The Firm That Remodels America 3,000 Stores at a Time

Walk into a Starbucks that just reopened brighter than you remembered, a Walgreens with a re-cut floor plan, or a Circle K that suddenly sells hot food - and you are standing inside someone's project plan. Not the brand's. A contractor you have never heard of, working from an office park in Downers Grove, Illinois, that quietly turns the sentence "remodel every location" into a schedule, a budget and a finished store. That company is Sevan Multi-Site Solutions, and its whole reason to exist is a problem most shoppers never think about: how do you rebuild a thousand buildings at once without the wheels coming off?

The answer, at Sevan, looks less like a construction crew and more like a logistics operation. The firm manages more than $1 billion of new builds, remodels and improvements every year for some of the largest brands in America. It employs roughly 400 people across North America and the United Kingdom. And it was founded, in 2011, by a West Point graduate and former Special Forces officer who decided that the discipline he learned moving troops through nine countries might also move drywall and permits through 3,000 storefronts.

01What Sevan actually does

The industry term is "program management," and it is easy to underrate. A single store remodel is a manageable job for a local general contractor. Two thousand of them, running in parallel across dozens of jurisdictions, each with its own permits, landlords, utilities and grand-reopening date, is a different species of problem. Miss on a handful and a brand eats delays and cost overruns. Miss at scale and a national rebrand slips a fiscal year.

Sevan sells itself as the layer that keeps that from happening. It handles the full lifecycle - real estate and site development, architecture and engineering, civil work, zoning and permitting, construction management, and the reality-capture and data tools that track it all. Clients can hand over a new-build program, a remodel wave, a rebrand, or a facility "reimage," and Sevan runs it end to end. Its own shorthand for the relationship is a tagline that doubles as a pitch: "you, multiplied." The company would rather be described as an extension of the client's team than as a vendor.

02Who hires a firm like this

The client list reads like a tour of American main streets and highway exits. Sevan has worked with McDonald's, Starbucks, Walgreens, 7-Eleven, Circle K, Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, BP, Marathon, Sunoco, Jiffy Lube, Chipotle, Panera, Qdoba, Zaxby's, IKEA, Amazon, Office Depot, Hallmark, HCA Healthcare, DaVita and Amtrak, plus government and military customers such as AAFES. The common thread is not an industry - it is a shape: hundreds or thousands of near-identical locations that all need to change at roughly the same time.

That is why Sevan organizes itself by sector - restaurant, grocery, fuel and convenience, retail, government, healthcare and pharmacy, and housing and hospitality - rather than by trade. A fuel-and-convenience rebuild and a pharmacy remodel are wildly different buildings, but the underlying job is the same: take one playbook and repeat it, reliably, across a map.

03The founder's angle

Jim Evans is not a typical construction executive. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1983 with a degree in engineering, served with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 10th Special Forces Group, and completed missions in nine countries. He later earned an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, spent the 1990s at JP Morgan Chase in structured finance, and then joined Lendlease, where he helped privatize 40,000 military family homes across U.S. installations and ran a joint venture with BP managing retail sites in the U.S., Mexico and 13 European countries.

Read that resume backward and Sevan makes sense. Finance taught him how capital programs are scoped and paid for. The BP joint venture taught him what multi-site retail construction looks like at continental scale. And the military taught him the thing the whole company is built around: logistics is a discipline, and it does not care whether you are moving a platoon or a permit. In 2011 he and a group of partners set out, in their own words, to become the best in the world at delivering design, program management and construction to organizations that operate across many sites.

04The technology bet

Construction is famously slow to digitize, which is part of Sevan's opening. Alongside the hard hats, the firm leans on reality capture - laser scanning and Matterport walkthroughs that turn an existing store into an accurate 3D model before anyone swings a hammer - and building information modeling to plan the change. On top sits a technology and data-analytics practice that tracks cost, schedule and quality across every active site at once, so a program manager can see which of two thousand jobs is drifting before it becomes a headline. The company packages the whole delivery approach under a house brand it calls 7Xcellence, which it markets as "a smarter standard for multi-site programs."

The pitch to a brand is straightforward: fewer surprises, tighter schedules, and a single source of truth for a program that would otherwise live in a thousand disconnected email threads.

05Money, growth and a trip across the Atlantic

Sevan grew for most of a decade before taking institutional money. In December 2019 it raised a $17.5 million Series A led by ABS Capital Partners - notably its only announced venture round, which for a services business is the point rather than a shortfall. Less than a year later, in 2020, it acquired UK-based Wyeth Projects Services, planting a flag in London and giving the firm a European base to match its North American footprint. Today its estimated annual revenue sits around $174 million.

The recognition has followed the growth. In 2025 Sevan landed at No. 121 on Inc.'s Regionals: Midwest list of the fastest-growing private companies, was ranked the #1 retail construction contractor on ABC's Top Performers List, and picked up a National Safety Excellence Award. It also formed a new joint venture, Keta Sevan, in May of that year. In early 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor named it a Platinum-level HIRE Vets employer - a nod to the military-heavy hiring that traces straight back to its founder.

06Where it fits - and who it is up against

Sevan operates in the gap between two familiar options. On one side are the real estate and project-management giants - CBRE, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, Turner & Townsend - that manage projects among many other services. On the other is the in-house route, where a brand staffs its own construction department. Sevan's argument is focus: it does multi-site programs and little else, end to end, which is a narrower promise than the giants make and a deeper one than most in-house teams can staff for.

Whether that focus is a durable moat is the open question. Program management is a relationship business, and relationships can move. But a fifteen-year client roster of the country's biggest chains suggests that "boring, on time, at scale" is a product people keep paying for.

07Where it would not work

The model has clear edges. A single flagship building - a museum, a headquarters, a one-off destination - does not benefit from a repeatable multi-site playbook; it wants a signature architect, not a program manager. The economics also depend on volume: without a portfolio of hundreds or thousands of similar locations, the overhead of a firm like Sevan is hard to justify. And it lives downstream of its clients' capital budgets. When big brands slow their build-and-remodel spending, the program pipeline narrows with it. Sevan's bet is that America's largest chains will always be changing their stores - and that someone has to run it.