HIGH PROFILE: Dan Williams, president of engineering firm Garver, took a pay cut to pursue his dreams

“Hopefully the pace certainly slows down, but I don’t want to do just outdoors stuff. I want to work. So I’m trying to figure out what that looks like, whether it’s in a consulting role for somebody, whoever is interested in if I have anything to say.” -Dan Williams
“Hopefully the pace certainly slows down, but I don’t want to do just outdoors stuff. I want to work. So I’m trying to figure out what that looks like, whether it’s in a consulting role for somebody, whoever is interested in if I have anything to say.” -Dan Williams

Dan Williams had his first brush with Garver and Garver before he graduated from high school. He has spent his entire career, save for one year right out of college, with the company, and he's frank about not knowing what life will look like after retirement.

"I haven't figured that out yet," Williams says from his office. From the window, he can see all the way to downtown Little Rock, including the 4,226-foot-long Big Dam Bridge over the Arkansas River's Murray Lock and Dam that was designed by the firm. "I have mixed emotions. I'm really pleased to have been a part of what's going on here because it's really exciting, and I know I'll miss that."

On Tuesday, Williams will step down as president, a title he has held since 2012. That position will be filled by Brock Hoskins, the company's current chief operating officer. Williams will remain chief executive officer through the end of 2019, with special duties related to the company's centennial anniversary.

"I've taken on the task of really being the brand ambassador," he says. "We've got a schedule for these centennial celebrations that we're going to have in each of our offices, and so my primary role is going to be to be involved in all of that."

Among other things, the company will adopt 100 schools, which will receive chain reaction kits -- kits with items that can be connected or rearranged to cause actions, like dominoes lined up, falling in a sequence and tripping a lever to make a ball fall into a cup.

"We're going to invite our clients in and the schools, and kind of have a celebration," Williams says.

“I want people to understand that Garver has been around a long time and has been through many successful succession plans and the one before me went fine and the next one will, too, so I’m just part of a much longer history at Garver. We’ve had some really fantastic growth over my tenure but that didn’t start with me.” -Dan Williams
“I want people to understand that Garver has been around a long time and has been through many successful succession plans and the one before me went fine and the next one will, too, so I’m just part of a much longer history at Garver. We’ve had some really fantastic growth over my tenure but that didn’t start with me.” -Dan Williams

Garver, founded in Little Rock in 1919, was a one-office company until 1993. Now it has about 500 employees, with 26 offices in 11 states; 14 of those offices have opened during Williams' term as president. Timing aside, Williams takes a modest approach.

"I want to be careful that it doesn't sound like I want to take all the credit for that, but I do think it's something that's really neat that's happened at Garver," he says. "I'm Garver's eighth president. I want people to understand that Garver has been around a long time and has been through many successful succession plans and the one before me went fine and the next one will, too, so I'm just part of a much longer history at Garver. We've had some really fantastic growth over my tenure but that didn't start with me."

Williams' history with the company can be traced back to its fourth president, Bill Driggers.

"This actually starts as a Garver story," says Williams, explaining that math and science were subjects he enjoyed when he was a student at Sylvan Hills High School in Sherwood.

He especially liked his mechanical drafting class back then, and he told his parents he wanted to be an architect. His parents, Lonnie and Faye Williams, mentioned this tidbit to Driggers, their Sunday School teacher at Victory Baptist Church in Sherwood.

"Bill said, 'No, he doesn't want to be an architect. He wants to be a civil engineer.' He was just insistent that I come tour Garver and meet some of the engineers, and as is usually the case, Bill was right. That really was a better fit," Williams says.

Williams went to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for two years before transferring to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

"Several of the guys that I hung out with kind of ended up in the same boat so several of us stayed and went to UALR for two years and then a group of us moved up there together, all in engineering, and got an apartment together," he says.

He met his wife, Ellen, in high school and they dated off and on through college and married during his junior year.

Ellen Williams worked to support them during his senior year and then enrolled in classes herself. She has a degree in health promotion and recently retired as sales manager for a medical equipment company.

"I would come home and I would need to study and she would want to talk. So I said, 'Hey, you're going to have to find something to occupy yourself -- why don't you take some classes?'" he says. "She grew up with three brothers who went to college but she wasn't expected to go to college. That wasn't part of her plan, initially, and then when she took some classes she thought, 'Oh, I actually enjoy this.'"

When Williams graduated from college in 1980, he wanted to work for Garver.

"They weren't hiring," he says. "There was a recession and I felt really fortunate that I had two job offers. One was at the Little Rock District Corps of Engineers and one was in Port Arthur, Texas, for Texaco. I thought, well, if I'm going to take a job I don't really want I might as well be close to family, and so I spent one year at the Corps of Engineers. Just as that year was wrapping up Bill Driggers contacted me and offered me a job."

He took a 20 percent pay cut to accept it.

"You would get pieces of design projects so you get a task and it might be the storm drainage or some profile of a road, but it would be a piece of some larger project," he says of those early days at Garver. "There was a kind of a road improvement project at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, and pretty quickly I got to do some structural design work and one of them was for a new Arkla Gas building at the Little Rock Port. It wasn't very long, within a couple of years, and it started being airport projects. I did a lot of different things but probably more airport projects than anything else."

Driggers says he thinks he would have hired Williams in the beginning, had a position been open.

"I thought a lot of Dan as a youngster. I've kept up with him and watched his career come along at Garver. I think he's had an outstanding career in civil engineering, and most of it at Garver," he says. "I tried to guide him in the firm in terms of what areas of responsibility he carried. I'm not going to take credit for advancing him to a point where he became president, but I think I set him in a position to where his talents would develop and he had a relationship in the firm in a particular expertise that enabled him to come into the presidency. He's a fine young man."

LIVING ON TULSA TIME

In 1993, Williams and his wife moved with their two then-elementary-age children to Tulsa so he could open the company's office there.

"That was probably the most life-impacting thing we did," he says. "Both sets of parents -- my parents and Ellen's parents were here. We had all this family around us and when we moved we had no family. The family used to be baby sitters and things like that. The thing that was really neat is that it just strengthened our family unit."

It also positioned him for advancement. When he was asked to return to Little Rock in 2001 it was as chief engineer.

The Williamses are active in Fellowship Bible Church. Their children -- Emily Price of Bryant and Zach Williams of Denver -- are grown, and they have three grandchildren -- Carter and Corbin Price, ages 8 and 3, respectively, and Hazel Hope Williams, 10 months.

It was Corbin's adoption, and a question Dan Williams pondered as a result of a discipleship program, Downline Ministries, that led him to Immerse Arkansas, a nonprofit organization that helps those who have aged out of foster care as well as supporting adoptive families.

"Part of that program is a discussion asking what ministry you're involved in and my answer was, well, I'm not. Until Corbin, that whole world of adoption and the needs in that area were just lost on me. That just seemed like a connection ..." Williams says.

Three years ago, Eric Gilmore, Immerse's executive director, asked the Williamses if they would mentor a young man.

"It would be hard to describe the impact that he and his wife, Ellen, have had on that young man. I don't think it's anything short of saving his life," Gilmore says. "Dan has just reoriented his life to give this young man a chance and to kind of give him a place to belong in this world. This is a young man who had a lot of abuse and neglect as a young person and had a really hard time in foster care and then just made some decisions that really got him into trouble, to where it would be easy for a mentor to just walk away and say, 'Well, that didn't work.' But instead they've just stepped up their support for him."

Williams talks with his mentee several times a week. He has no obligation to the young man, now 21, but he says he has no intention of abandoning him.

"Everybody in our family knows him. He's part of our family. It's rewarding, but at the same time it's challenging because you want to fix them -- and you can't fix them. You have to look for the small successes and be excited about that, and just be there for them," he says. "It's not as official as an adoption, but I don't see how there could ever be an end, until maybe they get a family and move off somewhere. But I think they'll always be a part of your life, unless they decide not to be."

Williams serves on the Immerse board of directors, and Ellen is the campaign chairman.

ADVENTURE BUDDIES

Williams travels often to Garver USA's offices, and on rare occasions he can build in time for fun on the road.

"We have an office in Huntsville, Ala., and there are a couple of guys over there who are my adventure buddies," he says. "After one office visit we did a three-day hike on part of the Appalachian Trail."

Ron King, founder of Recycle Bikes for Kids in Little Rock, met Williams through Brock Johnson, former Garver president and CEO, who died in 2012. A month before his death, Johnson presented a resolution to Garver's board appointing Williams president.

"We first went on a pretty bold bicycle ride, from Durango, Colo., to Moab, Utah, over the San Juan Mountains," King says. "I think six or eight of us went on that ride and it was a seven-day, really testing ride as far as your bicycle abilities."

They go on a ski trip each year as well.

"Dan is an engineer and he approaches everything from a very analytical standpoint. I think he gets as much enjoyment out of figuring out how things work as in actually doing them," King says. "He looks at a bicycle, not like the rest of us do as something you pedal and it goes forward. He's about the little intricacies like how the gears work and little tweaks and things you can do to it to improve the performance."

King appreciates his friend's support of Recycle Bikes, a nonprofit that collects, repairs and donates bikes.

"Dan understands the importance of kids getting a bike," he says. "It's just one of the basic things that kids ought to have."

Williams once watched his father, who worked for the Air National Guard, build a bike for him.

"Gosh, I hadn't thought about this in a long time. I wanted a bicycle that had a banana seat and high rise handlebars," he says. "He just went and got the parts and took an old bicycle and made it. I remember many times just sitting out on the carport with him working on cars and stuff."

Williams isn't among the Garver employees who bike to work, but the company supports those who do. There are two full-time wellness coordinators on site, and there is a bike storage room at the office, and some staff members go for rides on their lunch breaks.

"That's part of the reason for being here," says Williams of the Garver building constructed in 2009. "We already had a fitness culture at Garver and a lot of people had bicycles stashed in the halls and other places in our old building so as we were thinking about where we were going to be that was part of the driver, the access to the River Trail."

Williams looks forward to finding time for fly-fishing, hiking and biking after he retires, but he knows that won't be enough.

"Hopefully the pace certainly slows down, but I don't want to do just outdoors stuff. I want to work," he says. "So I'm trying to figure out what that looks like, whether it's in a consulting role for somebody, whoever is interested in if I have anything to say."

SELF PORTRAIT

Dan Williams

• DATE, PLACE OF BIRTH: August 1958, Little Rock.

• IF I HAD TO CHOOSE AN ALTERNATE CAREER PATH I WOULD: Be in home construction.

• MY FIRST JOB WAS: As an assistant for a house contractor during the summer. I mostly cleaned up junk and put in insulation and that kind of stuff. I was probably 16.

• A MOVIE I SAW RECENTLY AND LIKED WAS: Bohemian Rhapsody.

• A BOOK I RECENTLY READ AND LIKED WAS: Unoffendable. It's about interacting with people and refusing to be offended by the way people act.

• TO MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY I WOULD INVITE: Ronald Reagan, C.S. Lewis, Truett Cathy, Dwight Eisenhower and my mom, Faye Williams, who passed away 30 years ago.

• SOMETHING I ALWAYS HAVE WITH ME: My iPad. If I show up somewhere without it, people wonder what's going on.

• THE BEST ADVICE I EVER GOT WAS: From Brock Johnson, my predecessor and mentor, who told me I had to find a way to keep everything moving along, every day. When I was managing projects, I wanted one to be the priority one and he said they all had to be, because they were all important.

• I WISH I COULD: Be really good at fly-fishing.

• I'M MOST COMFORTABLE: In the Rocky Mountains.

• MY BIGGEST ACCOMPLISHMENT IS: Just that my kids have healthy, successful families.

• ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Calm.

High Profile on 12/30/2018

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