When Kevin Wilkes was about 10 years old, his parents had a custom home built. Wilkes can still remember the architect showing up with impressive plans for the home. But when the house started being built and that same architect showed up on the jobsite, even a child could tell he didn’t know what was going on.
“After he left, all the construction guys made fun of him,” recalls Wilkes, owner of the Princeton Design Guild. “I thought, ‘What if you were an architect and you knew how to build well, too. Wouldn’t that be a powerful combination?’ I wanted to be that architect.”
Fast forward to present day, and that’s exactly who Wilkes is. As an architect, Wilkes has fashioned his company into a true one-stop shop for clients. He’s also assembled an impressive list of trades people and skills—architects, painters, masons, metalworkers, and cabinetmakers—under his 10,000-square-foot headquarters, which includes shops for woodworking, stone fabrication, and metal fabrication. And he prides himself on his in-house staff who handle most of the work on a project.
“Our team of cabinetmakers, project managers, and experienced field staff can build complex projects with the precise tolerances of a shop environment,” Wilkes says. “When people come up here and see the shops and everything we’re fabricating, they’re like, ‘Hey, these guys are the real deal.’”
In the same meticulous way Wilkes builds his projects, he’s also been building his business. Over the past three years, he hired a management consultant firm to put together a growth plan that culminated with adding six full-time employees and a new project management system. As a result, business is expected to double in 2019.
