Icon (Close Menu)

Logout

Flexibility Key To Cromwell Architects Engineers’ 130-Year Survival

7 min read

After more than 30 years at Cromwell Architects Engineers Inc., CEO Charley Penix has the long view of the firm, on what has allowed it to survive 130 years to become the oldest architecture firm in Arkansas and one of the oldest in the United States.

“Flexibility,” he says.

Flexibility has allowed it to grow. Cromwell, founded in 1885 and based in Little Rock, is the largest architecture firm in Arkansas with 28 registered architects on staff.

Flexibility has allowed it to change. Cromwell added engineering to its portfolio in 1954 and is now the third-largest engineering firm in Arkansas with 27 engineers.

And flexibility allowed it to survive the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Penix was around for that latest economic downturn, when, he says, things got scary.

Initially, in the early days of the recession, Cromwell was well insulated. The firm had a number of contracts, “more than we had ever had probably, right on the outset of that downturn,” Penix says. One of Cromwell’s projects was the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences; another was Arkansas Children’s Hospital’s 260,000-SF South Wing Addition, “two big, big projects, $100 million each.”

With the typical architecture or engineering project having a lifespan of three to five years, the firm kept busy.

But then, about 18 months ago, long after the Great Recession’s official end in June 2009, “All of sudden we got caught up with the projects that were contracted in 2008,” Penix says. “All of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh, my God.’

“But we’re very flexible.”

Cromwell’s portfolio is huge, but one of its specialties is health care, and “health care is pretty stable,” Penix says. “There’s always something going on in health care.”

In addition, the firm has a number of Defense Department contracts, and Cromwell in recent years added two service lines, energy services and facility services. This diversification helped cushion the firm’s brief lean times.

How’s business now?

“It’s interesting,” he says. “This time a year ago, we were really worried about our contracts,” but in the third quarter of 2014, “we got more new contracts than we’d gotten the rest of the year put together.” That strong third quarter put the firm in good shape for 2015.

Cromwell’s annual revenue now is about $20 million, “up and down depending on the economy,” Penix says. The firm’s total staff numbers 115.

“It’s a funny business though,” he says. “What we’re seeing a lot of is projects that start up and they go through schematic design and then they die. They just stop, for whatever reason. And I’ve seen a lot of ‘thinking’ about doing projects.

“It’s getting better. It’s getting better. But there have been a lot of sort of startups and stops.”

Founded in 1885

Cromwell traces its beginnings to the arrival of architect Benjamin J. Bartlett and his son, a draftsman, in Little Rock in 1885. The two are believed to have come to Arkansas because they were chosen to design the Arkansas School for the Blind, according to Little Rock architect Charles Witsell Jr. in his article on the firm in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture.

(The history of the firm that follows relies on Witsell’s articles in the encyclopedia, on Cromwell’s history on its website, on newspaper articles of the time and on “Architects of Little Rock,” by Witsell and Gordon Wittenberg.)

Since its founding, Cromwell and its leadership have undergone a number of permutations, but the firm really began to come into its own in 1886 when architect Charles L. Thompson, born in Danville, Illinois, responded to Bartlett’s ad in a lumber journal. Within a couple of years, he’d been made a partner, but by 1890, Bartlett had left the firm and Thompson, himself, was more or less the firm.

In 1891, engineer Fred J.H. Rickon and Thompson formed “one of first known architecture and engineering partnerships.”

A Relationship Builder

“From the beginning of Thompson’s career, he proved himself a master at the business side of architecture, developing social and civic relationships with the business leaders throughout the state,” Witsell writes.

His gift for relationship building was reflected in Thompson’s appointment by Gov. George Donaghey in 1909 to chair the commission overseeing the completion of the Arkansas Capitol. Thompson also had the good sense to marry in 1908 Mary Watkins, granddaughter of an Arkansas Supreme Court justice. Watkins, Witsell notes, “was from one of the first families to settle in Little Rock.”

Thompson helped organize the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce and was chairman of the Pulaski County Red Cross. He headed the disaster relief program that responded to the Flood of 1927, the most disastrous in Arkansas history, and his efforts were recognized by then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

Thompson, who died in 1959, practiced architecture for 52 years, incorporating a succession of talented employees and, later, partners into the firm, which designed 2,000 buildings during his tenure, including 137 projects on the National Register of Historic Places.

Among Thompson’s works are the Washington County Courthouse in Fayetteville and Little Rock City Hall.

In 1935, Ed Cromwell came to Little Rock after having taken a job with the New Deal-era Resettlement Administration. He went on to practice architecture with George Wittenberg and Lawson Delony and married Henrietta Thompson, Charles Thompson’s daughter. Cromwell became a partner in Thompson’s firm in 1941. He and partner Frank Ginocchio designed the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, among other projects.

Cromwell’s tenure saw the firm grow with a number of wartime military contracts and the addition of engineers to the staff.

Gene Levy joined the firm in 1962. He married Trudy Cromwell, daughter of Ed, and went on to become CEO.

In 2000, the firm assumed its current name: Cromwell Architect Engineers.

Emphasis Continues

The emphasis on relationships continues into the 21st century. “What we’re really striving to do is establish relationships, not projects,” Penix says. “It’s all about building relationships and maintaining those relationships.”

Cromwell’s energy services and facility services divisions can be considered expressions of relationship building.

The green building movement and technology have resulted in the construction of “very sophisticated buildings,” Penix says, so sophisticated that operating them is beyond the abilities of traditional facility custodians. So entities — Heifer International is one — hire Cromwell to run their facilities efficiently and in an environmentally sound way. They use some of the money they save in energy costs to pay the firm.

“We have some contracts that our fee essentially is based on how much we save you,” Penix says.

Facility services are another result of the increasing technological sophistication of buildings. Cromwell works to cut operating expenses and maximize the life expectancy and efficiency of a facility.

Shareholders

In addition to the firm’s flexibility, Penix says Cromwell’s nontraditional ownership structure has served it well.

About half the firm’s employees, including some administrative staff, are stockholders. When the firm has a good year, the stockholders are rewarded financially.

Once they reach 65, however, they must sell their shares back to Cromwell at the same price they paid for them — in Penix’s case $1. Shares don’t rise in value.

“There’s no payoff, so we’re not stuck with, ‘Oh, we’ve got three senior partners retiring and we’re going to have to pay them off,’” Penix says.

People think the structure is “weird and crazy, but it works. And it also gives the younger talent — they see that there’s a place for them to move up.”

Penix thinks the firm’s early partners would be pleased at its longevity, though it has changed tremendously.

For example, “It’s really not a family business anymore,” he says. Although Gene and Trudy’s son Ed Levy (grandson of Ed Cromwell) is a principal at Cromwell, the firm is now a corporation.

Penix also thinks that Bartlett, Thompson, et al., “would be pleased about our flexibility. That’s the strongest thing we have in this firm, is flexibility. We do things all the time that we’ve never done before.”

Now in Europe

Cromwell Architects Engineers recently opened an office in Kaiserslautern, Germany, hiring Chris Arseneau to establish it.

The firm, headquartered in Little Rock, also has offices in Jonesboro and Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Arseneau, who has a degree in civil engineering from Western Michigan University and is a LEED green associate, will support the firm’s clients in Europe and will focus on energy services.

Arseneau also has training in health care construction and has worked on laboratories for the U.S. military.

“We serve the Defense Department over there,” Penix says. “We do a lot of medical work, on bases in Germany primarily. And a lot of what we’re doing now is commissioning work, which is analyzing mechanical systems, electrical systems, that kind of thing, making sure they’re run efficiently.”

Penix says Cromwell has designed more military commissaries “than any other architecture firm in the world” and calls Ed Levy, the firm’s “commissary guru.”

Send this to a friend