Udelhoven Oilfield System Services Inc.

• Author: McCorkle, Vern C.
• Position: Top Guns * Alaska's Top 49ers

2003 Top 49er Ranking: 21

Position Last Year: 19

2002 Revenue: $61.2 million

Number of Employees: 400

In 1970 there was Udelhoven, just Udelhoven. Today there is Udelhoven plus 400. What happened? An entrepreneurial, James Udelhoven risked everything, and in 1968 packed up his family of five young children and a wife, said goodbye to his manufacturing job at one of John Deere's Iowa manufacturing plants and headed for Alaska's oil fields.

"It was pretty risky," Udelhoven recalls, "but I knew what I could do, and I knew that I could bring some new talent to the petroleum industry." And bring some talent he did. His electronic capabilities began with his military career in radar and that, coupled with specialized training in industrial and power applications, prepared him to become one alone in oil-field technology.

"At John Deere, we had the very latest computerized machining and automated manufacturing equipment of all kinds and descriptions. In Alaska, some of the same technology was just beginning to happen in the oil field, but knowledge of how to fully employ it or to benefit from it was very limited."

Limited, until Udelhoven. He began working for ARCO in Cook Inlet, helping to perform startups, and where he could, put his special knowledge, technical experience and a young man's might and will to work. That was in 1970. Seasoned experts in the field encouraged him to start his own contracting business. Soon thereafter, he did, becoming a company of one! Thus began UOSS--on offshore platforms.

UDELHOVEN DIVERSIFIES

The pivotal point for UOSS came in 1980 when the young company expanded from Cook Inlet to Prudhoe Bay. As Udelhoven recalls it, "When we got to Prudhoe, we recognized that we would be asked to do a lot more than just our old stock in trade: electrical services. We added mechanical and welding services, and provided instrumentation technology. These were natural stepping stones to all facets of specialized maintenance and construction, urgently needed by the producer companies at that time."

In 1989, Udelhoven was in charge of installing the flow-through interconnection of the giant modules that were at that time still built in the Lower 48. Then in 1990, looking far down the road, commercial/industrial construction districts were brought on-line in Anchorage and Bush Alaska, as diversification became critically important to any...