Excerpts
Excerpts from Energy Entrepreneurs,Vol. 1:
A wake-up call for Plant Machine Works (page 15)
As anyone who’s worked in that profession knows, it can induce as much stress as almost any job imaginable. The task of training teenagers to focus on anything other than school and social activities is almost certainly an ongoing challenge. The work of Tommy’s father Claude — who had purchased the Baton Rouge, La., equipment repair and fabrication shop Plant Machine Works in 1976 and grown it into a hugely successful, multifaceted operation — seemed favorable by comparison.
At least that’s what Tommy thought in one pivotal moment during his final days on the court.
“My dad, believe it or not, never missed a basketball game that I coached,” Tommy said. “Whether it was a home game or on the road, and whether or not my son Travis played, he was at every game.”
During one particular contest, Tommy happened to peer across the gym and spotted Claude sitting proudly in the stands, just as he had at every other game of his son’s long career. It was no special occasion, but for Tommy, this short glance was something of an epiphany.
“I said to myself, ‘You know, I really should go and help him out,’” Tommy said. “Sure enough, within three weeks of that, I was done with coaching.”
Tommy’s lifelong dream was to coach basketball at the collegiate level. Shortly after retiring from the high school coaching scene, he received job offers from two universities. Even though they were the first college jobs he had ever been offered, Tommy rejected both without giving either one a second thought.
This undoubtedly took Claude by surprise. Up to that point, his son had expressed no desire to work for Plant Machine Works in any capacity, though Tommy always had great respect for Claude’s business. The chances of a Barber taking over Plant Machine Works after Claude’s retirement — whenever that would be — appeared slim.
Tommy’s change of heart, however, allowed Claude, his son and his management team to develop a five-year succession plan. The main objective was to have Tommy managing the day-to-day operations of the company while Claude handled sales and finances. In the meantime, Tommy would learn all the aspects of the business.
In September 2005, fate brought that plan to a screeching halt. Claude Barber, the heart and soul of Plant Machine Works, a man of great character and personality who had touched the lives of nearly every employee, customer, colleague and friend with whom he’d been associated, was diagnosed with brain cancer. Just four months later, he was gone.
To say Claude’s illness was a wake-up call for everyone at Plant Machine Works is an understatement. Although he had a trustworthy and experienced management team and a hard-working crew of shop employees, a Plant Machine Works without Claude Barber was hard for anyone to imagine. Everyone in the company, including those who had been there
As was his style, however, Claude didn’t fret over the future of his business when he
became ill. He’d had his share of problems in his 29 years of owning Plant Machine Works, including economic downturns, employee betrayals and the myriad job- and
According to Tommy, Claude dealt with his illness like any other challenge — he handled it and moved on. The two men spoke every day during those final four months of Claude’s life. In every conversation, Claude urged his son to not only be himself and make his mark on Plant Machine Works, but also to trust the management team that had worked so hard to keep the company successful — Estimator and CAD Specialist Kirk Jones, Customer Service Manager Eddie Hood, Shop Superintendent Bobby Williams and Sales Manager Chad Laurent.
Tommy has heeded his father’s advice. At the time of this writing, he had been at the helm for almost a year. Every day brings a new set of challenges, and Tommy readily admits that the growing pains have been constant. But Plant Machine Works is as strong as ever, though it will never be quite the same.
“They broke the mold when they made that man,” Hood said of Claude Barber. “There was no one like him.”
* * *
From developing business to flipping burgers? (page 49)
“He said we’d either be flipping hamburgers or asking people if they want to Super-Size,” Jon Hodges said.
Hodges first went to work for Waterpoint on the advice of trusted friend and business mentor Malcolm Waddell.
“Malcolm had been working with Waterpoint as a consultant,” Hodges said. “One of the things he told them was if they wanted to grow, they needed to hire certain people to get them there. He gave them my name.”
Hodges already had a great reputation for being a troubleshooter and for developing business. After a brief career in the maritime industry, Hodges went to work for BFI Chemical (Enclean) in 1984 — just three-and-a-half years before it was purchased by Main Tech, a full service company owned by Waddell and Tim Tarillion. Main Tech later merged with a chemical cleaning company called Park Chem and became known as Enclean. While at Enclean, Hodges was responsible for growing a new environmental services division in Deer Park, Texas. He brought the initial revenues from $1.4 million to $7 million in just two years. He later opened another yard in Texas City, Texas, with revenues beginning at less than $500,000, and grew it into a $10 million operation.
Hodges had officially begun his career as the go-to person for floundering locations. Shortly afterward, he was asked by an Enclean regional manager to take on the management of the company’s Freeport, Texas, facility, which was losing approximately $600,000 per year. Under Hodges’ leadership, the branch soon became the fourth most profitable facility in the company.
Brand purchased Enclean and another company called Naylor, which was based in Freeport and Texas City. After that deal was completed, both Naylor facilities and the Brand yard in Victoria, Texas, were merged into Hodges’ operation. He brought both Naylor facilities from the break-even point to profitability and was then promoted to regional manager of Southeast Texas and put in charge of Brand’s mega-yard in Baytown, Texas. (He describes this as being given the keys to a Cadillac.) The Baytown mega-yard was ranked first in profitability out of 52 divisions during the two years Hodges managed it. His other facilities also ranked in the top 10 — Texas City was second, Freeport was fifth and Victoria was seventh.
“I had everything you could ever want available to me at Rust,” Hodges said. “But Malcolm Waddell said to me, ‘Jon, I think this is a good chance for you.’ So I took the deal.”
Hodges hit the ground running at Waterpoint, opening branches for the company in Sulphur, La., and Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas. In three years, Waterpoint’s revenues increased fivefold. The honeymoon didn’t last, however. Waterpoint’s finances were badly
“I actually worked out a deal for HydroChem to purchase Waterpoint for $15 million,” Hodges said. “It would have been a good thing, but the majority owners elected
Approximately five months after HydroChem’s letter of intent to purchase was declined, Waterpoint declared bankruptcy. Rather than look for a different job, Hodges considered purchasing the company himself in order to rebuild its foundation and bring it back to profitability.
“Waterpoint had a lot of secured creditors,” Hodges said. “The bankruptcy trustee sold the creditors on going forward with me instead of closing the company and moving on. It was a five-year deal, but we cleared all the debt with the secured creditors, including the bankruptcy trustee, in one year. It’s really a success story.”
Bubba Nelson strikes out on his own (page 93)
No one wants to take a pay cut. Especially when it’s to the tune of about 75 percent.
In the early ’70s, Louisiana native Raymond L. “Bubba” Nelson was sitting pretty in the waste industry. The McNeese State University graduate held an important post with Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI), which had just a few years earlier bought his family’s solid waste and landfill business. As a division vice president for acquisitions, operations and market development, by 1977 Nelson was drawing an annual salary of approximately $80,000.
The next year, he worked harder than he ever had in his life — sometimes spending 10 hours on the road per day and doing jobs that required days instead of hours — but would only make $20,000. Such is the life of a budding entrepreneur.
Nelson had left BFI to found Allwaste Services of Texas in 1978 after witnessing the success of a colleague in the industrial waste removal business. With only a single air mover mounted on a truck chassis, Nelson put his dream of building a company into first gear and never looked back. He traveled to industrial sites all over the Gulf Coast and worked tirelessly, cleaning smokestacks, tanks and blast furnaces. For the first two years, Allwaste was a one-man company surviving on gumption alone.
Less than a decade after its inception, Allwaste went public and was ranked second among Forbes magazine’s 200 best small companies just two years after that.
Now retired, Nelson reflects on his career with the gleeful satisfaction of a Hall of Fame quarterback who’s won two or three Super Bowls, though he is quick to credit the people who made his success possible along the way.
Not surprisingly, Nelson was a gifted athlete in his youth — he lettered in three different sports as a student of Sulphur High School in Sulphur, La. He was always the first to arrive at the baseball diamond, the gridiron, the basketball court, the golf course and the track field and the last to leave.
“I can remember going home well after dark because I was so enthused about the different sports I played,” Nelson said. “I carried that on into the business. It’s exciting to accomplish something, no matter how tired you are.”
There are few things tougher for a human being to ignore than his own physical and mental exhaustion. But as Nelson proved during the early days of Allwaste, a good night’s rest is just one of the many sacrifices any industrial service provider has to make in order to be successful without anyone’s help.
“On one job, I strung up 100 feet of 12-inch steel pipe and cleaned out an incinerator,” Nelson said. “I worked for 72 straight hours. If they’d stopped me working for five minutes, they never would have been able to wake me up.”
Once Nelson was able to hire some employees, a healthy sleep pattern was reintroduced, but he didn’t rest on his laurels. Through hard work, hands-on customer service, benevolent management and sound strategy, Nelson and his team built Allwaste into a major player in industrial services.
The Paz family legacy (page 111)
In the late ’50s, future Paz Brothers Construction co-founder John Paz witnessed an event that changed his perspective on his career. Back then, he was an ironworker, doing jobs at industrial plants in an era when there was less emphasis on workplace safety.
One day, he witnessed a co-worker suffering from a shaking fit while standing on a scaffold that had been erected near a very high chimney stack. As Paz watched the man teeter at the top of the scaffold, he had a choice to make — either wait for someone else to rescue him or do it himself. He was forced to choose the latter option when he discovered that the only other ironworker on the job had been drinking alcohol and was not in a position to be a hero. Paz sprung into action, scaling the scaffold and bringing his co-worker to safety.
Paz’s boss vowed to reward him with a raise and a promotion. For the young laborer, however, no reward — financial or otherwise — or personal acclaim could convince him to remain in a situation where responsible leadership was lacking.
Fifty years later, Paz’s son John Michael, president & CEO of Godwin Pumps, likes to tell this anecdote to illustrate the high expectations his father held not only for the attitudes and behaviors of others but also for his own life.
“My father realized he needed to work for himself because his principles and his work ethic were higher than what he was able to find in others,” John Michael said. “He was a natural entrepreneur, the kind of person who was always looking to see how he could create his own success.”
Just 26 years of age, Paz quit his job and founded a heavy construction company with his brothers Ted, 28, and Bob, 19. The three young entrepreneurs started their business with nothing but a bulldozer purchased from money borrowed from their father and from a bank, and began to bid jobs. The trio possessed a strong aptitude for business and an extraordinary work ethic, and over the next five decades, Paz Brothers Construction enjoyed consistent success.
Paz passed away Aug. 12, 2006, at his home in Mickleton, N.J., after a bout with cancer. Described by his son as a charismatic man who enjoyed countless friendships and fruitful business partnerships, Paz’s legacy will endure through the memories of the many people on which he made an impact. He bequeathed an intangible inheritance to his son as he left this world — the spirit of entrepreneurship. (In addition to Paz Brothers, Paz founded a construction equipment leasing company, co-founded a carbon water filtration venture and operated a restaurant in Atlantic City, N.J., among other businesses.)
Whether that spirit was handed down through DNA or learned through observation, it is strong within John Michael, who has grown Godwin Pumps to a $200-million-plus-per-year, worldwide operation since he took it over nearly three decades ago.