A conversation with Bart Eberwein, vice president of Portland-based

Daily Journal of Commerce (Portland, OR), May 26, 2006 by Kennedy Smith

Bart Eberwein, vice president of Portland-based Hoffman Construction, fell into the construction business. After growing up in Baltimore and reading books about cowboys of the great west, Eberwein was intrigued by the idea of exploration and eventually moved to Eugene to attend the University of Oregon. He earned a degree in journalism, all the while trekking around the state with a backpack and a bike. He jokes that although his diploma says journalism, what he really studied was Oregon's landscape.

After graduating, Eberwein took the kinds of jobs that would support his adventuresome lifestyle, outdoor jobs, construction, foresting, those kinds of things, he says. During his years at his first big kid job - with Western Wood Co. under the mentorship of company president Marshall Turner - Eberwein learned the skills to maintain a strong sense of your own company's culture while working with other large companies, he says. After about a decade with Western Wood, Marshall and I had a talk about the future and he gave me his blessing.

That's when Eberwein came to Hoffman Construction; it was 20 years ago.

Eberwein is also a lover of art, a lover of books and a lover of bikes - and he's got the resume to show for it. It includes being on the board of the Architecture Foundation of Oregon, the board of Cycle Oregon, formerly on the Literary Arts board, the Portland Symphony and a grocery list of other organizations. It was pretty much a given that the question would come up:

DJC: Do you ever sleep?

Bart Eberwein: What I'm really excited about that is keeping me from sleeping a little bit is that I've just been appointed to the Oregon Arts Commission. But if your point is, am I over-boarded, let me try to answer that. I wasn't on any boards when I joined Hoffman 20 years ago, and one of the things that I learned from the strong culture and community connection here was that it's an important thing to do, to get involved outside of work with cultural and arts organizations. That's part of who we are. So a larger and larger part of my job is to be Hoffman's ambassador to the community. That's something that I enjoy doing and other employees of Hoffman give me license to do that.

DJC: So it was something that you came to the realization of on your own, that you were going to start involving yourself in the community, and Hoffman was fine with that?

Eberwein: I think (Literary Arts) was along those lines, and the (Portland Symphony) was more, Well we need a Hoffman person on the symphony. I said, Maybe you want to check the presets on my car radio. I'm not exactly a symphony guy. I listen to rock and roll and rhythm and blues. But I said OK. Cycle Oregon came out of a passion for bicycling and trying to make a link between bicycle tourism and economic development.

I guess it comes with a feeling of responsibility and a debt to how good Oregon has been to our company. In fact, there's a real business reason too. You want a successful Oregon economy.

DJC: There's a stereotypical personality that one would think of when you're talking about a bigwig at a huge construction company, as the dollars and cents guy, show me the money guy. But then there's someone like you, who is involved with bicycle tourism, with the arts, with thinking about the environment, things like that. Are there more people in the business who are becoming interested in how their buildings interact with the environment, the arts and the culture of a city?

Eberwein: My opinion is that the outside world, which I guess includes journalists and maybe most of the readers of your newspaper, might have a bit of a different opinion of contractors than I have on the inside of a construction company. When I look around at John Bradley from R&H and his community involvement, at David Andersen from Andersen Construction, at Wayne Drinkward and his father Cecil Drinkward (current and former presidents of Hoffman), my peers, my mentors, I see people that have a lot more commitment to the community than maybe the people on the outside looking in would think. Look at Eric Hoffman (former Hoffman president), there's Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, the Hoffman wing at the Portland Art Museum. I'm just doing what they showed me was the right thing to do.

The cultural shift that I see is owners and architects recognizing that contractors can be more than just the implementers of the plan, that they can help think through how to make a project better, faster, more valued, safer and be a valuable member of a team. There is a wider recognition, at least on the part of the owners and architects, that contractors can do a lot more than bolt steel together to help make a project successful.

DJC: I was reading about a time when you were speaking about the gap between nonprofit arts organizations and businesses and you contributed it to an old model - the business as the patriarch and the charitable organization as the recipient. What is the innovative partnership that you have in mind when you think of the new model?