VIcom’s new Mechanicsville office at 9335 Cool Spring Road. (Images courtesy VIcom)
Nearly eight years after expanding into the Richmond market, a Virginia Beach-based IT company has built and moved into a sizable new local hub in Hanover County.
VIcom, which provides audio-video and communication tech systems for commercial clients of all sorts, recently completed a 31,000-square-foot office and warehouse facility at 9335 Cool Spring Road in Mechanicsville.
BJ Hughes, the 23-year-old company’s president and co-founder, said the company began planning for the new building two years ago as it sought to have a facility to complement its Hampton Roads headquarters.
BJ Hughes
“We wanted something that matches up to what we have in Virginia Beach, that we can proudly bring our customers to and employees can collaborate in,” Hughes said.
Tom Kusiak, the company’s vice president of sales, added that the new building was needed due to the growth of its operations in the Richmond area, where 30 of its 80 employees are located.
“The growth in the Richmond market has been strong and continues to be strong and the size of this building reflects that,” Kusiak said.
The new Mechanicsville building replaces VIcom’s previous space it leased at 1580 E. Parham Road in Henrico.
VIcom occupies 24,000 square feet of the new building and will lease out 7,000 square feet. The company said Hanover County Economic Development, along with Ben Bruni of Commonwealth Commercial are marketing that leasable space.
Daniel & Co. was the general contractor on the new facility. 510 Architects did the design work. TowneBank financed the project.
VIcom would not comment on the cost of the new building. An entity tied to the company bought the 3-acre project site for $1.2 million.
VIcom occupies 24,000 square feet of the 31,000-square-foot building.
Hughes and Kusiak said the employee-owned company’s growth has been fueled by demand for designing, building, implementing and servicing AV systems for clients in education, local governments, healthcare and private companies.
Tom Kusiak
They said that demand increased noticeably with the arrival of the pandemic, when incorporating video conferencing into communication was brought into prominence, and that the demand hasn’t waned.
“It was a bit of a lightning rod and we took advantage of that to support current customers and expand,” Kusiak said. “There’s so much more intercommunication across platforms when it used to be face-to-face.”
Hughes said the company for years prior to the pandemic was pushing for the adoption of what he called unified communications. He said pandemic-era trends pushed the industry into the future.
“You had a lot of siloed platforms and Covid just forced everybody to adopt and move forward,” Hughes said. “It’s been great to see those things become real.”