. We live in the hospitality capital of the world. We’ve got Disney. We’ve got SeaWorld. We’ve got Universal. And I not only knew people that worked at those places, I got to understand the importance of that employee experience. And so it was very early in my career, especially on the management and executive side, where I realized that importance. Now executing that 100% of the time is the challenge. But understanding it and making sure that you have to do it—it was probably mid-nineties when I knew the importance of those things and creating an experience not only upstream to our clients—we wanna make sure that they have a great experience, we like to sell that as our strategic advantage—but you’ve gotta go downstream to your vendors, and you’ve gotta be internal. Creating an experience for people that’s positive, that shows you’re a good human—that puts you in a position where they’re gonna remember you not just for the work product but for who you are has always been really, really important. So yeah, I’ll say about half my life I’ve spent trying to do that.

Quinton Comino: That’s very difficult to maintain as you grow.

Jeff Forrest: It is.

Quinton Comino: And I’ve—that you’re at personally, we’re a similar amount of employees, and I just don’t see that I can have the levels of involvement with the employees that I’d like to if we continue to bring more on.

Jeff Forrest: It’s challenging. At one point we had 165 people—peak right before 2008, 2009. You can do it. Is it more challenging? Does it take more time and more effort? There’s no question about it. But it’s about creating various experiences—whether it be town hall meetings or holiday parties or our picnics—and then it’s about making sure that you’re genuine with people. And I think it permeates. So the people that I was responsible for, I modeled what I expected them to do when it came to the employees. Maybe I wasn’t the one in contact with every employee, but there are enough people that understood what we were trying to accomplish and the importance of that relationship. And so the more people you have, the more people you require to make sure that they drink the Kool-Aid.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. You know, my own shortcoming is that I don’t need a lot of affirmation, a lot of depth of relationship, so to speak. You give me the task, I’ll get that done. I’ll figure it out. I’ll find the people, whatever. And so my own shortcoming is that I won’t recognize when maybe an employee needs that. They need affirmation. They need just to know that you’re there and you see them. There are some employees who have told me, I need more of that from you. And I found that my own shortcoming is I just don’t feel I need it, so I don’t think other people need it.

Jeff Forrest: Fair enough. But I think what happens as you grow in various positions in a company—and I’m this way—when I first started in this company, first of all I thought I knew everything and I knew nothing. And I thought, well, I’m gonna come in, I’m gonna change the world. And what you think when you’re younger is it’s big things. And what happens as you progress is that you realize much like building a building—you start with a foundation, you add the slabs, you add the walls, you add the roof. And to use that analogy, it really is about building that relationship and doing the littlest of things that you can that’s important to that person. Finding just a little gem about what might be important to them and then making sure that you check in on a regular basis. I think it grows. And plus as you progress through the company, depending on what your responsibilities are—they can’t—you shed responsibilities and you add responsibilities. I think if you get into this role that I’m in now, which is more of an adviser to the younger group, my son included—I have more time to do that.

Quinton Comino: Exactly. Yes.

Jeff Forrest: And I think you’ll get there. You’re a young man that’s growing and your company’s growing. You got all this stuff going on, and eventually you find yourself in a role where you get to focus on what you’re really good at. What I’m good at is creating that connection—that could be a connection with a client, it could be a connection with a friend or a family member or employee.

Quinton Comino: That’s good. And I can see that where it’s difficult right now. I have a lot going on and I’ll have to tell people, I want to give you more time—I just can’t right now. I simply don’t have the time. I need to move on to what I have next. And it hurts me a little bit inside and it’s not terrible or anything because people understand, but I want to be able to give time to people in the way that I know I should and in the way that some of them really need. That’s just one of the growing pains sort of things that—

Jeff Forrest: Time out. One of the things you could do is just give yourself—say fifteen minutes a day. I’m gonna take a moment. It’s much easier with 45 employees than it was with 165 employees. But my assistant, my wonderful assistant Logan, will give me every single time somebody has a birthday or an anniversary—I get an email or a text and say, you know what? It’s Rex’s thirtieth anniversary. And I know that. I’m gonna make sure on that day that I connect with him in person or on the phone or however I can. So you kinda figure out ways of capturing moments—which is all you need to do during the day or the week where you carve that out. You still gotta do all that stuff—the important stuff is running your business and all the urgent things. But I gotta tell you, you take ten minutes a day and you make a list of people you’re gonna connect with—you’d be amazed what you accomplish.

Quinton Comino: Man, that’s convicting. You feel convicted me on that, Jeff, because I definitely lacked that. And I said it at the beginning of the call—you’d be amazed at what you learned just by walking around.

Jeff Forrest: Right on, brother.

Quinton Comino: And that’s just totally—that’s it right there. Just talking to people. Wow. That’s fantastic. So you said things kind of—the multifamily housing blew up and then it kinda blew up. Do you still do multifamily housing?

Jeff Forrest: Yeah. You know, we do. One of the things—there’s a handful of really good general contractors here in Central Florida that are known for multifamily, specifically stick-built. A lot of contractors don’t like to touch wood, and so we’re one of those that have made enough mistakes that we’re pretty good at it now. And so we don’t go out and market ourselves as a multifamily builder because our phone’s gonna ring when that happens. When every project was a multifamily project and we had six or eight of them coming out of the ground at any given time, there was a lot going on, and then we were all over the place—architects, newest clients, etc. What happens is as the market turns—for lots of reasons, all of the things that people talk about, economics and otherwise—we’re still known as a multifamily builder. And from time to time we don’t have to go out and chase a project because architects and clients know who we are. Our phone will ring as that product type starts to come back probably twelve months from now.

Jeff Forrest: And so what we wanna do is focus our efforts on markets where we’re not as known—small special projects, renovation projects. So in lieu of doing eight big projects, we’re gonna do 50 smaller projects—better margins, by the way. A whole lot less risk. You go out and build a $60,000,000 apartment project—your fee is gonna be fixed for a certain period of time, and you’re tied to that job forever. These smaller renovations, these smaller commercials, smaller special projects that we do have a little less liability, continued liability—and we sleep better at night. So we are known as a multifamily. I was at an open house for an architect, and they go, oh yeah—you guys are all over the place building multifamily deals. Of course, that was two years ago—that’s what they remember. But the reality is we need people to know us as a good builder and a good renovator in general.

Quinton Comino: In general. Yeah. That’s good. You know, I’ve noticed—so 520 and 528, the roads that kinda connect Orlando with the East Coast—Cocoa Beach and what have you—there’s 524 goes in between both of those, and just apartment complexes going up like crazy. As soon as they’re—before they finish one, they have another one going up and they’re clearing land for another. It’s just—and I always wondered who’s behind these things?

Jeff Forrest: We lived in that world, man, where we were breaking ground on an apartment project every two months. And demand is high. There is still an abundance of people either moving here from different parts of the world, changing from owner to rent environments—you pick it. There’s a reason why all these multifamily deals are being built because there is demand. The challenge that we face today aside from the economics of building them—the cost of building them, interest rates and construction, etc.—is that rents are a little bit lower now than they were—probably a lot lower now than they were two, three years ago. That’s the indicator—as rents start to creep up a little bit because all these multifamily deals are being occupied at that 95 to 98%—you’ll start to see the next wave of apartments in all of the places that you’ll end up seeing.

Quinton Comino: Now curious—because you’re local to the area—do you know Viera, south of Cocoa? It’s a kind of a master-planned community.

Jeff Forrest: I built senior living there. I built multifamily there. I’ve been hopping there.

Quinton Comino: I was curious because you’ve been around here for a long time, and they’re from Eastern Europe, I believe—the person that owned all the property and Unasad owns it. And then I guess they sell some of it to builders. I don’t know the relationship. But yeah, just curious on your involvement, what you’ve built there, and how you’ve seen that change because it’s just exploding—talk about apartment complexes going up, new houses going up, these townhouses going up, just commercial buildings going up everywhere—just constantly they’re building there.

Jeff Forrest: And Viera would have been considered five years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, what we would consider like a submarket. It’s in-between space where the roadways are there—but they need to build some off-ramps. And the moment they build the off-ramps, they’ll start to bring in all the other stuff. So the reason why we end up in both places is because of our reputation, and a client will bring us there. And in the case of Viera, we had a long-term multifamily client that we’d worked with for twenty years, and they developed a project there and asked us to be their contractor, which we did. The senior living project we did was the same—we were building for a senior living developer here in Central Florida. And they said, hey—we’re getting ready to break ground in Viera. Do you wanna go? And we said, absolutely. Viera is one of those locations where it’s an hour away from us—it’s not that bad. We’ve worked in Melbourne, by the way—I built a multifamily deal in downtown Melbourne for a wonderful client there. These areas—what we see is the corridor between Orlando and Tampa—Lakeland, you name it—that’s all got there’s still plenty of land there to do development, and we’ll see that kind of come together. And there’s other areas in Florida—there’s so much land in Florida. The question is, is it buildable and is it affordable?

Quinton Comino: So we were—I sold a number of mobile homes to this local developer, and he would just build them and sell them or put them on a property and sell them. And we give him a great price, and he loved it. But he also—what he would do is he would find properties that were buildable for commercial, for multifamily, like apartments. And he would—I guess he was doing the engineering for it and getting all the approvals. And I think even maybe getting it to the permit. Then he would sell that to a builder. Is that kinda how the process works? Does that sound familiar?

Jeff Forrest: There’s lots of ways for this to occur. More often than not, people like the one that you mentioned are getting their properties entitled for a specific use. We’ll use multifamily as an example—they’ve got 10 or 14 acres, and they wanna build 300 units. They get all of that approved through the jurisdictions. And then developers—the multifamily developers—will come in, and they’ll go, oh well, that project’s already—we’ve already saved a year, a year and a half of our time. We can go and we can design and build. So that’s maybe 50% of the projects are like that. The other 50% are developers going in and finding raw land and doing the entitlement process—getting projects entitled to build whatever the use is that people wanna build, it’s a lot of work these days—it really is. Jurisdictions have different requirements—depending on where you go, it takes a couple of years to do that.

Quinton Comino: I bet you’ve seen some serious change in your forty-six years. I bet you’ve seen some serious change in those types of departments.

Jeff Forrest: Well, I can tell you from a jurisdictional standpoint, inspection standpoint, building department standpoint—all you name it—in forty-six years, it’s been a wild ride. There was a time early in the career—my brother’s career—it’s a great little tangent story when we talk about building departments. But there’d be public projects that would be for various cities. My brother would go to the building departments, and back then it was a printed set of drawings, and that’s how you bid the job. He would go look for the projects that nobody could read the drawings—they were poorly drawn or whatever it was, and nobody could read them. And that’s the project he would bid because in his mind he felt like other contractors are gonna look at those drawings and go, I can’t read this—I’m gonna go to the next job, something I can do. And my brother’s mentality was, let’s find projects where people can’t understand and then bid them at some outrageous number and get them.

Jeff Forrest: But back to your point—the world has changed. I’ve gone through four cycles in my career, economic cycles as the world has turned. And I kinda hope I don’t have another one—I got about four or five years left of being here every day. But the technology in the world has changed for contractors. You are faced with kind of the lowest common denominator when it comes to dealing with vendors—not all of them are as technically proficient. But the world is starting to catch up. We’re starting to see more technology in the industry and manufacturing. We have drywall companies now that as they do a takeoff in the unit, they’re precutting all their either metal studs or wood—they’re precutting all the drywall, and they’re packaging all those up and placing them so you have less waste—you’re quicker. You’re starting to see AI creep into the scheduling world, certainly creep into accounting—our accounting department for purposes of invoice approvals, etc.

Jeff Forrest: So I’ve seen a lot in 46. The one thing that doesn’t change is it requires good people to build stuff. End of story. No question about it. You gotta have the right people. And I’ve been so blessed in all this time I’ve been here to have crossed paths with some wonderful humans that are much smarter than I am at building things—probably forgot more than I’ll ever know. Superintendents and project managers. And the company today—the industry as a whole was an older industry in the sense that ten, fifteen years ago my superintendents—we were probably 55 plus, half the company. Today it’s 35 and under. There’s—we got a bunch of people my age floating around, but the reality is my son’s 37. We have a project admin engineer sitting here that’s 23 years old. You can walk around this company, and you see a lot of good youth and a lot of good energy.

Quinton Comino: That’s so valuable.

Jeff Forrest: It’s the way companies should grow—that’s organically, growing people internally.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. Well, that’s really good, Jeff. I’ll leave it at that because that’s just fantastic. I feel like I could talk to you for hours.

Jeff Forrest: I can talk about, man. It’s a big industry, and I appreciate you taking the time to dig in a little bit. It’s always fun to come on and tell a little bit of the story.

Quinton Comino: Yeah, absolutely, man. WPC in Orlando and surrounding areas—so good. Absolutely love it. Love the story behind the URL. Love the story behind the company. It sounds like a really fantastic place to work, and I’m sure that your product speaks for itself.

Jeff Forrest: You know, you mentioned earlier—we try to put ourselves in the best places to work categories across the spectrum. And all the building stuff happens—if you got the right people, you get a good environment, people will do a good job.

Quinton Comino: Absolutely. Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. Well, thank you, Jeff. Really appreciate your time today.

Jeff Forrest: Thank you. Awesome, man. For sure. Enjoyed it.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. Bye bye.