Finding a balance.

• Author: Phelps, Jack E.
• Position: Environmental Management Inc. Vice President and General Manager John Simpson

The jack-of-all trades, so the old saying goes, is a master of none. But one businessman-engineer, John Simpson, has the balance to put the lie to the adage. Simpson, vice president and general manager of Environmental Management Inc. (EMI), has successfully married his experience as a laborer to his training and background in business administration and engineering to emerge as a leader in the rapidly growing field of environmental engineering.

Stuart Jacques, president and CEO of Central Environmental Inc. (CEI), an Anchorage environmental firm, founded EMI as a training arm for his company in 1989. EMI started strong, but by 1991 it was sinking fast -- the company had only two employees and was losing money. Jacques, however, has never been a quitter, so he started looking for someone who could turn the business around. Enter John Simpson.

Simpson is a home-grown product, an Alaskan with deep roots in the state. His mother came from Wisconsin to the Territory with her parents, who settled in the Matanuska Valley. They were among the 200 farming families transplanted to Alaska under Roosevelt's New Deal, says Simpson. His father went to work on the Alaska Railroad in the 1930s.

After graduating from West High School, Simpson went to work as a laborer helping construct the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. "I was actually a carpenter by training," he says, "but I ended up working in the laborer's union."

After pipeline construction ended, Simpson, at age 25, decided to go to college. At Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., he found a program that combined business administration with a civil engineering curriculum. He graduated with a B.S. degree in civil engineering and a minor in business administration. Broad-Based Background

After college he spent four years with URS Corp., a national engineering firm, where he got his baptism in environmental work doing site assessments for the U.S. military. In 1988, Martech International hired him away from URS and made him an operations manager focusing entirely on environmental work.

In 1989, when the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of North Slope crude into Prince William Sound, Simpson was in the thick of the cleanup effort. Operating out of Martech's main office in Anchorage, he managed the efforts of more than 350 employees working in the Sound. "Martech did $24 million (in gross revenues) in one year," Simpson says, "and about half of it was environmental." The logistical problems of...