Family Business, Family Spirit.

“One of the things that I think is paramount to anybody selecting us is to take a look at the people that we put on the project — the quality of the people, their educational background, their résumé, and most importantly, their desire to make the project a success,” says Bob, whose dad, Robert C. (‘RC’) Hunt, led the general contracting company from 1953 until his death in 2005. “It’s their ability to put their heart and soul into the project, stay the extra hours they need to. To live that project is paramount in our way of being.”

Living Hunt projects are 750 professionals standing together on a foundation of exemplary credentials and intense dedication to building excellence: surveyors, superintendents, managers, estimators, engineers, project accountants and others. The industry agrees: Engineering News-Record consistently calls Hunt one of the nation’s top commercial builders.

“Hunt Construction Group was built on one simple, yet powerful, philosophy: Do the job right,” says Bob, reaffirming three generations of family commitment to clients, to the community and to the highest standards. Today, the Hunt sign proudly stands on the construction sites and résumés of airports, hospitals, commercial structures, hotels and sports facilities throughout the United States. “We know we build more than buildings,” he adds. “We build communities, futures and lasting foundations.”

The same year that RC married Bob’s mother, LaVerne Raines, and shipped off to World War II to help rebuild bombed-out bridges for General George S. Patton’s Third Army, Paul B. Hunt and two friends, Arber J. Huber and Harry S. Nichols, each placed $5,000 into a post-war pot to start Indianapolis-based Huber, Hunt & Nichols. While the son saw to the country’s future in Europe — at the Battle of the Bulge, RC’s unit helped clean out Hitler’s mountain lair, Eagle’s Nest — dad was seeing to the present at home.

No wonder RC always called construction a “blood-and-guts-business.” HH&N built its first project in 1944, just as Congress was passing both the G.I. Bill of Rights to take care of returning servicemen and –women and the Federal Highway Act to give them and their families roads for success. One battle was ending, and the battle for Hunt’s success beginning.

The Right (Building) Stuff. At the birth of the post-war boom and all those baby boomers who would soon thrill at the new ’53 Corvette, fuel-injected Pontiac Bonnevilles, and big-block Caddys, the young company out-performed everyone on defense-plant conversions, becoming the largest builder of General Motors factories. Chrysler and Ford looked out their windshields, too, and got on track, signing contracts with HH&N.

RC returned to a country, and a company, prime for growth: Families in which one car had been a dream and a luxury would build two-car-garage split levels in the suburbs, and sports teams that had confined themselves to neighborhood ball parks would soon plan megastadiums the size of city parks. The Space Age was taking off: Moon watchers John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were test pilots. Everyone, and everything, was looking up, and America was looking for the right companies to take them there.

RC built himself first with a degree in civil engineering from MIT, continuing the studies he had begun before the war at Case Institute of Technology in native Cleveland. After graduation, dad gave him a job at Allison Plant #3, and he started his family in Indianapolis with Laverne. Robert G. Hunt came along in 1948, the same year Lou Boudreau, Larry Doby, Bob Feller, Satchel Paige and the Cleveland Indians would take four out of six from the Boston Braves in the World Series.

RC saw the future all around him: in the hospitals that needed building, in the hotels that would accommodate a country on the move, in commercial office towers where America’s postwar growth would be guided.

“It wasn’t long before the two older men were saying, ‘Let’s get out of this before the kid — meaning dad — runs us both into the ground,’” Bob says, with a laugh. “Well, as soon as he took over in 1953, he bought them both out.” Because of this continuing success, in fact, RC wouldn’t allow Huber, Hunt & Nichols to change its name to Hunt Construction Group until 2000, Bob explains.

But success by any name is sweet: RC took the company up and outward. He moved Hunt into larger offices in Indianapolis and bought the company’s first plane, which he learned how to pilot. In 1956, he established the Hunt Paving Company in Indianapolis to tap into the interstate road-building boom: Americans were moving to the burbs, moving West and vacationing everywhere. Three years later, father and son collaborated on the company’s first high-rise, the 30-story City-County Building in Indianapolis — Paul Hunt’s favorite project. He died two years later, in 1961.

Go West, South and East. In 1960, RC established the Construction Management Department to ensure that Hunt was comfortable in the new worlds of construction technology and contemporary building design. That same year, General Motors asked the company to build a facility in San Francisco — inaugurating Hunt’s expansion throughout the United States.

In 1978, the Phoenix office opened, followed a year later with Dallas. In 1996 and 1999, the two Florida offices opened, respectively, in Tampa and Orlando. Also in 1999, the year company sales topped $1 billion for the first time, the San Francisco office opened. The Irvine, Calif., office debuted in 2007.

Today, Hunt provides construction management, design-build, preconstruction, consulting, program management, risk management and environmental services.

The Hunt reach is nationwide, often building in conjunction with world-famous architects: in Philadelphia, the Helmut Jahn-designed 61-story One Liberty Place (1987); Cleveland, Frank Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University (2002); Peter Eisenman’s University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale (2007), the first retractable roof stadium (the largest lift to take place in North American history) with a roll out playing field. This last was RC’s final project:

RC made Hunt the stadium superstar — a role that Bob and the Hunt family proudly, tenaciously continue. Beginning with venues such as Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium and the remarkable Superdome in New Orleans, the company has created more than 100 sports facilities for sports teams and universities. Of the nine retractable-roof facilities in the country, Hunt has built or is building six of them.

Keeping the Faith in Family. In 2008, the company’s annual sales surpassed $2 billion, and today Hunt Construction Group maintains a contract volume from $6–$8 billion.

“When we were smaller, that family esprit de corps was easy to maintain,” Bob says. My dad used to know everyone on every jobsite; he knew their families and the names of their children. They called him ‘Pops,’ and he called them his ‘Kids.’”

He adds: “Today, that’s a lot tougher with our size, but anyone who works at Hunt understands that spirit and camaraderie and appreciates it.”

Bob’s son, Cameron, completed an internship at the CityScape project in downtown Phoenix this past summer, and the experience gave him not only working knowledge of different field skills— from the bottom rung — but also allowed him to absorb the Hunt culture of family, teamwork and pride.

The internship recalled Bob’s up-the-ladder company experience: as field engineer for the Eli Lily Lab project in Indianapolis in the early 1980s, then project engineer, construction manager, contract manager, division manager, and finally opening the Western Region office in Phoenix.