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Cincinnati Business Courier - Engineering an Ethical Firm

Engineering an ethical firm
Tritonservices combines expertise, dependability

Karen Bells
Courier Staff Reporter

As far as the owner of Tritonservices Inc. is concerned, you reap what you sow in the business world.

"We like to be a farmer rather than a hunter," said Majid Samarghandi, president and CEO of the mechanical contracting firm. "A hunter goes for a kill one time, but a farmer works the land and reaps for years."

Though he started Triton in January 2003, Samarghandi has been working the soil of the mechanical contracting field for years. He became president of Cincinnati-based RPC Mechanical in 1985, bought it not long after and sold it in 1998, agreeing to stay on for a five-year transitional phase.

RPC, together with partner Roth Bros. of Youngstown, Ohio, was a $100 million a year company by the time Samarghandi left. The loyalty and contacts he created during his 18 years there have helped him see results much more quickly than he expected.

"The success of Triton has surprised even myself," he said. "With our old company it took almost 10 years to get to $5 million (in annual revenue)."

Triton, on the other hand, surpassed $10 million in revenue in its first year. Samarghandi and his crew of five partners, each with their own long histories and connections in the field, had projected $6.5 million in first-year revenue and had hoped to hit the $10 million mark by the end of their third year.

The full-service firm handles commercial and industrial design, installation and service for heating, ventilation and air conditioning; plumbing; process piping; energy management; and site development.

"We're kind of a turnkey operation," said Richard Schock, vice president of sales and marketing. "We can take a project from design-build through implementation and installation, and through to service."

That complete range of services is a big factor for doing business with Triton, said Bryan Burk, project manager for Matrix Healthcare, which owns three nursing homes in Cincinnati and Oxford. He oversees the maintenance departments of the three facilities and has hired Triton for several projects of about $1 million or more.

"We've design-built everything we've done with Triton," Burk said. "We come in and engineer what we want to do. Not all companies can do that for us."

But the quality of the work isn't the only reason Burk continues to hire Triton. Samarghandi has tended that relationship for more than 15 years, handling many projects for Burk over the years.

"One of the main reasons I keep going back is his honesty," Burk said. "If the man tells you something, you can take it to the bank. A handshake and his word mean something. "That is not the case with lots of companies."

It's a critical part of doing business for Triton. Samarghandi, who has a Ph.D. in construction management, has given guest lectures on business ethics at the University of Cincinnati, where he is chairman of the College of Applied Science. He's also working with the Mechanical Contractors Association of America to develop a business ethics class.

"The construction industry as a whole has a bad reputation as far as ethics," he said.

In addition to the ethics classes, he teaches construction courses for the local Allied Construction Industry chapter and lectures on various construction topics for two weeks a year at the University of Texas at Austin.

The commitment to being deeply involved in the field extends to Triton's relationship with the plumbers/pipefitters union, Local 392. The company's tradesmen are union members, and Samarghandi is a big supporter of the group.

"It's a lot more expensive to hire union, but there's a price to everything," he said. "There's no disadvantage to us, because these people are so highly qualified."

Triton places a premium on making great hires, Samarghandi said, and has the discipline to cut someone loose if it makes a hiring mistake. In just one year of doing business, the staff has grown from five people to nearly 70 -- many of them loyal RPC employees who were eager to be hired by Triton, he said.

"We've been very fortunate across the board to be able to pick the cream of the crop from a lot of companies, due to the way we treat people," said Schock. That philosophy doesn't go unnoticed by customers.

"When I was down on the job site with all of them, it was clearly evident that they had a personal stake in things," said Terry Cannon, a project manager for Fairfax-based consulting engineering firm ThermalTech Engineering. "In the field everyone was centered around problem-solving and getting it done."

ThermalTech, which is currently working as a consultant on a project for which Triton is upgrading the boiler system at the Hamilton County Courthouse, first worked with the firm in September.

The mechanical engineering firm handled a cooling tower replacement project in September for a county building at 800 Broadway, which houses adult probation and juvenile court. ThermalTech wrote the documents to solicit bids and served as consultant on behalf of the county; Triton was the lead contractor, and among its responsibilities were scheduling and coordinating all subcontractors.

The entire project had to be completed in two days, over a weekend, so that county employees wouldn't miss any work days. "It was complicated because of the timing, plus rigging the towers, getting the old towers off into the alley that was barely wider than the tower," Cannon said. "It was 112 feet above ground, so they had to crane the towers and piping up and down.

"But the incredible part of the project was the teamwork it took to do all this in two days." Complex projects don't faze Samarghandi. "(It's) obvious -- the bigger the project, the more complex, the better we shine," he said. And like the teacher he is when not running Triton, he hopes to keep learning. "I hope our mistakes are exceptions and not rules," he said. "What we learn from them and how we avoid them the next time is key."