Poirrier And Fuller Celebrate 25 Years At Associated Terminals

In 1998, Todd Fuller and Gary Poirrier were looking to take their careers in a new direction. They didn’t know each other—yet—but through the course of their work at a bank in Baton Rouge, La., they both knew David Fennelly, founder of Associated Terminals, now the largest stevedore and terminal operator on the Lower Mississippi River.

That connection to Fennelly led both Fuller and Poirrier to join Associated Terminals in 1998. Twenty-five years later, they remain, with Fuller serving as president of the company and Poirrier as chairman.

Getting To Know Fennelly

“David Fennelly happened to be one of my early clients,” Poirrier said of his seven years in commercial lending.

Fennelly and Dan Barker, a veteran of the barge industry, started Associated Terminals in 1990 as a brokerage firm connecting shippers to terminals and stevedores. But by the mid-1990s, Fennelly wanted to expand the company’s scope.

“David, instead of just being a broker of stevedoring services with a phone and a fax machine and no assets or employees, had this dream to lease or buy some small cranes and actually enter the business of handling cargo in our industry,” Poirrier said. “And so I was actually one of his lenders and assisted him for the first acquisition of cranes, and that’s how I got to know David Fennelly.”

And so, when Poirrier decided to leave banking, he called Fennelly to let him know. Fennelly immediately asked to meet in person to talk over an idea.

“We met all day for two days—Mother’s Day weekend, I might add—and came up with a concept that I would join Associated Terminals as a minority owner with David and Dan Barker, who was also a minority owner at the time,” Poirrier said. “So there I was, three young kids at home, 29 years old, with nothing to lose, and I decided to give it a shot.

“Obviously, I was betting heavily on who I knew, which was David Fennelly and his creativity, and I felt the opportunity was there for the taking,” he added.

Poirrier came on as chief financial officer of the company, which in 1998 owned two cranes and leased a third and had a team of about 50 employees.

Like Poirrier, Fuller had gone to Louisiana State University and then began working at Bank One, previously called Premier Bank. Through his time at the bank, he too had gotten to know Fennelly and the type of work Associated Terminals did.

Fuller, who grew up in the Sulphur, La., near the vessel traffic on the Calcasieu Ship Channel, said he was captivated as he heard Fennelly talk about the work of Associated Terminals on the Lower Mississippi River.

“I told David one day, ‘I’m gonna be working for you at Associated Terminals. It just fascinates me,’” Fuller said.

Fast forward a few years, and Fuller went to work in outside sales for a company that supplied pumps and valves for the petrochemical industry. That company, though, began to struggle, and the owner was looking to sell, so Fuller decided it was time for a change.

“I called David and said, ‘Hey, college graduate here looking for a job, got a little bit of experience in sales, just curious if you’ve got something,’” Fuller recalled. “David said, ‘Funny enough, we’re growing.’”

Soon thereafter, Fuller joined the company in what would now be called a logistics coordinator role, coordinating vessel loadings, barge loadings and customer service. Fuller would go on to serve in a variety of roles before becoming president in 2012.

Growing As A Team

Poirrier and Fuller highlighted a series of milestones over the past 25 years that helped them grow individually and helped build Associated Terminals into the company it is today. First are the equipment acquisitions, from the Clyde crane Kristin J early on, to the company’s first floating Gottwald crane in January 2007.

“The day we bought our first Gottwald crane set us on a path for greater success,” Poirrier said.

Then, in March 2015, Associated Terminals acquired St. James Stevedoring, including its fleet of six Gottwald cranes. Today, Associated Terminals has 15 cranes on the river, and they’re all Gottwald cranes. The Gottwald cranes offer greater automation and ease of use, which drive up efficiency, reliability and, most importantly, safety.

Coupled with the company’s equipment buildout has been its technology development, like the remote operation of the track hoes and payloaders used to move cargo in barges or the hold of a ship. Traditionally, those machines and their operators have to be hoisted down into the barge or ship. Now, Associated Terminals is able to operate that machinery remotely from its headquarters in Convent, La. The company is also developing the ability to remotely remove and place barge covers within its Lower Mississippi River context, again in an effort to limit “boots on the barge.”

“We haven’t completely gotten away from boots on the barge, but we’re working toward that,” Fuller said.

Parallel to that equipment expansion, Associated Terminals has also grown its operations over the past 20 to 25 years. In 2000, Associated Terminals partnered with another stevedore to provide crane power at the Port of South Louisiana’s Globalplex Intermodal Terminal. Then, in 2005, Associated Terminals became the exclusive terminal operator at Globalplex.

In 2002, Associated Terminals acquired Gulf Coast Dockside Inc. and Bulk Material Transfer Inc., which included operations within the Chalmette Slip in Arabi, La. The small inlet off the Mississippi River, within the jurisdiction of the Port of St. Bernard, is the only slack-water slip on the Lower Mississippi River.

Poirrier said partnerships, both with customers and with the port authorities, have been the key component to enhancing facilities and operations and, ultimately, growing tonnage at those two ports.

“That’s always been a very important focus of ours, and it’s paid off with really good, long-term relationships with customers,” he said. “Another level of partnership is clearly with our port facilities. By operating two port facilities in their entirety, essentially, we’ve been able to grow their facilities, their dock space and their warehouse space by investing together, bringing customers to the table, and by using Port Priority funds from the state, as well as private funds. By working together, we’ve grown those port facilities in terms of tonnage, volumes, jobs, vendor support and taxes—all the things that port facilities are there for as public entities.”

Besides terminal operations within the Port of South Louisiana and the Port of St. Bernard, Associated Terminals also transfers cargoes at midstream buoys within both ports. The company also acquired Turn Services, a New Orleans-based fleeting and diversified towing company, in 2004. Not long after, Associated Terminals acquired a midstream grain elevator from Cargill, now known as Myrtle Grove Midstream Terminal or MGMT.

Poirrier and Fuller both said the success of Associated Terminals hasn’t come in spite of hardship but, in many cases, through hardships. One major hardship was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which flooded much of Orleans and St. Bernard parishes and displaced many employees. The team at Associated Terminals came together and made the decision to invest company resources into securing housing for employees who had lost homes in Hurricane Katrina.

“David Fennelly, Gary and others on this team knew that we just had to take care of individuals on this team,” Fuller said. “So we went out and secured homes and got people to work on employees’ houses so they could focus on their jobs and careers.”

That experience from Hurricane Katrina, both operationally and in serving team members, paid dividends just two years ago when Hurricane Ida made landfall near Port Fourchon and pushed inland, crossing the Mississippi River near Reserve, La.

“Hurricane Katrina gave us the playbook to respond and survive Ida probably better than we would have without,” Poirrier said.

Both Poirrier and Fuller said they’ve benefitted from a whole host of mentors. Fuller mentioned Barker in particular, along with Frankie Walker, Forrest Russell and Jason Perez for teaching him the operations side of the business and Glenn Schexnayder for teaching him about sales, contracts and customer relations.

“And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my father, who instilled hard work ethic in me and humility over the years,” Fuller said. “Unfortunately, he passed away about five months ago. Every day I owe a debt of gratitude to how he and my mother raised me and put those characteristics in my life. Fortunately, because of what he instilled in me, I’ve had the pleasure and blessings to meet and grow and learn and develop new family members and wonderful friends in this industry.”

Poirrier pointed to Fennelly as a mentor, not just for him but for many across the maritime industry.

“There’s no better mentor than a man like David Fennelly, who is so brutally honest, fair and giving,” Poirrier said. “David has been a mentor to the entire company and essentially almost every employee because he changed how our industry did business. David taught everybody it’s OK to be kind, to be considerate, to be civil, to learn together. David is a team builder and a dreamer, and he taught us a big lesson in life on how to respect everybody you’re around.”

Though Fennelly is no longer part of the ownership structure of Associated Terminals, his approach to others remains a big part of the company’s DNA through its core value of putting people first, Poirrier said.

“That means I am no more important than the brand-new deckhand at 3 a.m. on the river,” Poirrier said. “Todd Fuller is no more important than the brand-new crane operator who’s on his second shift in a hundred degree heat in the middle of the Mississippi River.

“We’re all equal, and we all have a part to play,” he added. “David started that, founded it, created that system within our company. Everyone has embraced it, and that is a huge part of our success.”

Fuller said Associated Terminals will always pursue the company’s mantra of having “the Ability and Attitude to Accomplish Anything” for its customers, and that means organically growing to meet customers’ needs. And yet, inherent in that is continuing to invest in the Associated Terminals team and being a good neighbor in the community. All those elements, Fuller said, are captured in the company’s core values of people, planet, property and performance.

“We have a close, cohesive team that has gone through a lot together, and we’re family and friends,” Fuller said. “That’s what makes us successful as a company.”

Caption for photo: Gary Poirrier, left, and Todd Fuller.