April 18, 2017

Crain's Chicago Business annual rankings of Chicago's largest privately held companies has just been released and we are proud to report that we have been ranked #200 for fiscal year ending 2016. In addition, Crain's, in the introductory article to the survey, made special mention of three firms with the largest increase in revenue from 2015, one of which was Epstein, describing our surge in income for 2016 as a fruitful year with a 158% rise in revenue. Very fruitful indeed!

As the Crain's article describes, our growth in 2016 comes from three significant projects, the program development and preliminary design for a new $1.5 billion expansion to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, as well as two large food industry projects in which Epstein served as the Design-Builder; the $54 million bacon plant for Daily's Premium Meats in St. Joseph, Missouri as well as the new $302 million pork processing plant for Seaboard Foods Triumph Foods in Sioux City, Iowa.

In addition to these large projects mentioned by Crain's, Epstein's growth in 2016 was also fueled from our strong diversity of design, engineering and construction services as well as project type including projects like Chicago's Conrad by Hilton five-star hotel; design and engineering services for the high-rise Mennica Legacy Tower in Warsaw, Poland; continued work designing highways and vehicle maintenance facilities for the Illinois Tollway; a nationwide hotel renovation program for the La Quinta Corporation; the renovation of the global headquarters for the Whirlpool Corporation in Benton Harbor, Michigan; design of a new two-building office building called The Bridge in Bucharest, Romania; as well as multiple airfield and terminal/facility improvement assignments at O'Hare International Airport.

For those of you curious about the details and requirements for the listing here is how Crain's describes the list: Crain's list of privately held companies is the most comprehensive available list of private companies in the Chicago area. It is ranked by 2016 revenue and includes only firms with revenue greater than $75 million. Most information is voluntarily disclosed by the companies. Figures estimated by Crain's are derived from various outside sources. The list includes firms in the seven-county region: Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Lake (Ind.), McHenry and Will. It also includes headcounts, top executives and more analysis of industries, fastest-growing companies and job creators.

Lastly, the Crain's 2016 list includes 347 companies with combined revenues of roughly $342.8 billion. These companies also collectively employ more than 162,000 people in the Chicagoland metro area and the average revenue growth rate for all of the companies on this list was 10.9 percent.