Frank L. Blum Construction

Blum Construction has held North Carolina general contractor license No. 18 for a reason: Frank L. Blum set up shop in Winston-Salem in 1923, and the company’s first job was a tunnel under Northwest Boulevard at Reynolds High School. A century on, the firm is still headquartered in Winston-Salem, with offices in Raleigh, Greensboro and Asheville added between 2015 and 2017. Its core markets are higher education, healthcare and senior living. Blum says it has delivered more than $850 million of CM-at-risk work in the last five years and $1.5 billion in North Carolina senior living projects. In Raleigh, it’s a partner in the T.A. Loving-Blum-Metcon team running the Lenovo Center Renovation.

Self-perform work and prefabrication are both published capabilities here, and together they explain how a construction manager holds a schedule. A firm that can put its own crews on the critical path is not waiting on a subcontractor to free up, and components built in a shop instead of on a live floor arrive finished. On a hospital or a senior living building, where the occupied-adjacent work is the hard part, those two capabilities are usually what the schedule rests on.

Virtual design and construction is listed as its own service rather than a software line item. In practice that means clash detection and coordinated modelling before anything is built – most valuable in exactly the mechanically dense buildings Blum concentrates on.

Preconstruction, design-build and sustainable construction complete the list, so the firm can be engaged at a concept stage with budget responsibility attached, or later as a builder on a finished set of drawings.

The office footprint is now five cities, not four. Winston-Salem remains the headquarters, with Raleigh, Greensboro, Asheville and Charlotte alongside it, and the firm states its markets as North Carolina and Virginia. Charlotte is the newer presence, and for a construction manager it is the one that follows the money – the state’s largest construction market, and a long drive from Winston-Salem to run a job from.

Core values are published rather than implied: integrity and honesty, high performance, strong relationships, safety and well-being, and continuous improvement. Safety stated as a value is cheap; what is worth asking a century-old contractor is how it is measured, since the firms that mean it track leading indicators rather than only incident rates.

Licence No. 18 is the detail that sticks. North Carolina began numbering general contractor licences in the 1920s, and holding the eighteenth one continuously is a claim very few contractors anywhere can make.

The headquarters is at 2601 Pilgrim Court, Winston-Salem, on (336) 724-5528.