FCL Builders

FCL Builders is an employee-owned industrial general contractor headquartered in Itasca, Ill., outside Chicago. The company traces itself to 1976, and the FCL name dates to 1993, when five employees bought the business. It’s best known for cold storage and food processing plants, plus warehouses, e-commerce and mission-critical buildings, manufacturing and life sciences space. It runs offices from Baltimore and Atlanta to Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix and Sacramento, and claims more than 625 million square feet delivered with a 97% customer retention rate. In north Fort Worth it’s general contractor on 35 Eagle Phase IV, Trammell Crow Company and PGIM’s three-building, 755,793-square-foot spec industrial addition, targeting summer 2027 delivery.

The 1976 date on FCL’s own history is the second step in the story, not the first. In 1967 Robert “Bobby” Stovall moved from Dallas to Chicago to open a local office for industrial real estate firm J.L. Williams. In 1976 he bought that business, renamed it Four Columns Limited and started a construction division. A 1987 merger with The Stava Construction Company created The FCL/Stava Group Inc., and in 1993 five employees bought the company and FCL Builders was formed. The ESOP that made it 100% employee owned came in 2019. Leadership turned over in 2022, when Chris Linn, who joined in 1986, became President and CEO and Michael Boro, who joined in 1979 and was President from 1993, became Chairman.

Two firsts set the specialisms that still define the firm. Its first cold storage and food processing facility was Culinary Foods in Chicago, completed in 1994. Its first data center was the Cyber Continuity Center in West Chicago in 2007. Both are now national practice areas with dedicated specialist teams, as is industrial land remediation.

That remediation group is behind a service line most industrial GCs do not advertise: brownfield to greenfield redevelopment. The Ford Chicago Manufacturing Campus project won the EPA’s Phoenix Award for brownfield revitalization in 2001. For a developer looking at a contaminated or previously built industrial parcel, that is a different conversation from a greenfield bid.

Office growth through the 2010s came fast and is dated on the firm’s own timeline: Dallas in 2014, Suwanee outside Atlanta in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2018, Houston and Philadelphia in 2019, Southern and Northern California in 2020, then Phoenix and Tampa in 2021. After the California expansion the firm was ranked #4 for Distribution Warehouses in ENR’s Top 400 Sourcebook. The Itasca headquarters at 1150 Spring Lake Drive also houses the national Cold Storage and Operational Excellence groups.

Safety reporting for 2023 cites 1,392 completed safety audits and an average 97% safety score, and the firm states that any crew member is authorized to issue a stop-work order. On an active industrial site with multiple trades stacked, who holds that authority is a practical question, and FCL answers it broadly.

Featured projects beyond the Fort Worth spec work include an Under Armour e-commerce facility in Baltimore, an Ashley Furniture warehouse in Mesquite, Texas, a Goodyear distribution facility in Newnan, Georgia, Cold Summit cold storage in Bedford Park, Illinois, and the Almond Avenue warehouse in Fontana, California.