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Sunday, Sep. 27, 1998
Berry company operations are diverse, but largely invisible outside industry
BY GLASTON FORD
Staff WriterRunning a company the size of the Berry industries is a lot like running a city the size of Corpus Christi, said former City Manager Ed Martin, now president and chief executive officer of Berry GP Inc.
The city has 3,000 employees; Berry has 3,500. The city builds roads. Berry builds roads. The city provides diverse services -- water, gas, law enforcement, fire protection, airport facilities. Berry provides diverse services -- it builds and repairs refineries, lifts heavy equipment and constructs metal towers and oil and gas process modules.
The hardest part of Martin's job since becoming president in December is understanding all the company's business units, he said.
Each unit has its own market and growth spurts. Offshore oil and gas exploration might do great, then plateau, he said. Then highway construction might increase.
As a city manager in Evanston, Ill., and later Corpus Christi, Martin had to understand the workings of diverse, unrelated departments, from water and sewer to police and airports.
Now he takes the skills honed in public service and applies them to an intensely private, family-owned company.
Berry, the fourth-largest private employer in the Coastal Bend, has customers all over the world and facilities in Corpus Christi, Houston, New Orleans, Morgan City, La., New Iberia, La., and Tulsa, Okla.
Martin, who has a master's degree in administration from the University of Southern California and more than 20 years of management experience, was hired for his ``managerial expertise and to implement the best management practices,'' said Glen Wittington, business development administrator at the time of Martin's hiring.
Martin became president shortly after company founder Marvin L. Berry died in November 1997.
One of the things he found was that many of Berry's practices still worked, said Martin, the first outsider to head the company.
``Many of the things Marvin Berry did were visionary and still make sense, whether it was the way he ran the steel work or accounting systems he set up,'' Martin said.
Marvin Berry set up offices in Louisiana for the offshore business before actually getting into the business, Martin said. The company founder had no direct background in the offshore business, but he applied what he knew from his related businesses and succeeded in a new field, Martin said.
He made strategic land purchases that the company had no need for at the time, Martin said. Later it would turn out the company needed the property to grow.
Lots of companies can make something or move something, Martin said. But Berry had the vision to create a company that could do it all in a lot of cases. ``It took big guts and big belief in what you are doing to move that far ahead,'' Martin said.
The Berry family is still very much involved with the company and are a part of its culture and history, Martin said. ``There is still a lot of family input, support and advice for the company,'' he said.
The family makes up the board of directors. Laura Berry, wife of the late Marvin Berry, is chairwoman. Their four sons, Kenneth, Dennis, Marvin and Allen Lawrence Berry, are also directors.
The family is still involved in the business and constantly in touch, Martin said. The company also has a practice called executive sponsorship in which a specific board member will become the sponsor for a large, important project, he said.
Laura Berry said she is in contact with Martin on a daily basis. During construction of Berry Dock West, she visited the construction site several days a week, Berry said. She stayed with crews throughout the night when concrete was poured for the dock, she said.
During tours of the company, Laura Berry likes to tell people about a sentimental attachment she has to one of the company's fabrication buildings.
Laura and Marvin Berry's first date in the late 1940s was to a place called Pleasure Pier in Galveston, Laura Berry said. Marvin Berry later bought the building at Pleasure Pier and moved it to the company headquarters in Corpus Christi, where it became the first fabrication shop, she said.
Stepping into the role of chairwoman of the company after her husband's death was not difficult, Laura Berry said. ``Marvin and I had no secrets,'' she said.
The company has tripled in size over the past 10 years, Martin said.
Berry officials wouldn't release any specific sales figures, but man-hours worked have doubled from 3.5 million in 1994 to an expected 7.0 million in 1998, said Bob Blair, vice president of business development for the main company, Bay Ltd.
The bulk of the business and revenue comes from Bay, Blair said.
The name ``Bay'' does not refer to Corpus Christi Bay or Nueces Bay, but to a nickname family members had for Marvin Berry, said Ben McDonald, longtime company friend and legal counsel.
Berry's size and influence are largely unknown outside the industrial world in which it operates.
If an ordinary citizen has heard of Bay, it is probably the civil and highway division, which does a lot of work for the Texas Department of Transportation such as expanding Holly Road and repaving U.S. Highway 181 in Portland, Blair said. Bay also does environmental remediation services, heavy hauling, rigging and erection, industrial construction and fabrication.
Several other companies exist under the parent entity of Berry GP Inc., which Martin heads. It is a maze of partnerships and entities, set up for legal and tax reasons, but they all generally do something related to heavy and industrial construction.
Martin would not elaborate on the specifics of the corporate structure, but said Bay and Berry are the names that matter most.
Other Berry companies include Berry Fabricators, which makes metal pressure vessels for heavy industry, Lone Star Equipment and RMS World Wide Sales and Leasing.
Even people who know Berry don't necessarily appreciate the scope of the work the company does, Blair said.
``We recognized that even our customers didn't realize a lot of the stuff that we did,'' he said.
Berry Fabricators, one of the few companies that carries the Berry name, specializes in large-diameter tall towers primarily for the refining industry, as much as 35 feet across and up to 250 feet tall, Blair said.
Bay Ltd.'s industrial division can build a refinery from the ground up, upgrade a unit or do turnaround maintenance.
The company built the iron carbide plant for Qualitech Steel Corp. on the Corpus Christi Ship Channel.
When an explosion damaged part of an alkylation unit at CITGO's refinery in May 1997, Bay was one of the contractors called in to repair the unit, said CITGO spokesman Chuck Cazalas.
Another Bay unit has been involved in major deepwater, offshore oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, Blair said. Bay installed the interconnecting process pipes on record-setting massive tension leg platforms such as Mars, Ursa and Ram-Powell.
Bay's fabrication division has built module process plants -- like a portable, self-contained refinery -- for projects all over the world including the Orinoco River Delta in Venezuela, the north slope of Alaska, Nigeria and Algeria, Blair said.
Bay's environmental division is building a landfill for the City of Alice, he said. It also built the landfill for Celanese's Bishop facility, a landmark structure with an air-supported dome over a five-acre area, he said.
The company does specialized, highly engineered heavy lifting, he said. Bay Ltd. is the 33rd-largest crane company in the world and the 13th-largest in America, according to International Cranes, a trade magazine for crane users and buyers.
Bay workers also disassembled the Tsingyi power plant in Hong Kong, once the principal source of power to the island, and helped bring about the sale of that plant to the Chinese government, Blair said.
The bulk of Bay's operations and employees are at the 100-acre headquarters in Corpus Christi, Blair said.
The company recently bought 16 acres to expand and consolidate its operations in Houston, Martin said.
Berry will continue to grow, but probably in a more measured and stable way than it has in the past, he said.
Much of Berry's work is dependent on the oil and gas industry.
``We have an insatiable desire for oil in this country and the world,'' Martin said. ``We are positioned well for that.''Post your comments about local news eventsFront Page || Main Index || News || Business || Texas || South Texas Outdoors || Birdwatching || Sports || Entertainment || Selena || Education || South Texas Attractions || World Wide Web