Resource Management honored by state of Kansas

Even Paul Gunzelman can’t quite explain how he went from geologist to head of a company with a half-dozen professional service lines.

“One thing led to another, and we just ended up growing into the business we are today,” said Gunzelman, owner of Resource Management Group Inc.

“It’s a crazy world sometimes. You never know who you’ll meet.”

This week, the company received an award from the Kansas Department of Commerce’s Office of Minority and Women Business Development. It was recognized as a top minority-owned professional service firm. Gunzelman is of American Indian descent.

Gunzelman said he grew up on a farm in the Texas Panhandle. After earning a degree in geology, a Colorado company sent him to work in Wichita 37 years ago, “and I’ve been here ever since.”

He worked for oil and gas companies until starting his own business 11 years ago.

“I found out there is a big need for people who have petroleum interests, that they either bought into or inherited, that really don’t understand the business,” he said.

“I represent those people that need help understanding it, buying it or selling it.”

Contacts he made through that work led him to realize there were demands for many other types of professional services, and being certified as a minority-owned business by the Small Business Administration helped his business get started, although that certification has expired.

Today his company employs about 100 people with many others on a contract basis.

“We do work for a variety of government agencies and some private individuals also,” he said. “The scope of that is large, ranging from the harbor and waterway dredging for the federal government to river studies for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to industrial hygiene work for the U.S. Army National Guard.

“We’ve done waterway studies for different kinds of contaminants and have also done soil sampling and reclamation.”

One interesting job, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was to remove ground contamination from old sheep dip vats from American Indian reservations, he said.

“Back in the day, they would run sheep through a vat of pesticide,” he said. “Apparently that’s not being done anymore.”

Gunzelman said most of his full-time employees are part of a contract he has with the federal Health and Human Services Department to provide staffing for federal occupational health laboratories and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. That part of his company operates like a personnel agency, “but on a professional level. All the people that work for us are experts in a particular field.”

Although Gunzelman lives and works in Wichita, he said petroleum work is the only work that his company does in Kansas. He has applied for contracts within the state of Kansas but has so far been unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, the state is recognizing his company.

“We do pay taxes, and the state benefits from our tax money,” he said.

This story was originally published October 12, 2016 at 3:22 PM with the headline "Resource Management honored by state of Kansas."