In May, Daniel Boman attended a Bakken Housing Summit in
where 350 builders and developers from around the country learned of oil-boom
opportunities in the region.
For Boman, those opportunities were hard to resist.
He and his partner, Jim Auth, opened System Building
Solutions in the old Boise Cascade plant in
now owned by Fox Lumber Sales of Hamilton, on Nov. 1. Boman is the president
and CEO and Auth is his plant manager. They have nine workers so far, who are
getting on-the-job training by building a two-story, 20-room modular housing
unit designed for use as an oil field man camp.
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| Daniel Boman, left and Jim Auth in their factory |
SBS plans to hire another nine workers in early February and
then nine more every month for at least a year. Boman said they picked that
number because it’s the best size for training a new crew.
The production of high-density housing is the niche
Boman sees his company filling, but he’s open to anything his clients
might want.
“What we are bringing to the market is simply
construction capacity,” Boman said. “If someone comes to us and says
‘We want to build 500 single-family homes,’ OK. We will consider that.”
using lumber from its landlord, Fox Lumber Sales, which has owned the old Boise
Cascade building, at
Railroad St.
the 80,000-square-foot main building with SBS and owns an adjoining
20,000-square-foot building where it makes trusses.
Boman is a native of
who has been in the
States
an international student exchange program and ended up staying. He got involved
in real estate and then in construction, and for the past 10 years he has been
an authorized builder for Nationwide Custom Homes.
Auth, who has more than 35 years in the modular home
industry, used to be a plant manager for Nationwide and has worked for various
companies up and down the
Boman said he and Auth originally thought of putting their
first completed building on display, by way of advertising, but they scrapped
that idea. For one thing, they are selling construction, not a particular
building.
