Everyone knows how important the angle of approach is when giving a tour. The path to a college dorm room, a nuptial apartment, or a first home is chosen for the effect it will have on the viewer.
“Do you mind if we kind of go the back way?” asks Kirk Kibler, CEO of WBK Construction, on his way to the Sierra Vista Center. Kibler, 38, has suggested a visit to the 175,000-square-foot retail complex to show what WBK is capable of two years after he took the helm. At least that’s Kirk’s excuse. The project’s location in Oak Cliff, the Kiblers’ ancestral homeland, might have something to do with his choice.
“It’s right here,” Kibler says, pointing, not at the future home of Carnival’s flagship grocery store in Dallas, but at a modest wooden bungalow slumped in the shade of a century-old street. “It doesn’t look quite like my granddaddy had it when I was a kid, but that shed he built behind the house still stands pretty straight, doesn’t it?” Also conveniently on the way to the construction site are the high school where one of Kirk’s grandfathers taught carpentry for 35 years and a stately Methodist church that his other grandfather built five decades ago. Buildings erected by men named Kibler have been casting long shadows in Dallas for three generations.
There’s plenty at the Sierra Vista construction site that Kirk’s forefathers could understand and be proud of. The superintendent’s trailer is spotless, and no one inside it seems the least bit anxious about the company’s CEO paying them an unannounced visit. The site foreman, his shirt pocket stuffed with green tags indicative of happy city inspectors, offers a tour through the anchor grocery store. In its cleanliness and order, the worksite resembles a laboratory, one which is now humming 20 hours a day in the grocer’s rush to meet store-opening goals.
But much in the scene would have been foreign to Kirk’s father Bill when he founded WBK Construction in 1971. For one thing, after having ridden the wave of development far out into Dallas’ suburbs, the company is erecting this shopping center in the inner city on a former industrial site next to a new light-rail station. With its brightly painted façade and expansive produce section, this Carnival store (Kirk pronounces it, rightly, car-nee-VAL) will cater to Dallas’ growing Hispanic market. Instead of winning the job with the lowest of more than a dozen “hard bids,” WBK Construction had been invited by Direct Development Company to help design the shopping center and to negotiate a fair general contractor’s fee.
And perhaps most unfamiliar to Kirk’s elders, the 20-hour construction day will have no effect on Kirk’s schedule. “I’m in the office a little before nine and gone before six,” he explains. “My job is to work on the business, not in it.”
The distinction would have been lost on Bill Kibler as a young man. Bill had grown up helping with carpentry jobs that his father took during summer breaks from teaching shop. After earning his economics degree from SMU, Bill Kibler learned the ropes of general contracting when hired by his father-in-law at R.B. Carpenter Construction Company. A yellowed annual report shows Bill Kibler’s mentors in suits and ties—befitting of their role as prominent businessmen and civic leaders in Oak Cliff—but with the rangy tan of men who spent more time on construction sites than behind a desk. At age 28, Bill announced he would start his own construction company. His father-in-law responded as any older man would, particularly one who is serving a sentence as a general contractor: “Are you nuts?”
By the standards of today’s MBA, Bill Kibler’s ambitions then were modest. “In the world I grew up in,” he says, “you were successful if you owned a filling station.” Kibler built an 8-by-12, corrugated-tin foreman’s shed that traveled from jobsite to jobsite. He saved money and ensured quality by “self-performing” the tasks of framing and concrete form work. He coached and babied his clients—church congregations, school trustees, and beginning developers. He earned the loyalty of subcontractors by listening to their advice and paying them promptly. After just eight years in business, Bill Kibler was picked to lead the Dallas chapter of the Associated General Contractors.
In 1980, Bill Kibler introduced his son Kirk to the family business by handing him a broom. The next summer he swung a hammer. But the following summer, Kirk was entrusted with a hardship driver’s license and payroll delivery. Nearly from the start, the younger Kibler, a product of private schools and Preston Hollow, was more interested in the business of construction than in its material aspects.
During his teenage years, Kirk watched his father operate WBK Construction as a classic, guild-style general contractor. Many of the men on construction sites had learned their trades before the days of pneumatic nailers, reams of architectural drawings, and OSHA. It was a different time, to be sure: Everyone had blue-collar roots, everyone spoke English, everyone hunted. Bill Kibler’s success came the old-fashioned way—by erecting buildings of quality, on-time and within budget.
When Kirk Kibler enrolled at SMU, he planned to become a trial lawyer, having long heard the best tool he carried was his mouth. Yet as graduation neared, a sense of obligation drew him back to the family business, which had survived the tumultuous 1980s on the strength of Bill Kibler’s reputation and through downsizing. After a few months of travel throughout Europe with college buddies, Kirk reunited with his father on the Amazon River to indulge their shared passion for fishing. Then they went back to work.
The construction industry that Kirk entered after college bore little resemblance to the business in which his father had apprenticed as a young man. Gone were the days of bidding against the same friendly two or three competitors in an environment where the low bid wasn’t necessarily the winning bid. WBK now routinely faced up to 15 other bidders, many of whom might be out-of-towners. WBK couldn’t use longtime subcontractors on bids that absolutely had to be the lowest to win. After the contract was signed, fees could only be altered cumbersomely through change orders. The number of constituents on a project ballooned as the owner’s construction manager, multiple lenders, regulators, specialized inspectors, and even stock analysts demanded their own hard hats.
Today, 16 years later, Kirk recalls his response to all this: “There was no way I could have run my dad’s construction company.”
He realized that his strengths—affability, gregariousness, salesmanship—would go to waste if he became a glorified project manager. The growing complexity of construction would require a new layer of white-collar staff. General contractors the size of WBK in 1990—“the smaller end of medium-sized,” as Kirk describes it—would be relegated to building churches in the suburbs.
Kirk had earned a history degree at SMU, not an MBA. He had no clear idea what he wanted to do with WBK or how to do it. Kirk and his father took stock of what they had—a 20-year track record as a dependable local builder; a stable of subcontractors who together could construct just about anything with a roof on it; and a competent in-house staff. Kirk’s first conclusion was that WBK needed to get the word out about their services. Today Bill Kibler cites marketing as Kirk’s greatest contribution to the company. But he confesses that when his newly graduated son asked to hire marketing staff, his response was, “What the hell are you gonna do?”
Kirk, as it turns out, did plenty. He became a devoted student of management theory, reading business bestsellers as fast as they were published. Kirk saw the way to grow in the construction industry—and the way around the tortuous process of hard-bidding—was to become a professional-services company, rather than remaining a guild-type shop. Kirk retooled WBK’s operations to serve clients much earlier than the ground-breaking ceremony and to continue serving them long after the final green tag. He invested in expensive budgeting and scheduling software. He hired seasoned project managers, plan reviewers, and estimators, and required them, in his words, “to drink the Kool-Aid” of anticipating the customers’ needs and watching out for their interests beyond the construction site.
In 1998, the Kiblers crowned their new organizational chart by naming Ed Portier as president. A graduate of Texas A&M’s architecture program, Portier brought a wealth of experience in the practice of design-build and quickly settled in as master of nuts-and-bolts. Portier functioned as the self-effacing go-between at WBK—eager to assume operational responsibilities from Bill Kibler in his slow-motion retirement and enthusiastic about helping Kirk chart a new strategic path. In his eight years at WBK, Portier has become a favorite among subcontractors, who regard him more as a problem-solving partner than a cajoling superintendent. “Once you make his team,” says Sam Petty of Venture Mechanical, “no one’s the boss.”
When the Kiblers and Portier had put the infrastructure in place to take on significantly more work, Kirk unleashed his formidable networking skills. He enrolled in the Real Estate Council’s Associate Leadership program for “young guns” in the industry. Following his father, he became active with the Associated General Contractors. The Lone Star chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization enabled Kirk to compare notes with peers attempting high growth in other industries.
Kirk promoted WBK Construction as a team-based provider of construction services. WBK would assemble a client’s building in record time, but they could also help with space planning, constructability analysis, insurance coverage, or securing a loan. Once the building was complete, they could advise clients on how to manage another contractor’s finish-out or how to plan for eventual expansion. WBK was happy to erect a building designed by the client’s architect alone, but smart clients would see the cost savings of WBK having a hand in design.
Ten years into the experiment, WBK Construction’s sales were climbing steadily, prompting Kirk and his father to adopt a succession plan. Bill, then 61 years old, sold WBK Construction to his son on a note to be paid off in nine years. Almost the moment plans were in place, Bill suffered a heart attack at home. Though Bill’s illness was not life-threatening, Kirk was relieved that his father could recuperate without the worry of running a company. Today, the only lasting effects of Bill’s heart attack are a low-fat diet and the loss of 30 unwanted pounds.
Kirk reports that 24 months ago, “everything seemed to gel.” For years, Kirk had been bringing in new business with his charisma and enthusiasm, and Ed Portier and his subcontractors had backed up Kirk’s promises with results. With a reputation that now preceded them and a base of repeat customers, WBK finally was in a position to negotiate the fee on most of its new contracts rather than slugging it out with a dozen other hard bidders. With sales in 2005 predicted to climb to $33 million, Kirk paid off the loan to his father—seven years ahead of schedule. Kirk predicts sales in 2006 to be more than double that number.
At 38, Kirk seems in no hurry for his father to leave. The elder Kibler still occupies the largest office at 9722 Abernathy Avenue and, as chairman, the northernmost spot on the company’s organizational chart. Kirk Kibler’s pride in his family’s long history in construction extends to his father’s continued involvement. “When we’ve got a real brain-buster of a problem, we call in the ‘gray hairs,’” Kirk says with a laugh, apparently unaware that he’s spouting a few himself.
