Preserving Our Historic Structures: A Look Into The Tradesmen Group, LLC.

The third Thursday of every January is National Get to Know Your Customer Day and we’d like to take the opportunity to get to know and share with you one of our customers, who we call clients, The Tradesmen Group, LLC., based out of Plain City, Ohio. We recently had the pleasure of working with The Tradesmen Group on the Chattanooga Readiness Center National Guard Armory. 

In 1997, with a passion for preserving, restoring and rehabilitating our country’s historic buildings, Melissa West founded The Tradesmen Group, Inc. Specializing in restoration, TTG offers several services including but not limited to historic rehab and restoration, water infiltration investigation, structural assessment services and project management. Over the last twenty-five years Melissa, along with her husband and business partner, Rick Freitag, have built a reputable and highly skilled team that is helping take them to the next level. In accordance with getting to know our customers, we were able to ask Rick a few questions about TTG and their history as well as their future plans. 

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Q: What vision do you all have for TTGs future? 

A: After 25 years of development and advancement in our industry, and achieving a status as one of our nation’s top historic restoration companies, TTG is transitioning to a 100% employee owned company in the coming weeks. This will include not only TTG, but affiliated company Tradesmen Crane & Equipment, LLC. This transition will profoundly benefit all of the great people that have worked hard and dedicated themselves to the success of this company through preserving our nation’s most significant structures. TTG (and affiliated TCE) is envisioned to utilize the positive energy of common ownership among its employees to catapult TTG to the next level of prosperity and growth and to cement itself as one of the nation’s most elite restoration contractors.

Q: When TTG started, approximately what was the staff count, and approximately how many do you employ now?

A: TTG started with under 6 people and today employs approximately 50 people. It is important to note that in the last 5-6 years Melissa deliberately kept TTG a small business with less than 50 employees. She intentionally avoided growth and held TTG to the size it is now. As we move forward into a new future as a 100% employee owned company, and under my leadership, I intend to grow TTG beyond where we are today. How big is yet to be determined. We will grow strategically as we must ensure we remain fully committed to our core mission and principles as we grow.

Q: What is your dream restoration project?

A: That is difficult to choose only one so I will answer with two dream restoration projects. It is a lifetime dream job to restore a lighthouse on an island, ideally in a tropical or sub-tropical area. We have proposed on several lighthouses but have never been successful in earning an award for a lighthouse project. The other would be to contribute to the preservation of an iconic structure such as the Statue of Liberty, the US Capitol Building or a similar iconic structure.

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A few of the many notable sites that TTG has worked on are the Tomb of Warren G. Harding, the 29th President of the United States, and his wife, the U.S. Marine Corp War Memorial at Arlington, Independence Hall, St Raphael Church, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, which earned them the North American Copper in Architecture Award in 2013, and as it would turn out, several parks, city and government agencies throughout the state of Tennessee, including Nashville's own historic courthouse, which suffered severe damage by widespread graffiti and broken windows due to riots and civil unrest. Currently, they are overseeing the restoration of another piece of Tennessee history, The Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church, commissioned in October of 1892. The sandstone and slate structures floor area is roughly 20,000 square feet and the wall area being restored is over 100,000 square feet. This restoration is set to last approximately two years and includes replacing approximately 75% of all mortar joints, removing, refreshing and restoring all capstone, parapet and buttresses, a complete re-roof that includes restoring 25% of the slate tiles and replacing the remainder with new slate tiles, restoring or replacing windows, including leaded stained glass windows, restoring any water damaged plaster and drywall and repainting. 

Built with ingenuity, hard work and dedication by our ancestors, these structures are a link to our past and what defines us today as a culture and a people. Whether it is your grandfathers’ old house, the school you attended as a child, the university hall where you met your spouse, the church where you were married, or the hospital where your children were born, we all find our lives intertwined with great historic buildings of our past. It is our responsibility to care for and maintain our historic structures to the highest standards possible so that generations to come can enjoy, marvel at, and benefit from our incredible historic buildings. (Home | the Tradesmen Group, Inc., n.d.)

There’s no denying The Tradesmen Group has quite an impressive history and repertoire and we’re proud to have had this opportunity to share a little bit about them with all of you.  We look forward to future partnerships with them and seeing their continued success and growth. 

*Home | The Tradesmen Group, Inc. (n.d.). Tradesmengroup.com. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://tradesmengroup.com/