Michael Baker International Expands in Arkansas with New Fayetteville Office

Mike Stengel , VP and office executive of Michael Baker International’s northwest Arkansas operations. (Michael Woods)

Michael Baker International, an engineering consulting firm in Pittsburgh, has found room and reason to grow in Arkansas.

The company has had a presence in the state since 2002 and opened its Little Rock office in 2007 under the leadership of Vice President and Office Executive Mike Stengel. Stengel ran the central Arkansas market until 2019 when he left to work for the company in Dallas.

Michael Baker brought Stengel back to Arkansas to run the newly opened Bentonville office in 2021. In November, Michael Baker expanded its northwest Arkansas footprint with a Fayetteville office, also overseen by Stengel.

Michael Baker International operates 85 offices with 4,500 employees nationally. In Arkansas, the company has 43 workers in Little Rock and 17 in northwest Arkansas.

“We made our first hire in Arkansas in 2002 when we hired an ARDOT person to market the state,” said Stengel, referring to a Michael Baker employee focused on the state Department of Transportation. “And then I joined in 2007 and, at the time, maybe there were, I guess, three of us, and I joined to do airports.

“In 2012 so we made some key hires around that time frame, and really started growing very rapidly from there, and that’s about 10 years ago.”

Michael Baker International has seen its investment in the state pay off. Stengel said the company has added about five employees a year for the past 10 years, and revenue has grown as well, increasing more than 15% in 2024.

“One of the important things is that the company had set certain targets of meeting profit goals,” Stengel said. “And we met those goals for 2024, so it was a good year financially for the company.

“And Arkansas had a really, really good year. I think we saw, in terms of net revenue, better than 15% growth from ’23 to ’24…

“Both offices met our targets for the year. So it’s a really good, good year in terms of both financial performance and growth. We’ve got a history going back several years where we’re typically in the double-digit growth in Arkansas.”

The multi-billion-dollar company declined to release specific revenue figures.

Homegrown Talent

Both Stengel and Amanda Furr, the vice president and office executive for the Little Rock office, are Arkansans, having earned engineering degrees from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Furr, who grew up in rural Washington County, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the UA.

Furr joined the company in 2020 after nearly a decade with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, where she specialized in the health care industry. She has a varied history, working with such companies as Ozark Mountain Poultry and Big Lots before filling Stengel’s position in central Arkansas.

“It allows you to connect; you can talk to the client,” Furr said of her and Stengel’s Arkansas roots. “You can kind of relate with people that have grown up in Arkansas. You know our clients and build the relationships based on where they’re from, or the some obscure small town in Arkansas that nobody’s heard of.

“I haven’t lived in northwest Arkansas in 17 years, but every time I go up there, it looks totally different from when I lived there. I’ve lived in Little Rock for the last eight years; Little Rock has had a bad rep, but it’s really not. It’s a really wonderful place to be.”

The company’s entry into Little Rock, first with a representative and then with a brick-and-mortar facility, was important because much of Michael Baker’s business is with ARDOT. The company is also working with the state to expand its broadband infrastructure and other needs.

In 2012, the state passed a 10-year, half-cent sales tax for highway improvements, spurring Michael Baker to add employees in Arkansas. The tax has since become permanent, securing funding for ARDOT construction, especially when coupled with the federal Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act.

“They passed the highway improvement bill, the tax funding on that eternally, so the funding is stable in Arkansas to support our growth in civil engineering and transportation design, so that’s a positive for us,” Furr said. “There’s a lot of opportunity we’re seeing on the water design side as well. There’s been several grant programs coming through to Arkansas, and then we’ve also been heavily involved in some of the broadband expansion into the rural areas of Arkansas.”

Roads, Bridges and More

Michael Baker and ARDOT do a lot of business in a variety of ways. Stengel said the company works on multiple projects, designing some, building some more and inspecting others.

Some of the well-known projects Michael Baker has had a hand in include the Bella Vista Bypass in northwest Arkansas, the U.S. 70 widening project in Hot Springs and the Interstate 40 bridge over the Mississippi River in Memphis.

“ARDOT specifically is our primary client,” Stengel said. “So when they’re well-funded, we generally do pretty well, and that has been the case for the last several years.

“A lot of the IIJA funding streams have opened up over the last several years; we’ve been able to take advantage of several of those here in Arkansas and nationally. Most engineering firms are seeing that as a positive, and we’ve seen that locally.”

But highways aren’t Michael Baker’s only area of expertise. Stengel specialized in airports when he joined the company and put together the company’s airport team in the state.

One of the company’s interesting projects, Stengel said, is building a railroad overpass to ease accessibility to the Jonesboro Municipal Airport.

“We serve airport clients around the state, and that’s always really good, sustainable work,” Stengel said. “We’ve got a really, really deep client base that we’ve held for a while.”

Furr said Michael Baker International was involved in helping Jonesboro clean up tornado damage in 2020.

“We brought some of the key pieces on board and started investing more into staffing ARDOT [work],” Stengel said.

“Since then, we’ve got a really healthy roadway team, a really healthy bridge team. We started a survey team, and we’ve got a pretty deep construction services team that focuses pretty heavily on ARDOT, but also on several municipal clients.

“We still have a five-person airport team, so we’re pretty well-balanced.”