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Danger zone
World's hotspots
provide special niche for Hankins and Anderson
by
Brett Lieberman
for Virginia Business
July
2004
The map on the wall at Hankins and Anderson’s
headquarters in Glen Allen reads like a roadmap of the
world’s most perilous hotspots. Red and blue pins
mark Beirut, Kabul, Mogadishu, Moscow, Nairobi, and
soon, perhaps, Baghdad. The cities are just a few of
the 175 locations in 86 countries where the Richmond
firm has found a strong demand for its services.
At a time when war, embassy bombings
and fears of terrorism have hurt some businesses, these
very calamities have fueled the growth of this architectural
and engineering services firm, one of a handful that
the U.S. Department of State relies on to build and
renovate America’s embassies around the world.
“We just saw it as a niche and decided to really
focus on it and expand it,” says Michael Matthews,
the company’s CEO and president.
Exploiting that niche turned out to
be a good move. Hankins began hammering out its place
in the market about 20 years ago while working with
architects who did a lot of embassy and government work.
Today, the company works almost exclusively for the
government, and is one of only three companies sanctioned
by the State Department to provide embassies with countermeasures
for chemical and biological attacks.
While much of the company’s work
requires security clearances and can’t be discussed
publicly, there are perks that come with working for
a company that sets up shop all over the world. Employees
have visited Egyptian pyramids, ridden on the backs
of camels and tasted exotic foods. But there is also
risk. “I’ve probably been to 25 to 30 countries,
most of which I would not pay money to go to as a tourist,”
says Matthews, who found himself in Dares Salaam, Tanzania,
helping to set up a temporary embassy four weeks after
the embassy was bombed.
When Senior Vice President Doug Burks
was in Afghanistan about two months ago, four bombs
detonated around the city as he was traveling between
his hotel and the American Embassy in Kabul. The closest
was about a half-mile away. “In Kabul you hear
gun fire and things like that,” he says. While
Burks has never been shot at, he has faced odd, uncomfortable
stares.
Interest in hardened buildings capable
of resisting blasts and other attacks spiked after the
9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The State Department’s
focus on security, though, began before that. The 1996
Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 Americans and wounded
500 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and the bombings of U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which left another
258 dead in 1998, left no doubt on the need for improvements.
Hankins was well positioned for the
burgeoning market, which has helped the privately held
company achieve about 20 percent growth in each of the
last five years. Last year, sales reached $18 million.
One thing Matthews likes about the work: “It doesn’t
have the competition that you have in other things such
as K-12 or university work,” he says.
Current projects include work on the
new embassy in Afghanistan, renovating the historic
embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay—designed by noted
architect IM Pei—and jobs at about a dozen other
embassies. The firm also is in the running to design
security upgrades for Baghdad’s Green Zone, the
four-square-mile area ringed by 15-foot concrete walls
and barbed wire where thousands of soldiers, contractors
and government workers live and work.
In the run up to the war in Iraq, the
company played a crucial role in a $70 million transformation
of the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, turning a tent city
into a modern facility that served as a major base of
air operations. The design/build project included new
guard towers, guard houses, a medical treatment facility
and even a community mall. Such work can be as mundane
as updating a heating and air conditioning system or
as complicated as adding protections against a chemical
and biological attack. When working on embassies, Hankins
must meet design standards approved by the State Department.
For instance, embassies must be capable of resisting
a blast as well as defending against a crowbar- and
axe-wielding mob. To achieve this hardening, building
techniques range from perimeter fences and walls to
what’s known as the interior hard-line, “where
nobody can get in without brute force over an extended
period of time,” says Matthews.
One of the firm’s best-known projects
may be the demolition, construction and renovation of
America’s new embassy in Moscow in 1985. The job
came after U.S. intelligence agencies found that Soviet
agents turned the structure into a giant antenna capable
of broadcasting some of the United States’ biggest
secrets. After years of hand-wringing, U.S. officials
finally decided to lop off the top of the embassy and
build a new, more bug-proof facility. “It was
certainly challenging because they were doing a lot
of things in a security perspective that had never been
done before, particularly as far as countermeasures
for intelligence collection,” says Matthews, who
served as lead engineer and project manager.
While many government contracts are
awarded to the lowest bidder, price has never been an
issue for Hankins and Anderson, because the federal
Perkins Act requires that professional services be awarded
based on qualifications rather than price. That makes
it difficult for newcomers to crack the market and compete
against the firm, which was named to Engineering News
Record’s list of Top 200 International Design
Firms. Besides, not every business wants to send its
people to hotspots overseas where the work is frequently
hazardous and expensive. In addition to ordinary business
costs, special insurance to cover medical evacuation
and repatriation can run as much as $3,000 a week in
Afghanistan. Then there’s extra costs for workers’
comp and life insurance, which may not cover war zones
under many policies. “We try to keep a low profile
while traveling overseas, so there isn’t usually
too much excitement,” Matthews says.
Considering some of the inhospitable
locations, the recruiting of employees might appear
troublesome. Yet Hankins attributes overseas travel
and the unique nature of its work as one of the reasons
for a less than 3 percent annual turnover among a 120-member
staff. Even the escalation of violence in Iraq was not
enough to scare off members of the team working on Hankins’
proposal for Baghdad’s Green Zone. Every one of
them was willing to travel to Iraq. “I was a little
surprised and quite pleased that these dedicated employees
were willing to take such a risk,” says Matthews.
“I think there’s a spirit throughout the
organization that we’re doing work that is making
a positive difference in the world.”
Finding qualified talent, though, remains
a challenge. Work on embassies, military bases and other
government contracts often requires a security clearance.
Most of the applicant pool that already have security
clearances live in the Washington, D.C., area, where
the pay scale is 20 percent higher. Rather than competing
for those employees, Hankins and Anderson tries to recruit
qualified engineers and then process them for clearances.
Since 9/11, a backlog in getting security clearances
can mean delays of a year or more. Fortunately, about
75 percent of the company’s work force already
has clearances, which puts them in line for government
work.
“It’s difficult to find
an engineering firm that’s really focused in that
direction,” says Mark Erdly, national director
of federal architecture for HNTB, a Kansas City-based
architectural firm with offices in Alexandria and Washington,
D.C. HNTB is working with Hankins on embassy projects
in Uruguay and Albania. The jobs require speed. The
State Department wants the 12 new embassies —
which average $65 million each — designed and
built in 24 months.
Thankfully, not all of the firm’s
business requires flak vests. Hankins and Anderson recently
landed a job closer to home—one of eight contracts
with the Architect of the Capitol in Washington, D.
C. The four-year agreement worth $16 million will mean
working around some of the nation’s most historic
and visible buildings on a 274-acre complex with more
than 6 million square feet, including the Capitol building,
Library of Congress, U.S. Supreme Court and House and
Senate office buildings
“It is significant in terms of
its dollar value and size, and obviously the facilities
that we will be working in are very significant due
to who occupied them and their historic nature and the
need for security,” says Joseph E. Wells, senior
vice president in the Washington office of Norfolk’s
Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern, which also won a
five-year, $20 million Capitol contract.
One of the rare projects Hankins and
Anderson has done in Richmond includes work on the federal
courthouse. It’s also involved in the $100 million
expansion of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Staying
close to home, though, isn’t this company’s
style. By helping to secure American buildings overseas,
Hankins and Anderson seems to have secured its own future.
Return to Virginia Business - July 2004
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