Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/109465
Nemetz (S/A) & Associates Ltd. Continuing a legacy through a combination of youth and experience by Robin Brunet arly in 2012, when asked to assess the health of his electrical engineering consultancy, Nemetz (S/A) & Associates Ltd. president and CEO Steve Nemetz remarked, ���A lot of irons are in the fire.��� As buoyant as Nemetz was, he was understating the case. It was in November of 2012 that he and his colleagues were preparing to fly east for the grand opening of the company���s first Toronto office. Affable as ever, Nemetz concedes that the expansion was something his grandfather, William (who launched the company as a local contractor 50 years ago) would have never imagined being possible. ���If he were still alive and had caught wind of my plans, he would have wished me ���Good luck��� ��� and meant it,��� says Nemetz. As for Nemetz���s father, Arnold (who converted William���s company Domino Electric into an electrical engineering consultancy), he was wary of the expansion. ���He worried a lot about the logistics,��� laughs Nemetz. ���But after we fine-tuned our business plan and found office space on Toronto���s King Street, he went around saying ���Why didn���t we do this earlier?������ E 8/��� ��� February 2013 p08-11Nemetz.indd 8 A lot of people who are familiar with Nemetz���s ability to evolve to meet changing market demands may well ask the same question. But one trait the Nemetz family shares is knowing when the time is right to strike, and the recent completion of the 66-storey, 572-unit Shangri-La Hotel in Toronto for Westbank signaled that the time had come to establish a permanent presence east. ���Everything went smoothly on the Shangri-La and we gained a good understanding of the local market,��� says Nemetz. As for the new 1,700-square-foot office, he notes that, ���We decided to locate downtown across from Royal Thompson Hall as opposed to somewhere in the suburbs, to demonstrate that we���re not merely setting up a satellite branch but instead a full-fledged extension of our Vancouver operations. At the same time, we appreciate that competition in Toronto is fierce. We have no illusions about taking over the world; we just want to be a part of it.��� Currently, Nemetz is busy in B.C. with Metrotower Three, a $170-million, LEED Platinum edifice that, when finished in April of 2014, will add 400,000 square feet of AAA-class office space; and the LEED Gold Highstreet shopping complex in Abbotsford, a new concept in suburban shopping that, when finished early in 2013, will consist of 600,000 square feet of outdoor retail space anchored by a Walmart SuperCentre, London Drugs and a Cineplex VIP Cinemas. This comes on the heels of the recently completed Uptown Shopping Centre in Saanich, built to LEED Gold standards, in which Nemetz ensured that at least half the electricity used by the facility comes from renewable resources (it also provided energy-efficient street lighting to reduce energy consumption and costs). These projects are part of a 10,000-plus project portfolio that includes the Woodwards redevelopment, Millennium Water, River Green and other highprofile facilities. It could be argued that this body of work wouldn���t have been as impressive were it not for the fact that shortly after Steve Nemetz became a principal of the family business in the 1990s, he began dedicating specific people to specific areas of expertise ��� which resulted in the company developing divisions in power design, communication, security and Nemetz (S/A) & Associates Ltd. 13-01-22 3:04 PM