By the age of 19, Bob Shell had already been fired from a job driving an ambulance and had been denied a promotion request at Fones Hardware in Little Rock from mail clerk to furniture salesman.
“They said, ‘You can’t sell anything,’” Shell recalls. “I was pretty disgusted.”
But on a cold January day in 1950, Shell applied for a construction timekeeper job with the Baldwin Co., which had been founded four years earlier. “I didn’t know anything about construction, and I’d never really worked anything,” he said.
The company’s founders, P.W. Baldwin, Olen Cates and Werner Knoop, who would later be mayor of Little Rock, would give him an opportunity that he would take full advantage of, working his way to the top of the firm that became Baldwin & Shell Construction Co. in 1983.
Shell, now 85, is chairman. He was president from 1983 to 2014.
Shell is one the five charter members of the Arkansas Construction Hall of Fame, a charter member of the American Institute of Constructors and a national lifetime director of the Associated General Contractors of America. He has been in Who’s Who in Finance & Industry (now Finance & Business) since 1975. He also is an Arkansas Business Executive of the Year winner.
“It’s not just a job,” he said about his 66 years with the company. “I’ve really loved it.”
Shell has not only become a leader in the Little Rock business community, but also the state’s construction industry. He is credited with pioneering construction management in the state, leading Baldwin & Shell away from the bid market to focus on landing negotiated contracts. He also initiated the formation of the first self-insured workers’ compensation insurance program for contractors in Arkansas and served as its board chairman.
His first job at the Baldwin Co. was working as a timekeeper on a federally funded housing project near the airport. “It was a huge project, and what I had to do was go around to everybody and keep up with the different forms and who was working,” Shell said. He then had to calculate the pay for each of the approximately 230 people working on the project.
Since then, he has been involved in more than 2,700 projects, including hospitals, offices, schools, churches, industrial plants, financial institutions, renovations and remodeling. A brief list inludes the Pine Bluff Convention Center, the Murphy Oil building in El Dorado, J.B. Hunt’s headquarters in Lowell, the renovation and addition to the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock and renovations of the Legacy Hotel and Lafayette Hotel in the state capital.
Baldwin & Shell is regularly listed among Engineering News-Record’s Top 400 Construction Companies, and for the past 21 years 70 percent of the work the company has done has been for repeat customers.
“That is something to be really proud of,” Shell said.
In 2010, Baldwin & Shell, which until just a few years ago worked only on projects in Arkansas, topped $211 million in revenue.
“He is a great man of integrity and has been a real icon to his profession,” said long-time friend Jack Ramer, who owns an insurance company in Little Rock.
Hanging on the walls of Shell’s office at Baldwin & Shell’s headquarters on West Capitol Avenue, not far from the state Capitol, are framed certificates and plaques indicating civic awards, association and organization memberships and business-related honors.
Near his desk are photographs of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, along with a variety of Arkansas Razorback memorabilia, as well as awards he has received over the years.
Shell said he realizes that the owners of the Baldwin Co. took a chance with him and that he worked hard to take advantage of the situation. He said Cates taught him estimating, project management and job cost accounting, skills that allowed him to quickly become a valuable asset to the firm. “They were all very good to me.”
During his long career, Shell also has had the opportunity to meet many businesspeople who would greatly impact the state, including a young truck driver named J.B Hunt and his wife, Johnelle. (She is featured this week as another business icon.)
In fact, Shell, who first met the couple in the late 1950s while trying to recruit them to his church, would later become one of the original investors in the couple’s small trucking company, which would grow into J.B. Hunt Transport Services, one of the largest trucking companies in the United States.
“I ended up giving maybe $1,500, and when it went public I was in the top 15 largest stockholders,” Shell said.
“He always had an idea. Some of them worked and some didn’t,” Shell said about Hunt, noting that he once found Hunt at his kitchen table making trivets out of scrapped ceramic tiles.
Scott Copas, who has been with the construction company since 1977 and is currently CEO and president, occupies an office right next to Shell’s.
“When I think of Bob I think of a true leader, not just in our business but in our community. He’s both civic minded and philanthropic, someone that is committed each and every day to anything he tries to do,” Copas said. “He’s been a very strong leader for the company for many, many years, and I certainly rely on him heavily. It’s nice to have him next door.”
Because of Shell’s institutional knowledge, Copas said, he recently asked him to write a history to commemorate the company’s 70th anniversary.
In 2003, Shell was diagnosed with throat cancer. Though treatment was successful, it left him without saliva glands or taste buds, and he has not eaten solid foods since.
“In most cases that would have taken a lot of people down, but not him,” Copas said. “It has never slowed him down, and he would never use it as a crutch.”
Shell was born in Honolulu, where his father was stationed with the Navy, and the family moved a number of times before landing in Little Rock, where he graduated from Little Rock High School when he was 16. At 17 he joined the U.S. Navy but served only briefly because of an acute case of seasickness.
A basketball player and competitive swimmer in his youth, Shell said he avoided traveling for work so he could spend more time at home with his family. “I wanted to see my kids play basketball, cheerleading, dancing ballet. … The family means a lot more to me than traveling out of state.”
Shell has five children, 13 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. He and his wife, Ginny, have been married 43 years.
See more at Ten Arkansas Business Icons Have Stories to Tell
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