Garver Executive Finds Joy In Family, Nonprofit Work

Brock Hoskins is in his 25th year working for North Little Rock-based Garver LLC, and has become a top executive with the state’s largest engineering and environmental services firms.

A Joplin native, Hoskins was 32 and a vice president at the company when the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal recognized him as a member of the 1999 Forty Under 40 class.

He was chosen to help establish the firm’s Fayetteville office that same year, and in 2007 began to transition from the role of regional office manager to chief engineer. He became the company’s chief operations manager in 2012, and remains based in Fayetteville.

During a recent sitdown on the fourth floor of Garver’s regional office in the Commerce Park II building on Joyce Boulevard, Hoskins said there have been other job opportunities through the years, but he has never seriously looked anywhere else.

“Garver has given me the opportunity to grow just as fast as I could stand it,” he said. “Opportunities to grow professionally that I have been completely satisfied with. There isn’t another [job] circumstance that could attract me. I love Garver.”

Hoskins graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and earned a master’s in engineering from the University of Texas the following year.

He immediately went to work for Garver, which had about 100 employees, all of whom worked from central Arkansas.

The company’s footprint began to grow in 1993 by adding an office in Tulsa, and the expansion continued. Garver has almost 400 employees today, working in 16 offices across nine states.

Founded in 1919, Garver specializes in engineering, planning and environmental services for several sectors. Transportation work, Hoskins said, is the company’s biggest line (the Arkansas Highway Commission picked Garver to serve as project manager for the $1.8 billion transportation improvement program) followed by aviation and water projects.

“Those are the big three,” Hoskins said.

Garver also provides consultant services for energy, development, federal, survey, and construction engineering and inspection projects, all of which are represented in the Fayetteville office.

In 2005, Garver also established its Water Design Center in the Fayetteville office, a center of excellence that occupies most of the third floor and brings together engineering disciplines for complex water and wastewater designs.

Hoskins said the WDC focuses on projects in Arkansas and the surrounding states, but it also works on national projects, all from Garver’s Fayetteville location. 

While his professional career continues to prosper, Hoskins additionally has discovered a passion for nonprofit work, specifically for the Christian Orphan Fund.

He founded the organization in 2012 to solicit, collect and distribute money to support orphan adoptions and orphan care consistent with Christian values.

The organization has given away about $125,000 so far, Hoskins said, and operates mainly by word of mouth.

“It’s pretty much an all-volunteer group with full-time jobs doing this on the side, but we’d love to become bigger,” he said. “I still wish we could give more.”

Hoskins said the “most significant and biggest blessing” since his Forty Under 40 recognition is becoming a husband in 2000. He and his wife, Crystal, have two daughters, ages 6 and 8. Besides recreational bicycling, Hoskins delights in being a devoted family man.

“I don’t have a lot [of hobbies] on purpose because I’d just about rather be with my girls than anything,” he said.

In addition to the Christian Orphan Fund, Hoskins is also a board member of the First Baptist Christian School, an affiliate of First Baptist Church of Rogers.

He is also on the board of AssetMax, a subsidiary of Garver founded in 2014 to take the company’s pavement management expertise to the private industry.

As for the future, Hoskins doesn’t discount another 25 years working with Garver.

“If the Lord blesses me with good health, I plan to; I can’t imagine anything else I would do professionally,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder about mission organizations, but I feel like I’ll be here. There’s a lot of things to do here.”