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| Pat Schweitzer with Hettinger Welding talks with a client while checking on a site where the company is building roads for a sub division near Gillette. - News-Record photo by Zach Long |
By PETER GARTRELL, News-Record Writer
Hettinger Welding started out 25 years ago with two brothers and a blue 1979 Ford pickup truck.The company had 100 employees in 2001.
By next year, that number could grow to as many as 1,000, and its assets now include six recently acquired cranes.
Through aggressive hiring, business takeovers and an infusion of cash from Clearview Capital, a Old Greenwich, Conn., private equity firm, the Gillette-based business has gone from a local oil field outfit to a regional company with an increasingly diverse range of services.
“You need to be a certain size to do a $30 million project,” said Paul Caliento, a partner with Clearview Capital, who now sits on Hettinger’s board. “The key is to be a one-shop stop for the industry.”
Caliento identified the company’s longtime experience in various parts of the oil and gas business paired with the red-hot drilling activity in the Rockies as reasons Clearview bought Hettinger in October, 2006.
“Because they have the skill, we’ve been willing to put in the capital to allow them to grow,” he said.
IDEA WAS TO DIVERSIFY
Mark Hettinger, part of a local ownership group that retained a 20 percent share in the company, founded the company with his brother, Mike. From the start, the idea was to diversify what they did, “just so in the morning if the oil patch is dead, there’s something to do.”
It meant taking jobs like welding the sewage tank in Sleepy Hollow — an unforgettably smelly gig the brothers took on in 1986 — or, today, building roads and laying pipe in subdivisions around Campbell County.
“I started off working a blade on a highway in 1957,” said Larry Cramer, 68, a former supervisor at North Antelope-Rochelle mine who came out of retirement last year to help kick-start Hettinger’s subdivision business.
On Wednesday, he was smoothing off a road in the Fox Ridge subdivision a couple hundred yards north of Lewis Road.
“Forty years later ... I got back to where I started.”
But the company these days is much further far flung than jobs just south of Gillette.
According to Hettinger, the firm is now doing work in the Jonah Field out of a 250-person office in Big Piney, as well as Colorado, Utah, North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska. The company was recently asked to bid on a project in California.
The company now employs about 300 people out of its Gillette office, a number expected to increase in the coming months as it works to get more contracts, although it remains short-handed.
The range of work is staggering, too. This year, Hettinger bought a directional drilling company in Bismarck, N.D., and Eagle Excavating in Moorcroft. It’s now working to add an out-of-state engineering firm and steel pipe company in the coming months.
Gross sales are expected to increase from $52 million in 2006 to $87 million this year to about $150 million by the end of 2008.
The idea, Hettinger said, is to have a start-to-finish company, so that every piece of the design, construction and completion of a project comes from one place without any subcontracting.
“The only thing we don’t do right now is our own engineering and we’re working on that right now.”
A GROWTH SPURT
“It’s a new company,” Pat Schweitzer said.
A part-owner of Hettinger Welding since 2000, Schweitzer was standing in his immobile office, the one in a building in the industrial park east of Gurley Avenue. He gets there most days by 6 a.m. and doesn’t leave until close to 7 at night.
But it’s not where he spends most of his time — that would be his “pickup office,” a Ford F-350 Super Duty, where he rumbles around Campbell County, chewing through 9,000 cell phone minutes every month. When things get really busy in the mornings and late afternoons, Schweitzer will sometimes talk on two phones at once.
The long hours are a good problem to have.
“When I stated there, we had one backhoe. Then it was two. Now, we have 30,” Schweitzer said.
With a business card that says “God’s Gift To Dirt” below his name, a big part of Schweitzer’s job is to keep the backhoes busy, whether it’s working for Anadarko on the Willow Creek project near Pumpkin Buttes, doing water work for Dry Fork coal mine or working to complete a deal for road work in a city subdivision.
Such work and the growing employee roster contributes to monthly fuel bills in excess of $150,000 and eight digit annual payrolls.
“It’s like watching a calf grow,” said Schweitzer, a boisterous, say-anything, do-anything man who moved to Gillette from South Dakota. “If you’re there everyday, you don’t realize how fast it’s growing.”
The recent growth has had a great deal to do with Clearview Capital, which has pumped millions into the company since purchasing it in October, 2006, but allowing the old ownership group to retain a 20 percent stake.
But the idea of growth came at a shop meeting in the late 90s at Hettinger’s old location further north on Gurley. The company had about 25 workers at the time.
“We were staying busy but we weren’t going anywhere as individuals or as a company,” said Jamie Black, 34, a part owner who’s spent half his life working for Hettinger Welding.
Hettinger recalled saying something to the effect of “we can keep here and do what we’re doing and we’ll be fine or we can decide to grow.”
The company began to take on different jobs as coal-bed methane boomed and within a couple years had quadrupled its workforce.
Hettinger is now looking to complete their suite of services by adding an engineering department. Paul Roberts, a project superintendent for Osborne Brothers Construction, said such a move would add value in the eyes of clients. Osborne’s work is similar to Hettinger’s, but is more focussed on coal mines.
A big component of that savings comes down to time when unexpected changes come about.
“If there needs to be a field fit, if you’re a complete design-build company, you can make that change on the fly,” Roberts said. “Being able to react to that is a huge value-added component. It reduces project delays.”
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