The tight-knit C2RS Contracting crew, who work together as a team, includes: (front row, from left) Travis Kinning, Residential Superintendent; and Alex Michaelis, Foreman; (center) Kim Yordt, Proprietor & Project Operations Director; (back row, from left) Gil Garcia, Commercial Superintendent; Mike Bailey, Partner & Project Manager; and Todd Bailey, Foreman & Metal Building Specialist.

The Blue Ribbon Auto Body in a Greeley, CO, strip mall is a prime example of C2RS Contracting’s creative approach to commercial conversions.

Kim Yordt, C2RS Contracting’s Proprietor & Project Operations Director, decided to take a different approach to construction when she established her company in early 2019 as a woman-owned business, treating both customers and staff as friends and family.

“We build extremely good relationships with our clients who become really good friends,” she says. “With the client’s needs and budget in mind, we make cost-effective decisions to stay within budget and on time while overall making sure we exceed our client’s needs. We always put clients first.”

C2RS is structured with two divisions, Residential and Commercial, and performs work primarily in Northern Colorado and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Starting out with a few residential projects, the company moved quickly to the commercial side, developing a niche for repurposing existing structures through tenant improvement projects.

According to Mike Bailey, C2RS Partner and Project Manager, “We love the fast-paced environment. We understand more than anyone that time is money. The longer you have a building sitting there not making money, it isn’t doing you or me any good. We like converting buildings into something else—repurposing—as well as building from the ground up.”

Collectively, Kim and Mike have 35 years of experience in the construction industry and all the insight that comes with it. Kim says Mike has a vision for seeing possibilities where other contractors don’t and a penchant for achieving the client’s objective in the most cost-effective ways. “Sometimes it only takes a small change to save clients money in time and materials,” he says.

Projects with Purpose

Blue Ribbon Auto Body in Greeley, Colorado, is an example of a successful C2RS commercial conversion. “We’re probably the only people who came up with putting an auto body shop in a strip mall next to Sherwin-Williams paint and the Dollar Tree store, with a McDonald’s out front,” Mike says. “It’s a prime location for an auto body shop, but the project had some environmental constraints like putting a paint booth and sand/oil interceptors in a multiuse building. Still, by working with the city, we did it six weeks earlier than the owner expected, allowing him to open his doors for hail season. He told us that we’d pretty much paid for the building conversion because there was a hail storm about three weeks after we finished.”

A current C2RS commercial repurposing project involves converting a former car dealership into an RV park with 52 spaces. The team is also renovating a house next door to provide living quarters for the manager. The dealership building itself will house showers, a laundromat and a game room/clubhouse with golf cart parking.

A group of investors also hired C2RS to build jet storage with living spaces from the ground up. The metal buildings, which will comprise a small community at a nearby airport, will contain 65-foot garage doors and 80- by 100-foot lofts that can be used as living quarters or office space on the second floor mezzanine above the nose of the jets.

C2RS started 2021 with 10 residential projects and four commercial projects on the board. The goal is to grow the commercial repurposing part of the business and balance it with the residential construction side. “We want to grow with our clients,” Kim says. “Northern Colorado is a true hot spot. There’s construction everywhere. Thousands of homes are going up, and the homeowners will need services to support that growth, including restaurants, stores and much more. We love watching our community expand and grow, as we are.”

It Takes a Team

In just under two years, C2RS has doubled full-time employees and tripled production. Kim and Mike say this growth would not have been possible without their tight-knit team.

“Our guys are all truly family,” Mike says. “We like to learn from our people, and we care about what they need. They can tell us things we need to improve on, just as much as we tell them. It’s all about finding the right person who has the right attitude, the right family feel. We’re very selective about who we hire. We don’t use any of those fancy personality tests. When it comes down to it, you have to fit the group. Our guys are very self-driven and want to see our company succeed just as much as we do.”

The diversified C2RS crew includes:

• Gil Garcia, Commercial Superintendent, who joined C2RS in 2020 with a construction background in wastewater treatment plants and metal buildings.
• Travis Kinning, Residential Superintendent, has been the expert in creative design finishes for bathrooms and basements for C2RS since 2019.
• Alex Michaelis, Foreman, converts his experience in structural steel engineering for cellphone towers and surveying projects into drawings that help C2RS clients visualize finished projects.

As Kim says, “We have a great mix of personnel. We’re more of a family than a management-employee company. Though diversified, we all have to work together as a team to complete a project or fix a problem. Their ideas are just as good, if not better, than ours. Our crew enjoys a fast-paced environment. The way we’ve structured our company and purchased our products makes our overhead less, which means it’s going to be less expensive for the client.”

Committed to the Community

C2RS is dedicated to giving back to the local communities it serves, both on the business and resident front. Each quarter, the company holds a drawing to recognize a resident in the community with a gift card from a locally owned business. In addition, C2RS helps individuals in need, whether that calls for adding a handicap ramp, installing a wheelchair-accessible shower, donating a new hot water heater to a busy single mother and nurse, or even renovating an entire bathroom to facilitate handicap access just for the cost of materials.

The company also partners with a charitable organization in Colorado called Community Pay It Forward Fundraising. The organization refers people who need renovations done to C2RS, which then donates 1 percent of the total cost of the project to the charity of the client’s choice. “We always try our best to help out our community when there’s a need,” Kim says. “That’s another really cool thing about our team. We bring those needs to our guys and they’re like, ‘I’m in. Sure, let’s do it.’ When you have a team like that, then good things happen.”

Formula for Success

It’s easy to see why C2RS has been named Best Home Remodeler for both 2019 and 2020 in the Reporter-Herald’s Readers’ Choice Awards and placed second in NOCO Style magazine’s 2020 Best Home Remodelers survey for Northern Colorado. And C2RS has barely begun.

C2RS clients are all repeat customers. For example, one of the company’s first residential projects involved remodeling a $1.5 million house purchased by a man from California. He had just moved to Colorado and essentially wanted the house gutted and completely renovated. That project resulted in the most unusual C2RS client request to date—he asked C2RS to match the color of his wife’s blue suede shoe he’d sent from California to his new kitchen cabinets in Colorado. The success of that first project resulted in this particular client awarding C2RS three additional residential projects.

“Contractors have a horrible name wherever you go,” Mike says. “We do not want that name by any means. We’re very open and honest with our clients. We want to be fair and more cost-effective for them. For example, we’re doing a job now where we switched to steel studs from wood just to save $7 a stud. At 800 studs, that’s a pretty big savings. We truly care about our clients. They do come first. I know a lot of people say that, but that doesn’t mean they believe it. We’re different: We do.”