What’s been your experience navigating the past five quarters?

It’s been a pretty wild ride. It’s like the spigot got shut off almost overnight. Clients in all sectors pulled back as soon as the stock market tanked, including certain sectors that had never pulled back before, like academia. It forced all companies, including us, to do a pretty dramatic course correction. The past year has been focused on getting the business right-sized, and in part it’s also been focused on strengthening the company. While we scaled back on our discretionary spending, we did not scale back on any strategic investments. Some of the most important and strongest hires we’ve ever made, we made over the past year.

Do you foresee more consolidation among big contractors?

We hope for it. Smaller contractors are going to struggle more in this recession, just because their backlogs burn off sooner, and they have less capital. We’ll probably lose some of the smaller folks. And those are good firms, by the way. I think some of the larger national and international players will look at the level of competition in this market, compared to other markets they’re in, and this might be a market they pull out of, just because the margins are so tight. We’ve already seen a merger of sorts recently. The problem is, most construction companies are privately held. They’re often family businesses, and there’s a lot of ingrained philosophy there. They don’t merge very easily. So whether firms can look beyond that and do the right thing remains to be seen. We wouldn’t allow ourselves to merge with a larger firm, but if we found some specialty companies that complemented our core business that we could fold into our operation, we would certainly consider that.