June 2021 Vol. 76 No. 6
Features
DCA 60th Anniversary: President Nelson Sees Progress Ahead as Covid Concerns Ease
By Jeff Awalt, Executive Editor
Ben Nelson’s term as president of the Distribution Contractors Association (DCA) began in late February 2020, about a month before the world went on lockdown with the COVID-19 pandemic. With vaccinations underway and restrictions finally easing, Nelson is focusing on his 2021 agenda while helping to shepherd the association through a gradual return to normalcy.
A second-generation DCA president, Nelson started working part time at his father David’s Seattle-area Pilchuck Contractors during high school and entered the business full time in 1996, after graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in construction management. The business and its 200 employees became part of Michels Corporation in a 1999 acquisition that expanded Michels’ gas distribution and telecommunications construction businesses to the West Coast.
Today, Nelson serves as president of Michels Pacific Energy, based in Santa Clara, Calif. His experience in the industry working with people from all types of business models inspired his initiative to attract and develop future DCA leaders, as more family businesses are acquired by larger companies.
UC: You got an early start in the contracting business. What led you to follow in your father’s footsteps?
Nelson: My dad ran a gas distribution contracting company, and just growing up in the family I observed what he did, and it looked like a job that was rewarding to him and an industry that treated him well, so it seemed like a good career option. I always had an aptitude for math and sciences, and it seemed like a good fit, so I went to him and said ‘if you’re interested in bringing in family, I’d like to do that.’
There were a lot of things I liked about it, and still do. I always really enjoyed the people of the business. They were just good, hardworking, dedicated people who were interesting to be around and had a good recipe for success: work hard, don’t cut corners, do good quality work.
It was a very relationship-driven business where you had your customers and interacted with the public and were out there working hand-in-hand with your city inspector and people like that. It was more complicated than maybe it looks to the average person who was just driving by a construction site and saw some guys digging a hole.
I started out doing simple jobs while I was in high school and college, whether it was delivering the mail or working in the warehouse or working on a crew as a laborer for those years. Once I got out of school, I just went right into the office and got into estimating and project management types of professional duties.
UC: Michels bought out Pilchuck just a few years after that. How did that come about?
Nelson: Through my dad’s industry involvement, particularly in the DCA, he got to know Pat Michels, and the Michels family was interested in expanding to the West Coast, primarily for the telecom market, and wanted to be able to offer coast-to-coast services to the big fiber companies. They ended up buying his business, and my dad stuck around.
It was a good relationship. He wasn’t just looking to take the money and get out. He liked it, and he was still relatively young at the time. And I think he was partially motivated to stay and make sure things continued to go well for myself and some other young people he had around – really for all of us – which was great.
He ended up working actively until 2013, and then took a step back at that point into an advisory position, where he still does some special projects. It was then that the Pilchuck company got rolled into the Michels Pipeline Construction Division of Michels Corporation. I ran it as a vice president for the area from that point forward, and my job has changed a couple of times since then.
UC: What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in the industry since your early days on the job?
Nelson: The single biggest change has been the growth of safety as a focus of both the contractors and our clients. That’s been huge. Back then, they didn’t have the emphasis on safety that we do now. Obviously, they wanted to work safely and do the job right, but it’s just become so much more of a priority.
Then the growth of HDD and its impact on the gas distribution market – that changed our market quite a bit. Also, the focus on replacement and rehabilitation and that kind of maintenance-type work, which has become the lion’s share of what we do now – where that aging infrastructure needs to be upgraded.
Some of that was going on back in the ‘90s, but then we were still really in an expansion mode, putting more lines in the ground and extending systems. Now, replacing and upgrading and upsizing are the main drivers of our industry. That’s where the largest budgets are.
Our membership at DCA, as a whole, is pretty healthy, and a lot is really owed to that work. We’re all grateful for that, and DCA benefits from that.
UC: Of course, in the shorter term, the pandemic has created a lot of challenges for the industry, and that includes DCA. You’ve extended your officer terms and canceled or combined some meetings. Can you bring us up-to-date?
Nelson: Once the lockdown started, there was really no practical way to meet in-person. We did have a couple of virtual events to keep the ball moving forward on certain issues and to keep some engagement and have some interaction. But I will tell you, the energy level and the opportunity to do association business virtually is poor. It’s just no substitute. You can get a few things done, but it’s no way to continue forward. We did what we could to hold things together.
We just had our first DCA in-person event in April – the Safety Congress – which was held in Dallas. It was very successful. We had more members at that than we have had at any other safety Congress. Last year’s got canceled, and everybody’s been at home, so many people are really looking for opportunities to reconnect with their peers and to get back out there. Some of them are vendors, who want to connect with customers. People are interested in learning again, with all that great educational work DCA does. I think we will have great participation at our convention.
UC: How have you handled things at Michels?
Nelson: I’ve been really impressed with the way our company and a lot of our peers have dealt with the issue. We’ve been able to continue to function. Yes, we had some periods where people were working from home, but as you know, you can’t build a pipeline from home. The field people have had to adapt, we had to establish protocols, procedures and come up with appropriate PPE and ways of doing our work to try to keep everybody safe.
I can speak for the Michel’s subsidiary that I run, which is called Michels Pacific Energy, we’re in California. We haven’t had one workplace transmission of covid, and we’re really proud of that.
I think we do what we can to try to try to mitigate the risk, although you can’t eliminate it. People are going to catch it in a variety of ways. It’s just something that I think we’ve all become quite used to. I’m really looking forward to moving beyond a lot of the safety protocols and mandates that make our job more difficult and less enjoyable.
And I think there are opportunities to continue to work safely in a vaccinated environment, where we don’t have to wear two masks and stay six feet away and have everybody meeting on Zoom all the time. I think there’s going to be a point where that will have outlived its usefulness, and I’m looking forward to that.
UC: Back to DCA, one of the biggest changes you’ve made this year is to combine your major spring and summer events into a single convention in July. How will that work?
Nelson: It will have all the business coverage that our conventions would have. But since we’re also making it our summer meeting, school will be out and a lot of people will want to bring their kids, so we’re trying to make it very family friendly. We’re making it a day shorter and we’re putting it in Orlando, so you could come one or two days early or stay late, bring your kids, attend an amusement park or whatever you want to do in the area.
It is a combined event. All the committees will be meeting, and we’ll do a lot of things we normally do but there will be a family twist to some of the events, as there would typically be at one of our normal summer meetings, with an open area for kids to play and things like that.
UC: Now that your virtual term has ended and your “real” term has begun, do you have any specific priorities for your year as DCA president?
Nelson: Speaking of the term, all of the board and the officers were extended one additional year. Instead of just taking your one-year tour, we’re all in it for two. I think that was the right thing to do. That way, we all get the opportunity to have, more or less, the full experience, although it’s a little altered.
I did come in with a goal that’s important to me, and I talked about this when I first became president last year. As somebody who’s been with the DCA for a long time and who had the opportunity to start participating at an early age, I want to help encourage our active DCA members to think more about the people at their businesses who are next in line to represent them at DCA, and start getting them exposed to the association.
In the past, a lot of the contractors were family owned and people like myself anticipated taking on a leadership role in
the business, so we really had some sort of history when we were asked to take on that role. But so many of our businesses have been bought out by larger contractors.
There’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry, and for a lot of great reasons. These are more sophisticated businesses that do a great job of bringing more of a corporate and professional view to our industry, but they may not be as focused as the family-owned businesses on grooming that next generation of management to become part of DCA.
That’s something that the DCA is looking at right now. (DCA Executive Vice President) Rob Darden is putting together a small group, kind of a special committee, to look at what can be done to accommodate that. We’ll see where it goes as we look to start kicking that off at our July meeting.
UC: How do you view the outlook for DCA as we work our way out of the pandemic period and look for a return to normalcy?
Nelson: I will say that the DCA right now has a good energy to it. It’s got great participation; it’s grown and evolved. Our government advocacy work, for example, is 100-times better now than it was just 10 years ago, and we’re really stepping up our game to get positive messages about oil and gas in front of government leaders.
Our industry is under a lot of pressure from the current administration, and we are working hard on behalf of our membership to keep all the family-wage jobs we provide in our communities. We have challenges ahead, but I’m very optimistic. It’s just an exciting and dynamic organization to be a part of.
It’s a great privilege to lead it, and I’m just hoping to be a good steward of DCA while I’m in the pilot’s seat.
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