Serving Southern California, Slater Builders is a full-service, family-owned commercial general contractor working in the areas of non-profit, faith-based, hospitality, education, active environments, healthcare, living environments, office/industrial, and tenant improvements, and striving to go above and beyond on every project. Through this commitment, the company has earned loyalty and maintains its standing as a relationship-based contractor, servicing many clients for more than 30 years.
Established in 1993 with a mission to drive client and project success, Slater Builders integrates forward-thinking people, concepts, and technologies into every collaboration. The team provides key services such as constructability review, designing within budget, value engineering, project scheduling, and strategic monitoring of commodities markets to optimize purchasing timelines to mitigate delay. By securing subcontractor contracts early and streamlining project cash flow, Slater ensures efficient and cost-effective project delivery from inception. The company successfully manages projects of any size thanks to its organizational structure, and provides a unique approach tailored to each project it takes on.
Slater Builders’ full-service contracting team prioritizes delivering maximum value to clients during the preconstruction and design-build stages. By collaborating closely early in the process, the company can establish comprehensive project scopes that align with programmatic and design visions. Leveraging technologies like Blue Beam and Procore, the team validates designs, ensures budget-friendly solutions through continuous pricing updates, and monitors supplier and subcontractor costs to manage risks and facilitate strategic buyouts. This approach ensures projects are completed successfully, on time, and within budget.
“At Slater Builders, relationships come first, and historically always have, which is why we’ve been working with some repeat clients, A&E teams, and subcontractors for three decades. My family started building in Los Angeles, California in 1886, with my great grandfather,” says Ed Slater, Principal and Co-Founder. “J.A. McNeil, my grandfather, was also a builder, so building has been in our family for quite some time. My dad was a builder, and my brothers were all in the business. When it comes to relationships, we’ve been working with some of our customers for three decades. Our customers and partners know they can rely on us for quality construction, hard work, integrity, confidence, and trust.”
This includes a fair amount of work within the non-profit world, he adds, helping to promote understanding of what the company calls ‘the preservation of the gift.’ “The nonprofit world is run a lot on donations and the goodness of people to provide support,” Slater says. “We really believe our fiduciary responsibility as part of the team is to try to preserve that gift.”
When it comes to relationships, he adds, the entire company—its collective identity and its individual people—focuses on supporting people. “One of the things that sets us apart is that our family has a nonprofit ourselves,” Slater says. “So, we’re not only building and working with nonprofits; having a nonprofit gives us a different insight, perhaps, than those who don’t really have that experience.”
Slater Builders’ nonprofit sister company, Mae House, is an Adult Residential Facility (ARF) for women with developmental disabilities. Established by the Slaters in 2018 and licensed in California, this long-term independent residential community is dedicated to supporting each member’s growth as they progress through all stages of life. Working to give members a home for life, the goal is to enable people with developmental impairments to lead active, fulfilling lives by providing them with a home and residential community. The team believes that people with exceptional needs can and ought to be successful, lifelong learners, and is committed to establishing and preserving a member-centered environment while recognizing the value of getting to know members’ interests and understanding what they wish to accomplish each day.
In terms of notable current and future work, Slater Builders is working on a number of pre-construction projects, including St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, California; a multi-purpose gymnasium for St. John the Baptist in Costa Mesa; a Performing Arts Center (PAC) for Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana; an LAPD virtual training facility in Los Angeles; the Verbum Dei Jesuit High School in Los Angeles; and upgrades to LoanMart Field for the Quakes baseball team in Rancho Cucamonga, just to name a few.
Additionally, there is the Bay Shores Hotel project on the peninsula in Newport Beach, for which the company did pre-construction work, as well as two Newport Beach restaurant projects: Nick’s Newport Beach and Café Lido.
“We’re also currently finishing up three projects,” adds Slater. “One is Ascension Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery in Lake Forest, California, along with St. Mark’s Presbyterian Preschool in Altadena, and also a library project for Flintridge Prep in La Cañada.”
Other projects of note include Quay Works, a structural and architectural renovation of an existing 40,000-square-foot, four-story office building located in Newport Beach. This project included a complete interior and exterior demolition, structural and seismic upgrades, new MEP systems throughout, a new curtain wall system with operable doors, new standing seam metal siding and roofing, modernization of the existing elevator, the addition of an ADA lift, and extensive site improvements throughout. The three-story, below-grade parking structure was also refurbished, and on the harbor side, the property includes a new docking system and upgrades to the existing seawall.
Slater also completed a one-story-plus-basement addition, renovation, and remodel of a private Beach Club, a Type V building originally constructed in 1923 and expanded a number of times throughout its lifespan. The company’s expansion work included replacement of the existing commercial kitchen and “grill” kitchen; replacement of existing maintenance and other back-of-house service facilities; remodeling of the existing bar and seating areas; expansion of the existing basement to create a barrier-free basement with expanded storage; replacement of all MEP systems serving the commercial kitchen; renovation within and extension of the existing building envelope, which called for seismic strengthening, mat foundation, and area separations; and a new trash enclosure building and outdoor receiving area.
The company’s work on the St. Anthony High School Athletic Field, completed in 2023, was a ground-up new sports complex involving the redevelopment and modernization of an existing off-campus high school athletic complex on a 10-acre site. The complex includes a new 1,200-seat stadium for football, track & field, soccer, and lacrosse events; a new north multi-purpose building with locker rooms, a co-ed training room, coaches’ offices, equipment storage, an attached outdoor weight studio and a student patio; a new north concessions building with restrooms; and a new south storage building. Site improvements included new surface parking, an entry plaza, and upgraded utility service.
Essentially, Slater Builders is not only in the industry of construction, but in the business of people—and in the business of communication and listening.
“And then we build things,” says Slater. “And I think that the training and the time we need to spend with the next generation so they can continue to learn the craft of building—and also learn the craft of communicating and managing people and expectations—is really the thing that I’d like us as an industry to focus on moving forward.”
Ed Slater has personally worked in the industry for decades, and that accumulated experience and knowledge lends itself to his understanding of what processes need to be undertaken moving forward. “We’re in the process of starting a strategic planning group and a plan for succession; that’s a pretty big challenge. I think the other challenge is just to continue to keep up morale for the people who are maybe encountering challenges outside of the business, with the stresses of everyday life.”
Those stresses include, for example, the challenge of remaining connected in a meaningful way with co-workers, something Slater aims to tackle whenever possible. “We rely so much on our devices that here, we really push for picking up the phone and having a conversation versus emailing or texting,” he says. “Our CEO, Liz Slater, every now and again has a ‘no emailing day,’ meaning you pick up the phone and have a conversation, call somebody just to say hi, and check in and continue to build trust and relationships.”
Ed Slater himself is also highly committed to maintaining personal connections within the company, whether that’s reaching out personally to speak with employees each week by phone or simply keeping track of what various employees are up to in terms of family commitments, holiday plans, or personal issues. In short, he says, when people know that you care, and they know that you’re thinking about them, they will reciprocate whenever possible.
“Our industry really just needs to get back to understanding that the building part is secondary,” says Slater. “It’s the people first, and then, when we assemble the right team, we can build anything.”
