Executive Achievement: Mark Bishop, President, Southern Transformers & Magnetics

Executive Achievement

Mark Bishop, President, Southern Transformers & Magnetics

How a would-be restaurateur became a world-class engineer.

By MarEx Staff

Mark Bishop is testimony to the fact that commitment and loyalty will pay huge dividends in your career. Bishop attended the University of Houston to get a degree in restaurant management, but within months of graduating he knew the industry was not for him.

As Bishop says, he had the great good fortune to meet a young electrical engineer named John Janik, who had recently started Electronic Power Design, Inc. (EPD).  He was the fifth person hired in the company and worked in the shop on electronic components. Bishop remembers Janik always spending lots of time teaching him about electronic components, AC/DC drives, and how to build custom circuit boards.

Learning the Ropes
“John Janik graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in Electrical Engineering. He had also worked on F-16s for General Dynamics dealing with harmonics,” said Bishop. “He’s not only a very smart person, but he was also very generous with his time and taught me a lot.” As the company began to grow, Bishop, who was now a senior employee, began taking control of the shop and organizing jobs and tasks. And it didn’t take him long to start working on engineering drawings for systems being built at the plant. “That’s when my career in engineering really started taking off,” he said. “I could see how systems were built and I had enough experience to feel comfortable. And I found a natural creativity in the work. I knew this is what I loved doing, and Janik continued to support my growth.”

Bishop admits that, when he discovered a restaurant career meant working eighty-plus hours a week, he wasn’t interested. Ironically, he was now logging eighty-plus hours a week at EPD, but he really enjoyed the challenges of the job and the variety of work. The company would get a contract to do engineering and commissioning work on a few casino boats along the Mississippi. Or he could be out on an oil rig or an offshore oil platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Being a small company, he knew he had to wear many hats; and whether in the shop getting projects out the door or in the field doing service or commissioning work, it really didn’t matter because he was doing what interested him. To make things even more exciting, he had gotten married and begun raising a family.

Bishop remembers when commissioning a vessel was no easy task. Power control systems are set into a ship from the beginning, and the ship is essentially built around them. Bishop says he was constantly replacing parts on sensitive electronics or fixing broken panels or cleaning systems that had been painted over or welded through. He also remembers taking either a crew boat or helicopter out to a rig and working long, strenuous hours retrofitting equipment, changing out parts or replacing entire units.

“Sometimes you’d get to the rig and sit for days before being able to work on the systems,” Bishop said. “Time is always of the essence when a rig is working, and when you get out there and begin working on the systems, you’d better know what you are doing. I can remember once working on a jack-up rig that we completely tore apart and upgraded all the drive systems in 21 days. Now, that was grueling and hard work, but it was very interesting and satisfying.”

Branching Out
In 2002 EPD began working with Rigdon Marine and the French offshore energy support giant, BOURBON Offshore, building “engine operating systems” (EOSs), which enclose and protect the ship’s power control systems by locking them into a container structure. The concept is to protect the electronics from being damaged as the ship is being worked on by pipefitters, welders and other tradesmen. When the ship is ready to be commissioned, the engineers come onboard and unlock the container and start powering up the ship’s systems. This way it takes days instead of weeks to commission a vessel’s power control systems.  

Rigdon built twenty offshore energy support vessels for the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and EPD built their systems in Houston. Meanwhile, BOURBON was investing billions of dollars building its fleet, which today has over 400 energy support vessels. EPD signed a contract with the French company and began building a new plant in Yangzhou, China to produce EOSs. Bishop was sent to China to establish the company along with Carla and Jay LeBlanc (Carla managed the administrative duties and Jay assisted in management of the manufacturing floor). He became the point man for EPD and was tasked with getting the plant up and running and manufacturing EOSs for BOURBON.

He eventually moved his family there as well. Unfortunately, after a year his older daughter developed asthma and he had to send her back to the states. But Bishop remained to complete the plant and get EOS units rolling out of the plant and to the growing French fleet, which was being constructed in a number of yards in China as well as in BOURBON’s own yard in Ningbo, on the China Sea. “It was an exciting time for EPD and for me,” Bishop said. “I was still in Houston and got to watch the first EOS unit delivered to Rigdon and was in China to see the first EOS unit delivered to BOURBON. There was truly a sense of accomplishment in it all.”

Launching the plant in China had been a vast undertaking by John Janik, Carla and Jay LeBlanc and Mark Bishop. Many of the engineers and assemblers in Houston went to China to work and to train the Chinese workers. During this time Janik decided to build transformers and inductors, which were a major component of the power systems built by EPD. So he built a 45,000-square-foot plant next to the EOS facility in Yangzhou. He also set up a shop in Houston to manufacture transformers and inductors.  

By 2007 Bishop had completed his two-year agreement with EPD Asia and was anxious to get back to the states. Butch Windham was hired from the states and became EPD Asia’s General Manager. But Janik promoted Bishop to Vice President of Engineering-Asia, and he continued to keep his fingers on the pulse of the Asian operations. Between 2009 and 2010, Bishop spent five months a year at the China plant supporting those engineering activities. In 2011, his trips to China became weeks instead of months at a time.

Southern Transformers & Magnetics
The transformer and inductor business was doing well, but it was absent a full-time leader, so Janik promoted Bishop to President of Southern Transformers & Magnetics in June 2011 to really get the business fine-tuned and focused on marketing and production. Janik knew that, in promoting Bishop, he was not only rewarding his loyalty but recognizing his expertise as a consummate professional and a person who moves agendas forward and gets them completed.

Bishop has already begun working with sales representatives around the country as well as business development people. John Norwood, President of EPD Brazil, has a number of projects for STM, and they have started doing some work for rig operators like Transocean. Bishop said they are not looking to compete with manufacturers who mass-produce transformers; they are seeking out companies needing specialty and custom-designed units. Bishop’s China travels are far from over, however, because STM has 35 employees in China and the plant is strategically positioned to produce high volumes of units as needed.

Meanwhile, he works alongside Ken Kline, who is a well-known transformer engineer based at STM Houston. Bishop smiled when asked if it was like starting all over again: “In a way it is, but it’s also very gratifying to work with people building a global company. EPD is now in China, Singapore, Brazil and the U.S. and has hundreds of employees. And just to think I was the fifth employee! Well, it’s been a great career so far and I am looking forward to making Southern Transformers and Magnetics a name recognized around the world.” Knowing Mark Bishop, that shouldn’t take long. – MarEx