Custom Truck One Source Inc. was recently recognized with a Capstone Award by the Kansas City Business Journal for the company’s $35 million renovation of a 220,000-square-foot warehouse located on the former site of Kansas City’s Armco Steel plant, which is now part of Custom Truck’s 175-acre headquarter campus.
The renovated building was part of the historic factory that closed in 2001 and which is now undergoing an overall adaptive reuse transformation. Custom Truck revamped the building to house its Fabrication & Crane Manufacturing; Paint & Powder Coating; and Parts, Tools and Accessories departments.
The site, which has been used by various manufacturers since the late 1800s, was taken over by Armco Steel in 1930 and approximately 4,500 were employed at the plant’s century-old warehouses, including Building H, during its peak usage in the 1950s.
Today, Custom Truck employs close to 1,000 people on its overall headquarters site and executives expect to add approximately 100 positions at Building H this year, including machinists, welders, painters, assemblers, and materials operators.
The work is part of an ongoing renovation of Custom Truck’s campus, which company founder Fred Ross and his family purchased in 2005. Since then, Custom Truck has grown from 250 employees and one location to a leading North American specialty truck and heavy equipment provider with more than 2,500 employees in nearly 40 facilities.
Custom Truck last won a Capstone award in 2019 for the renovation of a 119,000-square-foot production facility also from the early 1900s.