2025 Dynamic Dozen No. 9 and Judges' Choice: Gold Mechanical Inc.

SBJ: What has been key to your recent growth?
Ron Bogart: If you have the manpower, it gives you market share. If you’ve got 10 people working for you, you’re gonna be able to land the work of 10 people. If you’ve got 200, you’re gonna land the work of 200. We hired (HR Director Karen Carcamo) a little over two and a half years ago, and her job was to attract the talent, train the talent, help implement the talent. When we brought her in, she was so ridiculously successful at attracting talent to Gold Mechanical, that allowed us to go out and grab more market share. Without the people, there’s no way that we would be able to serve the clients.

SBJ: What is Gold Mechanical doing to get people?
Bogart: We did a little research on tradespeople, and a lot of times they end up trading jobs to get raises. We realized that tradespeople really didn’t like having to trade jobs to get raises. So, we guaranteed regular raises. Probably a bigger offering that we have is Gold Mechanical is employee owned, so we do an awful lot in profit sharing. Not all, but a lot of people in the construction industry live paycheck to paycheck. What we do at Gold is every time we hit our budget for a quarter, we give everybody an extra paycheck. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and we are performing well as a company and you get four extra paychecks a year, that’s pretty meaningful, especially when you look at how prices have gone, inflation, everything else around that. It’s just pay people well and then reward them when the company does well. As being employee owned, we have a mechanism to do that beyond what just a regular sole proprietor can do.

SBJ: What are your top issues when it comes to managing growth?
Bogart: With size comes complexity. When we were running 130 employees three years ago versus the nearly 200 that we’re at now, you end up with a lot more moving parts. Probably the biggest challenge we have is to continually simplify while we are growing, and that is no easy feat. It’s like, you can get bigger or you can get better, but it’s hard to do both at the same time. I feel like for us, we’ve gone through the growth phase and now we’ve gotten bigger, and so we’re actually intentionally trying to slow that growth phase so we can spend some time getting better. Once we’re able to do that, then we can probably shift back into growth mode.

SBJ: What is the best business advice you’ve received?
Bogart: My chief of staff, who still works on my board, when he came on about 10 years ago, we had some projects that were going OK, but we didn’t really sit back and think about what it was like for the individual that’s out in the trenches. He told me that “people matter.” It was just the way he said those two words. When you think about problems in business, typically there’s more problems that stem from psychology than there are from economics, because businesses are full of people. People are complicated. There has to be some psychological safety in every organization for people to thrive.