Constructive Journey

Once a local company has been swallowed by a multinational corporation, it’s hard to pry the behemoth’s jaws loose.

But that’s exactly what Herb R. Sargent did in 2005, when he purchased the civil construction firm founded by his grandfather and returned it to local ownership after 17 years. The renamed and reorganized Sargent Corporation, which prepares sites for major construction and landfill projects throughout Maine, New Hampshire, and in the mid-Atlantic states, was named Business of the Year for 2006 by the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce.

From his office at the company’s headquarters on Bennoch Road in Old Town, Sargent can see the house in which he spent a childhood dominated by two interests: baseball and construction. “I grew up right on this street,” he says, “and I attended the Herb Sargent School, which caused me no small amount of grief.” The school was named after his grandfather, Herbert E. Sargent, who founded the H. E. Sargent Company in 1926 and died at the age of 100 in 2006, a year after seeing his business brought back into the family fold.

“It meant a lot to him, which made it more meaningful to me,” says the grandson, now 44.

Sargents have been moving the earth in Maine for generations. On the wall of the office is a 1905 picture of a Maine road crew with shovels and pickaxes. One of the workers is James Sargent, Herb Sargent’s great-grandfather. His father, also named James, ran the company after Herb E. Sargent’s retirement.

H. E. Sargent was sold in 1988 to the French construction firm Razel, and, after a series of mergers, became part of Fru-Con, a German-owned conglomerate. In 1992, the younger Herb, who had been working for the family company since 1979, decided to strike out on his own, and founded Sargent and Sargent. He soon found himself competing with his old company for jobs. “I was not smart enough to know that you couldn’t do it,” he says. “But I had a young family, and I was tired of traveling all the time.”

Sargent and Sargent’s first contract was for the site work at the Wal-Mart in Bangor. “The general contractor asked me how much equipment I had, and how many people. I told him, ‘As of this conversation, I don’t have anything or anyone. But if you hire me, you won’t have to lie awake at night worrying about the job, because I will.’ In 1992 there were a lot of people unemployed. I ran an ad in the paper, and was able to get 15 to 20 people. Over half of them are still with me today. If it wasn’t for the quality people I was able to hire, we never would have survived that first year.” By the time he purchased H. E. Sargent in 2005, Sargent and Sargent employed more than 100 and was a force in the business.

Today, Sargent Corporation employs about 400 in Maine, New Hampshire, and Virginia. “We saw the move as a natural one,” Sargent says. “The biggest challenge was integrating two great workforces. But many of us at Sargent and Sargent had grown up working for H. E. Sargent. There was no cultural disconnect.”

The company’s footprint can be seen all over Maine and beyond, from the runways at the Greenville and Presque Isle airports, to the site of the new Lowe’s in Brewer, to the Acadia Crossing shopping center going up in Ellsworth and a new dormitory at Eastern Maine Community College.

While earthwork construction is critical to everything from a building’s stability to the parking lot drainage, it’s unglamorous work that requires a constant eye on time, materials, labor costs, and meeting spec exactly.

Through nearly 30 years of industry changes, Herb Sargent has stayed grounded in his grandfather’s philosophy.

“The equipment’s all changed, the type of work has changed, society’s changed,” Sargent says. “There’s got to be something that’s the same all the way through. My grandfather always said, ‘Never stop honing the craft.’"n