From The Charlotte Business Journal on June 14, 2013…
Charlotte contractor Myers & Chapman has eye on
future
Enlarge
NANCY PIERCE
Myers & Chapman principals Rick Handford Jr. (left) and Bob Webb are relieved to have survived the recession and are now
grooming the next generation of leadership.
Julie Bird
Contributing Writer
The fact that Myers & Chapman Inc.survived the Great Recession shouldn’t be too surprising. After
all, the Charlotte construction company has made it through 60 years of booms and busts.
Brevard Myers and John Chapman sold their company in 1986 but remained involved in their
namesake firm as it grew under their protégé Mike North.
President Rick Handford joined the company from J.A. Jones Construction in 1990 as vice president
of operations. The firm recruited Bob Webb from Bovis Lend Lease in 2004 as chief executive.
That same year, Handford, Webb and other employees bought the company from majority
shareholder North, who remains as chairman. Handford and Webb hold about 85% of the company’s
private stock.
Handford and Webb recently sat down with the Charlotte Business Journal to discuss the Myers &
Chapman legacy and how it survived the Great Recession’s construction bust. Edited excerpts
follow:
What type of projects did the company build early in its history?
Handford: They were doing small things, as you might expect from a startup construction company.
They did some individual houses, gas stations, warehouse space, and over time built up a repeat
clientele. I think they were doing around $25 million a year when they elected to sell the company in
1986. Retail was a hot sector during the ’90s and well into the 2000s.
Webb: We’ve always had a good mix of other commercial projects: office, medical office, some
industrial. The last few years we’ve had a higher percentage of industrial and medical office and
office, and still continued to do a fair amount of retail. We also do some institutional work.
What were the company’s major challenges during the 1990s?
Handford: Growth. I think we took the company from $4 million (in gross revenue) in 1990 to $40
million in 1996. Just keeping up with that growth and not losing your culture, your values or your
reputation in the process was difficult.
There must have been some stumbling blocks during that expansion. What was the biggest
and how did you get past it?
Handford: We were always careful about who we worked for. We were always careful to not sign
bad contracts. And in situations where didn’t feel we could provide a clear, value-added service to
the client, we would turn down work. So we had some stumbling blocks, but nothing I would consider
to be huge.
What was the next phase of the company’s development?
Webb: We put in a leadership team when I came in 2004. We started being much more formal about
our planning processes and our strategic objectives. Profit is important, but it’s the result of doing all
these other things right. We got good team buy-in to all those things, so I think it gave us a platform
to build successfully from that point forward.
When did you first feel the impact of the recession?
Webb: In September of 2008 we had 23 jobs that hadn’t started yet but were in some stage of
award to us. Of those 23, only one started, and it started in 2012. The other 22 went away forever.
Our volume did come down considerably and now it’s basically doubled back. We were in the low
$90s (millions) in gross revenues in ’08, then we dropped back to the mid-$30s in ’09 — that’s how
fast it fell — and by ’11 we were back up to doing around $75 million.
How did you keep busy during the bust?
Webb: We had a few consulting engagements, (including) basically performing as a program
manager overseeing the design and construction of buildings. We provided them a useful service
and it kept (our) costs covered, to a certain degree. Our main strategy was to keep the core team
intact, and that’s what we did.
What kind of cutbacks did you make?
Webb: We had to look at personnel, our largest single expense. It’s hard, but you’ve got to pare the
tree to save the tree. We looked at everything from our insurance policies to our office rent. We
subleased part of our office.
Did you take smaller jobs than you had previously?
Webb: There are two things we do differently. One is we will go anywhere clients would like us to go
with them. We used to say we only want to go (about) 100 miles from Charlotte. But that’s not true
anymore. If an existing client wants us to go to Texas, we are happy to go.
The second is the size of the job. There was a time when we would think twice about taking a job for
less than, let’s say, a quarter of a million dollars. There’s no hesitation now.
What was the biggest lesson learned from the Great Recession?
Handford: Above and beyond all else, relationships matter.
Webb: Also, it’s important to keep a good diversity of mix. Of that list of jobs that I told you that went
away, that wasn’t very diverse. Most of them were retail.
Handford: And a much higher percentage of it now is renovation — across all sectors, but retail
especially so.
What are your goals moving forward?
Webb: Rick and I are working very hard on bringing that young team along — I say young, they’re
40 years old — to have another transition in this organization in X number of years. We want to get
them prepared to blow the lights out.
What are your successors going to say about your leadership?
Handford: We were blessed with the name Myers & Chapman and an understanding that you could
trust these people. We worked very hard to be sure we could be just as trustworthy as they, that
everybody in the organization understands they will do what’s right and what’s necessary to take
care of clients.
Julie Bird is a Belmont-based free-lance writer who can be reached at [email protected].