Building blocks – R.A. Smith

Smith grows firm based on simple philosophy — people come first
Rick Smith beams as he takes a visitor through the newly remodeled first floor of the Smith Centre, 16745 W. Bluemound Rd, Brookfield. The surveying practice group of National Survey & Engineering, a division of R. A. Smith & Associates, is moving to a new floor, and there’s a first-day-of-school atmosphere as employees configure their new workspaces.
The firm is the ninth largest civil engineering and surveying firm in Wisconsin. It occupies all three floors of the three-story building — with the exception of one small tenant, spreading 110 employees out of 195 throughout the building. The balance of employees either work out of the Oshkosh office or are surveyors out in the field.
It is a far cry from where Greenfield native Smith found himself in 1978 when he took over the civil engineering firm where he had been an employee. Morale was low and the employee count had dropped from 25 when he started in 1975 to 12 when he took over as a wide-eyed 28-year-old with no business background. As he recalls it, he was on his way out, too, when he had a meeting with the firm’s owner. His co-workers thought he was going to be fired immediately when he told them he planned to tell the owner that he was going to start looking for a new job, but wasn’t sure when he would actually leave.
“I said, ‘No, if you treat people the way you would want to be treated, they’ll respect that,'” he remembers telling the skeptics.
In the meeting, the absentee boss, who ran the Brookfield firm from Rhinelander, offered him more money, which he promptly refused. A few months later, he asked Smith if he would be interested in buying the firm.
“I looked at him like he was totally nuts,” Smith said. At the time, he and his wife, Joan, lived in an apartment and had very little money in the bank.
After months and months of negotiating — and the loss of a potential partner — the long-distance owner agreed to sign for Smith’s financing, and he found himself addressing the few employees that remained.
“I remember assembling people and telling them that I was the new owner,” Smith said, “and everybody’s jaws dropped. What must they have thought? A couple of them just walked out and left. Those were the harsh realities of business.”
Goodwill gone bad
But the good times were just starting. Part of the advantage of buying an existing firm was its existing client base and reputation. Once he took over, Smith began meeting with clients and introducing himself as the new president of the company. Doors were slammed in his face almost as soon as they opened. The problem: under the previous owner, the firm’s work had been shoddy and the municipalities all seemed to have had bad experiences.
Even the clients he had worked for who liked his work seemed opposed to rehiring the firm even though it was under new ownership. City councils only knew the firm’s name — not Smith’s — and the association was negative. After talking with former clients, the advice was all the same: change the name of the firm and start over.
From that experience, and from his first experience out of college where he was treated miserably, Smith developed his founding principles of the firm: quality, innovation and stability. Quality, because everybody wants it; innovation, because there’s always a better way; and stability, because “I’m interested in building long-term relationships, so I don’t want unhappy people,” Smith, 51, says. “I don’t want turnover. When I retire, I want a waiting list of people who want to work here. … I try to make this an enjoyable experience and a life-long career for people.”
The positive attitude is evident as Smith walks through the office, greeting employees as he goes.
“He really, genuinely cares about people,” director of marketing Chuck Stevens said, recalling Smith’s frequent inquiries about his health after eye surgery. “That’s the God’s honest truth.”
And here’s another revelation: Smith says he works for his employees, constantly asking what he can do to make them happier. Whether it’s letting each employee choose the color of his or her office walls, sponsoring sports teams or making sure no one works too much overtime, Smith’s door is always open.
“I believe I work for every person in this company,” Smith says. “And I think most business people don’t. I think they feel the client comes first. I feel the client does come first, but the way the client comes first is through the people, and I can provide (good) people. As the business grows, how many clients get to see me? Not too many, but they get to see everybody else in this firm, so they’ve got to reflect me.”
That philosophy was evident when R.A. Smith & Associates merged with National Survey & Engineering in 1994. It looked like a perfect match on paper. Smith & Associates were primarily servicing municipalities while National Survey & Engineering serviced private developers. Each firm had 65 employees at the time, and Smith admits being naïve about the challenges that come with merging cultures.
When the reality set in that National Survey didn’t operate as R.A. Smith did, Smith said he met with each employee of National Survey from senior engineers to supply managers. It took him six months to speak with each employee, with each interview lasting between two and four hours. He asked for their help, their patience, their understanding and their cooperation. If they gave him those things, he promised them that at some point — and he didn’t know how long it would take — they would be happier with him than they had been before.
The strategy worked; not one employee from National Survey left after the merger. Today, 60% of the firm’s revenues come from private development projects while 40% come from the public sector.
As for Smith’s other goals, former competitor and current division engineer for the City of New Berlin Larry Wilms describes R.A. Smith’s services as timely, creative, cost-competitive and wide-ranging.
Wilms — who has known Smith since the early days of the firm — goes on to say that Smith “has high values. I think he’s honest. He’s a good businessman. He’s creative. What else can I say? He has a good vision of how he wants his firm to perform and has achieved many of those goals, if not all of them.”
Aug. 3, 2001 Small Business Times, Milwaukee