SYRACUSE — N.K. Bhandari, Architecture & Engineering, P.C. (NKB) — a 39-year-old firm servicing federal, state, K-12 school, and corporate clients — has revved up its growth over the last several years and is looking to keep it going. NKB has grown from nine employees in 2014 to 25 employees today, says Christopher Resig, company […]
SYRACUSE — N.K. Bhandari, Architecture & Engineering, P.C. (NKB) — a 39-year-old firm servicing federal, state, K-12 school, and corporate clients — has revved up its growth over the last several years and is looking to keep it going.
NKB has grown from nine employees in 2014 to 25 employees today, says Christopher Resig, company owner and president.
That employee growth has been driven by strong revenue increases.
The firm’s revenue jumped 55 percent in 2018, 65 percent in 2017, and 19 percent in 2016, Resig tells CNYBJ. And, he’s expecting company revenue to again increase by double digits in 2019.
nkb derives 60 percent of its revenue from contracts with the federal government and the other 40 percent is a combination of private clients and state government work, he says.
When asked about the company’s keys to growth, Resig says, “First and foremost, it is working at maintaining relationships with our clients. The next thing is diversification of where our projects are located and who our projects are with. To that end, our total revenue a number of years ago was more heavily weighted to the federal sector. It has shifted considerably” down to the current number of 60 percent of revenue coming from federal-government sources.
NKB is headquartered in the Rockwest Center at 1005 W. Fayette St., on Syracuse’s near westside. It is located a 6,600-square-foot space on that building’s fifth floor, which it moved into in January 2017.
The architecture and engineering firm had been on the building’s fourth floor since 1997. Before that, NKB operated in locations in the town of Salina and on James Street in Syracuse.
The firm, which has 18 employees in its Syracuse office, decided to move up one floor because its previous space could fit only 20 people and there was no further room for expansion, Resig says. The new space is configured for 28 people and NKB has the opportunity to expand the space by knocking out walls on two different sides of its space, he notes.
N.K. Bhandari, Architecture & Engineering is growing in the Washington, D.C. area through the office it opened in Bethesda, Maryland in September 2017. NKB has four employees there.
NKB has a five-year contract with the federal government’s General Services Administration, which has it doing work in a geographic area stretching from Maine down to Washington, D.C. then west to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The company received 72 projects from this one contract, Resig says.
“A considerable portion of those 72 projects have been related to agencies, and actually the projects are located in the D.C. metro area. The agencies we have served down in the D.C. metro are both the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, as well as Customs and Border Protection, which is an agency of the Department of Homeland Security,” he says, explaining why NKB opened a Washington, D.C.–area office. “…so having a physical presence there and personnel positioned so closely to the project location as well as the clientele themselves made all the sense in the world.”
NKB has four separate indefinite quantity contracts with governmental agencies as well as non-governmental work. The governmental contracts are with GSA, the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, and the last one is an indefinite quantity contract with the New York State Department of Education, according to Resig. For the latter client, the firm does compliance reviews for K-12 projects designed by others.
In addition to its Syracuse and Maryland offices, NKB has two employees in West Point, N.Y. and one employee in Michigan.
Company history
Narindar K. Bhandari launched the business as a sole proprietorship in 1980, providing structural engineering and construction-management services to a variety of federal, state, and institutional clients throughout upstate New York, according to the firm’s website.
In the mid-1980s, NKB expanded to include architecture and civil engineering services. In 1988, NKB was restructured as a professional corporation under the new name N.K. Bhandari, Consulting Engineers, P.C.
The name would eventually return to N.K. Bhandari Architecture & Engineering, P.C.
Bhandari retired in 2008, and Jim Resig, who had worked for the firm since 1982, assumed ownership. Chris Resig bought the firm from Jim, his brother, and took over as president of NKB in 2015. He has been with the company since 2010 in his second stint, after having initially worked there between 1983 and 1995.