After long career, Bruce Engstrom far from calling it quits
August 11-17, 2014
By Jay Edwards
The path to becoming an accountant was not a direct one for Bruce Engstrom. He graduated from Hall High School in 1965 and headed to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, with the idea of becoming an engineer, following in the footsteps of his father and older brother.
“I felt like my fate in life was to be an engineer because my father had been an engineer and my oldest brother was at Columbia University getting a double major in arts & science and engineering,” Engstrom recalled from his office at EGP, LLC on Main Street in North Little Rock.
Everything was going smoothly and according to plan until he ran into something called Engineering Physics II, and specifically, the chapter on electricity where he remembers arguing the concept. “They were trying to tell me that electricity didn’t flow through a wire but rather that the atoms began vibrating when you plugged in the cord, and that’s how the light came on. I argued with the teacher, publicly and demonstrably, which was probably the beginning of the end for me as an engineer.”
That was in the middle of his second year, and soon after came the decision to change his field of study, but to what?
“One of my favorite places on Dickson Street was the D-Lux Café,” Engstrom says. “I took a pad and pencil there one Wednesday night, to the upper room, where the pool table and shuffleboard table was, and conducted a survey.”
His survey contained two questions. Whether he even got to the second question depended on how people answered the first.
The first question was – ‘Are you currently making your grades?’
“And they would answer me, ‘yes, no, or I am not even in school.’”
If they answered yes then he would ask the second question, which was, ‘What college are you in?’
The results showed that the vast majority who were there on a Wednesday night, drinking beer, playing games and having fun; and who were making their grades, were in the business college.
“So I said okay, that is it, I need to be in the business college.”
But his research did not end there. He knew the student newspaper printed, at the end of each semester, the starting salaries of people that were getting job offers and getting hired.
He also remembers that the top salaries were all engineers.
But the first one that wasn’t an engineer was in accounting, which was in the college of business. “My research was over,” he said. “I enrolled, got my degree and I’m still an accountant to this day.”
Because of the degree change, Engstrom was scheduled to graduate in the spring of 1970. This was during the Vietnam War and in December of 1969 he reported for his physical, which everyone had to do. The Army said they would give him an exemption until he graduated.
But in January they began the lottery system, and Engstrom wasn’t sure if he would fall under that, or the old system, where everyone who passed a physical was taken. He had passed the physical. So he called and they told him he would be in the lottery, and when the numbers were drawn, his was 315, and he never had to go.
After college Engstrom accepted an offer with Russell Brown, then the state’s largest public accounting firm. His plan was to learn as much as possible and after a few years take what he had learned to the private sector, specifically with Pickens Bond on his radar. “But what happened was, once I went to work for Brown, public accounting got in my blood,” he recalls. “I was hooked; I loved it.”
Other than three years working specifically for one client, under a non-compete, he has always been a public accountant.
In 1981 he and partner Bob Digby opened their own firm. The firm grew, Digby later moving on and then, around eight years ago they found another lucrative niche in the litigation support area; an area Engstrom soon found he was well suited for and one he would come to love.
Now, slightly past the defined “retirement age,” Engstrom says he isn’t ready to fall into that category.
“There is more than one reason for that,” he says. “Number one is, my wife won’t let me hang around the house. So I figured out I would have to go hang out at the library with the other guys who have been kicked out of the house for the day.
“But the real reason is I feel like I can still help people, and I have skillsets that apparently people agree with because they keep hiring me.”
Engstrom sold his partnership shares in January and now works as an advisor, almost exclusively in litigation, and admits he has worked harder this year than last. “I can be selective, which is very nice,” he says.
He also says he is not only comfortable on a witness stand; he enjoys it. “It’s like playing in a championship football game,” he says. “You get knocked down and you scrap and you might get hurt but you relish it. It’s mentally challenging.
“And again I go back to the way I was raised with big brothers. I had to grow up with a thick skin, having the kind of brothers I had. And I loved my dad and my dad loved me but he could be very strict. He didn’t put up with a whole lot so we had to be able to respond to his thought process; we didn’t have to agree with him but we had to respond to him.”
That thick skin and close attention to detail has made Engstrom, and the company he founded over three decades ago, one of the most sought after litigation support firms, not only in Arkansas, but in the U.S.
For him, it is the most interesting and rewarding part of EGP’s practice. And it’s a safe bet you won’t find him anytime soon hanging out with retirees down at the library.
