One of St. Pete’s greatest local success stories is also one of its best-kept secrets, for those of us outside the world of construction. Hidden in plain sight on the north side of town, Power Design Inc – and the sprawling modern campus it calls home – is the Burg’s biggest private employer with thousands who have joined the locally-run company.
Power Design got its start as a small family business in St. Pete – so small, in fact, that its first office was founder Mitch Permuy’s dining room table. His children can still remember crawling underneath the glass table as kids while their dad and his partners pored over blueprints on the tabletop. Now, Power Design is one of the nation’s leading design build contractors, with a 35-acre campus in St. Pete and satellite operations throughout the country.
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Today the company employs more than 3,000 people in everything from engineering and design to marketing, technology, and even an impressive group of chefs and baristas. As for the work of the company itself, Power Design has grown into something of a one-stop-shop for construction developers. By specializing in so many different areas (a rarity in the field), Power Design helps streamline construction processes by doing the work of what typically requires multiple contractors.
Specifically, they focus on electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and systems technologies buildout for construction projects. That scope encompasses everything from the lighting in conference rooms to carbon filtration in parking garages, with all the fire alarms, bathrooms, and literal nuts and bolts in between.
The local company powers the St. Pete economy
Of course, while it’s their professional services that make them important to their clients and partners, it’s Power Design’s role in the community that makes it special to St. Pete. It’s a rarity in so many of Florida’s growing cities to have such a large company not only headquartered locally, but founded there. With another facility in South St. Pete and a massive warehouse operation on the other side of the Skyway, Power Design is entrenched as an economic driver for the individuals and families who actually live in St. Pete and the surrounding areas.
And the benefits have spread much farther than that, thanks to Power Design’s primary charitable program: Project V5. The company uses millions of pounds of wire on its job sites all over the country, resulting in a significant amount of excess scrap wire. The program ensures that all of the wire is recycled for cash, and then the profit is donated straight to employee-chosen charities.
To date, the program has recycled nearly 400 million pounds of wire, benefiting more than 500 charities that represent the company’s five core values: integrity, accountability, teamwork, innovation, and growth.
As part of Power Design’s commitment to St. Pete, it is also an outlier in its industry as the company strives to keep as many of its employees as possible based locally and working out of its office on 9th Street North. And for the proverbial cherry on top, Power Design has regularly been listed as one of the Top 100 places to work in America by outlets like Fortune Magazine, Inc., and Glassdoor.
As it becomes more important than ever to help preserve the things that make St. Pete unique, we’re happy to see a local company that made it big and continues to invest in the community it has called home since day one.
Learn more about the company at powerdesigninc.us.
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