02.05.06
By SMILEY ANDERS Advocate staff writer Published: Feb 5, 2006 As a lad in his native Ireland, Brendan O’Connor swam in the chilly waters of Dublin Bay, overlooked by the famed James Joyce Tower. Although he left Dublin when he was 8, O’Connor never strayed far from the water. Today, from the Mississippi River city of Baton Rouge, his Celtic Group is making its name on the world’s waterways. And the company is taking a leap into a new business — show business — with its involvement in a Baton Rouge movie studio’s development. The Celtic Group started in 1985 when O’Connor, who had moved from New Jersey to Baton Rouge, home of his wife Sylvia, opened a third-party logistic provider (now called a 3PL) business in their Sherwood Forest house. Today the private company occupies a 12,000-square-foot building on 5‰ acres on South Sherwood Forest Boulevard, plus a warehouse off George O’Neal Road. Celtic has 60 employees, with 40 in its headquarters building and the other at its Baton Rouge warehouse and U.S. offices in New York, Chicago, Houston and Louisville and one in Monterrey, Mexico. A shipping office in Mobile, Ala., is presently staffed from Baton Rouge. O’Connor created his 3PL when the concept was new in the transportation industry, but it has caught on as more companies downsize, eliminating their transportation departments and relying on outsourcing to handle the movement of goods. Celtic Marine Corp. offers a full range of transportation services: cargo supervision services, ocean vessel chartering, contract barges, contract stevedoring and truck brokerage. The staff manages the movement of cargo ranging from steel and bulk commodities to containerized freight, all over the globe. There’s also a Truck & Rail Division, a licensed and bonded carrier to all of the United States, Mexico and Canada, handling both bulk and containerized cargo. Celtic International Shipping Agency, formed in 1997, is a joint venture with LBH Group of Rotterdam and Curacao, serving U.S. and Caribbean ports with emphasis on the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast. Celtic Commercial Services, organized in 1999, offers warehousing and commercial moving, and archives and records management services in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and New Orleans. It operates a data record storage facility with Internet connections for quick retrieval. Celtic Financial Services, which dates from 2000, includes Celtic Mortgage and Celtic Title, and deals in real estate loans to be bundled and sold to institutional “secondary market” investors. Celtic & Stone Liquid Consulting was formed by Celtic and John M. Stone in 2003 to service the liquid end of the transportation business for domestic and international shippers. Then there’s the newest venture, Celtic Media Centre, located on 12 acres near Airline Highway and Interstate 12. The complex is built around a 30,000-square-foot recording studio partially built by rapper Master P when he was located in Baton Rouge. Celtic bought the building for $950,000, and is using Raleigh Studios as the consultant to bring it and other buildings to be built on the site up to Hollywood standards for both production and post-production of movies, TV shows and video games. Of the site, O’Conner said, “We have plenty of room for expansion.” Asked about his many irons in the fire, he explains, “I don’t micro-manage, but the computer helps me keep an eye on each area of the company. I don’t have to be in the faces of employees to see how they’re doing.” He said Celtic “isn’t growing quickly, it’s evolving,” and each new entity is added after careful planning. O’Connor was 8 when he came with an aunt to the United States to join his parents, who had come over earlier to get established. “My father met my mother in London after World War II,” he said. Although Irish, his father qualified for the G.I. Bill because he had served in the American Merchant Marine, on a ship that was torpedoed by the Germans. He had then joined the European Expeditionary Forces and took part in the invasion of Normandy. After the war, the elder O’Connor worked as a self-taught hydraulic engineer and was in the shipping industry in the United States when his son came over. After growing up on Long Island, young O’Connor joined the shipping business in New York by answering an ad for a “young man, willing to work hard.” By 1962 he was making $3,000 a year, but facing a daily 90-minute commute by bus and subway from Long Island to Manhattan. He joined the U.S. Navy, and served in the Tonkin Gulf off Vietnam. But during his Navy service he was also able to attend Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., and Brooklyn College in New York. Out of the service in 1966, he worked for Metal Trading Co., a shipping customer rather than a shipper. He used the G.I. Bill to attend Manhattan Community College at night and study international business and marketing. The hard-working young man became international manager for Continental Ore, saving the company millions in transportation costs. But by the mid-’80s he was tired of traveling, tired of middle management, tired of “being a number” in a big corporation. When the giant IMC (International Minerals Corp.) bought out Continental he knew it was time to strike out on his own. “I liked what I was doing” in the transportation end of the business, he said. “I had two customers to start, and I knew I could make a living with 10. Now we have over 300.” O’Connor had a house in New Jersey, and his wife Sylvia had a house in Baton Rouge. He had already been spending a considerable amount of time in Baton Rouge, the Burnside port and the New Orleans Bulk Port. So he rented his New Jersey house and set up shop in Baton Rouge as a transportation consultant, under the Celtic Marine banner. “I lived in my car,” he said of those early days. “I knew people I had done business with before, so I went up to New York and started knocking on doors.” He offered his customers a full range of transportation services — chartering ships, barges and trucks, dealing with quality control, etc. “We moved a multitude of items, but primarily metals and minerals, from China to Chicago, Brazil to Birmingham. As big companies fell apart, the smaller companies that resulted had to outsource,” said O’Connor. “We could save them time — they didn’t have to chase ships around the world. We were one of the first to do this, to put it all together in a total package as a 3PL .” He admits to being “nervous” during that first year. But as the bad economy of the mid-80s got better, his business improved. By 1989 he was doing well enough to hire his son Michael as his first employee. Michael is currently president of Celtic Marine, and his sister, Shannon Alexander, is marketing and sales coordinator. Another son, Brendan, is in the department store business in Florida. “Michael had been working for a steamship agency until I could afford to hire him,” said O’Connor. He said that while his firm has diversified (“I don’t want all my eggs in one basket”), he has been careful to keep his core business while he looks for new businesses. And he doesn’t see his entrance into the movie business as that much of a stretch. “Trucking, warehousing, archives — these are services needed by movie companies,” he said. “And I’m a landlord, not a movie expert. I like movies, but I’m in the studio business — bricks and mortar — and not the movie industry.” Phase One of Celtic Media Centre involves producing three movies a year for four years, with Raleigh Studios partnering with Celtic in managing the studio and Nova Features providing the production funds. Plans call for two to four movies a year with budgets between $5 million and $20 million. “We’ll be working with local producers, recording artists, computer game developers, etc.,” said O’Connor, who serves as president of Celtic Studios. Linda LeBlanc is general manager of the studio project. He said that while he looks for 10 to 20 permanent employees at the media center by the end of 2006, he’s expecting the center to generate hundreds of temporary jobs when movies start being made. Phase Two involves the addition of more warehouse space on the 12-acre site, plus offices and other facilities for the support people needed to make a motion picture. O’Connor said the media company’s personnel would “go around the state and the U.S., looking for talent and for post-production people. Movies have been shot in New Orleans, Lafayette and Shreveport, but we need our post-production operation in Louisiana also.” He praised the state incentive program for the film industry, which gives Celtic tax credits for 15 percent of all costs associated with buying and completing the recording studio. At the unveiling of the project in January, state Sen. Jay Dardenne, R-Baton Rouge, said it was an example of the way the incentive program could create jobs and encourage entrepreneurship in the entertainment industry in Louisiana. O’Connor said he was also encouraged by steps being taken by the state’s colleges to add courses for young people interested in the entertainment business, as entrepreneurs as well as entertainers. “This will help the entire community,” he said. “When we first saw the building, some graffiti artists had been painting on it. Some of the work was really good. I thought, ‘Why couldn’t we get these artists work painting props?’” In addition to its other interests, Celtic has built two rental office buildings of 6,000 square feet each next to its headquarters on South Sherwood Forest Boulevard, plus a 2,000-square-foot Starbucks coffee house. “There’s room at the front of our lot for more commercial buildings,” O’Connor said. He explains Celtic’s sailing ship symbol: “The Irish are sea-faring people, so the symbol represents not only the traditional Irish skin boat, but the ships of the Viking invaders from Scandinavia. It’s because of those invaders that there are so many blond and redheaded Irish.” About his future plans, O’Connor said, “I want to keep working. Work is my hobby.” With a laugh, he pointed out that the halls and doorways of his office building “are wide enough to handle my motorized wheelchair when I need one.” He admits that work is not his only hobby — he’s an avid fisherman. And he has a growing passion for philanthropy: “As I gotten older, I’ve gotten more interested in wanting to give back to the community, to help people get jobs.” Somewhat surprisingly, O’Connor said Hurricane Katrina had “not been too bad” for his bulk shipping business: “The bulk business, which doesn’t rely on warehouses like the cargo business, fared well. The bulk ships can stop in midstream for loading and unloading. There was lots of scrambling around for vessels, and barges were lost, and we had to help a lot of our customers. “But in a crisis, we do our best. During the low inland water of the ’80s, we diverted barges to routes with higher water to help our customers. We didn’t miss a stroke.” He said that while a company warehouse in New Orleans sustained some “very slight” damage from the storm, by Nov. 1 it was in use to store materials needed for the rebuilding of New Orleans. “The storm did slow the studio business,” said O’Connor, “but New Orleans will come back real strong. However, the federal government needs to get with the state and strengthen the levee system, at least to handle a Category 5 hurricane. And it really needs to be up to Category 6. If the federal government doesn’t commit to Category 5 protection, I wouldn’t build a hotel in New Orleans. Our government has to take the responsibility.” He added, “We have to put people at ease, with the proper levees. Then they will come back, and businesses will come back.” O’Connor said the hurricane has hastened the establishment of a New Orleans-Baton Rouge corridor, leading to a “bigger, better” future for both cities. “Our future is up to us,” he said. “We’ve had corruption in times past, but New York had corruption, Chicago had corruption. Louisiana is no different. The times are changing …. " |