ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702210035
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
STAND IN Roanoke's City Market area if you want to survey the impact of Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern Inc. Look north to the Market Square Walkway. To the south, there's Center in the Square and, farther away, an office building where Trigon Healthcare Inc. has its regional headquarters and Carilion Roanoke Community Hospital.
Out of sight but to the west of downtown, there's the WSLS television studio and offices and a major addition to City Hall. And east of Roanoke, there's the state Department of Motor Vehicles headquarters in Richmond and coal-export piers in Norfolk where Norfolk Southern Corp. trains that rumble through Roanoke dump minerals destined to points spanning the globe.
The skyline and the streetscape of many communities were sketched in part on the drafting tables at Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern, a Roanoke firm of architects, engineers and planners.
Its founders started small 50 years ago next month, with a Covington pump house and an armory on Reserve Avenue in Roanoke among the earliest projects. In a half century, they've built a national reputation for handling jobs as complex and sensitive as one involving the Pentagon.
Its history reflects a pattern of growth, diversification and use of technology that company president T. Howard Noel said could continue indefinitely.
A symbol of the company's optimism will be buried at an anniversary celebration at company headquarters March 10: a time capsule to be opened in another 50 years.
Over its lifetime, the private company has recorded sales of $400 million, in non-inflation adjusted dollars,
and believes its local economic impact is five times that considering the effect of money spent on payroll, taxes and purchases changing hands.
In addition, the business community has grown more diverse with Hayes, Seay offspring. At last count, about seven years ago, 100 former employees were principals in their own firms, Noel said.
Over the half century, the firm has grown from a handful of technical personnel making $1.50 an hour to a corporation with 102 licensed engineers and 52 licensed architects, many professionals working toward licenses, planners, landscape architects, interior designers, numerous technicians and nine branch offices in five states. It is among the 4 percent of the architectural firms in the nation with more than 50 employees and pays an average of $20 an hour.
The company also spans an era in which computers replaced slide rules and to some extent drawing tables. In the beginning, new hires brought their own drafting equipment - triangles, rulers and pencils - and were assigned a table and stool. Today, a newly hired architect or engineer is often assigned a computer worth at least $5,000, Noel said.
Engineering crews working in the field carry laptops and cell phones. Just a few months ago, the company laid the groundwork to sell imaging services - a departure from design which involves capturing a building, facility or other location, real or imaginary, in pictures, animation, virtual reality or a combination of the three, on a CD-ROM.
"We could take a client on a walk-through of a building before ever laying the first brick," said computer operator Jimmy Stevens.
What has kept a company its size in a third-tier market such as Roanoke has to do with roots.
"We grew up here," Noel said. Senior managers have strong community ties; the notion of uprooting the executive offices for a move to, say, Richmond, is "outlandish" as well as unnecessary, Noel said.
The limited daily air service to and from some Eastern cities forces employees to drive for out-of-town appointments more than the firm would like, but it's an acceptable trade-off for this area's quality of life, Noel said.
The firm has thought about relocating its leadership to the state capital, part of the reason being that "you can walk down the street to the state agency you want to work for and say, 'Hey, we're just around the corner,''' Noel said.
He suspects the firm lost out on getting some of the design work for Motorola Inc.'s planned computer chip factory in Goochland County because Hayes, Seay isn't Richmond-based. The designers selected for the project were.
But Hayes, Seay will design a sewage treatment facility for another of the state's three planned chip factories, namely the joint Northern Virginia project by IBM and Toshiba. |n n| On an evening in December 1946, Paul Hayes, Gilbert Seay and brothers Edwin Mattern and Guilford Mattern met in one of their offices on Kirk Avenue in downtown Roanoke to plan an association of their individual practices to compete for larger Navy contracts than they could win alone. They signed the agreement March 10, 1947, and later ceased solo work.
All were "children of the Depression" who worked hard to do a good job and infused their ethic throughout the company, said Clarence Renshaw, a communication consultant used by the company.
In those days, "You had to work to get along," said Guilford Mattern, 85, of Salem, the only founding partner still alive.
In the lingo of the time, a diligent young architect or engineer would be spoken of as keeping his "nose to the board," meaning his drawing board.
The foursome made a good team. Hayes of North Carolina was an architect and Carnegie Tech graduate who came to Roanoke in 1930 to work on the 2,000-seat American Theater, demolished in 1973 and replaced by what's now the First Union Bank Building. He designed the General Office Building North for Norfolk and Western Railway, a now-vacant North Jefferson Street structure some envision becoming a higher education center.
Seay, a Roanoke native and Virginia Tech graduate, was an electrical and mechanical engineer who ran an appliance store in downtown Roanoke. The Matterns were civil engineers and graduates of Georgia Tech who, by a flip of the coin, passed on Washington, D.C., and decided to practice in Roanoke, where, before World War II, Edwin had been Roanoke County's first engineer.
When Hayes met them, the Matterns were scrubbing the floor of a building in which Hayes was inquiring about office space, Renshaw said. But that had nothing to do with the Mattern name going last in the firm's name. According to Mattern, the names simply sounded best in the order they appear on the shingle.
Early on, the men used contacts from their military service in World War II to get jobs from government offices in Norfolk and Washington, D.C. Having agreed they wouldn't try to win work by scoring points with politicians, they settled on a strategy of face-to-face marketing.
"It was not unusual for us to go up and down the corridors at the Bureau of Yards and Docks ... the Pentagon and others, knocking on any door that looks as though the people inside had anything to do with construction," said Hayes in a memoir. That kind of presence paid off. Hayes recounts an incident in which a government official walked up to him in the hallway of a federal building and asked the firm to design a sewer plant on a military base.
Flash forward, and the firm in recent years designed provisions for a complete overhaul of a one-fifth wedge of the Pentagon, which will cost $90 million. That involvement with classified work is the reason the firm keeps a locked room in the basement, presumably full of top-secret documents.
Another part of the corporate strategy was to put integrity first, even if it cost the business money. The Mattern brothers set the tone for this principle when their independent company that predated Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern agreed in 1947 to design a section of U.S. 220 from Roanoke to Boones Mill for a price they learned after work began was too low to cover costs, much less earn a profit. When the Matterns were told by the state they could raise their price, they refused and finished the job for the initial rate.
"It was the best money we ever lost," Guilford Mattern said, according to a company history book. From then on, Mattern & Mattern and later the merged firm were never without a state highway contract, the history said.
Professional services firms including designers usually get government work by beating competitors in a test of qualifications. Unlike construction contracts, where the job generally goes to the lowest qualified bidder, a design firm negotiates its fee after it has been selected.
That means if a design firm performs, it wins repeat business, as Hayes, Seay discovered. It has had some clients nearly since it opened for business, among them the Navy, Army, state of Virginia, Roanoke and Roanoke County. Though 85 percent of its work comes from government, the firm counts Norfolk Southern as a longtime private client and has done work for C.B. Fleet Co. Inc. in Lynchburg.
One draw was Hayes, who, according to company lore, sketched on a napkin the design of the 1,500-bed Portsmouth Naval Hospital. According to Oliver Stein, an architect and retired partner who knew Hayes, "Paul had a knack - as architects do - for coming up with basic conceptual designs."
Stein once had an idea spark in church. "I remember coming up with a solution to a building and drawing it on a church bulletin ... during the sermon."
For the designer, questions of how to put the pieces of a project together "kind of go to bed with us and they follow us around wherever we go," Stein said. "You never know where you're going to be when, 'Boom,' you have an idea." |n n| Through the years, the firm had its creativity tested again and again. Aside from drawing many bridges, pieces of basic infrastructure such as sewer and water systems, and buildings, the firm designed a noisemaker for NASA that could generate a sonic boom; a pier 1,560 feet long and 82 feet wide to support two rigs for dumping a train car full of coal into a ship or barge; and renovations and additions to the AT&T Etam Earth Station, a communications facility bristling with satellite dishes in Etam, W.Va. The now-disconnected national debt clock in downtown Roanoke was a product of the firm's design team as well.
It consults on annexations, drew plans for a new community in Haiti and investigated strange odors at a Spotsylvania County school in 1995 that were making pupils, teachers and staff members sick. The odors were sewer gasses traced by the firm's environmental division to substandard plumbing.
"Viewed in total, it's surprising the impact or the footprint that the company has left on the landscape of Virginia," Renshaw said.
Added Kevin Bertholf, president of the region's chapter of the American Institute of Architects and president of Architectural Concrete Products of Daleville: "The impact they have had on the City Market area has been a very important one for Roanoke," because of dominant structures the firm designed downtown. "A lot of the citizens hold that dear."
Not everyone was pleased with the appearance of the pedestrian bridge between Hotel Roanoke and the City Market. Said Noel: "Architecture is in the eye of the beholder. It's like art."
Another supporter of the firm and one who speaks from a close association, Earl "Jim" Cochran Jr. of Richmond, a retired state highway engineer, uses words such as "integrity" and "professional" to describe the firm and said it had a peculiar ability to keep good leaders in power throughout the years.
Hayes, Seay was run by a succession of leaders - the third generation of partners is in place - because the original partners agreed to retire at age 65 and their successors retired at close to that age.
As a place to work, Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern is like "a roller coaster sometimes. You're busy, you work a lot of hours and then sometimes it gets kind of slow out there so you cut back a little," said Brian Vodzak, a mechanical engineer hired about a year ago. The office lights are on well into the evening on weeknights, and pencils scratch away on weekends, too.
The challenge, said designer Bill Gregory, is "to meet deadline and put out a safe product. ... It's a very responsible job. You have to make sure you're doing everything right. You don't just throw something on paper."
Work-station mementos are appropriate for the profession - a rock at one and at another a tattered length of red marker tape reading, "CAUTION - ELECTRICAL LINE BURIED BELOW."
It's the kind of place where workers bond around a coffee pot and beside third-floor vending machines, where a bulletin board may be tacked with company announcements as well as a message from co-workers putting together a hike. That's the scene in the larger of the firm's two Roanoke offices, both on Franklin Road in Old Southwest. Newer offices occupy a former Virginia Employment Commission office up the street.
As the company looks ahead, it forecasts that sales, which rose to $33.2 million in 1996, will climb steadily by between about 5 percent to 8 percent per year at the least. But it will push for annual growth of 10 percent to 12 percent.
Growth is forecast for its divisions devoted to health care centers, court and correctional facilities, industrial and office buildings, and schools because, to the company, this appears to be where those who control the capital in government and private industry will be putting their money, Noel said.
Hopes are also riding on the firm's fledgling international division, which has been designing renovations to U.S. embassies in Khartoum, Sudan; Tel Aviv; Vienna, and elsewhere. Its target is to design new health care facilities expected to be needed in Central America and South America.
Military cuts, once feared as likely to reduce the firm's sales, instead have shifted the type of work it does for the federal government away from military installations such as munitions plants to administration buildings and health care facilities.
Growth seems manageable because designers can turn out drawings today faster than ever. A designer used to keep two workers busy tracing his plans onto blueprints for contractors. Today, because many designers use computers linked to printers, the ratio has flip-flopped; now there are twice as many designers as support technicians, Noel said.
Noel also wants growth so young employees have opportunities to advance - much like he has in his 30 years at the firm, where he began as a bridge designer.
One new hire with hopes for a promotion is Casey Armstrong, 23, who on a recent day loaded a computer with another worker's hand-drawn specifications. The project was renovation work planned at the Smithsonian Institution's Natural History museum in Washington, D.C. She said she learned computer skills by attending Virginia Western Community College at night while working as a clerk and stocker at a Kroger grocery store.
"I've come a long way," she said.
LENGTH: Long : 245 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Cindy Pinkston. Chad Durham (left) and Jimmy Stevensby CNBwork in the computer imaging department where the design for a
building, facility or other location can be displayed in pictures,
animation, virtual reality or a combination of the three, on a
CD-ROM. 2. (headshot) T. Howard Noel. 3. Spring Hollo Reservoir,
Roanoke County. 4. DMV headquarters, Richmond. 4. Cox Cable
building, Roanoke. 6. CSX Ninemile Bridge, Lynchburg. 7. AT&T Etam
Earth Station, Etam, W.Va. 8. Jefferson Street Bridge, Roanoke
(viewed from beneath the bridge). 9. Anacostia Metro station,
Washington, D.C. color. 10. Norfolk Southern coal-handling pier,
Norfolk.