(L to R) Dr. Marilyn Young, UT Tyler professor of management; Dr. Harold Doty, UT Tyler College of Business and Technology dean; and Kilgore businessman Reuben Martin. Decades of work came into the spotlight when Kilgore businessman Reuben S. Martin was recognized recently by UT Tyler’s Beta Gamma Sigma.

Martin was recently honored by the national honor society serving business programs accredited by AACSB International – The Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

Honored along with four UT Tyler faculty, the president and CEO of Kilgore’s Martin Midstream Partners received the BGS Business Achievement Award in honor of his significant accomplishments in business and community impact.

Coming up in the business from age 14, Reuben Martin started driving small trucks for the company, graduating to larger trucks at 18. He’s worked in every aspect of the business, right down to dispatching.

In 1979 he became president, building the propane company that his father started in 1951 into a publiclytraded $600 million enterprise employing about 2,000 people across the nation. The large, diversified oil and gas enterprise, Midstream Energy Company, earns an estimated $2 billion in annual revenue.

Martin also has business concentrations in the areas of land and marine transportation, terminalling and storage, sulfur and sulfuric acid sales and natural gas storage and sales.

In 2002, he took a portion of the company public in what was the company’s largest milestone to date.

Going public has its advantages – and its challenges, Martin said.

“What drove the public offering was to get access to capital to fuel growth as the banking markets got tough,” he said.

“We are compared to our peers on a daily basis – you have to be careful that your management philosophy doesn’t change from the long-term view to a shortterm view … How you’re graded by the market, which can be very fickle at times,” he said.

According to company stats, Martin Midstream Partners (MMLP) has given shareholders a 13.2 percent annualized return – for a total of 155 percent - since its inception in November, 2002.

Martin took lessons from his father and implemented those principles throughout every facet of the family business.

He has always emphasized a mantra of “quality and customer come first.”

“If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers by providing quality products and service, while always remembering that service is just as important on the back end. Success will come,” he said.

A lifelong Kilgore area resident and a 1969 graduate of Kilgore High School, Martin offices out of the former General Telephone building on the outskirts of Kilgore, a renovated beauty where rays of East Texas sun filtered through pines stream in through a circular window in Reuben Martin’s office.

There, a Chihuahua-mix mutt named Nacho bounds in, heralding the arrival of Sue Martin, Martin’s high school sweetheart and the mother of their two daughters.

His community involvements include serving as an elder for First Presbyterian Church of Longview as well as on the board of directors for Good Shepherd Medical Center, Texas Association of Business, Sabine River Authority and Trinity School of Texas. He is founder and president of East Texans Against Lawsuit Abuse.

Active in charitable concerns, the Martin family established the Paula Martin Jones Charities after the untimely death of his sister. In 1990, the charity purchased the YMCA facility to secure the future of Longview and Harrison preschools. The facility later became the Longview Child Development Center.

The Paula Martin Jones Charity also built the R.S. Martin Jr. Center to house the Boys and Girls Club of Longview, and it sponsors East Texas Lightning, the local chapter of Special Olympics.

Martin said he’s pleased by the recent recognition from the UT Tyler group – and impressed with the job the school does in putting out the next generation of business men and women.

“Education can be just as good here as anywhere else in the country,” he said.

“They’ve really come a long way. It allows people without the resources to go to a major college the chance to stay in the area and get a good education,” he said.

Martin said he has current and former UT Tyler students on staff, and he’s been pleased with the caliber of the graduates there.

“The understanding is it’s who you are and how you use that education, not where you got that education,” he said.

“It’s what you learn and how you use it. The important thing is common sense and diligence after you graduate and hard work that will put you ahead of the pack.”

He looks ahead in the business world and sees a business environment that will demand individuals with top-notch skills.

“The biggest challenge would be the complexity of the banking, the accounting, the human resources – the increase in the complexity of having to manage all thought different aspects of a business,” he said.

“I think it takes a lot of good, smart employees to maintain an ongoing entity. It takes a lot of people – and everyone has their own talwith