Environmental cleanup firm forges experience through SBA programs.

After graduating from Massachusetts Maritime Academy and a stint as a merchant marine, Bob Delhome started working in the environmental cleanup field and soon decided he'd like to start his own company.

"It took about four years from the time I had the idea and really knew I wanted to do it before I really got started," says Delhome, who saw an opportunity for improving delivery of environmental cleanup and remediation.

He thought a company could be successful by adopting a general-contractor approach and using project managers, but he had little idea of how to make it happen. He eventually found his way to the Small Business Administration offices on Causeway Street in Boston.

After general counseling sessions with volunteers at SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives, De]home understood the mechanics of starting a business. SCORE offers individual counseling and workshops for entrepreneurs and online help.

Delhome, a native of Panama, realized his firm, Charter Environmental Inc., could qualify for set-aside government contracts through the SBA's 8(a) Business Development Program for disadvantaged small businesses, and he established it as "a general tool box that I pulled from as needed." The SBA program helps with bid writing and provides networking opportunities that match 8(a) business owners with contract officers so they can better understand the bid requirements.

Delhome was able to use those government contracts to prove his firm's capabilities to undertake complex environmental remediation, experience he then took to the private sector.

The result is a business that in less than a decade has grown to average $28.5 million in annual sales and has a goal of average annual growth of 20 percent over the next five years.

Because federal agencies required him to have certain systems and infrastructure in place to secure contracts, Delhome found he was building capacity that he then turned loose on the private sector, which has long made up more than 60 percent of his firm's revenue.

"When we got those systems in place, it actually helped us raise the bar and perform higher services in other areas as well," he says. "The SBA certainly helps you in terms of government contracts. But the other benefits are the lessons learned along the way, how working for the government side applies to the private sector."

For example, one contract landed was work through the Army Corps of Engineers to reclaim a landfill that had long ago been filled in to create a drive-in movie theater in Lincoln, R.I. The work included wetlands restoration, which Charter had not done extensively before. It's now a growing portion of the firm's work.

Terry Mooers, a business opportunity specialist with the SBA in Boston, recalls Charter beginning the 8(a) certification process in 1997 and winning approval half way through the following year.

"They got their first contract almost immediately," Mooers says. "At that time, environmental remediation was still fairly new ... It certainly wasn't the booming business it is now."

Charter's first contract was a $35,000 award from the Air Force and within a year, it had achieved $1 million in sales. Since then, the firm has won 18 contracts worth just over $9 million through SBA.

The growth since--Charter had just six employees in those early years and now has 105 in offices in Wilmington and Lowell, Mass., and in Eliot, Maine--helped make it the 2005 Minority Small Business of the Year for New England and earn it the administrator's Award for Excellence. Accolades have come from elsewhere as well. Charter has been named by Engineering News Record as one of the top 200 environmental firms in the country.

"The timing was good for us, but I like to believe that we would have been successful regardless of the timing," says Delhome.

Today, Charter offers a range of services, from site remediation and redevelopment of brownfields to ecosystem restoration, decontamination and demolition of sites polluted with PCBs, asbestos and other contaminants, and waste-management services.

Charter's structure is streamlined, Delhome says, and each project has a manager who can make decisions and is "responsible for performance, schedule, and budget and client satisfaction." As a result, "decisions are made quicker, the client is constantly informed and it allows us to be more flexible, innovative and responsive to our clients' project needs."

For Delhome, the hardest lesson he had to learn was figuring out how to delegate decision-making responsibility as the firm experiences rapid growth. "It's something you get better at as you go along," he says.

Meanwhile, Mooers says Charter Environmental is the model for how the SBA should work--a startup gets a boost along the way and then goes on to outgrow the programs that helped it get established. "That's what we hope for," she says. "We want them to grow that way and outgrow us."

Delhome looks forward to giving back to smaller firms, hoping to take on a mentor role for startups.

Meanwhile, Delhome wants Charter to grow its geographic footprint to more of New England but also to take on more complex projects and to gain the ability to perform an even broader range of services for clients.

"We're transitioning from being an emerging business to being an established small business," he says. "The biggest challenges and changes lie ahead of us."

CHARTER ENVIRONMENTAL INC.

72 Jonspin Road Wilmington, MA 01887

[phone]

www.charterenvironmental.com

Founded: 1997

Employees: 105

Annual revenue: $28.5 million