PO‘IPU — It wouldn’t be news simply because a local boy started his own construction-related company. It wouldn’t even be news if one of his jobs is right down the street from where some of his family members still live.
PO‘IPU — It wouldn’t be news simply because a local boy started his own construction-related company.
It wouldn’t even be news if one of his jobs is right down the street from where some of his family members still live.
What makes the story of Clinton Hinchcliff Jr. newsworthy is that not only has his small company survived tumultuous times, but he actually has jobs “in queue,” or lined up for his men and women into the future, and promising bids on new and continuing projects on several islands in Hawai‘i.
A Balmores boy from the South Shore, Hinchcliff is president of Hinchcliff Drywall Construction and Supply, Inc., and ended up on the Kona side of the Big Island after his mother left Kaua‘i.
There, she met Clinton Hinchcliff Sr., who is the one who first got Junior interested in the construction trade.
Among the projects of Hinchcliff Drywall are five of the standing buildings of the under-construction Koloa Landing project along Po‘ipu Road. Further down Po‘ipu Road, adjacent to the commercial complex where Kukuiula Store is located, some of his family members live.
There are nine employees at the Hinchcliff Koloa Landing project now, and if things work out as planned and project sales pick up, Hinchcliff, wife and Vice President Aimee Hinchcliff and Koloa Landing Project Superintendent Tom Lovett will be looking for up to 50 additional framers, tapers and drywallers to work.
Continuing an established company policy, they’ll hire Kauaians first, with Lovett saying all of the workers will be from Hawai‘i, not outside the state.
A few weeks back, Hinchcliff was mentioned in a story about the Hawai‘i Carpenters Union conducting informational bannering outside the Koloa Landing project, where union men were letting the community know about alleged “area-standard wages” not being paid by Hinchcliff to the men working for him.
While a headline in that story indicated workers were the ones claiming the substandard wages, it was in fact the union making the claims. Furthermore, Clinton Hinchcliff Jr. said in a recent telephone interview that workers on the Koloa Landing project make “industry-standard wages,” or between $25 to $35 an hour for journeymen, with all workers making a comfortable wage with full medical benefits.
Hinchcliff Drywall statewide has around 70 employees, coming from humble beginnings 10 years ago when Aimee and Clinton Hinchcliff Jr. started the business in their Kona home with help from his father and brother.
They have around 12 to 18 months left on their current Koloa Landing work, after spending countless hours having to re-value and re-engineer the bid for the Koloa Landing project to lower costs in the wake of the current economic slowdown.
He described his business as “stable,” seeing more and more projects to bid on more recently, though with liquidity and loans hard to acquire, the process is challenging.
They recently moved into a new building in Kona, have an office staff of six, and consider themselves leaders in specialty interior and exterior plaster applications, and among only a few in the state (and the only one on the Big Island) to be certified installers of a product called Texston, a type of plaster that can be used to imitate everything from tree bark to lava rock.
It is heat, mold and mildew resistant, and Hinchcliff has been using it for 10 years, he said.
His jobs on the Big Island are mostly residential, while his work on the other islands has been primarily commercial. The bottom line is that he has been able to keep his workers working, and happy, he said.
At the Koloa Landing project, Lovett explained the on-the-job training program Hinchcliff uses that allows workers to go from apprentices to journey workers in five years. Workers get hands-on experience in all facets of the work, under the guidance of journey workers, said Lovett.
