Why Florida?
“My family owned LaSalle River Construction,” said
Trottier. “They built bridges in Manitoba, did piling. And then
they all moved, including my father, to Plant City, Florida.
Then my father came back.”
It was in 1982, after he returned, that Joey’s father Terry
started what is today a local (Manitoban) continuation of the
family business. It was handed over to Joey in 2004 when his
dad retired. Joey maintains the company in a controlled way,
preferring to have a small and dependable crew of employees,
not expanding too quickly and mostly focusing in on the
tasks at hand.
“I have five full-time employees, and then there’s myself,”
said Trottier. “And on substantial projects, I hire out trucking
firms to haul the product and I’ll hire companies like Cam-
Arrow Drilling Editor’s note: Read about Cam-Arrow Drilling
in Q3 2014 of Piling Canada. They will send an operator, a rig
and a swamper and we pick up the extra slack that way. So,
instead of having a real big employee base, we have a good
five or six employees and on large projects, we farm some of
it out.”
Staying small and mighty
While Trottier doesn’t necessarily cite the old saying, “small
is beautiful,” he seems to enjoy running a quick and mobile
team while enjoying all the benefits of being a smaller firm.
“I’ll say the big guys are like the ‘big bears;’ I’m like a fox.
When they’re full, I go pick up the scraps,” he said. “It doesn’t
take much for a small company to stay busy and stay competitive.
I guess the challenges are when the big guys don’t have
a lot of work and the price drops. It’s pretty hard to compete
with them when they’re hungry. I know a lot of people like to
grow, but all the big companies that I talk to say I’m doing
something right by staying smaller.”
Trottier, who says his company mostly sticks to
Saskatchewan and Manitoba jobs, maintains that his firm
doesn’t specialize in any one thing.
“It’s just anything driven,” he said. “Driven timber, pre-cast
piles or steel piles, whether they’re pipe or H-piles. The one
thing we don’t really get into is the drilling part – cast-inplace
piles, caissons, etc.
“We do a fair amount of bridge repairs, small RM bridges,
MIT bridges. The problem is as we can do anything, we can’t
do a lot of everything. We run one or two crews. Some years
we’re driving a lot of timber piles, the next year we’re driving
pre-cast piles; one year we might be driving a lot of steel piles.
Throw about five or six bridge repairs in the mix, and then it’s
year-end.”
One of his more interesting projects recently involved,
strangely, carp.
“That’s a neat one, that carp exclusion project was very
interesting,” said Trottier. “If you YouTube ‘Delta Marsh Carp
Exclusion,’ it’ll actually show you the fish being trapped by
that structure. It looks like you can almost walk across it; it’s
tens of thousands of fish trying to get through.”
Prairie pride
Trottier also enjoys making Manitoba his home. There’s
enough work for him and his crew, and the economy is
stable, without swinging up or down too dramatically (what
COMPANY PROFILE
Joe Trottier’s grandfather
invented a pile driver, filing
the patent in 1960
CONTINUED ON PAGE 69
66 Q1 2016 www.pilingcanada.ca
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