By Warren Miller, Marine Construction Magazine
Mark Boyer started his construction career as an electrician who worked his way up a ladder of his own making, forming his own company—Boyer Inc.—more than 30 years ago.
“God gave me the gift of watching someone do something and figuring out how to do it myself,” he says. “I never went to college. I learned from others how to do just about everything we do.”
He made a number of good choices along the years that helped Boyer Inc. grow. The first was a decision to focus on public-sector infrastructure work. A second choice was to recruit people—from experienced tradesmen to apprentices—who could contribute to the company.
As the company website states, “Boyer is an experienced contractor maintaining its place in an ever-changing market by expanding its in-house services in order to sustain its ability to selfperform over 95 percent of all projects. … Our employees bring a vast amount of knowledge and work experience to our operations. … The bar for excellence is held high for every project that holds the Boyer name.”
MCMag: How did you make the transition from being an electrician to starting your own company?
Mark Boyer: I was working for a big company called Midwest that was having trouble in the late 70s and early 80s. I was a division head by that time and they were going to relocate me to Arizona to take over a failing shop. I just decided it was time to change my life. At the time, I was divorced and didn’t have any kids, so I didn’t have anything to hold me back.
I talked my mother into going into business with me. We formed Boyer Inc. in 1986. I was the salesman and did the work and my mother ran the office. We started out doing mostly electrical work, but as the economy pushed us, we evolved into being a public works contractor.
Like I said, I was mechanically inclined and had a lot of great people helping me. We have about 200 employees today.
Was Houston a good market to be in at that time?
Not really. That was when the oil industry crashed. Property values dropped by half and wages went to half. But there wasn’t anything the market could do but come up, so in that sense, it was a good time to start a business. We were successful, and I attribute a lot of it to my mother. We had great employees and built of lot of big projects, mainly city, state and county infrastructure. To this day, we don’t do much private work. We bid on lots of dams and intakes and wound up buying sectional barges. Today, we have over 200 barges and a big part of our income is third-party— we rent barges and other equipment to other contractors.
You’ve also evolved into an equipment fabricator. What prompted that?
Necessity. Most of the time, the jobs we would bid were real odd. One-offs. We don’t pour concrete or do paving. I’d rather bid on lowering an existing pump station while it’s operational.
A story I use to explain that preference comes from Dr. Michael DeBakey, the Houston surgeon who pioneered heart transplants. One day, Dr. DeBakey took his Mercedes to the dealer for service. The guy working on it was a white-gloved technician, a man who’d been trained to the highest standards.
So Dr. DeBakey’s talking to him, telling him what’s wrong with his car, and the mechanic says, “You know, doctor, I do the same thing you do. I work on the heart of the car, the engine. I adjust the valves, the carburetor, make it run like a clock. But I don’t make a tenth of what you make.”
Dr. DeBakey looks at him and says, “Try doing it while the car’s running.”
And that’s what we do. We work on operational infrastructure, whether it be big tunnels, water or wastewater plants. You can’t turn them off.
You’ve invented a lot of your own tools to be able to do that kind of work. Was it because the tools you needed didn’t exist?
That’s correct. I’ll give you an example. When we work on a dam that’s already holding water, you can’t turn off the water, so every technique you use is counter to what they used to build it. The original contractors didn’t have the force of the water pushing against them, they just had a big structure.
We designed and built pullers for the pins on the gates, which might be huge, upwards of 20 inches. There are no commercial pullers on the market to pull a 20-inch pin, so we had to build our own.
Then you can sell or rent your tools. And I gather from what you’ve said that you’d rather rent them.
Absolutely. We don’t want to compete with United Rentals, but we rent what they don’t have. Economics drives the rental business. It’s not so much what the margin is or the ROI—it’s what something is worth.

On that subject, you mention something on your website for which you just got a patent on, “topdown construction” in regard to alternative fuel infrastructure. What was that?
Well, it’s a distribution design for compressed natural gas, but it’s not economically feasible. It still may happen with hydrogen. It’s a concept for retrofitting an existing gas station to make it work with the new fuel.
The idea is, at a gas station, the fuel is in the ground and you pump it up to put it in your car. But compressed natural gas is lighter than air. You don’t want to store it underground because if there’s a leak, it’s going to leak right through to where you’re standing.
My theory was, put all that product on top of the canopy because every gasoline station has a canopy and above it is wasted space. Storing gas fuel above the canopy is safer. If you have a fire or explosion, and it’s above you, it’s less likely to hurt you.
It was a great idea but the infrastructure didn’t happen for natural gas. I think it’ll happen for hydrogen and we’ll wind up doing that to enable retrofitting. You don’t want to dig up the parking lot of a gas station because you’d have to shut the operation down. But if you can put the new fuel above the pump area and the hydrocarbons below that, you’d still have a working operation while you add the new fuel.
You might have to make the canopy stronger, but that’s still more economical than digging up the ground and changing everything.
What do you like most about what you do?
I’ve always liked building things. Taking on challenging projects and finishing them.
Do you have a succession plan?
I’m going to sell the company to the employees. It’s going to take an extended period because they can’t afford to just buy me out. I’m going to owner-finance the sale and stick around to make sure things get done, but when it’s done, they’ll own it. The business is going to pay me to retire.
I’ve got some great employees. Some of them I call my adopted children, and they’ve helped build this.
I still think I’ve got 10 good years here, but at the end of that, I need to be fading off into the sunset.
What’s something that even people who know you don’t know about you?
Something my family knows but not everyone else does is that I have an affinity for things that go fast. I love fast cars, fast boats. I used to be a pilot and flew airplanes. I love things that are mechanized.
I’ve got Viper cars, Aston-Martins. I have a vintage collection of drag boats from the ’60s and early ‘70s, flat-bottom speedboats from California. I take them out on lakes and reservoirs. I owned my first racing craft the year I graduated from high school.
Who has had the greatest influence on your life?
My mother and my wife, Laurie, who has contributed greatly to our successful business by supporting me and putting up with a workaholic husband, taking care of our family in my absence.
Another influence was a long-time friend who passed away recently. I gave the eulogy at the memorial service for him.

He was a legend. He did engineering for contrators like me. If I was doing a project and came up against something tough, he would take the time to talk to me and show me possible solutions. I mean, I could build stuff in the shop and test it to failure, but sometimes I needed somebody to help me before I spent all the money to test something that wasn’t likely to work. And tell me why it wasn’t likely to work.
He was humble and his business evolved from working with contractors. He taught me, in the 30 years that we were friends and coworkers, to be an engineer.
Isn’t the essence of engineering being a problem solver? Something you’ve been from the start?
Absolutely. We start with a blank sheet of paper. And that’s how we want all of our employees to work.
I recruit at high schools. I try to bring employees in at that level and I give an apprenticeship. We have a four-year program for every trade—electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics, civil construction, how do you lay pipe, how do you drive a tractor. We graduate them every six months, and if they’re learning their trade, they get a raise and become journeymen. Once you become a journeyman, the next goal is to become a foreman, then a general foreman, and if you’re really good, you get to be a superintendent.
I’ve had a few that were in and become project managers, which are the vice presidents of the company. But out of 100, you might get two that make it that far. If they’re smart enough, I’ll reimburse them for their college if they graduate, working during the day and going to night school.
If you hire young people out of high school, usually for their first full-time job, you have the opportunity to train them the way you want your business to operate.
Yes. Some of the best students I’ve hired have been part of FFA, Future Farmers of America. Those kids have learned how to take care of an animal. You can’t tell an animal what to do, you have to learn how to take care of it.
That sounds like Dr. DeBakey’s concept— “while it’s running.”
Exactly!
Reprinted from Marine Construction Magazine Issue IV, 2023