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Monday, July 20, 2009
Bohannan Huston perseveres, thrives despite economic, personal challenges
By Copyright © 2009 Albuquerque Journal By Richard Metcalf
Journal Staff Writer
Albuquerque was coming off a boom in 1959 when a couple of young engineers, Jerry Bohannan and Bob Stephenson, formed their own company to go after some of the action.
With nearly 10 new houses and apartments completed every day, the city doubled in population during the 1950s to more than 200,000. The local school system grew from 10 schools to 49 during the decade. Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Laboratories were taking shape as the economic engines they are today.
The fledgling Bohannan & Stephenson Civil Engineers remained intact until Stephenson left the company in 1964. That same year, the renamed Bohannan Engineers hired U.S. Forest Service employee Larry Huston to work part time.
The seed was sown for the diversified engineering company known today as Bohannan Huston Inc., whose growth has mirrored the changes not only in Albuquerque and New Mexico, but in the Southwest. Bohannan Huston has played and continues to play a role in a broad spectrum of projects in transportation, flood control, utilities, land use and construction.
"Being able to work on long-term and large projects has been an important part of our history," said president Brian Burnett.
Currently employing more than 200, the company is celebrating this week its founding 50 years ago. An employee picnic will be held in the courtyard of the company's office complex at Journal Center, plus other observances and community service programs throughout the rest of the year.
Challenging from the start
The launch of Bohannan Stephenson proved more stressful than anyone expected, prompting the 30-year-old Bohannan to see his doctor about two weeks into it. "That was the first and last time I used tranquilizers," he said.
The national economy was slowing down in 1959 and eventually fell into a 10-month recession in early 1960. For the rest of the decade, Albuquerque's growth was at almost half the pace it was in the hectic 1950s.
The early jobs were primarily surveying for residential subdivisions and other development projects in and around Albuquerque. Then came small-scale surveying jobs for Denver-based Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph (now Qwest) to expand its communications system around the state.
Bohannan said he was surprised by Stephenson's decision to leave in 1964, but was determined to carry on. Stephenson, who died in 2004, went on to a career in law and public service but remains best-known for his involvement in the surveying profession.
The part-time hiring of Huston enabled the company to offer photogrammetry, which basically involves making maps to scale using aerial photography. Huston learned photogrammetry on the job with the Forest Service and, at the time, was one of a small number of people in the private sector who had the skill.
Tough times, however, soon followed.
"In the summer of '65, we were in bad shape," Bohannan said. "We had nothing going. No work. I told my wife I would give it up if we didn't get a job the next week."
The following Wednesday, Mountain States Telephone awarded Bohannan the job of surveying for a major extension of a telephone line near Raton. "That saved the company," he recalled.
1969 boom time
The company, which had about 15 employees at the time, began explosive growth in 1969.
Jack Westman, district engineer with Mountain States Telephone, teamed up with Bohannan to form Bohannan-Westman Engineers, while Huston finally quit his day job at the Forest Service to form Bohannon Huston Photogrammetry. The two companies merged in early 1972.
Westman was a "go-getter" who helped the engineering company compete against bigger, more established firms, Bohannan said. Huston assumed the role of chief financial officer while his mapping services produced a steadily growing revenue stream.
Under Westman's guidance, the company went after communications engineering work first for Mountain States, then for other telephone companies as far away as Wisconsin. This type of work soon become its bread and butter.
The company also made headway in getting jobs from the state highway department. "Some of the projects were so small, the bigger firms didn't want to mess with them," Westman said. "As we did more work, we got more projects."
Then there was work for municipalities, including Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Gallup, as well as for the Fort Worth office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The 16-month economic recession that began in late 1973, triggered by an oil crisis, proved calamitous for what was then known as Bohannan, Westman, Huston & Associates. One by one, telephone companies stopped outsourcing their engineering work, instead doing it in-house to save money, Westman said.
"At the time, it was the largest part of our company," Bohannan said. "All the telephone work disappeared. We went from 107 people to 35."
Recessions and other setbacks
The setback triggered an overhaul of the company's business strategy.
"Our goal was to be able to take an engineering project from the very beginning to the very end – from mapping and surveying to construction management," Huston said.
In order to do so, the company started to hire engineers and related professionals with diverse backgrounds and credentials. Its current most senior employee and now a managing partner, Silas Suazo, was hired in January 1976, early in the rebuilding process.
"The message I got when I was hired by Larry (Huston) was, 'We're excited to grow,' " Suazo said. "The focus back then was diversification and growth."
One breakthrough was doing the master plan to manage drainage from the Sandia Mountains for the Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority. The city was going through another explosive development cycle in the 1970s, requiring extensive stormwater management infrastructure.
The master plan led to the company later doing extensive engineering for the construction of drainage channels in the Northeast Heights. AMAFCA remains a regular client of the company to this day.
In 1976, the company was selected as consulting engineers for work on the Very Large Array, the radio telescope project on the Plains of San Agustin, west of Socorro. The work was a boost to the diversification effort, said Bohannan, adding, "VLA was one of our turning points."
Westman, who was chairman of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce at the time, left the company in 1977 to take over a major construction company. Although his departure was a loss, the renamed Bohannon Huston Inc. "was off to the races," Huston recalled.
The back-to-back recessions of the early 1980s proved another test. At one point during this period, Huston had to get on a plane to pick up a check from a client in order to make payroll. But the hardships from economic downturns were no longer crippling.
"We were fortunate in that way," Huston said. "When one area crashed and burned, we were so multidisciplined that we were able to change direction."
Bigger and better
The Bohannan Huston of today was largely in place in 1985 when Bohannan retired.
The company's menu of services included most disciplines related to civil engineering. By 1985, it was back up to 107 employees, a number that's deceiving when compared to the 107 employees back in 1973.
Technology was revolutionizing what had been a labor-intensive, time-consuming engineering process.
Bohannan Huston was ahead of the times when it invested in its first mainframe computer – Digital Equipment Corp.'s VAX system – in 1978-79. Burnett remembers the challenge of moving the cumbersome VAX to the company's new headquarters at Journal Center in 1986. Fortunately, the computer proved "pretty indestructible," he said.
"We were back up and running the Monday after the weekend move."
Huston said the company has continually invested in new technology, spending millions of dollars on new equipment over the years. "We were doing digital mapping before just about anyone in the country," he said.
In its latest upgrade, Bohannan Huston plans to increase the speed of its network infrastructure by 10 times over the next year, Burnett said.
Tested by tragedy
The company's resilience has also been tested by tragedy.
When Bohannan's replacement as president, Mike Emery, died of an apparent suicide in mid-1997, the company kept moving forward without losing any clients, Huston said. "Mike delegated, I delegated," he said. "Everybody had someone underneath them who could do the job and had good relationships with the customer."
Burnett was named president five months later, working with Huston, who was chief executive officer at the time, until the latter's retirement in 2002.
Tragedy has always brought out the best in the company – its employees. Suazo's wife Dana, a former Bohannan Huston employee, died in a car accident last year.
"I don't think I could be here, in my head, if it wasn't for the people in this company," Suazo said. "This has been a wonderfully supportive family."
PRINCIPALS: 16 partners
— Brian Burnett, president
— Kerry Davis, CFO
— Howard Stone, COO
HEADQUARTERS: 7500 Jefferson NE, Albuquerque
OTHER LOCATIONS: Las Cruces, Dallas and Denver
PRODUCTS/SERVICES: Engineering, spatial data and advanced technologies
# OF EMPLOYEES: 210
GROSS REVENUE: $32 million in 2008
CONTACT INFO: Main phone number is (505) 823-1000. Web site is www.bhinc.com.
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