The building that housed the Fontana Fitness Center for years has been sold to a Lafayette tech company for $2 million.
Techneaux Technology Services bought the 23,000-square-foot building at 719 Kaliste Saloom Road from sellers Paul and Rose Fontana this week, land records show.
Techneaux, which has been housed at an 11,000-square-foot space at 312 Westgate Road in Scott, hopes to move into the building in about a year, said CEO Ben Johnson, who founded the business 13 years ago. It’s the next step for the growth of the company, which Johnson and his father, Michael, started in a garage in 2010.
The building is centrally located in Lafayette Parish, and the open office space fits well with the company’s culture and how it operates. It also has more parking area than the current building, which was a factor in not seeking a space in downtown Lafayette, he said.
The building will undergo a significant renovation that could take about 12 months. Its Olympic-sized swimming pool will be filled in, Johnson said.
“The location is great,” Johnson said. “It’s close to River Ranch area and a quick shot to the Oil Center and downtown. As we’ve grown, we’ve hired a lot of people from the university (of Louisiana at Lafayette). They’ve grown their careers here, and they’ve got families and have bought houses. Typically those starter homes are out toward Broussard and Youngsville, and so it’s a more centralized location for a lot of our people.”
Techneaux, which does IT work and consulting for mainly oil and gas companies but also has customers in other areas of the energy sector and in municipal services, now has 127 people employees, with 90 in its Scott office. It also has employees in a Houston office.
The company grew out of that garage and into a space in downtown Lafayette, where it grew to 28 employees and had some working at a station in the lobby of the office, earlier reports indicate. It then bought its current space, a former furniture warehouse, in June 2012, records show.
It uses a model of distributed capitalism, he said, and has grown from having two owners to seven owners. A 2012 report on the Scott office noted Techneaux's focus on its employees, including how it terminated a contract with a client that accounted for nearly three-fourths of its business for being disrespectful to its workers.
“We want the people that actually make the money to earn the money,” Johnson said. “We have kind of a unique business model where I’m a CEO that’s not going to make 300 times what the average team member makes. We distribute that. We have pretty good profit sharing. We’ve given ownership to the people that deserve it, and we’re continuing to grow.”
The building came up for sale when the Fontanas announced late last year it would close on Dec. 31 upon their retirement. The business specialized in occupational therapy, work rehabilitation and fitness and also included an industrial occupational therapy clinic, which moved to Broussard.
The building sat on the market for years, the Fontanas said in a December social media post, and the owners had hoped to find a buyer to continue the fitness center.
“It is with heavy hearts and tears to have to say farewell to our fitness center members who have become such dear friends that we all consider like family,” their post read. “We will forever cherish the memories.”