St. Louis Business Journal
By Ben Unglesbee, Staff Writer                                                                          Photo Gallery

ST. LOUIS— George Foster and his friend, Tom Rollins, started Jefferson Barracks Marine Service more than 40 years ago when they bought a broken-down boar for $5,000 and worked on it in their spare time. He and Rollins fixed up the boat they bought, sold it, bought another, and sold that boat, raising the seen money to start their own company.

In 1999, Foster bought out the company’s cleaning and repair division and started JB Marine Service, Inc. Today, JB Marine had more than 100 employees and runs a repair operation that includes eight tugboats, four dry docks, four topside facilities, a fabrication shop, a machine shop, and thousands of feet of fleeting area. The office view from the company’s headquarters, housed on a re-purposed concrete-hauling barge that floats on the Mississippi River in south St. Louis County, is arguably one of the best in the area – though the offices and conference rooms tend to rock as boats pass by in St. Louis Harbor.

JB Marine recently re-entered the boat-building business after a two-decade hiatus. One building job is underway at the company’s shop for Gateway Dredging and two more are on order. The tugboats that the company is constructing can sell in a neighborhood of $2 million each, Foster said.

But the company’s bread and butter are still boat and barge repair and barge cleaning. Along with their repair docks, JB Marine also had a fleet to service vessels in the area that need a quick fic that can be done with the boats in the water. In the past five years the company has added three repair boats to its fleet, a significant investment. (New boats can cost more than $1.5 million, Foster said.) Repair work can be small or extensive – such as repairs from barges that have collided – and can cost $150,000 or more for owners to fix.

Foster figures his company is the second largest player in the harbor when it comes to barge repair, behind McNational Inc., which has a service facility in Hartford, Illinois.

JB Marine Director of Operations Tina Dinsmoor, who is Foster’s daughter, said the company typically works on 10 to 30 barges in a month. Nashville, Tennessee-based Ingram Marine Group is JB Marine’s largest customer by volume for dry-dock repair, Foster said.