Arthur "Artie" McFerrin, Jr.
Texas A&M University
When Arthur “Artie” McFerrin Jr. takes a look around, he sees a world of processes. Driven by his chemical engineering background, this mild-mannered East Texas entrepreneur believes there’s a better, more efficient process for doing just about everything – whether that’s making a specific product or handling the finances of his multi-million dollar chemical manufacturing company. Most of the time, he’s right. But in addition to his aptitude for breaking things down into their component parts, McFerrin possesses the rare ability to simultaneously do the very opposite – that is, see the “big picture.”
Together, those two disparate yet complementary qualities have formed an overall vision that has successfully guided McFerrin throughout his more than 40 years in the chemical manufacturing industry. It’s a vision that was there in the beginning, helping him transform an upstart business into a cash cow, and it’s with him still as he directs his attention to his beloved alma mater, Texas A&M University, and in particular the department that gave him his start.
Artie McFerrin has a vision for Texas A&M’s chemical engineering department.
He sees it as a major player in advancing chemical engineering education and research throughout the next century and beyond. He’s confident it can become a national powerhouse, one that’s consistently recognized for its teaching and research endeavors and one that’s a perennial mainstay in national top 10 rankings. In its faculty members, he sees some of the foremost thinkers. In its students, he sees the future leaders of industry and academia. In short, McFerrin sees unbounded potential.
That’s something for which he’s always had a pretty good eye – though he’s likely to downplay it.
With a charming sensibility and sincere humility, the Beaumont native describes his time in the chemical manufacturing industry as a “bit of stumbling around” until he learned enough to win a few more times than he lost. In reality, McFerrin hasn’t lost too often. Still, his humbleness isn’t an act. There’s not the slightest hint of pretentiousness about the man. And that stereotypical Texas businessman bravado never took root in this friendly East Texan, even as his successes multiplied.
It was back in 1973 when McFerrin first turned that eye towards the entrepreneurial realm. He had previously been working for Shell Chemical after graduating with a chemical engineering degree from Texas A&M in 1965. Though he was gaining valuable experience, McFerrin couldn’t see a future for himself with the company.
“It was a first-class company, but I realized it wasn’t necessarily what I was looking for,” he said. “I didn’t have a lot of interest in my boss’ job or his boss’ job or even his boss’ boss’ job. I just didn’t have that interest. At that time, I was involved in Jaycees [Junior Chamber of Commerce] and I was getting to see people in all types of business and people who were in business for themselves. I had never really thought about being in business for myself until that point, but somewhere along the line I decided that is what I wanted to do.”
So, McFerrin began to put his plans in motion. After a brief stint in consulting work when Shell introduced him to the right people, and when the Arab oil embargo hit in 1973, McFerrin (who had obviously impressed his contacts), was asked to manage a small plant. It was one of several facilities that had sprung up throughout Texas in response to the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announcing it would no longer ship oil to nations that had supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt.
As a result, the market price for oil significantly increased, spurring a wide variety of new exploration initiatives throughout the country, all aimed at countering the economic effects of the embargo. During that tumultuous time, McFerrin estimates he frequently worked 100-hour weeks. It was a grueling schedule, but it enabled him to build enough of a nest egg to start his own company. In 1975, he did just that, founding KMCO, LP, a specialty chemical manufacturing and processing company based in Crosby, Texas.
“I kind of knew it was risky, but I was really young and had no fear,” McFerrin said with a chuckle. “That’s not to say I didn’t know there was risk, but I knew I could do it.
“When I first started off I saw I could reclaim some byproducts, some waste products, and recover some good material from the large chemical companies,” McFerrin said. “A lot of these byproducts were being disposed of until the embargo. At that point, people were making money by recovering those byproducts. It started there, where I could do that distillation-wise. Then it evolved more into making products for other people. That’s where I decided I needed to do things for the larger chemical companies. The other thing I realized was that I could do small projects for them less expensive and better than they could.”
And with that, McFerrin was off and running, all the while relying on that unique vision of his.
He scrutinized the details of his business, looking for ways to improve: “Everything is a process, and whoever has the most efficient, effective process to do things is going to win.”
But he was never so bogged down by the details as to lose sight of the big picture: “No matter what you think or what your grandiose ideas are, they don’t amount to a hill of beans if you’re not making money at it. You look at where you’re making your money and you just go that way.”
Today, McFerrin’s KMCO owns production facilities in Port Arthur (KMTEX) and terminal/packaging facilities across the Houston area (South Coast Terminals). McFerrin also is a partner in a plant in Louisiana.
“What I mostly do is I do work for the large chemical companies; I do the small jobs,” McFerrin said, summarizing his place in the industry. “I put up the capital at a much lower price than what they would do and generally a lot lower than my competitors would do. And I hire the right people to operate and run those facilities. I just try to meet their needs, and I try to stay lean so there’s money in it for them and for me – so we both win.”
As is the case with nearly every successful entrepreneur, McFerrin’s venture into manufacturing was a calculated move. His early years in the business had provided him the opportunity to witness and experience the dramatic ups and downs of a speculative and sometimes volatile industry. As he assessed his environment, it was the manufacturing aspects of the field that seemed to provide much more stability as well as room to grow, McFerrin explained.
“After having been out from Shell for a few years, I knew how hard it was to make money every month,” he said. “Every time you had a few good months you’d wind up having to pull yourself back up by your own bootstraps and start all over again, looking for something else. I saw that manufacturing was a way that you could build one level that would operate 24 hours, seven days a week. Then you could build something else on top of that that would run 24 hours, seven days a week. Then you could still build something else on top of that. All of that appealed to me because it was a way you could build something solid. I realized manufacturing was a great thing. I realized there was great opportunity there.”
Four decades later McFerrin has that same feeling. This time however it’s not about manufacturing; it’s about education, specifically the quality of education being offered at his old stamping grounds.
Fueled by an adamant belief that Texas A&M’s chemical engineering program is on the cusp of achieving unprecedented national prominence, McFerrin is doing what he’s always done when he identifies ripe potential. He’s attacking it full steam ahead with a goal of nothing less than turning potential into reality.
And though McFerrin isn’t shy about professing his love for all things Texas A&M, this is hardly a case of a former student wearing rose-colored glasses. McFerrin is far from a wide-eyed dreamer; he’s a shrewd businessman who knows what it takes to achieve large-scale success – effective processes, of course. With regard to Texas A&M’s chemical engineering department, that means having the right parts – in this case, people and resources – in place, and McFerrin is committed to ensuring they are.
In 2001, he and his son Jeff, a 1992 graduate of Texas A&M, established the McFerrin Professorship in Chemical Engineering to support the teaching, research and professional activities of an outstanding faculty member. That professorship was critical in the department’s efforts to attract top talent. Just a year later and leveraging the increased resources provided by the professorship, the department welcomed to its ranks Professor Mahmoud El-Halwagi who had spent the previous 12 years at Auburn University. There he was named a five-time Outstanding Faculty Member as well as a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s National Young Investigator Award.
A national authority in the field of process integration, El-Halwagi’s success hasn’t been limited to the laboratory. Since joining Texas A&M, he’s received a college-level Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching from The Association of Former Students as well as the Fluor Teaching Excellence Award.
Four years later McFerrin forever changed the face of chemical engineering education at Texas A&M, making the largest private gift to the department in its nearly 60-year history – a $10 million endowment exclusively devoted to supporting chemical engineering at Texas A&M.
“The McFerrin endowment has been an incredible benefit to this department, greatly enhancing the teaching and research initiatives taking place here,” said Department Head and Unocal Professor Michael V. Pishko. “Endowment funds have been used to establish a state-of-the-art distance learning facility in our building as well as to support student travel to domestic and international conferences – an aspect we believe to be critical in their academic development. We’ve also used these funds to recruit top U.S. graduate students and to improve research facilities within the department.”
As monumental as McFerrin’s financial support has been, he’s also equally invested his own time and energy to the department’s efforts, serving as chairman of the Chemical Engineering Advisory Board. Professor and former department head Kenneth Hall lauded McFerrin’s work as chairman, stating McFerrin’s "expertise, passion and vision have been invaluable to the department.”
“I’m focused on where I can have the most impact – in chemical engineering; that’s my background, Chem-E at A&M,” McFerrin says with a discernable pride. “I feel like part of the department, and I want to see the department be successful. It’s always been successful, but on the national scene there is a constant battle. Even with the new [Jack E. Brown] building, which is great, and the facilities and labs and the endowment, this is still a growing effort, but at least we have a better foundation to grow from now.”
That growth, in McFerrin’s eyes, will be characterized by not only offering first-class academics but by providing an overall experience of personal maturation for the students enrolled in the program, an experience he says is unique to Texas A&M and one he believes made him the man he is today.
“Texas A&M offers so much more than pure academia,” says McFerrin, who this past year received the highest honor bestowed upon a former student of Texas A&M, the university’s Distinguished Alumnus Award.
“Don’t get me wrong; academics are very good here, and I think we need to continue to be highly successful in academics, but you could find that at lots of places – the same type of quality education. The thing that really counts and makes A&M so different and important is the other stuff. A&M offers something special that very few other universities offer – a certain culture, certain values. A&M is a magnet for strong-valued people with strong work ethics. A&M attracts people like that. The more we can do to help each individual person become more successful in their life, that’s an opportunity we have that most other places don’t.”
And it’s an opportunity that Artie McFerrin is committed to seeing realized. Given his track record, Texas A&M and the next several generations of Aggie chemical engineers should be feeling pretty good about that.
In addition to his support of Texas A&M’s department of chemical engineering, Artie McFerrin has been one of the university’s most avid and generous supporters in a number of other areas. His many contributions to Texas A&M are visible throughout the campus and include the McFerrin Indoor Athletic Center and the Cox-McFerrin Basketball Center. McFerrin also has endowed the Becky Gates Children’s Center, the Marilyn Kent Byrne Student Success Center in the College of Education and Human Development as well as the Byrne Chair, also in the college of education. McFerrin has served on the President’s Corps of Cadets Board of Visitors, the 12th Man Foundation Board of Trustees, Texas A&M Research Foundation, and the Chancellor’s Century Council.