Wilbur Milhouse has built Chicago-based Milhouse Engineering and Construction company into such a globally successful company one might never guess it actually started in his basement and seeded with money he earned delivering pizza.
Milhouse, the company’s chairman and CEO, had a vision to create a different – a better – engineering firm. But what he lacked, at least at first, was the brick-and-mortar facility from which to launch it.
So Milhouse, a graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and now holding engineering licenses in eight states plus the District of Columbia, did what he had to do and got started in the unfinished basement of his southwest-Chicago home.
That was in December 2001. By his own accounts, the business got off to a decent start earning about $100,000 in revenue – “Not terrible, but pretty decent,” he said – and by 2003 Milhouse Engineering had collected, but not yet started, a couple of projects.
Since his professional licenses were connected to his business, Illinois law prevented Milhouse from going to work for other companies. But these contracts were coming up.
“I knew by the time March came around I was finishing up some other work, but if it didn’t start, I was going to need to do something,” Milhouse said. “So my choices were go and throw boxes at UPS or deliver pizza at night. I chose to deliver pizza because … I could control my hours a little bit better, I get cash every night.
“I used to deliver pizza … in college when I was raising my family and going through school. So I knew how to do it.”
Milhouse told that story and talked about a variety of other business issues during the most recent episode of “CEO Thought Leadership Series on LinkedIn Live,” the discussion series hosted by the National Association for Business Resources.
Produced in conjunction with the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For and Corp! Magazine, the series is hosted by NABR CEO Jennifer Kluge and features business leaders from around the country.
Jennifer Kluge: Give everyone a 30-second overview of the various projects that you’ve done or are doing in the various areas of expertise of Milhouse.
Wilbur Milhouse: Milhouse Engineering and Construction is comprised of several different units in the aviation space, water, wastewater space, the facility space, the transportation space and gas and power environmental program management, project management. Then we have a branch that does general contracting. Then we have a forestry business that’s based down in Atlanta, and then we have a development business that’s based here in Chicago. So we do a little bit of everything.
Kluge: Anything that stands out as a project that you’re most proud of?
Milhouse: I’m very proud about the work that we’re doing at O’Hare Airport and many of our airports. Whenever I’m flying back to Chicago and I take off or land on runway ten center, there’s a sense of pride because that was one of our genesis projects after I was delivering pizza that we had won. And then it started literally or figuratively taking us off.
Kluge: A culture comes from the top. It’s a full-time job. What experience do you want for a team member working at your company?
Milhouse: That’s a great question. And then it really starts from the root of why I create it now. So when I created Milhouse, I wanted to create something better than I worked at before. I wanted to create something that I felt that people can be proud to wear across their channels, that I wanted folks to really embrace the company. It’s being part of the family.
Kluge: You created Milhouse Charities. What’s the purpose and what are your goals there?
Milhouse: Being philanthropic is part of our DNA. I look for opportunities to give back in various different ways. And after starting a company and becoming more successful, I would do it kind of haphazardly. And then I started to think about how to focus and to channel our dollars. And one of the things that’s most important to me are very important to me is to inspire your children that are in the math and sciences, to continue to be in the math and sciences and do well and give them victories and applaud their accomplishments.
Kluge: Somebody once told me it’s not about making great things happen in great crowds. It’s about making great things happen at an individual level that makes change. I’m sure your team members also rally around as far as the energy project in Nigeria. How did that start?
Milhouse: I went on a trade mission back in 2013 with five or six other individuals from the Chicagoland area over to Nigeria. I was really just floored by all of the potential opportunity in this country today that is numbering probably over 200 million people. But their resources were very woeful and in need of repair. So I saw everything that we could be doing — schools, libraries, police stations, roadways, water systems, electrical systems, everything, anything that you can think of. So after really understanding that it’s not as mature as in America … that country is probably 100 years behind us in many different aspects, expressly that you even think about the basic things like power.
So my philosophy related to Nigeria is if I can create power, I can create a middle class because I can create industry and we can create jobs. So that that’s what we’ve been up to.
Kluge: Can you share a monumental moment or two, things that you were worried about?
Milhouse: We are going through one of those moments right now. As we continue to build — we’re somewhere near 500 folks today — it seems like there’s iterations of our growth. When we went from like 50 to 100 and got to be about 120, we had to change almost everything. Our processes, everything the way we operate, because most of those things, the way I built them at the beginning, started falling apart.
And usually that leads into other financial issues that we’re all over the place. And so the first one probably happened back around one of our times when it was very tough in the country in 2008, nine, ten where we were growing steel, but all of our systems were falling apart and we had to do a lot of changing up the way we were doing things and really figuring out how to operate better and really studying other firms and and being able to really see and have reflection on ourselves.
Kluge: What are your thoughts on the changes in the last four years … the workforce has changed, attitudes have changed, What’s working and what’s not working?
Milhouse: I think there are good things that came from the last four years. I think it allowed us to be at a place where a person doesn’t have to be in the office, but I also think that many individuals have taken advantage of that flexibility to some extreme, which makes it hard for those who actually perform well at home.
And I don’t subscribe to everyone needs to be in the office. We have a superstar developer who works 100% remote and she’s fantastic.
Kluge: What trends are you seeing that other executives can learn from within your industry?
Milhouse: Right now, I think it’s holding steady. I’m looking at our utility space very closely. I’ve seen in a few locations where various rate cases were not approved related to those utilities having certain rates that they can charge their customers, which has reduced the amount of work in which that utility needs to do to keep the infrastructure solid.
So those are concerning things that that I’ve seen in two different regions. But most of the regions, especially in that space I’ve seen, be very solid. The transportation space seems to be very, very solid. The housing market is a bit shaky. We don’t do a lot of work in the housing market very, very little, not a lot of work with developers in that space or others in the Chicagoland area.
