John Fish

Construction companies are in the bulls-eye of the economic downturn.

The fall-off in demand for everything from new condo projects to office towers threatens to hit local builders hard.

And one big question for the local industry is whether one of its top players, Suffolk Construction’s John Fish, will be able to sidestep the roundhouse punch that is coming the way of everyone who builds things for a living.

A rising star on the local business scene, Fish has taken the family construction business and turned it into a national franchise, with offices as far afield as California and Florida. And if you haven’t noticed it already, you can spot a Suffolk sign on almost any major project going up in Boston.

Suffolk now does $1.7 billion in business a year, with roughly 1,000 employees in eight different states.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that a good portion of that growth in recent years came as Suffolk, like other builders across the country, rode the housing boom.

Top Shelf

Suffolk built the opulent new Mandarin Oriental condo and hotel high-rise on Boylston Street near the Prudential center. (The project’s roster of condo owners features a who’s who of local business leaders, including Fish himself). Suffolk also built the new 45 Province Street condo tower near Government Center, to name a few local projects.

Back when the real estate market was soaring, the big construction company also delved into what were then red hot housing markets in Miami and California.

However, in the cold light of the fall of 2008, that sounds like a prescription for trouble.

And it’s an assessment, actually, that Fish himself agrees with.

The construction chief says he started seeing signs of trouble in the real estate market as far back as 2004.

One tipoff that trouble was on its way, Fish recalls, was when some of his Florida subcontractors started getting into the condo development scene. The scent of easy profits, of property flips and fanciful talk of never losing money on real estate, was in the air. Miami wound up with dozens of tower cranes on its skyline, and practically a new condo high-rise on every block.

All of which alarmed Fish, who knew that development is far from easy and fraught with risk.

“We thought to ourselves that business is not that easy,” Fish said. “This is going to be a harbinger of things to come.”

Changing Focus

Since that realization struck, Fish has been steadily weaning Suffolk off of residential work and pushing aggressively into other, more stable areas.

Four years ago, 60 percent of Suffolk’s business was building residential projects. Today it’s a shrinking minority, with work on new buildings for the federal government, hospital and educational facilities now accounting for half the firm’s revenue. The company is building projects for health care giant Partners, Boston Medical Center, and Northeastern University, among other local institutions.

By 2010, Fish would like to boost that number even higher, to 65 percent of his business.

“We didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket,” Fish said. “We started looking at where we wanted to place our bets, on health care and education.”

The slowdown in new office tower and commercial construction has forced Fish and Suffolk to make additional, and at times painful, course corrections.

Suffolk has begun to look more carefully at the subcontractors it works with. With banks cutting back on lines of credit to small builders, Fish and Suffolk are checking the balance sheets of individual subcontractors to see if they have the cash flow to stay in business.

“We are being more thoughtful in the evaluation of the people we do business with,” said.

And Suffolk recently cut a few dozen positions on the commercial side as work in that sector drags.

“In this type of environment, everyone has to reexamine their resources,” Fish said.

Fish has placed his bets. Now everyone will be watching to see how they turn out.