SAN DIEGO – Seattle-based Coffman Engineers’ San Diego office has grown from 10 employees to over 100 employees since it was first established a decade ago.
Coffman Principal Casey Whitsett has been there since the beginning.
Before Coffman entered the San Diego market, Whitsett was a Vice President at San Diego-based multidisciplinary structural engineering firm Hope-Amundson, Inc.
In 2017, a year after establishing offices in San Diego, Coffman acquired Hope-Amundson, expanding its San Diego team beyond fire protection and electrical work.
“The secret sauce for Coffman is that we do have a bigger national presence, but we’re very locally focused,” Whitsett said. “All of our principals have long tenures here in the San Diego market — 20-plus years each. We all know the market really, really well.”
Coffman has 900 employees nationally, offices in over a dozen states and a company-wide revenue of $182 million.
Over the last five years, Coffman’s San Diego office has experienced a local revenue growth of 145%, while local office staff grew from 71 to 100 during that same period.
On a local scale, the firm has been behind major San Diego projects, including the $500 million University of California San Diego Ridge Walk North, $52.7 million Southwestern College (SWC) Performing Arts and Cultural Center and the 520,000 square-foot Torrey View life science research campus in Carmel Valley.
“Locally we are focused on the projects that help San Diego thrive,” Coffman President Scott Twele said. “We are kicking off several San Diego Community College projects this year, as well as working on several military and federal projects in San Diego and the larger Southern California region. We also continue to focus on healthcare, and upcoming opportunities with adaptive reuse projects in life sciences, office space and residential markets.”
Purposeful Growth
Over the course of its decade in San Diego, Coffman has charted measured growth.
The firm’s last major acquisition was Abbott Engineering in 2019. Whitsett said that, when it comes to expansion strategy, the company levels up by assessing what its offerings are missing. With Abbott, Coffman gained mechanical and plumbing capabilities.
By offering a broad spectrum of honed capabilities, Whitsett said that Coffman can stay nimble and adapt to projects’ needs.
“We try to take a special approach to being multidisciplined. We bring lot of diversity between our different disciplines for our expertise, and we don’t try to force every discipline on every project,” Whitsett said. “We often have a very unique makeup on any given project, where, for instance, we might be providing structural services, but the rest of the design team is made up of other engineering firms from around town who would normally be, our competitors in some instances, but we might have the structural expertise and the resume to really perform well on that project.”
Much of Coffman’s growth over the last five years, Whitsett said, has been organic.
“It’s not super beneficial to just keep growing one office and get it to multiple hundreds of people, especially in the San Diego market,” Whitsett said. “It’s not necessarily that the work here can sustain that type of single office. So, a lot of our growth is focused on taking our culture and our services and investing in some new locations.”
Much of the company’s broader growth comes from expansion throughout the Southwest and Southeast. Coffman’s San Diego office, specifically, has sponsored extensions in Pheonix in 2022 and Las Vegas in 2023.
“We attracted some top talent in those markets,” Whitsett said. “We had the opportunity to bring on some individuals and grow a little more organically. They are essentially extensions of our team. We collaborate remotely when they have projects that need multidisciplinary support.”
Each extension office has about 6 employees, Whitsett said.
“We are often selective in terms of which disciplines are going to make the most sense and be successful in new markets,” Whitsett said. “We think, for instance, in both of those offices that fire protection services have a really good, established footprint. We are seeing a lot of opportunities. It gives us chances to establish client relationships, continue some services there, while minimizing investment, and then grow organically and a little more slowly.”
Adapting for Future of Engineering
Over the past couple years, Whitsett said San Diego has been an “interesting market.”
“Historically, a big part of our focus has been the life science market, and some of our biggest projects in San Diego concentrated in very large life science campuses,” Whitsett said. “A lot of the work in San Diego over the past couple of years — what’s really coming on the books — is much more municipal focused.”
One such project is Coffman’s work on the 206,000 square-foot San Diego Mesa College Mathematics & Natural Sciences Building under Measure HH, the $3.5 billion bond measure approved by over 60% of San Diego voters in November 2024 to modernize San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) facilities.
Almost all of Coffman’s work happens before groundbreaking, Whitsett said, when the firm charts out engineering and design in collaboration with architects and general contractors. The design phase for the Mesa College project will span about a year.
A big economic driver in the San Diego market, Whitsett said, is its pipeline from higher education to the life science market. That is reflected in the set of projects Coffman and other firms work on.
Whitsett reflected that, since 2023, the demand for lab and life science office space has not necessarily been keeping up with the surplus of real estate.
“San Diego is still one of the top life science markets in the nation with Boston and San Francisco,” Whitsett said. “We’re still very ambitious and bullish on what San Diego will be when we rebound and come back stronger after that tenant spaces is pulled up, but that is definitely affecting investment dollars and new building construction.”
With that in mind, Coffman has been intentionally diversifying its project portfolio, particularly in higher education and student housing.
Coffman is also invested in federal and military projects in the region.
According to Twele, as Coffman enters 2026 the firm, like many others, is paying attention to AI.
“AI has obviously been a major contributor to change in our industry lately,” Twele said.
“However, the AEC [Architecture, Engineering and Construction] industry can sometimes lag behind in adopting new technologies.
“Coffman has been at the forefront of understanding the capabilities of AI as it relates to our industry and how and when we can utilize it as well as working on projects impacted by AI,” he continued. “We’ve embraced AI to help us be effective in many areas but also understand that AEC is a relationship business and continue to invest in our staff and local resources to best serve our clients.”
Above all, Whitsett said it is important to remember that Coffman’s work is a “people-oriented profession.”
“It’s a little easy to get lost in your calculations or have your head in your computer, but I always want to remember that what we’re doing is for people,” Whitsett said. “You and I are all sitting in buildings right now, and we’re counting on somebody to have done their job really well to keep us safe.”
Coffman recently finished work on the new student union at SWC, where Whitsett’s wife is a professor. Hearing about the impact of Coffman’s work on a personal level was especially meaningful to him.
“As nerdy as it sounds, that really touches my heart,” Whitsett said. “I’ve got this responsibility to all of these people, and they’re never going to notice if everything goes right. To see the spaces that we designed activated, people excited to be there and then also to have that personal connection of knowing that somebody I love will also be enjoying this space — that’s what brings me to work every day.”
Coffman Engineers
FOUNDED: 1979
CEO: Dave Ruff, PE
HEADQUARTERS: Seattle
BUSINESS: Engineering
EMPLOYEES: 900
REVENUE: $182 million
WEBSITE: www.coffman.com
CONTACT: https://www.coffman.com/contact-us/
SOCIAL IMPACT: Coffman looks for ways to give back to the community throughout the course of the year such as volunteering at the food bank, walking dogs with the Frosted Faces organization, Surfrider San Diego beach cleanups, participating in the Curebound Cancer Challenge and an office wide donation drive to Toys for Tots. They also participate in the ACE mentorship program and Women’s Construction Coalition to engage students in learning about STEM careers.
NOTABLE: Coffman’s San Diego office will be celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year.
Born and raised in San Diego, Madison takes great pride in local storytelling. Her coverage at the San Diego Business Journal includes tourism, hospitality, nonprofits, education and retail. An alumna of San Diego State University’s journalism program, she has written for publications including The San Diego Union-Tribune and The San Diego Sun. At the 2024 San Diego Press Club awards, Madison was recognized for her exemplary profile writing. She was also a speaker for the 2023 TEDx Conference at Bonita Vista High School. When she’s not working on her next story, Madison can be found performing music at a local restaurant or on one of San Diego’s many hiking trails.
