They’re surfing now off the coast of Boscombe Spa Village in Bournemouth, England.
Not that they hadn’t been surfing there before. But an artificial reef the size of a football field recently installed about 200 yards offshore has been, well … tubular.
The reef was created with 70 yards of supertough bags – the largest the size of a school bus – that induce waves to break further offshore. And now the city, which paid $5 million for the project, is waiting for the swell of tourists.
“It’s the first one in Europe and there’s no doubt it has changed Boscombe forever,” Roger Brown, the city’s director of leisure services, told reporters earlier this month.
The credit goes to Amalgamate Solutions and Research Ltd., an El Segundo company that was headquartered in New Zealand before it was bought in July by two local avid surfers, Nick Behunin and Chris Jensen.
Founded by a group of New Zealand scientist with lots of academic prowess but little business experience, ASR originally made its mark by offering consulting services to governments, non-profits and private companies engaged in projects along the world’s coasts.
Measuring currents, wave dynamics, water quality and other conditions, the scientists create mathematical 3-D models used to predict environmental impacts associated with projects from desalinization plants to harbor dredging.
Among the clients currently under contract are the Melbourne Water Co. in Australia; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and Golder Associates, a New Zealand engineering firm based in New Caledonia doing a sediment transport project. But the two new owners are shifting the focus to the design and construction of reefs to decrease beach erosion; create marine habitat; and, as in Bournemouth, improve the surfing.
“We represent the environmentally sensitive future,” said ASR Managing Director Behunin, 30, who works with Jensen out of a trilevel loft near the beach. “Our goal is to develop innovative solutions for coastal protection working in concert with nature.”
Origins
ASR was founded in 2000 by two marine scientists – Dr. Kerry Black and Dr. Shaw Mead – who had met while working together at the University of Waikato in Hillcrest, New Zealand.
Behunin is a former managing partner of Del Rey Properties, a Burbank company that develops and owns commercial office and apartment buildings. He first learned of ASR while doing research on multipurpose reefs, a subject in which he and Jensen had a personal interest.
“We both grew up with an affinity for the ocean,” said Marketing Director Jensen, 40, who co-founded and is still the majority owner of Arbor Snowboards Inc. in Venice.
After befriending the scientists and corresponding with them on a number of projects, Behunin went to work for ASR in 2007 to help the company develop new business models. That eventually led to the buyout.
“It took us a number of years to get them comfortable enough that they were willing to hand over the reins to a couple of Yanks,” Behunin said.
Neither would disclose the price they paid, along with other silent investors, for a majority interest.
Developing artificial reefs, however, is not for the faint of heart. It requires divers dropping from a barge to anchor the bags to the ocean floor, then pump them full of sand from the bottom.
The completion of one reef, designed off New Zealand’s Opunake Beach, has been delayed for more than three years due to bad weather and shaky funding. Another reef planned in India has had to wend its way through an array of political and financial obstacles. And even the Bournemouth reef came in a year late and 10 percent over cost due to inclement weather.
Zane Taylor, an elected official of the Rodney municipal district near Auckland, New Zealand, described one such process. His district would like to build a series of artificial reefs to prevent erosion at a local beach. But since hiring ASR in 2002, he said, the project has been beset by problems.
The company completed a number of feasibility studies and various environmental modeling for the project. But then things got derailed for years, Taylor said, because “there were so many political minefields to break through.”
Currently, he said, the district is in the process of obtaining the necessary permits for the offshore reefs, after which a local charitable trust will begin raising funds.
“We can’t fault them,” he said of ASR. “They’ve gone above and way beyond.”
Organization
Part of the challenge of the company is simply running it. The company’s name says it all – amalgamate, meaning to mix, blend together or combine.
ASR has two main offices: its El Segundo headquarters where finance, business development and accounting are handled, and an office in Raglan, New Zealand, that handles technical and scientific work.
When reef construction or other field work begins, a team of five to eight divers overseen by a manager is dispatched to the project area where they stay, weather permitting, until all work is completed. Experts in the two offices communicate with each other and with their teams in the field through daily teleconferences conducted via Internet.
“We have very smart people working for us who understand how to follow models,” Behunin said.
The consulting jobs, for which the company is paid $50,000 to $1.5 million each, are still rolling in with about 20 under way. Between those jobs and the reef work, revenue is expected to hit $10 million, almost double of last year.
ASR hopes to capture a bigger piece of the revenue pie for each reef project by expanding its scope of work. Even though the company has done design and feasibility study work for more than 40 artificial reefs worldwide, the Bournemouth reef is the first it has taken all the way from design through construction, one of the trickiest parts of the project.
Next up: a $1.5 million reef off India’s Kovalam coast that the company expects to complete early next year. Eventually, ASR hopes to build reefs offshore in the U.S., where it has so far not done one.
“Coastal protection is a $10 billion-a-year industry,” Behunin sighs. “Our long-term plan is to prove stuff internationally and then bring it home.”
Amalgamate Solutions and Research Ltd.
HEADQUARTERS: El Segundo
FOUNDED: 2000
CORE BUSINESS: Design and construction of artificial reefs; consulting on environmental effects of coastal development
EMPLOYEES: 25
GOAL: To double the business in the next three years
THE NUMBERS: $10 million in revenue projected for 2009
