Think back to the mid-1980s. The overvalued dollar was making U.S. goods prohibitively expensive, the Rust Belt was in the doldrums, and many observers were questioning the ability of this country to compete in the world economy.
In 1985, Bill Connell, then 47, was executive vice president of the Ogden Corporation, a giant New York-based conglomerate whose operating units ran the gamut from food service to heavy manufacturing. One day, the company's chairman made a startling announcement. Since the United States had entered into a postindustrial era, he said, Ogden would spin off its shipyard and six manufacturing companies to form a new employee-owned enterprise called Avondale Industries. If Connell wanted to be its CEO, the job was his.
Connell didn't hesitate. A seventeen-year veteran at Ogden, he had started out as treasurer but soon headed a number of the firm's major divisions. But he wanted to run a company. Furthermore, he didn't accept the notion that manufacturing was dead. "It seemed to me that a nation had to make at least some of what it needed, or it would be in deep trouble."
For the next two years, however, Avondale's bottom line did not present a pretty picture. The shipyard was doing fine, but the other firms were fighting for their lives. As the value of their stock sank, the shipyard workers wanted their independence. Connell responded in 1987 with a leveraged buyout, a $148 million deal that gave him 85 percent ownership of the industrial companies. The Connell Limited Partnership was in business.
Total sales were then around $660 million. Last year, the four firms remaining in the Partnership—Danly Die Set/IEM, Mayville Metal Products (a fabricator of enclosures for electronics equipment that was recently sold), Wabash Alloys, and Yuba Heat Transfer—accounted for revenues of more than $1 billion. Connell modestly notes that he's had some "good luck" along the way, but the success of his ventures over the past fourteen years speaks volumes for his skills and vision as a leader. From the vantage point of his sparsely staffed Boston headquarters, for example, he sets the overarching strategy for each firm, while giving managers and workers in the field enough independence and responsibility to make them feel like owners.
Connell also maintains a tight system of quarterly operations reviews and monthly financial reports, and he makes frequent visits to plants and customers in this country and abroad. Beyond all this, he has insisted on a commitment to the highest standards of business ethics. Every employee is required to sign a certificate of compliance after reading a 28-page booklet outlining the Partnership's code of conduct as well as policies regarding issues such as antitrust and environmental protection.
As a young man, Connell didn't give a thought to becoming an executive. Growing up in West Lynn, an industrial city north of Boston where his father, an Irish immigrant, drove a bus, he started selling newspapers at the age of ten, worked at a drugstore as a high-school student, and figured the next step would be an apprenticeship at the local General Electric plant. His father had other ideas. "He was always saying that education was 'the key to the door,'" Connell explains in a mellifluous voice.
In the fall of 1955, therefore, he entered Boston College. "I wanted to study physics," he says with a smile. "But a priest, noting a lapse in one of my high-school conduct grades, decided I'd be better off taking courses in business administration." Majoring in accounting, Connell graduated magna cum laude and was now eager to become a professor like his mentor at BC, a Harvard Business School alumnus named James O. Dunn, who urged him to continue his education at Soldiers Field.
After a couple of years as an officer in the U.S. Army, Connell did just that, earning his MBA as well as a letter of acceptance to the DBA Program. He opted to fulfill his field research requirement immediately by developing and implementing a computerized accounting system for a small garment manufacturer near Los Angeles. One year turned into two and in 1965 came an offer to join Beverly Hills-based Litton Industries, then the ultimate conglomerate. "I had always assumed there were limits to what a person could accomplish in life," Connell notes. "After HBS, my experiences in the workplace showed me otherwise. I decided to stay in business."
Quickly promoted to assistant treasurer, Connell (by then married to his wife, Margot, and the father of two of their six children) was transferred to Litton's financial offices in Manhattan in the summer of 1968. But before everything was unpacked, Connell's bosses phoned from California. They had named Litton's treasurer to another position and wanted him for the job—provided he return to Beverly Hills. "Since my family was happy in our new home, I was ready to commute to the West Coast," he says. "I had even declined an unexpected offer to work at nearby Ogden, but then their chairman and CEO called me back with a deal I couldn't refuse: 'Prove yourself in the treasurer's office and you can move quickly into general management.' That's exactly what I wanted." Opportunity had knocked.
For more than a decade, Connell's prominence as head of one of the country's largest privately held companies has been matched by his involvement in a vast array of civic and philanthropic activities in the Greater Boston community, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Public Library Foundation. "I've never forgotten that every Sunday my father gave whatever he could to the church," he explains. "At the same time, I've tried to use those platforms to spread the word that by providing people with jobs and security, businesses bestow on society one of its greatest benefits."
Connell's face lights up with a final observation. "Remember that priest who didn't let me study physics? I say a prayer for him every day."
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