Mark Huber featured in The Capitol Regional Business Journal

Capitol Regional Business Journal's Executive Profile
2009-08-31
by Patricia Simms

 

As a child playing in the sand box, Mark Huber showed strong signs that he was destined for a career in civil engineering. Now, as chief executive officer of BT Squared, an environmental and civil engineering firm, his early training is being put to good use.

He has worked at BT Squared for 15 years, the last four as CEO, and has seen the company grow from a small, single-focus venture to a large environmental services company that offers soil and groundwater remediation, brownfield redevelopment, property transaction due diligence, solid-waste management, and air-quality and emergency-spill response. Civil engineering services include subdivision and site development, surveying and geotechnical engineering.

Raised in Dubuque, Iowa, Huber is married and has two children.

Q: What is your background?

A: I am by training a civil engineer. Up until about four years ago, that's what I did day to day. Then I took over as CEO.

Q: When you were a kid, did you envision yourself doing this kind of work?

A: I can definitely say I was the kid who liked to play in the sand box and see how the water went through it, making sand castles and bridges and tunnels. Civil engineering was a good fit for me.

Q: What does BT Squared do?

A: We are a very diverse company for our size, and our service line is pretty broad. We do solid waste engineering, for example. We go out to landfills and help them get designed, permitted and constructed. We do the engineering involved with those landfills to contain everything.

Q: Are those very controversial projects?

A: Yes, the "not in my backyard" syndrome. It's very difficult to get them sited, but once they are sited, the host communities tend to find that the clients are actually quite good at their job, and they're very good at keeping the landfill out of the public eye in terms of nuisances or odors or truck traffic.

Q: You also do a lot of remediation work?

A: That's another big area for us. That's how the company got started. Mark, Tom and Ray. Bergamini, Tierney and Tusler. That's how you get the BT Squared. They founded the company. They were working at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. There was a program put in place to make sure underground storage tank sites were getting cleaned up because what had happened over time is that the tanks would start to rust out or there would be spills on the sites, and the fuel would get into the ground and from there go into the groundwater and might impact what people were drinking.

They saw that this program was going to be good, and that money will be administered by the state to help the gas station owners clean up their sites and put in new underground storage tanks that were not going to leak quite as much. So, they started this company doing that work, and it involved a lot of going out to sites and assessing the soil and ground water by collecting samples, then sending them to the laboratory to find out if there was indeed contamination from the petroleum products, and then, designing some sort of system to clean up the soil and ground water.

Q: When did BT Squared start to grow?

A: Right away. The program was our initial growth. Mark and Tom and Ray knew this program and knew it would eventually sunset, and they wouldn't be able to clean up gas stations forever. So they just started hiring people who knew how to do that type of work but also knew something else - how to design a landfill, how to do air permitting or how to manage storm water. That's really how the company grew - leveraging that program to diversify us into areas that were similar but a little different.

Q: The business was founded in 1991. What have been the big changes in the business?

A: The big change for us is the fact that the (underground tank) program is still there but represents no longer 90 percent of what we do but probably less than 10 percent. Now, instead of just doing environmental, we've added civil engineering to the mix. For example, we have a crew right now on the Beltline near Whitney Way at night putting up a safety barrier right down the median.

Q: What is the bulk of your business now?

A: Still soil and gravel remediation, but the type of mediation we do is changed. Now, it's just really making sure the contamination is not moving or has a chance to move from where it is. Through the history of the program, and cleanups in general, we've found that petroleum products will just break down by themselves. There are microbes in the ground, and they will eat that up and break it down into chemicals or constituents that are not toxic or a danger to people or the environment.

In terms of the environmental business, the 1980s and 1990s was kind of the heyday, and a lot of really good work was done then. We also learned a lot about what needs to be done to protect the environment. Now you are seeing programs more directed at spill prevention so you don't cause contamination. There are other programs that make sure waste is managed much more carefully than maybe it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Q: You have private sector clients as well as government clients?

A: We probably do 70 percent private and 30 government. We are primarily working with private clients to help them manage and work through government regulations. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation is one of our bigger clients.

Q: What's the yuckiest thing you've ever had to do?

A: As a company, one of more unique things we had to do was a corn spill. The grain spilled into a creek, and the problem was, if you didn't get it out of there, as it started to decay, you would start to deplete the oxygen in the stream, and then that's not good for the fish. So we were out there with shovels and wheelbarrows, getting that corn out of there. A lot of people were making fun of us. I think they felt we were sitting in the middle of these agricultural fields, and there's corn laying all over the ground, then why do you have to get this corn out of there? It was because it had gone into the stream.

MARK HUBER

Chief executive officer of BT Squared

Age: 43

Business address: 2830 Dairy Drive, Madison; branch offices in Milwaukee, Lake Delton and Chicago

Employees: 53

2008 sales: $5.5 million

Web site: www.bt2inc.com