Six months ago, shortly after the start of the new year, Rob Moore walked into his office at Big-D Construction to a display of helium balloons above his desk that spelled out “Cheers to 50 Years.”
It took him a minute. It wasn’t his birthday and definitely not his 50th. That had happened 23 years earlier. Then it dawned on him. This was his work birthday.
His thoughts went back half-a-century to a frigid January day in Logan when he was working on a roof on what would become the Logan Recreation Center. “You’re wanted on the phone,” someone shouted out. Rob climbed down the ladder to take the call in the construction shack. Cell phones were still 20 years in the future.
His friend Dee Livingood was on the line. Dee owned a small construction business he’d launched in 1967 when he sold his Volkswagen for $1,000 to raise the startup capital. Dee was 6-foot-5. Everyone called him Big-D, so that’s what he named his company.
For nine years Dee had been basically a one-man show. Now he was looking to expand. He needed someone to, as he put it, “hustle me up some work,” and invited Rob to come to Ogden for dinner so they could talk about that someone maybe being him.
“I remember it was 20 below zero in Logan that day,” Rob says, “I’m a subcontractor, up on that roof doing all the steel structures. Of course I said yes.”
On Jan. 16, 1976, he joined Big-D Construction as Big D’s right hand man.
Then he started cold calling.
One of his first calls was to Dick Herrick, owner of Herrick Industrial Supply on Pennsylvania Avenue in Ogden.
His sales pitch consisted of: “I’m Rob Moore with Big-D Construction. I’m just wondering if you might need a building.”
Rob remembers Dick’s reply: “You know, we are thinking about building a new warehouse.”
But what he remembers most is sitting down with Herrick face-to-face to talk about the kind of warehouse he wanted.
“We met and I said, ‘Well, Dick, tell me what your thoughts are. What’s your vision here?’ He said, ‘I need to be able to start stacking in racks all my products so I can grow the company.’ So we started talking about that, what that would entail, and I pulled out a piece of paper and started sketching. ‘You probably ought to have some concrete out front. You’ll have to protect the doors with bollards, you’ll need a door here and maybe here.’ I found out I had a knack to be able to put something on paper and have the customer visualize it. ‘OK, you’ve got a dream, how can we make it happen?’”
That kind of collaborative approach — “being able to sit down with a customer and see his vision, his thoughts, his ideas, his dreams, and take that, put it on paper, and make it a reality” — has been Rob’s, and Big D’s, stock in trade ever since.
Literally tens of thousands of projects later — from Smith’s stores throughout the region, to Cisco outlets across the West, to Latter-day Saint temples, to high-end residential homes, to hospitals, to skyscrapers, to 2-million-square-feet warehouses, to the Utah Natural History Museum at the University of Utah, to the Salt Lake Airport (its biggest-ever project) — Big-D Construction has become one of America’s busiest and biggest general contractor construction companies, consistently ranking in the top 40 in Engineering News Record’s annual rankings.
In addition to its Salt Lake City headquarters, located on 400 West across from Pioneer Park, the company has 18 branch offices in eight states and employs 3,000-plus people at the height of building season. In addition to hundreds more independent contractors.
“At any one time we can have as many as 700 projects going,” says Rob. “We’re a very, very large company made up of a bunch of medium-sized companies.”
At 73, Rob talks with an easy been-there, seen-that pride about a company that had just three employees the year he started — Dale Satterthwaite also came on board in 1976 as an estimator — and expanded to “the young lions” when Dee’s son Jack Livingood was added to the lineup two years later.
In a tough and competitive business, no one could foresee the exponential growth that was to come. Least of all Rob, who grew up on a small Summit County ranch in Henefer (population 797) and gave college barely a glance before deciding he liked building things better. The truth was, what Rob was good at wasn’t taught in a classroom.
“I could have used a lot more education,” he concedes, “and I don’t like my grandkids to hear my story because I want them to get an education — but I’m not a bookworm; what I can do is look at something and figure stuff out.”
Rob retired as CEO in 2022 when he turned over the company reins to his son Cory (another son, Braden, also works for Big-D) and joined Jack Livingood as co-chairmen of the board.
He still comes to the office, but on more of a “I can do what I want when I want” schedule.
And he continues to put his personal touch on Big-D’s deals. You can be sure he’ll see the Salt Lake Airport project — a “Rob deal” that has been some 14 years in the making — to its conclusion.
Big build, small build, they’re all the same. “Putting a deal together on paper and seeing the vision come to reality for a customer, there is nothing that brings more joy,” he says. “You work for your customer, you just happen to get a paycheck from Big-D.”