From a Basement in 1986 to Here: 40 Years of a Lot of Change (and a Few Things That Never Will)
On the first Monday of June 1986, Jeff Harrington sat down at a desk in his basement in Atlanta and started a fire protection engineering firm. No staff. No office lease. No guarantee of a single client. Just a conviction that there was a better way to serve people, one that corporate life had made impossible.
Forty years later, Harrington Group, Inc. has more than 65 employees working across the country, with a headquarters in Duluth, Georgia, and projects reaching well beyond US borders. The basement is long gone. A lot of other things are, too.
The world in 1986 looked a little different
To put June 1986 in context: Top Gun was in theaters. The Challenger disaster had happened just months earlier. The internet, as most people know it, did not exist. A cell phone was the size of a brick and cost more than most people’s monthly rent. If you wanted to reach a client, you picked up a landline or drove to their office.
Jeff did a lot of driving. In the early years, he met in person with the principals of every prominent MEP firm in every major city in Georgia. Cold calls. In-person visits. Handshakes. Business cards. That was the business development playbook, because it was the only one available.
Spreadsheets were something you made by hand. Project documents lived in filing cabinets. Fax machines were cutting edge. If you needed to share a drawing, you mailed it.
What starting a firm actually looked like
The reason Jeff started HGI was not ambition in the conventional sense. It was frustration. Working as a supervisor at an insurance company, he had found a creative solution for a client facing a costly fire risk recommendation, one that saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars and was technically sound. His boss nearly fired him for it. The lesson Jeff took from that moment was not to be more cautious. It was that he needed to be free from corporate constraints in order to actually listen to clients, look at their specific problems, and come up with solutions that fit.
So he went home. And he started building something in his basement.
By 1987, the firm had moved into its first leased office. By 1989, Jim Rucci joined as the first employee.
By 1991, the two of them were going without salary for months during a recession, with only two weeks of viability left when they landed a project that kept the doors open. They did not close. They kept going.
What 2026 looks like
Today, HGI’s fire protection engineers and engineering consultants work remotely across the country, collaborating through tools that did not exist when the firm was founded. Computer fire modeling allows the team to simulate and analyze hazards before a building is ever built. Projects span the US, Canada, and several countries in Latin America. The PM-centric model Jeff and his team developed gives project managers real ownership and real authority, something else that would have been hard to imagine in a 1986 corporate structure.
The speed of communication, the reach of the firm, the sophistication of the tools, all of it is categorically different from a one-man shop with a basement desk.
What has not changed
In 1998, Jeff and Jim Rucci sat down and put into writing the core values and purpose that had been guiding the firm informally since its founding: service, competence, honesty, integrity, and respect. Those values did not come from a consultant or a branding exercise. They came from 12 years of figuring out, in practice, what kind of firm they wanted to be. In 2025, the leadership team added a sixth: quality, a formal recognition of something that had always been present but deserved its own place at the table.
Those six values: service, competence, quality, honesty, integrity, and respect, still direct every decision HGI makes. They shaped how Jeff approached that client in 1986 when he was still working for someone else. They shaped how he and Jim kept the firm alive through a recession in 1991. And they shape how the team shows up for clients and each other today.
The world looks very different than it did on that first Monday in June 1986. The work is more complex, the team is larger, and the tools are things Jeff could not have imagined sitting at that basement desk. But the reason HGI exists: to serve clients honestly, competently, and with integrity, has not changed at all.
Cheers to 40 years. And to whatever comes next.