Rogers Engineering Firm Keeps Busy in Downturn

It’s getting harder to keep a low profile at Tatum-Smith Engineers Inc., which is just fine with J. David Tatum, president of the Rogers structural engineering firm.

While other businesses have shed personnel in a shaky economy, Tatum-Smith has managed to hold the line the past three years, currently employing 14. That’s enough to be “lean and mean,” as vice president Mark Smith puts it, but a far cry from the three-person operation that launched in 1996.

“We’ve stayed very busy and it looks like we will stay busy through the second quarter,” Tatum said. “But compared to previous years we have had work we could see coming over the horizon. Now it’s like ‘Wow, there’s not much out there.’ We’re kind of hanging in there right now.”

Smith concurs. “We’re happy to have work. A lot of people are struggling in the construction industry,” he said.

Nevertheless, the company is looking to grow in the face of fewer opportunities as clients have tightened their belts.

“The economy has taken its toll,” Smith said. “But we will grow as our clients grow, we’ve always done that. We do want to get larger.”

To that end, the company is now licensed to take on jobs in 46 states.

“We haven’t focused on marketing ourselves, but a lot of our projects come from client recommendations and word-of-mouth,” Smith said. “Everyone who gets to looking at the drawings, they sing our praises. We get a lot of phone calls from people we haven’t heard from before.”

Tatum-Smith has participated in a diverse mix of projects. “We’ve done schools, churches, retail facilities, gas stations, convenience stores,” Smith said. Smith particularly enjoyed the construction of air traffic control towers such as the one at Carter Field, Rogers’ Municipal Airport.

In all, the firm has worked on hundreds of structures. It’s just about impossible to live in Northwest Arkansas and not pass by a Tatum-Smith building. Banks in 11 cities. Two dozen churches. Bookstores, condos and apartment buildings. Not much has been beyond the firm’s purview.

The company is working on Siloam Springs High School and a smaller project associated with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. The museum project is artist James Turrell’s Skyspace, a small structure that the museum describes as “a structure that allows the viewer to experience the 
ever-changing aspects of light and space.”

It’s not the first high-profile project the company has been involved with. The Underwood Plaza high-rise condominium on Dickson Street in Fayetteville also has Tatum-Smith fingerprints. Bentonville’s highly regarded high school football stadium a few years ago was another.

These types of projects are what keep Tatum, Smith, and principals Lungshen “Tiger” Tsao (a college classmate of Smith’s at the University of Wyoming) and Richard Welcher enthused. The four engineers are supported by six computer-assisted designers on staff and two interns.

“It may sound real corny,” Smith said, “But for me, leaving something behind makes this work fun. To be able to see something you can drive by and point to it, it’s a way to be immortalized through your work. It makes it a labor of love.”