The story
The company was founded in 1976 by Irvin E. Richter and Michael W. C. Emerson, P.E. Richter had worked in Construction Claims Consulting at Wagner, Hohns, Inglis Inc., Mount Holly, New Jersey, from 1974 to 1976 before he started the firm to provide similar services. The first offices were in Richter's home in Willingboro, New Jersey. The name "Hill" was to designate the preferred location of the company office in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Richter immediately began a series of acquisitions. One was Construction Management Services, Inc. (CMS, a Critical Path Method [CPM] scheduling company). CMS was formed by A. James Waldon, Dwight Zink, and William De Vos. Several of the principals at CMS as well as an employee, Joseph J. Ranieri, had worked at Mauchly Associates, a consulting company founded by Dr. John W. Mauchly. Zink and Ranieri, were two of the early practitioners of CPM, an early application of computers to construction and procurement scheduling. They helped establish CMS, a CPM consulting firm that worked extensively in scheduling construction projects and forensic scheduling analysis and both worked at Hill after the acquisition.
Government contracting
Hill prospered in the late 1970s, in part because of the explosion of local construction projects funded by the newly established United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA required the use of the Federal Acquisition Regulation and claims (as "Requests for Equitable Adjustments") became the norm for local procurement. The firm had about 20 full-time employees by the end of 1979. In 1980 the firm opened its first branch office in Washington, DC and began to serve the U.S. government and government contractors from this location.By the 1980s, another series of events in the construction industry fueled a further increase in construction claims and the growth of Hill - the construction of numerous nuclear power plants. The construction of these plants was highly regulated and resulted in overruns in cost and schedule for almost every plant built. Over 46 plants had been commissioned in the 1980s alone. At this time, the Nuclear Power Generating Industry was at the end of a rapid increase in constructing plants and began to terminate many projects. This decline had already begun due in large part to nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. This brought another explosion in construction claims for schedule and cost overruns as well as termination claims, including utilities, engineers, and nuclear reactor manufacturers as well as contractors and subcontractors. At this time, Hill brought in William J. Doyle to oversee the growth in nuclear related claims business. Doyle had built a small mechanical contracting company into one of the largest mechanical contractors in the nation, General Energy Resources, Inc., whose core business was subcontracting at nuclear power plant projects. Doyle then served as Senior VP of Northrop Corporation before he became an executive of Hill overseeing much of the nuclear claims work as well as other multi-million-dollar projects.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Doyle oversaw the beginnings of the expansion from a claims consulting firm into a project management company. Hill's initial ventures into Project Management were through a concept called "Troubled Project Turnaround". In 1981, Hill was involved in supporting a major litigation at the Tropicana Casino & Resort Atlantic City where what was supposed to be a $180 million project almost doubled to $300 million. The firm provided technical expertise in resolving the claims and litigation support, and also helped manage the completion of the construction. According to Richter, "... we became a construction manager as a result of that project and eventually also became involved in project management and program management afterward."
Hill continued to expand its management role (re: "Troubled Project Turnarounds") at the City of Niagara Falls, New York. Hill helped the city gain control of the stalled construction of its wastewater treatment plant project and maintain liaison with state and federal regulatory agencies. Hill then acted as the city's construction manager (CM) to complete the reconstruction of the wastewater treatment plant. The city had actually been one of Hill's first clients in 1977 when it hired the firm after having been impressed by its work for a contractor in a claims situation with the city. Similar troubled project CM work took place at the Point Pleasant, PA, Water Intake and Pump Station.
During this time frame Hill became one of the initial Project Management Oversight contractors (PMOC) for the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) during the construction of the Sacramento (CA) Light Rail. Hill next worked for the FTA on the LA Metro. Hill was now included in this FTA list of PMOCs, who were mostly large, established CM firms such as Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall, Fluor Daniel, Parsons Brinckerhoff, and Stone & Webster, among others. By 1984 Hill had opened a Los Angeles Office.
In 1988, Hill expanded its services by acquiring Gibbs & Hill, an engineering / design firm in New York City. Also in 1988, it entered the environmental market by purchasing Kaselaan & D'Angelo (K&D), an air-quality design firm that specialized in asbestos clean-up consulting. The acquisitions raised company revenue to $200 million and increased company size to more than 2,000 employees.
Hill entered the program management service sector in 1991 when it became program manager for the New Jersey Turnpike Widening Program (Interchanges 11–14). This $543 million program involved 9 design sections, 7 construction sections, and more than 50 separate construction and procurement contracts.
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In 1993, Hill sold Gibbs & Hill in three parts to United Engineers, then a subsidiary of Raytheon, in 1993 and K&D to ATC Environmental, of Mount Laurel, NJ. Hill began a successful turnaround at this time by concentrating on its core construction claims business and seeking to expand its growing construction / project / program management sector.
International expansion
Hill has been "International" since its beginnings. Some CMS clients who became Hill clients were involved with projects in Europe and Africa, including an early iron pellet plant project (in the late 1970s).
In 1981, Hill represented a Filipino labor contractor providing on-site claims and dispute resolution services at King Khalid Military City, a project being built in Saudi Arabia by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The form of contract was the FAR.
Hill first attempted to open a non-field overseas office in London in 1981 when it hired John A.W. Tanner, an executive with Pullman Swindell (now Swindell Dressler International Co.) The venture was ultimately unsuccessful, and the office closed in 1985.
However, Hill continued to expand its international claims work. Its contacts in the nuclear plant claims arena included General Electric (who used Hill services on its Boiling Water Reactor). GE's overseas subsidiaries also used Hill's services on several claims in Egypt, including the Abu Sultan Power Plant and other projects in the early 1980s. The firm assisted a Spanish joint venture in evaluating their potential claims against the government of Kuwait on a major road modernization project in Kuwait City.
By this time, in 1983, Richter had authored a book, International Construction Claims, Avoiding and Resolving Disputes and the international momentum landed Hill in Abu Dhabi with an independent overseas office that was turning a profit from the start. Hill had landed the role as a lead consultant for the Abu Dhabi Claims Committee.
Hill continued to pursue offices elsewhere. In the early 1990s, it was selected by Bechtel to help guide the completion of the Channel Tunnel Project that had begun in 1986. But as work progressed, the owner, Eurotunnel, and the Anglo-French consortium responsible for design and construction, TransManche Link, were plagued by severe cost, schedule, and safety problems. In 1990, the banks funding the project became involved. When it became clear the project was at risk, Eurotunnel called on Bechtel to get the project back on track. Hill was hired by this project rescue team to perform claims analysis and mitigation and had a project team working with Eurotunnel for several years and eventually opened an independent office in London. Hill sought to bring in qualified European staff to run their European offices. It hired Raouf Ghali, who was educated in the U.S. Ghali had recently been hired by Hill and had worked leading Hill on the Petronas Twin Tower Project in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ghali, then working in the London office (but also working from his home base of Athens, Greece), expanded the Construction Management group of Hill. For example, the firm began work on the Athens Metro, the National Library of Latvia, and, in 2002, the Palm Islands Project in Dubai. Hill moved its corporate headquarters from Willingboro to Marlton, NJ, in 2002. By 2004, Hill had about 500 professionals working in 25 offices worldwide.
From 2002 to 2006, Hill's revenue rose from $73 million to $197 million, a 170% increase, with 55% percent of its revenue coming from Europe and the Middle East.
Becoming a public company via a reverse merger
Richter had always envisioned Hill as a public company. The company's financial difficulties of the mid-1990s, however, made the approach of going public through an IPO unattainable. In 2004 Arpeggio Acquisition Corporation of New York was formed in April as a "blank-check company"—meaning its business activities had not been determined. It was established for the sole purpose of buying a company within 18 to 24 months of its initial public offering.
On December 5, 2005, Arpeggio and Hill announced that they entered into a merger agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Hill's shareholders received 14.5 million shares of the common stock of Arpeggio at closing and owned 63.6% of the combined entity. When the deal closed on June 28, 2006, Arpeggio changed its name to Hill International, Inc. and on June 29 began trading as HINT on Nasdaq.
When HINT began trading on Nasdaq on June 29, 2006, the price of HINT was $5.30 per share. At the end of the year the price was $7.15 per share. Hill achieved record revenue of $197 million with record net income of $11.3 million. Most of this was due to organic growth in the Project Management sector of the company. With the cash infusion from going public Hill could now begin a series of acquisitions and mergers that would grow the company as Richter had envisioned previously.
Hill made one immediate major acquisition in 2006 after going public – the purchase of J. R. Knowles (the largest construction claims company in the world) for $13 million. As a result, Hill assumed the title of the largest claims firm in the world. The Knowles acquisition also provided access to new markets in Southeast Asia, Australia, and Canada.
In 2007, Hill implemented its plan to acquire additional project management companies, notably KJM & Associates Ltd., Bellevue, WA. This move opened up new markets to Hill in the western U.S. This acquisition and continued organic growth resulted in record revenues of $290 million (with record net income of $14.1 million) in 2007. The stock soared to close the year at $14.17 per share.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hill International, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7