March 1, 2004
Family style | Jackson Parker has made Reed & Reed, a four-generation family construction business, an industry leader
By Scott Sutherland
It was a sunny weekday morning last July, and Jackson Parker had an idea. The state had just announced it would be taking bids for a big new bridge project, and Parker, president and CEO of Reed & Reed, the construction firm in Woolwich, considered his plan: Instead of competing with longtime rival Cianbro for the contract, what if the companies partnered on a proposal that could flatten the competition? He picked up the phone and punched in the number for Pete Vigue, Cianbro's president and CEO.
The project was the construction of a new cable-stayed bridge on Route One over the Penobscot River, just south of Bucksport, to replace the existing Waldo-Hancock suspension bridge. The Maine Department of Transportation had discovered in July that the 72-year-old bridge was beset with irreparable flaws and was unsafe, and launched a fast-track bidding procedure for the immediate construction of a new bridge, with an estimated price tag of $70 million or more.
Cianbro liked what it heard from Parker, and later that week managers from the two companies met in Augusta to discuss putting together a bid. There was a little history to get past ˆ among other tangles, Parker had accused Cianbro in 1997 of not complying with bid specifications for the $55 million Carlton Bridge project in Woolwich, charges Cianbro denied; neither firm got the job ˆ but it was all forgotten in the pursuit of the new contract. The companies agreed on a 50-50 partnership, and spent the fall drawing up proposal plans, submitted to the state Nov. 7, than included a price tag of $77.5 million.
Maine DOT considered one additional proposal ˆ by a partnership led by Fru-Con, the parent company of the Stillwater-based construction firm H.E. Sargent ˆ but finally announced it would award the project to the team of Reed & Reed-Cianbro. The award was the largest single bridge contract ever issued by the state. "We thought it would be good for Maine if these two companies could block out the competition," Vigue says. "Our firms have more knowledge and capacity to work in [Maine] conditions than anybody else."
Teaming up with a competitor to win the largest job in Reed & Reed history may have been Parker's most significant accomplishment in 2003, but it wasn't the only one. Reed & Reed secured 15 contracts in Maine last year, while the firm's Caribbean subsidiary added five more, bringing total revenues to more than $40 million ˆ a company high, and a jump of 23% over the previous year. It purchased a construction company in the U.S. Virgin Islands to help expand its Caribbean business, and placed a renewed emphasis on its commercial construction division here in Maine, where it will soon begin overseeing the construction of a new alumni/ development center on the campus of Colby College in Waterville, Parker's alma mater. The firm was recognized by the Profit Sharing/401K Council of America for its employee benefits. Parker, 49, also presided over the 75th anniversary of the founding of Reed & Reed, a closely held family business ˆ his wife, Susan, is the great-grand-daughter of the company's founder ˆ that has quietly become one of Maine's most successful construction companies.
Somewhere during that busy 2003, Parker might also have taken some satisfaction in his role in the company's emergence over the last two decades. When he was named president in 1985, at the age of 30, Reed & Reed was a $5 million company that built bridges and little else. Now, many times larger, it's a diversified, flexible and profitable enterprise aggressively seeking new market opportunities in Maine and beyond. "We just try to be very good at what we do, and to do it quietly and without a lot of fanfare," Parker says. "We don't need public accolades to reinforce that."
Stabilizing influence
People who own construction companies fall into two general categories: those who know how to build, and those who know how to build and run a company. "If you look at old bid lists for jobs here in Maine, you'll see a lot of companies that aren't around anymore," Parker says in a recent interview in his large, sunny office at Reed & Reed headquarters, located on a quiet back road in Woolwich. "Those firms grew up around guys who could build things, but at a certain point you have to be able to concentrate on the business side, too. That's the only way you're going to last."
By all accounts, Parker knows both sides of the business as well as anybody. "Jack's well known in the industry as being a very smart businessman whose knowledge of construction comes from having done it himself," says John Butts, executive director of the Associated Constructors of Maine, an industry group to which Reed & Reed belongs. "He's able to see down the road and plan accordingly, so the company is set up well for the future. The joint venture with Cianbro is a good example ˆ you identify the opportunity and capitalize on it."
Opportunity entails risk, but Parker seems to thrive on the challenges risk presents. He specialized in finance in business school, at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and he says he weighs any major decision ˆ bidding on a job, the purchase of a new piece of equipment, the acquisition of a new company ˆ on the scales of risk assessment, which Parker describes as "more intuitive than it is a science."
Kenneth Sweeney, a deputy chief engineer with the DOT who has worked closely with Reed & Reed on dozens of bridge and highway projects over the past 25 years, describes the firm as "one of the innovative ones" that can figure out how to do projects less expensively, and thus win competitive state contracts. "A skilled workforce can help you do that, and so can matching the right equipment to the job," Sweeney says, a critical skill in the gear-intensive heavy construction industry. "Reed & Reed always seems to have the right equipment, and they're not shy about getting the right piece if they need it."
Last year, in need of a new crane for the ongoing Kennebec River Bridge project in Augusta, Parker oversaw the purchase of a 250-ton Linkbelt crane for more than $1 million, the company's largest-ever capital expense. But he stresses that the crane wasn't purchased with just one job in mind. "We analyzed our markets, identified specific project opportunities [like the upcoming Penobscot River bridge], looked at trends in designs toward larger, heavier structural components, considered how owning a large crane like the Linkbelt LS 278H might distinguish us from our competitors and, of course, prepared a careful investment analysis including an after-tax cash flow analysis that included modeling the range of possible returns the investment might bring," he says. "Then we made the decision to buy the crane rather than merely lease it for the Augusta project."
Parker was hired as chief financial officer at Reed & Reed in 1982, and immediately applied his analytical skills to a company in transition. Reed & Reed had been founded in 1928 by a former ship's captain, Josiah W. Reed, and his son, Carlton Day Reed, and since then the company had existed almost exclusively on state bridge building contracts. A partnership of Carlton Day Reed, his son Bud, and Bud's brother-in-law, Ed Hunter, formed in 1968, but began to unravel in 1982 with Hunter's death from cancer. Carlton Day Reed died two years later, leaving Bud Reed to manage the company's far-flung operations single-handed.
"Times were really tough in the early 1980s," Parker recalls. "Finding new business was a real challenge, and they'd had some jobs that hadn't gone well financially. They were spread all over the state, doing a bridge in Presque Isle, a fish pier in Eastport, and it was hard for Bud to manage all the jobs as the only remaining partner. The company was never at a point where I thought it might perish, but it was clear to me that we needed to broaden the kinds of work we did, and that we had to execute [projects] more efficiently."
A company's new look
Parker helped devise a long-term strategy for the company to become more operationally sound, fine-tuning its business practices and financial management. Bud Reed, who always preferred managing jobs in the field to running the office, was soon urging Parker to consider taking over the firm's day-to-day operations. "He was trying to set the stage for a long-term transition, which is always a key to survival for any family business," Parker says. "He wanted to see if I was up to the job." Parker was named president, Reed remained chairman of the board, and the young CEO gradually assumed more responsibility for planning the future of Reed & Reed.
With the company stabilized, one of Parker's first steps toward diversification was the formation of a commercial building division in 1985. The division soon landed its first contract: the $7.8 million, 52,000-square-foot Anti-Submarine Warfare Control Center at Brunswick Naval Air Station, a high-security, explosion-resistant facility that was completed in 1987. In 1992, the company diversified geographically, launching a commercial construction subsidiary, RR Caribbean, in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. "We vacationed there as a family, and I'd look around at the firms that were down there and the work they were doing and think, '[Reed & Reed] could do this a lot better,'" Parker says. RR Caribbean soon began winning a wide range of contracts, including a government medical clinic, shoreline protection for a condominium project and a low-income housing project.
In 1993, anticipating a large federal outlay for transportation projects, Reed & Reed acquired its toughest competitor, Mechanic Falls-based Callahan Bros. Inc., a bridge, road and utility contractor. (Parker puts the purchase price at "between $1 million and $2 million.") When the state, buoyed by hundreds of millions of federal dollars, began soliciting bids for a lengthy list of road and bridge projects, the newly beefed-up Reed & Reed was in a prime position to compete. It won large jobs on projects like the Casco Bay Bridge between Portland and South Portland, the Androscoggin River Bridge connecting Brunswick and Topsham, the Penobscot River Bridge between Bangor and Brewer, and many more. "The mid-90s were the heyday of bridge building for us," Parker says. The bridge boom fueled a period of significant growth for Reed & Reed, which by the late 1990s boasted revenues of $30 million.
But that kind of growth, and the size Reed & Reed had attained, were unsettling to some members of the Reed family. "I was never interested in a lot of growth ˆ we were happy making a living, but Jack has taken the company almost to the point of being a big business," says Bud Reed, now 73, who still makes an occasional visit to Reed & Reed job sites. "Not that that's not honorable, but I think you can get to a certain size and wish you hadn't gone that direction. The company is doing very well, and we haven't extended our resources to the point where we can't move. But I also know that anything can happen to a business, things you never expected. That's how business is."
All in the family
"In a family-run business," Parker says with a grin, "family is always involved."
Family has always been involved in Reed & Reed, to the point where it's difficult to separate company from clan. The company's five-member board consists entirely of Reeds and their extended family. Tom Reed, 41, Parker's brother-in-law, is the company's treasurer and field-manages many of the firm's biggest jobs. "They're this relatively prominent family that's just sort of hidden off in the woods," says John Amerling, who runs RR Caribbean. "They all believe in the things old Captain Reed believed in, like probity, being smart, not drawing attention to yourself. You do what you do quietly and well, and you make money at it."
Parker's first, and most significant, encounter with the family was Susan Reed, a classmate at Morse High School in Bath and one of six children of Bud and Betty Reed. (Parker grew up in Bath with three siblings. His father, Reginald, was a banker who retired in 1994 and died six years ago; his mother, Barbara, lives in Woolwich.) Susan and Jackson started going out their sophomore year at Morse, where he was a standout wrestler and football player.
His junior year, however, brought what he calls an "early formative experience," when he broke his leg badly in a football game and was out of sports for five months. "I had a lot of time to reflect about what my priorities were, and I started hitting the books," Parker says. "I saw the connection between working hard and academic results, and it was very fulfilling." At the urging of Bill Haggett, a family friend of the Parkers and an executive vice president at Bath Iron Works, Parker decided to attend Colby College. He and Susan went off to Colby together, where he majored in government and played defensive end for four years on the football team, and she majored in government and administrative science. They were married two weeks after graduation in the spring of 1976.
Parker was wait-listed at the University of Maine law school ("Thank God," he says now, "otherwise I might be a lawyer"), but entered business school in 1977. He finished at Tuck in 1979 and took a job as a senior financial analyst with the giant FMC Corp. in Chicago. "I loved it," he says of the experience. "I had great managers and great projects and I was in a lot of positions where I could excel." In 1981, he and Susan and their two young daughters returned to Maine, where he went to work as a cost control manager for BIW.
Reed & Reed was a constant presence in his life, however, and when the company encountered its management challenges in the early 80s the family turned to Parker for help. "It was probably Susan and her mother who first started talking about me coming on at Reed & Reed," he recalls. ("I hadn't heard that one," says Bud Reed, "but then you learn something new every day.") He'd been surrounded by Reeds most of his life, though, and had worked as a laborer for Reed & Reed summers while in college, all of which added to a certain inevitability that he would one day join the Reed & Reed family.
The Parkers built a house for themselves and their children in the mid-1980s at The Narrows, the Reed family compound that stretches along the east bank of the Kennebec River, just upstream from BIW. (The compound includes four clan Reed homes, a rudimentary golf course and a family lodge.) Parker makes the half-mile commute to his office in a 2002 BMW 745i, often arriving by 5 a.m. "It's a productive time for me," he says of his early-morning routine. "And I love coming to work."
Building on success
Parker still moves with a kind of coiled athleticism, a quality that can make him look simultaneously large and compact. His voice is soft, but he speaks in complete sentences that suggest a precise intelligence. His gaze can be probing and intense, especially when he removes his glasses. All of which can make him, in the business world, an imposing adversary and a challenging partner. "Jack gets his point across," says Butts of the ACM. "He's very direct, and he doesn't pull any punches."
Parker brings that directness to his management style, and combines it with a willingness to let managers make their own decisions. "I try to build a company culture that attracts inductive thinkers, people who can step out of the conventional boxes," he says. "The trick is to combine structure with flexibility, so I make my expectations known and turn people loose."
It's a generous approach to management, and sometimes it can backfire. A former general manager of RR Caribbean, hired by Parker, was indicted on charges of wire fraud and filing false claims in connection with inflating government-reimbursed repair costs in the aftermath of Hurricane Marilyn in 1995; he pled guilty and was sentenced to jail time. The silver lining in the incident is that Reed & Reed was represented by John Amerling, then an attorney with Verrill & Dana in Portland, whose involvement with the company steadily grew until Parker asked him to run the Caribbean operation in 2000. Even so, the incident still pains Parker, who can barely bring himself to talk about it. "It burned him," says Amerling, "but he made sure he didn't tuck his tail between his legs and run out of the Caribbean market. He did the right thing and stuck around and built the business, and he's given me a lot of freedom to map out a strategy. But I think he watches more closely now."
He's also willing to reward his employees. Reed & Reed matches employee retirement and profit sharing at up to 9% of salary, nearly triple the industry average, and last year was recognized by the Profit Sharing/401K Council of America. On top of that, managers enjoy a substantial bonus program. Employees are encouraged to succeed with the help of detailed training programs, including programs geared to women and minorities, who make up 20% of Reed & Reed's workforce, compared to the industry average of 1%. "Success builds on success," Parker says. "People feel good being part of something that's successful."
At the moment, Reed & Reed is looking every bit the successful company. In addition to the Cianbro partnership, the Caribbean subsidiary is in the running for up to $40 million in construction contracts. A new emphasis on Reed & Reed's building division holds the possibility of yet more diversification in the near future, Parker says. The 1999 reformulation of Callahan into a union company means Reed & Reed can bid on construction jobs specified as union only, like many at BIW and elsewhere.
Having the capability is key, Parker says, as is knowing what's going on out in the field, which is why he tries to spend at least a couple days each week visiting job sites. "It helps me make decisions on resource allocation if I know what's going on at the various jobs," he says. There's also the camaraderie he enjoys with laborers and managers by regularly getting his boots muddy. "I was this young Ivy League M.B.A. when I went to work here, and there was perhaps some resistance to me," Parker says, smiling. "But it certainly established some credibility with our field people that I was down in the hole mucking it out. You don't have to have played football to be a good coach, but it sure helps."
The project was the construction of a new cable-stayed bridge on Route One over the Penobscot River, just south of Bucksport, to replace the existing Waldo-Hancock suspension bridge. The Maine Department of Transportation had discovered in July that the 72-year-old bridge was beset with irreparable flaws and was unsafe, and launched a fast-track bidding procedure for the immediate construction of a new bridge, with an estimated price tag of $70 million or more.
Cianbro liked what it heard from Parker, and later that week managers from the two companies met in Augusta to discuss putting together a bid. There was a little history to get past ˆ among other tangles, Parker had accused Cianbro in 1997 of not complying with bid specifications for the $55 million Carlton Bridge project in Woolwich, charges Cianbro denied; neither firm got the job ˆ but it was all forgotten in the pursuit of the new contract. The companies agreed on a 50-50 partnership, and spent the fall drawing up proposal plans, submitted to the state Nov. 7, than included a price tag of $77.5 million.
Maine DOT considered one additional proposal ˆ by a partnership led by Fru-Con, the parent company of the Stillwater-based construction firm H.E. Sargent ˆ but finally announced it would award the project to the team of Reed & Reed-Cianbro. The award was the largest single bridge contract ever issued by the state. "We thought it would be good for Maine if these two companies could block out the competition," Vigue says. "Our firms have more knowledge and capacity to work in [Maine] conditions than anybody else."
Teaming up with a competitor to win the largest job in Reed & Reed history may have been Parker's most significant accomplishment in 2003, but it wasn't the only one. Reed & Reed secured 15 contracts in Maine last year, while the firm's Caribbean subsidiary added five more, bringing total revenues to more than $40 million ˆ a company high, and a jump of 23% over the previous year. It purchased a construction company in the U.S. Virgin Islands to help expand its Caribbean business, and placed a renewed emphasis on its commercial construction division here in Maine, where it will soon begin overseeing the construction of a new alumni/ development center on the campus of Colby College in Waterville, Parker's alma mater. The firm was recognized by the Profit Sharing/401K Council of America for its employee benefits. Parker, 49, also presided over the 75th anniversary of the founding of Reed & Reed, a closely held family business ˆ his wife, Susan, is the great-grand-daughter of the company's founder ˆ that has quietly become one of Maine's most successful construction companies.
Somewhere during that busy 2003, Parker might also have taken some satisfaction in his role in the company's emergence over the last two decades. When he was named president in 1985, at the age of 30, Reed & Reed was a $5 million company that built bridges and little else. Now, many times larger, it's a diversified, flexible and profitable enterprise aggressively seeking new market opportunities in Maine and beyond. "We just try to be very good at what we do, and to do it quietly and without a lot of fanfare," Parker says. "We don't need public accolades to reinforce that."
Stabilizing influence
People who own construction companies fall into two general categories: those who know how to build, and those who know how to build and run a company. "If you look at old bid lists for jobs here in Maine, you'll see a lot of companies that aren't around anymore," Parker says in a recent interview in his large, sunny office at Reed & Reed headquarters, located on a quiet back road in Woolwich. "Those firms grew up around guys who could build things, but at a certain point you have to be able to concentrate on the business side, too. That's the only way you're going to last."
By all accounts, Parker knows both sides of the business as well as anybody. "Jack's well known in the industry as being a very smart businessman whose knowledge of construction comes from having done it himself," says John Butts, executive director of the Associated Constructors of Maine, an industry group to which Reed & Reed belongs. "He's able to see down the road and plan accordingly, so the company is set up well for the future. The joint venture with Cianbro is a good example ˆ you identify the opportunity and capitalize on it."
Opportunity entails risk, but Parker seems to thrive on the challenges risk presents. He specialized in finance in business school, at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and he says he weighs any major decision ˆ bidding on a job, the purchase of a new piece of equipment, the acquisition of a new company ˆ on the scales of risk assessment, which Parker describes as "more intuitive than it is a science."
Kenneth Sweeney, a deputy chief engineer with the DOT who has worked closely with Reed & Reed on dozens of bridge and highway projects over the past 25 years, describes the firm as "one of the innovative ones" that can figure out how to do projects less expensively, and thus win competitive state contracts. "A skilled workforce can help you do that, and so can matching the right equipment to the job," Sweeney says, a critical skill in the gear-intensive heavy construction industry. "Reed & Reed always seems to have the right equipment, and they're not shy about getting the right piece if they need it."
Last year, in need of a new crane for the ongoing Kennebec River Bridge project in Augusta, Parker oversaw the purchase of a 250-ton Linkbelt crane for more than $1 million, the company's largest-ever capital expense. But he stresses that the crane wasn't purchased with just one job in mind. "We analyzed our markets, identified specific project opportunities [like the upcoming Penobscot River bridge], looked at trends in designs toward larger, heavier structural components, considered how owning a large crane like the Linkbelt LS 278H might distinguish us from our competitors and, of course, prepared a careful investment analysis including an after-tax cash flow analysis that included modeling the range of possible returns the investment might bring," he says. "Then we made the decision to buy the crane rather than merely lease it for the Augusta project."
Parker was hired as chief financial officer at Reed & Reed in 1982, and immediately applied his analytical skills to a company in transition. Reed & Reed had been founded in 1928 by a former ship's captain, Josiah W. Reed, and his son, Carlton Day Reed, and since then the company had existed almost exclusively on state bridge building contracts. A partnership of Carlton Day Reed, his son Bud, and Bud's brother-in-law, Ed Hunter, formed in 1968, but began to unravel in 1982 with Hunter's death from cancer. Carlton Day Reed died two years later, leaving Bud Reed to manage the company's far-flung operations single-handed.
"Times were really tough in the early 1980s," Parker recalls. "Finding new business was a real challenge, and they'd had some jobs that hadn't gone well financially. They were spread all over the state, doing a bridge in Presque Isle, a fish pier in Eastport, and it was hard for Bud to manage all the jobs as the only remaining partner. The company was never at a point where I thought it might perish, but it was clear to me that we needed to broaden the kinds of work we did, and that we had to execute [projects] more efficiently."
A company's new look
Parker helped devise a long-term strategy for the company to become more operationally sound, fine-tuning its business practices and financial management. Bud Reed, who always preferred managing jobs in the field to running the office, was soon urging Parker to consider taking over the firm's day-to-day operations. "He was trying to set the stage for a long-term transition, which is always a key to survival for any family business," Parker says. "He wanted to see if I was up to the job." Parker was named president, Reed remained chairman of the board, and the young CEO gradually assumed more responsibility for planning the future of Reed & Reed.
With the company stabilized, one of Parker's first steps toward diversification was the formation of a commercial building division in 1985. The division soon landed its first contract: the $7.8 million, 52,000-square-foot Anti-Submarine Warfare Control Center at Brunswick Naval Air Station, a high-security, explosion-resistant facility that was completed in 1987. In 1992, the company diversified geographically, launching a commercial construction subsidiary, RR Caribbean, in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. "We vacationed there as a family, and I'd look around at the firms that were down there and the work they were doing and think, '[Reed & Reed] could do this a lot better,'" Parker says. RR Caribbean soon began winning a wide range of contracts, including a government medical clinic, shoreline protection for a condominium project and a low-income housing project.
In 1993, anticipating a large federal outlay for transportation projects, Reed & Reed acquired its toughest competitor, Mechanic Falls-based Callahan Bros. Inc., a bridge, road and utility contractor. (Parker puts the purchase price at "between $1 million and $2 million.") When the state, buoyed by hundreds of millions of federal dollars, began soliciting bids for a lengthy list of road and bridge projects, the newly beefed-up Reed & Reed was in a prime position to compete. It won large jobs on projects like the Casco Bay Bridge between Portland and South Portland, the Androscoggin River Bridge connecting Brunswick and Topsham, the Penobscot River Bridge between Bangor and Brewer, and many more. "The mid-90s were the heyday of bridge building for us," Parker says. The bridge boom fueled a period of significant growth for Reed & Reed, which by the late 1990s boasted revenues of $30 million.
But that kind of growth, and the size Reed & Reed had attained, were unsettling to some members of the Reed family. "I was never interested in a lot of growth ˆ we were happy making a living, but Jack has taken the company almost to the point of being a big business," says Bud Reed, now 73, who still makes an occasional visit to Reed & Reed job sites. "Not that that's not honorable, but I think you can get to a certain size and wish you hadn't gone that direction. The company is doing very well, and we haven't extended our resources to the point where we can't move. But I also know that anything can happen to a business, things you never expected. That's how business is."
All in the family
"In a family-run business," Parker says with a grin, "family is always involved."
Family has always been involved in Reed & Reed, to the point where it's difficult to separate company from clan. The company's five-member board consists entirely of Reeds and their extended family. Tom Reed, 41, Parker's brother-in-law, is the company's treasurer and field-manages many of the firm's biggest jobs. "They're this relatively prominent family that's just sort of hidden off in the woods," says John Amerling, who runs RR Caribbean. "They all believe in the things old Captain Reed believed in, like probity, being smart, not drawing attention to yourself. You do what you do quietly and well, and you make money at it."
Parker's first, and most significant, encounter with the family was Susan Reed, a classmate at Morse High School in Bath and one of six children of Bud and Betty Reed. (Parker grew up in Bath with three siblings. His father, Reginald, was a banker who retired in 1994 and died six years ago; his mother, Barbara, lives in Woolwich.) Susan and Jackson started going out their sophomore year at Morse, where he was a standout wrestler and football player.
His junior year, however, brought what he calls an "early formative experience," when he broke his leg badly in a football game and was out of sports for five months. "I had a lot of time to reflect about what my priorities were, and I started hitting the books," Parker says. "I saw the connection between working hard and academic results, and it was very fulfilling." At the urging of Bill Haggett, a family friend of the Parkers and an executive vice president at Bath Iron Works, Parker decided to attend Colby College. He and Susan went off to Colby together, where he majored in government and played defensive end for four years on the football team, and she majored in government and administrative science. They were married two weeks after graduation in the spring of 1976.
Parker was wait-listed at the University of Maine law school ("Thank God," he says now, "otherwise I might be a lawyer"), but entered business school in 1977. He finished at Tuck in 1979 and took a job as a senior financial analyst with the giant FMC Corp. in Chicago. "I loved it," he says of the experience. "I had great managers and great projects and I was in a lot of positions where I could excel." In 1981, he and Susan and their two young daughters returned to Maine, where he went to work as a cost control manager for BIW.
Reed & Reed was a constant presence in his life, however, and when the company encountered its management challenges in the early 80s the family turned to Parker for help. "It was probably Susan and her mother who first started talking about me coming on at Reed & Reed," he recalls. ("I hadn't heard that one," says Bud Reed, "but then you learn something new every day.") He'd been surrounded by Reeds most of his life, though, and had worked as a laborer for Reed & Reed summers while in college, all of which added to a certain inevitability that he would one day join the Reed & Reed family.
The Parkers built a house for themselves and their children in the mid-1980s at The Narrows, the Reed family compound that stretches along the east bank of the Kennebec River, just upstream from BIW. (The compound includes four clan Reed homes, a rudimentary golf course and a family lodge.) Parker makes the half-mile commute to his office in a 2002 BMW 745i, often arriving by 5 a.m. "It's a productive time for me," he says of his early-morning routine. "And I love coming to work."
Building on success
Parker still moves with a kind of coiled athleticism, a quality that can make him look simultaneously large and compact. His voice is soft, but he speaks in complete sentences that suggest a precise intelligence. His gaze can be probing and intense, especially when he removes his glasses. All of which can make him, in the business world, an imposing adversary and a challenging partner. "Jack gets his point across," says Butts of the ACM. "He's very direct, and he doesn't pull any punches."
Parker brings that directness to his management style, and combines it with a willingness to let managers make their own decisions. "I try to build a company culture that attracts inductive thinkers, people who can step out of the conventional boxes," he says. "The trick is to combine structure with flexibility, so I make my expectations known and turn people loose."
It's a generous approach to management, and sometimes it can backfire. A former general manager of RR Caribbean, hired by Parker, was indicted on charges of wire fraud and filing false claims in connection with inflating government-reimbursed repair costs in the aftermath of Hurricane Marilyn in 1995; he pled guilty and was sentenced to jail time. The silver lining in the incident is that Reed & Reed was represented by John Amerling, then an attorney with Verrill & Dana in Portland, whose involvement with the company steadily grew until Parker asked him to run the Caribbean operation in 2000. Even so, the incident still pains Parker, who can barely bring himself to talk about it. "It burned him," says Amerling, "but he made sure he didn't tuck his tail between his legs and run out of the Caribbean market. He did the right thing and stuck around and built the business, and he's given me a lot of freedom to map out a strategy. But I think he watches more closely now."
He's also willing to reward his employees. Reed & Reed matches employee retirement and profit sharing at up to 9% of salary, nearly triple the industry average, and last year was recognized by the Profit Sharing/401K Council of America. On top of that, managers enjoy a substantial bonus program. Employees are encouraged to succeed with the help of detailed training programs, including programs geared to women and minorities, who make up 20% of Reed & Reed's workforce, compared to the industry average of 1%. "Success builds on success," Parker says. "People feel good being part of something that's successful."
At the moment, Reed & Reed is looking every bit the successful company. In addition to the Cianbro partnership, the Caribbean subsidiary is in the running for up to $40 million in construction contracts. A new emphasis on Reed & Reed's building division holds the possibility of yet more diversification in the near future, Parker says. The 1999 reformulation of Callahan into a union company means Reed & Reed can bid on construction jobs specified as union only, like many at BIW and elsewhere.
Having the capability is key, Parker says, as is knowing what's going on out in the field, which is why he tries to spend at least a couple days each week visiting job sites. "It helps me make decisions on resource allocation if I know what's going on at the various jobs," he says. There's also the camaraderie he enjoys with laborers and managers by regularly getting his boots muddy. "I was this young Ivy League M.B.A. when I went to work here, and there was perhaps some resistance to me," Parker says, smiling. "But it certainly established some credibility with our field people that I was down in the hole mucking it out. You don't have to have played football to be a good coach, but it sure helps."
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