The Drive to Succeed | MMR and Pepper Rutland

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED H O W A T E A M O F B E L I E V E R S B U I LT A M E R I C A’S L E A D I N G E L E C T R I C A L A N D I N S T R U M E N TAT I O N P O W E R H O U S E

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED H O W A T E A M O F B E L I E V E R S B U I LT A M E R I C A ’ S L E A D I N G E L E C T R I C A L A N D I N S T R U M E N TAT I O N P O W E R H O U S E

D E D I C AT I O N T H I S B O O K A L S O R E M E M B E R S S O M E O F T H E E M P LOY E E S A N D S H A R E H O L D E R S W H O A R E N O LO N G E R W I T H U S , A N D W E D E D I C AT E I T TO T H E M E M O R Y O F:

It’s not every company that can build itself from the ground up to become the largest in its field. Yet MMR, proudly headquartered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has accomplished that feat not once but twice. And that is nearly unheard of.

Over the past 50 years, MMR has become the largest open-shop electrical and instrumentation contractor in the United States.

That’s worth celebrating, which is exactly the purpose of the book you’re now holding. The Drive to Succeed captures the incredible story of how MMR got to where it is today, and most importantly, it does so by showcasing many of the employees, families, and business partners who have contributed to this success. This book is for them, as well as for all the GARY WILLIAMS

J A M E S E . “ B U B B A” SMITH

H A R LY N COURVILLE

S H AW N WELBORN

JEFFREY RUTLAND

many more whose names could not fit here but whose contributions will never be forgotten.

— P E P P E R R U T L A N D, B ATO N R O U G E , N O V E M B E R 2018

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MMR

AROUND THE WORLD USA 1

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C A N A DA

MMR POWER SOLUTIONS, LLC FRESNO, C A 730 West Pinedale Avenue, Suite 101 Fresno, CA 93711

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MMR CONS TRUC TORS, INC. BAKERSFIELD, C A 1567 James Road, Suite B Bakersfield, CA 93308

10 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. CORPUS CHRISTI, T X 2033 FM 2725 Ingleside, TX 78362

MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. LONG BEACH, C A 21818 South Wilmington Avenue, Suite 414, Long Beach, CA 90810

11 MMR PROCOM, LLC HOUSTON, T X 11620 Bammel North Houston Road Houston, TX 77066

SOUTHWESTERN POWER GROUP PHOENIX, A Z 3610 N. 44th Street, Suite 250 Phoenix, AZ 85018

12 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. PASADENA, T X 3222 Pasadena Freeway Pasadena, TX 77503

MMR CONS TRUC TORS, INC. DENVER, CO 14250 East Easter Place, Unit B Centennial, CO 80112 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. WILLISTON, ND 5319 22nd Avenue West Williston, ND 58801 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. OKL AHOMA CIT Y, OK 5816 SW 21st Street Oklahoma City, OK 73128 MMR CONS TRUC TORS, INC. HOBBS, NM 5624 North Loving Highway Hobbs, NM 88240

MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. ODESSA, T X 3698 South Fulton Avenue Odessa, TX 79766

13 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. BEAUMONT, T X 7065 Fannett Road Beaumont, TX 77705 14 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. L AKE CHARLES, L A 2861 Calcasieu Industrial Drive Sulphur, LA 70665 15 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. (OFFSHORE SERVICES) L AFAYE T TE, L A 1043 QCP Park Drive Broussard, LA 70518 16 MMR GROUP, INC. (HEADQUARTERS) MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. (HEADQUARTERS) MMR INTERNATIONAL, LTD. MMR INTEGR ATION CENTER

MMR COMMUNIC ATIONS BATON ROUGE, L A 15961 Airline Highway Baton Rouge, LA 70817 P.O. Box 84210, Baton Rouge, LA 70884-4210 17 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. KENNER, L A 14 Veterans Memorial Boulevard Kenner, LA 70062 18 CONSTRUC TORS, INC. (OFFSHORE SERVICES) BELLE CHASSE, L A 2104 Engineers Road Belle Chasse, LA 70037 19 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. MOBILE, AL 8499 Bellingrath Road Theodore, AL 36582 20 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. ORL ANDO, FL 10003 Satellite Boulevard, Suite 203 Orlando, FL 32837 21 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. GREENVILLE, SC 910 Fork Shoals Road Greenville, SC 29605 22 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. C ANONSBURG, PA 102 Springfield Drive Canonsburg, PA 15317 23 MMR CONSTRUC TORS, INC. WARREN, PA 34 East Harmar Street, Suite 7 Warren, PA 16365

24 MMR C ANADA, LIMITED 450 City Centre, Suite 315 Kitimat, British Columbia Canada V8C 1T6 25 MMR C ANADA, LIMITED 11083 48th Street SE Calgary, Alberta Canada T2C 1G8

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S O U TH AM E RI C A 26 MMR PANAMÁ Av. Paseo Costa del Este, Cruce con Av. La Rotanda PH Financial Park, Piso 30, Oficina MMR Costa del Este, Ciudad de Panamá, 080812 Panamá 27 MMR VENEZUEL A, S.A. Edificio Leif-Piso 2, Av. Intercomunal Jorge Rodriguez Sector Las Garzas, Frente Al Deposito Del Inos Barcelona, Edo. Anzoátegui Venezuela 28 MMR C ARIBBEAN, LIMITED P.O. Box 2291, Chaguanas Trinidad and Tobago, W.I. 29 MMR ECUADOR Avenida 12 de Octubre N24-68, Edif. Mirage, Piso 7 Barrio La Floresta, Quito República del Ecuador

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MMR

WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO MMR is a full-service contractor specializing in electrical construction, instrument installation and technical services, power distribution, enhanced panel and modular control building services, telecommunications and security systems, commissioning and start-up assistance, renewable energy, and maintenance services.

CHEMICAL AND PETROCHEMICAL DOWNSTREAM

OIL AND GAS PRODUCTION AND PROCESSING

INDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURING

POWER GENERATION

POWER DEVELOPMENT

GRAIN EXPORT

AUTOMOTIVE MANUFACTURING

BATTERY STORAGE

DATA CENTERS

SUBSTATIONS

FOOD AND BEVERAGE

MARITIME / MARINE SERVICES

MINING AND MINERALS

PHARMACEUTICALS

PULP, PAPER AND FOREST PRODUCTION

RENEWABLES

WASTE AND WATER TREATMENT

SYNTHETIC FUELS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

INTO THE STORM 10 CHAPTER TWO

MOMMA’S RULES 26 CHAPTER THREE

THE TOUGH GET GOING

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CHAPTER FOUR

GOING WIDE

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CHAPTER FIVE

THEY CALLED THE WIND KATRINA 102 CHAPTER SIX

WINNERS NEVER STOP TRYING 126 CHAPTER SEVEN

WE ARE FAMILY

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WE’VE WEATHERED CATEGORY 3s BEFORE. WE WERE KEEPING AN EYE ON IT, AND IT DIDN’T SEEM THAT BAD. CHAPTER ONE

INTO THE STORM

— J O H N C L O U AT R E

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N AUGUST 24, 2005, satellite weather reports showed a dark angel forming above the islands of The Bahamas. The tropical depression was swirling counterclockwise and moving west, gathering strength as it vacuumed heat from the shallow waters of the Bahamian archipelago. In a short time, the storm became a living thing, and, in accordance with World Meteorological Organization protocol, it was given its own name: Hurricane Katrina.

Meteorologists warned people in the southeastern United States to fuel up their vehicles, pack their bags, and get ready to head for higher ground. Hurricanes are fed by warm water, and though it weakened as it crossed central Florida, Katrina picked up strength again as it entered the Gulf of Mexico. By late Saturday, August 27, it had grown into a Category 3 hurricane and evacuation notices were issued for coastal areas in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Baton Rouge is situated well inland from low-lying areas along the Gulf Coast, and the news did not excite great concern. In Baton Rouge, the locals assumed that the weather would be manageable.

“We weren’t all that worried,” says resident John Clouatre. “There was no telling where it would come ashore, and we’ve weathered Category 3s before. We were keeping an eye on it, and it didn’t seem that bad.”

Katrina grew overnight, its great skirts whirling and accelerating as the warm Gulf waters pumped explosive energy upward into its core. By daybreak on Sunday morning it had become a monster, a precedent-shattering Category 5 with wind gusts of almost 175 miles per hour. A hurricane of this strength destroys everything in its path — and it was headed straight for New Orleans.

For decades, experts had warned government officials that New Orleans was uniquely vulnerable to assault by a Category 5 hurricane. Much of the city lies below sea level, protected by a system of levees and dikes engineered to withstand a Category 3 at worst. The dikes along the Mississippi River were solid, but the

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BATON ROUGE IS SITUATED WELL INLAND FROM LOW-LYING AREAS ALONG THE GULF COAST, AND THE NEWS DID NOT EXCITE GREAT CONCERN.

PAGE 13: Baton Rouge, photographed in the 1950s when it was a quarter the size of nearby New Orleans. Post-Katrina, refugees swelled the capital city to outpace the Big Easy.

PAGES 14–15: Katrina, as pictured in the Gulf of Mexico late on August 28, 2005; it remains the most damaging and deadly hurricane in U.S. history.

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back side of the city is fringed by lakes, bayous, and marginal dikes. If just one part of the system failed, the whole city could flood. Calling for immediate and mandatory evacuation, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said, “We’re now facing the storm we have always feared.” Later that same day, the National Weather Service predicted “devastating” damage and warned that most of the Gulf Coast area would be “uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer.”

Many New Orleans residents live below the poverty line, and it was estimated that about 20 percent of the city’s half-million residents did not have access to a car, public transportation, or other means of transport that would allow them to evacuate the city. As the storm approached, the Superdome opened its doors as an emergency shelter, and by nightfall, 10,000 of the city’s poorest residents had taken shelter there. Tens of thousands of others decided to ride it out in their houses. In the black early hours of Monday, August 29, the hurricane descended.

Dikes failed. Floodwaters up to 20 feet above normal tide levels swept into neighborhoods.

People climbed onto rooftops or took refuge in

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

upstairs bedrooms and attics. Rooftops turned out to be a colder, wetter, but safer place of shelter.

Well over a thousand people were trapped inside their houses and drowned.

Locally, the response was superhuman. Coast Guard rescue swimmers descended on cables from hovering helicopters, swam through filthy water, and plucked survivors from rooftops. Ignoring orders to stay put, hunters and fishermen (the socalled Cajun Navy) launched their own boats and patrolled flooded districts, rescuing people who otherwise would have died.

Those with vehicles took to the highways and headed north. But many roads were flooded and some bridges collapsed. Traffic jams clogged escape routes, and in many cases people ran out of gas, abandoned their vehicles, and walked.

“By daylight on Monday morning we realized how bad it was,” says John Clouatre, senior vice president of onshore operations for MMR. “We were up in Baton Rouge, so we escaped the flooding, but as the news began to come in we learned that New Orleans and the whole Gulf Coast was in serious trouble.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME? Every year, hurricanes sweep across the Atlantic, and when two or three storms are brewing, assigning names to the different systems makes it much easier for meteorologists, pilots, mariners, and the public to keep track of them. Intense lowpressure systems actually receive their names when they are still in the tropical storm stage. Once a tropical storm reaches a sustained wind speed of 39 mph, it is given a name by the World Meteorological Organization. By the time the 11th such storm of the 2005 season reached hurricane force (74 mph), it had already been named Katrina.

When meteorology was a new science in the early 1900s, storms were named after the latitude and longitude where they originated. These labels were difficult to remember, so during the Second World War, meteorologists began using women’s names, which heightened awareness and public safety. The practice was broadened to include men’s names in 1978, and nowadays names are selected from a long list that is rotated every six years. The only exception is when a storm is so unprecedented in its ferocity that recycling the name would seem disrespectful to the victims, and for that reason there will never again be a Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA TOOK DAYS TO ESTABLISH OPERATIONS IN NEW ORLEANS, AND EVEN THEN, BOTH STATE AND FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS SEEMED UNSURE OF HOW TO PROCEED.

John Clouatre and his wife, Vickie, at the 1999 MMR managers meeting. John, a second-generation MMR executive, followed his dad, Gene, into the business 40-plus years ago.

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A DISASTER IN THE MAKING In contrast to the local heroics, the response from Washington seemed confused and ineffective.

Scientists and hydrology experts had been warning for years that a disaster in New Orleans was inevitable, but the Feds seemed to have no plan in place. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took days to establish operations in New Orleans, and even then, both state and federal governments seemed unsure of how to proceed.

The public had always assumed that its wellfunded high-level emergency response agency would have measures in place for providing water, food, medical aid, and accommodation in the event of a disaster. But no one at FEMA, at the Louisiana state house, or in Washington seemed to know how to cope with the damage and the desperate condition of the survivors.

President George W. Bush responded to growing criticism by assuring the rest of the country that FEMA chief Michael Brown was doing “a heck of a job.” But it was soon obvious that the top-heavy bureaucracy was making a hopeless mess of things. (Later investigations also blamed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for failing to use outside

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

BRED TO BE TOUGH experts to double-check the Corps’ flood wall designs. Because of its status as a federal agency, it was immune to sanctions.) Once the Superdome was full to capacity with flood refugees, its doors were locked, and some of the people who were subsequently turned away drowned as they waded through deep water, desperately searching for shelter. Some tried to escape the city by walking across bridges to outlying suburbs, but they were turned back by heavily armed police.

Like other government agencies, the police were overwhelmed. Stations lost power, patrol vehicles disappeared under water, and the police radio system completely failed. Many officers worked around the clock to rescue their fellow citizens.

But in the absence of an obvious point of command, the situation grew apocalyptic. Rumors spread that police headquarters had issued a shoot-to-kill order, and in several cases, overworked and stressed-out police officers did open fire on civilians who were later found out to be innocent of wrongdoing.

The gravity of the disaster didn’t fully strike Clouatre until he left Baton Rouge and drove down I-10 toward New Orleans. “There was lots of traffic headed north but nothing headed

As part of his duties, John Clouatre typically oversees well over a dozen major projects at any one time, in industries ranging from pulp and paper to pharmaceuticals to oil and gas. He and those he supervises are responsible for installing instrumentation and electrical networks — the most complex and critical part of any industrial facility.

Like many of the senior leaders at MMR, he entered at the bottom, sweeping the warehouse floor when he was 15 years old. “I got a summer job here in 1977,” he says. “Leeland Kilpatrick and I got started around the same time. Our boss was Rodi Rispone’s father. Of course, my dad worked for Pepper and Leeland is Pepper’s nephew, so the boss was a helluva lot harder on us than anyone else. He was a tough fella. But that didn’t do us any harm. We needed it.”

The Cloautres are old-time Louisianans who trace their ancestry back to the French pioneers of Acadia, today’s Maritime provinces of Canada. In the early 1700s, Britain was at war with France in North America. The Acadians were sympathetic to the French cause, so the British military deported over 10,000 of them, many to Louisiana, where they became known as Cajuns.

The Cajuns had a tough go of it in Louisiana. “All the good land was taken,” says John. “So they had to settle in the bayous and swamps, trapping fur and catching crawfish and making a living any way they could. That was all well before my time.

But my father grew up poor in a family of 13. Everyone around here still thought the

Cajuns were dumbasses. So my parents made the tough decision not to have us kids speak that language. They wanted us to get educated and get ahead.”

His father, Gene, was “a hard-nosed, old-school kind of guy” who tried to teach him the proper way of doing things. “Of course, I was young and thought I knew better. But I guess some of it must have sunk in, because I eventually turned out all right.”

John went on to become certified as an ABC electrician, moved into the MMR estimating department, and worked on out-of-state projects, spending much of his 20s working in big and small cities all over the country and living in backwoods “crapholes” whose names he can barely remember.

By the time Katrina arrived in 2005, John was one of the top people at MMR. He says trying to get the best of Katrina was one of the most intense experiences of his life. “We’d all been through Cat 2s and 3s probably 10 times. So we didn’t know it was bad until 8 or 10 hours before it hit. From that point forward it snowballed.

It was just crazy.”

WE’RE NOW FACING THE STORM WE HAVE ALWAYS FEARED. — R AY N A G I N

NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS WITH ASSAULT RIFLES BLOCKED THE HIGHWAY, AND FROM WHAT I COULD SEE, THE CITY BEHIND THEM WAS A GHOST TOWN. IT WAS SHOCKING.

PAGE 21: In the 80 weeks following Hurricane Katrina, MMR crews put in over 300,000 work-hours and were even tasked with feeding Fluor emergency folks and FEMA refugees.

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south,” he says. “Instead of the usual bumperto-bumper traffic there — J O H N C L O U AT R E was no one on the road.

On the outskirts of New Orleans, National Guard troops with assault rifles blocked the highway, and from what I could see, the city behind them was a ghost town.

It was shocking.”

FEMA finally recognized that it was in over its head. It realized it needed help from a private company, a seasoned team of professionals accustomed to tackling massive, complex problems, and so it contacted Fluor Corporation. The large multinational engineering and construction firm, headquartered in Irving, Texas, specializes in oil and gas infrastructure and other large construction projects. Founded in 1912 by a feisty entrepreneur named John Fluor, the company played a key role during the first half of the 20th century in major campaigns like the Manhattan Project and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

THE PHONE NEVER STOPPED RINGING Throughout the postwar era, Fluor continued to grow and to gain expertise in implementing a wide range of projects, including environmental restoration and nuclear waste cleanup. It seemed like a good choice to manage the hurricane relief effort, but when FEMA called, Fluor executives confessed that they didn’t have much in the way of know-how or resources in the Baton Rouge area.

Ian Foster, a senior executive with Fluor with 28 years of international problem solving under his belt, was in South Carolina when Washington came knocking. “I got a call that FEMA was looking for a place near New Orleans where they could set up offices. Did I know of any companies in Baton Rouge that might be able to help with the relief effort?”

As it turned out, he did.

MEET THE PROBLEM SOLVERS MMR knew little about hurricane relief — possibly even less than FEMA and Fluor — but Ian Foster was confident that MMR would be

an important contributor. He got in touch with CEO James “Pepper” Rutland, who explained that MMR was stretched pretty thin but would try to help. As Ian puts it, “Pepper is the kind of guy who doesn’t say no when someone asks for a favor, so he said, ‘Sure, come on down. We’ll see what we can do.’”

Ian told his colleagues at Fluor the good news, flew home to Texas, packed his bags, gassed up his car, and headed for Baton Rouge. Personnel from Fluor and FEMA arrived ahead of him.

According to John Clouatre, he and his staff didn’t exactly know what assistance they were supposed to be providing. “We thought, ‘Okay, maybe there’s some electrical work we can help them with.’ But it started getting out of hand very quickly. The first day, we had 6 or 8 people using our phones. A few days later there were 300. There were strangers wandering all through our building. You’d come back from the bathroom and there’d be somebody sitting at your desk talking on your phone.”

“Katrina was a very big deal for all of us,” says Kevin Alexander, now a vice president with MMR. “It was an intense time — large amounts of work coming in at high speed — and we were going as hard as we could just to keep up with it. The phone never stopped ringing. It was like that for over a year, and that was very hard on the families. It might have even been harder on them than it was for us.”

What made it all bearable was the feeling of teamwork. MMR is a large company that feels like a small business. “That comes from Pepper — he really cares about his people. For example, after seven years of working here, you get 100 percent health coverage for you and your family. That’s really unusual.”

The employees show their appreciation by coming through in a crunch.

“The way people were working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week during Katrina — people won’t make sacrifices like that just to make money. People only work that hard out of loyalty.”

AN ENTIRE INDUSTRY IN HARM’S WAY The Gulf Coast is an important region for the refining industry, with about half of the country’s refinery capacity sitting along the shores of Louisiana and Texas. There are more than 4,500 oil production platforms in the United States portion of the Gulf of Mexico — the largest concentration of offshore platforms in the world and more, in fact, than in the rest of the world combined.

MMR is an important player in the development of the Gulf oil and gas industry, and has installed instrumentation and electrical systems for numerous onshore refineries and offshore platforms like the Shell Perdido (a $48.7 million contract) and the Shell Olympus ($35 million). The ChevronTexaco Tahiti, which looms 500 feet above the ocean surface, required 380,000 work-hours of electrical and instrumentation work and earned MMR a superior reputation for handling big projects in the Gulf.

When Hurricane Katrina roared through the Gulf, hundreds of rigs stood in its direct path, and scores of them were badly damaged or destroyed. The Rowan New Orleans was sunk, the Ocean Warwick was washed ashore, and Transocean’s $330 million Deepwater Nautilus was pushed 80 miles off position. After the hurricane, the U.S. Coast Guard coordinated the cleanup of more than 8 million gallons of spilled oil, which was almost equal to the wreck of the infamous Exxon Valdez, which spilled 11 million gallons. The Gulf Coast oil industry has excellent evacuation protocols, and no lives were lost.

Chevron’s platforms in the Tahiti Field, the deepestproducing field in the Gulf of Mexico. The Tahiti Field is estimated to contain recoverable resources of 400 to 500 million oilequivalent barrels.

FA S T FAC T S

SMALL WORLD

IF YOU WANT US TO HELP, WE’LL HELP, BUT WE WANT TO DO IT OUR WAY. — J O H N C L O U AT R E

One week after the disaster, the U.S. government put out a rare international request for emergency foreign aid.

More than 70 countries responded.

KUWAIT

Kuwait was the most generous, with a swift donation of $500 million.

GREECE — FINLAND

Greece and Finland dispatched cruise ships to house the homeless.

MEXICO

Mexico donated 2 warships, 2 helicopters, 385 troopers, and 300 tons of food.

CANADA

Teams of Canadian disaster specialists headed for Louisiana in frigates and military helicopters.

JAPAN

A single Japanese citizen sent a check for $1 million.

INDONESIA

Indonesia sent 45 doctors and 10,000 blankets.

CUBA

Cuba’s offer of 1,500 doctors and 26 tons of medicine was declined.

Very quickly, the influx of FEMA and Fluor staff became unmanageable. The MMR parking lot was full of FEMA vehicles and million-dollar buses with big satellite dishes. The top brass used the buses to report directly back to the president in Washington. “It was sheer confusion,” says John. “Not just ineptness — it was ineptness on a massive scale. Nobody knew what was going on. You’d look on the TV and see the governor of Louisiana sitting in the corner, crying, because she had no idea what to do.”

Meanwhile, hospitals had no power, women were going into labor in waiting rooms, prisons were having to open their doors and release convicts, and thousands of people were suffering from thirst in neighborhoods surrounded by water. John says MMR called a meeting with FEMA and Fluor and said, “Listen, we’re trying to run a business here.

If you want us to help, we’ll help, but we want to do it our way.”

FEMA agreed, and Pepper put several of his top people, including Kevin Alexander,

John Clouatre, and John Courville, in charge of hurricane relief. “The MMR people suited up and hit the ground running,” says Ian. “The crisis revealed the strength of character at the core of MMR. They’re the kind of people who can take on complicated tasks without supervision and get them done.”

John Clouatre says the MMR people had to devise solutions on their own. “There was no clear chain of command. It was total chaos. We were working seven 16s every week without a break. But MMR people excel at working without direction.

There’s a spirit of can-do determination here that I’ve never seen in any other organization.”

When veterans like John tell stories about the work ethic that’s part of the company’s DNA, and long-serving industry professionals like Ian claim that MMR — an inanimate business organization — has mystic traits like “character,” one has to wonder if they are projecting human qualities onto a lifeless corporate entity. After all, businesses are just businesses. Corporations exist only in order to make money. Isn’t that standard teaching in business school? If a company can have human qualities like loyalty and character, where would those values come from?

“Katrina was a very big deal for us,” says MMR vice president Kevin Alexander.

“It was like going to war.”

CHAPTER ONE: INTO THE STORM

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BERT WAS A BATON ROUGE HOUSEWIFE WHO TAUGHT HER KIDS TO LIVE BY THEIR PRINCIPLES AND TO GIVE IT THEIR ALL. CHAPTER TWO

MOMMA’S RULES

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N THE SAME WAY that a wisp of air off a butterfly’s wing might theoretically lead to a cyclone 1,000 miles away, big global events can sometimes be traced back to the anonymous actions of a single person.

The helicopters that descended on MMR headquarters in Baton Rouge, the satellite dishes connecting the emergency teams at MMR with the president of the United States, the ringing phones, the all-night shifts of exhausted workers — none of this frantic activity would have happened if not for reverberations set in motion many decades before by one person: Bert Thompson Rutland.

Bert was a Baton Rouge housewife who taught her kids to live by their principles and to give it their all.

Her husband, L.E. Rutland, was no slouch himself — an industrious, hard-smoking disciplinarian who worked as a construction superintendent — but Momma was the one who really passed on these values. She had grown up in a wealthy Mississippi family and, like many other Mississippians before her, aspired to become a writer. But fate had other plans, and she found herself living in lowered social circumstances in a modest Baton Rouge neighborhood, cooking meals and cleaning house for her husband, her daughters, Carol and Brenda, and her sons, Hulan and James.

In her household, she had a code of ethics called “Resolutions to Remember,” which made clear to the kids that she expected them to behave in school, study hard, and make something of themselves. She focused particularly on James, the baby of the family, and hoped he would develop his artistic side, perhaps to compensate for her own abandoned writing aspirations. When James was still young, she had him dancing in ballet classes and singing on TV. It seemed that the boys on the street didn’t share Momma’s enthusiasm for ballet, and James often had to respond to their comments with his fists. With his quick temper, he soon earned the nickname Pepper. And although his mother eventually gave up trying to turn him into a songand-dance man, the training turned out to be worthwhile. “All those ballet classes must have made me light on my feet,” says Pepper. “By the time I was 10 or 12, I was excelling at most school sports, especially football.”

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MOMMA'S RESOLUTIONS TO R E M E M B E R

MY EXPECTATIONS TO SUCCEED WERE PRETTY HIGH AND MUCH OF IT WAS BECAUSE OF MY MOTHER.

1. No one leaves this world alive.

2. Maintain a sense of high values.

—JAMES “PEPPER” RUTLAND

3. T ake care of yourself. Good health is your one source of wealth. Without it, happiness is impossible.

By his early teens, Pepper was a popular leader of his teammates and friends. “My expectations to succeed were pretty high,” he says. “And much of it was because of my mother. If I got a 97 on a test, she always wanted to look closely at the mistakes. What went wrong? Why didn’t I get 100? She had high expectations, and I just kind of grew up expecting to excel at everything. She taught me to live by clear-cut rules and have a disciplined attitude.”

One of his mother’s Resolutions was “Nobody gets out of here alive.” That one “made a big impression on me,” he says. “You have to give life your very best shot, because you won’t get another chance.” And so he went hard at everything, playing both ways on his high school football team, the only player on the team to do so.

It was exhausting, but he was taught not to complain and instead to find the positive in any challenge. When he was 16, he got a job in an Exxon industrial plant. “You were supposed to be 18,” he says, “but I lied about my age, and

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THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

when I walked into that plant my eyes opened wide. I was the only white kid on my construction crew. My dad was a superintendent, so of course, the black guys on the crew gave me a hard time.

They didn’t know if I was the real thing or not.

But somewhere during midsummer the first year, the two lead guys building the wooden forms on a big foundation asked me to join them for a beer downtown after work. They didn’t know I was way underage and I couldn’t do that, but it felt pretty good, because these were grown men doing this for a living, and I was only 16. So I knew I’d proved myself and they’d accepted me.”

Still, for every grown man telling him he was all right, there was another happy to remind him he wasn’t even close. In high school baseball he slid into third base, caught a cleat, and broke his hip. The pain was intense. The coach told him to jog back to the locker room, half a mile away.

“My leg just locked up but he was yelling at me to shake it off and run! So I ran the whole way on a broken hip. I can’t describe how painful that was. Of course, when the doctors X-rayed me and found out my hip required immediate surgery,

4. B e cheerful and help all people. Family first. You will receive your reward.

5. A lways listen more than talk. You never learn by just talking.

6. N ever hand out advice. (This one is hard.) Remember: wise men don’t need it, and fools never accept it.

7. B e understanding with the young ones, Compassionate to the aged, Sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak. During your lifetime, you will have been all of these. (Another hard one.)

8. Don’t equate money with success. The world is full of money makers who sometimes are miserable — unhappy failures as human beings.

9. Success to my thinking is how it is achieved.

PAGE 28: Pepper (left) with brother Hulan Rutland, who was part of the old Matthews McCracken Rutland back when it opened up on the site where MMR HQ stands today.

PAGE 29: Bertie Mae Thompson Rutland and Loyes Edward “Rut” Rutland, photographed in October 1971.

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PAGE 30: Baton Rouge High’s Class of 1969. James “Pepper” Rutland is highlighted in red.

PAGE 31 Family man. Pepper, surrounded by Jacob, Annaleigh, Jonathan, and Kennan Bruser; wife Connie and son Michael Rutland with Claire Hunt; and nephew (and shareholder) Leeland Kilpatrick.

PEPPER’S RESOLUTIONS “I got a lot of my drive from my parents. There was always an expectation to achieve. Whether in sports or academics, you were always expected to be the best, the winner. It wasn’t like it is today, where you reward kids for trying hard and being good sports and participating. My parents conditioned you to believe that you can never, never lose. Losing was unacceptable.

“I have mixed feelings about that. When you discipline a child, the worst thing you can do is tell them you’re disappointed in them. That just crushes them. My parents never did that, but they always withheld their approval. If I worked hard and achieved a goal, they would just raise the bar. If I got a 3.8 academically, they would say, ‘Why didn’t you get a 4.0?’

“I found that frustrating. My wife, Connie, grew up in a totally different style, and she just doesn’t get that hard-driving approach. So we haven’t done that with our kids. I mean, I’ve tried to emphasize what they’re expected to do, but I have not imposed that demand for success on them. I think it’s almost smothering for a kid, feeling that no matter what they do, it will never be good enough.”

THE TENDER MERCY OF COACHES

In college, all football players participated in an off-season training program called PE 1000, in which young athletes ran the bleacher seats at Tiger Stadium.

“You had to run the steep part of the stadium. Bottom to top in 18 seconds. And it was tough. One day my roommate and I skipped PE 1000 and went off to buy Valentine’s Day cards for our mothers. We were coming out of the drugstore and we saw a guy break the window out of a car, grab the tape deck, and take off.

“So I chase him down Highland Road, held him over the hood of a car until the police arrived. It’s a rough part of town, and all these people are gathering around, saying, ‘Let him go, he didn’t do nothing,’ and the crowd is getting out of hand. The cops arrive just in time, and the story makes a little clip in the newspaper. Guess who reads the newspaper? Our coach. He says, ‘That was a great thing you guys did. I’m really proud of you. But you were skipping PE 1000.

So now you’re going to run stadiums.’

“Inside Tiger Stadium at 5:00 on a sweltering hot humid morning? You don’t want to be there. Especially when it’s just you and a pissed-off coach determined to make you run until you drop. He blows the whistle and you run and crawl, run, sprint, down, up, down, then all the way around the top of the stadium and then all the way down. Run until you can’t go anymore. That was him teaching me a lesson: next time you do a good deed, don’t expect to be rewarded by your conditioning coach.”

the coach felt bad. But the coaches, their bible was toughness. They didn’t care about extenuating circumstances. They just cared about winning.”

The doctors put a pin in his hip, which became an issue when he tried to enlist for military service.

“When I went to LSU, I was on a football scholarship and officer training — ROTC — was mandatory.

But ROTC would not let me march on the parade grounds because of my hip. That was my first inkling that the government is actually clueless.

Here I was, this college athlete, and they told me I was only fit to sit at a desk.”

At Louisiana State, he became a leader and team captain, a celebrity who was constantly hailed by strangers in public. But the culture of the sport was hard and heartless. Team members were competing against each other as much as the opposing players, and most of the coaches regarded

them as tools, weapons to be used hard. “I kept getting broken noses, and they’d tell me there was no point in fixing the nose because it was just going to get broken again, so they’d fix it properly when I graduated. But of course, they never did.”

At the end of his football career he tallied up the true price of his football scholarship and “free” education: “Multiple concussions. My nose was broken numerous times. Had my jaw cracked.

Broken hip from high school. A really bad calcium deposit that eventually required a shoulder replacement. I had to use an experimental helmet that I still have at my house. It was the first one ever used in the Southeastern Conference. So when I graduated and they asked me if I was interested in the NFL draft, I said no thank you.”

His football career had made him a hometown hero, but he didn’t care. “It was a bigger deal to

other people, but it didn’t matter to me. I was always polite and I’d sign autographs, but I didn’t believe in that hero stuff. For years afterward, my playing career actually ruined my enjoyment of the game. An athletic scholarship was my chance to get an education. Once I had that education, I was done. I walked away and never looked back.”

PAGE 32: Pepper with Charlie McClendon, the longestserving coach of the LSU Tigers. In his 18 years with the team, he posted 16 winning seasons — a record 137 winning games that no coach has come close to matching.

KEEPING SCORE One of Pepper’s first seasonal jobs was across the river from Baton Rouge. The superintendent he was working for made him ride in the back of the pickup truck, and by the end of the summer he calculated that he had ridden about 10,000 miles in it. “Our jobs were at the end of a lot of long gravel roads,” he says, “and when it rained, I used to throw a beach towel over my head. Later, that same superintendent came and worked for

PAGE 34: Tiger Stadium on the LSU campus is one of the country's most famous sports venues. Visiting teams fear “Death Valley,” but fans revere their hometown stadium, with stories of events passed down from generation to generation — like the 1988 game that made fans roar so loud a neighboring seismograph thought there’d been an earthquake!

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A GRIDIRON MBA “The confidence you learn in sport and the skills you build up are transferable to other fields like business,” says Pepper. “And I was not the greatest athlete. Coach McClendon did an interview once and said, ‘Rutland doesn’t have the greatest athletic skills. He’s not the fastest guy. He’s not the biggest guy. But he’s maybe one of the smartest linebackers we’ve ever had.’”

ONCE I HAD THAT EDUCATION, I WAS DONE. I WALKED AWAY AND NEVER LOOKED BACK. —PEPPER RUTLAND

HOW IT ALL BEGAN A stack of newspaper clippings about Pepper’s exploits on the football field wasn’t going to buy groceries or put gas in the tank. His old employer, Bob McCracken, who had hired him in the summers during high school, also ran an electrical and instrumentation company. Pepper liked that side of the business.

“Instrumentation work is an interesting part of the construction industry,” he says. “It’s the high-tech end. On any major construction project, the instrumentation people are usually the smartest guys in the room.”

After Pepper graduated from LSU with his construction degree, McCracken hired him full-time. “I was 22 years old, and he started me out at $1,000 a month, which was big money at the time. The older gentleman, his partner Mr. Matthews, didn’t care for me and didn’t want me working in the same office with him. I was wired pretty tight, and I guess I rubbed him the wrong way.

So McCracken started a division of that company called United Instruments.

Matthews didn’t want any part of the instrumentation work, so we kept it all separate. I operated out of a one-room suite office on Wooddale Court, down in the middle of Baton Rouge. It’s not such a good area anymore, but it was okay then. There was a common secretary who took phone calls for the four different businesses that shared the office space. Any projects that came in, I had to estimate them and oversee the construction. I had to buy the materials, do everything.

There was nobody else. If you telephoned a company called United Instruments in Baton Rouge in 1973, you were calling me.”

me. I never reminded him that he used to make me ride in the back of the truck. But I’m sure he remembered.”

His first full-time job was with a company called Matthews McCracken. In the summer of Pepper’s college sophomore year, Bob McCracken sent him off to Sudbury, Canada, to estimate a large project at International Nickel.

Pepper had never been out of the United States and had only flown a couple of times. “When I got to Sudbury, I checked into the hotel under my name, and when I tried to pay my bill with McCracken’s credit card they thought I had stolen it. It was a complicated estimating job, and I was way out of my comfort zone, but that’s how you learn. Even now I deliberately put guys into demanding, unfamiliar situations to develop their confidence and improvisation skills.”

Some people found McCracken hard to get along with, and Pepper wasn’t exactly easygoing either.

“I was pretty aggressive. I had a tougher demeanor than I do today.

I would lose my temper sometimes

and throw things, punch walls, do all kinds of stupid stuff. But I was very passionate about succeeding, and it was frustrating when things didn’t go well. It was the drive for perfection that I learned from my mother. And I guess Bob liked that, because we got along pretty well.”

In 1974, Matthews McCracken bought a piece of property on the same lot where MMR headquarters is now located. They believed that the instrumentation and electrical business was the future. In any plant, paper mill, or petrochemical factory, all the process equipment is regulated and monitored by instrumentation.

In that era, those instruments would have been connected by pneumatic tubing and regulated by air pressure. “Our first project was a sugar mill in Rio Grande, Texas, right on the border of Mexico.

It was the first sugar mill built in the United States outside the state of Louisiana, with the exception of Hawaii. I would drive down there — it was a 12-hour drive — about every two weeks.

I didn’t even have a project superintendent to run the job, so I called my dad and asked him if he knew anybody. I needed somebody who knew instrumentation, but those guys were hard to find. It was a lump-sum job, and it was important

IT WAS A COMPLICATED ESTIMATING JOB, AND I WAS WAY OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE, BUT THAT’S HOW YOU LEARN.

to keep an eye on it. My dad gave me the name —PEPPER RUTLAND of a superintendent who was from the mechanical side, the piping side. He said, ‘He might not know instrumentation, but he can oversee it.’ So I hired him. It was our first decent project as an instrumentation contractor, and it worked out all right.”

The next generation of instrumentation involved electrical wiring rather than pneumatic tubing. (Computerized instruments connected wirelessly are just entering the field now.) It made sense to do the wiring too, so Pepper’s instrumentation division began doing electrical work as well. As his workload and revenues began to grow, they hired more people, and the instrumentation and electrical division began absorbing the rest of the company. “There were some other people that owned shares in the company, major contractors in town who owned some interests,” says Pepper. “I started buying them out, and we started calling the company Matthews McCracken Rutland. Well, that was a long clunky name for the receptionist to have to say when she picked up the phone, and it

In 1974, Matthews McCracken bought a piece of property on the same lot where MMR headquarters is located to this day.

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MOST COMPANIES ARE FOCUSED ON THE BOTTOM LINE. THEY ARE PRIMARILY MOTIVATED BY PROFIT. IT’S THE MMR BELIEF THAT YOU NEED TO FOCUS PRIMARILY ON SERVING THE CUSTOMER. — G E N E C L O U AT R E

Pepper with (left) Allen Boudreaux and Gene Clouatre, both long-term employees who became key executives as MMR grew.

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sounded too much like a law firm. So we changed it to MMR. Before you knew it, we were doing $40 million a year, which was huge back then.

When Mr. Matthews retired, that left just Bob and me, so we kind of divided up the projects.”

As the senior partner, Bob McCracken took the preferred jobs. Being Canadian, he particularly liked doing projects north of the border. “For example, when we had a big project going in Medicine Hat, Canada, Bob went up there and took all our best guys. I got the short end of the stick, managing a project in Maine, and took the lesser guys and whoever was left. I was the young partner, and I had to prove myself.”

Pepper got another tough job, this one out in the Mojave Desert, between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. He had never been to a place so bleak and miserably hot. There was one water pipeline going in and one phone line going out. “It was like a cowboy movie out in the middle of nowhere,”

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

he says. “A bunch of tough union guys with bad attitudes. Our superintendent had been stealing, and there was all kinds of criminal activity going on. I was real angry, flew out there, and wound up firing everybody on the site. We had to handwrite 300 paychecks and get them off the job.”

By the time Pepper was 29, Bob McCracken had made him company president. MMR now had 400 employees and his team included Allen Boudreaux, Gene Clouatre, Tom Welborn, and Grady Saucier, among others. They were all avid practitioners of MMR’s unique approach to doing business. Gene Clouatre, who is now retired, says MMR emphasizes doing a much better job than the customer expects. “Most companies are focused on the bottom line. They are primarily motivated by profit. It’s the MMR belief that you need to focus primarily on serving the customer.

Doing a great job, making the customer happy — if you do that, you’ll do well financially.”

MMR attorney and general counsel Allen Boudreaux says the company’s strategy was to court the clients they wanted and win them over with exceptional service. “We focused on clients that we really liked to work for,” he says.

“We defined why we liked to work for them, and then focused our sales efforts to get them to choose us, even if we weren’t the lowest bidder.

They knew from our past performance that we were going to do a good job for them. So even if we had to go through a competitive bid process, they wanted to choose us. That turned out to be fundamental to our success.”

Allen, Tom, and other company veterans say Pepper was more interested in success than profits — and he agrees. “I’ve honestly never been motivated by money,” says Pepper. “I cared about doing a better job than anyone else. Business is like football, except you use dollars to keep track of your performance.”

A LOT OF BUSINESSES WERE FAILING IN THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN, AND WE WERE ABSORBING SMALLER COMPANIES LEFT AND RIGHT. —PEPPER RUTLAND

PEPPER AND HIS TEAMMATES INITIALLY FELT PRETTY GOOD ABOUT THE NEW FINANCIAL INVESTORS.

ON A ROLL The postwar period in the late 1940s saw years of growth in the USA. The war had catastrophically damaged the industrial capacity of Germany, the UK, France, Russia, Japan, and the other manufacturing powerhouses of the time, and the United States enjoyed several decades of widespread prosperity.

But by the 1970s, the domestic industrial boom had begun to slow. Offshore manufacturing was strengthening and the United States entered a cycle of high inflation and economic recession.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan entered the White House on a campaign of tax cuts and slashes to social spending. Reagan’s plan was to get America working again, but the problems he inherited were deeply intractable, and the early ’80s was a miserable time for the U.S. economy. Farmers were hit hard by falling agricultural exports, poor crop prices, and rising interest rates. Mortgage interest rates were heading to breathtaking levels, and many homeowners without locked-in financing handed their keys to the bank and walked away.

Governments were pinching pennies. Business bankruptcies rose 50 percent. It was a tough time to be a contractor.

Bob McCracken was older than Pepper, and he decided it was time to sell his share of Matthews

McCracken Rutland and get out. Pepper, who was still only 33, wanted to purchase the remaining 80 percent of the multimillion-dollar company but lacked the financial leverage. So, in 1983, McCracken sold MMR to a private equity firm in New York. Pepper stayed on as CEO and COO of the newly renamed MMR Holding. It was an unusual arrangement — like once again playing both ways in football.

Pepper and his teammates initially felt pretty good about the new financial investors. “The private equity deal looked great at first,” says Pepper. “Our new owners were based in New York, Argentina, and France. They had big money, a lot of connections, and they owned a variety of different businesses. So the deal allowed us to grow. A lot of businesses were failing in the economic downturn, and we were absorbing smaller companies left and right. They would fail to complete a job.

We would come in, take over the project, take over the company, clear out individuals who had caused the company to fail in the first place, and get them running right as part of MMR.” During the mid-1980s, MMR Holding took over 13 companies, plus about 400 of their ongoing projects, and grew from $40 million to $500 million. The firm now had 8,000 employees,

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TOM IS ONE OF THOSE RARE INDIVIDUALS WHO IS ABSOLUTELY ROCK-SOLID HONEST AND RELIABLE. IF YOU QUIETLY ASK TOM TO DO YOU A FAVOR, EVEN IF YOU JUST MENTION IT IN PASSING, YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO BRING IT UP AGAIN, BECAUSE IT’S AS GOOD AS DONE. —PEPPER RUTLAND

John Clouatre (left) worked his way up from the bottom, sweeping the warehouse when he was 15. Tom Welborn had the same do-it-all career path, starting out in the estimating department.

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THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

MMR HOLDING FOUND ITSELF COMING UNDER PRESSURE FROM SHAREHOLDERS WHO DID NOT NECESSARILY UNDERSTAND OR BUY INTO ITS UNIQUE CORPORATE CULTURE.

FA S T FAC T S

BOOM TIMES In 1983, MMR was purchased by a New York-based private equity firm. With an enriched war chest, the freshly named MMR Holding went on an acquisition spree, growing at an unprecented rate.

13

COMPANIES

400

8,000 EMPLOYEES

ONGOING PROJECTS

92%

2ND

GROWTH

$500 $40 MILLION

MILLION

LARGEST MECHANICAL CONTRACTOR

3RD

LARGEST ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR

and was the second-largest mechanical contractor and third-largest electrical contractor in the United States. MMR was on a roll.

The company went public in 1987, which effectively opened it to more armchair quarterbacks. MMR Holding found itself coming under pressure from shareholders who did not necessarily understand or buy into its unique corporate culture. “Management was under increasing pressure to make quarterly earnings,” says Pepper. “We had always placed our emphasis on customer service as well as profits, in the belief that if you do a great job, you’ll always be busy and revenue will take care of itself. But our new owners were primarily focused on the bottom line only. The pressure to work fast and churn profits got even greater when we went public.

Their main focus was getting maximum return on investment; they didn’t care about MMR or the people who built the company. So we lost track of the personal touch and the corporate culture that made us successful in the first place. If that’s an indictment of how private equity manages private business, then so be it.”

Tom Welborn was one of the early stalwarts at MMR Holding, and Pepper still considers him to be the Gibraltar of the company. “Tom is one of those rare individuals who is absolutely rock-solid honest and reliable,” says Pepper. “If you quietly ask Tom to do you a favor, even if you just mention it in passing, you will never have to bring it up again, because it’s as good as done. He’s an example of the culture we built here. Guys like Tom don’t walk in off the street. He’s the heart and soul of this company. And when you have outsiders coming in and making changes, or when your operations get too spread out and you’re dealing with people with whom you don’t have the same degree of trust, it’s inevitable you’re going to have problems.”

Tom Welborn started in the estimating department in the early days of MMR and worked his way up. Like most of the senior people at the company, he has done just about every job in the house. He knows the company inside out and says they made a mistake in getting involved with people who didn’t share their values.

“I think you’ll hear Pepper say that we would never go public with the company again,” he says.

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I THINK YOU’LL HEAR PEPPER SAY THAT WE WOULD NEVER GO PUBLIC WITH THE COMPANY AGAIN. WE WERE GETTING BIG SO FAST WE COULDN’T SEND PEOPLE TO OVERSEE THESE OTHER COMPANIES. —TO M W E L B O R N

“We were getting big so fast we couldn’t send people to oversee these other companies. We kept a lot of the same people in the offices of those companies, and I’m afraid they kept making the same mistakes, taking cheap work. You can’t stay in business taking cheap work. So we were growing, but we didn’t have enough core MMR people to keep watch on everything.”

MMR veteran Leeland Kilpatrick agrees.

“What happened was out of our control,” he says.

“That doesn’t excuse it. But that’s what happened.

You’ve got to remember that Pepper was a very young guy when Bob McCracken sold controlling interest of the company to outside investors.

Pepper stayed on as CEO, but he was a minority shareholder. Then MMR went public, and what do publicly traded companies want to do? They want to grow. There’s a constant drive for expansion.

We were taking over all these other companies that kept screwing up and losing money. They

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THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

were fighting among each other, bidding against each other for the same projects, undermining the parent company.”

Meanwhile, the company was getting entangled in complicated legal issues with the federal government, and the New York owners were losing patience with the process of solving the growing pains they’d helped to create. “If they’d stood by us, we’d have been able to weather the storm,” says Pepper. “But they weren’t interested in MMR or its culture. They were only interested in their return. They saw an opportunity to walk away with a nice tax write-off, and that’s exactly what they decided to do.”

In 1989, the whirlwind romance with big-city financiers ended just as dramatically as it had begun.

The owners finally showed their true colors — they put MMR Holding into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and everyone went home.

It was over.

THE NEW YORK OWNERS WERE LOSING PATIENCE WITH THE PROCESS OF SOLVING THE GROWING PAINS THEY’D HELPED TO CREATE.

‘WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?’ I SAID I DIDN’T KNOW, BUT IT MEANT A LOT TO KNOW THEY STILL BELIEVED IN ME. CHAPTER THREE

THE TOUGH GET GOING

—PEPPER RUTLAND

T

HE COLLAPSE OF MMR was hard on everyone in the company. The organization they’d built was destroyed. But Pepper’s strict maternal upbringing and hard years in football had taught him that after you’ve been knocked down you get back up. Quitting was not an option.

In part, he wanted to prove that the original concept was right. Plus, it made a big difference that many people still believed in MMR and the team philosophy that had built the company.

“The other guys played a key role in my decision to roll up my sleeves and get back into business,” Pepper says. “I kept getting calls from guys that I’d worked with for years. They were scattered all over the place. They kept asking me, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said I didn’t know, but it meant a lot to know they still believed in me.”

One them was Allen Boudreaux. He grew up in Thibodaux, Louisiana, graduated from LSU, and met Pepper in the course of his early career. “Around 1979, I was not long out of law school and was working at a law firm that represented and did some work with Pepper. I think he was running the estimating department at MMR.” Pepper and Allen developed a good strategy for takeovers. When a company went broke, it usually left a number of jobs unfinished. A bonding company would come in and find another contractor to complete the work. It was important that the bidder do the work quickly, properly, and at a good price. MMR would bid on the contract, complete the job, and leave the customer more than pleased, and in the process, it would absorb the bankrupt company’s equipment, personnel, and buildings.

MMR grew exponentially through the 1980s, and Allen was a crucial player in his dual role as part owner and legal counsel during those growth years. When MMR Holding went bankrupt at the end of that decade, it left a number of jobs uncompleted. When they decided to restart the company, they decided to take the novel approach of bidding on the old company’s unfinished jobs.

In the meantime, their new company needed a name.

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I ALWAYS KNEW THAT PEPPER WOULD BOUNCE BACK. HE’S THAT KIND OF PERSON; HE ISN’T GOING TO SIT BACK AND SAY, ‘OKAY, IT’S DONE.’

THE BIRTH OF MMR II In the federal registry of corporate titles, MMR was still available, so Pepper decided that they might — C AT H Y B R E L A N D as well buy the rights and keep it. As he explains, “Once you got outside Louisiana, nobody knew the troubles the company had been through. We had former clients who didn’t know a thing about the bankruptcy and didn’t really care. They knew many of our key people and still had a lot of respect for the MMR name. So we decided to stay with it.”

Reviving the title might have been solely a business and marketing decision, but some of Pepper’s colleagues believed he had personal reasons for reclaiming the MMR flag. “In my opinion, keeping the name was part business smarts PAGE 51 (from left): Allen and part hard-headedness,” says Gene Clouatre. “For Boudreaux, Pepper Rutland, and Tom Welborn. Says Allen: some it was a respected name. For others it wasn’t, “The key thing that Pepper has and Pepper wanted to prove them wrong.” is the ability to build a team.

Cathy Breland, one of the original MMR adminHe knows how to rally his istrative executives, says she wasn’t surprised to players and get them going in the same direction.” hear that the company was reincorporating, and

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DOING THINGS THE MMR WAY doing so under the same name. “I always knew that Pepper would bounce back. He’s that kind of person; he isn’t going to sit back and say, ‘Okay, it’s done.’ I was glad to hear he was coming back under the old name. After all, at that time, MMR and Pepper were one and the same thing. The company wouldn’t have existed without him.”

Some of the veterans thought it was a risky marketing move. “I thought it was a crazy idea,” admits Tony Gibson, who was drafted by MMR during its rapid growth years and spent eight years as a project superintendent with the company during the 1980s. “There were a lot of rival companies bad-mouthing us in Louisiana, and by bringing back the company under its old name, it seemed like we were making it easier for them to keep the negativity going.”

Cathy says that in her opinion that was all the more reason to keep the name. “When MMR failed, it was like Pepper failed. He had to prove himself.”

So the name was reclaimed (first as MMR– Radon, and then as MMR Group), as were the company’s founding values. For Pepper, it was a

When the new MMR rose from the ashes of the old, Allen Boudreaux was right there at Pepper’s side. After a decade of service throughout the 1980s as legal counsel and part owner of the company, he knew Pepper as well as anyone, and he felt strongly that the company’s unique culture was the key element in bringing MMR back to life.

“Pepper is a very determined individual, and he inspires confidence in others. He likes to give people a lot of creative control. But to a large degree, it’s a one-man show.

He hates it when I say it, but in my opinion the company worked so well because it was a benevolent dictatorship. You can’t run companies by consensus, and I think the key thing that Pepper has is the ability to build a team. He knows how to rally his players and get them going in the same direction.

“That comes from strength of character and the ability to inspire loyalty. You don’t just build a team by throwing a lot of money at them and getting them to join you.

You have to get them to buy into the goals of the company and include them in the company’s success. And that’s what he set out to do with the new MMR. “He did a number of things brilliantly. One of the most important things he did was to create a system that was fair, that rewarded people. He treated people equally

to some degree, but he also rewarded successes. He developed the idea that you could become a stockholder and participate in the growth of MMR, and that really made people identify with the goals of the company. Most remarkably, he did it in a way that didn’t create a competitive environment among his senior people.

“Another thing that was fundamental to the success of the new MMR was the decision to focus on those clients we really liked to work for. We defined why we liked to work for them, and then focused our sales efforts to get more work out of them, even if we weren’t a low bidder. That was key — having the client pulling for us, promoting our case to their directors and decision makers. Even in a competitive bidding process, those preferred clients saw us as a good fit. They knew that the MMR culture and their own culture would fit together, and that made it much easier for us to get long-term agreements with them.”

IT WASN’T EASY CONVINCING THE OLD-TIMERS (AND THEIR WIVES) TO COME BACK TO MMR, TAKE A CUT IN PAY, AND ROLL THE DICE WITH A REBORN OUTFIT. Page 55: Tony Gibson and his wife, Jennifer. Tony was one of the originals who had to leave during MMR’s financial troubles, but Pepper knew he’d be back: “When you feel like packing a suitcase and coming on over here, we’ll be waiting for you.”

I WAS HESITANT BECAUSE THERE WAS A BIG BLACK CLOUD HANGING OVER THAT COMPANY NAME. —TO NY G I B S O N

lesson learned. “I resolved that I would never go public again. And I would caution anyone against getting involved with outsiders who are only interested in making a quick buck.”

For the first two years, Pepper refused to take a salary, instead plowing whatever money they made back into the company. Meanwhile he worked the phones, trying to put the old team back together. MMR Group may have been struggling, but a lot of the original players, still relatively young and with growing families, were making good money at other companies.

Allen Boudreaux was on board as a shareholder and legal counsel for the reborn firm. “Gene Clouatre was tied up with another company and couldn’t join us at that time, so it was just Pepper and me. Between the two of us, we got the controlling interest in a company called Radon, so we called ourselves MMR–Radon for a while. We put together completion agreements with joint venture partners, and that was how we funded MMR II. But yeah, it was humble beginnings because of the bankruptcy. I think we actually lost money the first year.”

It wasn’t easy convincing the old-timers (and their wives) to come back to MMR, take a cut in pay, and roll the dice with a reborn outfit. Tony is a typical example of those who answered the call to come back. “I got my training in Alabama, my home state, and knew both electrical and instrumentation,” he says.

“There was a large paper mill expansion project going on there, and that’s when I came on board with MMR. I think Pepper was about 34 when I first met him, and my first impression was, my gosh, he’s very young to be running such a big company. I was quite impressed. MMR was growing very, very rapidly, so I stayed with them and worked as field superintendent on projects in Arkansas, Mississippi, all over the United States. I was away from home a lot, but it was good money and there was lots of room for advancement.”

THE TOOL TO FIT THE JOB Measuring instruments have been around for thousands of years, the first examples being crude water clocks from the 15th century BC found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. Three thousand years later, English architect Christopher Wren designed an instrument that could record and predict weather with ink pens that scrolled patterns across a moving drum of paper.

One of the most famous challenges in the history of engineering was the British contest to design a clock that would work on the high seas. Pendulum-driven clocks don’t work at sea and spring-driven clocks are affected by variance in temperature.

A sea-proof clock would allow mariners to navigate their way through dangerous waters by marking high noon, checking it against the vessel’s clock, and thereby determining longitude.

Clocks, recorders, and other instruments were mechanically driven until the Industrial Revolution, when compressed air and pneumatic hoses started to be used to regulate sensors, displays, and controls. Pneumatic lines were replaced by electrical wires in the 20th century, and today instrumentation technology is

evolving at an accelerating pace. As leaders in the field, MMR is in step with the next wave of instrument technology: wireless systems monitored by a central computer system.

Instrumentation in the process industry is essentially behind the control of four activities: flow, pressure, temperature, and level. These activities are monitored and controlled in all process technology. Most facilities involved in steel, oil, petrochemical, wood fiber, textile, and power production have separate instrumentation and control departments. The fundamental job of instrumentation and control engineers is to automate processes that are too complex and potentially dangerous for hands-on management. Automation has been a major economic force since the first steam tractor, and although it sometimes gets a bad name for putting people out of work, it tends to spin off new types of jobs — jobs that are more efficiently done and easier on the back (as any farmer will testify). Instrumentation contractors like MMR have helped to create a modern industrial world that is more productive, clean, efficient, and safe.

IT WAS MORE OF A CULTURAL THING THAT PULLED US BACK. MMR HAS A UNIQUE KIND OF CULTURE THAT YOU’RE JUST NOT GOING TO FIND ANYWHERE ELSE. — L E E L A N D K I L PAT R I C K

Tony says he was working on a job in Grenada, Mississippi, when the phone rang and he learned that MMR Holding was filing for bankruptcy. “We knew MMR was having trouble, but it still came as quite a shock.

I had a wife and a newborn, so I made an arrangement with the client to finish the job, and then went on to work on other projects.

A few years later, Pepper called me to see if I wanted to come back with the newly formed MMR, but I was hesitant because there was a big black cloud hanging over that company name.”

Pepper offered Tony different jobs, including a post in Thailand that would earn him good money.

But it would have required him to be away for most of the year, and he felt it would damage his relationship with his kids. “I told him I couldn’t do it,” he says. “We had all gone through this really bad time when the company went

through bankruptcy and I just didn’t think I could do it again, particularly with my family involved.

But it was hard to say no, because MMR is a really outstanding company to work for and I really did like being there. Pepper called me several more times with different proposals. He said, ‘Listen, I’m going to stop aggravating you. But when you feel like packing a suitcase and coming on over here, we’ll be waiting for you.’ I wasn’t too happy where I was working, so finally I bit the bullet, called Pepper back, and said, ‘I’m coming over with my suitcase.’”

Some of the other veterans came back around the same time. Tony emphasizes they weren’t lured back by a bigger paycheck. “MMR was still struggling to find work,” he says. “It wasn’t making any real money yet. It was more of a cultural thing that pulled us back. MMR has a unique kind of culture that you’re just not going to find anywhere else.”

Leeland Kilpatrick was one of the first original players to return. Like John Clouatre, Grady Saucier, and others, he had climbed aboard MMR on the very bottom rung — sweeping floors and doing odd jobs in the warehouse as a teenaged summer student. “I went to LSU in 1982 and continued working part-time with MMR in the summers, and eventually moved into the estimating department,” he says. “That’s pretty much where they like to start you off if they think you have long-term potential. It’s the hothouse where they really put you through your paces and teach you about the business.”

Leeland says MMR deliberately sends promising employees into challenging situations to see what they can handle. “It’s one of those things where they want to see what you’re made of,” he says. “One of the companies that MMR absorbed during the 1980s was called Wallace, which then became known as MMR–Wallace.

I was a 24-year-old field engineer right out of college, so they put me in as a project manager for Wallace. They were a general contractor, mechanical contractor. This was the early ’80s.

The oil and gas market was in a recession, so companies like Wallace were looking for other types of work, like sewage treatment plants.

One of my first jobs was a sewage plant in a rundown part of Baton Rouge. We had to cut into an existing sewer line, and we decided to do it in the early hours between midnight and daybreak, when it seemed like the fewest number of people would be flushing their toilets.

“So there we were, down in the manhole, trying to cut into this 16-inch sewage line and get it done before people started waking up in the morning and doing their business. The city had storage tanks that could take a certain amount during low flow, but they could only hold so much, and we had a window of maybe four or five

PAGE 58: Leeland Kilpatrick was one of the first of the original MMR staff to return.

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MMR. left: Pepper albuciusFrom tractatos, mea veri vidit Rutland, Bruser, falli id. SedJonathan cu recteque explicari.

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Chapter Three: The Tough Ge t Going

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THEY WORKED LONG HOURS FOR LOW PAY BUT THEY DIDN’T COMPLAIN, BECAUSE PEPPER WAS WORKING JUST AS HARD AND GETTING PAID NOTHING. hours to get this cut-in done. So that was really fun, standing knee-deep in raw sewage with mosquitoes biting you on the face and, of course, you can’t wipe them off, because you’ve got youknow-what on your gloves. That was one of my first few jobs, and I remember thinking, ‘Man, you’ve hit the big time now.’”

After MMR closed its doors in 1989, Leeland went off to work for different companies, finally ending up at Comstock with Gene Clouatre. “I was only there with Gene for three or four months, doing estimating, when MMR started up again,” he says. “I told Gene I wanted to go back to MMR, and he understood. I was one of the first guys MMR Group hired back — myself and Bubba Smith. Some guys thought it was too risky to leave a good job, go back to MMR, and maybe six months later find themselves on the street again. But I wanted an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with MMR and help build the thing back up. I had a lot of pride in what we had done the first time around.

So I went in and took the chance, took a cut in pay. I was making probably about $47,000 but came back to MMR for $35,000. And boy, we had to work hard for every penny of that.”

Leeland and the late, legendary Bubba Smith (or Mr. Bubba, as he was known around the warehouse) struck an arrangement. “We agreed that if you open the door, you don’t shut the door.

Bubba liked hitting the deck before sunup, so he got here early in the morning and opened the door. I was always a night hawk, so I’d work in the evenings and lock the doors when I left.”

They worked long hours for low pay but they didn’t complain, because Pepper was working just as hard and getting paid nothing. “That was good motivation for the rest of us. Pepper never asks of others what he isn’t willing to do himself.

Even today, if there’s a downturn, the pay cuts start at the top with Pepper and the directors.”

In sports and in business, it’s all about the players. “You have to recruit the right individuals,” Pepper says. “Whether it was Allen Boudreaux or Gene Clouatre, Leeland Kilpatrick, Tom Welborn, Grady Saucier, or Bubba Smith, they had all proven they had the right stuff, and I wanted to work with them again. But it was a big risk for each and every one of them. Their careers were going well. They were making good money. There was a lot at stake. But they had the courage and the strength of character to quit

Chapter Three: The Tough Ge t Going

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I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST GUYS MMR GROUP HIRED BACK. I WANTED AN OPPORTUNITY TO GET IN ON THE GROUND FLOOR AND HELP BUILD THE THING BACK UP. — L E E L A N D K I L PAT R I C K

The dress code was pretty clear: white shirt for everyone, tie unless you’re Pepper. In the foreground (from left): Jason Blume, Tom Welborn, and Pepper; behind the table (from left): Dennis Schroeder, Brett Jacob, Matt Wascom, Darryl Clark, Jeramiah Blum, Jason Clouatre, and Rodi Rispone.

The occasion was an LSU spring football luncheon.

THERE WAS A LOT AT STAKE. BUT THEY HAD THE COURAGE AND THE STRENGTH OF CHARACTER TO QUIT THEIR CURRENT JOBS, COME BACK, TAKE LESS MONEY, AND HOPE IT ALL WORKED OUT IN THE END.

FOLLOW THE LEADER

—PEPPER RUTLAND

Cathy Breland has worked with Gene Clouatre outside MMR and in it. Nothing compares to the experience of being part of MMR. “There’s a feeling of camaraderie here I’ve never found anywhere else.”

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their current jobs, come back, take less money, and hope it all worked out in the end.”

Still, it was tough going. When Tom Welborn came back to MMR in 1994 he knew he was betting all his chips on the future of the company and sometimes wondered if he had done the right thing. “When I came back to MMR, we were probably working six to seven days a week in the estimating department,” he says.

“One night I went home at ten o’clock after another long day and told my wife, ‘I’m not really sure I made the right decision coming back over here.’ We were easily working 80 hours a week. It was like pushing a train up a hill. You’re hoping you’re going to come up over the top at some point and things will get easier.

But while you’re pushing, it’s really tough and you have no idea if you’re making progress. It was just hard, unrelenting work, day after day.”

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

Finding new contracts turned out to be a bigger problem than they had anticipated. Baton Rouge is situated near the heart of the Gulf Coast oil and gas industry — it’s a huge swath of land stretching from the Mississippi River to the oilfields of Texas to the deep-water drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. But like any big industry, the oil and gas sector is dominated by a relatively short list of fiercely competitive companies, and MMR’s historic rivals were making the most of this opportunity to badmouth MMR and anyone who went to work for the company. As Pepper says, “After a few years of working hard to get back on our feet, it became clear to us that our reputation was pretty much ruined in southern Louisiana. If we were going to survive and grow as a company, we had to go somewhere else — someplace far away where we could start from scratch and prove ourselves.”

Cathy Breland worked for MMR throughout the 1980s and was laid off like everyone else when the company went down. But she missed the companionship of MMR and couldn’t find another job that was as interesting and challenging. “I did demographic research on soap products and worked for a coffee company,” she says. “Neither one was as much fun as MMR. One night at about 1:00 a.m. the telephone rang. I was fast asleep, and I thought someone had died or something.

It was Gene Clouatre, MMR’s former vice president. He said he was calling from New York and wanted me to come back and work for him, not at MMR but at a construction company called Comstock. They wanted to open a branch office in Baton Rouge. Gene said, ‘I need your answer right now. Tell me you’re going to do this.’ So I thought about it for a minute and said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’”

Cathy worked with Gene at Comstock, flying back and forth to New York and running the Baton Rouge office. After a while, Gene announced that he wanted to join the newly reborn MMR, and he asked Cathy to come back with him. “Comstock wanted both of us to stay on,” she says. “We were very profitable for Comstock in Baton Rouge. They called Gene their golden boy. We did union construction work

and made them a lot of money, and they loved us. It was a great little office, but like Gene, I wanted to take this chance to go back with MMR, so they had me sign a paper saying that I would not leave for a year.”

She didn’t need a piece of paper to keep her word. She liked the people at Comstock and didn’t want to leave them in the lurch. “Over the next year, I traveled from California to Ohio to close out our projects, and when my year was up, I came straight back to MMR. That was 1995, and I’ve been here ever since. I guess in my life I’ve been with four different companies and never felt the feeling of family you get here at MMR. A lot of that feeling comes from Pepper. He’s really insistent that we’re all on the same team. Anybody can walk into his office and talk to him. Everybody helps everybody with their problems. There’s a feeling of camaraderie here I’ve never found anywhere else.”

The Tubular Bells deep-water oil and gas field was discovered in 2003 and lies in approximately 4,300 feet of water, 135 miles southeast of New Orleans.

AS ALEXANDER THE GREAT SAID: “I’D RATHER HAVE AN ARMY OF SHEEP LED BY A LION, THAN AN ARMY OF LIONS LED BY A SHEEP.”

CHAPTER FOUR

GOING WIDE

—PEPPER RUTLAND

I

N THE CROWDED ARRIVALS WING of Bangkok International Airport, a young construction supervisor named Mike Wilson picked up his luggage and walked out into the sweltering Thailand night. The press of the seething crowds, the racket of motorbikes zooming in and out of parking spots, and the reeking exhaust of worn-out taxis assailed his jetlagged nerves as he stood there wondering where to go and how to get there.

“I finally spotted a guy with a sign that said WILSON,” says Mike. “He took my bags and we headed into downtown Bangkok. It was after midnight, but the traffic was just crazy. Nobody obeys any rules of the road in that city, and thousands of rickety motorcycles were buzzing around us, beeping and revving their engines.” Every square foot of the city is claimed by people or vehicles or animals; it is a churning mass of noise and air pollution. “I had been traveling for 24 hours, and with the exhaustion and everything else my head was just throbbing. It was quite a culture shock for a small-town guy from Baton Rouge.”

Bangkok is one of the most important commercial centers in Asia. U.S. investment after the Second World War stimulated dramatic economic growth, and by the 1980s, Thailand was becoming an important hub of oil and gas development. As Mike explains, “I was in Thailand because Thai Oil needed a power plant to supplement their energy at their refinery. MMR won the bid on the electrical and instrumentation part, and I went there in 1997 to manage the job. I was way outside my comfort zone, but that didn’t seem to bother Pepper at all. Just before he sent me over, I asked him, ‘How are you going to sleep at night knowing there’s a 12-hour time difference and I’m going to be running this project while you’re all asleep?’ He said, ‘Just the fact that you’re asking that question tells me everything I need to know.’”

Mike had worked his way up through the MMR organization and finally reached the point where he seemed ready to manage a project on his own. He says that one of the first challenges he faced in Thailand was figuring out how to navigate a literally foreign culture. “There were so many things to learn.

I didn’t know how much things were supposed to cost. I didn’t know how much to tip people. At the hotel

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WELCOME TO THAILAND

IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE LOCAL CUSTOMS, YOU CAN GET INTO TROUBLE. YOU CAN MAKE SIMPLE MISTAKES THAT ARE QUITE INSULTING. in Bangkok, the bellhop insisted on carrying my bags, so I reached into my wallet, into this mass of red bills and green bills and purple bills, and just gave him one. I had no idea how much it was.

The next morning, five people were waiting for me in the lobby. They wouldn’t let me out the door. I had given the bellhop a massive tip and now everyone wanted to help me.”

He knew it was important to conduct himself professionally, not least for the sake of the company’s reputation. “If you don’t know the local customs, you can get into trouble,” he says. “You can make simple mistakes that are quite insulting.

For example, you don’t ever show people the bottoms of your shoes. If you’re sitting on a mat eating, you’ve got to cross your legs a certain way so no one can see the undersides of your feet.

There’s a lot to learn, and it’s important to develop a good social relationship because it can really affect the outcome of the project.”

One of his most grueling challenges was giving a speech at a Thai funeral. “A fellow who worked —MIKE WILSON

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THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

for us had run his motorcycle into the back of a truck and was killed,” Mike says. “Kamon was a young fellow in his 20s, and I wasn’t sure if I was expected to go to the funeral. I asked another American who was working with me, but he didn’t know. I didn’t want to offend anybody by showing up at the funeral uninvited and I didn’t want to offend anyone by not showing up either.”

Mike talked to his Thai secretary about the finer points of funeral protocol. “I asked her, ‘Should I go? Am I permitted to go? Would the family be offended if I didn’t go, or if I showed up uninvited?’ I found out later that that’s the wrong way to ask a Thai person a question. They’ll only answer one question at a time. She finally said, ‘Yes, you may go.’ But still, I didn’t know what she meant. Did it mean my presence would be tolerated, just because I was a dumb American?

Did it mean nobody cared if I went or not?”

After thinking about it for a while, he decided that skipping the funeral was the riskier choice.

When he arrived, he saw a chalkboard covered with bird symbols, mysterious calligraphy, and

ies , a cha llenge for U.S. compan Doi ng busine ss in Asia is ng lon g ndi y repres ent atives are spe par ticularly when compan ati ng oti neg ng wit h loc al people and per iod s of time int eracti learned e rtly aft er his arr iva l, Mik daily busine ss affairs. Sho one’s sho es, to show the underside of that it is ext remely rude inc lude: . Other rules to rememb er esp ecially dur ing din ner ecially at at any thi ng or anyone, esp 1. Never poi nt your fin ger If nec ess ary, k. mon fam ily or a pas sin g a pho tog raph of the royal gers curled. ext end the hand wit h fin que stion at a time. i people only answer one Tha . ons sti que two ask 2. D on’t on the head.

3. Never pat a Thai child kin g, ween two people who are tal 4. If you have to wal k bet ir view of eac h other. duc k so you don’t blo ck the se, ght as a guest in a Thai hou 5. If you are stayin g overni and st sion of the resident gho don’t forget to ask permis g when you leave. to thank him in the mornin

the loca l language? of s rd wo w fe a n ar le to t an W r name fo r Bangkok: he ot e th th wi rt sta d ul co u Yo Mahadilok Phop thaya Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayu Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Amon Piman Awatan Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom m Prasit.

Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanuka

THE THAILAND JOB WAS NOT JUST AN EXERCISE IN ADAPTATION. THE COMPANY’S VERY SURVIVAL WAS AT STAKE. one phrase he recognized: “MMR — Mike Wilson.”

Seeing his name on the guest list made him feel simultaneously relieved and mortified. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, that was a close call.’ Obviously they’d assumed that I would come, and I had come close to hurting their feelings by almost skipping it.”

The first part of the funeral ritual involved eating food with the mother and widow of the young man. “That’s a kind of awkward story, too.

You know, sometimes they feed you things in Thailand that you can’t believe — even things that are still alive. But that wasn’t the main problem.

There was a stage up front, with little stations set up with burning incense, an altar, Kamon lying in a casket up on a pedestal surrounded by flowers, and three or four monks conducting the prayer ceremony. There was lots of incense, because it’s a hot climate and dead people start to smell bad very quickly. So as I’m sitting there, my Thai superintendent, who speaks English, comes and tells me I have to go up on stage. I thought, ‘Are you kidding?’

I was already sweating like crazy, because it’s really hot in Thailand, even at eight o’clock at night. And now I had to go up on the stage? It was more than I expected, but I didn’t have much choice.”

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THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

Mike remembered to kick off his shoes before he followed his superintendent up onto the stage.

In accordance with whispered instructions, he knelt down, lit some incense, knelt down some more, lit some more incense, then knelt in front of the monks, who were chanting and looking at him with what seemed to be disapproval. “Their eyes were boring holes right through me,” he says.

“They looked offended. I wondered, what was I doing wrong?

“Finally, my Thai superintendent led me over to the altar in front of the coffin. The coffin was elevated above me, with flowers all around it, and as I lit another stick of incense he said to me, ‘Now you have to say something. You have to make a speech.’

“A speech? What kind of speech? The mother and widow were sitting in front, and all the mourners were watching me, like they were waiting for me to say something reassuring and wise. When the superintendent saw that I was preparing to talk to them, he said, ‘No, you have to talk to Kamon.’

“I whispered, ‘You mean say something silently, like a prayer?’

“He says, ‘Mister Mike, if you don’t speak to him out loud, how is he going to hear you?’”

The superintendent patted Mike on the shoulder and left him standing there, sweating with tension. One part of his mind was reflecting

on the many bizarre things he’d found himself doing since taking charge of this project. When he started working at MMR, he never thought that his job description would one day include delivering a motivational speech to a corpse.

BUILDING STRENGTH BY EMBRACING DIFFICULTY The Thailand job was not just an exercise in adaptation. The company’s very survival was at stake.

After MMR’s bankruptcy in 1989, the company found it very difficult to secure business in Louisiana. “Our corporate rivals didn’t like us,” Pepper says. “I guess that’s normal, but people caught up in rivalry can do cruel things. Our competitors went out of their way to prevent MMR from getting back into business. They poisoned the water for us in Louisiana. I never wanted to look for projects internationally; we’d never done it before, and frankly, it felt very risky. There were so many unknowns, hidden costs, labor problems, delays, you name it. But we had to do it. We had to find new markets if we were going to survive.”

One of MMR’s first important forays into the international sphere happened almost by accident.

In 1995, MMR did a job for Texas-based Dresser Industries, fabricating some instrumentation modules that were bound for Venezuela. Allen

Boudreaux recalls that the client asked him and some other MMR principals to go down to Venezuela and supervise the hookup of the modules. “When we got down to Venezuela, we were introduced to some very nice people,” says Allen. “They really appreciated what we did, and their head of engineering construction said, ‘You know, the next time we need you, it might be on short notice, and I wish I didn’t have to call you in the U.S. I’d like to call a number here in Venezuela and have one of your people answer the phone so we can meet and discuss the job.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s fair enough.’

So we left a guy down there to set up an office.”

His name was Harlyn Courville. “This was in the early 1990s,” says Pepper. “Harlyn stayed down there and liked it. He liked it so much he never came back.”

One of the major players in Venezuela at the time was a man named Ray Proctor, the project director for a large expansion for PDVSA, the Venezuelan oil giant. “I knew Ray a bit,” says Pepper, “but I didn’t know him well. And he knew about me a bit because his wife was friends with my old college roommate. It was just one of those coincidental connections. Anyway, I had just gone to Florida with Connie for a rare vacation when Harlyn called me from Venezuela and said, ‘Ray Proctor is here, and I think you should come

Mike Wilson with Thai employees. International markets were crucial to the company’s reboot, but overseas projects became important in their own right as MMR’s expertise and contacts grew.

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WE HAD TO FIND NEW MARKETS IF WE WERE GOING TO SURVIVE. —PEPPER RUTLAND

down here and talk about doing some business for him.’ I said, ‘Listen, Harlyn, if I come all the way down there on a wild goose chase, you and me are going to have a problem.’ He assured me it would be worthwhile, so I flew down.”

Pepper and Ray Proctor went out for dinner. At dinner, Ray asked to hear the MMR story firsthand.

“I just told him the whole thing,” Pepper says. “He listened carefully as he was eating his dinner, and after I was finished, he told me to come and see him the next day on the job. This was an incredible job site. You had to see it to believe it — 13,000 people working on a construction job, and he was the top guy.

He was the king. He told me he was going to put a start-up and commissioning program together and had decided to give MMR a shot.

He said, ‘I’m not going to let your company do the electrical testing, because I’m not sure you can do it. But I’m going to go ahead and take a chance and give MMR the commissioning work.’

“That job had lots of hurdles, but we got over them one at a time. This was a very significant opportunity for us. There was a chance of this growing into a $25 million job if we handled it right.”

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THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

It was good to have a big international project on the go, but it was difficult to find reliable people who could go on assignment to a foreign country and represent MMR. Pepper had learned a hard lesson in the 1980s when he entrusted key projects to people who didn’t share MMR’s service-oriented cultural values. He didn’t have much choice that time — when Bob McCracken sold his controlling stake in MMR to a private equity firm, MMR lost control of its founding culture — but he wasn’t about to make the same mistake again. Venezuela was going to be a big growth opportunity, and the company needed someone who was steady and reliable, someone they could trust with keeping the books and guarding the MMR legacy.

A FEW GOOD MEN MMR’s representative in Venezuela, the late Harlyn Courville, had a younger brother named John.

Harlyn and John grew up in Baton Rouge, and after graduating from high school in 1969, John shipped off to Vietnam. “I did not serve in a combat capacity,” he says. “I worked in logistics, making sure that ships were unloaded properly and goods were sent to their proper location.” After serving in Vietnam and Germany, he went back to Baton Rouge,

IT WAS DIFFICULT TO FIND RELIABLE PEOPLE WHO COULD GO ON ASSIGNMENT TO A FOREIGN COUNTRY AND REPRESENT MMR.

WELCOME TO VENEZUELA Venezuela is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with extraordinary natural wonders like Angel Falls (3,200 feet) and Lake Maracaibo, an ancient lake with nonstop thunder and lightning.

It is a racial melting pot, famous for its passionate culture and strikingly attractive people. With 300 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, it also has the largest reserves of oil in the world.

Venezuela’s democratic government worked closely with international oil companies to develop the country’s oil wealth, and during the second half of the 20th century, partnerships with Exxon, Shell, and other multinationals made Venezuela the richest country in Latin America. Venezuelan oil production peaked the year that Chávez was elected, and has steadily gone downhill ever since. Even though gasoline is essentially free (you can fill your tank for pennies), Chávez’s successors are even worse, and the country is ruined — thanks to a failed experiment in creating a socialist utopia.

VENEZUELA WAS GOING TO BE A BIG GROWTH OPPORTUNITY, AND THE COMPANY NEEDED SOMEONE WHO WAS STEADY AND RELIABLE … attended LSU on the G.I. Bill, and graduated with a BA in accounting in 1976.

He went on to work at several accounting jobs in the Baton Rouge area, but he found the work flat and uninteresting. “It wasn’t challenging enough,” he says. “I decided to try something different, so my wife and I went to Africa, to Sudan, where we got involved in the big famine relief effort there.

We stayed with a Sudanese family and worked for aid organizations in Khartoum, and it was very interesting. Nice people and a country with a long, rich history. When we first arrived, a benevolent dictatorship was running the country. The people were very poor, but they were friendly and funloving. They enjoyed their alcohol and would cut loose on the weekends. Then, about a year into our stay, the Muslim Brotherhood overthrew the government. My wife was evacuated, and it became a risky place to be an American. I made friends with the U.S. Marines who protected the American embassy. That turned out to be a good idea, because the city started to unravel and life became wretched and unhappy for the Sudanese people. The Muslim extremists who ran the new government instituted Sharia law, and during those two and a half years I watched the country

go steadily downhill. It went from being a happy place to a total disaster. Everyday life was nasty and dangerous, so I went back to the States.”

When John got back to Baton Rouge, he did freelance accounting work and wondered what his next move might be. Harlyn had already left for Venezuela by this point. “I guess I’ve heard the story many times,” says John. “Harlyn was supposed to go down there for a short while, but Venezuela is a very seductive country. Anyway, Harlyn went down there, fell in love, and never came back.”

While Harlyn was living in Venezuela and working for MMR, he told Pepper about his brother, John, the ace accountant who liked global travel and was married to a wonderful woman named Patty, a veteran bookkeeper. As Pepper explains, “Harlyn was not an execution guy. He was a salesman. We were having a lot of struggles on that job, and we needed someone to monitor the thing. Harlyn asked me to interview John, and I liked him. He and Patty had worked all over the world, and John was also a CPA, so I made him an offer and they came on board.”

“This was 1994,” says John. “MMR had just acquired a significant amount of work there,

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From left: John Courville, Rodi Rispone, Gary Williams, Allen Boudreaux, Tom Welborn, Pepper Rutland, Harlyn Courville, and Grady Saucier on the links in 1999; John and Harlyn Courville at a managers’ retreat in the Bahamas, 2009; John and Patty Courville at the same event; and the city of Punto Fijo, Venezuela, where John and Patty were stationed when they first moved to South America.

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and they needed someone to administer the contract and handle those kinds of duties. They were sending a lot of Americans over there, and it was turning into a big responsibility, so they wanted to make sure everything was being monitored and administrated properly.”

John and Patty moved to a little city called Punto Fijo, on a peninsula just across the water from the Caribbean island of Aruba. Even during those relatively peaceful years, the city of Caracas was large and chaotic, but fortunately they had no need to spend a lot of time there. They followed commercial opportunities in the oil business, moving on to Maracaibo, and then Puerto la Cruz, on the eastern side of the country, where the U.S. oil companies were establishing upgrader refineries. “That’s where they processed and upgraded the heavy crude for the market,” says John. “We did electrical instrumentation on a lot of projects, including some contracts in Aruba and Colombia. Looking back on it, the contracts were

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much smaller than what we do now. But they seemed big at the time, and we were very busy.”

Patty also worked for MMR, setting up the accounting systems. They lived in an apartment complex, they drove to work together, and life was relatively safe. “People respected the American and European expatriates. There was a feeling that we were working to bring jobs and economic development to the country, so we were welcomed.”

Venezuela’s era of growth and prosperity ended in 1999, when a young socialist firebrand named Hugo Chávez came to power. Chávez was celebrated by social progressives around the world, and his popularity grew in his own country as he began handing out cash to the poor. Venezuela had more oil reserves than any other country including Saudi Arabia, and for a while the country’s Treasury seemed bottomless. However, Chávez’s Robin Hood approach to wealth redistribution was a cover: he was using the oil wealth to enrich himself and his cronies. It’s an old story — a social reformer

who is actually only interested in power. He seized foreign-owned businesses, fired the managers, replaced them with incompetent political cronies, and sent 100,000 barrels of free oil every day to his friend Fidel Castro in Cuba. The bolivar (Venezuela’s currency) dropped precipitously, and MMR had to transport steamer trunks full of currency, accompanied by armed guards, to meet its payroll.

Employees had to carry per diem allowances in bags because the currency wouldn’t fit in their wallets. Chávez’s policies led to runaway inflation, street protests, brutal repression, unstocked food stores, and skyrocketing crime. At the peak of the dictatorship, Venezuela had one of the highest murder rates in the world. “We lived there for nine years,” says John Courville. “In the last two years, crime became a real concern.”

He and Patty would take different routes to work every day and leave at different times in case they were being patterned. They were wary of stoplights, where there was a heightened risk

WE ALWAYS HAD TO AVOID BEING STUCK IN TRAFFIC, BECAUSE THAT’S WHEN SOMEONE COULD RUN UP TO THE CAR WITH A GUN. —JOHN COURVILLE

CHÁVEZ’S POLICIES LED TO RUNAWAY INFLATION, STREET PROTESTS, BRUTAL REPRESSION, UNSTOCKED FOOD STORES, AND SKYROCKETING CRIME. of being hemmed in by other vehicles. “We always had to avoid being stuck in traffic, because that’s when someone could run up to the car with a gun. We had a few scary incidents. One of our employees was robbed at gunpoint coming out of a store one evening. They robbed him, forced him into his car, and drove him out to the middle of nowhere. He thought they were going to kill him, but they just threw him out of the car. He still works for us.”

They would never go out for dinner in the evening, and walking outside after dark was “absolutely out of the question. You just couldn’t leave the house. Before Chávez, life was pretty good.

We would socialize with other couples, get together, and do different things. It was like what happened in Sudan, where the Muslim Brotherhood ruined the country for everyday Sudanese people. In Venezuela, a nice country on the right track was ruined by a dictatorship.”

Hugo Chávez and his followers blamed the country’s spectacular economic woes on the United States, multinational capitalists, and foreign-owned oil companies. Ironically, average Venezuelans had benefitted more from those foreign companies than they did from their own leader.

MMR has always tried to hire and train local workers, and, whenever possible, to bring them into the full-time workforce. “When we went abroad, we started using fewer and fewer Americans and Europeans,” says John Courville.

“We developed our own technical and craft work force from Venezuela, and we still use them today.

Anywhere. As a matter of fact, we brought some of them to Canada, to the Alberta oil sands, where we did some commissioning work. One gentleman, for example, Gianfranco Ventresca, was a guy that we knew who had his own little technical company in Venezuela. When one of our managers moved to Canada, he said, ‘I know the perfect guy.’ So we brought in Gianfranco, got him a visa, and he stayed in Canada for two and a half years. About three years after he went back to Venezuela, we brought him to the U.S. and he started up the automation part of our commissioning group. He works for us in Houston now.

“We’re also working on getting visas for some of our Venezuelans who have come here, have asked for political asylum, and were granted it. I get emails from workers who want help getting work permits, and we generally do whatever we can to provide assistance. If our Venezuelan technical

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THE BIG YELLOW SIGN In 1892, a barge carrying kerosene docked in Bangkok harbor and launched Shell’s first venture in Southeast Asia. Since then, Shell has played a lead role in developing the Thai oil industry, establishing refineries, building more than 500 retail stations, and trucking fuel, heating oil, and lubricant around the country.

It is regarded by the Thais as a good corporate citizen and has worked closely with the Thai government to build and strengthen the country’s economy.

Shell has also partnered with major subcontractors like MMR to protect the environment, subsidize disaster relief, fund scholarships, and educate its Thai workforce with voluntary free programs like the popular Shell English Quiz. As part of the ongoing search for fuel-efficient technologies, the company is a long-term funder of the Shell Eco-Marathon, a competition that encourages students from across Asia to devise new techniques for maximizing fuel energy.

The bright young students supported by Shell often win the pan-Asian competition.

A state-of-the art refinery opened in Rayong Province, Thailand, in 1996 — a joint venture between Shell and the Petroleum Authority of Thailand, with support from MMR. Inset: a student takes part in the Shell Eco-Marathon, which since 2010 has challenged participants to build vehicles achieving the highest possible fuel efficiency.

WE DEVELOPED OUR OWN TECHNICAL AND CRAFT WORK FORCE FROM VENEZUELA, AND WE STILL USE THEM TODAY.

people work for us for 12 months within a 36-month period, and if they can prove that they work for a foreign affiliate of MMR, we’re able to get them a work visa here in the U.S.; it’s classified as an intercompany —JOHN COURVILLE transfer. We’ve been able to get blanket approval for that and we’ve used it to bring people to the U.S. or send them to Canada. We do a lot of intercompany transfers, and the employees really benefit from our ability to do that. We moved our entire MMR Venezuela staff to Ecuador, except for a few admin people we left in Venezuela to do recruiting. Our project in Ecuador was completely run by Venezuelans.”

PULLING UP STAKES Venezuela was an exotic and challenging new environment for MMR, and Thailand was even more ambitious.

Ian Foster says that when he first experienced Thailand, it was a daunting work environment, even for a huge and experienced company like his.

“In 1993, Fluor got involved in a refinery for Shell in Thailand,” he says, “and it was a nerve-wracking scenario, because this was the largest lump-sum risk project that Fluor had ever undertaken. A lot of that pressure ended up coming down on me,

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because the CEO told me, ‘All right, you’re supposed to be a functional leader and you’re supposed to be the best in your field — go over there and manage the risk on that project in Thailand.’”

It was a massive project. “We had 15,000 workers on the job, with 55 million man-hours recorded for that whole project,” he says.

“We had so many workers on the job because about 20 percent of them don’t do anything. That’s just their work culture. They sit around and eat or sleep, and you have to just accept it and hire more people.

So this is where MMR did things differently.”

When Ian got to Thailand, he noted that all the contracts had been awarded to companies from Korea, Thailand, or Europe. Fluor is a Texas-based company, and it struck him as curious that no U.S. firms were involved. “The construction manager was from Louisiana, and he felt the same way.”

Ian already knew a bit about MMR, and so he decided to call Baton Rouge. “I asked Pepper if he might be interested in bidding on some of the refinery project,” he says. “At that point, MMR was just getting restarted after their run of bad luck in 1989 and their international experience was just Venezuela. I wasn’t sure if they were even interested in working so far from home. But within a matter of days, Pepper and his business partner at the time, Allen Boudreaux, landed in Thailand, bid on a contract with the largest engineering/construction company in Thailand, and won the job. It was an amazing thing to see.”

THE HOME TEAM The sheer distance between Baton Rouge and Thailand is incredible — it’s about as far as you can go around the world without coming back the other way. Allen Boudreaux only had to spend two weeks there every three months — but there were always surprises. “I left one time for a two-day meeting and stayed five weeks.

It was sort of challenging for my wife.

She was really good about it but was never happy about it. Later on, when we started doing work even farther afield in places like Angola, I would disappear for a couple of weeks, and we couldn’t even talk by phone because back then you didn’t have cell phones. So yeah, none of us could have done this work without good support from our families.”

According to Allen Boudreaux, the Thai project was very, very different from anything MMR had ever tackled. “The culture was so different that we decided to rebuild our entire approach from the ground up. In the U.S., you don’t just throw bodies at a project. Your labor costs are so high that you have to manage it, plan it down to the last detail, or your labor costs will sink you. In Thailand, everything was about the schedule. You’re trying to maintain the productivity level in order to stay on schedule.

Labor there was only $1.30 an hour, so we decided we’d be better off putting 300 more workers on a job and finishing on time.”

They also redesigned the job descriptions. In the U.S., a Class A electrician might do anything that needs to be done, including pulling wire and other mundane tasks. MMR decided to dispense with the team approach. “We didn’t need a Class A electrician for pulling underground cable,” says Allen. “And we didn’t have enough of them anyway. So we broke the work down more like a manufacturing process. For example, in one case we had something like 900 light fixtures that were exactly alike. So we taught people how to preassemble all those light fixtures, and that’s all they did. They didn’t know how to mount them, and they didn’t know how to terminate them.

But they knew how to assemble them.

That’s how we got past the problem of not having enough Class A people available in that region.”

For executives like Allen Boudreaux, the requirements of the job can be tough — a lot of time on the road, away from the family, coming up with solutions in less-than-ideal conditions. So downtime, like taking part in the MMR fishing tournament enjoyed by employees, clients, and friends for 20 years, is doubly important.

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As in Venezuela, MMR was interested in using local workers as much as possible, motivating them, training them, and even bringing the best ones into MMR for long-term employment. The old maxim “If you want a job done right, hire a woman” proved accurate in Thailand. “We hired a lot of women,” Allen Boudreaux says. “For welding, we actually trained, tested, and certified the welders back in our shop, and the women were more reliable. They showed up and were very motivated. If they were available, we trained them.”

MMR also introduced accommodation allowances that worked better for female employees.

“Normally, the other contractors provided what they call construction housing for their workers,” says Allen. “When we got there, we looked at it and felt it was pretty basic and overcrowded, so we decided to create a per diem system. We said.

‘We’re not going to build a camp for you. We’re going to give you some money on a per diem basis and you can go live wherever you want.’ We were the first contractors to do that, and they really appreciated it. They were happy that they weren’t forced to live in a camp. They could leave the job site at the end of the day and be with their families or friends.”

MMR pioneered an identification system for the workers’ hardhats that allowed the

WE HIRED A LOT OF WOMEN. FOR WELDING, WE ACTUALLY TRAINED, TESTED, AND CERTIFIED THE WELDERS BACK IN OUR SHOP, AND THE WOMEN WERE MORE RELIABLE.

supervisors to watch the job site with binoculars and determine who was working effectively. Some of the Thais were alarmed by this. Slacking on the job is pretty much standard in economic systems where hard work and lazy work —ALLEN BOUDREAUX are paid equally and chances of personal advancement are nonexistent. Many of the Thais believed they had a perfect right to nap on the job if they were tired or to cook a meal in the middle of their shift if they were hungry. After all, they’d shown up for work. Wasn’t that enough? Ian Foster says the Through its hiring policies, MMR folks were called “those crazy Americans.”

Craft Training Center, and “One of the Thai supervisors came to me and connections with schools like complained that MMR had put big numbers on LSU, MMR is actively pursuing more balance in the gender everyone’s helmets and now they were sitting on makeup of its contractors their butts spying on the workers and planning — here a female student to fire anyone who wasn’t performing. I called in practices tape terminations the project manager and said, ‘What the heck is on a 150-horsepower motor in the training center. Inset: going on?’ He said, ‘No, no, they don’t understand.

Pepper visits the Shell refinery It’s the opposite. We’re not trying to find out who jobsite in Map Ta Phut, isn’t working. We’re trying to find out who is Thailand, to congratulate the working. We’re going to watch those people and crew on their outstanding safety practices. promote them.’”

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In Thailand, a crowd of 13,000 gathered for the biggest safety meeting MMR has ever seen.

Part of the draw? Giveaways at the meeting included mopeds, motorcycles, and bags of rice.

THEY WERE HAPPY THAT THEY WEREN’T FORCED TO LIVE IN A CAMP. THEY COULD LEAVE THE JOB SITE AT THE END OF THE DAY AND BE WITH THEIR FAMILIES OR FRIENDS. —ALLEN BOUDREAUX

Many of the tasks on the Thailand job were divided by gender. For instance, crews pulled cable by hand. The men would pull the cable, and the women would bend it to turn corners.

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Rewarding workers who showed initiative was a novel idea on a construction project in Southeast Asia. “There were about 15,000 workers on the overall job and about 3,000 workers on the MMR contract,” says Allen. “You can’t fire people for not working. That’s just not done. But the numbered helmets allowed us to quickly identify where someone belonged, what discipline they were in, and what they were supposed to be doing. We took the best workers, paid them more, and trained them. Of the 3,000, we selected about 500 who were really good. We trained them well and found work for them after our part of the Shell project was finished. We had them doing everything from cutting the grass to cleaning the offices, just to keep them busy. And then we went across the street and built a plant for Monsanto. After the Monsanto job was wrapped up, we took that same Thai workforce and went down to Singapore to build a plant there.

So that turned out to be a great arrangement both for our Thai employees and for MMR.”

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Ian Foster says that word travels fast in Asia, and MMR’s performance on the Shell project raised eyebrows in the construction industry. “MMR got it done on time. The work was top quality, and they outperformed every other contractor,” he says.

“That was the first time I’d actually worked with them. It was a great success, and I was glad that I’d called them.”

WHEN IN BANGKOK …

Mike Wilson took his family to Thailand, which made life easier for him but not necessarily for them. He says, “The whole family got quite sick one time, but that was mostly my fault. Most people tell you not to eat from the street vendors, but I preferred them because you can see them cooking.

At restaurants you don’t know what’s going on in the back. So I would watch closely whenever they made my food. I told them I didn’t want their cucumber garnish because they would chop that on the same block the raw meat was sitting on.

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT THE MEAL IS LIKE AT THAT KIND OF DINNER, YOU’VE GOT TO SAY IT’S GOOD. —MIKE WILSON

“I learned how to speak a few restaurant words, and I’d always say, ‘ ’ — no need for cucumber! And they’d look at me like I was crazy, because it’s free, so why would you not take it? They’d shake their heads and leave off the cucumber and that usually worked fine.

But one day I promised the family I would bring home some food, and they were all waiting for me.

I stopped to see this one lady who made barbecue chicken on a grill. There was no barbecue sauce like we would have here, but a concoction of some kind of garlic butter that tasted really good.

I asked for four or five orders, and she insisted on chopping it up into little pieces with shattered bone. She took this thing like a toilet brush and used it to slop stuff all over the chicken. I thought, oh great, I don’t know how long it’s been sitting here. Maybe it’s full of botulism. But it was too late to say anything, so I took it home and sure enough, everybody was sick within hours.

The whole family was throwing up.”

Meanwhile, it was important to keep smiling and to maintain good social connections with business associates. “When you get invited to dinner, you can’t really say no,” he says. “That

would be bad. Before my family arrived, I went by myself to a meeting at a little restaurant on a reservoir. It was an open-air, thatched-roof-like setting, and they wanted to invite me for something special called jumping shrimp. We sat around a table, and they brought out this bowl, opened it up, spooned in a bunch of chili powder, quickly stirred it up, and put the lid back on. Most of these things are communal dishes and everybody has a spoon.

As soon as the lid came off, I had to plunge in and get some like everyone else. I didn’t know what it was, but pretty soon I figured out why they kept that lid on tight. There were shrimp in the bowl, and they were alive.”

When he realized what was in the bowl, he hesitated even though he knew he had no choice, because his associates would lose face if he didn’t join in and enjoy the meal. “I didn’t want to be a coward,” he says, “but these were live critters, grass shrimp, and they were jumping around in the bowl. So I got the least amount I could, maybe three or four shrimp, and put them in my mouth.

They were clicking and twitching in my teeth, their little horns were poking me, and I chewed them as fast as I could and swallowed them with a smile.

It doesn’t matter what the meal is like at that kind of dinner, you’ve got to say it’s good. I was choking these things down, and they were looking at me with big smiles — ‘Oh, you like, Mister Mike?’ “‘Love it,’ I’d say. ‘Yeah, sure. More?’”

Mike says that when MMR first assigned him to the Thailand file he was very excited. “It was a pretty fantastic opportunity,” he says. “I had always wanted to build internationally, and I was pretty much prepared for anything. Or at least I thought I was. But nothing can prepare you for the cultural differences and the strange situations you find yourself in. Sometimes you find yourself in a tight spot and you just have to improvise.”

That was the case at Kamon’s funeral, when he was ushered to the front of the temple and asked to give a brief speech to the flower-heaped corpse of his former employee. “My Thai superintendent went up to the coffin, knocked on it as loud as you can knock on a wooden coffin, and said, ‘Kamon, Mister Mike has something to say to you!’

“I thought, oh yeah, this is definitely happening.

So I spoke loud. I said, ‘Kamon … listen, I’m sorry you’re dead. But don’t worry about your wife, because we bought her a sewing machine. We know

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HE NEVER THOUGHT THAT HIS JOB DESCRIPTION WOULD ONE DAY INCLUDE DELIVERING A MOTIVATIONAL SPEECH TO A CORPSE.

I’M SORRY YOU’RE DEAD. BUT DON’T WORRY ABOUT YOUR WIFE, BECAUSE WE BOUGHT HER A SEWING MACHINE. —MIKE WILSON

she wants to go back home and be a seamstress again. So we bought her a sewing machine and we’re sending her back home. Again, sorry you’re dead. Goodbye.’”

The next day there was another ceremony, which his family was expected to attend. “We showed up the next morning and we were all given a little paper fan with a match stuck in it.

The coffin was put on this rolling device next to the cremation chamber, and everybody went up the stairs and threw their little paper thing onto that tray or the coffin to help ignite it. Then they opened the coffin. Kamon was only 25, but he looked 95, all black and shriveled up. They poured coconut milk on his face, closed the coffin, and started the fire. And that was the end of the ceremony. Except they didn’t let us leave, because we’re the Americans, we’re the white people, and they were honored we were there.

“Everybody loved the kids, the little American kids. My daughter was always so hot her cheeks were always red, and they loved to pinch her cheeks and touch her face. My middle son had blond hair, and they loved that because they’re a culture of all black-haired people. My youngest

one was small, he was probably only three or four, and they always wanted to pick him up, so we were a hit there. They were wanting to talk to us, and while we were speaking, the ashes of Kamon started coming down on us. Ashes were falling all over us. It was kind of creepy but we couldn’t leave.

“I found out that later on, after the cremation ceremony was over, that Kamon’s buddies would be retrieving his bones from the fire, arranging them on a blanket in the shape of Kamon, and then drinking and playing cards all night and talking to his skeleton. I didn’t stay for that part.

I thought we had done enough for the sake of cultural exchange.”

THE PUMP DOESN’T WORK, BECAUSE THE VANDAL TOOK THE HANDLE Mike Wilson spent several six-month blocks of time in Thailand and says it developed his ability to improvise and deal with challenges. “When you’re in a foreign country, there’s nobody to help you,” he says. “It’s on you. The only rule is, do whatever you have to do.”

One of the more onerous problems was accessing special materials, parts, and tools.

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FA S T FAC T S

GLOBAL FOOTPRINT Angola

El Salvador

Puerto Rico

Aruba

Equatorial Guinea

Russia

The Bahamas Barbados Brazil Canada Chile China

Ethiopia Ghana India Indonesia Iraq

Colombia

Jamaica

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Nigeria

Ecuador

Panamรก

Egypt

Mexico Oman

Saudi Arabia Singapore South Korea Spain St. Eustatius St. Kitts and Nevis Thailand Trinidad United States U.S. Virgin Islands Venezuela

EVEN IF YOU’RE THE CEO OF THE COMPANY, YOU MIGHT STILL HAVE TO HAND-DELIVER SOME PIPE FITTINGS TO A JOB SITE 12,000 MILES AWAY. —MIKE WILSON

Materials were under constant threat of being stolen. “For example, we had these big spools of electrical wire,” he says. “There’s 1,500 feet of wire on a spool, and the spools are stacked up in a storage yard, which was guarded 24 hours a day.

The guard would get paid to look the other way while the thieves threaded one end of the cable out through a hole in the fence. They were cutting off 100 feet, selling it, then coming back for more.

A spool that doesn’t have the full length of cable is ruined, so that could become a big problem if we didn’t have enough cable to finish up.”

He realized that sometimes the best way to deal with “shrinkage” of stored materials was to find out where the thieves sold the stuff and buy it back. “I’d go to supply houses and look for my equipment,” he says. “We had instruments stolen in boxes with our handwriting on it. I would go into the supply house, and they were sitting right there on the shelf. It was

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on our shelf a few days ago, now it was on his shelf and it was for sale. What could I do? We needed the stuff. We had no choice but to buy it back.”

Theft from the job site was so problematic that Mike required the client to sign off on a form verifying that a valve had been installed, and if it disappeared, it was the client’s problem, not MMR’s.

“The client didn’t like it,” he says, “but I forced him into it. Once he agreed that the part was in place, it became his responsibility to keep an eye on it.”

Some of the valves were stainless steel, valuable as scrap metal. They were easy to remove, and so many of them were being stolen that some operators got into the habit of carrying one in their pocket. “They’d install the valve, do the necessary fine tuning, then take it off, and go to the next job.

You can’t get some of these parts in Thailand, and it would take a long time to get them shipped in.

Our big challenge was meeting our scheduling contracts. You can imagine how difficult it was to be missing parts that were crucial to the job.”

In a real emergency, MMR’s head office would mount a rescue mission. In one case, Mike’s

team ran short of special pipe fittings, which jeopardized the schedule. It would have taken a long time to get them delivered by regular methods, so back in Baton Rouge, Pepper and Allen Boudreaux packed the fittings into some little metal tackle boxes, wrapped them with heavy-duty metal bands, and hopped on a plane to Thailand. When they arrived in Bangkok, the customs officers gave them a hard time about the metal boxes. “Pepper told them it was baby food,” says Mike. “The guards said, ‘Open it.’ Pepper told them they’d have to do it themselves, because he wasn’t carrying tin snips. After all, who’s going to try to carry tin snips through security? The customs officers didn’t have tin snips either, so they just grilled them for a while and then waved them through. That was a good example of the lengths you have to go to to do business offshore.

Even if you’re the CEO of the company, you might still have to hand-deliver some pipe fittings to a job site 12,000 miles away.”

The requirement to go abroad and take on contracts in Venezuela and Thailand turned out

to be a valuable growth experience for MMR. “Anytime you’re outside your comfort zone, that’s when you learn,” Pepper says. “It feels great to have things your own way, but then you’re not forced to grow.”

The successes and rave reviews that MMR got for its work in Latin America and Asia encouraged the company to keep expanding internationally, and now MMR has worked in 37 countries around the world. “They aren’t all developed countries, either,” says Pepper. “If you look at where we’re operating, you’ll see we’ve been in places like Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, El Salvador, and Angola.

“These can be very difficult and challenging environments, and working there made us much more capable than we would have been if we’d stayed at home. All our competitors, they stayed here, poking away at the same old jobs. We went international and became much bigger, stronger, and more skilled. Nowadays, when a customer says, ‘We’ve got a possible job for you, but it’s a long way from your home base — in Nebraska,’ we tell them, ‘We’re pretty sure we can handle that.’”

Pepper with workers during a site visit to Thailand in 1995.

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When the work in Thailand began, MMR had to buy its workers steel-toed boots to satisfy jobsite safety requirements; many workers weren’t used to wearing shoes at all.

IN THE DAYS TO COME, THE SOUTHERN COASTAL STATES OF MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA WOULD BE CRUSHED BY HURRICANE KATRINA AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WOULD DIE.

CHAPTER FIVE

THEY CALLED THE WIND KATRINA

M

MR’S FORAY INTO THE ARENA of international contracting was a risky one.

Labor problems, local corruption, cost overruns, delays caused by weather and other contractors, hostile moves by new regimes, and myriad other risk factors dissuade many U.S. firms from trying to do business abroad. But the MMR team did not have a reputation for backing down from a challenge, and they prevailed. MMR not only turned in first-rate work on time and on budget, but it also consistently outperformed its rivals in Thailand, Venezuela, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. That decade of international outreach (1995–2005) made the organization stronger and more inventive. But its biggest challenge was yet to come.

At 5:00 p.m. local time on August 23, 2005, a spool of breeze arose from the warm seas of the southeastern Bahamas and began to gather strength. A recent tropical depression in the area had just expired, and conditions were ideal for the little squall to grow in size and power. Within hours, the sky had begun to darken and the hitherto unremarkable late summer storm was grease-penciling onto weather screens as Tropical Depression 12 began spinning west, rapidly growing into the largest recorded hurricane ever to set its sights on the United States.

In the days to come, the southern coastal states of Mississippi and Louisiana would be crushed by Hurricane Katrina and thousands of people would die. (The official death count was 1,836, but over 700 are still missing.

Most of the victims were disabled and elderly citizens without access to vehicles in which to flee the area.)

Almost all of New Orleans was flooded to rooftop height, and the storm ended up causing over $80 billion in damage. The scope of the destruction defied comprehension, and it fell to MMR to help clean up the mess.

At the time, Ian Foster was a senior executive with Fluor, one of the largest contracting firms in the world and on speed dial in Washington for any gigantic government project. He was on a golf course in Greenville, North Carolina, when the phone rang. “It was a Saturday morning, so the storm was just about to hit,” he says. “It was my company, Fluor, on the phone, asking if I knew anyone or any places in Baton Rouge where

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I HAD TOLD MMR THAT WE WERE ONLY TALKING ABOUT HALF A DOZEN, OR MAYBE A DOZEN PEOPLE AT MOST. A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, THEY HAD 300 PEOPLE COMING IN THE DOOR.

we could mobilize. I knew MMR from Thailand and other projects, so I called them up, talked to Allen Boudreaux. His first response was no. He said they were too busy with their own commitments.

They had obligations to other clients and didn’t have any spare capacity.”

—IAN FOSTER Donnie Fairbanks, the chief financial officer at MMR, explains that a lot of the big companies along the Gulf Coast were in danger of being wiped out by the storm and they wanted MMR on retainer. “The oil companies called us and said they wanted us to put a certain amount of people on standby. As soon as the storm cleared, they intended to send people back to the Gulf to get those oil rigs back in production.

So we had hundreds of our own people sitting at home on standby. When it was time for those people to go, they had to be ready. So we didn’t have any extra capacity to handle Fluor and FEMA as well.”

Allen Boudreaux delivered those facts to Ian Foster. “I said, ‘Fine, that’s all right,’” recalls Ian.

“I told Allen that we’d look somewhere else. I had barely hung up when Allen called back and said, ‘I just spoke to Pepper and he said to come on down — we’ll take care of you.’”

Ian called his colleagues and told them MMR could host a few people from Fluor and FEMA. “I had told MMR that we were only talking about half a dozen, or maybe a dozen people at most.

A couple of days later, they had 300 people coming in the door. You have to bear in mind that they didn’t have all the buildings they have right now. They only had one smallish building, which is now their HR building. And suddenly they had all these people wanting desks and photocopiers and phone lines.”

Ian went home to Houston and told his wife that he had to go to Baton Rouge to head up the contracting program. “She was actually working for Fluor as well at the time, so she called her boss and he told her she could go too, because they needed procurement people there. On the Sunday night, we packed up the car with our two dogs and headed for Baton Rouge. We locked up the house and left our furniture and personal effects behind, thinking we wouldn’t be gone that long.”

As they were driving down the I-10 toward Baton Rouge, they called friends and relatives, trying to find a place to stay while they worked on the storm recovery. They couldn’t find a good place, or even a bad place. “Everybody kind of laughed at us,”

THAT’S A LOT OF ZEROS Hurricane Katrina inflicted approximately $80 billion worth of damage. How much is $80 billion? Consider that if New Orleans spent $100,000 every single day of the week on storm reconstruction, it would take 2,190 years to pay off the bill. Not counting interest.

NO ONE SERIOUSLY THOUGHT WE’D BE DEALING WITH BROKEN DIKES, AN ENTIRELY FLOODED CITY, AND HURRICANE DEVASTATION 100 MILES WIDE. — B O B S PAU L D I N G

PAGE 104: Ian Foster was a senior executive at Fluor when Katrina hit. In the immediate aftermath, he wound up buying a house in Baton Rouge and selling his old one in Houston.

PAGE 106: Among the first responders was the United States Coast Guard, which rescued more than 33,000 people in the aftermath of Katrina.

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THE SCOPE OF THE DESTRUCTION DEFIED COMPREHENSION, AND IT FELL TO MMR TO HELP CLEAN UP THE MESS.

BY THE TIME WE GOT TO BATON ROUGE, THERE WERE HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE CLIMBING ALL OVER EACH OTHER AT THE MMR OFFICE. —IAN FOSTER

he says. “They said, ‘Don’t you realize there isn’t a hotel room or empty guest bedroom in all of southern Louisiana?’

“So now we were heading toward Baton Rouge with animals and nowhere to go. By the time we got to Baton Rouge, there were hundreds of people climbing all over each other at the MMR office.

It was ridiculous. Grady Saucier’s wife, Vicki, was a realtor at the time, so after my wife dropped me off at the office, she went to look at houses with Vicki.

I thought, ‘You can’t be serious. We’re looking for houses too?’ My wife came back in about two hours and said, ‘You’ve got to sign this.’ I said, ‘What is it?’

She said, ‘We’re buying a house.’ I said, ‘Oh, great!

I’m buying a house sight unseen.’ So, thanks to Katrina, we ended up with a house in Baton Rouge and a house in Houston. We eventually sold the house in Houston. I never saw it again.”

Their main task was to produce housing for the massive number of people rendered homeless by the storm. (Thousands of storm refugees migrated from New Orleans to higher land in Baton Rouge, and many stayed. The population

of Baton Rouge almost doubled after Katrina hit.)

Ian Foster says it was the beginning of “a great working relationship” with MMR. “Bob Spaulding stayed with Pepper and then it kind of nurtured that whole relationship even more.”

Bob Spaulding was senior vice president of Fluor Corp when the storm hit. Before joining Fluor, he had cut his teeth traveling all over the world, working in places like Dubai and Kuwait, managing large projects with budgets of over $1 billion.

Bob already knew of MMR. “I first met Pepper in the mid-1990s,” he says. “We partnered up on a legal matter affecting us both, and it worked out well. At that time, they were more domestically focused than international, but they were starting to take on work in Latin America and Asia and getting a reputation for tackling complex jobs and doing them very well.”

Prior to Katrina, Fluor had secured a standing arrangement with the federal government. “It was called a Contingency Operations contract,” he says.

“Basically, the Feds present you with a hypothetical problem and you bid on it, tell them what it would

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IT WAS AN UNBELIEVABLE DISASTER SCENE. THE SCOPE OF THE DAMAGE WAS FAR BEYOND ANYTHING I’D EVER SEEN.

BROTHERS IN ARMS

— B O B S PAU L D I N G

cost to fix it, and you add your fee to the package.

Then they pick the lowest bidder and put a contract in place for you. It’s kind of an odd contract because it’s so theoretical — the scope of the problem is unknown and the duration of the work is unknown, but the government wants someone on hand in case all hell breaks loose.

“So a day or so before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, we got a call from the Feds. They said, ‘Look, it’s going to make landfall somewhere on the Gulf Coast. We’d like Fluor to send a couple people down there, maybe to Louisiana. If it turns out to be as bad as we think it could be, we want to have boots on the ground.’

“I had just finished an 18-month Contingency Operation contract for the U.S. military in Iraq, so I got a chartered aircraft and flew down to Baton Rouge to keep an eye on the situation there.

Another one of our Fluor guys, Ian Foster, had already talked to MMR and arranged for us to use some of their office space. It was pretty crowded.

In fact, I had nowhere to stay when I first arrived.

Baton Rouge was getting battered and knocked

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around pretty badly, but it was nothing like the destruction in New Orleans. I flew up and down the coast, and it was just an unbelievable disaster scene. The scope of the damage was far beyond anything I’d ever seen.”

Pepper recalls that the Katrina disaster made for strange bedfellows, literally. “Here we had Bob Spaulding, the senior VP of one of the largest corporations in the world, sleeping on the floor of my office. I said, ‘Look, you’re just going to have to stay at our house.’”

“I stayed that night with Pepper and Connie,” says Bob. “Connie cooked us dinner, and when I came down in the morning, they were making me bacon and eggs. That’s the kind of people they are.

I got to know them really well.”

Pepper and Bob got right down to business.

“I said to Bob, ‘What are you doing here? What do you need?’ He said, ‘Pepper, we’ve got tens of thousands of mobile home trailers that have to be brought in, hooked up, and electrified, and we want you guys involved in that.’ I remember telling him, ‘I was hoping at this stage in my career I would be

Transparency International is a global movement with one vision: a world free of corruption. With chapters in more than 100 countries and an international secretariat in Berlin, T.I. fights corruption everywhere you can imagine, from villages in rural India to the corridors of power in Brussels. The agency works with governments, businesses, and citizens to stop the abuse of power, bribery, and secret deals.

In 2012, Transparency International conducted an anti-corruption study and awarded Fluor an A ranking. Ethics are a constant concern when doing business with foreign and domestic governments — where things are not always done according to the rules — and Fluor hosts online and in-person anti-corruption training sessions for staff members and executives to ensure they understand and uphold the company’s firm principles. According to the Los Angeles Times, Fluor — which has offices in 25 countries, making it the largest construction and engineering company in the Fortune 500 — is a “major corporate citizen” that supports local

charities and is active in civic groups in environmental work and habitat restoration, which is particularly impressive given that many of its operations are located near natural resources, such as uranium deposits in Canada, oil reserves in the Middle East, and mines in Australia.

It’s a noteworthy honor that Fluor has repeatedly called MMR when a particularly challenging job comes along.

OUR MAIN ASSIGNMENT WAS TO INSTALL 8,000 MODULAR TRAILERS FOR PEOPLE WHO’D LOST THEIR HOMES, ALONG WITH WATER HOOKUPS, SEWAGE TREATMENT, AND 16,000 POWER POLES. —KEVIN ALEXANDER

doing something bigger and more challenging for Fluor than hooking up trailers.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You know what? This is going to be way bigger than you think. This is going to be massive.’

And he was right.”

Bob says there were “lots of other contractors” he could have called in, but he wanted to work with MMR. “This was a real serious situation. And MMR is the kind of company you can trust. If they say they’re going to do something, they’re going to do it, so I said to him, ‘Look, we’ve got more work here than you can shake a stick at, and I’d like MMR to take on as much of it as you can handle.’”

Pepper told him that MMR was in a bind because it already had major commitments to other clients. “We couldn’t just drop everyone and go off with Fluor and FEMA,” he says. “We had to figure out how we could service our ongoing contracts and still provide assistance with hurricane recovery. I couldn’t compromise our quality standards by taking on more than we could handle.

And I didn’t want to be taking orders from anyone,

least of all the federal government. So I told Fluor, ‘Listen, we’ll help, but we are going to require total autonomy. We want to do things our way.’”

Pepper called in two of his top players, John Clouatre and Kevin Alexander, and told them to drop their ongoing projects and concentrate fully on disaster relief. Kevin says that the first day he started working on the Katrina file was the last day he would have three square meals and a decent night’s sleep for a long time. “It was sheer chaos,” he says. “Our main assignment was to install 8,000 modular trailers for people who’d lost their homes, along with water hookups, sewage treatment, and 16,000 power poles.

We didn’t have nearly enough manpower at MMR, so we had to hire 1,500 crews, with several workers on each one, and get them out there and keep an eye on all the different job sites and make sure the work was being done properly. John Clouatre and I were totally in charge. We were working from dawn until dusk, seven days a week.

It was like going to war.”

More than 500 travel trailers at this temporary housing site in Baker, Louisiana, housed individuals and families left homeless

by Hurricane Katrina.

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FEMA WAS BEING CRITICIZED BY BOTH THE PUBLIC AND THE MEDIA FOR ITS CLUMSY RESPONSE TO THE DISASTER.

Katrina displaced over a million people throughout the Gulf Coast region.

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There was no guidebook or precedent for recovery measures. Bob Spaulding says that when Fluor signed the Contingency Operations contract with the federal government neither agency had any idea what it would eventually entail. “No one seriously thought we’d be dealing with broken dikes, an entirely flooded city, and hurricane devastation 100 miles wide,” he says. “FEMA, in my opinion, is set up to apply Band-Aid recovery measures. They’re equipped to run around after a hurricane, put a bunch of blue tarps on roofs, and give people a place to live until the housing is repaired. No one ever imagined we’d be dealing with 2,000 dead. We had to build a morgue. We had to let people out of prisons.

Women were giving birth in hospitals that had no electricity; there were elderly people that needed life support systems.

If you didn’t live through it, you couldn’t possibly imagine any of this happening in a modern-day, developed country.”

MMR couldn’t provide adequate office space for the growing army of emergency responders, so Kevin Alexander and John Clouatre took over an old Wal-Mart building down the road and

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

FA S T FAC T S

MMR AND KATRINA converted it into a 60,000-square-foot office building with carpets, computers, phone lines, and office furniture. “It was a three-month job, and we had it up and running in two weeks,” says John.

“When FEMA showed up, they were shocked. They said, ‘Hey, you’ve done too good a job, you’re going to make us look bad.’”

FEMA was being criticized by both the public and the media for its clumsy response to the disaster, and in many ways Fluor and MMR were saving the agency from its own incompetence. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, FEMA wasn’t exactly falling over itself to thank the two contractors. “The Feds weren’t big on handing out compliments,” says Ian Foster. “Before that headquarters was finished, MMR had about 300 emergency response people in its offices, and nobody was getting any rest or eating properly. It was typical of MMR and their way of doing things that they arranged to bring in a chef one evening and cook a wonderful giant meal for everyone. The guy from FEMA was living in a motor home in the parking lot and he went nuts. He was getting pressure about public perception of FEMA, and he didn’t want us getting photographed eating a decent hot meal while all these flood refugees were forced out of their homes. So from then on we had to eat prepackaged army meals — K-rations.”

1,500

10,000 300,000

MODULAR PERMANENT HOME POWER TRAILER INSPECTIONS DROPS

60,000 SQ-FT OLD WALMART CONVERTED TO AN OPERATIONS CENTER IN

2

WEEKS

WORK-HOURS FOR 80 WEEKS (24 HOURS A DAY, 7 DAYS A WEEK)

8,000

MODULAR TRAILERS

16,000 POWER POLES

no HIRES version of this

Work crews prepare power poles for the so-called “FEMA trailer villages” following Hurricane Katrina.

IT WAS A THREEMONTH JOB, AND WE HAD IT UP AND RUNNING IN TWO WEEKS.WHEN FEMA SHOWED UP, THEY WERE SHOCKED. — J O H N C L O U AT R E

… WE WERE CHARGED WITH PROVIDING FOOD FOR THE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE IN THE CAMPS HERE IN BATON ROUGE AND FOR THE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WHO WERE IN THE SUPERDOME …

—RODI RISPONE

All those homeless people had to be fed, and one of the MMR executives working on that was Rodi Rispone. His day job at MMR hadn’t prepared him for his new tasks after the hurricane. “I got started working in the warehouse at MMR when I was 13,” he says. “A lot of my family were already working there, so many in fact that one of our inside jokes was that MMR stood for ‘More and More Rispones.’”

After graduating from law school, he went back to work at MMR, this time as the company’s legal counsel. “We had about 40 electrical people in the

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family, and I was the first lawyer, so they were proud of me, especially since I wanted to go into construction law. Now I run the legal department, which consists of me and four other lawyers. We have many, many issues to deal with. For example, a big issue is contracts. All our work involves complicated contracts, so I have to review every word and make sure there are no potential problems.

The main issue is people trying to find ways not to pay you, so I have to be watchful of that.”

When Katrina hit, Rodi was responsible for doing the legal work on the transfer of the trailers,

but he became involved in other, less familiar side issues, such as lining up lunch packages for the homeless. “A lot of the people at MMR probably don’t even know this, but we were charged with providing food for the thousands of people in the camps here in Baton Rouge and for the tens of thousands of people who were in the Superdome for the first week or so after the flood. A guy who had contacts with FEMA said, ‘Can you help us get a whole lot of meals delivered every day down into the Superdome?’

“I had to get in touch with a wholesale bakery, and they brought additional facilities down here.

They had to bring down extra supplies, because the grocery store shelves were empty. I wasn’t exactly serving lunch to these people in the Superdome, but for a while there I had to drop my lawyering duties and work at arranging daily sandwiches for 10,000 people.”

IS THE CHECK IN THE MAIL? The federal government (i.e., the U.S. taxpayer) and a variety of insurance companies footed the bill for most of the reconstruction work. Fluor was a Fortune 500 company with annual revenues in the neighborhood of $25 billion, but Katrina was still the biggest job it had ever taken on. Fluor was spending $7 million a day, much of which was slated to go to MMR. But before MMR could be compensated, it had to document every hour of labor, every tank of fuel, and every hose clamp it purchased on behalf of the storm recovery effort.

John Clouatre recalls that initially the federal government paid everyone promptly, but some people started taking advantage of the situation and the cash flow stopped. “The government said, ‘Okay, we’ve got to make sure all this money is being spent correctly,’ and they started auditing everybody. What followed was a period of several months where nobody got paid anything and we

By the night Katrina hit, New Orleans’ Superdome had become an emergency shelter for 10,000 of the city’s poorest residents, who were locked in for up to six days without adequate food or sanitation — and those were the lucky ones. Others were left to the floodwaters.

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This is what it looks like when the levee breaks. Aerial view of houses and businesses inundated by floodwaters on the outskirts of New Orleans.

QUARTERMASTER GENERAL

MMR WAS OUT OF POCKET FOR $35 MILLION, AND THEY JUST HAD TO TRUST THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE FEDS AND ASSUME THAT THE CHECK WAS IN THE MAIL. — J O H N C L O U AT R E

Facility manager Robbie McGowan working the phones (plural) in his trophy-stuffed office. He manages a lot of material, but that’s not what matters most.

“A company isn’t made out of buildings and vehicles and tools, it’s made out of people.”

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were financing the work ourselves. Pretty soon MMR was many millions of dollars out of pocket, and that hit us hard.”

Insurance companies and the government had to be vigilant about unscrupulous contractors inflating their invoices. “Some people will take advantage,” John says. “So there are various audits and checks and balances. Plus, you had these very bureaucratic government programs and rules that were new to me and new to the people I hired. So we were always struggling to make sure we did it right. Even at the best of times there’s a lag between the expense and the payment, and in the meantime the contractor is acting as a lending agency for the federal government. Some contractors had to wait months, even years, to get paid, but to my knowledge MMR was one of the few companies whose invoices were never disputed. I think at one point MMR was out of pocket for $35 million, and they just had to trust their relationship with the Feds and assume that the check was in the mail.”

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MMR’s perfect track record during the Katrina reconstruction owed much to the oversight of Rodi Rispone’s legal team and the accounting skills of John Courville and his indomitable wife, Patty.

The Courvilles had proven their mettle in difficult operating environments like Sudan and Venezuela, and throughout the two years-plus of the Katrina recovery they were assigned the task of documenting and invoicing for the thousands of expenses associated with labor and materials. “John and Patty did an unbelievable job,” says John Clouatre. “Kevin and I were running wild and spending money left and right, and they had to go behind us and track whatever we did, billing for our time, subbing out work to crews we didn’t even know. We weren’t even signing contracts at first. Later on we’d bid on jobs, but in the early stages there was no time for that. We’d hire somebody and write the job description on a napkin — ‘We need someone to go there and do this, for this amount of money. Can you do it?

Okay, see you later, get busy.’ It was a huge task for John and Patty to sort through all that.”

Robbie McGowan is everyone’s favorite character at MMR. Practical joker, chef extraordinaire, storyteller in residence, and good ol’ boy beyond comparison, Robbie also hammers out long days as MMR’s super-efficient facility manager. From his office in the spanking-clean warehouse, beneath a jury of mounted deer heads, he works the phones, organizes the orders, and somehow keeps track of every power tool and piece of equipment going out the door, including the company’s fleet of 700 trucks. (MMR purchases about $5 million worth of tools every year.) If you don’t bring back a power tool from the MMR warehouse, Robbie will come looking for you.

He says Hurricane Katrina was an ordeal for everyone, even him. “I had all these guys coming in from out of state, wanting this, wanting that. It was big pressure,

all day, every day. It never let up. We were working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It was really, really hard and there were times, frankly, when I felt like packing it in and going hunting, but the only thing that really made me hang in there was, I didn’t want to let the other guys down.”

Robbie worked at other companies when he was younger and says MMR has a unique atmosphere. “There’s a good spirit here,” he says. “The harder things get, the more everybody pulls together. That all goes back to Pepper. He’s sort of like a father figure. He’s like … I don’t know, is he the captain of the team? Is he the coach of the team? People really want to do a good job for him. Nobody ever quits this company, and you practically need an army tank to pull ’em out of here when they retire.”

THE KATRINA RECOVERY EFFORT WOULD TURN INTO THE BIGGEST PROJECT MMR HAD EVER TACKLED.

The Katrina recovery effort would turn into the biggest project MMR had ever tackled. “It challenged us in every way,” says Pepper. “And it never stopped. Sunday was like Monday; there was no such thing as time off. And it turned into a massive undertaking for Fluor, too. I mean, Fluor is more than 100 years old, and this was the biggest contract they’d ever taken on.”

Bob Spaulding reiterates that “character” is why Fluor reached out to MMR in the first place. “We could have worked with any number of contractors,” he says, “but we wanted to work with MMR because of the people. I got to know the company really well during the time of Katrina, and when you work alongside MMR, you learn that everyone there has a team spirit and a certain strength of character. I think that the quality of their people is the main reason for their success.”

During Katrina, the 17th Street Canal was one of the most significant failure points, allowing water to flood into the city. The much-blamed US Army Corps of Engineers has since upgraded the canal with floodgates and pump stations.

Additionally, MMR performed work on a project to upgrade its electrical system post-Katrina.

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THE BAR IS SET VERY HIGH, AND MUCH OF THE TIME YOU’LL FAIL. BUT EACH AND EVERY TIME YOU HAVE TO GET UP OFF THE GROUND AND TRY AGAIN.

CHAPTER SIX

WINNERS NEVER STOP TRYING

— GRADY SAUCIER

T

HERE ARE MANY WAYS TO SURMOUNT OBSTACLES. The athletic Greeks devised one ingenious method — a long wooden pole.

No one knows for sure when pole vaulting was first attempted, but ancient vases depict that the 12-foot-long ash spears carried by Greek warriors were used for a variety of purposes.

A skilled warrior could use his spear to cross a stream, leap a wall, impale a charging cavalry horse, or escape an animal that wanted to have him for dinner, as Ovid describes one Greek warrior named Nestor doing: to avoid the charge of a wild beast, “by means of his lance, planted in the ground, he leaped into the branches of a tree that was standing close by, and, safe in his position, looked down upon the enemy which he had escaped.”

Grady Saucier took up pole vaulting in his backyard with a bamboo stick when he was growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana; he became a skilled athlete who won a college track scholarship and could soar over a 16-foot bar (higher than some Olympic records). But success didn’t come easily. Concussions, broken bones, torn muscles, and excruciating injuries of all kinds are the standard costs of an athletic scholarship, and although Grady avoided some of those injuries, he once bounced off the mat with a lower leg now pointing in the wrong direction. “It hurt pretty good when they popped it back in, and I was in a cast for six weeks. I also broke seven poles, but I was lucky enough that I never got stabbed by the splinters.”

After a four-year course in construction engineering, Grady graduated in 1973 to find the economy in a downturn. “There weren’t a lot of jobs around,” he says, “so I worked with the Boy Scouts for a while, running the summer camps. The kids live in tents and study different skills, working toward badges for canoeing, archery, campfire cooking, all the badges required to move up to the next level. They learn in a

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A LOT OF OUR RECRUITS START OFF IN ESTIMATING. THAT’S WHERE YOU PROVE YOURSELF. ESTIMATING IS OUR BOOT CAMP. — GRADY SAUCIER

“When I started with the company, we used to ring the ship’s bell whenever we won a job,” says Darryl Clark, now a VP in construction operations. “We were doing about $15 million worth of business a year and getting a new job was a really big deal. Today, with $30 to 40 million coming in every month, we just ring the bell at the end of the month when everybody gathers for a beer and a bit of a celebration.” (The beer vending machine is not shown).

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group, so they’re practicing how to work alongside others and be a leader. To me, the whole purpose of Scouting was to learn how to interface with other kids. It’s a great way to develop people skills.”

While Grady was on an athletic scholarship at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Pepper Rutland was attending Louisiana State.

One day they were talking (they knew each other through mutual high school friends), and Pepper suggested that Grady should consider coming over to work at MMR. “He told me they needed a warehouse guy,” says Grady. “Someone to help in the warehouse, getting the right tools and equipment together to send out to the job site.

MMR was a much smaller company then, probably fewer than 100 people, but it was growing and had a good future. I went over and worked in the warehouse for a couple of years. Then I went into their estimating department, which is the life blood of the company. In the construction industry, if you don’t have a good estimating department, you’ve got nothing. So a lot of our recruits start off in estimating. That’s where you prove yourself.

Estimating is our boot camp.”

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

DROP AND GIVE ME FIFTY On a hot Louisiana day in 1992, a young electrical engineering graduate named Darryl Clark, who coincidentally was Gene Clouatre’s nephew, found himself playing golf with Pepper Rutland. He knew that Pepper was a contractor, but not much else.

Darryl was impressed by Pepper’s determination and fierce energy. He says he had “never seen a man hit a golf ball so far in the wrong direction.” (Jack Nicklaus once gave Pepper a complete set of clubs, which Pepper left in his locker at the country club, unused, and tried to give away more than once.) “I was looking for a job in the construction industry,” says Darryl, “and by the ninth hole he’d hired me.”

Like most new recruits, he ended up working in the estimating department, which he went on to oversee with Jeramiah Blum. There is a ship’s bell mounted on the wall in the department lounge that used to be rung to celebrate a new contract.

“When I started with the company, we used to ring it whenever we won a job,” says Darryl. “We were doing about $15 million worth of business a year and getting a new job was a really big deal. Now we have about 50 estimators and we’re doing about

$30 to 40 million a month, so we can’t be ringing the bell every time a job comes in or the bell would be ringing constantly and driving everyone crazy.

Nowadays we just ring the bell at the end of the month when everybody gathers for a beer and a bit of a celebration.”

Jeramiah Blum, MMR’s vice president of estimating, says the bell was Pepper’s idea. “It has significance for anyone who knows a little bit about naval history,” he says. “When a bell is ringing on a ship, it means the captain is about to make an important announcement. Pepper put the bell on the wall, and it’s become an important part of the culture here.”

When Jeramiah started at MMR it was still a small company, and the estimating department consisted of him and only a handful of others. They were actively looking for recruits, and everyone would work nights and weekends, sometimes keeping each other company and bringing in takeout food to keep their spirits up. It’s a tough job, and even now, more than one MMR estimator will be sitting at his desk late at night, wondering what he’s gotten himself into.

Chapter Six: Winners Never Stop Trying

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THE MARKETPLACE MMR Group estimators compete for jobs in a range of oil and natural gas industries.

The upstream industry (sometimes called the exploration and production sector) includes companies that search for underground (or underwater) oil and gas fields. Upstream producers drill exploratory wells and operate the rigs that pipe the crude oil and natural gas to the surface. Upstream producers can be based on land or offshore, but in the last 50 years, the offshore oil drilling industry in the Gulf of Mexico has grown rapidly — it now accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. national production.

After recovering oil and natural gas from underground fields, upstream producers ship their products to midstream companies, which process, warehouse, and market commodities like natural gas, crude oil, and associated products such as propane, butane, and sulfur. The midstream industry also includes pipeline companies that transport those products to refineries across the continent.

The downstream industry includes oil refineries, petroleum distributors, petrochemical plants, power generating stations, and various natural gas processors.

About half of all U.S. oil refining and natural gas processing takes place along the Gulf Coast, so MMR’s Baton Rouge headquarters, right in the heart of the industry region, is ideally situated. The downstream sector also includes a vast network of processors, distributors, and retailers spread across the continent (and around the world, like the huge Shell refinery in Thailand), and these too are past, present, and future clients of MMR. Mills and manufacturers are another important market for MMR. Included in this sector are metal manufacturers, pharmaceutical plants, mines, and pulp and paper mills.

The Phillips 66 Borger Refinery, in Borger, Texas, was built in 1926 and has been upgraded many times since. The 6,000-acre refinery processes primarily medium sour crude oil and natural gas liquids, and has a capacity of 180,000 barrels per day.

YOU NEED TO PROVE TO ME AND EVERYONE ELSE AROUND HERE THAT YOU DESERVE A JOB HERE. AND I’M WARNING YOU, THAT’S NOT GOING TO BE EASY. —JERAMIAH BLUM

MMR has been a huge supporter of the College of Engineering at Louisiana State University, having donated $1 million to the Construction Management program that included Pepper in its first graduating class (1972). MMR has funded three labs on campus, including the Advanced Materials and Methods Laboratory and the BIM “Cave,” a massive virtual reality environment that allows student designers and contractors to visualize changes before construction has begun.

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“Now that we’re big everyone wants to work here and we can be choosy about who we hire,” Jeramiah says. “We’ll do presentations with college students and throw a cocktail party. Most other companies will give the students, like, two beer tickets and say, ‘Here you go, kid. Have a good time and help yourself to the pretzels.’ But in true MMR fashion, our cocktail party is the best of the best. It’s an open bar, where the students drink whatever they want, and there’s great food.

We have this reputation for being the best company, and we’re swamped with applicants.

Last year we had 92 applications, which we whittled down to 14 candidates who actually got to do interviews with us. One time, when I was doing a presentation to some students and asked them if anyone knew the significance

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

of the ship’s bell, only one kid raised his hand and said, ‘It means, all hands on deck!’

I said to him, ‘You just won yourself an interview!’”

The interview process further narrows the field to five or six. Jeramiah says teamwork is very important at MMR, so they want to evaluate applicants’ people skills. “We’re only going to hire maybe two of them, so we take them to a baseball game, take them to various social situations and watch how they handle themselves. We introduce them to everybody and see if the chemistry works.”

Darryl adds that it’s important not only to measure the applicants’ ability to work with a team, but to get a sense of how they handle themselves under pressure. “Everything is about nerves around here. You could be talking to a whole boardroom full of high-powered executives at Shell. It might be a make-or-break situation, but you have to be calm, self-confident, and convincing. Some people have an aptitude for that. Some don’t. That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

If they get past that hurdle, Jeramiah kicks it up another notch. “Let’s say they pass all those tests and make it in the door,” he says. “Great.

Now they’re in the intern pool. The first thing that happens is, I bring them into my office and give them my ‘intern speech.’ And I’m not very nice or encouraging with them. In fact, I’m a bit of a jerk.

“Maybe they think I’m going to pat them on the back and welcome them with a hearty handshake. If that’s the case, they’re in for a surprise. Essentially, I just sit them down and say, ‘All right, you made it, congratulations. You got the internship. But the real selection process is just starting. Your life is going to suck for the next three months. I’m telling you it’s not going to be fun, okay? It’s not going to be enjoyable. You need to prove to me and everyone else around here that you deserve a job here. And I’m warning you, that’s not going to be easy.’”

The interns are all academically qualified and present well in the interview process or they wouldn’t have made it to this point. The odds may

be in their favor — 92 possibles down to 2 interns — but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll be hired. “We get a few who come in here and they’re just flat,” says Jeramiah. “They don’t have the edge. After a couple of months it becomes apparent that they’re not going to fit in. So that’s it, they’re gone. We have no trouble finding someone else to fill their spot. Having said that, we have a pretty good nose for talent, and most of the guys who make it to an internship get hired.”

He says he looks for people who are self-motivated. “I want people who can see that something needs to be done without me having to tell them. I’m not going to be finding work for them. If they don’t have a job, go find one. We call it ‘trickor-treating’ for work.

We want them to prove they’re a go-getter. Get busy.

IT’S A COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT, BUT WE’RE ALL COMPETING AGAINST OURSELVES, NOT EACH OTHER. —DARRYL CLARK

AMERICAN HEAVY INDUSTRY IS BROADLY DISLIKED AND OPPOSED EVERYWHERE BY THE NIMBY (NOT IN MY BACKYARD) MIND-SET.

Grab a broom and sweep the floors if they need sweeping. Check in with the other estimators, see if you can help them. Most of them will be busy, and you don’t want to make more work for them or make their day more complicated. Prove that you can be an asset.”

Darryl points out that all the offices in the estimating department are exactly the same. “That’s really important, because we have a unique culture at MMR and everybody has to get along together. Once you’re hired, there’s no pecking order here.

It’s a competitive environment, but we’re all competing against ourselves, not each other.

We’re trying to be the best that we can be.”

THE ENGINE ROOM OF THE NATION Everybody wants to be able to pull into a gas station and fill up their car, but nobody wants Shell to build a refinery right beside their jogging path.

Liquid natural gas plants, paper mills, oil platforms, chemical factories, and textile mills are all crucial to the everyday functioning of the global economy, but people don’t like to look at them — or even to recognize that those same gritty installations clothe their kids and put food on their table.

It would be next to impossible to get permission to build a chemical plant or refinery on the coastlines of Oregon or Virginia, and distrust of the oil industry runs so deep in California that environmentalists routinely oppose conservation and habitat restoration projects funded by oil companies. American heavy industry is broadly disliked and opposed everywhere by the NIMBY (not in my backyard) mind-set. And that has presented the country with a zoning dilemma: Where to permit the big ugly stuff that generates the revenue that pays for our quality of life?

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The latest mega-project for MMR is Sasol North America’s Lake Charles Cracker Project.

With a contract value of over $320 million for MMR, the facility in Lake Charles, Louisiana, brought together at its peak 1,400 workers logging four million work-hours and installing about 1,366 miles of cable. It will convert (“crack”) natural gas into the plastics ingredient ethylene, at the rate of up to 1.5 million tons a year.

EVEN IF THE CLIENT KNOWS US, WE STILL HAVE TO WORK VERY HARD PUTTING TOGETHER A BID, FIGURING OUT EVERY LAST DETAIL, WORKING LATE, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, PUTTING TOGETHER THE PERFECT PACKAGE. — GRADY SAUCIER

Chevron’s Big Foot, completed in 2015, is the largest tensionleg oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. MMR performed electrical and instrumentation services on the $5.1 billion development, which included installing 1.7 million feet of cable, 119,000 feet of tubing, and approximately 55,000 field terminations.

This work gave the company an Excellence in Construction Award (shown on page 145).

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That place has turned out to be the Gulf Coast.

As any visitor to Louisiana will discover, the Mississippi River has become an interstate highway of heavy barge traffic, and the actual interstate, the I-10, has become a concrete Mississippi filled with 18-wheelers. The seaports of South Louisiana and Houston are among the busiest in the world. The Gulf Coast handles 70 percent of the nation’s seaport traffic, and the discovery of oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico and the subsequent development of more than 4,000 oil platforms have made the Gulf Coast the heart of the U.S. petrochemical industry. Oil extraction has spawned massive development in the refining and transporting of oil and gas, and the economic diversification spinning off from the petrochemical industry has spurred major population growth and attracted more Fortune 500 companies than the rest of the country combined.

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

All of this has created enormous opportunity for MMR, and the sales team headed by Grady Saucier is making the most of the economic boom.

“We have about 20 salespeople,” says Grady.

“Amber Leach, an experienced journalist, does a terrific job with our media relations, corporate communications, and the overall content, look, and messaging of our website, press releases, and printed materials. We all represent the company, and you never know where our leads are going to come from.”

MMR has an excellent reputation, and many of its jobs are with repeat customers. But that doesn’t mean there’s no competition for contracts with regular clients. As Grady explains, “Our client base hasn’t changed much in 40 years, and about 80 percent of them are repeat customers. Frankly, most of them would probably prefer to just do business with us. But their board of

GLOBALIZATION AND THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION HAVE RADICALLY CHANGED THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY, MAKING SOME PROCESSES EASIER AND OTHERS MORE DIFFICULT.

ANOTHER STEP FORWARD Clients in need of fabrication and integration services for industrialized control buildings, custom control panels, analyzer sample systems and shelters, and temporary power racks can visit the MMR Integration and Panel Fabrication Centers.

Located in Baton Rouge and Belle Chasse, Louisiana, the centers total 40,000 square feet and include 14,000 square feet of controlled environment. MMR is UL 508A-certified, UL-and CSA-listed for Type 4X Industrial Control Panel Enclosures, and ATEX-certified.

In addition, they are equipped with a host of state-of-the-art features, such as two 40-ton bridge cranes with weight cell capabilities, multiple private Factory Acceptance Testing rooms, and webcam technology that enables clients to remotely monitor their project in real time, from inception to completion.

MMR continues to grow rapidly, with operations in all industrial sectors and around the world; the Integration and Panel Fabrication Centers are examples of its strategic plan to continue to expand its capabilities and lines of service.

directors or the hierarchy of whoever is running the company will usually insist on competitive pricing, so that’s why we’re often starting from scratch. Even if the client knows us, we still have to work very hard putting together a bid, figuring out every last detail, working late, night after night, putting together the perfect package. The hardest part is staying focused and keeping your spirits up, because we’re bidding on 8 to 10 jobs a day, and usually we’re competing with as many as five other companies for that work.

And many of the jobs will go to someone else. That’s the life of an estimator. The bar is set very high, and much of the time you’ll fail. But each and every time you have to get up off the ground and try again.

You can never stop trying.”

THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS Darryl Clark says the estimating department is working on about two dozen bids at any one time.

“Some of them take a couple of days to prepare, some of them a couple of months. It depends.

Our success rate is about 18 percent. Notice that I said that we’re working with a success rate of 18 percent rather than a failure rate of 82 percent.

You have to stay positive and focus on the wins rather than all the times we work hard on the bid and don’t get the job.”

When Grady Saucier started working at MMR, his college education had already taught him a fair amount about various construction sectors, including paper, mining and metals, and carpentry.

But he says you can’t fully understand the construction industry without paying your dues as an estimator. “It takes quite a while to be able to learn a set of blueprints; to be able to look at a set of plans and say, ‘Okay, this is what this is.’”

Grady says the main challenge in estimating is coming up with an accurate count of labor and materials. “Your labor costs are going to vary depending on the geography of the physical environment you’re working in. For example, it’s going to take longer to do a job in North Dakota in the wintertime than it would in Louisiana, because

of the weather. So you have to accurately estimate your labor hours. But 90 percent of an estimate is having an accurate material takeoff.”

Globalization and the digital revolution have radically changed the construction industry, making some processes easier and others more difficult. Not so very long ago, MMR would deliver an estimate by hand to a client’s front office; nowadays it’s done with the click of a mouse.

Drawings and blueprints are often outsourced to Asia, and that makes an estimator’s job much more complex.

“Let’s say that MMR here in Louisiana is bidding on a refinery job in Texas,” says Grady. “We’re looking at blueprints put together on a computer by someone in China or India who has never actually been to the jobsite. They’re looking at a computer screen. They don’t even know if Texas has mountains or jungles or whatever. Only a few decades ago we’d get drawings from an engineer who knew the actual physical layout of the property and maybe had walked the site. The package would be 100 percent accurate, with dotted i’s and crossed t’s. All the terms and conditions would be correct,

PAGE 140: The 40,000-squarefoot Integration and Panel Fabrication centers provide custom design, fabrication, integration, and analytical systems for clients in need of industrial instrumentation and electrical services.

PAGE 142: The Employee Wellness Center, with a full basketball court, weight training and exercise rooms, and boot camp classes, opened in 2016, free of charge for MMR home office employees.

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GET A MOVE ON Few companies can compete with MMR when it comes to employee health and fitness.

MMR strives to maintain a healthy environment in a number of ways. The company pays a percentage of health insurance premiums on an increasing scale every year, topping out at a remarkable 100 percent coverage after seven years of employment.

The company also provides accidental death benefits, and dental and vision insurance.

“Try and find that anywhere else in the industry,” says Robbie McGowan.

One of the most impressive and attractive parts of the entire MMR campus is the Employee Wellness Center. The 10,000-square-foot facility features a fabulous weight training and exercise room, a full-size basketball court, and trainer-led boot camp classes, where Pepper can often be spotted out on the floor, alongside employees half his age. The facility is free of charge and the hours are flexible, all of which makes it more difficult for desk jockeys to come up with excuses for not getting active.

“We built this facility so that it would be affordable and convenient for our employees,” says Pepper. “It’s part of our commitment to a healthy workplace and a healthy community.”

FA S T FAC T S

“IT’S 52 PERCENT ATTITUDE. WE CAN TEACH THEM EVERYTHING ELSE.” — G E N E C L O U AT R E

52%

ATTITUDE

48%

EVERYTHING ELSE

LET’S BE CAREFUL OUT THERE John Cassagne, MMR’s vice president of health, safety, and environmental, started off as a laborer on offshore platforms, worked his way up through the roles of journeyman electrician, supervisor, project manager, and so on, until he happened into a safety management position. “In 2003, my boss at Seco asked me to temporarily fill in for the safety manager who had left the company. I told him I didn’t know anything about safety. He said, ‘Neither do I, but I know you, and I have confidence you’ll pick it up quickly and handle it well.’”

John must have demonstrated an aptitude for safety management, because he’s been doing it ever since. In 2005, he moved to MMR, where he strengthened the company’s already exemplary safety procedures and rules. “You have to keep your safety procedures simple and understandable,” he says. “You have to do a good job of establishing rules and expectations or you cannot hold people accountable.”

At MMR, John has helped institute a sturdy network of safety protocols. The rules and procedures are published in manuals that must be studied and fully understood by every MMR employee exposed to potentially hazardous environments. Some of the rules pertain to mind-set. For example, workers in some companies are reluctant to express concern if the person creating a safety hazard is of higher rank. (More than a few airline accidents have been attributed to the reluctance of junior officers to question a captain’s actions.) MMR preemptively addresses that risk by issuing “Stop Work Authority” to each and every employee, empowering them to call an immediate stop to work if they see a hazard. “We train our employees to observe each other,” he says. “All of which translates into company performance. Crews with superior safety training are also the most productive.”

Under John Cassagne’s guidance, MMR has become an industry leader in workplace safety, with incident rates far superior to the national average. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, electrical contractors on average report 1 million work-hours annually with 14 recordable incidents, resulting in a frequency rate of 2.8. MMR, on average, reports approximately 8 million work-hours annually with 6 recordable incidents, for a frequency rate of 0.15. In recognition of its performance as a safety leader, it has been honored with a number of awards, including the Business Round Table Construction Industry Safety Excellence Award, the ABC STEP Diamond Award for Safety Training, and the ABC National Safety Excellence Merit Award. While working at the Shell Albian Sands project in Alberta, Canada, MMR employees recorded 1 million hours without a single accident or even an incident, and won the Vice President’s Award for Safety.

and the scope of the work would be accurate.

Now the engineering packages we get range from 20 percent to 80 percent incomplete.”

When one of those outsourced bid packages arrives at MMR, the estimators try to interpret what the client wants. “We have to guess what the intent of the package is,” says Grady. “Suppose we have to run a conduit from this place to that place.

Well, there might be a road getting in the way, which may not show up on the drawing, which might require underground trenching, which is an added expense. On top of that, you’re often dealing with different cultures and languages and different systems of measurement. For example, we have a big job coming up where the engineering will be done out of China. It’s going to be in the metric system, and the U.S. is still in the imperial system, so you’ve got to convert metric to imperial. That might require thousands of calculations — and you’d better not make any mistakes.”

Then the package goes out, and they wait for the verdict. “No matter what relationship you have with the client, it’s almost always about price,” says Grady. “You need to be competitive in terms of pricing. If you’re high all the time, they may not call you back. And it’s tricky, because you don’t know what the other companies have bid and the

YOU HAVE TO STAY POSITIVE AND FOCUS ON THE WINS RATHER THAN ALL THE TIMES WE WORK HARD ON THE BID AND DON’T GET THE JOB.

client won’t tell you. Sometimes we’ll call and say, ‘How do we look? What’s the status of the review?’ They might say, ‘You look good. We’ll probably call you back.’ Or more often, they’ll say, ‘Sorry, you’re out of it. You were four out of five.’ The bad —DARRYL CLARK news goes something like that.

You’ll be four out of five about 80 percent of the time. So that’s it. Once again, you tried your best but you didn’t get the job. You have to get up off the ground and try again.”

PUT ME IN, COACH Pepper’s skills as a football player won him a scholarship to LSU and paid for the education his family couldn’t afford. But when he graduated, he walked off the playing field and has never looked back. His body was broken and scarred, and he was ready to move on with the construction career that had been his goal in the first place. As happens so often with college athletes, the team organization had taken more from him than it gave in return, and it was years before he was even interested in attending another LSU Tigers game.

He eventually came around when his son began

Christmas in Louisiana: Pepper, Becky and Jeff Smith, Gene Clouatre, and Grady Saucier celebrate another successful year.

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ATHLETICS IS A GOOD ANALOGY, BECAUSE OUR BUSINESS IS ALL ABOUT DISCIPLINE. IF YOU HAVE DISCIPLINE AND DESIRE, WE CAN TEACH YOU THE REST. —PEPPER RUTLAND

In 2014, MMR was inducted into LSU College of Engineering's Society for Engineering Excellence, which recognizes those who have given at least $1 million overall. Shown here are LSU president and chancellor F. King Alexander, Connie and Pepper Rutland, and LSU College of Engineering dean Richard Rick Koubek.

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FOOTBALL BRINGS OUT THE MOST HEROIC AND BRUTAL ELEMENTS OF HUMAN CHARACTER, AND SERVES AS AN ALMOST PERFECT ANALOGY FOR THE WORLD OF BUSINESS.

I HAD ONE THING GOING FOR ME. I WAS A HARD, HARD WORKER, AND BY THE LATE 1980S I’D WORKED MY WAY UP TO SUPERINTENDENT. —KEVIN MERCER

to play, and in any case, his personal experience of playing college football hadn’t diminished his aesthetic appreciation for the violent beauty of the game. Like war, football brings out the most heroic and brutal elements of human character, and serves as an almost perfect analogy for the world of business.

As a laborer, foreman, superintendent, and globe-trotting CEO, Pepper has worked with hundreds of people over the years, and he says he looks for certain qualities in the people he employs and does business with. “I think it was Gene Clouatre who said many years ago, ‘It’s 52 percent attitude.

We can teach them everything else.’ And that’s probably still true today. We don’t aspire to get the super-brilliant guys. We want to see hungry guys, competitive guys. One of the questions we always ask is, ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ The best answer is, ‘I want to be sitting in your chair, doing your job.’ That generally tells you that you’re talking with somebody who wants to get ahead and has the discipline to go for it. Athletics is a good

analogy, because our business is all about discipline.

If you have discipline and desire, we can teach you the rest.”

Kevin Mercer exemplifies the sort of determined individual who fits in well at MMR. Like a lot of the senior people at the company, he worked his way up from the bottom, starting off with a small Baton Rouge contracting company called Radon. “I had no higher education to speak of,” he says. “I started out doing labor, working alongside a bunch of school dropouts like me. We were rough and wild, a bunch of misfits. I had one thing going for me. I was a hard, hard worker, and by the late 1980s I’d worked my way up to superintendent. When MMR took over Radon, my boss was Gene Clouatre. He was the hardest-working, most honest man I’d ever met, and he drove me hard.

We called him the Tasmanian Devil. I guess he saw something in me, like maybe we were cut from the same cloth, because he guided my development, and MMR became like my family. We fought like members of a family too, but there was a loyalty

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HONING THE CRAFT The economic boom that has come to the Gulf Coast has also presented challenges.

Older craftsmen are retiring, and a lack of emphasis on craft training at the high school level has created a shortage of craft personnel at a time when demand is at an unprecedented peak.

Instead of waiting for the demographics to improve, MMR took the initiative by creating an impressive training center where ambitious craftspeople can receive nationally recognized training. MMR is accredited by the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) as a Training Sponsor and Assessment Center, providing Electrical, Instrumentation, and Industrial Maintenance Electrical and Instrumentation Technician certification.

The MMR Craft Training Center is a 15,000-square-foot facility located right on the grounds of MMR headquarters, where qualified MMR personnel get classroom training and hands-on experience under the guidance of a veteran instructor. After their classroom time, students are required to successfully complete over 35 hands-on stations in order to become NCCER, NCCER Plus, and MMR certified. “We’re doing a lot of things that have never been done before,” says MMR marketing director Amber Leach, “and one of them is the Craft Training Center. It really demonstrates how MMR is constantly growing, adapting, and playing a global leadership role in the industry.”

The program is certified by the U.S. Department of Labor and benefits the students in a number of ways. Eric Hebert started with MMR when he was just 20 years old and has been with the company for 18 years. “I’m a site manager now,” he says. “My specialty is mostly electrical, but I do have some training in instrumentation. I took the 40-hour program and graduated with my NCCER certification, which is very good on my record.

We also get a nice bag of tools, an extra week of vacation, and a pay raise. You’re not going to get a better deal like this anywhere along the Gulf Coast or even in the country.”

Richard Sanders (“Colonel,” as many call him) is the gruff, knowledgeable program instructor. He says that the program benefits MMR by encouraging long-term loyalty.

“The manpower shortage is a big problem for companies along the Gulf Coast, and that translates straight into their ability to service jobs. In this industry, you will typically see craftsmen following the work and the best opportunities, moving from job to job and from company to company. If you don’t have the manpower, it makes it real difficult to service contracts. This Craft Training Center is a tool that MMR uses very effectively to retain our employees and impress our clients with high-quality work turned in on schedule.

“MMR’s clients benefit from the ‘safety first’ attitude that is drummed in through task repetition in a monitored environment. And students gain a higher appreciation for quality performance through constant feedback in the classroom and in their training.

This results in increased productivity and decreased turnover on the jobsite. It’s a win-win program for all involved.”

FACING PAGE: Hard at work during a vendor training and certification class.

THIS PAGE: Richard “Colonel” Sanders brings decades of experience to the Training Center, where he applies his experience as an NCCER Master Trainer and OSHA 500 Instructor (among other qualifications) to helping MMR retain employees and impress clients.

FOLLOWING PAGES: The Craft Center — a place for everything and everything in its place.

WE’RE DOING A LOT OF THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE, AND ONE OF THEM IS THE CRAFT TRAINING CENTER. IT REALLY DEMONSTRATES HOW MMR IS CONSTANTLY GROWING, ADAPTING, AND PLAYING A GLOBAL LEADERSHIP ROLE IN THE INDUSTRY. —AMBER LEACH

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FOR MOST COMPANIES, EMPLOYEES ARE LIKE TOOLS FOR MAKING MONEY. BUT MMR WAS DIFFERENT. THEY TREATED THEIR PEOPLE LIKE FAMILY. —ADAM PHILIPPI

you couldn’t shake, and we were determined to get ahead. It’s been an amazing journey. When I started, MMR had about 12 employees and now it has about 4,000. I went from being a ditch digger to a shareholder, and that’s because this company gives you personal freedom and lots of opportunity to get ahead. I’m proof you can go anywhere in MMR if you work hard and you really want it.”

Like Kevin Mercer, MMR senior executive Adam Philippi grew up rough. “I quit school at 16,” he says. “My big ambition at the time was to be a butcher at a supermarket. But I ended up working as an electrician’s helper in Bakersfield, California.

I must have been good at it, because by the time I was 20 I was a superintendent, and one year later they made me a project manager. When I was 24, I went down to Houston and did some work on platforms where MMR was the electrical and instrumentation contractor, and I noticed they were a different kind of company.”

Adam was exceptionally young for his position, but he wasn’t challenged by the roughnecks on

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THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

his crews. “I’m not a pushy kind of guy,” he says.

“I’m a positive, friendly person, so I got along with everyone quite well. I treated my guys with honesty and respect and I’d grown up from nothing, so I guess they could relate to that. For most companies, employees are like tools for making money. But MMR was different. They treated their people like family. So I didn’t want to work anywhere else.”

There’s a lot of lateral mobility in the electrical and instrumentation industry. It’s not unusual for craftspeople to abruptly quit jobs and go across the street to work for another company for an extra 50 cents an hour. Adam says he noticed that craft employees would stay at MMR for the long term.

“There’s something about MMR that generates loyalty,” he says. “It attracts a certain kind of person.

And I feel very lucky to have found a role with the company, because MMR sent me off to get my MBA and now I’m running giant projects, racking up 2 million man-hours of work and $180 million in revenue — not bad for a high school dropout who thought he’d end up cutting meat in a supermarket.”

WE DON’T ASPIRE TO GET THE SUPERBRILLIANT GUYS. WE WANT TO SEE HUNGRY GUYS, COMPETITIVE GUYS. —PEPPER RUTLAND

I’VE SEEN PEPPER BUILD MMR FROM A $20 MILLION REVENUE COMPANY TO NEARLY A BILLION-DOLLAR COMPANY ON TWO DIFFERENT OCCASIONS. VERY, VERY FEW PEOPLE HAVE EVER ACCOMPLISHED THAT.

IF YOU HAVE THAT PERSONAL DRIVE, THERE'S MORE OPPORTUNITY AND UPWARD MOBILITY HERE THAN YOU'LL FIND ELSEWHERE. —KEN FRIEDMAN

—RONNIE POLITO

Ken Friedman is another senior executive (vice president) who worked his way up. He says, “That’s actually pretty typical. If you talk to the senior management, you’ll find that most of them started off as junior estimators or whatever. Some of the guys started off sweeping floors.”

Ken likewise started off modestly, working as a welder alongside an old gentleman who had been around long enough to remember when Pepper was just a summer employee. “It’s a big asset for any senior manager to have worked at all those different levels,” Ken says.

“When you’re meeting with the craft guys, you can speak their language because you’ve been in their shoes: you’ve worked in the field, you’ve been away from home,

you can identify. That’s part of what makes MMR special. We’ve done those jobs, so there’s mutual respect.”

Like a lot of the original employees, Ken went off to work for another company when the original MMR closed its doors in 1989, but he eventually returned to the new MMR because he missed the energy. “Working here is not just a job,” he says. “It’s an attitude. We take our work personally. You need to have a lot of self-discipline and ambition to work here, but if you have that personal drive, there’s more opportunity and upward mobility here than you’ll find elsewhere.”

Discipline can be the external type, imparted by the rules of an organization (as in the military), or it can come from within. Pepper says selfdiscipline is the type they value at MMR. Although the CEO is unquestionably the coach of the team,

the company has a relatively flat power structure, in which everyone is trusted to do their job. It’s not so different from a well-run football team.

“A lot of people think a football team is an authoritarian structure,” Pepper says. “That’s not true. If everybody on the team does their job out there on the field, the coach is not going to have anything to say other than a few words of encouragement in the locker room at half-time.

The general rule is, ‘If you do your job and I do mine, it will all mesh together beautifully and we’ll field an unstoppable team.’”

Ronnie Polito has known Pepper since 1979, when he worked as an apprentice engineer for the original MMR. Their working relationship evolved into friendship, and they still have lunch together almost every week. Although he is now president of a sister company of MMR, Fabricated

Pipe, Inc., Ronnie says he has witnessed the success of MMR not once but twice. “I’ve seen Pepper build MMR from a $20 million revenue company to nearly a billion-dollar company on two different occasions. Very, very few people have ever accomplished that.

“After weathering a storm caused by outside investors, rapid growth, and management teams from different cultures, Pepper rebuilt the company in ways that adhere to his personality.

Yes, he has a great team around him, but make no mistake, this is Pepper’s creation. He’s as strong as a bull and he’s brilliant at forging relationships with both clients and employees. And the football coach analogy is accurate, because he has a unique skill that makes the players around him better.

He’s very determined to delegate authority to his team and to give them credit for the company’s

PAGE 158: Ken Friedman goes back to the original crew.

When the first MMR closed up, Ken went off to work for a competitor but eventually rejoined Pepper. “Working here is not just a job. It’s an attitude."

PAGE 159: Pepper with Ronnie Polito, friends since 1979 when the two worked together at the original MMR — Ronnie has since moved on to a sister company, Fabricated Pipe, Inc., but the two remain close.

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KEEPING THE BOOKS In 2005, Brent Campbell started with MMR as an accounting clerk and worked his way up to comptroller, the person whose job it is to know where the money goes.

Across the U.S., accounting firms report that one of their biggest challenges is retaining staff. Workplace dissatisfaction is exacerbated by the constant need to stay abreast of technological change. It’s common for companies to be juggling dozens of software applications, each one requiring constant updates, interface changes, and button commands. Keeping up with these changes can be exhausting, and Brent has seen a lot of change since 2005. “It’s been a heck of a ride,” he says. “MMR has grown so quickly that we need to constantly train new staff and existing employees. We’re pretty much always training, and the bigger we get, the better we need to be.”

One thing that has made his work easier is the high level of staff loyalty at MMR. “You never hear anyone say anything negative about this company. If people have an issue, they feel free to speak out. That keeps little problems from turning into larger ones. There’s a strong feeling of family loyalty here, so any debate usually focuses on the question ‘How can we do our jobs better?’”

Consolidating the flow of data has also helped. When Brent started with MMR, different divisions within the company were using different accounting programs. “In 2014, we brought it all together so that we can share information across all the different divisions. That will make the overall system more efficient, and we’ll need fewer adjustments as the system matures.”

MMR’S RULE IS THAT YOU ALWAYS ERR ON THE SIDE OF CLIENT RELATIONS VERSUS MAKING AN EXTRA DOLLAR. IT’S A HUGE CONCEPT, AND YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND IT TO WORK HERE. — J O H N C L O U AT R E

success. Part of that is his natural generosity, but it’s also a good strategy. He’s taught the employees how to do their jobs without his supervision. He’s built a team that runs on auto-pilot.”

Most of the veterans at MMR have stories to tell about Pepper’s hands-off approach to decision making. Mike Wilson says he noticed Pepper’s unique leadership style soon after he graduated from LSU and started working in the estimating department. “He likes to put people in challenging situations so they’ll learn how to figure out problems for themselves.”

As Mike worked his way up, he tackled increasingly difficult jobs. He says he walked by Pepper at MMR headquarters one day and Pepper asked him how things were going. “So I made the mistake of telling him I was having some trouble with a project with labor issues and with the licensing board, and he just held up his hand to stop me and said something

like, ‘I don’t need to hear the details of your problems. I just need to hear that you solved them.’

That was a real moment of insight for me. It stayed with me. It’s a good feeling to know that your boss trusts you to come up with the right decisions. But it also produces a lot of pressure, especially when it’s your first time dealing with an issue.”

Pepper says that’s the best way to teach people confidence and self-sufficiency. “I don’t micromanage. If I’m in California and you’re in Louisiana and it’s a major, complicated project with a lot of money on the line, I want to know that you are doing exactly what I would do. When I feel that way about you, then I’m absolutely totally trusting you to run with the ball. But it takes a long time to build that relationship. It takes a lot of trust and character development. That’s why this company was built organically. We don’t have a lot of guys that came from other companies, bigger companies where they do things their own way. We did that

one time and we paid an awful price. Now we do things our own way.”

John Clouatre emphasizes that doing things the MMR way means putting the customer first.

“Pepper forged that attitude and passed it down to my dad, and my dad passed it down to us. MMR’s rule is that you always err on the side of client relations versus making an extra dollar. It’s a huge concept, and you have to understand it to work here. Most people in our industry err on the side of fattening up the bottom line. I’d say the MMR motto is, ‘You Run on Clients.’ You take care of all of them the best you can. Treat them fairly and treat your craft and your employees fairly. That was a learning curve for me, because when I was a young guy at school and getting started in the business, we all wanted to make as much money as we could and as quickly as possible. That was the measure of success. The other guys would look at you funny if you said, ‘Hey, I did an extra-good job for my client

Brent and Keely Campbell.

As company comptroller, Brent oversees a constant evolution in technology. “MMR has grown so quickly that we need to constantly train new staff and existing employees. We’re pretty much always training, and the bigger we get, the better we need to be.”

Chapter Six: Winners Never Stop Trying

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IT’S A GOOD FEELING TO KNOW THAT YOUR BOSS TRUSTS YOU TO COME UP WITH THE RIGHT DECISIONS. —MIKE WILSON

The first site Mike Wilson managed on his own was in Thailand — baptism by fire.

In 2002, he was recognized as Site Manager of the Year, an award he received from Gene Clouatre (left) and Pepper Rutland.

THE PARALLELS BETWEEN BUSINESS AND FOOTBALL ARE INDEED COMPELLING. BUT AS PEPPER POINTS OUT, BUSINESS IS JUST FOOTBALL WITH DOLLARS INSTEAD OF POINTS …

Before his death, Pepper’s son Jeffrey (shown standing between Pepper and brother Michael) worked with MMR’s newly formed communication group, folding corporate security into new and existing projects.

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today.’ Pepper and my dad had to train that into us.

It’s a different way of doing things, but it’s been a successful formula for us.”

The parallels between business and football are indeed compelling. As Pepper points out, business is just football with dollars instead of points, and it’s interesting to listen to him compare strategies for building a winning team. “Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys had two different approaches. The Dallas Cowboys decided to draft young players like Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, and some others. The guys were young and didn’t have any experience. They played terribly and the fans were pissed off. The next year, these young guys grew within the organization and showed some improvement, and the next year, they were a little

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

THE JOURNEY FOR SELFIMPROVEMENT better. The next year, they won the Super Bowl. And the year after, they won the Super Bowl again. The Cowboys won three or four Super Bowls in a row.

“The Washington Redskins did it a different way. They gave up their draft picks and traded them for veterans from other teams. They traded away all their youth in return for experience.

And with that approach they won one Super Bowl right away, then they fell off and went into decline.

They didn’t have any young talent in reserve.

So which approach makes the most sense? With the first one you’ve got to endure tough years.

It might be very discouraging. But if you stay true to the plan and build a loyal, hard-working group of ambitious young people, you have a very good chance of coming out on top.

“That’s how we’ve built our team at MMR.”

In the 1950s and early ’60s, the phrase “Made in Japan” was a joke used to indicate that something was bad, really bad. Japan was still recovering from the devastation of the Second World War, and in its rush to increase trade it was exporting shoddy goods that were likely to fall apart soon after coming out of the package. In ensuing decades, “Made in Japan” became synonymous with excellence, with companies like Toyota and Honda showing the rest of the world how to build a machine. What happened?

What happened is kaizen, a Japanese word that means “constant improvement.”

The discipline of kaizen was passionately incorporated into Japanese manufacturing,

urging companies to not only improve their existing lines, but to broaden and diversify.

Japan didn’t invent kaizen. It merely adopted an approach to self-improvement pioneered by Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Browning, and other American geniuses. The essence of self-improvement is growth — constant forward movement into new and challenging environments — and MMR has consistently explored where it has never gone before.

The urge to improve has taken MMR around the world, to countries across Asia, South America, and Africa, and has allowed the company to explore areas quite different from its core business of electrical and instrumentation contracting. Before his untimely death, Pepper’s son Jeffrey Rutland worked for MMR’s communication group, a relatively new division of MMR that provides corporate security. This might entail surveillance cameras, card readers, access gating, and other systems that ensure that only legitimate personnel are allowed entry into factories, shipyards, airports, refineries, office complexes, and other sensitive infrastructure. “We sometimes piggyback on projects that MMR is already involved in,” Jeffrey said, “but we’re also going out and finding work on our own. This has become a very big business since 9/11. Homeland Security requires a lot of cameras and security measures for critical infrastructure, so it’s a real growth opportunity for MMR.”

FA S T FAC T S

INSTALLING A $2 BILLION EXTENSION CORD The Sunbelt region of California and Arizona is one of the fastest-growing and most power-hungry segments of North America. People want lush golf courses, hybrid cars, and air-conditioned malls but they don’t want coal-powered, nuclear, or hydroelectric generating plants. New Mexico has abundant “green” power in the form of wind and solar technology, but how to deliver it to market?

The problem has found its solution in the SunZia Project — a 520-mile-long transmission line that will carry 500 kilovolts of electrical power from Lincoln County, New Mexico, to Pinal County, Arizona.

It’s a $2 billion project, and MMR is in charge of engineering, procurement, and construction. SunZia is a new challenge for MMR, but the company excels at growth and innovation. Jonathan Bruser, MMR’s senior vice president of project development, has teamed up with veterans Mike Wilson, Bob Spaulding, and Ian Foster, so the MMR SunZia team has many decades of experience working abroad in challenging and unique environments.

“The project has many sponsors,” says Jonathan, who happens to be related to the CEO through his marriage to Pepper’s daughter Kennan. “But MMR is in the lead role. It’s been a long and complicated process that started in 2008 and involved a tremendous amount of negotiation.”

SunZia requires right-of-way permissions from federal and state governments as well as private land owners; the construction of new access roads; the installation of substations and other facilities; and the construction of hundreds of reinforced steel towers to support the 500-kilovolt power line. The whole project is very different from anything MMR has taken on previously, which fits well with the company’s philosophy of constantly throwing itself into new challenges. “We’ve never done anything this big,” says Pepper, “so it will be a tremendous growth experience for MMR.”

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25,300,000

MILES OF TRANSMISSION LINE

LINEAR FEET OF CONDUCTOR

1,917

600+

STEEL TOWERS

EMPLOYEES AT PEAK

30,000

500

TONS OF STEEL

KILOVOLTS OF ELECTRICAL POWER

9,100,000

834

LINEAR FEET OF FIBER

MILES OF ROADWAY

1,500,000 HOMES POTENTIALLY POWERED

EARNING TWICE AS MUCH MONEY DOES NOT NECESSARILY MAKE SOMEONE TWICE AS HAPPY AT WORK. AND IF THERE IS LOW JOB SATISFACTION, EARNING THREE OR FOUR TIMES AS MUCH DOESN’T MAKE MUCH DIFFERENCE.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WE ARE FAMILY

S

OME OF THE MOST USEFUL DEVELOPMENTS of the 20th century were in the field of public opinion polling. Western society is supposedly democratic, but how do politicians and manufacturers set their priorities when it is so difficult to determine what people think?

In the early years of public opinion research, pollsters and market surveyors stood on street corners with pencils and notebooks, or went from door to door, asking people their opinions about everything from government policy to toothpaste. When telephones became a central feature of the average American household, so did annoying dinnertime polls. Nowadays most opinion surveying is done online, on a voluntary basis. And although politicians and media pundits are sometimes disdainful of the faceless masses and their ideas, online communication has made public opinion a force to be reckoned with — and not just during election campaigns. These days the backlash comes within hours.

Opinion gathering has revealed that some of our assumptions about running a business are inaccurate.

It has always been assumed that the best way to motivate employees is to pay them more. But is that a valid assessment? Modern online technology has made it possible to ask that question, and it turns out that while a raise in salary is always welcome, employees say income is not directly related to job satisfaction.

Earning twice as much money does not necessarily make someone twice as happy at work. And if there is low job satisfaction, earning three or four times as much doesn’t make much difference. According to the research, Manhattan bank executives who earn millions are often less satisfied with their work than Filipino caregivers or Louisiana crab fishermen. But if high income does not necessarily produce a happy worker, then what does?

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I FOUND THAT IF YOU PUT IN THE EFFORT AT MMR, THE REWARDS ARE TENFOLD. YOU’RE SEEN AND HEARD AND YOU’RE ABLE TO BUILD YOUR OWN CAREER …

—CHRIS FRASIER

BECOMING THE BEST VERSION OF YOURSELF When the new MMR rose from the ashes of the old, Tom Welborn, Tony Gibson, Gene Clouatre, Leeland Kilpatrick, Donnie Fairbanks, Charlotte Gray, and other original employees walked away from solid, well-paying jobs with other companies to rejoin MMR for less money and a riskier future. Donnie Fairbanks’s explanation for this echoes everyone else’s: “I preferred working here, even if it was for less money at first. We all took that risk because we liked the feeling of this place. MMR has a company culture that is very hard to find.”

Chris Frasier was initially so hopeful about getting a position at the new MMR that he was not only willing to work for less money, he was willing to work for no money. “Some of the guys started at the bottom,” he says. “I started a little below that.”

After studying construction management in upstate New York, Chris moved to Baton Rouge in 1991, where he rented a bedroom from a longtime MMR employee named Gary Williams. “Gary kept telling me what a great company MMR was,” he says.

“I really wanted to work for them, but the company had just risen from the ashes, so there were no openings. I offered to work for them for free and did exactly that for a couple of months. I basically bulled my way into a position with them. I think they must have felt guilty or something, because they finally offered to pay me if I drove a truckload of cable tray up to Pennsylvania. So I loaded a 26-foot U-Haul with cable tray and drove it up there. The cable tray was all dirty from being in storage, so I also had to scrub it clean. That was my first paid position with MMR: Official Cable Tray Scrubber.”

Chris’s elbow action must have impressed his boss, because he scrubbed his way into a full-time

career. Over the following 25 years he traveled to Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and numerous other far-flung locations, managing projects for MMR, and he’s now a vice president of the company. “I owe a lot to the late Gary Williams for introducing me to MMR,” he says. “And I owe a lot to Pepper and the other senior guys for giving me an opportunity. There aren’t many companies where you can start right out of college and do anything you set out to do. I found that if you put in the effort at MMR, the rewards are tenfold. You’re seen and heard, and you’re able to build your own career because it’s a wide-open structure.”

Pepper says that he deliberately keeps that sense of openness in the company. “People have different sets of skills and ambitions. Some people don’t want to leave their homes and families and work on the other side of the world. Others are willing to go anywhere they’re needed. We like

to give people a lot of leeway to make their own decisions and solve their own problems.”

Veteran estimator Matt Jean likes knowing that his efforts at work are directly linked to his rewards. “It’s an America-based company,” he says, “so the structure is open all the way to the top. You come here, you work hard, you get rewarded for it. You’re not held to any particular level. Your level is only limited by your ambition and how hard you apply yourself. In estimating, we work a lot of nights and weekends, and the company has always done a tremendous job of rewarding our efforts. With the younger people, I tell them that these are real important things to look for when they select a career. They need to find a place that’s going to let them grow their talents and skills.”

Rather than organizing itself on the model of a top-down power structure, MMR takes

MMR has always rewarded hard work. From left: Charlotte Gray (with Allen Boudreaux and Pepper) and David Woodward (with Allen Boudreaux, Pepper, and Gene Clouatre) are recognized for their years of service; Leeland Kilpatrick, Jeramiah Blum, Landon Roussa, and Chris Frasier at a charity golf event.

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“Family is woven into almost everything we do,” says Grady Saucier. “Christmas parties, football games, the spring picnic — we’ll fill the yard up with face-painting booths, blow-up games, horses. It’s not for the employees. It’s for their families.

We want them to know they’re part of this organization.”

RATHER THAN ORGANIZING ITSELF ON THE MODEL OF A TOP-DOWN POWER STRUCTURE, MMR TAKES A COOPERATIVE TEAM APPROACH.

PORTRAITS

JEFF SMITH

MIKE CORSENTINO

DONNIE THIBODEAUX

VICE PRESIDENT AND PROJECT DIRECTOR

VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL PROCUREMENT

VICE PRESIDENT OF OFFSHORE SERVICES

In 1985, Jeff Smith started working for MMR. He immediately liked the company, not so much for the prestigious nature of his job (electrician’s helper) or for the big money ($6 per hour), but because “they did things the way I liked.”

Like everyone else, he had to find another job in 1989, but he returned in 1993. “John Clouatre and I have a slight difference of opinion about the way I ended up coming back to the company,” he says. “The way John remembers it, I called him and begged for a job. The way I recall it, he called and begged me to return.”

Back at MMR, Jeff was no longer getting paid minimum wage to pull wire and fetch tools.

“I worked my way up to project management, building everything from power plants to paper mills. In 2010, we finished a big steel mill project in Alabama — the biggest project we ever took on — with 850 people and a $100 million bill. It’s been a steep upward curve for MMR since I came back, and I feel very fortunate to have been a part of it.”

Mike Corsentino joined the original MMR in 1979, working as a trainee estimator. He says working in the estimating “hot zone” was a tough experience.

“You were scared to death that you might miss some detail. When you didn’t get the job, which was most of the time, you’d lie awake at night wondering what you did wrong.”

He moved on in 1989, but eventually returned to MMR Group because he wasn’t finding personal fulfillment elsewhere. “The other jobs were just jobs.

At MMR, you’re teaming up every day with people you respect, doing something difficult and challenging that you really enjoy. You’re pushing yourself onward, so it actually helps you to grow and be a better person.”

Donnie “D.T.” Thibodeaux was a self-employed operations manager with a long history of working in Africa before he came to MMR. He had a project in development in the Congo, but civil war broke out in the late 1990s and made it too dangerous to continue working there. MMR was interested in finding someone with experience and good connections in Africa, and Gene Clouatre invited Donnie to join MMR in 1998.

Donnie then took over the management of offshore projects in Equatorial Guinea. “We don’t hire people off the street for that kind of work,” he says. “It takes a special sort of individual. They’re going to be away from home for long periods of time, so they have to be a stable, experienced individual who knows how to handle problems. Support from their spouse and family is also really important. Electrical and instrumentation work is pretty straightforward. So that’s not what makes MMR special — it’s the people.

“We only hire the kind of people who exemplify MMR culture. It’s not so much about making money as doing a good job. We figure that we owe it to our customers to send the right people offshore.”

a cooperative team approach. This creates a stimulating work environment for the sort of selfdisciplined individuals that MMR selects through its recruitment drives.

The Harvard Business Review has examined the core values of leading businesses, and despite a common perception among CEOs that pay bonuses are the best motivator, the researchers discovered that leading companies actually put more emphasis on employee encouragement and recognition.

The HBR cites the example of the low-cost airline JetBlue, where coworkers nominate each other for acts of exemplary behavior and news of the awards is shared internally on the company newsfeed. The nominee is then given points that they can spend on a vacation or a night on the town. The researchers determined that the very high esprit de corps within the company was largely because of this emphasis on giving credit to those who try harder. It’s probably no coincidence that JetBlue has received the highest rating in customer satisfaction among low-cost airlines for 11 years running.

Similarly, MMR celebrates its successes in many ways — ringing the ship’s bell at month’s

end, sharing success stories at regular monthend mixers, and hosting outdoor adventure trips to build team spirit and reward hard work. MMR team members also take this incentive-based culture with them when they work abroad.

In that first venture into the foreign environment of Thailand, working as an American contractor on a huge refinery project for Shell, MMR shook things up by painting numbers on the helmets of the Thai workers and rewarding those who showed exceptional effort. “Nobody had ever done that before,” says Ian Foster. “The local people got a little upset at first. But then the workers grew to appreciate that MMR was offering bonuses for hard work, and many of the Thai workers ended up doing much better than they would have under the old system. Some of them upgraded their skills and pay level and became much more effective as employees. This benefited everyone and in fact MMR turned out to be the best foreign contractor on the job.”

Thanks to its merit-driven work culture, MMR has grown larger and more profitable every year.

As it has grown, it has been opening branch offices across the country and around the world, and it is

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now widely recognized as the industry leader on the Gulf Coast. “If you look at our growth pattern and our revenues, we’re by far the biggest,” says Pepper. “If you take our two key competitors, add their revenues together, and double them, they’ll be almost even with MMR. This reinforces our core belief that hard work and customer service will always win.”

A TEAM EFFORT Revenue figures, market share, and global footprint are traditional ways of measuring success.

But MMR’s winning formula is based on unique cultural traits that can’t be conveyed via a bar chart. The company’s best assets are intangible.

There’s a spirit of inclusion, optimism, and positive energy that makes it a happy place to work.

What exactly makes for a happy workplace?

Countless studies have investigated that question, and whether the organization is an advertising agency, a sports team, a high school, or a police department, the answer is always the same: it’s all about leadership. The principal of the school sets the tone, draws the lines, puts forward the goals, and establishes the culture inside and outside the classroom walls. If a new police chief calls a meeting and lets their patrol people know

YOUR LEVEL IS ONLY LIMITED BY YOUR AMBITION AND HOW HARD YOU APPLY YOURSELF. — M AT T J E A N

“IT’S NOT LIKE HAVING A JOB” With the enhanced capabilities delivered by web-based communication, psychological researchers have made enormous progress in determining why some businesses tend to have happier and more energized employees.

Many studies suggest that one characteristic separates the happiest companies from everybody else: the degree of positivity and cooperation in the workplace. A long-term study of 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found that strong social engagement at work was the main predictor of job satisfaction — more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race.

As MMR veteran Charlotte Gray puts it, “I would never work anywhere else. It’s not like having a job. You look forward to coming to work every day. Everyone supports each other through good times and bad. We’re more like a bunch of friends than employees.”

Halloween is always an event at MMR, but the 2018 costume competition was especially meaningful thanks to Team Holly’s Magical Unicorn Warriors, who dressed up in support of cancer survivor Holly Hollis Stars, MMR’s corporate counsel and equal employment opportunities offer.

PEPPER HAS A NATURAL GIFT FOR RELATING TO PEOPLE. HE CAN TALK EASILY AND KNOWLEDGEABLY TO ANYONE, FROM A FIELD LABORER TO THE STATE GOVERNOR.

Grady and Vicki Saucier.

MMR is a family affair — especially when Vicki, a former realtor, found Ian Foster his house back when Fluor moved him to Baton Rouge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

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in no uncertain terms that fair and scrupulous behavior is expected every single day, that will create a certain tone in the workplace. If a new leader doesn’t take charge in a clear, positive, and emphatic way, if they decide to merely handle problems as they come along, to “go with the flow,” the organization will drift off course and eventually run into trouble.

Pepper didn’t learn his man—IAN FOSTER agement style at a business school.

“Pepper has a natural gift for relating to people,” says Ian Foster. “He can talk easily and knowledgeably to anyone, from a field laborer to the state governor. And he talks to them with respect and understanding for the challenges of their work. It’s not a learned technique. It just comes easily to him. He has the people skills of a natural leader.”

Happy workplaces have a certain atmosphere, a mood of energy in the halls, and it’s a telling detail that there are no neckties at MMR. “It’s a really informal workplace,” says Ian, who, after so many years as an external partner, has recently joined MMR as a senior project manager. “People have business cards, but I bet a lot of them can’t

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

even tell you what’s written on their cards. If you ask them their title, they usually have to think about it. That’s what I like about this place. The job description is that you’re part of a team. The team is more important than the individual.”

Pepper says it’s important to him that people actually enjoy coming to work. “The average person spends about 80 percent of their waking life at work, so if you don’t like what you are doing or the job that you are in, you need to find a new career,” he says. “We regard our employees as the heart of our company, and we strive to promote a culture that fosters personal development and professional growth while offering both tangible and intangible rewards to those with the drive to succeed.”

Back in the late 1980s, when Pepper’s first partner, Bob McCracken, decided to retire and sell his part of MMR, his controlling share went to a private equity firm out of New York that wanted to run the business with an emphasis on aggressive expansion and the bottom line only. Pepper’s philosophy was somewhat different. “Look, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better — I’m not going to say it’s not. I care about profit and growth, but I’ve always put the main emphasis on customer service, in the belief that if you do a great job servicing the client you will never need to worry about getting work and growing your profits.”

KEEPERS OF THE COMPANY FIRE Grady Saucier has 36 years under his belt at MMR, and he says the company veterans safeguard the founding values.

“When a kid first joins MMR, we keep an eye on him to make sure he’s doing things the MMR way. If he does a good job, he’ll earn more and more trust as he gets more experienced.

He really has to convince us that he gets our values.

“Once he’s fully developed we’ll let him have his independence. Nobody has to watch him anymore. Nobody has to follow him around and review everything he does. We know he’s going to do exactly what we would do under the same circumstances.

“That’s when things really start to click for the employee and for the people around him. He’s proven himself and now he’s a member of the family. And one of the strongest values at MMR is family.

“Family is woven into almost everything we do.

Christmas parties, football games, the spring picnic — we’ll fill the yard up with face-painting booths, blow-up games, horses. It’s not for the employees. It’s for their families. We want them to know they’re part of this organization. And the kids just love it. When they grow up, a lot of them end up working here.”

HAPPY WORKPLACES HAVE A CERTAIN ATMOSPHERE, A MOOD OF ENERGY IN THE HALLS, AND IT’S A TELLING DETAIL THAT THERE ARE NO NECKTIES AT MMR.

THAT SUIT COAT AND NECKTIE SYMBOLIZE A PRIVATE EQUITY MENTALITY AND A WORLD THAT WE’RE NOT INVESTED IN. —PEPPER RUTLAND

The new owners had a different philosophy, and they steered the company away from MMR’s values. That would eventually lead to major trouble. During the rapid growth that followed, MMR absorbed a variety of other companies and, by necessity, retained the staff and management of those companies, many of which did not share the MMR outlook and did not even have any particular sense of loyalty to their parent company.

MMR grew into an enormous house of cards.

When Pepper re-formed MMR after the disasters of 1989, he took a private oath that he would never again let outsiders tinker with the company’s principles. “That suit coat and necktie symbolize a private equity mentality and a world that we’re not invested in,” he says. “We do massive projects all around the world, but we’re a small business at heart. That’s our culture. We are more open-minded than most companies. Our values are somewhat intangible, but they are expressed every day in the way people behave. If you ask someone to work late or to stay late or do something extra or come in on a Saturday or Sunday, there’s no

hesitation. They’ll say, ‘Absolutely, I’ll be glad to do it. How can I help?’

“People here jump at the chance to help each other. You’d be amazed how many times that happens in the estimating department. If one guy has to stay late to get a job finished up, another guy or a couple of guys will stay late to help out.

Eric Wiethorn is a great example. The other night, several estimators were working until almost 2:00 a.m. It wasn’t even Eric’s project, but he sat in there with the team and said, ‘I’ll bring y’all food and drinks and sit here with you until you’re done.’

Who does that nowadays?”

For Robbie McGowan, people really are the company’s most valuable asset. “If we lost everything tomorrow, we would still be able to get back up and running in a few months,” he says.

“A company isn’t made out of buildings and vehicles and tools, it’s made out of people. And with the people we have here, we’d go right back to being the best in the business.”

Individuals show their loyalty not by their words but with action. The MMR family has been

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THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DECLARED IT A THOUSAND-YEAR EVENT, AND BECAUSE IT WAS UNPRECEDENTED, MOST HOMEOWNERS WERE UNPREPARED AND HAD NO FLOOD INSURANCE.

A flooded Baton Rouge, 2016 — an all-too-common sight in the Gulf Coast region.

In 1957, the Most Reverend Maurice Schexnayder wrote “Prayer for Hurricane Season,” which includes these lines: “We live in the shadow of a danger over which we have no control. The Gulf, like a provoked and angry giant, can awake from its seeming lethargy, overstep its conventional boundaries, invade our land, and spread chaos and disaster. During this hurricane season, we turn to You, O loving Father. Spare us from past tragedies whose memories are still so vivid.”

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through enough trouble to know the truth of that.

In August 2016, a freakish weather system dubbed the No-Name Storm dumped two feet of rain on the Baton Rouge area, and about 146,000 homes were flooded. In some parishes, 75 percent of the houses were destroyed. The National Weather Service declared it a thousand-year event, and because it was unprecedented, most homeowners were unprepared and had no flood insurance. The national media didn’t give it much coverage, but in terms of rainfall amounts and flooding, it was a bigger disaster than Hurricane Katrina.

When it started raining, MMR legal assistant Misty Roussa was at home with her husband, Landon, who works in the company’s construction department. It was a Sunday evening, and Misty was looking at pictures on Facebook of people getting flooded out in nearby Denham Springs.

“I told Landon, ‘I feel so bad for those people.

I must have survivor’s guilt,’” she says. “Then maybe 20 minutes later our lights went out.”

They loaded up the car, but then what? “We were driving,” Misty remembers, “but we literally did not know where we were going. My sister’s place was flooded, and all the interstates were

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

shut down. We just got in the car and drove.

We ended up at my sister’s mother-in-law’s house.

There were five families in this three-bedroom house, dogs and everything, and we stayed there for about three weeks. With 17 people, the bathroom was popular in the morning.”

Misty says her boss in the legal department, Rodi Rispone, offered her his guest house, and they stayed there for two months. “He was so great,” she says. “He told me to take care of my family first, and come back to work whenever, just whenever.”

Misty’s colleagues Matt and Audra Jean lived only a mile away, and their street was flooded too.

“We stayed up all night monitoring the weather,” says Audra, who works in the purchasing department. “I waited to see if the storm would abate, but in the morning the water was coming down the street like a run of rapids.”

“I’ve never seen water like that in my life,” says Matt, who works as a senior member of the estimating department. “We sandbagged all day, but the water kept coming. It finally started flowing over the dike and into our home. I said, ‘Okay. We’re done. We’ve got to go.’” Like many

WHEN THEY RETURNED, THE MESS WAS INCREDIBLE. EVERYTHING WAS ROTTEN AND FILTHY. SNAKES AND SPIDERS AND BEETLES HAD TAKEN OVER THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

The 2016 storm that slammed Baton Rouge left destruction in its wake, and MMR employees were not immune. Misty and Landon Roussa’s house was hit hard, but the company rode to the rescue, with estimators, equipment, and ice in tow.

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THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

HE TOLD ME TO TAKE CARE OF MY FAMILY FIRST, AND COME BACK TO WORK WHENEVER, JUST WHENEVER. —MISTY ROUSSA

other MMR employees, they were forced out of their homes by the flood. When they returned, the mess was incredible. Everything was rotten and filthy. Snakes and spiders and beetles had taken over the neighborhood.

“You would move a piece of furniture and the spiders would just run off,” says Audra. “There were roaches and ants all over everything. I must have swept up a thousand worms off the floor.

Eels were flopping around in the yard like it was a fish pond. But the worst thing was the smell.

The flooding had backed up all the sewers and there was raw sewage everywhere. Plus, no one had a chance to empty out their refrigerators or freezers so they were full of rotten food and that added to the general stink in the air. It was so depressing to come home and find all that mess and your house ruined.”

Walls had to be torn out, sprayed with disinfectant, and allowed to dry. Drywall was piled in front yards in disgusting heaps. “That was awful stuff to clean up,” says Landon Roussa.

“It gets all soft and mucky when it’s wet, so you

just have to get out the shovel and go at it. It was really discouraging until Mike Corsentino called from the office. He said he was going to send some estimators to help out, and I started dancing around, I was so excited.”

MMR was coming to the rescue. Jeramiah Blum showed up at the Roussas’ house with 10 young estimators, fans, dehumidifiers, and bags of ice. “That was the thing that really made my knees buckle,” says Audra. “It was his sheer kindness to bring that ice. You have to remember that all the stores were flooded out and closed, so ice was unavailable. It was so hot and sticky in the heat of August, and these guys brought ice for us.”

Then the cavalry arrived at Landon and Misty’s house. “And they were there to work,” says Landon.

“They weren’t dropping by to shoot the breeze.

Their attitude was, ‘What do you need done? How can we help?’ Everybody was like that.”

One of the things that really touched Misty was young Michael Rutland’s showing up and asking what he could do. “We had all our furniture underneath the carport and didn’t know what to do

with it. It was kind of upsetting because we knew we had to throw it away, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was so heartbreaking. Michael saw me standing there, and he just quietly offered to do it. Then Pepper put a whole crew of guys to work cleaning our houses. He paid them to work for us, cleaning up our homes, while we were at the office.

It was incredible.”

Pepper’s son Michael started with MMR in 2014 as a rookie estimator. He had just bought a house himself and says that he felt guilty because his home was one of the few in the area not affected by the flood water.

“It gave me a weird feeling,” he says, “driving around Baton Rouge and seeing all these flooded homes, some of them swamped up to the roofs, all these people with their houses destroyed while I had no damage whatsoever. Why them and not me? These were families with a lifetime of equity they’d worked for and they’d lost everything. It felt really unfair, and I was very motivated to help out.”

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THESE WERE FAMILIES WITH A LIFETIME OF EQUITY THEY’D WORKED FOR AND THEY’D LOST EVERYTHING.

COMMUNITY TIES The MMR family includes the communities in which its 21 domestic branch offices and 6 international offices are located. Along with his sponsorship and financial support of blue ribbon charities like the Special Olympics, the American Cancer Society, and

the Red Cross, and educational programs like the LSU College of Engineering, Pepper is the founder of the Miracle League at Cypress Mounds, a nonprofit that encourages children with disabilities to play baseball, regardless of their physical challenges.

—MICHAEL RUTLAND

Michael and his fellow estimators went from house to house, wading through the swamped wreckage, pumping water out of the homes, tearing out sodden drywall, setting up dehumidifiers.

“You hear about our company’s values, how we support each other and so on, and this was a chance to practice what we preach. Sometimes it takes a disaster for people to come together. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also an opportunity to show how we actually care about each other.”

The MMR cavalry wasn’t there just because Pepper had sent them. Audra emphasizes that their help was voluntary. “They came on Saturday and Sunday too, on their days off. I was crying the whole time, but it was great, because they weren’t just there to do physical work. They were there for emotional help too, keeping our spirits up. Cracking jokes and stuff. I’d go from crying to laughing.”

Misty says it really strengthened their friendships to see those supporters turn up when they were in trouble. “I must have cried to Jeramiah six times one day,” she says. “We were at our very worst, and they didn’t care. They were

there to help us get through it. It was like a big group hug the whole time, and that’s something we’ll never forget.”

Landon’s neighbors watched the MMR people bringing food, drinks, and ice; helping out with the work; offering emotional support, working on their days off, and they couldn’t figure out what was going on. “Everybody was saying, ‘Wow, what a great company you work for. Is MMR hiring?’”

WORK HARD, PLAY HARD Even when they’re off-duty, MMR team members go hard. The company fishing trips and tailgate parties are legendary exercises in human endurance.

The fall pheasant hunting trips to South Dakota that the estimators are treated to as a reward for their hard work test both their physical stamina and their sense of humor.

Robbie McGowan gets to go along because he’s such a good cook. “We started cooking up there 10 or 12 years ago,” he says. “Everybody raves about

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Even when they play, MMR folks go hard. Annual hunts mean lots of fuel for long days shooting birds and long nights shooting the shit. Here, Allen Boudreaux (standing, no hat), Tom Welborn (standing, blue shirt), and group review the day at Longleaf Plantation, in Purvis, Mississippi.

PAGES 192–193: A successful haul at Pheasant Crest Lodge, in Kimball, South Dakota.

190

my Louisiana-style food, and that’s how I landed that permanent spot. We do steak and wings, fried shrimp, and a big ol’ pot of seafood gumbo, enough to feed everyone, the whole town of Warner, South Dakota, population 300. It’s quite a party.”

Pheasant hunting is hard work — walking for miles through fallen corn stalks and tangled knee-high brush — and being hungover and sleep-deprived is considered no excuse for missing breakfast at first light and a full day of walking in heavy boots with an eight-pound gun in hand. For a variety of reasons, the Midwestern pheasant population is in decline. The traditional family-owned farm is fading from the U.S. landscape. Narrow margins have forced out small farmers.

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

Large agri-business is taking over the industry, with an emphasis on profit over land stewardship. The brushy woodlots, creek bottoms, and marginal lands that provided cover for wildlife are being cleared away to make more room for crops. A number of severe winters have amplified the problem.

This means the MMR crew have to work much harder for their birds. “In years past we used to have real good hunts,” says Robbie.

“We were sometimes done in 3 fields, where the last couple of years we’ve had to go sometimes to 10 or 15 fields to get our birds. We got spoiled, because we’d be back at the barroom at two o’clock and I’d be able to start cooking. Now we hunt until five, it’s almost dark, and I have to cook for 300 people.”

Robbie explains that “another sad part” is that everyone is getting older, including him, and can’t party as hard as he would prefer. “One night it was cold as heck, only 22°F or so, and after cooking for hours, I had a few drinks and was so tired I passed out under an oak tree. When they found me I was curled on the ground with snow on my head.

It was good entertainment.”

The annual pheasant hunts, like this one from 2010, have been a perfect example of MMR's “work hard, play hard� mentality. But even the "play hard" part has required more work lately, as declining bird populations have translated into more tramping, less shooting.

FA S T FAC T S

LOUISIANA WHITE TAIL DEER POPULATION HIGHEST NUMBERS OF DEER TO HUNTERS SPECIES

WHITE-TAILED DEER Odocoileus virginianus

ESTIMATED POPULATION

500,000 REQUIRED HUNTER ORANGE OR BLAZE PINK

400

SQUARE INCHES

DAILY BAG LIMIT

1 ANTLERED 1 ANTLERLESS Created by ladhina from the Noun Project

LICENSES SOLD ANNUALLY

195,000

If you want to know why there are so many mounted deer at MMR Group headquarters, your first clue might be to look in Robbie McGowan’s warehouse … or Robbie McGowan’s office … or at Robbie McGowan’s house …

ALWAYS LEAVE THEM LAUGHING

I WANT YOU TO DESIGN THE HARDEST HUNT YOU CAN PUT TOGETHER. I DON’T WANT TO STAY IN CABINS. —PEPPER RUTLAND

PAGE 197: James Edward “Mr. Bubba” Smith Jr. was one of the few who could keep up with Pepper’s pranks. He passed in 2007 but will never be forgotten.

This book is dedicated to his memory, and the memory of all those we miss. (See page 2.).

PAGE 199: The shareholders of MMR Group, circa 2016 — you'll never find a more seroius group of professionals.

196

He is a well-known instigator of pranks and jokes, but he insists that Pepper is the main troublemaker. “Oh yeah, he parties harder than anyone. Last year wasn’t as rowdy as usual and I think it’s because it was the first year in 20-something years that Pepper had some obligation and he missed the hunt.”

The company has a “work hard, play hard” mentality that ties in with their shared belief that nothing good comes without effort. “The estimators work so hard we like to treat them to a hunt,” says Pepper. “One year we took them on an elk hunt, but it wasn’t a soft vacation. I called the outfitter ahead of time and told him, ‘I want you to design the hardest hunt you can put together.

I don’t want to stay in cabins. We want to ride way up into the mountains and sleep in tents and hike through deep snow all day.’

“And man, that was a hard hunt. I think one day I walked 20 miles through deep snow, most of it up and down steep hills. The hunting wasn’t very good either, but the guys, they’ll remember it for the rest of their lives. And it forged them together as a band of brothers.

THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED

“Hardship builds strength and character, and that’s really been the case with the company.

I was talking to this football coach recently, and he said, ‘I never learned anything from winning.

Every valuable lesson I learned came from losing.’

Well, that was our story. All those bad things that happened with the first MMR turned out to be a blessing. Adversity forced us to stretch out and learn some new strategies. It forced us to find our strength of character, and that’s been the key to our success.”

After humble beginnings in a little one-man office on Wooddale Court in Baton Rouge, MMR has grown through the decades, enduring many challenges and crushing lows, always staying true to the dream of becoming the best in its field. Now, with 4,000 employees, branch offices around the country and the world, and revenues approaching $1 billion a year, MMR is the largest open-shop electrical and instrumentation contractor in the United States. By any measure — but especially by its own — MMR has brought the trophy home.

As anyone who works in a high-stress environment knows, there’s nothing like a good joke to make the workload seem a bit lighter. Charlotte Gray, Pepper’s well-mannered and ladylike assistant, has been working at MMR for most of her life and says a good sense of humor is definitely an asset. “The boys can certainly get a bit silly after a 16-hour day,” she says. “I’ve had to deal with prank calls, whoopee cushions hidden under my desk, and some kind of dye that turns your ear black when you answer the phone.”

Company-sponsored hunting and fishing trips offer excellent opportunities for rigging complicated practical jokes at the expense of rookie estimators, and more than one keen young employee has been sent off on a long shopping trip to buy a pheasant call or some other crucial and nonexistent piece of equipment. On one elk hunting trip, the gear and clothing was sent ahead of time with instructions to the outfitter to unpack each man’s gear prior to their arrival.

This was all arranged by Robbie McGowan, who put considerable time into shopping for equipment and packing the bags. When the hunters arrived, each man’s gear was neatly laid out on his bunk, including the inflatable dolls that Robbie had hidden in some of the bags. “Oh yeah, that was funny,” Robbie says. “The best part was, some of these hunting guides were pretty rough guys, and when we were leaving, a couple of them wanted to know if we could leave the inflatable dolls behind.”

Robbie says that when it comes to practical jokes, Pepper is “worse than anybody.”

Not everyone knows the story of the time when Pepper was on the road with Bubba

Smith and they were sitting in a hotel room, unwinding with a drink after a long day.

They began arguing about football, and Bubba Smith put forward the proposition that Pepper never would’ve been able to get past him when he was playing defense.

Pepper heartily disagreed, the argument became spirited, and Pepper suggested that they put Bubba’s alleged tackling talents to the test. They went out into the hallway in their underwear and got down into position, Bubba called cadence, and as the imaginary ball was snapped Pepper stepped back into the room and closed the door.

This left Bubba standing by himself out in the hallway, which he didn’t find funny. He knocked on the door and ordered Pepper to let him in. Pepper ignored him. Bubba’s protests grew louder. Pepper called the front desk and said a drunk man was banging on his door and appeared to be naked. Hotel security arrived, and Bubba explained that Pepper was just fooling around. The security guards knocked on the door. Pepper opened it.

The security guard said, “Excuse me, sir, do you know this man?”

Pepper took a long look at Bubba. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

ADVERSITY FORCED US TO STRETCH OUT AND LEARN SOME NEW STRATEGIES. IT FORCED US TO FIND OUR STRENGTH OF CHARACTER, AND THAT’S BEEN THE KEY TO OUR SUCCESS.

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN, DESIGNED, AND PRODUCED BY: ECHO STORYTELLING AGENCY 1616 WEST 3RD AVENUE VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA V6J 1K2 ECHOSTORIES.COM 1.877.777.ECHO Creating inspiring books, video, and digital content since 1999.

Design © ECHO 2019

PHOTO CREDITS: Jake MacDonald John Burns art director Cathy Smith designer Illene Yu photo editor Adam Stenhouse production manager Gerilee McBride copy editor Lesley Cameron proofreaders Renate Preuss, Marial Shea writer

All images courtesy of MMR unless stated. © mahesh chinnaiyan / Picasa: pages 9–10; © Pictoral Parade / Getty Images: page 13; courtesy of Creative Commons / wikimedia.com: pages 18, 103, 105, 106–107, 112, 114, 118, 119–120, 124–125, 185; © Stokkete / Shutterstock: page 26; © Smith Collection/Gado / Getty Images: page 35; © SANCHAI / Adobe Stock: page 71; © capiotti / flickr: page 76; © Alejandro Solo / Shutterstock: page 79; © Skybox Creative Photo / Creative Market: page 92.

editorial director