Profile: Farlow Environmental.

• Author: McCarty, David
• Position: David Farlow - Company Profile

For the moon-suited participants in the environmental-investigation training exercise, it should have been a simple walk in the woods to check out the contents of a few "suspicious" metal drums.

Russ Farlow had other ideas.

"I knew we shouldn't have let Russ buy that box of smoke bombs," says Larry Silverstein, director of industrial hygiene, safety and training at Farlow Environmental Engineers Inc. To heighten the exercise's sense of realism and teach the trainees a few things not found in the instruction manuals, Farlow dropped a few smoke bombs at the drum site to see how participants would react. "They came tearing out of there through that smoke," Farlow, field scientist and son of company president David Farlow, recalls with a satisfied look. Despite the humorous outcome, Farlow says adding such unexpected elements to routine training exercises helps ingrain important lessons that workers reacting to real hazardous-materials cleanups need to know, lessons such as always having more than one escape route out of an investigation site.

That commitment to top-quality technical work -- combined with an appreciation of how things happen in the real world of business -- helps makes Farlow Environmental Engineers one of the state's most successful environmental-consulting firms.

With more than 500 environmental investigation and remediation projects in 35 states and Puerto Rico to his company's credit, founder David Farlow has found his way down the often hazy path to long-term success in the risky environmental-consulting business.

The route to success hasn't always been clear, however. After getting degrees in water-resources engineering and civil engineering at Purdue University, following three years of military service in Germany, Farlow's insistence that environmental-engineering work was commercially viable got him fired from the firm for which he worked at the time.

"It was frustrating because I worked for people who didn't have the appreciation for environmental work and where it was going that I had," Farlow explains. "In fact, I recall one guy saying he thought environmental work was a flash in the pan."

That "flash" now brings in about 60 percent to 70 percent of the total work done by Farlow's former firm, he estimates. A friendly, outgoing man with a quick laugh and penetrating wit, Farlow also finds it easy to marvel at his own success.

Starting with only his personal experience and a belief that as the demand for government...