Engineering Firm of the Year

Merrick & Co. Multidisciplinary firm thriving through strategic market focus

Aurora’s Merrick & Co. is our 2009 Colorado Engineering Firm of the Year.

By Kelly Davidson

Even in the midst of economic downtown, Aurora-based Merrick & Co. continues to post impressive gains and maintain its focus on growth.

“Decisions and strategies that we put into play five or more years ago are paying off now and keeping our business going strong,” says Ralph Christie, Merrick’s president and chief executive officer.

Foreshadowing tougher economic times at the start of the decade, the company set in motion a plan to diversify its core business and focus on six emerging markets—geospatial technologies, civil engineering, nuclear technology systems, military and government, life sciences, and energy and fuels. The company also made a commitment to expand its footprint at home and abroad.

Today, Merrick is coming off its best year ever, with annual revenues of $85 million for the fiscal year ending in March—a 20% increase over the previous year. The firm hired more than 100 employees in the last fiscal year and recently opened new offices in Tennessee, Texas and Mexico.

This year, the firm anticipates continued growth, forecasting 17% revenue gains. It exceeded its profit plan in the first quarter, posting 20% gains.

Key to its profitability was the procurement of public sector and government contracts, which account for more than two-thirds of the firm’s current work. Military base transformation projects—including the Airmen Training Complex at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and the Fire Crash Rescue Station at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico—are driving the majority of those contracts.

Go West Young Man

More than a half century after opening its doors, Merrick & Co. remains a direct reflection of its founder’s vision and entrepreneurial spirit, Christie says.

As a young man, Sears W. Merrick heard and answered the call of the West, following his entrepreneurial instincts to Colorado’s Front Range. Sears, a West Point Military Academy instructor and Syracuse University graduate who completed two tours in the U.S. Army, saw an opportunity to capitalize on the region’s power distribution boom.

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In 1955 he opened a firm in Denver and began putting his background as a civil engineer and pilot to work. Sears took to the skies, mapping and surveying mountains, small towns and fledgling ski areas to plot power transmission lines and other infrastructure for power companies.

Together with new partner and fellow engineer Ed Lecuver, Sears took the business to the next level, and in 1959, the firm incorporated as Merrick & Co.

The company branched out into the other engineering disciplines in the 1960s and added architecture in the late 1970s. By the late 1980s, it expanded its mapping services to include geographic information systems and put itself at the forefront of the growing geospatial services industry.

Today, geospatial solutions remain the cornerstone of Merrick’s business, representing about one-fifth of its current projects.

The firm’s specialty is the use of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to collect high-resolution geospatial data for contour mapping and 3-D perspective analysis. The firm owns three fixed-wing aircraft equipped with the latest technologies used to map coastlines, flood plains, transmission corridors, environmentally endangered areas and transportation routes.

This focus on high-end digital imagery and analytical data has brought Merrick major business from the federal arena, with contracts servicing the Dept. of Homeland Security and other governmental agencies. Since Sept. 11, Merrick has taken on a number of Homeland Security projects, including the design for the U.S. Northern Command headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.

Currently, it is providing the architectural and engineering design of border-control facilities for the DHS, as well as geospatial services for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The firm also is working with the Southwest Florida Water Management District, providing geospatial data collection and analysis services for 16 counties covering an area of approximately 10,000 sq miles.

Project Diversity

Along the Front Range, Merrick is best known for its recent work at RidgeGate, a 3,500-acre, master-planned community near the Interstate 25 interchange in Lone Tree. The firm provided drainage engineering, planning, design and construction management services for the development’s stormwater quality system.

This Airmen Training Complex is the first of 12 new basic military training facilities that will be constructed at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. (Rendering courtesy of Merrick & Co.)

While the firm remains true to its roots as a civil engineering and surveying business, Merrick has become known for continuously evolving with the changing marketplace and diversifying its services.

Forecasting the growing demand for alternative fuels, the company made its move into nuclear market in the 1990s. Today, the firm is a recognized leader in non-reactor nuclear facility design and construction.

One of the firm’s more high-profile projects is the ongoing, 14-year renovation of systems and facility features at Technical Area 55 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Dept. of Energy facility used in plutonium research and weapons development. Merrick is providing architecture, engineering and construction services for the $105-million project.

The company also pursued biofuels commercialization and hydrocarbon processing long before such technologies became fashionable. Its expertise led to its current role as design engineer for the Integrated Bio Refinery Facility at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, as well as the firm’s work with refining companies Conoco, Suncor and Valero.

For its more recent venture in laboratory planning and design for life sciences institutions, the firm spent years positioning itself in the market, hiring high-end talent and building its resume to win top projects—including project commissioning for the $500-million U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases facility at Fort Detrick, Frederick, Md.

Merrick is also providing commissioning services for a project at Washington State University and has completed other commissioning projects at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Missouri.

The Merrick Way

Merrick has operated as an employee-owned business since 1959 when the founding partners transferred ownership of the firm to an employee stock ownership program.

This sustainably designed fire-crash rescue station at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico won a Citation Award from the Air Combat Command. (Photo courtesy of Merrick & Co.)

“Employee ownership has definitely made us a bit more entrepreneurial and willing to take risks, but when youhave skin in the game, you pick and choose your risks more carefully, knowing it’s your money not someone else’s to lose,” Christie says.

All of the firm’s 505 permanent staff are considered employee owners and receive complete monthly financial performance reports. All company shares are held in a specially created employee trust that acts much like a retirement account. At the end of each year, a portion of Merrick’s profits is distributed in stock to each employee. The amount of stock each employee receives is based on the employee’s tenure and position with the company.

“When employees are not involved and do not understand the big picture, they can become resentful and unmotivated,” says Debbie Norris, vice president of human resources. “By keeping them very knowledgeable about where we are and where we are going, they understand our financial picture and better understand why certain decisions are made.”

Merrick’s open-book management style and employee stock ownership program have helped the firm keep involuntary turnover low and maintain nearly 90% employee retention each year.

The firm has had only three chief executive officers. After Sears’ retirement in 1983, Bruce Walker took over and served as CEO until his death in January 1997. Christie, who joined Merrick in 1992, has been CEO since.

The company’s motto—“There’s more to life than work”—keeps morale high and attracts top-level talent. Flexible work schedules, coupled with a family-friendly environment and perks such as employee ski days, have earned the frim accolades. Merrick has been recognized as a “Best Place to Work for in Colorado” by ColoradoBiz magazine for four consecutive years and also as a “Colorado Best Company for Working Families” by Colorado Parent magazine in 2006. Since 1991, the firm has been consistently listed in Engineering News-Record’s Top 200 Design Firms in the United States.

“Retaining good employees is critical to doing good business,” says Dave Huelskamp, senior vice president of business development. “A project team that is in sync and working well together can deliver the client with the highest-quality standards.”

Huelskamp says the firm is now developing a 10-year strategic plan to guide its next moves.

In addition to defining new markets, the plan will renew the company’s commitment to international growth, as well as energy infrastructure, homeland security and life sciences.

“While we feel pretty good about our market mix going into the next few years, we recognize that we’re too heavily dependent on the federal sector and need to shift our focus some to create more balance in our portfolio,” Huelskamp says. “We’re actively looking for projects to fill the gap that will be created once some of our government and military projects slow down.

“The trick is to focus on markets that are complementary to one another. They will not all perform well in a given year. One will do better while another slows down. We’ve had a winning mix so far, and we’re hoping we find a good balance for the next five or 10 years."