On any given day, it isn’t unusual to find 56-year-old Kevin Marsh eating lunch with employees in the courtyard of SCANA Corp.’s new $160 million headquarters in Cayce.
After 22 years with the company, Marsh this month succeeded Bill Timmerman as chairman and chief executive officer of the energy giant. Marsh – who favors wool dress slacks and an open-collared dress shirt over suits and ties – said he knows he can’t run the company alone.
“If you ask me what my mission is at the company, it would be to take all the energy and excitement and the passion our employees have and translate that into how we serve our customers,” said Marsh, who says he learned much of his business sense from his grandfather, “Boppy.”
Marsh, who chose to stay put in the office that he had as president of the Fortune 500 company and turn the former CEO’s corner office into a conference room, sometimes can be found down the street from SCANA’s headquarters in the call center for the company’s principal subsidiary, S.C. Electric & Gas. There, he will plug in a headset to hear calls from customers as they roll in.
A couple of years ago, the state was experiencing a particularly cold winter and the call center was overwhelmed with customers having trouble paying their bills when Marsh sat in. He didn’t like what he was hearing.
“I came away from there saying, we’ve got to do something above and beyond what we’re doing today to help customers,” Marsh said.
At Marsh’s direction, the company’s customer service team made a handful of changes aimed at making it easier for customers to pay their bills. One move allowed customers to get into the utility’s budget billing program without having to pay their current balance.
“It doesn’t make the bill go away, but it certainly eases the way they have to do it,” Marsh said.
The utility also found about $11 million in available community assistance that it could direct toward struggling customers, he said.
There are some other signs Marsh may not be your typical chief executive.
For instance, the father of two grown daughters and two grandchildren says it would be a shame to miss an opportunity to play a practical joke on a co-worker. “Work ought to be fun.”
Even so, Marsh – who will lead the company through a nearly $10 billion expansion of its V.C. Summer Nuclear Power Station in Jenkinsville over the next seven years – has a work ethic born of necessity.
Born to a preacher in Atlanta, Marsh grew up mostly in Athens, Ga., where his father was an Episcopal chaplain at the University of Georgia. After attending eight different schools in 11 years as a youth, Marsh graduated from the University of Georgia in 1977 with a degree in accounting.
En route up the corporate ladder, Marsh said he worked as a newspaper carrier, window washer, sold grandfather clocks, pumped gas, prepared tax returns and taught night school at Midlands Technical College.
He met his wife-to-be, Sue, when he was in the eighth grade; she was in the ninth. The two have been married for 36 years and are members of Grace United Methodist Church in Columbia.
It is probably Marsh’s early background that most influenced his management style.
Marsh’s grandfather, “Boppy,” who was an automobile mechanic, immigrated to the United States from Lebanon in 1900.
Marsh keeps his grandfather’s 1923 diploma from automobile mechanics school and his class picture in his Cayce office.
“I learned a lot about how I deal with people (from) hanging around with him,” Marsh said. “He ran a car shop, and when I would go down there, people would come in and get cars worked on, and some people were having financial problems. He’d sit down and work out a way to help ’em on their cars – work out a payment plan.
“He always taught me, you’ve got to be sensitive to the needs of others. He was a strong, calm man, but he left a real strong example of how you ought to be treated.”
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