Thirty years ago, a young John L. Marshall III decided to leave his father's and
uncle's construction firm in Pawtucket and set up his own shop. He had started out there
as a water boy when he was 14, had worked summers, and had gone to work at the firm
full-time after he graduated from college. But after four years Marshall felt the future
of construction was more in marketing and sales -- and in industrial construction.
Today, the firm he started -- Marshall Contracting in Rumford, R.I. -- is one of the
country's premier construction firms in the high-tech, microelectronics field, part of a
small group of companies capable of building the extremely specialized factories needed by
IBM, Intel, Digital, Cypress Semiconductor, Hewlett Packard and others of its customers.
This is no small feat. These factories must meet incredibly exacting standards for
cleanliness that few construction firms can meet. A factory that Marshall built for IBM
required a submicron environment: The temperature in this environment could never vary
more than 1/160th of a degree. A clean room at the factory could not have more than 10
particles of dust per cubic foot of air. (By comparison, the operating room where open
heart surgery is performed at Massachusetts General Hospital cannot have more than 150,000
particles per cubic foot.)
Such attention to detail suits Marshall's personal business philosophy. "In the
construction world today there are two words that stand out above all the others: safety
and quality," says Marshall. "You cannot work in this high-tech business without
a top-of-the-line safety program. We don't want anyone -- and that includes visitors -- to
get hurt under any conditions."
Marshall believes that safety is the critical first step toward quality. "We have
people who work on safety full time and that brings out the quality on these
projects," says Marshall. "Everyone has to know you're running a tight ship. You
don't go to the bathroom without a hard hat. I won't even let one of our pickup trucks on
the site with a dent in its fender. That sends a message that we would put up with
something that's not right."
Recently, the company won the Association of General Contractors national first prize for
safety.
Marshall built the company by thinking of it as a family, preferring to hire young people
and give them the latitude to progress in the job. "The average age of our employees
is under 40 and they're all trying to get ahead," says Marshall. "They know we
have offices in Raleigh-Durham, Atlanta, Phoenix and San Jose. They look forward to the
opportunity to move to one of those offices and grow. It's exciting to see someone else
become a better person and expand his or her horizons."
But it begins with the right employee. "We look for people who have a real commitment
to excellence, to success, to be better than they felt they could be," he says.
The company makes the next move, supporting the employee and helping him or her to
develop. If a supervisor notices that a particular employee is not moving up as they
should, the employee is taken aside and asked if they are unhappy, if there is something
the company can do to make an improvement.
"No one works for anyone else," says Marshall. "We all work with each
other. This is a family business and we don't lose many people."
He adds, "With all these things going on, the natural things thing happens: You make
a profit. But that's not anywhere near as important as all the other things that have to
happen first."
Today, Marshall employs about 350 professionals -- engineers and other construction
professionals.
In 1994, Marshall did about $400 million worth of business, but the list of its customers
keeps expanding, and in 1996 the company was bidding on a single project worth $500
million. About 70 percent of its volume is repeat business.
While the company has developed a reputation in the demanding microelectronics
construction field, it has expanded into the biopharmaceutical field, doing construction
work for such nationally known companies as Biogen, Ciba-Geigy, GLAXO, Organogenesis,
Pfizer and Merck.
The latest field it entered is the food industry, and it has built factories for Pillsbury
Co., Pepsi-Cola, Miller Brewing, Purity Supreme, Borden among others.
The company likes to think of itself as "America's Technology Builder" and it
sees both of these new markets as extensions of its specialized work in microelectronics.
And Marshall thinks the company can continue to expand into the foreseeable future. He
sees his company as occupying a distinctive place in the construction business. "We
have never been thrown off a high-tech project for any reason," he says, with some
pride. "There aren't many construction companies in the United States that can make
that statement. We have finished every job we ever started, and everything we have built
works. That's unique."