Engineer Jay Wynn admits he likes to stick close to home, but that hasn’t stopped him from building a business that specializes in transportation and civil engineering.
“I don’t like to travel. I don’t want to see anything. My wife likes to tour and see castles. I can do a lot of work here,” says Wynn, president of CJW Transportation Consultants LLC, which he founded in 2005.
Wynn, a graduate of the University of Kentucky, originally came to Springfield to work as a city traffic engineer. He also spent some time as a consultant before launching CJW.
The company posted 2010 revenues of $2.2 million, a 50 percent increase compared to 2008 – no small feat considering that the recession has vastly slowed construction.
Wynn says his strategy has been to focus on customer service, keep in contact with clients and to deliver the work they expect.
“A lot of it is, you’re only as good as your last job,” says Wynn, who has more than 21 years of experience in civil engineering and land transportation planning and design.
“We’ve been trying to do quality over quantity and focus on the clients we have.”
Nearly 80 percent of the company’s work comes from repeat clients.
“We have a lot of repeat customers, so as the economy has improved, people we’ve worked with in the past have come back to us with new stuff,” says Mary Wynn, Jay’s wife and the company’s chief financial officer. “We’ve taken advantage of keeping people happy, and as they’ve gotten the work, they’ve come back to us.”
In the beginning, the company’s niche was just on transportation engineering, which made sense given Jay Wynn’s background. CJW’s design footprint is all over Springfield and includes the intersections at Glenstone Avenue and Primrose Street, and Fort Avenue and Sunshine Street. The firm also has performed two civil engineering site design projects for CoxHealth, including its 37,000-square-foot, two-story intensive care unit expansion, set for completion in October.
“As we got some clients – especially municipal clients in Springfield and Nixa – we got other projects related to civil engineering,” Mary Wynn says.
Some of that work has been in the utilities realm. Last year, CJW landed a gasline project for Summit Utilities, and it has done surveying and pipeline distribution work for companies such as Southern Missouri Natural Gas.
Creating access points for new developments has become a focus for CJW, Jay Wynn says.
“We’ll help Price Cutter, or Hy-Vee for example, at Kansas and Battlefield to get access, which makes the property worth having,” he says. CJW designed public and private site improvements for Hy-Vee’s 11.2-acre commercial use development. An 84,000-square-foot Hy-Vee store could open there later this year, according to past Springfield Business Journal coverage.
Having 33 employees who each pull their own weight has helped the company operate efficiently, and Mary Wynn says all employees are considered key players in the business.
“We really rely on every person,” she adds. “To pick out one or two people is something I can’t do, because everybody plays a really important role and without them, we’d really be lacking.”
CJW is registered to provide engineering services not only in Missouri, but also in Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, but the company doesn’t have plans to add offices in the other states.
“Unless we got really huge and got lots of work … I don’t think we’d put up a permanent office in another state,” she says.
As for what the future holds, Jay Wynn was tight lipped about CJW’s next projects, but he left some room for interpretation.
“I’d like to think we’re working on a couple of big box stores that are going to be coming on the east and west on Chestnut and Highway 65, and West Bypass and Republic Road,” he says. “We’re also working in Branson and the surrounding area.”
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