Powers of Arkansas Looks Back on 40 Years of Business

Adam Hope, vice president of controls operation at Powers of Arkansas, and his dad, Alan Hope, the company’s owner and CEO. (Steve Lewis)

Alan Hope started out in accounting at the University of Arkansas, but he didn’t love the numbers.

“So I went over to the technical numbers and got an industrial engineering degree,” said Hope, longtime CEO of Powers of Arkansas, based in North Little Rock. “I thought that would lead me into technical sales, which it did eventually.”

Now, as the building controls and HVAC company celebrates its 40th anniversary, Hope has some pleasant numbers to contemplate.

“When I bought the company in 2005 we had 60 employees making $6 million [in annual sales],” Hope said. “Now we have 350 employees making over $100 million, and we feel our responsiveness to customers has driven that. Just taking care of people answering every phone call. We answer the phone every time.”

Growth over the last 20 years has stretched the company footprint to nine offices across Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. “We provide Siemens controls, and we provide air distribution devices,” Hope said. “We provide parts. Anything that has to do with HVAC, we sell it, and sometimes we install it and service it.”

The company works exclusively in commercial buildings, specializing in federal work and major projects across the South. “We’re currently doing Walmart’s new world headquarters,” Hope said. “It’s like a $4 billion project we were fortunate to work on, and it’s going well. That will be the largest project ever in Arkansas.”

Powers has put controls into buildings at Hope’s alma mater in Fayetteville and other universities. “And we dabble in the K through 12 market,” he said, referring to kindergarten through high school. “They’re always building K through 12 schools.”

Before focusing on the company’s past, Hope took a stab at divining the future.

“We think we’re through expanding, but it depends on people and opportunities,” Hope said. “We have seen a tremendous uptick in the federal market. We’re doing all this GSA [General Services Administration] work. The federal government’s going through downsizing, but they still need our services across the board.”

The company found a niche in health care, working for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Baptist Health System and CARTI hospitals. “Our technology not only provides comfort, but also energy efficiency. So they like that piece of it, cutting utility costs,” Hope said.

The company held a PowersFest celebration in April, with 250 people braving a stormy night in a big tent for food, games and giveaways. Company teams will continue the celebration in coming months with crawfish boils, special lunches and golf outings.

Growth History

Hope was there from the start. After graduating from UA in 1984, he joined MCC Powers in October. “They came in and said, ‘We’re closing this branch office and we’re going to make it an independent field office owned by private business.’ Mr. Paul Briscoe was going to be the guy who owned it. So I went to him and he hired me in 1985 on the first day Powers started.”

MCC Powers was a factory branch for Siemens, so Briscoe and Hope rechristened the independent field office as Powers of Arkansas, playing off the MCC Powers name.

“We were basically selling building controls, and then in the late 1980s we took on selling the HVAC equipment,” Hope said.

He left the company in 1997 to work for an engineering firm, but yearned for a stake in Powers of Arkansas. In 2005, Briscoe sold him the business.

Over the years, the company moved from West Park Lane in Little Rock to North Shore Business Park in North Little Rock. “We built a bigger warehouse and better facilities,” Hope said. The 2008 downturn didn’t impede the company.

“We called it Obama money, because they threw a lot of money at everything federal,” he said. “We picked up a lot of work through that, so we didn’t suffer through the downturn; we actually expanded.”

During the COVID pandemic, the company expanded with Powers of Mississippi and Powers of Louisiana. “Today we are the largest privately owned controls company in Louisiana and Mississippi,” Hope said. Two years ago, Powers built a new northwest Arkansas headquarters for what had once been a small office. “That gave us more warehouse, more space, because we have a lot of customers in northwest Arkansas.”

The company is now Siemens’ exclusive representative in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Mississippi.

At first, expansion relied on trial and error. “But we learned that the key factor was having the right people in place, local people experienced in the market,” Hope said. “When we went to Oklahoma in 2017, we didn’t really have a leader over there, and we struggled and struggled. Now we have the right sales people in place, and we’re going great guns.”

Hope preaches a business model based on creating customers for life.

“That puts a different philosophy into how you go about doing your work,” he said.

Instead of bypassing projects with smaller paydays, Powers works to help each customer out. “It pays off in the long run, because it’s easier to keep current customers than it is to go find new ones. You develop relationships, and they trust you to give them good pricing, good service and to provide what they need.”

Time of Trial

Hope touched on the most challenging event of his career, when he and a partner in a separate contracting business, DAV Construction, were accused of defrauding the federal government on contracts intended for companies owned by disabled veterans.

Federal prosecutors couldn’t convince jurors with their case, and a deadlock led to a mistrial in September 2017. In October of that year, U.S. Attorney Cody Hiland moved to drop the charges and the case was dismissed.

Hope called the basic charge a sham, and he was elated when the charges were dismissed with prejudice, meaning they couldn’t be refiled.

“My lawyer was Chuck Banks, a former U.S. attorney, and he kind of held my hand through all that and made sure we got to where we needed to be,” Hope said. “I said look, Chuck, if God wants me to go to jail or he wants me to lose all my money, or if he wants me to run Powers and live happily ever after, that’s where I’ll be.”

It was an emotional time, but customers stood by him, Hope said. “This was in the news, and all of our customers and competitors knew about it, and some of our competitors were pretty nasty about it. But our customers stayed by us the whole way. Not one customer fired us. Almost to a customer, they said, ‘Hey, you’ve done good work for us. We trust you. We know who you are.’ That really bolstered not just me personally, but all of our staff.”