Chugach Alaska: from bankruptcy to $1 billion gross.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: ALASKA BUSINESS MONTHLY'S 2010 CORPORATE 100

Twenty years ago, it seemed Chugach Alaska Corp. was experiencing one financial catastrophe after another.

The regional corporation for the Prince William Sound area was created in 1971, encompassed five Native villages and the cities of Seward, Whittier, Valdez and Cordova. It busied itself with minor construction and maintenance on the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, as well as timber and fish processing.

Its troubles began when the Exxon Valdez, in March 1989, spilled 11 million gallons of oil into the sound.

Then, timber prices plummeted after the corporation built a more than $20 million sawmill in Seward in 1990. A blaze at the company's large Orca canning facility on Labor Day that year destroyed the plant's loading dock and freezing plant after a massive pink salmon run that summer.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the time, it had revenue of less than $10 million and net losses of nearly $64 million.

Fast-forward two decades. Now, Chugach Alaska Corp. is ranked among the state's Top Corporate 100 because its decision to delve into government contracting opened lucrative financial vistas for the company.

Chugach Alaska billed more than $1 billion last year--up from $950 million the preceding year. It employed 6,604 people, with 1,031 employees in Alaska, as of December 2009.

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"When you contract with the government and invoice on time, they typically pay on time," said Chugach Alaska President Barney Uhart.

SOLID GROUND

Uhart helped steer CAC through its lengthy recovery and onto solid financial ground after former CEO Mike Brown recruited Uhart in late 1993.

Chugach Alaska needed to find some lines of business that weren't capital intensive or resource based, and Uhart had been involved virtually his whole adult life with government contracting.

"I met everyone who worked for the company, memorized all their names within the first couple of days, that's how small it was," Uhart remembered of his earliest days with CAC. "From a financial standpoint, obviously they were in the bankruptcy and everything was going to the creditors that was coming in."

WHERE IT COUNTS

Uhart says CAC decided to delve into government contracting and homed in on service-sector enterprises, also known as base operations.

"Which really could be anything," Uhart said. "We do anything from a soup-to-nuts type effort where you do everything from working on airplanes on the flight line to cutting the grass to maintaining buildings...