Larry Williams has been a prominent figure in the steel framing industry, no question about it. His commitment, career, activism and much more has had an impact on the wall and ceiling steel framing community, and produced noticeable change.
His story in the industry begins in the early ‘90s (but really jump-started in 2000), with how he has been a known force for steel framing. Although he spent the early 2000s in Belgium, his roots were planted in the U.S. market around this time and since his return to the States, he’s been the “go-to” person for the industry —through his job and his advocacy. His position as the executive director for the morphing associations showcases the industry’s trust in him as one of the authorities on all things steel framing.
As you will read in the following interview, Williams has left his mark on the steel framing industry and the SFIA. We, as the Voice of the Industry Since 1938, felt there was no time like the present to discuss his important and studied career as he passes his position of executive director on to Don Allen.
Williams will be missed. We are thankful for his time discussing his career and for the wonderful individual that he is.
W&C : Tell us briefly about where you are from and your life leading up to a career in steel framing
LW: I’ve lived in a lot of different places in the U.S. and around the world, but I mostly think I’m from Denver and San Francisco. Although my dad worked in the medical field, he was also a pretty good carpenter, plumber and electrician; consequently, I spent a lot of weekends helping him with projects that could’ve included anything from adding a room to the house, installing conduit and wiring, or building cabinets and helping with the finish woodwork for that room.
And for all I knew in the 1960s and 1970s steel was for nails or electrical boxes.
My first real introduction to steel framing didn’t happen until 1992. I was a partner in a San Francisco PR/Marketing agency and one of my clients was U.S. Steel and their Northern California facility named USS-POSCO. Before taking them on as a client in 1989 I had no exposure to the steel industry and even after three years I was still learning the industry and how steel is made.
Images courtesy of Don Allen/Larry Williams/SFIA.
W&C : What was your introduction to the steel framing industry and what lead you down this path?
LW: One day I was sitting in the office of the company president when a vice president of a commercial outfit dropped in and asked me: “What do you know about steel framing?”
The catalyst for the question was recent federal legislation intended to protect the Spotted Owl by putting millions of acres of forest off-limits to logging. The predictable result was an almost immediate spike in the price of wood, creating enormous pressure on home builders who were already struggling to keep up with demand for new housing across the U.S. The National Association of Home Builders had already approached the steel industry to see if they could contribute a solution in the form of steel studs, which at that point were almost exclusively used in limited applications for commercial construction.
As the steel industry began studying the request, their efforts were focused on areas east of the Mississippi and California, the largest housing markets in the U.S. They had the same needs, and we scheduled a series of meetings with the major home builders on the West Coast that confirmed their need and willingness to adopt a substitute for wood framing and aid our efforts to do what was necessary to enable the use of steel framing.
Among the greatest needs identified through this process were training of construction crews, shortening the lead time for engineering by building a community of design professionals who could efficiently design steel framed homes, and helping connect home builders with providers in the market who could supply, design and frame homes with steel.
It was a very exciting time to be in the steel framing industry and I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.
W&C : What was your first position? Was it with the Steel Framing Alliance?
LW: My first “position” was just as a member of a team of experts who were enthusiastic contributors of knowledge and skills across the complete spectrum of the supply chain. Logically, as a PR/marketing consultant, my role was mostly on the information and promotion side—organizing events within events like “Steel Central” at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference and other major builder shows in the Western U.S., working with the media; things like that.
My involvement expanded when I was asked to organize the very first meeting of a small group of engineers with residential experience who we could find on the West Coast. And I guess that led to my first official position, which was as managing director of the Light Gauge Steel Engineers Association, which is now the Cold-Formed Steel Engineers Institute.
I moved to president of the Steel Framing Alliance in 2003 when the industry’s development efforts were almost wholly focused on the residential market, then shifting to mid-rise in 2007. And after a hiatus in Europe with World Steel Association, was able to come home to steel framing in 2012 with the Steel Framing Industry Association.
W&C : Can you give us any insight into what the European position is on utilizing steel framing? A lot of old buildings are still standing strong after centuries.
LW: Generally speaking, the construction practices in Europe (and many other older and developed markets around the world) are much different than the U.S. in that the primary construction materials have been concrete, masonry, and brick and mortar. These have been durable materials over centuries, but also have a significantly longer construction cycle for setting forms, pouring or laying material, and then allowing the materials to dry. Consequently, steel framing is clearly both cost-competitive and allows for faster occupancies.
Major areas of development in Europe are also highly urbanized, so off-site pre-fabrication offers contractors a high degree of flexibility in the set-up of the construction site and installations. Here again, steel framing offers a number of obvious advantages that support the implementation of off-site construction.
More recently, European architects are more willing to push boundaries with new materials and more challenging designs in many places on the continent. This creates new opportunities for high-performance materials like steel, but also openings for competitive materials like mass timber.
W&C : In the past 20 years, what would you consider to be the most important development in cold-formed steel framing?
LW: Relative to other construction materials, like wood and even structural steel, cold-formed steel framing is still a very young industry, so my nomination for “most important” might seem pedestrian: Codes and Standards. It wasn’t until 1946 that we even had an AISI Specification, and not until the mid-1990s, when the first design guides for cold-formed steel framing came out. Without these, however, manufacturers would have no minimum performance criteria for steel framing materials, designers would still be trying to decipher the AISI Specification to create engineering drawings, contractors would not have standard installation requirements, and there would be no common basis for inspection and approvals of designs and installations.
It was possible to make, design and install cold-formed steel framing of course, but there was no uniformity so it was much more difficult and time-consuming to use than the alternatives. You had to really, really want to use it.
W&C : Regarding the previous question, what is the one thing you had hoped would have come about but has yet to be developed?
LW: The deep recession we experienced in the last decade created opportunities for division and conflict within the industry that are still healing. When I left for Europe in 2008 the industry still had a common purpose to build markets for cold-formed steel framing and a general agreement within the industry on how to go about it.
When I came back from Europe we’d lost most of that and had even lost the industry group with the mission to lead the charge, the Steel Framing Alliance. I came back at a time when the leadership vacuum had been recognized and industry leaders and groups like the AWCI were working to address the problem by creating the Steel Framing Industry Association.
We’ve made a lot of progress in getting the industry back together, but we still have a lot more to do.
W&C : What accomplishments are you most proud of regarding the industry as a whole?
LW: Without a doubt, I think what we’ve built at the Steel Framing Industry Association is remarkable because of the progress we’ve made in pulling the industry together and building a focal point for the steel framing industry in a relatively short period of time with very limited resources.
You want to know how big the steel framing market is? We can tell you. You want to learn about steel framing design and installation? We have educational programs that are available 24/7, a hotline, a project assistance service and a searchable “Product and Provider” map. You need to meet quality assurance requirements in a project specification? We have comprehensive certification programs that are recognized in the majority of project specifications used by architects today. In BuildSteel.org and the BuildSteel Weekly, the SFIA operates the industry’s most effective platform for promoting cold-formed steel framing. The addition of the Cold-Formed Steel Engineers Institute under the SFIA organizational umbrella enables us to serve the design professional community more effectively than ever. And now, as an ANSI-accredited Standards Development Organization we have the opportunity to manage the reference standards for steel framing design in a way that promotes both safe and efficient design and construction with cold-formed steel.
All of this has been accomplished at less than half the cost that was needed to build the old Steel Framing Alliance which offered many of the same programs.
W&C : Do you foresee a day in 10-20 years when steel will overtake wood as the framing member of choice in single and multi-family residential construction?
LW: I think there will always be a base of builders who see steel framing as their material of choice. The question is always: How large will that base be?
I’ve actually come to see this question a little differently than I did in 1995 when our vision was of houses entirely framed with steel, rather than what was starting to happen when we dialed back our focus on residential construction in 2006 and 2007. In that decade we were able to increase our share of single-family residential from .5 percent to 2 percent and multifamily from 1 percent to 5 percent. On one hand, it was short of the most ambitious targets set during the frothy goal-setting in the 1990s but on the other, there were certain applications within both types of construction where we had significantly greater success. For example, in 2007 we had captured 16 percent of interior walls of multifamily construction and 4 percent of the single-family interior wall market.
My takeaway from this and other similar evolutions in the market is that builders will ultimately adopt new technologies and materials in ways and for applications where transitions are relatively simple and make economic sense. If the industry ever decided to target a new market like residential, I think the lesson would be to target those applications where adoption is the simplest, build share, and as builders become familiar with the supply chain then move to the more complicated applications—but we in the steel framing industry have to make this process easier. And that takes investment of time, effort and resources.
W&C : Will the domestic steel mills ever support the cold-formed steel framing industry in the same way the wood industry supports the residential construction industry?
LW: The truth is that we will never have some of the same sources of funding that the wood industry has available to them for product development, marketing and technical support. Their check off program, the Softwood Lumber Board which mandates funding from all wood product producers, is available to them because wood has been deemed an agricultural product – a primary requirement for that type of program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture funds the Forest Products Lab who, in turn, provides major research and product development support.
We could certainly use more support and engagement from the steel mills, and there are other places we may be able to tap for funding, but at the end of the day it’s also going to take getting everyone under the same umbrella and rowing the same direction.
W&C : How can contractors/owners or other stakeholders feel confident when using materials manufactured by SFIA members?
LW: “Quality assurance” continues to be a key factor in the choice of construction materials and among the reasons is the increasingly litigious environment we operate in today. Technical evaluation reports issued by recognized bodies like the ICC Evaluation Service, IAPMO, and Intertek have traditionally satisfied the basic need for some form of documentation for third-party review of the listed product. The primary requirement for a product listing is the engineering review of product technical specifications and quality control procedures the manufacturer intends to follow.
The SFIA Code Compliance Certification Program for studs and track and Manufacturing Certification Program for cold-formed steel connectors, takes the next step by connecting the “quality assurance” aspects of a technical evaluation report with “quality control” through semi-annual unannounced audits and destructive testing of the products being produced by the manufacturer.
By combining “quality control” and “quality assurance” the SFIA Certification Programs provide verification that the product specifications meet the minimum requirements of the building codes, and then that the products are being manufactured as intended. I cannot think of a better way to provide stakeholders with the level of confidence that the products they’re buying, distributing and installing are going to stand up to scrutiny by building officials, owners, and challenging construction environments.
W&C : Steel framing seems to be the obvious choice when it comes to life safety, particularly with respect to the risk of fire. Why do mid-rise hotels continue to use wood framing?
LW: I don’t think there’s one reason that we have such a competitive challenge in a segment of the industry that’s has been so important to us; however, it’s clear that the door was opened with the changes to the building code that were introduced in the 2006 International Building Code, which allow for the use of combustible framing in buildings that effectively go up to 8 stories in height.
If the code changes were the gasoline, the spark for the wood industry targeting of the mid-rise market was originally an extremely weak market for single-family housing coming out of the great recession, and home builders who expanded their operations into markets more often served by commercial contractors. Homebuilders’ familiarity with wood and established supply chains—including a base of wood-friendly framing contractors—made wood the first choice for these builders. This was also supported by an enormous investment in marketing by the wood industry, which promised enormously lower costs and direct technical support often funded by the wood industry.
The natural result was the increased use of wood framing, followed by a continuing series of dramatic fires that have destroyed countless projects under construction across the country.
Despite the predictable result from erecting lumberyards in the sky, wood framing will continue to be a formidable competitor for cold-formed steel framing thanks to the massive investments being made by the wood industry in gaining and holding market share wherever they can find it.
W&C : What benefits does the SFIA provide to members?
LW: I’d sum up the package of benefits we offer across all our categories of membership with the word “access.” Access to information and resources that help you build your business, including outstanding technical support, the ability to participate in SFIA certification programs, access to more educational programs and resources, access to higher visibility among the industry’s largest network of manufacturers, suppliers, design professionals, and others. SFIA members also can participate in working groups that help define the direction and investments being made in the future of the industry.
As the SFIA continues to build its membership, programs and services, it is increasingly true that if you’re not in the SFIA you are on the outside. We’d rather have you inside because we are all better together.
W&C : What does the future of the SFIA look like?
LW: There is still a lot of hard work ahead but I think that over the last decade, we have put in place the kind of structure the cold-formed steel framing industry needs to support the continued growth of the industry. I believe that over the next few years, we will increasingly grow beyond the divisions of the past and that we will have a truly unified industry. A unified industry will be even more effective in defending our markets and expanding opportunities to attract more investment in the use of cold-formed steel framing.
A growing membership also creates the critical mass that is needed to support local chapters or groups of SFIA members. Having this grassroots network can exponentially increase our effectiveness in reaching potential new users through technical and application-focused information and educational programs.
