Heavy civil contracting is an unforgiving business. Margins are tight, weather and soil conditions can derail a schedule overnight, and the work itself—moving earth and preparing sites for everything that comes after—rarely gets the spotlight.
For RAWSO Constructors, a Tennessee-based earthwork and utility contractor that has grown from a single rented skid steer into an operation of roughly 200 people, that lack of glamour is part of the point. The company has built its reputation not on flashy projects, but on the systems, people, and partnerships that sit underneath them.
According to Shawn Hampton, Board Member and Chief Strategy Officer, RAWSO has deliberately stayed narrow in its scope. “‘People’ is more of our business and ‘construction’ is what we do,” Hampton says, quick to add that the company has no interest in stretching across multiple trades. RAWSO sticks to earth and utilities, site development work that includes grading, excavation, and the underground infrastructure that must go in before a building can rise. That focus, Hampton argues, is itself a competitive advantage: rather than being a generalist contractor that does many things adequately, RAWSO has built deep expertise in one demanding discipline.
RAWSO’s origin story is a familiar one in the trades, with a twist. Founder and CEO, Dylan Stephens, came through Middle Tennessee State University’s Concrete Industry Management program and went to work for a local civil contractor. What he found frustrated him—particularly, how employees were being treated and developed within the industry.
Rather than staying and trying to change the system from the inside, Stephens made a leap. With a young family to support, he bought a skid steer, started taking on driveway work, and built a small operation job by job. That early period of odd jobs, small grading work, and the kinds of projects most contractors outgrow quickly, laid the foundation for everything that followed.
By 2014 and 2015, the projects started getting bigger, and RAWSO began adding team members beyond a handful of field helpers. Crucially, the frustrations that drove Stephens to launch the company in the first place didn’t get forgotten as the business scaled; they became the operating philosophy, to build something where people are developed, not just deployed.
Early on, the company moved away from Excel-based estimating and adopted HCSS software, a platform widely used across the civil construction industry for estimating, project management, and field reporting. That sequencing mattered. By building a technological foundation first, RAWSO created a shared set of processes and data structures that new hires could plug into as the team grew. Rather than each project manager or estimator developing their own methods, everyone works from the same playbook, which means a new hire can get up to speed faster and contribute sooner.
That investment has compounded over time What started as basic scorecards has evolved into dashboards built on top of HCSS data, giving leadership and field teams real-time visibility into project performance, costs, and trends. The company is now exploring how AI tools might extend this visibility further, layering smarter, more efficient dashboards on top of the data it already collects.
Kimberly Lush, Director of Cultural Relations at RAWSO, points to the impact directly: “I feel like technology has allowed us to grow and build a team, and to achieve a consistent level of excellence,” she says. This kind of institutional knowledge, made accessible and clear, is something RAWSO sees as central to how it develops talent.
A culture of safety is also integral to employee success, with the company’s safety program led by Colton Richardson, who came up as an estimator and project manager after graduating from the same concrete industry program as Stephens. When Richardson found himself burned out in that role—but passionate about safety and people—RAWSO restructured around that passion, spending several months transitioning him out of project management and into building a dedicated safety department from scratch.
What he built goes well beyond standard compliance tracking. Field crews log not just injuries, but near misses, equipment incidents, and minor issues—a scratched piece of equipment, a close call, anything that didn’t go quite right. These get discussed in field operations meetings as lessons learned: what happened, why it happened, and what the takeaway is.
The real value, though, is in the pattern recognition that all that logging enables. If minor incidents that normally show up once or twice a week start showing up two or three times a day, RAWSO treats that as a leading indicator, a sign that crews are stretched thin or under pressure, even before anything serious occurs. When that pattern shows up, leadership responds by scaling back hours, holding all-hands conversations, and addressing the underlying strain before it turns into a real incident.
This data-backed approach is layered with regular inspections and third-party reviews, and RAWSO holds itself to standards that, in many cases, are tighter than OSHA or TOSHA requirements. The cultural framing matters too. As Hampton puts it, “We don’t have safety police; we have a safety culture.” The goal is participation, a safety culture that field crews own rather than one imposed on them.
Across the heavy civil industry, one topic comes up at nearly every conference and peer group meeting: the workforce. Specifically, the looming retirement of a generation of highly skilled field leaders, and the comparatively thin pipeline of younger workers coming in to replace them.
Lush is blunt about the stakes: “We have this entire generation of highly skilled individuals who are on the cusp, in the next 10 years, of retiring, and we’re going to lose all that information if we can’t figure out how to download it from them to the next generation.”
Rather than just talking about the problem, RAWSO hired a dedicated training professional, someone with a teaching background and family ties to the construction industry, who understood both the technical content and the people she’d be working with.
Many field employees didn’t pursue traditional higher education, so a classroom-style training model wouldn’t have worked. Instead, RAWSO built its program around partnerships with the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER), using existing industry-specific resources as a foundation.
But the bulk of the training is in leadership and communication. Field leaders and foremen are often spread across multiple job sites, making consistent communication difficult even before generational differences are factored in. RAWSO’s training focuses heavily on helping experienced leaders translate what they know into language that resonates with younger crew members, rather than assuming younger workers simply lack the right attitude or work ethic.
One concrete output of this push is RAWSO’s GRIT Line program, still in its early stages, which is designed to help field employees move into their first leadership roles. The company is also showing up in schools and at trade fairs, working to raise awareness of civil construction as a career path, an industry that, Lush notes, tends to get overlooked in skilled-trades conversations dominated by HVAC, electrical, welding, and plumbing.
Even the equipment itself is part of the solution. Manufacturers are increasingly building GPS-guided digital-control systems that appeal to a generation that grew up with video game controllers rather than farm equipment.
Certainly, RAWSO’s growth hasn’t been a straight line. For several years running, the company saw growth rates between 50 and 300 percent year over year, the kind of trajectory that builds reputation fast but can also outpace systems. In 2022, that growth caught up with the company. A combination of challenging projects and problematic soil conditions on one of its largest jobs caused things to unravel quickly. What had taken roughly a decade to build started to come apart within 12 to 18 months.
Hampton describes it as a humbling period, one that forced leadership to recognize that intuition and a small group of key people could no longer carry the operation. The response wasn’t to retreat, but to invest more intentionally in both people and systems.
Two leaders in particular reinforced the rebuild: Keith McBride, who came on as Vice President of Construction Operations, and Matthew McQueen, who became President. McBride is described as the kind of veteran field leader every heavy civil contractor needs, someone with decades of old-school construction experience and a reputation for high standards. What makes him different, in Hampton’s telling, is humility: rather than becoming an indispensable bottleneck, McBride has leaned into mentoring younger employees and adapting his own approach rather than insisting it’s his way or nothing.
McQueen, meanwhile, became the connective tissue for culture as the company scaled, reinforcing the values that had carried RAWSO from its earliest days.
Looking back, Hampton frames the period as one of the company’s defining moments because of how the team responded to it. “Being able to walk away from it and say we’re much stronger now, and we realize what our mistakes were and we were humble enough to fix them, I think is huge,” he says.
Today, the company focuses primarily on private-sector work, with public and DOT work historically making up less than five percent of its business. The team deliberately gets involved early, working alongside owners, developers, engineers, and general contractors well before construction begins. That early involvement allows RAWSO to propose value-engineering solutions and reduce risk before it becomes costly. It’s a more labor-intensive approach than simply submitting a number at the last round of bidding—RAWSO may end up pricing a job three, four, or five times before it’s awarded—but Hampton suggests the upfront investment pays off for everyone involved.
Earthwork and utility work occupy a particular position in a project’s risk profile. Dollar for dollar, it’s often one of the largest and riskiest scopes in a construction package, outside of structural steel, and one of the pieces most likely to determine whether a project can move forward, especially in markets with limited sites or difficult terrain.
For general contractors, particularly younger project managers who may have only a few years of experience managing dozens of trades on a vertical build, having an earthwork partner who understands those risks and proactively manages them can be the difference between a project that pencils and one that doesn’t.
Once a project moves into execution, that same forward-looking approach continues in the field, with two-week and four-week lookaheads that account not just for RAWSO’s own scope, but for how the team interacts with other trades on site.
As RAWSO continues to grow, the company’s leadership remains focused on the combination that got it here: a narrow and deep expertise in earthwork and utilities, a technology foundation that gives people at every level visibility into how the business runs, a safety culture built on data and participation rather than enforcement, and a training pipeline aimed squarely at the industry’s looming workforce gap.
For Hampton, the measure of success isn’t any single project, but the broader company culture. “I feel like that’s given us the ability to give people really great growth,” he says. “I’m so proud of the culture and the environment where we’re able to bring in young talent and see them grow.”
In an industry bracing for a wave of retirements and a widening skills gap, RAWSO’s bet is that the contractors who invest in both their systems and their people now will be the ones still standing and still building a decade from now.
