When the first Nissan van built in Canton, Miss., rolled off the assembly line in late May, Bill Yates was there to see it.

And he should have been there. The company he owns with his son William, Yates Construction, was the primary contractor for the sprawling automobile manufacturing plant north of Jackson.

"For Nissan to come to Mississippi and name us as their prime, lead contractor was a significant moment for Yates," said Bill, who serves as CEO of the family enterprise. His son William, the firm's president, unfortunately did not make it to the automaker's ceremony.

But considering the projects on the Yates plate, it's not easy to be everywhere for the completion of everything. Indeed, a visit to one of the more than a dozen Yates offices in the southern United States is like dropping in on a beehive.

Pinning the father-son team down for a word about their work is tough because there is always some project somewhere that needs their personal attention.

It has been a long road for the Yates family, which traces its construction background at least as far back as Bill's grandfather, who was a builder around the family's home turf in Neshoba County, Miss.

The father-and-son executives are second- and third-generation owners of what was incorporated in 1964 as W.G. Yates & Sons Construction Co. in Philadelphia, Miss. While William G. "Bill" Yates Jr. was a co-founder of the endeavor, his father William Gully Yates Sr. was in the driver's seat in the formative years.

The elder Yates, he was known as "Gully," died in 1992 and left the business to Bill and grandson William. (Bill's brother Andrew, the other part of the "Sons" in the company's original name, decided not to stay in the construction business).

Today, the company's headquarters is located at 1 Gully Ave. in Philadelphia. And Gully was responsible for initiating the lasting philosophy that guides the enterprise, as it approaches its 40th anniversary. That philosophy is embodied in the firm's motto: "On time, within budget and to your satisfaction."

Jody Tidwell, the firm's vice president of business development, said Yates Cos. comprises the original firm as well as JESCO Inc., Blaine Construction Corp., MEI Inc. and Merit Electrical.

"We have 6,000 employees throughout all the Yates companies," Tidwell said. Producing a nine-page list of ongoing and completed projects since January 1999, Tidwell pointed out a number of them valued at less than the amount many new homes cost. The vast majority, however, are in the multi-million-dollar range.

Tidwell said the range of values, from less than $100,000 to the company's largest undertaking to date, the $550 million Borgata Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., illustrates the Yates mission to cover the construction spectrum.

"Merit, for example, has $5,000 projects all over the place.," Tidwell added. "People have this idea we do only real big jobs but we do a ton of small jobs. There's no job too small, and no job too big."

Tidwell opened a spiral-bound notebook that he uses in his job to sell the services of Yates Cos.

He settled on the page that describes the Borgata project being built for Boyd Gaming. It has 2,000 rooms in a 40-story tower that will complement the 4,000 slot machines in the casino's 225,000-sq.-ft. gaming area.

The project has landed Yates in an upper realm in the world of construction. While the company has built casinos such as Golden Moon Hotel & Casino and its predecessor, Silver Star Resort & Casino, in its hometown of Philadelphia and the Beau Rivage Casino on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the Brogata is a step that Bill never thought would happen.

He said that, during the '70s and '80s, the company grew and took on many large jobs, but it hit a plateau and Bill figured there was a limit to what the company would become.

"You have to learn to be OK with where you are in life," he recalled thinking.

But in the early 1990s, the Mississippi Legislature changed the construction landscape when it legalized gambling along the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River.

"Casinos changed everything," Bill said.
The company became expert at the kind of construction required to build casinos on top of floating barges, as the Mississippi law required. By the time the upscale Beau Rivage project came about in the late 1990s, Yates had the methodology nailed down.

"We developed a novel design concept that had zero-tolerance against tidal surge fluctuations," William said.

"Our team had experience in the gaming industry, and once you perform and perform as well as we did, owners see that level of confidence."

Tidwell said the firm recently completed the first hotel built on the prestigious Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C. Yates also has constructed a variety of structures on college campuses in the country, and has built a working relationship with clients as diverse as the gaming interests to manufacturers to retailers such as Wal-Mart.

"Every time we build, we're building to build again," Bill said.

With revenues of more than $1 billion per year, the firm has climbed, year by year, to 44th place in the "2002 Top 400 Contractors List" of Engineering News Record.

Bill said that along the way the company was able to practically abandon one of the givens in construction: "Through the '70s we started learning to do things other than just the typical general contractor," he added. "The conventional bid process is not where we wanted to be. We started looking at ways to negotiate bids."

Today, most of the Yates projects are indeed the result of negotiated bidding. Bill and William Yates said it offers both the Yates companies and the clients a better working relationship and more value.