Clean-up crew.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: Geological Resources Inc. its business and success

When October's record rains stopped failing, Terry Kennedy's phone began ringing. News photos showed cars floating down city streets and farmland turned to lakes across the Carolinas, but Kennedy's mind dwelled on what lay beneath the floodwaters. Enormous underground gasoline storage tanks in Wilmington had erupted through layers of concrete and floated in a stew of water and fuel. These are the moments when Geological Resources Inc. gets the call.

It's not the glamorous work either Kennedy or John Brown envisioned when they met in the early 1990s while working at a Charlotte environmental consulting firm. The geologists imagined traveling the world--Kennedy picking up where he left off in oil exploration, Brown reliving his globe-trotting Navy days--after acquiring GRI, the company Brown's father, Henry, started in 1971 while a marine sciences professor at N.C. State University. Brown and Kennedy imagined that environmental consulting work would tide them over until some "real" jobs came along.

Almost 20 years later, GRI has 28 employees, including two more partners, a new headquarters in Monroe, a second office in Winterville, near Greenville, and the possibility of a third outside of North Carolina. Annual revenue increased 13% to $5.4 million in the fiscal year ending June 30.

Environmental catastrophes that would have bankrupted companies back in the 1980s can now be mitigated with contaminated sites converted to new uses, often at a fraction of the former cost of cleanups.

"A lot of companies used to go out of business to avoid environmental regulations," Kennedy says. Instead of cleaning up, Brown says, "they would just walk away," leaving property ownership in limbo or the government's lap. With a long list of contaminated properties across the state, North Carolina established funds to assist gas-station owners, dry cleaners and others.

Kennedy and Brown also adapted to changing regulations and technology. Still, the partners "were making decisions as geologists, not MBAs," Brown says.

When the recession hit, GRI was struggling with debt and slow payments from government agencies and other customers. In 2010, the N.C. Department of Commerce picked GRI for its Biz Boost program aimed at bolstering vulnerable companies during the downturn.

"They thirsted for that knowledge of how a business operates," says Mary Klock, a counselor in the N.C. Small Business and Technology Development Center's Charlotte office. "They're very...