Baldwin & Shell looking beyond state

Arkansas work in construction just not enough

1/13/14
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STEPHEN B. THORNTON
John "Scott" Copas, left, listens as Bob Shell talks inside his office at Baldwin & Shell Construction Co. headquarters at Capitol Ave. and Chester Street in downtown Little Rock.
1/13/14 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STEPHEN B. THORNTON John "Scott" Copas, left, listens as Bob Shell talks inside his office at Baldwin & Shell Construction Co. headquarters at Capitol Ave. and Chester Street in downtown Little Rock.

Baldwin & Shell Construction Co. has long prided itself on the fact that it does all of its work in Arkansas.

The outline of the state has been the dominant part of the company logo. Until last weekend.

The state can still be seen in the revamped logo, if you look hard. It’s in the lower loop of the ampersand.

Now the company has reached across the Mississippi River to Memphis, said Scott Copas, newly named president and chief executive of the Little Rock-based firm. He succeeds Bob Shell, 83, who was elevated to chairman of the board as part of a realignment of top management, which was announced Jan. 11.

The company has done some maintenance and repair work for a Searcy-based client’s Memphis plant, Copas said. “We’re hoping to do some major work for them in Memphis, maybe as early as this year.

“The board decided that for us to continue to grow and provide for opportunity of our employees and to meet the needs of some of our national clients that we’re going to have to go out of state,” he said, adding that “it’s certainly in its infancy.”

Typically in the top five commercial contractors in the state in terms of revenue, Baldwin & Shell is the last of those companies to venture outside the state. The others, in no certain order, are Nabholz Construction, VCC, CDI Contractors and Clark Contractors.

Baldwin & Shell says its revenue for the past five reported years was: $107 million in 2008; $127 million in 2009; $202 million in 2010, an all-time company high; $149 million in 2011; and $100 million in 2012. Figures for 2013 are not yet available.

In 2012, Nabholz led all of the companies with $537 million in revenue, followed by VCC with $525 million, CDI with $136 million and Clark with $104 million, according to a list compiled by Arkansas Business.

The Searcy-based industrial client fits with Baldwin & Shell’s renewed emphasis on industry, said Copas, 60, formerly executive vice president and chief operating officer. Historically, the company built plants for Alcoa, Reynolds Aluminum and 3M, he noted.

More recently, the company has returned to the industrial sector, adding a building at the Welspun Tubular LLC plant near the Little Rock Port and a 35,000-square-foot expansion at Remington Arms in Lonoke.

Much of the company’s work has been in educational, medical and office buildings, as well as churches.

“To continue to grow, with the limited amount of construction dollars in Arkansas, we’re going to have to look at other types of businesses,” he said.

“We’re going to be chasing the retail market a lot more,”Copas said.

Bob Shell is proud of his company’s reputation for quality work.

Baldwin & Shell was selected to build the Fulbright Peace Fountain at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. E. Fay Jones, the noted architect, said he’d design the 41-foot-tall sculpted brass fountain only if Baldwin & Shell would build it, Shell said.

The firm later built the Anthony Chapel at Garvan Woodland Gardens in Hot Springs, the ultramodern wood-and-stone structure based on Jones’ airy design for Thorncrown Chapel near Eureka Springs.

Shell and Copas estimated that 70 percent of their work is repeat business. One year it was 95 percent, Shell said.

Baldwin & Shell has maintained its ability to do exacting work, as it deals with the hard facts of an economy that cratered a half-decade ago and is still climbing back from that low point.

Many general contractors have become managers who use only subcontractors, but Baldwin & Shell has the capability to do up to 25 percent of its work in-house, Copas said. The company has about 190 employees, down from a high of between 300 and 400 in the late 1990s.

Shell said the company has very low turnover in what has been at times a rough-and-tumble industry.

And, it’s difficult to find people willing to learn the endangered skills required for work like ornamental plastering and decorative stone work, Copas said.

“You can make a very good living in our industry if you’re a good craftsman,” he said.

The construction industry took a beating during the most recent protracted recession, with the number of contractors in the state, sub and general, falling from about 18,000 to 7,000.

So finding a good subcontractor is consequently a big challenge these days, the two said.

The industry faced challenges in the past too, not the least of which was protecting itself from unethical practices such as “bid-shopping,” the men said.

To address that, Baldwin & Shell was instrumental in establishing a chapter of the American Society of Professional Estimators, Copas said.

Dan Nabholz, former chief executive for Nabholz Construction Co. of Conway, wrote in an opinion piece in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1995 that “construction industry ethics in this market primarily [was] dictated by the founders and senior managers of the dominant Arkansas [general contractors].”

The “four Arkansas construction industry trade groups … [wrote] ‘Ethics of Fair Bidding for Construction,’” Nabholz said.

Bid-shopping is when a general contractor submits the lowest price for a project, then rebids the project to subcontractors and suppliers at an even lower price, thus enhancing his profitability.

The result, according to Nabholz, is compromised quality, jeopardized schedules and price manipulation.

Baldwin & Shell describes its founders this way: Werner Knoop was the engineer, Phillip Baldwin was the construction guy and Olen Cates was the finance man.

Shell was hired by the Baldwin Co., as it was called then, in 1950 as a “time-keeper” and kept up with the hours and expenditures at work sites, including at the company’s biggest project to date - the Hollinsworth Grove public housing project near what is now Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.

In his youth, Shell said, he had not been a particularly good student - although he was good at keeping up with sports statistics - but graduated nonetheless from Little Rock High (now Little Rock Central High) and aimed to emulate his father, a career Navy man who was stationed many places, including Honolulu, where Bob was born. The Shells moved to Arkansas after his father left the service.

Bob Shell joined the Navy but mustered out after he had “one of the worst cases of seasickness they’d ever seen,” he said.

He landed a job as an ambulance driver for Griffin Leggett Funeral Home - which was located where Baldwin & Shell headquarters is now, at Capitol Avenue and Chester Street. Later, he worked at Fones Brothers hardware before getting the job with Baldwin Co.

Soon after he joined the company, it built two arenas that are state landmarks and still in use: Barton Coliseum in Little Rock in 1952 and Barnhill Arena at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1954.

Shell rose through the ranks to become president and chief executive in 1983. He was honored by his peers in 2000 as one of the first inductees into the Arkansas Construction Hall of Fame.

Copas says of Shell’s career: “We’re cognizant of how we got here - the standards set by Bob.”

Business, Pages 69 on 01/19/2014

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