Despite several setbacks over the years, Merrill Stewart keeps his contracting company on course.
By Cary Estes
There is a framed quote resting on a bookshelf in the lobby of the Stewart Perry Company commercial building firm. It was given to company co-founder Merrill Stewart by his father, who received it from his father before him.
The quote centers on the theory that the bumblebee should not be able to fly, because its wings are too small to support its body weight.
“But the bumblebee doesn’t know this,” the quote concludes, “so it goes ahead and flies anyway.”
Stewart adorned the lobby with the quote earlier this year, as his 25-year-old, Birmingham-based company struggled with a 30-percent decrease in business due to the economic downturn. It was Stewart’s subtle way of reminding his employees that anything is possible.
“There are project opportunities in the marketplace today,” he says. “You just have to have a creative way of seeking them out and finding them.”
This positive attitude has served Stewart well over the years. It has enabled him to bounce back from going broke on two occasions, most recently in 2000 after a series of professional and personal issues eroded the business and led to the departure of company partner Charles Perry.
Since then, Stewart Perry Company has gradually grown into a $37.5-million business with 35 managers and projects throughout 24 states, primarily in the southeast and mid-Atlantic. In April 2008, the company moved into a picturesque new $4.2 million headquarters located on 16 acres off Overton Road.
Despite difficulties both past and present, Merrill Stewart continues to fly.
“We always learn much more from our mistakes than we do our successes,” he says. “Over the last nine years I’ve rebuilt the business stronger than ever.
I’ve totally focused on having good customers, good character and good culture. “You have to let [life’s] challenges flow through you. When you do, you walk out the other end a much better person, and a better company.”
Stewart admits he did not always think this way. The Auburn University graduate says he drifted away from some of his core values and beliefs in the 1990s, and the company suffered for it.
“After 2000, I took a good hard look at who our customer profile was and decided it was not necessarily the profile across the spectrum of who we needed to do business with,” Stewart says. “We’d had customers whose culture and character were the same as ours, and we wavered from that in the ‘90s. That’s what got us into trouble.
“We became true to ourselves again. We became brutally honest about our strengths and weaknesses, and we changed up the mix of our customers. If your core values and your character and your culture are not similar to your customers’, there is not an opportunity for a long-term relationship.”
One of the newer customers is commercial real estate developer Childress Klein Properties, which has worked with Stewart Perry in recent years on the construction of two shopping malls in the Charlotte, N.C., area.
Chris Thomas, a partner with Childress Klein since 2004, says Merrill Stewart’s reputation within the industry is one of the reasons Stewart Perry Company was chosen for those projects.
“I just kept running into people who told me about their relationship with Stewart Perry,” Thomas says. “It became evident to me that Merrill was in a very special class of general contractors.
“All I’ve ever seen from him is total consistency. If he tells me he’s going to do something, it’s going to get done when he says it will and how he says it will.”
To Stewart that’s simply a matter of doing the right thing. It is the same attitude he had toward the creation of the company’s new headquarters, which was built to LEED-certified environmental standards established by the U.S. Green Building Council and earned the company a national award from Associated Builders and Contractors.
“I really felt that building it this way was a have-to situation, not a want-to situation,” Stewart says . “I believe a building should be more than just four walls and a roof. It should really have the ability to promote the brand of the organization behind it, and to be better space for the folks occupying it.
“What happened to me [in 2000] has given me a new perspective on what we should be doing as human beings. What will be our legacy? How have we improved and helped? Money is important, but at what point do we taper that off and think of other things that are equally important? That’s what this place means to me.”
Stewart says he wants to see officials throughout the Birmingham metropolitan area demonstrate similar long-range thinking and a willingness to sacrifice. A native of Atlanta, Stewart says he easily could have moved his headquarters out of state when the company recently relocated, but he is committed to his adopted hometown and believes the region’s current issues will improve with time.
“We have a great city with great people and businesses. We deserve good things to happen,” Stewart says. “If together, standing shoulder-to-shoulder and city-to-city, we provide a uniformed approach to economic development, then we will all be better off.
“I have confidence and faith that we will come through this period. And when we do, we will be able to enjoy some of the benefits we deserve.”
After all, appearances aren’t everything. Just ask the bumblebee.
