Engineering Firm Shops for New Hires

A 28 percent increase this year in its local staff makes Perry L. Butcher & Associates the largest architectural and engineering firm in Northwest Arkansas with 158 employees. But the Rogers firm, in business for more than 37 years, is not just growing in Benton and Washington counties.

Butcher, the principal owner, said his Dallas office alone has increased from a four-person staff a year ago to 15 people today. The company has more than $210 million worth of projects under way from Freeport, Bahamas, to Shanghai, China.

And Butcher is actively trying to fill 50 new positions as he expands the company’s Rogers headquarters with a schedueled 10,000-SF addition.

“The jobs are here if you want to work,” Butcher said. “We have excellent positions for architects, interns, graduates of architecture school, field supervisors and project managers.”

Butcher said his firm has battled Northwest Arkansas’ worker shortage both by hiring from the University of Arkansas and other universities and by recruiting workers with strong construction backgrounds who can be trained in-house.

The second largest firm, The Benchmark Group in Rogers, increased its local staff by 22 percent from 101 in 1999 to 123 this year.

CEI Engineering Associates Inc. in Bentonville and Crafton Tull & Associates in Rogers are next with 92 and 63 local staffers, respectively.

Six of the top 10 firms, including the top four, are located in Benton County. Jim Parks, The Benchmark Group’s director of human resources and brother of principal owner Paul Parks, said architectural and engineering firms flourish there because of the presence of corporations in the county.

“There’s more than one firm here that does work for Wal-Mart,” Parks said. “And the companies the firms here do work for keep coming back because Benchmark and the other firms here do quality work. Over the long haul, it’s been thought that Little Rock had all the star attractions in terms of design firms, but that’s no longer the case.”

Parks said 90 percent of Benchmark’s work is repeat business.

Butcher said his company is doing three projects and has several more in the design stage for the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville. Butcher & Associates is also pursuing projects in Canada, the Caribbean and is stepping up existing operations in China.

Fifteen years ago, Butcher said, his company would not be able to keep up the kind of pace it maintains today. But because of Computer Aided Design and Drafting (CADD) technology, there’s hardly any limit to the workload the company can take on.

The importance of computer-enhanced design to the industry is illustrated by the fact Butcher increased his CADD operator staff by 61 percent, from 23 in 1999 to 37 this year.

“Our CADD operators do the work of four to six men each, and without that technology we’d need a staff of 160 to 200 people to handle our workload today,” Butcher said. ‘The old hands in the industry like me resisted CADDs at first, but it’s so good and fast now I don’t know how we did without them.”

Butcher & Associates is on pace to surpass the 1,400 projects it did in 1999. Some of its largest clients include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., McDonald’s Corp. and Lowe’s Companies Inc.

Parks said his company has been in a growth mode for the last four years. Benchmark, he said, has also fought the area’s low unemployment rate by recruiting across the region and other non-traditional sources.

“Especially in our electrical design area, we do hire a number of folks from electrical construction backgrounds as opposed to electrical engineers,” Parks said. “We’ve had good success with people who have a lot of experience putting electrical systems in buildings.

“We even have an in-house training program to help the make the transition from electrical construction to design.”

Wal-Mart is The Benchmark Group’s oldest consistent client.