ARCO Design/Build

ARCO Design/Build is a design-build contractor founded in 1992 and headquartered in St. Louis, part of the broader ARCO family of construction companies. The firm is 100% employee-owned through an ESOP and operates from more than 50 offices with roughly 1,800 associates. Its core market is industrial: manufacturing plants, distribution and logistics facilities, cold storage, food processing and light industrial buildings, delivered under integrated design-build contracts that put design and construction risk in one place. ARCO broke ground in July 2026 on a 143,940-square-foot, two-story manufacturing facility for OPW, a Dover company, in Smithfield, North Carolina, targeting completion in the second quarter of 2027. The firm has now delivered 22 ground-up projects in Johnston County totaling more than 4.4 million square feet.

Engineering News-Record ranks ARCO Design/Build the number one domestic builder of distribution centers and warehouses in the United States. The supporting figures the company publishes: more than 7,500 design-build projects completed, in over 400 cities.

How the company is organized

ARCO Design/Build operates as a set of division offices, each fronted by its own president, vice president or division manager rather than a corporate project executive dispatched from headquarters. The named roster runs Atlanta, Baltimore, Charleston, Charlotte, Columbus, Greenville, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Louisville, Memphis, New York (out of White Plains), Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, Salt Lake City, Savannah and Washington DC. Some leaders cover more than one market – Indianapolis and Columbus share a president, as do Baltimore and Philadelphia – and the company is explicit that it travels outside those metros when a client’s site requires it.

The ownership structure has specific mechanics worth understanding. Eligible full-time associates receive shares of company stock annually, sized in proportion to salary, so profitability flows to the people running jobs. ARCO describes the ESOP as a deliberate continuation of the entrepreneurial partner model the firm was built on.

Warehouses are the calling card, but the industry list is broader than the label implies: cold storage, self-storage, manufacturing including metals manufacturing, mission critical and data center infrastructure, life sciences, aviation, aerospace and defense, healthcare, e-commerce fulfillment, multi-family, and capital improvement programs inside existing facilities. The firm self-performs concrete through an integrated services group, and maintains dedicated foreign direct investment and economic development practices – advisory work aimed at overseas manufacturers siting their first U.S. plants and at the local authorities recruiting them.