When a company declares — in its name, no less — that it offers a “complete” line of services, expectations run high that it can do anything in a particular field. Complete Underground LLC is trying to live up to its name.
The Midlothian, Virginia, contractor offers directional drilling and plowing services for utilities, excavation on work sites and underground utility locating, pneumatic boring and duct bank and manhole installations.
Complete Underground is a busy company and Timothy Fortson, company vice president, wears many hats. His office is the cab of his pickup. He meets with customers, keeps a handle on day-to-day operations, over the years has “learned to mechanic a little bit” so he jumps in to repair equipment, and sometimes climbs in the operator’s seat on a directional-drilling unit for an especially challenging bore.
The 35-year-old executive is partnered in the enterprise with his father, also named Timothy Fortson but with a different middle name. The senior Fortson, who goes by Tim, owns the company. The vice president grew up around the drills and excavators of his father’s company, went away to college for a year, and finally decided that his future lay underground, so to speak.
“I started out in the ditches,” the son recalls about learning the trade as a younger man. “When I was younger and no one else was around I would jump on the machines to learn to operate them and watch the guys working them.” By 2006-07, Tim Fortson was a committed underground contractor.
MAKING A NAME FOR THEMSELVES
In 2012, after a nationwide cable TV company operating in Virginia began to frustrate small contractors involved in the laying of cable, the Fortsons decided to make a clean break from the firm. They reimagined their business plan, emerged as a new company called Complete Underground, and today are working up and down the East Coast.
The Richmond market is the base of business, but “we’ll work anywhere in Virginia, and do,” says the vice president, “all the way across the state from the mountains to the beaches. In recent years, we haven’t had to go out of state for work, but we will if the work warrants it. We’ve been fortunate. I really want to stay in the Mid-Atlantic region and build up our name.”
Through the years, the company has dug into soils in Delaware, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Florida. While it principally serves commercial clients wherever it digs, municipal utility departments have benefited from its work, and residential properties are not an uncommon destination for one of its rigs.
Fortson says directional drilling has always been the company’s bread and butter. Complete Underground has six Vermeer HDD units, ranging from a model 16x20 to a larger 24x40 that the company recently used to bore an 18-inch hole 500 feet under a creek, dropping 30 feet at its deepest elevation before rising again. The company typically has three of the drills working on projects somewhere every day.
“We are pretty loyal to Vermeer,” Fortson says. “All the brands have their own strengths and weaknesses, but all our drills are Vermeer.” So are the company’s plows. In its equipment yard are a Vermeer Flextrak 115, vintage 1998, a 750 quad track, a 1250 quad track and a 10-ton 1250i2 quad track with such features as a self-leveling cab.
“Everyone loves the quad tracks,” he says, adding that there is a resurgence of interest in the plows. “They have come back into play in the industry. Ten years ago, it seemed to be something of the past. Now, we can’t even find the plows we need, let alone the people to run them.”
The company has four plows running every day somewhere in Virginia.
Other tools that Complete depends upon include Vivax-Metrotech utility and fiber multifrequency locators. The company recently purchased a Kubota 50 compact excavator and a 74 hp Bobcat T76 skid-steer that Fortson calls a Cadillac. “It rides smoother than any skid-steer I’ve ever been on,” he says. “Another nice thing: Its engine compartment is wide open for servicing.”
The company also has Grundomat pneumatic boring equipment in its toolbox. The cylindrical “missile” devices are utilized when a site is too confined for a drill unit and the bore hole is relatively small. “You can’t do a real long shot, maybe 30 or 40 feet, but we can offer it to customers who need it,” Fortson says.
When solid rock is the impediment to completing an HDD job, the company sometimes turns to an Inrock performance drilling tool. That was the case when the company was drilling under Hardware River south of Charlottesville for a fiber optic line. It began to bore in nice, yielding soil, but at the edge of the creek ran into rock.
“That was a difficult shot. We had to get our pitch just right before we drilled into the rock. There wasn’t much steering at that point,” Fortson says. Inrock engineers flew up from Houston to advise the Complete crew and stayed three or four days while the HDD unit reamed out a hole through the solid mass. “They were definitely a big help.”
A challenging shot that Fortson recalls was a 500-foot bore with a 50-foot elevation change under another creek. No rock on that project, but the clay was memorable. “The material under the creek was nice and soft, but then I ran into some reactive clay,” Fortson says. “I had to call our mud guys to help us with our mix so we could get our four 4-inch conduits pulled back. It was the first time I’d encountered something like that. I was on the drill for that shot and it was one for the record books.”
The “mud guys” or technicians were from Tarheel Contractors Supply out of Rock Hill, South Carolina.
ALL CONDITIONS, ALL WEATHER
Complete Underground tears into soil in the country and in the city, wherever the soil needs torn. “The guys do like being in the rural areas and predominantly right now we are in rural areas,” says Fortson, “but we’ve done jobs in urban northern Virginia where you can’t even find a piece of pavement without paint on it.”
One urban memory is a job right there in Richmond that required open face cuts in a highly congested area. Drilling through the ground to install new lines was problematic because of many existing underground utilities. Over the course of a year, the crew installed miles of duct bank. The crew excavated an area where a duct bank was to be placed, assembled the receiving conduit with spacers between them, poured the concrete to form the “bank,” refilled the hole, compacted the soil and re-asphalted the paved area.
It was a Complete job in every sense of the word. It also was a hectic urban work site.
“Downtown Richmond drivers drive like crazy, and fast, too,” Fortson says. “We had banners and signs and cones out there and one lady came right on through all of them and drove right into the ditch. Never a dull moment.”
Virginia weather doesn’t hamper the company’s work as a rule, Fortson says. A winter storm periodically will disrupt drilling and trenching for a few days, but work goes on year-round. “For seven or eight years, we have been lucky to have big projects that we could keep working on right through the winter,” he says.
FINDING LONG-TERM EMPLOYEES
Another element the company seems to be able to count on is employees who stick around. Fortson says if someone hires on and stays a year, they are apt to still be there many years later. One long-timer has been employed by the family company since before the new company was formed. Numerous others have worked there for six to eight years.
“The majority of our guys have been with us for a while,” Fortson says. “We’re trying to get a younger generation in here, too, but that’s tough. The new generation is hard to figure out.”
A couple of long-term employees warrant special mention. Jed Erickson — the vice president sometimes refers to him as “Uncle Jed” — began working with Tim Fortson when they were still in Minnesota. Today, Erickson is director of operations. Another key employee, Jesus Nunez, is the lead direction drill foreman. He worked with the senior Fortson for nearly 30 years before leaving for a family job and then returning five years ago.
All this employee loyalty gives the company the luxury of running five or six experienced crews. Crew members are cross-trained to some extent. About everyone can run a mini-excavator, for example, but there are HDD and plow specialists.
What’s the vice president’s favorite machine to operate? “I always liked the drill,” Fortson says. “You can’t see the work because it’s all underground, so it’s like a learning experience every time you get on it. We have a lot of different soils in Virginia, and you don’t know everything about what’s down there.”
AN EYE ON GROWTH
Fortson doesn’t know what the next decade is going to bring for Complete Underground. The immediate future looks good though. The company is finishing up an 80-mile installation of broadband fiber that Fortson hopes leads seamlessly to a second contract for an additional 500 miles of buried fiber optic. He also is attempting to broaden the company’s involvement in the running of water, sewer and natural gas lines.
“And I’m trying to get more governmental contracts,” Fortson says. “That’s where I have been headed for the last six months.”
Residential work seems to be slowing down from the pace of work the company enjoyed over the last couple of years. “Property owners aren’t spending the money they have been,” Fortson adds.
He believes the company is recognized by small and large customers alike as a good one to do business with, for two reasons. First is that its crews do high-quality work and do it quickly.
“Anywhere we go, when we roll in and start to work, customers can’t believe how productive we are,” Fortson says. “I push that with our guys, take pride in the work we are doing, clean up as we are doing it. Generally, customers are amazed at how much we can get done.”
The other selling point for Complete Underground, Fortson believes, is that it is a family company, rather than a conglomerate.
“We take a lot of pride in our name because everything we do comes back on us,” he says. “I want us to grow, but I don’t want us to be a national company or something. I want to offer the same quality services that bigger outfits offer and remain a family company, a more personal company, where people can ring up and I will pick up and answer. One of my goals is to at heart remain a small family company.”
