SRC Industrial plans move to $19M facility by September

Spencer Cunningham: Hiring plans will be a gradual process over five years.

Ryan Stack: SRC studying options for facilities SRC Industrial will exit this year.

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After recently combining two of its subsidiaries, SRC Holdings Corp. officials intend to have the newly formed SRC Industrial Corp. occupy a new multimillion-dollar building by Q3 of this year.

SRC Industrial General Manager Spencer Cunningham said the combined workforce of 85 currently operates at 4727 E. Kearney St. and 2401 E. Sunshine St. However, plans call for the employees to be under one roof at a $19 million, 200,000-square-foot facility under construction in northeast Springfield at 2801 N. Mulroy Road.

“We’ll be merging all those together around the August or September timeframe,” he said.

SRC Industrial was formed late last month through the combination of Global Recovery Corp. and Whole Goods. The combined energy and power generation manufacturing and remanufacturing company works in the rental, disaster relief, construction and agriculture markets, with products such as industrial power units, engines, industrial generators and industrial air compressors.

Cunningham, an 18-year employee at SRC, most recently led Whole Goods as general manager before taking on his new role. He said Whole Goods had been a division of another SRC subsidiary, Springfield ReManufacturing Corp., aka SRC Heavy Duty, since 2013. That year also was when Global Recovery Corp. formed. GRC supplies new, used and remanufactured diesel engines, power units and parts to the agricultural, trucking, industrial and automotive markets. Neil Chambers, GRC’s founding general manager, exited the company last year, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting.

Since Whole Goods and GRC operate in similar industries, Cunningham said it made sense to combine them.

“There’s a lot of synergies that existed between both companies as well as a lot of vertical integration that’s going to occur by bringing these two companies together,” he said. “It made a lot of sense to not only combine the facilities and all the equipment that they have, but also the cultures are very aligned as well between both these SRC companies.”

Cunningham said creation of SRC Industrial wasn’t originally part of the discussion when construction of a new facility on North Mulroy Street was under consideration a couple years ago.

“We started putting the game plan together for the new facility in September of 2023. When we did that, we were looking at a potential layout of approximately 125,000 to 130,000 square feet,” he said. “Then going through that exercise of looking at that new facility, we knew we had additional room for expansion. At that point is when we started looking at the two facilities and potential capacity restraints that (Whole Goods) had in our building as well as GRC had in their building.”

“We started to put a layout together that could bring both those facilities into one. So, it’s really been a plan that’s been in the works since late 2023.”

While Cunningham referenced plans to introduce a new line of products in a recent news release announcing SRC Industrial, he said there are no specifics to offer at this time on what those might be.

“There’s lots of opportunities in the energy segment that we play in currently,” he said. “The infrastructure across the U.S. for energy, it’s a struggle every day. We definitely see opportunities there for growth.”

Although he declined to name most of the company’s current clients, Cunningham said Whole Goods has had a longstanding relationship with Michigan City, Indiana-based Hitachi Global Air Power.

“They’ve been a great customer, a great partner of ours for 10 years now,” he said of the global industrial compressed air manufacturer. “We’re looking to expand into some new opportunities with Hitachi.”

Workforce boost
SRC Industrial plans also call for growing its workforce by more than 200 jobs in the Springfield area over the next five years. Although Cunningham said the employees should occupy the facility within the next six months or so, hiring won’t start for a while.

“Obviously, my team’s going to be extremely busy this year with just getting the building up and then getting everything moved over,” he said, noting there also will be a need to purchase additional equipment, such as cranes. “So really that ramp up from a people standpoint, we’ll start in 2026.”

Cunningham expects boosting the workforce to be a gradual process.

“We don’t want to have an onslaught and have to hire 100 people overnight. That’s not how we’re trying to grow the business right now,” he said. “We’re trying to grow it responsibly over that five-year timeframe.”

The new hires will add to SRC Holding Corp.’s position as one of the Springfield area’s largest employers. The company ranked No. 12 last year with 1,660 local employees, according to SBJ list research. SRC employed roughly 1,960 companywide as of July 2024.

Krisi Schell, SRC’s executive vice president of human resources, said the current employment numbers remain consistent with those from last summer.

Facility plans
Once the SRC Industrial employees exit their current facilities, plans are still up in the air on the future of those spaces, said Ryan Stack, SRC Holdings executive vice president.

“We’re going through some analysis amongst our other divisions and looking at our future prospects as well to see whether or not they’re going to be needed for our own growth internally,” he said, adding SRC subsidiary Ceramex North America LLC is interested in taking on some of the East Sunshine Street space occupied by the former GRC.

Alternatives still on the table include leasing them to outside companies or selling them, Stack said.

“There’s a lot of energy to the conversation. We’re trying to figure out what the best move may be as far as long term,” he said.

The SRC Industrial building, which started construction in spring 2024, adds to an existing growth area for SRC Holdings.

Its SRC Logistics Inc. subsidiary completed a 150,000-square-foot expansion to its 2607 N. Mulroy Road home in 2023, according to past SBJ reporting. That work came two years after its original 162,000-square-foot building on the site was built in 2021.

A 10-year plan announced in 2021 by SRC called for $100 million in projects companywide.

Part of that is the planned consolidation of operations for SRC of Lexington, which Stack said is working out of three buildings in Kentucky. SRC also has a Joliet, Illinois, facility with over 1 million square feet of space which it opened in 2020, according to the company’s website.

Stack said the company in March 2024 purchased a 180,000-square-foot facility in Lexington and is amid renovations and adding equipment. He said plans are to occupy the building by Q4 of this year.

Noting the combination of Whole Goods and GRC wasn’t specified in the company’s 10-year plan, Stack said SRC Industrial’s future facility does fit in with SRC’s overall growth aim. That includes expanding its Queen City properties by roughly 1.1 million square feet by 2031, according to past reporting.

“I think there are any number of ways that our growth has happened and that just happens to be the way that that piece of our growth has taken shape,” Stack said of SRC Industrial’s creation.