Nailing It

A line runs through the new performing arts center at Husson University, splitting the building neatly in half. On the south side of the line, administrators settle into new offices and students flow in and out of new classrooms as another academic year gets under way. A few steps away, the floor of the ambitious new theater remains bare earth, some of which is being removed for a recently conceived orchestra pit.

“We planned to do it this way by design,” says Karl Ward, the 44-year-old CEO and principal owner of Nickerson and O’Day Inc., the Brewer-based construction firm building the project. “The school can use the space on the finished side of the building this year, and the theater will host its first performance in the fall of 2009.”

The company’s fingerprints are all over the fast-growing Husson campus. Across a parking lot from the performing arts center, the Robert D. O’Connell commons building earned Nickerson and O’Day the contract to build the performing arts center. Completed in just 11 months, the project came in $360,000 under budget.

Ward is just the third head of a company that was founded in 1955. Born and raised in the Millinocket area, he graduated from Schenck High School and went to the University of Maine. “I was the first person in my family to go to a four-year university,” he says. “My dad quit high school to go to World War II, and my mom had a one-year business degree.”

Ward excelled in UMaine’s College of Engineering, graduating first in a class of 378 students. At Orono he met Kathy Otto, who was studying to be an eye doctor. The two married and moved to Berkeley, California, where Kathy attended graduate school and Karl went to work constructing golf courses. Their decision to move back to Maine after Kathy finished school was cemented by the earthquake that disrupted the 1987 World Series between San Francisco and Oakland. “I was working on a golf course when it hit,” Ward recalls. “It shook us up a bit.”

He started with Nickerson and O’Day in 1993, working first as a safety inspector and then as a cost estimator. In 1999 he became a project manager, and he was promoted to vice president and made a minor partner in the company in 2001.

He’s been active in the community as well, from teaching adjunct classes at the University of Maine for 11 years to serving on various boards, including the Bangor Leadership Institute, the YMCA, and the Katahdin Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America. Most recently, he was elected to Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems’ 2008 Board of Corporators.

When he’s not working, Ward likes to indulge his enthusiasm for mountain bicycling, a passion that’s taken him to Costa Rica, Mexico, and the western United States. Firm believers in large horizons, he and his wife have taken their three kids, ages 7 to 14, on numerous international adventures. “We like to challenge them,” he says, “and as a result they’re more capable, competent, enriched people. They’re ready to storm the world.”

Whether at work or play, Ward believes in thinking on his feet. The Husson theater project (whose original plans did not call for an orchestra pit) is but one example.

“We have an award called the ‘one-clawed hammer,’ which is given each year to the project manager who does the most with the least,” he says. “Legend has it that Mr. Nickerson, the founder of the company, would never throw anything away. A one-clawed hammer can still pound nails. It may not be able to pull them out, but if we do our jobs right, we won’t have to pull them out anyway.”