Moving Where the Opportunities Are

Moving Where Opportunities Are

Author:  Keith Wayne, CEO

The past eighteen months have presented a challenging climate for new construction opportunities. That challenge has been compounded by our intentional pursuit of market growth across most of our service offerings. Our planned craftworker hiring and training program has built our ranks to just under 800 employees, and finding adequate work to keep everyone fully engaged at the level we aim for has required real effort.

Our Industrial Services Group has stepped up its growth plans and absorbed craft workers from our buildings divisions. That move has kept everyone productively engaged. As I compiled this article, I received a memo from Operations indicating we may have completed a record volume of work in the first month of our fiscal year. Even so, billings are still running 5 to 8 percent behind our budgeted plan for monthly revenue.

Achieving our 2026 plan will require us to exercise agility in our execution strategies once again. Throughout our company’s 40-plus year history, “agility” has been the most frequently and consistently demonstrated behavior from our list of 25 fundamental behaviors. We define it as moving where business opportunities are going to be. Not where we have existed in past years, and not where opportunities exist today. Where tomorrow’s opportunities are expected to be when we arrive with our well-trained skill sets ready to deliver.

Wayne Brothers has developed new capabilities and created new service offerings across multiple cycles of change. We have positioned ourselves to perform new scopes of building and industrial plant services, provide supporting engineering, and vertically integrate our supply chain for successful materials procurement. Time and again, our decisions to exercise agility have produced both resilience and the business growth we sought. The continued expansion of our service offerings creates real challenges for our team members and equally real opportunities for those same dedicated people to grow in their careers.

The road ahead is full of challenges. Where we strategically shift our focus is a continual conversation among our executive team. Right now, agility looks less like a geographic move or adding new services and more like an operational one. We are focused on strengthening the services and locations where Wayne Brothers already has a presence, building the kind of efficiency and capability that positions us well for whatever the market demands next. What we can be certain of is that our agility will prove itself once again as a fundamental differentiator, building a stronger and more capable company in service of our customers’ needs and our continued pursuit of being the #1 construction services team.

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