Providing a multitude of industry and manufacturing as well as buildings and facilities engineering services

James Angelo is the president of TAI, an engineering, management, and technical services firm. For 27 years, TAI has served a wide range of industry and manufacturing clients in market sectors that include food and beverage, natural gas, chemical process, wireless telecom, power generation, and many more. TAI also designs buildings and facilities for healthcare, laboratory, government and military, and commercial and office clients, as well as building envelope systems. The company employs over 200 professionals in more than 16 divisions across five office locations. TAI’s corporate headquarters are located in Owings Mills, MD.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Tell us about the history of TAI. Have you been with the company since the beginning?

JAMES ANGELO: The company has a long storied history. I was fortunate: Dan Tourgee founded TAI as Tourgee & Associates, Inc. in 1989; two months after its founding, he asked me to join the firm and I’ve been a part of the company since. It’s provided me with the opportunity to advance my career and grow along with countless others as part of the firm.

EDWIN WARFIELD: How does the company now compare to what it once was? How has TAI changed and grown over the years?

Up until 2001, the company had generally thrived upon supporting a local marketplace of industrial manufacturing companies. The local market transitioned due to the easier move of capital and corporate clients’ strategic plans, Most of our core customers disappeared during that time, relocating to the South, relocating overseas, some of them just no longer in need for the product. What we were able to accomplish was the redefining of how we acquired work for the firm. We started performing services for corporate engineering groups or manufacturing industrial facilities across the United States and some select international markets.

Additionally, during that time, we realized that our initial base of operations, which was primarily the chemical process industry, needed to be expanded. Each business segment has a market cycle. We don’t necessarily want to ride the ups and downs of those market cycles. Since these cycles in each separate industry don’t necessarily overlap, by us adding new market segments to our offering, we were able to flatten those curves out. So, we started getting into power generation, which has a different spin cycle. We started getting into some of the manufacturing of household product, food and beverage, of pharma, life sciences—and by building up all these different market sectors, we were able to smooth out the cyclical nature at the insuring firm, who service one marketplace.

Over time, as the firm has grown, our clients have asked us to push into new sectors to be able to service them. As such, what started as an engineering design house blended over into technical services and management services—everything from procurement and construction management—to assist our clients in building the designs that we’re preparing over to doing inspection and test services; to look at existing equipment and how long it would continue to be suitable for service; analysis of that equipment; calibrating, troubleshooting, instrumentation that runs the equipment; doing the programming for the screens that whenever you want to make a widget, you push the button—and say you start making red widgets today—and I’m done making those, made a hundred, and now you push the button and say let’s start making blue widgets. Those additional offerings have made us a more robust complementary firm for everything that we provide.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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