A Race With No Finish Line
The Hagemann Brothers and Boardman, Inc.
Robby Hagemann took the road less traveled to his current position as president and CEO of Boardman, Inc., an historic Oklahoma City-based metal fabrication business: He was a college soccer coach.
After pursuing soccer as an athlete in his college days, Hagemann finished his degree at Oklahoma State University and wound up on the coaching staff. He was an assistant soccer coach there from 2001 through the end of 2006. After coaching for OSU, Hagemann worked for Baker Hughes, the oilfield equipment giant, selling drilling bits to energy exploration companies.
Then he received a call from Roger Grommet, Boardman’s co-owner, about joining the business. Hagemann’s father, Jim Hagemann, is also a co-owner, but the elder Hagemann remained hands-off during the hiring process of his son.
Robby came on board in shipping/receiving and spent the next three years working in the shop before moving into the office, working a variety of other jobs like purchasing and sales before joining the leadership team.
“Then Roger approached me with the reason he hired me,” Robby Hagemann says. “It was his succession plan. So, I bought him out and took over the presidency in 2013.”
Hagemann’s brother Scott came into the business in 2014, lured back to his hometown from Dallas, where he worked as an employee benefits consultant for health insurance company Unum.
“When I lived in Dallas, we talked just about every morning during our drive to work,” Scott says. “Once Robby bought the majority of the business, the conversation turned to working together to build something special. I interviewed with Roger, the same process as Robby, and came aboard in June of ’14 and bought into the company in January of ’17. Since Dad was hands off during the hiring process, our conversations were able to be between father and son, rather than business partners.”
Today, Jim Hagemann is the company’s chief financial officer, and Scott Hagemann is vice president of sales.
The Common Goal
So, what did Robby Hagemann’s previous life as a college soccer coach do to prepare him to lead a company that has operated in Oklahoma City for 111 years?
“Pretty much everything,” he says. “When you’re coaching a group, the biggest thing is you’ve got to identify the common goal. You set your mission and your vision in aligning your goals. You recruit to that. You coach to that. You motivate the kids. Everybody has the same goal. If you don’t have everybody working toward the same goal, you’re taking away from it.”
All of which also translates to the business world. “There’s a whole lot of parallels between sports and business,” he says.
Oklahoma City was only two decades old in 1910 when Boardman, Inc., was founded as a metal fabrication business in what is now known as Bricktown. Four years later, it moved to its current site just south of the Oklahoma River along S. McKinley Ave.
“They did all sorts of metal fabrication, stock tanks, anything that needed welding or riveting, metal forming type stuff,” Robby Hagemann says. “In 1926, they started building fire trucks, among other things. They built smokestacks for liberty ships during the war effort. They built cement mixers and burial vaults.”
“The one thing about Boardman through the years is they figured out what they needed to do to stay in business,” Scott added.
The Hagemann family wasn’t affiliated with Boardman until 1997, when Jim Hageman joined the business. He and two business partners bought the business in 2000 after the majority shareholder unexpectedly died.
Today, the Hagemanns are working to develop a company that people will want to work for, and a new, stronger culture within which people perform as a team.
“You’ll never see a successful team with a bad culture,” Robby Hagemann says. “When you’ve got a team full of individuals, you don’t accomplish the goal. In soccer, when you’ve got 11 players playing together, you can beat any team, even those teams that are better than you.”
Boardman, Inc. has evolved into a company that today specializes in producing what are known as pressure vessels to serve a variety of industries. Oil refiners such as Phillips 66, Chevron, Valero, British Petroleum and others are its biggest customers. It added a field services division in January of this year.
“That’s done pretty well so far,” Robby Hagemann says. “We’re going to try to keep growing that; keep building pressure vessels. We’ve got to keep improving ourselves and reinventing ourselves to stay ahead of the competition.
”It’s a race with no finish line.”
Local Love
The Hagemann brothers were raised on OKC’s south side, and are proud of their Oklahoma City heritage. Although they both left the city and worked elsewhere, today they live within a mile of each other.
“The people of Oklahoma City make it,” Robby says. “Another thing that falls under the radar is the way Oklahoma City is laid out. It’s like a hub-and-spoke where downtown is the center of things and all the suburbs are surrounding it. We can get places quickly. We don’t have the traffic. We both travel quite a bit; we say that coming home to our little airport with our people is just so refreshing.”
Adds Scott: “There’s just nothing like the pull of home. Oklahoma City is always home and felt like home to us. It’s a good place to be, a good place to raise a family. I love the pace of life. In the 10 years that I was gone, the city changed, and I think changed for the better. Great food, great places to go, things to do. You can go whitewater rafting in Oklahoma City. It’s crazy. It’s fun.”
photos by Jordan Mobley