Marid Industries CEO Tim Houtsma, COO Greg Schofield, and PM Jason Nowak walk through 38 years of structural steel in Atlantic Canada — design-build philosophy, Tekla-driven fabrication, COVID supply-chain swings, and the projects that test everything you think you know about schedule and risk.
At Halifax Stanfield International Airport there's a 112,400-square-foot aircraft maintenance hangar that required a 300-foot clear span — widest east of Montreal when it was built. The truss that carries that opening was assembled in the air, in sections, using the building's own wall columns as temporary support towers. That erection sequence was not the engineer's idea. It came from a member of Ironworkers Local 752, standing on the site, who had spent more time putting steel in the sky than anyone in the room had spent drawing it.
Tim Houtsma, CEO of Marid Industries, tells that story as a lesson about authority and field knowledge. The company has been fabricating and erecting structural and miscellaneous steel in Atlantic Canada since 1983, when David and Connie Alton founded it. A management buyout around 2007 brought in new leadership; Houtsma and COO Greg Schofield acquired the remaining interest roughly two years before this recording. The crew they lead runs out of Halifax, with a satellite office in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, and produces roughly 6,000 tons of steel a year at full capacity for commercial, industrial, and infrastructure clients across the region and into the United States.
This is what one hour on the record with three of them yields.
Filter your customers before you quote
Design-build is Marid's primary differentiator — and the model only works if the client is ready for it. Houtsma is direct on the qualifying question: "if you really don't know what you want to build, go find an architect, go find a structural engineer" — design-build is not a discovery process. It is an optimization process, and it requires a client who already has a clear idea of what the building must do.
When that condition is met, the whole-envelope logic kicks in. Because Marid controls the design, it can trade cost between trades. The example Houtsma gives is a roof-to-wall interface detail: a minor change to the steel roof structure that costs a little more on his side, but eliminates a more expensive problem for the siding contractor. In his words: "it cost me an extra 500 bucks in the roof structure but it saves them a thousand bucks in the walls". The client captures that full-envelope saving. A structural-only steel sub can't make that call.
The commercial consequence is compounding. Clients who experience that math become repeat clients. Marid's competitive edge, Schofield says, is continuity: "every time you come you're dealing with the same project manager, dealing with the same estimator — there's time to build relationships". That relationship capital is slow to build and hard to buy.
The potato barns: what design-build schedule actually means
The most concrete example of design-build's schedule advantage is a set of potato storage warehouses built for Cavendish Farms in New Annan, PEI. Two 44,000-square-foot refrigerated buildings, 48 million pounds of potato capacity, galvanized throughout because the interior atmosphere runs at near-saturation humidity. Houtsma gives the timeline plainly: "we got the award in may, started fabrication, put steel up on the first of july, and they were putting potatoes in those buildings on the first of october".
May to October. That is five months from contract to occupancy. Marid's own portfolio entry confirms the sequence — agreement end of May 2017, erection beginning July 2, potatoes in barn October 1. The traditional route — hire an architect, develop plans, issue a tender, award to a general contractor, start construction — would have easily consumed that entire window in design and procurement alone, leaving the harvest season without its storage.
The galvanizing detail is worth a separate note for anyone specifying steel in similar conditions. Primer coat in a 98-to-100-percent-humidity enclosure is not a cost-saving measure — it is a waste of money that will fail. Galvanize the steel or accept the corrosion. Conversely, interior structural steel in a climate-controlled building almost never needs primer at all: "putting a coat of primer on it is not an efficient use of money because you don't need it". Match the corrosion protection to the actual exposure class.
The machine doesn't touch the data
Marid runs Tekla software for 3D structural modeling, and the workflow reflects a broader principle: remove human data-handling from every step where a transcription error can cause a costly field problem. Jason Nowak describes the output: "if it fits in the model it fits outside — nobody touches any of that data and it goes straight to the machine". The 3D model drives the CNC equipment directly. If the model is right, the parts are right.
The shop-floor benefit is not just accuracy. Prefabrication in a controlled environment is also a safety and schedule lever: "we try to prefab everything as much as possible in a controlled environment in our shop which reduces the risks of person hours on site". Every hour of steel work done at floor level in the shop is an hour not done at elevation in the field. The risk profile, the weather dependency, and the schedule predictability all shift in your favor.
Tekla also produces shop drawings and 3D erection plans used by the field crew to sequence the work before a bolt is turned. For a project like the IMP Hangar — where the erection sequence was genuinely novel — that pre-visualization capability is part of how the team could safely execute an approach developed by a tradesperson on the ground rather than in a formal design document.
When the shutdown window is the entire job
Not every Marid project is a new building. In Pugwash, Nova Scotia, the company replaced a salt mine head-frame on a hard six-week shutdown: 40 to 50 ironworkers at peak, a production facility that cannot earn revenue while it is stopped, and a client whose entire calculus is: "we need to minimize the amount of time that mine is shut down — it can't be seven weeks, it can't be eight weeks".
Shutdown-constrained projects demand a different planning discipline than new construction. The field can't discover scope. Everything has to be resolved before the clock starts — material, sequencing, temporary works, contingency plans. The cost of a missed deadline is not a penalty clause; it is the client's revenue stream. That sharpens the pre-construction phase considerably.
Meanwhile, another current project at the time of recording was the cable-inspection scaffold on the McKay Bridge — 150 to 200 feet above the bridge deck, over Halifax Harbour. Both projects represent the less-photographed side of the business: industrial maintenance work and infrastructure access, not just new commercial envelopes.
Pay attention to the people on the tools
Houtsma returns more than once to the subject of listening — specifically, to ironworkers who have installed more steel in the field than any engineer has designed from an office. The IMP Hangar erection sequence is the proof point, but the lesson is broader: "pay attention to what the guys outside have to say — they've put up more steel than you have designed".
This is not anti-engineering sentiment. Marid uses Tekla, employs engineers, runs full 3D models. The point is sequencing knowledge and field-condition awareness that formal drawings don't capture and that takes years of erection experience to build. A PM or estimator who dismisses field input on erection sequence is creating preventable problems. The solution the ironworker proposed for the IMP Hangar truss assembly was not in any drawing; it worked because he had solved similar geometry before.
The safety culture runs on the same principle. Jason Nowak describes the JOSH (Joint Occupational Safety and Health) committee as owner-driven: safety issues get resolved at the source, not escalated into a bureaucratic loop. The most dangerous corner-cutting on a steel site is usually visible to the people closest to the work, and the culture has to make it safe to say so.
The companies doing the work
Most of the steel Marid erects is installed by union ironworkers from two locals. In Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, that's Ironworkers Local 752 — roughly 525 members dispatched to structural, ornamental, and rebar work across the region, with in-house apprenticeship and journeyperson training. In Newfoundland and Labrador, field labor comes from Ironworkers Local 764, which supplies skilled members to industrial and construction contractors across the province and runs its own certification and dispatch system.
The Newfoundland operation also reflects a lesson about market entry. Marid followed loyal general-contractor clients into the province rather than moving speculatively. The Mount Pearl office came after the work was there, and it is staffed locally for a direct reason: "you need Newfoundlanders working with Newfoundlanders — it's just there's a culture over there". That's not a criticism; it's an operating condition that any contractor entering a new Atlantic market would do well to take seriously.
During COVID, industry coordination in Nova Scotia was handled substantially by the Construction Association of Nova Scotia (CANS), whose daily protocol calls kept construction classified as essential when other sectors shut down. Houtsma credits the association directly: "CANS was very instrumental in keeping the construction industry open — they were meeting once a day just to make sure everybody's on the same page". For a sector running on thin margins and seasonal labor, staying open through 2020 was not a given.
Why steel
Houtsma's three-word case for structural steel: "safe, sustainable, and scheduled — those are the three pillars".
Safe because prefabrication moves labor out of uncontrolled site conditions and into a shop. Sustainable because scrap steel feeds back into the next heat — the beam being fabricated today may have been a car or an appliance last year, and it will be a building component in another form years from now. Scheduled because design-build compresses timelines that a traditional tender process cannot match, and because a prefab envelope goes up in days, not weeks.
The Marid Industries portfolio shows what that argument looks like built out: the IMP dual-bay hangar at Stanfield, the Cavendish Farms potato barns on PEI, a 100,000-square-foot cannabis cultivation facility in St. John's with a full mezzanine, the Dallard Centre, Queen's Marque, and two decades of miscellaneous metals work across Atlantic Canada — architectural stairs, railings, and the kind of detailed fabrication that outlasts the building's original owners.
The person who built the erection sequence for a 300-foot clear-span truss was standing on the site in a hard hat, not sitting in the office. That's the show, and the first hour of it is still worth an afternoon.
Guests: Tim Houtsma (CEO), Greg Schofield (COO), and Jason Nowak (PM) — Marid Industries Ltd. Episode 1 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: Ironworkers Local 752, Ironworkers Local 764, and Construction Association of Nova Scotia (CANS). Receipt source for the potato-barn timeline: Marid Industries portfolio.