Most general contractors treat an occupied facility as an inconvenience to work around. We treat it as the brief — because that is the only kind of project we take.
S-Bar Construction was founded in 2022 by Paul Siwek and Jason Barkatt. The pairing is the reason the company works the way it does.
Paul came to construction from the engineering side. At Accenture he worked on digitally transforming engineering, construction, and operations for oil and gas clients — facilities where going offline is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.
At KBR he ran project management and business development, including a two-year assignment in Saudi Arabia. That background produced a specific conviction: on an operating asset, the schedule is the commercial risk. Not the bid.
Jason has spent thirty-seven years actually delivering the work — commercial and industrial projects from ten thousand square feet to a million, across build-to-suit industrial, office, and retail programs.
That range is unusual, and it is why S-Bar can self-perform and directly supervise some of the most complex subcontracts you can hope for. Very little on a site surprises him, which is precisely what you want in the person writing your phasing plan.
Put those two halves together and you get a company that thinks about a project the way an owner does. Paul's side asks what the work costs the business while it happens. Jason's side knows what is physically possible to stage around a running operation.
S-Bar exists to revitalise commercial and industrial space — site work, roofing, renovation, and facility improvement on assets already in service. By definition that means working around people who still have jobs to do.
We did not grow by chasing ground-up projects. We grew by becoming the contractor owners call when something has to be fixed and the operation cannot stop.
Naming what we do not do is not modesty. It is how you avoid finding out at week three that your contractor was learning on your building.
On a national contractor, the people who win the work are rarely the people who deliver it. Here, the owners are on the projects. You will not be handed to a regional office after signing.
We take on scope we can directly supervise rather than subcontracting the parts that decide whether a phasing plan holds. The crew on your site works to our standard because it is our crew.
The person who scopes the work drafts the contract and runs delivery. Whoever wrote what you signed is the person answering when you call about it.
Every proposal includes how the work gets staged around your operation. If a contractor cannot show you that before mobilising, they have planned the scope and hoped.
Every institutional owner runs qualification before a contract. Here is what we carry — full documentation on request, usually same day.
We'll walk one of your sites and send a written condition report — photographed, prioritised, and costed by urgency. No obligation, no sales visit attached.