Boosted by education and health care, XL Construction doubles footprint on R Street Corridor

So when it came time to look for a bigger space, the Milpitas-based company had to think about not only where to find it, but how it should look in a world that had changed for offices in the last few years.

“There was a little bit of, ‘if you build it, they will come,’” said Kelley Cowan, the Sacramento region director for XL. “We had a really good response to the new office.”

In early October, the firm decamped from 1810 13th St. in Sacramento’s R Street Corridor to a space twice as big, 8,400 square feet, at 1030 R St., about three blocks west.

Cowan said the firm applied the lessons from a study done during the Covid-19 pandemic for renovating its Milpitas location to determine what would work best there. The result in Sacramento is 33 workstations and six conference rooms, double what the firm had in its previous office.

XL Construction has a remote work policy where employees only have to come in two days a week, as long as it doesn’t affect their projects moving forward, Cowan said. About 21 employees come in on a regular basis, and about another half dozen who are in a preconstruction planning stage are there two to three days a week.

The new office will accommodate future growth, Cowan said, though not too many employees beyond the number there now.

But the company also added spots for XL Construction divisions at a corporate rather than local level, for departments such as accounting, risk management and sustainability, she added. They’ve hosted more visits from company headquarters as well.

In addition, the company has better space for training in a particular discipline, or for a partner firm to use. “I like that we can do more of that without impacting our own business,” Cowan said.

In 2021, XL Construction was named one of the Sacramento Business Journal’s Best Places to Work.