Jay Dardenne remembers John Engquist as “one of the cool kids” at Westdale Junior High School in the late 1960s.
As Business Report details in its new cover story on Engquist, he was an alpha male in a class brimming with an uncanny number of alpha males—including Dardenne, Matt McKay, Johnny Fife, Kevin Reilly, David Brantley and Sam Brocato, among others—who would grow up to become high-profile business and community leaders.
“But he and the guys he hung around with were hardworking and went on to create opportunities for themselves and took advantage of those opportunities,” says Dardenne, the former lieutenant governor and current commissioner of administration.
The 64-year-old CEO of H&E Equipment Services has a proven track record as a successful business executive, having grown the heavy equipment dealership founded by his father in 1961 into a publicly traded company with more than $1 billion in revenues and nearly 90 locations around the U.S.
He’s also athletic, having played basketball at LSU for two seasons in the early 1970s under legendary Coach Dale Brown. Today, he still takes home trophies for catching 830-pound bluefin tunas at fishing tournaments along the Gulf Coast.
Engquist and his wife of 44 years, Marty, have raised a family together and, in their spare time, founded a nonprofit organization that has supported St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis to the tune of some $5 million over the years.
In less than a decade, Engquist has also established himself as one of the most successful players in the Baton Rouge real estate market—and he’s still the full-time CEO of H&E. Real estate may simply be a sideline venture for him, but he’s already better at it than many who have made it a full-time career.
Those who know him well are not surprised. They say Engquist is a quick study, aggressive and fiercely competitive, traits that serve him well both in the boardroom and in the rough-and-tumble world of real estate development. Perhaps more importantly, he’s not afraid of risk or failure. The challenge that comes with adversity and the thrill of the deal only motivates him to work that much harder.
“John is one of the most intensely competitive people you will ever meet. If there was a game of tiddlywinks he would play ruthlessly,” says one longtime associate. “That kind of energy and drive and competitiveness has gone a long, long way toward defining his success.”
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