All in the Family: Danos growing, but keeping family-like feel in south Lafourche Parish

In 1947, south Lafourche Parish native Allen Danos and his brother-in-law Syriaque Curole decided they were tired of farming – the line of work their families had been in for years.

So they borrowed some money and bought a 65-foot single-engine wooden tugboat in an effort to test their hands as offshore businessmen.

Now 67 years later, their efforts have proved most fruitful. The company they started has thrived and is currently expanding with more than 2,000 employees who call it home.

Danos continues to be a local leader in construction, fabrication and marine works to boost our area’s rich economy, which is heavily reliant upon the oil and gas industry.

But no matter how much Danos may grow, they remain steered toward the importance of family, safety and integrity – the same principles the company was founded upon when it was first created and operated by just two men.

“We’re really a values-driven organization,” said Danos Executive Vice President Eric Danos. “We talk a lot about what our values are. And today, the values that we talk about are integrity, safety, service, improvement and respect. And those values are really not a whole lot different than the values that we had when my grandfather started the company in 1947. Those are all definitely things he believed in.”

For Danos, the past six-plus decades have been marked with huge growth. When the company started, it was completely a two-man band that picked up a contract with Gulf Oil to stay pushing forward.

“They bought a boat and started out in their garage,” Eric Danos said of his grandfather’s humble beginnings. “So everything that we do today is rooted back to that start and the things that those two gentlemen did at that time to get us started.”

The original founders have passed away, leaving the fruits of their labor to family. The company has now been run for several years by Allen Danos’ son Hank, the company’s CEO and President. Hank’s sons Eric and Paul have come into the fold in the past decade or so, each serving as Executive Vice Presidents under their dad.

From their earliest days, Danos has evolved and gained steam, expanding in its offerings and services.

Eric Danos said that today the company is broken into two primary business groups.

The first is dealing with projects, which involves project management, construction and execution for just about anything dealing with the oil and gas industry, both offshore and on land.

“For example, we get involved with engineers and look at the constructability of projects and start planning the actual construction,” Eric Danos said. “We can fabricate modules and decking extensions and piping and different things like that. We have crews that go offshore and do the installation, as well as the electrical and instrumentation and scaffolding. We deal with all of the associated construction services that go along with putting something together and putting it out in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The executive vice president said the second segment of the company is on the production side, which is an effort to help Danos’ customers produce their assets.

“We’ve got people who work offshore – some technical specialists who will go out there and help our customers run their day-to-day production so they can get the oil out of the ground and into the pipelines and floating back inshore. Those guys are spread out across the Gulf of Mexico and also in some land-based operations all over the country.”

The company’s efforts have been so successful that they were actually able to drop boating from their focus in 2005 so that they could better refine and polish its greatest areas of strength – the project management and production.

Danos’ current crown jewel is a project to move its headquarters from Larose to Gray. That project, combined with a new fabrications plant the company is working on in New Iberia will give more than 400 jobs to Louisiana.

Eric Danos said the decision to move to Gray was a move of necessity, as the company has simply outgrown its current infrastructure. He said Danos had opportunities to locate in Texas, among other places, but made the concerted decision to nestle in Southeast Louisiana because this place is their home.

The Gray-based facility is expected to be completed in early 2015, and the company has two phases it will conduct in its building process.

“We’ve outgrown this building we’re in now, which we built in 1985,” Eric Danos said. “We looked all across the Gulf Coast, and we really wanted to identify what was the right place for us to build some additional office capacity for us to recruit and retain talent. But what we realized right away is that we didn’t really want to go anywhere else. We’re down-home folks, and we’re here, and we wanted to stay here. So we found some property in Terrebonne Parish and we took it from there.

“We wanted to stay home and keep the folks who have brought us this far working with us, while also working to attract and retain folks who can become a part of the Danos organization in the future. This does that.”

After all, this is probably the way that the original owners would have wanted it – the company here in Southeast Louisiana.

Eric Danos said one of the biggest regrets he has about the business’s growth is that it’s lost a little bit of the family-like, personable feel of a smaller group.

But he said that no matter how big Danos may get now and into the future, it will remain a place where employees can feel at home with the peace of mind in knowing that they will be given every opportunity to thrive.

Following those guidelines have gotten them this far. So why change it now?

“One of the things we hear from our employees quite often is that one of the things they like about Danos is our family atmosphere here,” Eric Danos said. “We know that as we grow, it becomes more and more difficult to be family to more and more people, but it’s something that we really work hard to retain – that family atmosphere.

“We want our employees to think this is a great place to work. We want our employees to know that if they stick with us, we will provide them the chance to grow and the chance to evolve and work their way up within our business.”

The Danos family – Paul, Kara, Rodlyn, Hank, Rebecca, Eric, Kayce and Mark Danos – break ground on their latest expansion project.

COURTESY PHOTO