Jim Butler, President of Butler Coring, Inc., at his office in Gurnee, Illinois.

The completed loading dock at the St. Charles Trading, Inc. facility in Elgin, Illinois, finished on time and within budget.

In 1890, Edmund J. Longyear, a mining engineer from the first graduating class at the Michigan Mining School (now known as Michigan Tech), drilled the first diamond core hole in the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota. To accomplish this feat, he created the tool that would lead to a world-renowned business enterprise, and the catalyst that would come to define Jim Butler’s career.

The E.J. Longyear Company hired Jim in 1985, nearly a century after Longyear’s groundbreaking invention. Over that time, the E.J. Longyear Company, now called Boart Longyear, had become a leading global provider of drilling services, equipment and performance tooling for mining and drilling companies.

A New Beginning

On his first day at the E.J. Longyear Company, Jim reported to the manufacturing and distribution plant in Simi Valley, California. He quickly began to gain invaluable experience in the manufacturing process of diamond bits, blades, saws, drills and power units.

Before long, Jim was transferred to Chicago to take on the role of Upper Midwest Sales Manager. But as fate would have it, the role was short-lived. The company came upon challenging economic times and a decision was made to lay off all nationwide regional representatives, and much to Jim’s dismay he lost the new job that he had quickly come to love.

No one could have foreseen how Jim’s fate would twice change in one day. Left with no job, and completely new to the Chicago area, Jim went to one of his recent customers, Encotech Construction Services, Inc., and was hired on the spot by the Chicago-based drilling services company as an Operator.

A Second Beginning

For years, Jim core drilled, slab sawed, wall sawed and ran Bobcat machinery while training new team members and building relationships with clients. When Jim joined the company in 1987, it was a four-truck operation. By 2000, Jim had become the General Manager and the company boasted 25 trucks and 35 employees.

But yet again, Jim found himself employed at a business where company growth would not be long-lived. In 2008, as the economy worsened, the company was forced to liquidate its assets, let go of its 20 remaining employees and go out of business.

Working quickly, Jim and the management team, Mike Belcher, Mike Hewlett and Denise Polster, decided to launch a new company by purchasing the company’s assets and retaining its workers.

Jim had the most financial leverage at the time, and so he personally guaranteed the purchase of the trucks and drilling services equipment. He then secured the working capital for the first three months of the new business by taking out a home equity line of credit against his personal family property. And that is how Butler Coring, Inc. was established in 2009 in Chicago —with a great deal of determination at a turbulent time.

“At times, I felt like I had purchased a last-minute ticket to the Titanic,” Jim says.

A Third Restart

Despite some early setbacks, once the economy stabilized, Butler Coring began to grow in revenue and service offerings, continuously evolving the dynamic business to the present day.

Today, Butler Coring provides ground penetrating radar (GPR) scans, coring, sawing, excavating and concrete patching and repair work. For each job, the scanning division of the business produces a GPR survey report for client approval, which is also forwarded to the scheduled core driller or saw operator before these staff members arrive on-site. This critical piece of site intelligence allows the teams to be fully prepared, with time to review the conditions of the job ahead of time.

The Butler Coring operators also provide dimensions and depths for the concrete crew to help with the ordering of materials and to provide an early warning of any challenging site conditions that could affect the concrete crew’s work.

“Our goal is to assist our clients’ project managers by providing a seamless flow of information from our scanners to the operators and on to our concrete crew,” Jim says. He adds that this level of service and intelligence is what sets Butler Coring apart from its competitors.

Complex Cutting and Reconstruction

Butler Coring has also become distinguished from its competitors for its ability to solve very complex concrete cutting and reconstruction problems.

For PanCor Construction & Development, LLC, the team at Butler Coring performed an extremely complicated excavation to allow PanCor to accommodate the needs of St. Charles Trading, Inc., a new industrial tenant. St. Charles needed an industrial-sized loading dock for its operations, along with 12 oversized overhead doors and levelers and a man door. The tenant’s needs resulted in a major reconstruction performed by Butler Coring that required clear planning, innovative thinking and a team with unique problem-solving abilities. Butler Coring took on the highly complex, multiphase process of lowering the face of the PanCor building to accommodate the tenant’s requirements—work that needed to be completed under a tight deadline to ensure the concrete loading dock slab was poured before there was frost in the ground.

Geno Cabrera, one of Butler Coring’s experienced operators, undertook an innovative approach to cutting the sections of the existing concrete by adjusting his blade in a way that allowed him to jump over the angle-mounted brackets that were in place for structural support. The extreme lengths and depths of the cuts that he achieved while using this technique are rarely seen in the industry, Jim says.

A Comprehensive Service Menu

Jim credits much of the recent success of the business to strategic hires that he and his managerial team have made over the past five years in both the sales and technical divisions of the business.

Matt Foley joined the Butler Coring staff in 2014 and made an immediate impact on sales growth. He also assembled an industry-leading safety program that helps to ensure the comprehensive stability of the company’s operations. Steve Samaritano joined the business in 2016, providing another boost to the company’s sales team as well as assisting the company’s operators with tricks and techniques that he acquired through 16 years of field experience.

Dwayne Long, Butler Coring’s Chief Mechanic, along with Paul Baehr, a vastly experienced saw and machine operator, provide the business with extraordinary maintenance and repair expertise that Jim says is unique in today’s industry.

Building on these successes, in 2017, Butler Coring opened a new branch in Minneapolis. Led by Matt Jaakola and Dave Dinaso, this division of the business has gone from strength to strength over the past two years—so much so that now Jim and his team have future plans to one day expand Butler Coring into other regional territories.

Perseverance pays and Butler Coring proves it.