Pay dirt.

• Author: Johnson, J. Douglas
• Position: ATEC Associates Inc. - Cover Story

Testing and treating soil, he built ATEC Associates from the ground up into one of the country's leaders in engineering and environmental services.

How many of these structures do you know?

* Interstate 465 in Indianapolis

* General Motors facilities in Anderson and Kokomo

* Indiana State Office Building in Indianapolis

* INB and Bank One towers in Indianapolis

* Cummins Engine Co. facilities in Columbus

* Indiana Convention Center & Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis

* Eli Lilly & Co. facilities in Clinton

* Campus buildings at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ball State University in Muncie and Butler University in Indianapolis

* Indianapolis Motor Speedway bleachers

OK. Now what do they all have in common? The holes to test for their foundations were drilled by a company called ATEC and its founder, Gerald "Jerry" D. Mann. He made sure the Indianapolis skyline, and skylines in other cities across the nation, stand straight and tall.

Mann is the essence of entrepreneurship. Let's start at his beginning.

Next time you pull off the highway and stop at a roadside stand, look around and see if some 14-year-old boy is waiting on customers. If he is, think of young Jerry. The youngster ran his own stand outside of Newport, N.C., after the Great Depression. He counted out tomatoes, corn and melons and bagged them from cock's crow 'til the cows came home. He was an entrepreneur even then, although he had never heard the word and certainly didn't know what it meant. He just thought he was giving customers what they wanted.

"We didn't have any money," Jerry says. "To get pencils and paper for school, I took eggs and bartered them with Lloyd Garner, who ran the general store." Jerry learned to follow honest work ethics, trade fair and labor hard. His dad called the technique "survival."

Gerald D. Mann still minds his dad's survival rules as president and chairman of ATEC Associates Inc. Those letters, ATEC, are short for American Testing and Engineering Corp. Thirty-four years ago when Jerry and his wife, Edna, coined the company name, they thought it sounded big and impressive. They hoped their little firm might grow and have a coast-to-coast presence someday.

They managed it and more. Mann expects his company to gross $125 million this year. He has made a profit every year for three and a half decades. The trade authority Engineering News Record ranks ATEC the 71st largest in the country in a list of 500 top firms in engineering design. And it counts ATEC the 25th largest in the "hazardous-waste consultant" category.

Over the years Mann has branched into materials engineering, mine reclamation, and earth dam design and safety inspection. In the '80s, when environmental awareness took off, so...