CEO Patrick Schueck preferred an earthier version, but his vice president of marketing and communications, Bill Fitzgerald, urged restraint. “I convinced him not to use four-letter words,” Fitzgerald recalled with a laugh.
Whatever word you use for the stuff, there’s no question the projects are big.
“We have a brand-new division that’s not even on our website yet called Lexicon Construction Management,” Fitzgerald told Arkansas Business in a video conference from Lexicon’s headquarters at the Port of Little Rock. “They’re working on the big new ArcelorMittal mill in Calvert, Alabama. We had been doing the ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel project, AM&S, that exists right next door.”
Lexicon has long managed construction projects as a general contractor, but only recently formalized that arm of its business into a construction management division.
The team has been working on Nucor Steel’s biggest investment ever, a $4 billion sheet steel plant on 1,700 acres in Apple Grove, West Virginia.
“They say it’s the most technologically advanced mill they’ve ever produced,” Fitzgerald said. “Those are very big projects, and we’ve built nine or 10 data centers for seven or eight different customers. Those guys are like a million or 2 million square feet.”
Fitzgerald landed at Lexicon after COVID disrupted his life as vice president of marketing and communications for the Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau. The pandemic brought conventions and travel to a screeching halt.
“We lost 30% or 40% of our workforce,” Fitzgerald recalled. “I was kind of freelancing.”
Longtime colleague Denver Peacock suggested that he talk to Schueck, and telling stories of steel became his mission as the company’s marketing director.
Now he has a multitalented duo of newcomers to help him do that, both internally and externally. Lexicon announced its addition of Blake Curry and Camryn Jacobs back in May.
“When I came on board there was no marketing or communications function at all,” even though Lexicon is a nearly 60-year-old family company with a compelling Arkansas success story to tell,” Fitzgerald said.
It built all of the major steel mills in Mississippi County along with countless other projects. It even has a division, Heritage Links, that builds world-class golf courses.
“Those stories just weren’t seeing the light of day,” Fitzgerald said. “Now we’ve got a great team to get the word out.”
Most knowledgeable businesspeople in Arkansas know a little bit about how Tom Schueck started the business in his converted garage in Little Rock in 1968. And they probably heard how Schueck built it into a steel juggernaut before company leadership passed to his son, Patrick, after Tom Schueck’s death at 78 in March 2020.
“When I was interviewing, Patrick said, ‘You know, we’re one of the biggest companies in town, and nobody knows who the hell we are or what we do,’” Fitzgerald said. “So we’ve worked to raise the profile. When I started, I think we had around 2,000 employees. Now we’re up to about 3,000, but many of those are dispersed.”
Fitzgerald said that even though Lexicon had thousands of employees, only about 400 had Lexicon email addresses.
To communicate with the rest of the workforce, Fitzgerald helped develop an internal communications platform that now reaches about 65% of Lexicon employees.
“Now I’m looking at a big video monitor over my desk; the broad term for it is digital signage,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s an internal network, and we have monitors at about 30 different worksites around the country. We’re able to push content out to people, and that’s something that Blake and Camryn are working on in their specific jobs.”
In telling Lexicon’s story to the outside world, the team’s perspective has evolved.
“When I came aboard, they thought we just needed somebody to do Facebook posts,” Fitzgerald said. “Obviously it’s more than that, but I did develop a complete social media program. Now we’re up on all the major social media outlets and our engagement is way up.”
Curry’s job title is multimedia producer; Jacobs’ is content creator. But Fitzgerald said they have a diverse tool kit including photography, videography, journalism and design.
Fitzgerald wants them to tell Lexicon’s story beyond the numbers. But the numbers themselves are impressive. The company had about $800 million in annual revenue in 2020, and it’s been steadily rising. “We just cracked a billion dollars [last year] and this year we’re predicting around $1.2 billion,” Fitzgerald said.
Jacobs said she enjoys highlighting the people behind those numbers. “I have found that everyone here has a story, and I really love representing these people,” said Jacobs, a storyteller and photographer trained at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
“Everyone is working extremely hard from the shop to the jobsites to the office. Every day is different. We might be traveling to West Virginia and taking videos and pictures at the jobsite, or going out to the shop. There are so many things, and that’s what I love about it.”
The company’s culture of caring for employees, the community and the state of Arkansas also gets notice, Fitzgerald said.
“Patrick is a good leader and a visionary leader,” he said. “One of the things we’re really working hard on is our Strong as Steel: Building Mental Might campaign.” The internal mental health campaign kicked off Aug. 1 with a month’s worth of content and videos for the whole month. “It’s something Patrick believes in, and the problem is very real. Patrick wants to take care of his people — suicide in the construction industry is four times higher than the national average — and the attitude of caring filters through the whole company.”
Curry, who studied graphic design at John Brown University before earning a degree in organizational leadership from Evangel University in Missouri, said he made the right choice joining Lexicon.
“What drew me here in the first place was the people,” Curry said. “I told Bill in our first interview that I would actually give up work and pay preferences for a great culture and people, and that’s exactly what I found here. That’s actually not hyperbole. After my first week here, my wife and I lost our baby boy, and I was just overwhelmed with care.
“I had executive leadership calling me. The company offered me a week of paid bereavement. It was uncommon mercy in a corporate setting, and it was just proof that this really is a people company.”
