Dewain William Hodge Jr

Taking the plunge

SELF

PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: March 12, 1966 in Baton Rouge, La.

Occupation: Cofounder/president, HP Engineering Inc.

Family: Wife Shannon;

daughters Maegan and Tori, son David The best advice I ever received was “Do the right thing,” from my dad, Dewain, a retired judge.

He told a lot of people to do the right thing.

Something people might be surprised to learn about me is I was an exchange student in Japan one summer in high school. That was awesome.

What my friends say about me: “He’s an engineer with a personality.” That’s not often said about engineers.

The question I’m most often asked is “How much is this going to cost me?” The guests at my fantasy dinner party would be the group from Duck Dynasty: Jase, Phil, Willie.

And Si.

If I had an extra hour each day I would spend it with my family.

I wish I was better at driving on the highway.

My wife says I’m a terrible driver.

If I won the lottery I would retire and travel.

How I unwind: I take my son to the range. We shoot handguns and throw skeets [to shoot] with a shotgun. That’s fun.

A phrase to sum me up: “YOLO, you only live once.”ROGERS - Bill Hodge’s decision looks good now.

Back in 2007, his wife was scared, his friends were skeptical and his investment partners were aghast. Hodge plunged in anyway, confident there was a market for the kind of engineering he wanted to do.

He and partner Brandon Pinkerton formed HP Engineering Inc. in the teeth of a sinking economy that was dragging the construction business down with it. When it came down to it, even though others had doubts, Bill Hodge never even blinked.

“Our banker and our insurance guy and our IT guy were all looking at us like, ‘You’re smoking crack,’” Hodge says. “We just thought we could do a good job. We thought we could do it better than what was out there.”

Pinkerton and the bankers may have been easier to convince than Hodge’s wife, Shannon. Bill says now that Shannon was “cautiously supportive” about the endeavor, but Shannon says he is being more polite than accurate.

“I don’t think I was very supportive,” Shannonsays. “I asked him, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure? Is this what we need to do?’ I don’t like change, but he’s more of a risk taker. He will definitely stretch you outside of your comfort zone.”

Bill Hodge, 47, was right to be confident. HP Engineering may have started on unstable ground, but six years later the firm has 17 employees, annual revenue of $1.5 million and 220 projects on its plate.

“Bill was much more confident in our abilities than I was,” says Pinkerton, HP Engineering’s vice president. “Bill put me on his back and carried me into this thing. It was a big leap, and the first year was nerve-wracking.”

Hodge never showed his nerves. Pinkerton remembers the company’s first business cards were embossed with its then-catchy motto “High Performance.”

When Pinkerton and Hodge would meet prospective clients, Hodge introduced the pair by saying, “Brandon is Performance, I’m just High.” “HighPerformance” did not survive as the firm’s motto.

“Bill can bring life,” Pinkerton says. “He is optimistic, he’s upbeat. Bill is spirited.”

For his part, Hodge says he thought they could form a company that did good work, but he didn’t expect it to be so successful so quickly. He just wanted to be his own boss and run a company the way he felt one should be run.

“I wanted the freedom to make the decisions I wanted to make,” Hodge says. “I wanted to look in the mirror and see the problem if I didn’t like the decisions that were made. There is no one else to blame.”

Hodge says his business model is pretty simple: Do the best job you can do for the customer and don’t worry about anything else.

It’s worked so far.

“We knew we were not going to get rich doing this,” Hodge says. “We knew we were not going to retire wealthy, and we were not going to retire early.”‘THE PROFESSOR’

Judy Hodge remembers coming into her son’s room when he was a kid and finding it crisscrossed with taut strings, like a spider’s web.

She started to ask just what in the world he was doing, but he interrupted her and told her to watch. Hodge jumped into bed, pulled one string and the lights went out. He pulled another to turn on the radio and then pulled another to turn on the ceiling fan.

“We called him ‘The Professor,’” says Judy, today a retired teacher living in Bella Vista. “Billy was always inventing things. He was a little engineer even then.”

Hodge says he was just tired of having to get out of bed to turn out the lights, so he devised the string-and-pulley system.

Bill’s father, Dewain Hodge Sr., says his son was always taking things apart to see what made them work. Once he bought Bill and his sister Pamela dirt bikes and Dewain discovered one day that Bill was taking parts from his sister’s bike to fix his own.

“But Dad, she never even rides it,” Bill protested.

Hodge says now, “My bike always ran. It always had parts.”

Both Dewain, a retired Scott County judge, and Judy, go to great pains to tell how their Billy never talked back, never acted rudely - “a perfect little ol’ boy” in Judy’s words. Dewain always preached the importance of doing right, or making it right, and that personal philosophy has become HP Engineering’s professional creed.

“I couldn’t be more proud of that fella,” Dewain says.

The Hodges had another daughter, Paula, who was less than one year older than Bill and one year younger than Pamela. One night, after the family had finished dinner and was talking at the table, 10-year-old Paula suddenly fell over dead.

She died of an aneurysm from what Dewain says was an undetected genetic disease. Bill couldn’t process the death of his sister, thinking of her as on a long vacation instead.

Judy Hodge refused to let the tragedy define her family, so Dewain bought a camper and the family began to go on excursions together.

“We had two remaining children, and they didn’t have anything to do with this,” Judy says. “We made the best life we could. We didn’t want to lay down and wallow in grief. You don’t know how much life God is going to give us.”

The respect and pride Bill has in his parents is obvious when he talks about his sister’s death. He is the father of three himself, two girls and one boy, just like his parents.

“Watching my parents, especially my mom, go through that was very traumatic,” Hodge says. “But it brought the family closer together. It was incredible wisdom they had.”

PERFECT ASSIGNMENT

Hodge hasn’t always put a lot of deep thought into hisdecision-making process.

When he was growing up in Waldron, he would stalk ants with a magnifying glass and then marvel at the power of the sun, dreaming one day of working with solar power. He enrolled at the University of Arkansas in 1984 on an ROTC scholarship, but had no idea what he wanted to study.

One day Hodge wandered by the mechanical engineering building and there was a rocket on display outside. Rockets are cool, he thought, so he wandered inside and found his major.

Still, he wasn’t thinking about how to use his degree in mechanical engineering upon his 1989 graduation, because he knew he belonged to the Air Force for the next four years due to his ROTC commitment.

The Air Force put him on its construction project management team, where Hodge fell in love with the process of planning and installing heating, ventilation and air conditioning units, along with plumbing and lights and the other “guts” of buildings.

“Mechanical engineers in the Air Force go into HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning],” says Hodge, who reached the rank of captain. “I loved it. It’s amazing because I never had a vision or a dream for what I wantedto do. HVAC was fun and it was interesting.”

After leaving the Air Force, Hodge returned to Northwest Arkansas, working for Trane for seven years and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for six. He then did consulting work before deciding he was “ready for something” and hooked up with Pinkerton, whom he had worked with through Wal-Mart.

Pinkerton heads the Tulsa office and is in charge of the electrical engineering side of HP. He says Hodge is a very good mechanical engineer, but his true talents lie in management.

One of Hodge’s firm rules is that chemistry is as important as engineering at HP.

As the company began to grow, so did the need to add engineers to help with the increased workload. Hodge refused to hire anyone unless he was confident the person would be a good fit to its overall fabric.

“We try to hire character rather than design talent,” Hodge says. “I can teach someone to draw and design, but I can’t teach them character. Hiring someone of high integrity is pretty tough.”

Pinkerton says he defers most personnel decisions to Hodge.

“Bill can see things in people that they can’t see in themselves,” Pinkerton says.“He has brought in people I wasn’t sure about. We have people who wouldn’t work in any other business but ours. That’s Bill’s leadership.”

Hodge not only has to manage his employees but he also has to deal with his customers, the architects who hire HP Engineering to install the guts of the buildings they design. The process of arranging all these different facets can be incredibly time-consuming, with meticulous planning, and then replanning - followed by more replanning - as design changes lead to engineering changes, which lead to more design changes.

“It’s a very collaborative effort,” Hodge says. “That’s all day, every day. At any given time, we probably have 100 active projects.”

Invariably, a mistake will be made. A bathroom will be designed and then installed, and afterward someone will notice there is no handicapped stall.

Or a sink counter will be the wrong style. Or an air vent will be the wrong diameter for the needs of the room.

“How you handle your mistakes will be the deciding factor on whether someone uses you again or not,” says Hodge, who says HP has 39 architecture customers. “We all make mistakes. No one is perfect in this industry. If wemake a mistake, we own up to it, resolve to fix it and that goes a lot further.”

In Hodge’s postings in military and civilian engineering, he learned a lot about how - and how not - to be a boss. He says HP doesn’t have a hierarchy, other than he and Pinkerton have the responsibility of signing off on all final designs.

If someone walks into HP Engineering’s offices, it’s hard to tell who is the boss. Hodge’s desk is as nondescript and cluttered with papers as any other in the room - exactly how he wants it.

“There’s no level of management,” Hodge says. “We’re all accountable to each other. The one thing that was true about all my good bosses is they would never ask someone to do something they weren’t willing to do themselves.”

As lighthearted and joyous as Hodge can come across, it’s still his name on the checks and the company letterhead.

“Sixteen families rely on me for their income,” Hodge says. “That’s a lot of pressure. That keeps me up at night.” STORY FOR LIFE

While Hodge never claimed to have a vision about his life’s work, he knew early on who was his life’s love.

Even a detour in college couldn’t change that.

He has been in love with Shannon, two years his senior, since he was in fourth grade. As a sophomore in high school, though, he developed a crush on her best friend, Brenda. Hodge met Shannon at the local Pizza Barn to discuss his chances, where she broke the news that Brenda wasn’t interested.

Undeterred, Hodge happily began dating Shannon. They dated until Bill graduated from high school but then broke up when Bill went to the University of Arkansas and Shannon attended Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia.

In November 1987, an unattached Bill reconnected with Shannon and asked for another chance. Shannon told her father she was going to make him wait a month - Shannon’s father advised her to make him wait much longer - before agreeing to date again.

They were engaged a few months later, and in August will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Shannon has recently become a fulltime office administrator at HP, where the two e-mail each other throughout the day even though they sit back-to-back in the office.

“I could never do Bill justice,” Shannon says. “Bill is my best friend. He’s an awesome husband and father. If I had to do it all over again, I would choose him.”

Shannon says Hodge is afraid of heights but built a treehouse 20 feet off the ground - “He kept his eyes closed” - for his children. He also went on a zipline ride with Shannon because she wanted to.

The quintessential Bill Hodge story took place during his college days.

He went to Arkadelphia to attend a wedding with Shannon and, afterward, got directions to a house where he was planning to spend the night. Hodge dutifully entered the unlocked door at midnight but didn’t find the couch-bed ready for him. He checked the mail on the table and thought it was strange the man’s name on the mail was different from that of the man he was supposed to be staying with.

Give him a minute…

When he realized he was in the wrong house, Hodge hit the floor, figuring if anyone decided to shoot him, it would go over his head. He crawled out the back door and was chased by a dog over a fence.

When he realized he left his duffel bag in the house, he went back, this time getting chased by the dog into the house. He grabbed his bag and made the crawl-past-thedog-over-the-fence gantlet one more time.

The homeowner, friends with the man Hodge was supposed to stay with, said the next morning he and his wife had heard Hodge crawling around but assumed it was their college-age son arriving home. That’s why they had left their door unlocked, and had gone back to sleep despite Hodge and the dog making a ruckus.

“Shannon’s mom brings that up all the time,” Hodge says. “That’s a story for life.”

Northwest Profile, Pages 33 on 03/31/2013

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