Editor’s note: Ken Tait in 1964 founded Tait & Associates where his sons Tom, the former mayor of Anaheim, is chairman while Rich is president. Tom’s son Trevor is CEO. The family won a 2022 Business Journal Family-Owned Business Award and was the featured speakers at our 2023 event. This year’s Family-Owned Business Journal awards ceremony is scheduled for June 12. To nominate a company, go to: https://cbj.formstack.com/forms/ocbj_2025_fob_awards_nominations_form
The three of us are credited in the byline, but really it is Ken Tait who wrote this story. Ken passed away last month at the age of 94, so we are doing it for him. His story reflects the dynamic formation of Orange County and his exuberant contribution to the county’s growth.
Ken came from humble beginnings in Montana and developed a strong work ethic at an early age, helping support his family with such jobs as dodging drunken bowling balls as a pinsetter at twelve years old, and braving sub-freezing Montana winters on his paper route.
He had a smoldering sense of adventure that simply would not allow him to remain in his small city of Billings. Soon after high school he worked on a horseback land survey crew in the Big Horn Mountains for weeks on end mapping the wilderness for the Bureau of Land Management. Then, off to the South Pacific for the Navy Seabees during the Korean War.
After the war, he came back home to finish his education and started his family within a week of earning his civil engineering degree. He joined Mobil Oil and was soon leading an international team of over 30 searching for oil in the Libyan Desert. He successfully established the first producing oil well in Libya, and then moved back to Montana, wanting to establish a home for his growing family. All of this before he was 28 years old.
Ken remained intrigued by California from his Navy Seabee training at Port Hueneme. California’s natural beauty and climate was an obvious draw, but more than that, it was the promise that the state held. At that time, Southern California was the epicenter of the American Dream, and Ken had to go, so he moved his family to the San Gabriel Valley. He landed a job with the LA County Department of Public Works but found it too bureaucratic, so he joined Standard Oil but found it too corporate, so he founded Tait & Associates in 1964 where he could manage his own destiny. This is where the story really starts.
The Orange Curtain
Starting the company allowed Ken’s adventurous spirit to be unleashed. His spirit was allowed to assume a higher form. It evolved and refined into the form of the Entrepreneur. He invested everything he had into the faith of his capabilities to create value for others; and if he did so successfully, he reasoned, they would come back with more and he would be rewarded.
So where would Tait & Associates call home? All his oil company client base was clustered in and around downtown Los Angeles and the conventional wisdom was that a consulting engineer needed to be near the client. After all, those were the days that business was done daily over the three-martini lunch, so it made sense to be proximate. Ken had different ideas.
In 1964, Orange County was somewhat of a semi-rural afterthought in the mindset of Angelenos. Sure, there were nice beaches and Disneyland, but not much else other than bean fields and orange groves. Living behind the “Orange Curtain” was a derision for the backward hayseeds living in the county and their lifestyles.
Ken saw it differently. He saw Orange County as a land of raw and wild opportunity. Wide valleys separating the foothills and mountains from the splendor of the Pacific Ocean. Adjacent to the economic juggernaut of Los Angeles. An essay by Walt Disney on why he located Disneyland in Anaheim locked Ken’s decision. He reasoned: Tait & Associates is a civil engineering company, and we need to be close to where our projects are – or, more importantly, where they are going to be – to better serve our clients. So, he located Tait & Associates in Anaheim.
As the county grew, Tait & Associates grew along with it. It was a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the early Orange County construction community. As demand grew, more professionals and workers were needed. All those new people needed homes and shopping centers, which fueled more demand, and so on and so on. This dynamic continues today, though much more diversified with industries that could hardly even be imagined sixty years ago.
The Successful Business Plan
Ken’s business philosophy was simple: provide the client with what they need and do it well. Period. His often-repeated guidance to the associates was, “when faced with a challenge, rise to it– we’ll figure it out.” At its core, the company is an association of problem solvers who ultimately do what problem solvers do: rise to the challenge and solve problems. It’s inherent in an engineer’s nature. If you drop a group of engineers in the middle of the desert with nothing but a roll of duct tape and a blueprint, they’ll have a working solution before sunset.
This simple one-sentence business philosophy led to decades of growth. By stepping out of our comfort zone, we developed new skill sets. With new skill sets, came new service lines. New service lines created new profit centers. And so on. When Ken founded Tait & Associates, he was primarily providing land survey services. When a client asked if he could provide civil engineering design services, he knew that he could help that client with their design challenges better than the competition. Initially, there were many long hours behind the scenes, but he delivered and was awarded the next project.
Over the years, the same process repeated itself with architectural services, fuel tank management, program management, environmental services, land development, and alternative energy development. There has not been a rigid formal plan to build these businesses; they formed organically by adhering to Ken’s original philosophy to solve problems for the client with a willingness to expand our comfort zone.
We’re now well into the third generation of family leadership at Tait & Associates. This is a rare occurrence. According to the Harvard Business Review, only 13% of family businesses survive into the third generation. Ken’s spirit of entrepreneurship certainly is a major reason for the company’s longevity, but it is not the most important reason. His love – sometimes blind love – for his family is the core reason for Tait & Associates’ success. To be clear, Ken’s family extended beyond his immediate family; it includes all company associates past and present. He had more confidence in us sometimes more than we did in ourselves and always encouraged us to pursue new opportunities and challenges. He took failure in stride (“Failing is learning.”) and then would always look to what’s next.
Ken’s story is really the story of all that is good in Orange County. It is the story of having nothing, seeing everything, and through joyful curiosity and fearlessness creating something lasting and beautiful.
