Published Sunday, August 29, 2010
Commercial construction alive, but it's leaner
The Newnan Times-Herald
Commercial construction is alive and well, if a little leaner, in Coweta County.
Work is proceeding rapidly on projects in the Fischer Crossings development, located at the intersection of Highway 34 East and Fischer Road.
In Newnan, Biff Farmer and "Rocky" Reeves have just broken ground on a brand-new restaurant, Rock Back Pizza, at a site on the Newnan Bypass. Grading has already begun.
Recently, crews completed work to improve the site distance for drivers along Fischer Road, and the detour is no longer in place. The Sam's Club is going up quickly, and work is also being done on the parking lot.
Across Fischer Road at the other corner, a new movie theater is going up quickly, too.
The developer, Scott Seymour, has applied to Coweta County for a controversial expansion of the project. He is seeking commercial zoning for additional property on the north side of Wynn's Pond Road, which will require the relocation of the road. Seymour is also seeking conditional use permits to build athletic fields and a day-care center on additional property to the north.
A public hearing on the rezoning request is set for Sept. 16 before the Coweta County Board of Commissioners.
As for Rock Back Pizza, Farmer said this will be the first of what they hope to be hundreds of stores. "We are building a training facility into this pizza restaurant where we will train franchises, and start the franchise process here." They had planned to create the new restaurant before the economy tanked.
"The economy is... just kind of in the way of what we were going to doing anyway," Farmer said.
However, they have discovered "there are some benefits to stepping up and starting a store or starting a business nowadays," he said.
For one, there are great deals on property.
Also, "it's a good time to find a contractor, because a lot of them are out of work," Farmer said. "It was a great time to negotiate with a contractor and to find one that could do a project quickly -- because they are looking to get their people working," he said.
The same thing goes with architects, engineers, and landscape designers.
"We found that over half of the architects in the city of Atlanta are out of work," Farmer said. "We interviewed about 16 of them... we could afford to be choose."
However, not everyone is hungry.
"I have been amazed at the apathy of some of the people I have talked with," Farmer said. "There were equipment people that never called me back, that didn't follow through. I thought 'man, here we are with the worst economy in my lifetime,' and I call a restaurant supplier and I don't get a call back."
"I found myself going with a lot of vendors that were just conscientious and got back to me," he said. "It wasn't always who was the cheapest. It was who was the most responsive."
"There are a few out there that are really hungry and aggressive, and they really go the extra mile to get the business. They're the ones getting the business," he said.
Farmer and Reeves may be starting a new business from scratch, but they're certainly not neophytes.
Reeves is one of the original founders of Mellow Mushroom Pizza.
Farmer worked for him for 15 years, running the marketing department.
Reeves left the company in 2007. But it wasn't long afterwards that "he called me and said, 'Biff, let's get into this, let's do a whole new thing,'" Farmer said. "We're going to do the same thing we did at Mellow Mushroom, just kind of take it to the next level."
