Hitt Contracting isn’t for the quiche-and-cabernet crowd.
Company T-shirts read “Hitt ’Em Hard.”
“True Grit. True Hitt,” was the slogan of a recent marketing campaign, which marked the company’s emergence from a recession that hammered revenue.
The three co-owners — Russell Hitt, 76, son Brett, 50, and Russell’s son-in-law Jim Millar, 54 — are polite and brutally direct.
[See complete Post 200 coverage of Hitt Contracing here.]
When I was eating lunch at a Washington steakhouse a few months back with Russell and Jim, they bluntly (and rightly) gave the wait staff a comeuppance for slow service.
Hitt sets high standards for itself and expect the same of others.
“We don’t accept mediocrity,” Millar said.
They foster a driven culture that put this 75-year-old family-run enterprise on the verge of becoming a billion-dollar company, with 720 employees, revenue of $920 million, and profits I estimate to be between $30 million and $40 million for the fiscal year 2011 that ended in September.
Not bad for an enterprise in an industry that is supposed to be flat on its back.
The company has offices up and down the East Coast, and plans to open a Denver office any day, and another in Silicon Valley after that. Hitt builds just about anything — from restaurants to roads. But its specialty is commercial interiors, especially those understated wood-and-chrome offices that ooze power.
Hilton, Washington Gas, W Hotels, Northrop Grumman, the Hay Adams Hotel are all clients. Hitt does about 4,000 jobs a year, which range in size from a few thousand dollars to $200 million. The average job is $200,000.
The all-business Brett studied construction at Georgia Tech University, and sprinkles his conversation with words like “logarithmic” and “prescriptive.” His voice ratchets up a notch when discussing the company’s training school, Hitt Institute, where new employees learn everything from Spanish or English to Excel, the computer spreadsheet program.
Brett said the Hitt discipline, hard-wired into the company over three-quarters of a century, was the trick to weathering the financial crisis, which saw revenue drop from $913 million in 2008 to $707 million in 2010, a 22 percent decline.
Family-owned Hitt attacked the decline head-on, freezing salaries for two years, canceling the 401(k) match, cutting bonuses and making sure everyone felt the pain equally. About 50 positions went unfilled. Ten employees were laid off.
“I didn’t sleep much,” Brett said of those days.
The owners took a haircut, too, giving up 20 percent of their bonuses for a couple of years. Overall, payroll costs declined around 8 percent, squeezing margins.
Hitt said its diverse lines of business is what helped it manage the downturn. The big drivers are new construction and work for law firms at $150 million in revenue each; interiors at $200 million; building data centers, $125 to $175 million; and special projects, $100 million.
When the bottom fell out of the building construction sector, Hitt shifted managers to healthier sectors such as health care and data centers, where they just finished a sprawling $100 million data center in Denver for the State Department.
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