Richie Arnold is retiring after 39 years with Conway Corp, 19 as CEO.
With its 90th year in business in sight, Conway Corp might be content to sit back on its corporate laurels, but the energy management entity, founded in 1929 to operate the city’s electric plant, is doing anything but. The organization continues to roll out new services and invest in infrastructure and capital improvements to support the city’s growing needs.
But then, it’s not the first time the organization has bucked expectations. It’s very structure is unique even to industry longtimers like Richie Arnold who has spent the past 39 years with the company, 19 as chief executive officer.
“We are a private, non-profit corporation and we lease and operate the city-owned utilities. That structure is fairly unique as far as my experience has shown,” Arnold said. “I work for a board of directors; seven members of the community serve on our board as opposed to working in city government per se, which is what you see often. We’re really structured uniquely and it’s worked really well.”
Arnold, retiring at the end of May, credits this leadership structure not only for Conway Corp’s staying viable, but for anticipating trends and community demands. For example, in 1966 the organization recommended the city reserve the cable TV franchise, more than a decade before cable TV started gaining steam and almost 20 years ahead of the first Conway house to be installed with cable.
The company broke new ground again in 1997 when it became just the third entity in the U.S., and the fifth in the world, to offer high-speed, broadband cable internet service. Arnold said that same innovative, forward-looking spirit is alive and well today.
“We’ve always had an eye on being a little bit ahead of the curve and we’ve tried to continue that,” Arnold said. “On our board, you’ve got business people that serve in those roles and they’re very helpful and very astute. They are good advisors as far as what they see as trends and whatnot.
“Beyond that, we’ve been very fortunate to recruit some really good young people as employees who are very talented and innovative.”
Of course, behind the sizzle of new technology lies the steak — the electric, water and wastewater operations that are of primary importance to quality of life in the city.
“Our core services have always been electric, water and wastewater which are really utility service needs,” Arnold said. “Most people will tell you that those services are important, but they also will probably tell you they don’t notice them unless they’re not working.”
Such base utilities may not be glamorous, but are essential building blocks for the kind of business growth Conway has enjoyed recently and which it looks to continue. Arnold said companies considering a move to Conway weigh heavily the rates and reliability of the community’s utility system, and on both counts Conway Corp gets high marks.
“You start meeting with your typical employer, those two things are important. They’re almost primary,” he said. “They want to understand how are we situated, what kind of redundancy do we have in our network that’s supporting them and at what cost.
“We have our substations set up in such a way we can shift loads from one station to the other if we lose a substation transformer. So that reduces potential downtime for those folks.”
Conway Corp opened the doors on a three-story, 30,000-SF customer care center in early 2017. Within the building, the organization’s new data center was built to withstand bad weather events up to an F4 tornado. And its location keeps Conway Corp in the downtown district where it has resided for years.
“Our goal is to be able to serve our customers for at least another 15 years in downtown Conway, hopefully longer than that,” Arnold said. “This is an investment in downtown.”
Finally, Conway Corp announced the creation of the Arnold Innovation Center, in partnership with the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce and Conway Development Corporation. Arnold said the center, named in his honor, will provide a dynamic environment for nurturing Conway’s home-grown businesses.
“The facility will become the epicenter of Conway’s startup community,” Conway Corp board of directors chairman Johnny Adams said. “With plans for co-working space, leasable office suites and seminar facilities, the Arnold Innovation Center will provide a continuum of space for Conway startups as they grow.”
See more about Conway’s economic growth at Outlook Conway.
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