Postech Screw Piles marks its millionth pile with a donation to Habitat for Humanity Manitoba
By Lindsay Risto
Milestones are wonderful markers for businesses to note how far they’ve come and to set the pace for future achievements. Whether it be years in service, a notable duration with no time-loss incidents or all team members completing a training initiative, there are many reasons to celebrate in the Canadian deep foundations industry.
Another notable milestone for deep foundations companies: the number of piles installed. Albeit, this may be a difficult number to keep track of for various reasons. However, one company did and, it’s safe to say, they’ve reached an impressive milestone. On June 13, Sherbrooke, Quebec-based Postech Screw Piles installed their one millionth pile in Canada at a Habitat for Humanity Manitoba job site in Winnipeg, Man.
This past summer, Postech packed an RV and embarked on a cross-Canada road trip to meet the Postech Nation. “Our team here, they came up with the idea that if we were to travel Canada from coast to coast, we would be in a position [to introduce] our dealers from coast to coast to our customer base and promote what we do and who we are,” said Jean Routhier, Eng., M.Sc.A, president and CEO of Postech Screw Piles in a telephone interview with Piling Canada.
On each stop of the road trip, the five-person (and one dog) Postech RV crew met with a Postech distributor at a noteworthy job site to “showcase something that we’ve accomplished, a project that we are proud of, as well as our involvement in the community; a local flavour of what it is that we do, how we are involved,” said Routhier. All of the job site visits are on the Postech Road Trip blog.
When determining the logistics of the road trip, it became apparent that the timeline for Postech to reach its millionth pile installation would coincide with the Winnipeg stop. Where to install the pile?
Postech has a long relationship with Habitat for Humanity, a non-profit that helps build affordable homes, which stems from Postech’s own distributors. “We have a few of our dealers that are working with them,” said Routhier.
“We will grow our relationship with them because it makes sense. The fact that we offer a foundation at a reasonable price makes construction for them cheaper at the end of the day, which makes more housing available for the people they serve.”
Partnering with Habitat for Humanity Manitoba, Postech donated the one millionth – golden – pile to Habitat’s first set of condos to be built in a suburb of Winnipeg.
“Stan Higgins was the one who promoted the idea from the start,” said Routhier.
The site is the future home of 10 two-storey side-by-side units and is one of Habitat’s larger sites. The golden pile serves as the foundation for a flagpole and marks the start of a new tradition for Habitat. Upon completion of this project the flagpole and the golden pile will be uninstalled and relocated to other large Habitat job sites.
“It’s an absolute great honour because there’s over 100 dealers like myself across Canada, and I get the honour to put in the millionth pile,” said Higgins an eight-year veteran with Postech and owner of Postech Winnipeg.
Established in 1995 as Les Fondations Vistech, 24 years may seem like a long time to reach this milestone, especially when considering some deep foundations projects require thousands of piles for completion.
“We’re the guys that fill the gap in residential, we’ll come out for the three or four pile job. So, there’s some companies out there that have done a lot of piles, but we’ve done hundreds of thousands of sites to get to a million, which makes us really, sort of unique,” said Higgins at the special installation ceremony.
With the successful road trip over, thoughts turn to what’s next for Postech.
“In 2020, it’s going to be a special year for us because we’ll be celebrating our 25th anniversary. Honestly, we’re very proud of that, and our slogan is, ‘Starting off on a solid foundation.’ So now we feel the first 25 years were very exciting and we’ve become a national brand, and now we think we can start the next 25 years on a solid foundation by expanding our market. We feel like we could become a company in North America. Our business model is ready to grow outside of our Canadian markets,” said Routhier.
When asked if the RV will make the cross-country drive next year Routhier said, “We like to see ourselves as being very creative. And for me, although it was very exciting, I think we’ve done it and we need to be creative again. Already we’re working on something very ‘out there,’ something different for next season.”
Be sure to visit www.postechpiles.com/roadtrip for all of the blog and video posts from the 2019 Postech Road Trip and to learn more about Postech Screw Piles. 
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