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2011 was a milestone year for Brice Companies – and not only because it celebrated its 50th anniversary as a family operated business. The Fairbanks, Alaska-based company also could take pride in having established itself as a leader in civil, marine and environmental construction as well as materials and equipment rental services in the Land of the Midnight Sun. 

Brice has built a reputation for performing logistically complex projects in rural and remote locations, utilizing local resources to the maximum extent while exceeding clients’ expectations, according to President Sam Robert Brice. “Ever since the company started in 1961, we’ve tried to be involved in the communities we work in,” he notes.

“We are sensitive to rural jobs and try to utilize as many local resources as we can,” Brice says. “We have a training plan to train folks on the equipment that we’re going to have working at the job. Instead of bringing in a camp, we try to rent some of the local facilities even it if takes quite a bit of investment to upgrade these facilities to camp standards, and we utilize local cooks, cleaners and other services.” 

Brice Companies consists of:

• Brice Inc., which performs heavy civil and arctic construction statewide; 
• Brice Environmental, which provides environmental remediation and range reclamation services; 
• Brice Marine, which provides ocean, shallow-draft river and coast marine transportation services;
• Browns Hill Quarry, a commercial basalt quarry and alluvial gravel pit in North Pole, Alaska;
• Brice Equipment Rentals, which serves customers in the North Slope and statewide; and
• Brice-Sukakpak JV, a gravel pad with camp and shop facilities in Deadhorse, Alaska.

Opening New Doors

Brice has a long history of participating in some of the most prestigious and challenging projects undertaken in its home state. These include the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in the 1970s and the Drift River Oil Terminal Dike construction and Koyukuk River Villages flood reconstruction projects in the 1990s. 

In the past decade, Brice has continued to focus on rural Alaska infrastructure work and winter work, such as constructing ice bridges and snow roads, while at the same time supporting contract operations at Prudhoe Bay and the Fort Greely and National Missile Defense sites. In 2001, Brice won the Small Business of the Year Award from the U.S. Small Business Administration for its remediation work at the Amchitka mud pits for the U.S. Department of Energy. 

In July 2010, Brice was acquired by Calista Corp., which is one of the 13 Alaska Native Regional Corporations that were established when Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971. “We thought long and hard about it, having been a family owned business for many years,” CFO Todd Henderson says. “We found that we were too small to be big and too big to be small, and we really needed that extra edge and higher capitalization to get some of the larger projects that are out in the marketplace.”

“Our 50-year history is based on a lot of state department of transportation public works jobs, and what we’re best known for is the rural Alaskan village air strips,” Sam Robert Brice adds. “We’ve done over 60 of them and have been back to some of them as many as three times upgrading them over the years. What we’re seeing now is a transition to large resource development projects for the oil and gas and mining sectors.”

Calista oversees the region of Alaska that contains the Lower Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, which has large known gold deposits, he says. Brice plans to use its remote logistics and construction experience to participate in the development of Calista’s resources. 

“We’ve done a lot of work in that region’s villages and do a good job of hiring locals and training them to be part of the work force, so that’s one of our big focuses right now,” Brice says. 

Legendary Matriarch

Another advantage the Calisto acquisition brought to Brice Companies is the fact it provided an exit strategy for the second generation of family leadership, now nearing retirement, Henderson says. He, Sam Robert Brice and four other family members represent the third generation. The company was founded in 1961 by Luther and helenka Brice, and their sons Al, Sam, Andy and Thom. helenka Brice – who always insisted on keeping the first letter of her first name lowercase – was well known throughout the state.

She built Brice from the ground up and led as president until her passing in 1993. “She was very much our family matriarch and leader,” Sam Robert Brice says. “We all grew up having her as our role model. She was a very dynamic, forthright person. She was our identity; the company was a part of who she was. I didn’t truly realize what she meant to the business until 10 years after we lost her. My dad, uncles and myself were more geared toward performing the work than some of the things she did over the years to make us well known.

“Also, my dad and three uncles were very much a tight-knit family and made decisions as a family and stuck by them, so that’s the business model that we’ve continued with today. If we have a major issue, we get together and discuss it. We tend not to make many unilateral decisions, especially in relation to strategies, markets or opportunities.”

Since the Calista acquisition, Brice Companies has been transitioning its business model to align with its new parent corporation. 

“We are definitely not hands-off as far as the operations of the company,” Henderson says. “Because we have changed from being family owned to being family operated, we are in the process of taking our knowledge base and getting it to that next level of management.”