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SWCA Environmental Consultants is celebrating our 30th anniversary.
Founder Steven W. Carothers talks about how it all began and how the company has grown
since then.
The company was started in 1981 but in 1980
the director of the museum where I had been a biologist
for fifteen-sixteen years came and said that
the museum was having financial difficulties and that we were all going to have to be let go.
So I took those contracts
that I had at that time and we started SWCA.
I was looking for an office, and
basically my
good friend John Running, the famous photographer from Flagstaff, Arizona,
allowed me to have a small closet space
in his shop that was above Martan's restaurant, a restaurant that is
still extant in Flagstaff,
and i started there with a 27-character
memory
Remington Selectric typewriter,
a telephone (we didn't have cell phones in those days) services
and that was the humble beginnings.
In 1984
Steve incorporated his fledgling business.
It was during this era that several key figures in SWCA's formation and growth
joined the team,
including Mark Raming
and former and current CEOs Ron Borkan and John Thomas.
The company would not be where it is today without the influence of John and
Ron, and how it worked was
they were able to take over the actual management of the company and then
that allowed me to continue to be a scientist and continue to to bring in
the work.
I would get the work and
basically throw the responsibility of managing the company -- the payroll,
insurance, and everything -- over my shoulder
and those two took it on.
In 1988
SWCA added cultural resources to the mix
by hiring archaeologists in Flagstaff and Tucson.
One day I was sitting in my office and I happened to be looking at the Flagstaff
newspaper
and once again the Museum of Northern Arizona had decided to
essentially abandon their cultural resources projects and their
cultural resources team.
I called Dave Greenwald and said,
hey, let's join SWCA.
It was a tremendous increase in our revenues and a tremendous increase
in the number of people that we had working for us and expanded our services
greatly.
SWCA expanded beyond Arizona in the 1990s,
moving into Utah for wetlands work and environmental planning,
New Mexico for cultural resources projects, and Texas for natural resources
and endangered species work.
We began to expand SWCA geographically into the adjacent states
in the late
1980s and early 1990s. We basically followed the
opportunities. We went where the
projects were and that's something that we continue to do today.
At the end of the decade
SWCA established an employee stock ownership plan.
The employee stock ownership program is one of the secrets of SWCA's success.
We were able to in the in the late 1990s -- actuallly in the early
1990s we began discussions on how to transition the ownership of
the company from the sole proprietorship -- me -- into an employee owned company
and that is what's held the company together and that's what's held the
remarkable talent of
Ron Borkan and John Thomas in the company
for almost as long as I've been here.
And that truly
is why we did the ESOP
and why we maintain that today.
There's no question that the motivation of the employees is tremendously
enhanced by
them realizing that they're owners of the company as well.
The new millennium brought rapid growth through news services and acquisitions.
We realized that if we were going to continue to grow
that one of the ways we could accomplish that would be through acquisitions of
smaller consulting firms that were available at the time
and we did that.
We continued our organic growth, hiring a person at a time when when that right
person became available,
but we really took off with the acquisition of other groups -- RMW Paleo
in California,
the Fishman group in Portland, Oregon,
the Morro Group, again in California.
It's just been a tremendous growth factor for us to acquire those other firms.
One of the defining moments for SWCA in the new millennium was
putting a board member on -- an outside board member, Robert Perry -- who had been
with Dames and Moore for 42 years, another consulting company.
He came into the company and helped us
with facing the new millennium's challenges, the growth growth
through acquisitions, organic growth through just hiring more employees but
he really helped us put tremendous systems in place that monitored our
financial growth and helped us get through those times.
SWCA has grown to more than 750 employees
in more than twenty offices throughout the western U.S. and Pacific Islands,
something Steve foresaw early on.
In the very early days of SWCA's growth I had been working at
the museum for Dames and Moore, a big consulting firm;
interesting and poetic that our first outside board member had worked for
Dames and Moore for forty two years,
but at that time Dames and Moore had revenues of about ninety million dollars
a year
and I looked at that and I thought, you know,
we could do that. We really could. There's nothing that could hold us back and
it was fanciful thinking at the time but guess what, we're going to be there.
The SWCA strategic plan as we map our way into the future
includes the continued growth,
the way we are right now -- we have an infrastructure with our accounting and our
human resources.
All of the basic business infrastructure that we've got right now will allow us
to even double our size, and we can do that, we believe, and maintain that culture,
maintain the passion and maintain the high quality employees that we have
today.
The environmental challenges that are facing
our world as we move into the next thirty years are substantial, and our
mantra,
our tagline --
sound science and creative solutions -- are going to help us
bring on the next thirty years and I'm looking very much forward to that.
With our continued dedication to
sound science and creative solutions,
we at SWCA Environmental Consultants not only celebrate thirty years
in business
but also look ahead to the next thirty years.
Happy anniversary!