In Canada’s Garden Province of Prince Edward Island, Arsenault Bros. Construction has expanded from humble roots to provide full-service drywall construction across Atlantic Canada. With 40 years in business as of 2023, the company is both a shining example of, and a testament to, the regional can-do spirit.

Like many businesses, Arsenault Bros. started up to satisfy a community need. After living in Alberta for several years, Carl and Anne Marie Arsenault returned to their native Prince Edward Island in the early ‘80s. “Dad had learned the drywall trade out in Alberta, and while he was home he saw an opportunity to start a commercial drywall company here on the island,” says son and current company president, Lucas Arsenault.

At the time, any building project involved off-island companies, and Carl resolved to change that. After recruiting several of his brothers and friends, Carl formally founded Arsenault Bros. in 1983.

The fledgling company expanded slowly but steadily, growing from five carpenters to an estimated 30 when Lucas returned to the island, having followed in his parents’ footsteps to Alberta.

Going beyond the Island
In addition to its growth, Arsenault Bros. had also evolved from simply hanging drywall to performing full-service interior construction. After an injury confined him to a desk job, Lucas transitioned from labour into management. “I took a few courses: cost control, project management, drywall estimating,” he recalls.

Lucas’s education continued until 2020 when he and his brother David drew up a formal succession plan with their parents. Today, Arsenault Bros. remains very much a family enterprise, with Lucas as president, David as co-owner, and several other close family members as senior site supervisors and foremen.

Once Lucas had taken the reins, he decided to lead the company in a new expansive direction, not unlike his father. “There are large general contractors that cover all of Atlantic Canada, and there wasn’t a commercial drywall contractor,” he says, “so I thought it would be beneficial.”

With such a seasonal work schedule, Lucas reasoned that establishing the company over as wide an area as possible would provide more projects and enable Arsenault Bros. to maximize productivity. “I had a bit of a growth mindset, and the new areas and new people were of interest to me,” he concludes, “so I decided to branch off the island and try projects in different areas.”

In just over ten years, Arsenault Bros. has expanded from a single office to operations across all four Atlantic Canadian provinces. “This year, we probably will average 350 employees in all of Atlantic Canada,” Lucas says. The company works in commercial, residential, and institutional spaces, providing not merely drywall but all aspects of exterior walls, interior finishing, steel studs as well as walls and ceilings, and soundproofing panels.

Satellite offices in Moncton, New Brunswick and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia now augment the company’s Cornwall, PEI headquarters and enable the team to work throughout the region.

Building on principles
To manage this balancing act, Lucas says, Arsenault Bros. is built entirely on trust and relationships. As a proud union contractor, Arsenault Bros. will typically send a foreman to a local job site, where they will recruit a work crew from local unions. “We might send a foreman that we trust, and then hire local guys.” Lucas says that this ‘delegation’ approach enables Arsenault Bros. to hire locally and complete jobs across Atlantic Canada.

Additionally, Lucas and his team see themselves as performing a vital community service, and Lucas constantly reminds his work crews: “You’re in service to someone when you go to work, and you have to keep that in mind,” he says, as Arsenault Bros.’ crews are consistently working for either general contractors or building owners.

But he also recognizes Arsenault Bros.’ impact lingers long after the dust has settled and the crew has left. “Someone’s going to own the space that we’re working on,” he says. “Someone’s going to live in it, someone could work in it, depending on what it is that we’re building or working on at that time.”

This, he concludes, is what prompts Arsenault Bros. to take the long view and see the people behind their work. “We want to send the message that our service is meaningful and that a person is going to take value from it.”

Reinforcing this philosophy are Arsenault Bros.’ three core values of humility, trust, and pride in the work. “This is a leadership-style company, not a dictatorship,” Lucas says, alluding to his family’s strong religious convictions in fostering an attitude of humble service across all departments.

Trust, meanwhile, is essential to daily operations as well as greater expansions. Lucas remarks that trust in Arsenault Bros.’ satellite offices is the leading company trait that has enabled the company’s expansion across Atlantic Canada, and it is equally important and effective in the office and on the job site.

“It all pushes up and down the ladder,” he says, “so if you build it on trust, then it’s very hard to break.” Finally, pride in the work helps build team competence and inspires team members to attain more skills and share greater accolades.

Making a difference
As Arsenault Bros. consolidates its operations across Atlantic Canada, its trademark quality projects can already be seen in every province in the region. In its native Prince Edward Island, the company has been tapped to provide interior residence space for the upcoming 2023 Canada Winter Games, which PEI will be hosting in February-March 2023.

“It’s the largest project we’ve ever done on PEI,” Lucas remarks. In fact, it’s the largest achievement in the company’s 40-year history. Yet even this is only a small part of the company’s on-island work, most of which continues to be projects that provide housing. A recently purchased subsidiary, Charlottetown-based Top To Floors, is helping in that endeavour.

“We’ll have 212 units fully rented on PEI by spring,” Lucas says with some pride. “We’re making a difference to a lot of people’s lives, which is the purpose.”

Outside its native province, Arsenault Bros.’ satellite operations are hard at work as well.

In New Brunswick, company crews are helping expand Fredericton’s Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital, as well as a large medical centre on the Canadian Forces Base at Gagetown and a new RCMP building in Moncton.

In neighbouring Nova Scotia, the company is flexing its multi-service muscles by providing a long-term care facility in Mahone Bay, repurposing an old department store, building a new port warehouse in Halifax, and expanding a Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) campus in Sydney.

Finally, the company is helping provide a new community centre in Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

Help after the hurricane
Apart from its traditional mandate, Arsenault Bros. is assisting in the rebuilding efforts following Hurricane Fiona, which hit Prince Edward Island hard in September. Several ongoing small projects are helping local homes, businesses, and schools get their roofs and water-logged interiors repaired in time for winter. “There were six schools that lost pretty much half their roofs,” Lucas explains, “and so we’re helping there.”

Coordinating with both the provincial government and the Construction Association of PEI, the private sector is setting competition aside, he says. “The industry’s really coming together on the island to help all these people that need this work done before it gets too cold. It’s good to see the generosity of people and the industry.”

Providing opportunities
As Arsenault Bros. continues to expand, it’s also operating a natural pipeline to incentivize younger Islanders to stay close to home and enter the construction industry.

“We give a $1,000 bursary to one student from every high school on the island, every year, who is going into the carpentry trade,” Lucas says. Meanwhile, he and his staff work methodically to foster a positive and inviting culture in the office and on work sites. “That’s what we’re trying to build—a place where people want to be and not a place where they have to be,” he says.

An in-house referral program ensures that employees volunteer leads to like-minded peers, helping Arsenault Bros. ensure a steady employment stream while also fostering the company’s value of trust. “It’s more your everyday atmosphere that recruits and retains people,” Lucas says with conviction.

While Arsenault Bros. has grown significantly over a short period, its new president has even larger plans. A goal is to have at least 600 employees, and the company is well underway with 350-plus currently in its ranks.

But above all, Lucas and his staff are committed to their company becoming the leading interior systems contractor in Atlantic Canada. With the region’s hunger for urban housing likely to increase, Arsenault Bros. is well-established in its market and on its way to becoming a regional powerhouse.

The post An Island Powerhouse<p class="company">Arsenault Bros. Construction</p> appeared first on Construction In Focus.

With a background in the Electrical industry, Dan completely restructured the company into a great success. It now boasts up to three hundred employees with around four hundred active projects with a boom in business over the past near-decade. “Everything was built to the new way of business,” he explains; new policies and procedures had to be put in place to meet new company standards.

Under Dan’s direction, Gil-Son restructured as a full Electrical contractor before evolving to add Mechanical services like heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration (HVAC-R). Gil-Son also offers Sheet Metal and Welding fabrication, at its current location. Gil-Son can handle any part of construction services, from Electrical to Mechanical and beyond.

Dan is quick to tout the efforts of many past and present employees who helped the company become an industry leader. This includes his wife Melissa and his father, Don Hiltz, who Dan names as being instrumental in every aspect of the business.

Dan is proud of the family atmosphere that the company now has, adding that his goal is to create an environment in which people can grow and succeed, a place that everyone can be proud of. “We pride ourselves on trying to make everyone feel like they’re a part of a family, not just a corporate number,” he shares.

The company wants to stand out from its competition in all respects, and its low turnover rate combined with employee enthusiasm is one way that it has distinguished itself from its competition. Internally, Gil-Son operates under an open-door policy at all levels, and this is encouraged even for new hires. Dan says that he and upper management also try to keep employees apprised of the company’s financial situation and are open about new projects while encouraging input from all levels.

It is important that employees, in his words, “are part of the machine and that they understand where the machine is heading.” This family atmosphere extends outward to its local Atlantic Canada community, wherein Gil-Son regularly contributes to many local charities and causes such as Children’s Wish and local minor sports.

This firm focus on fostering strong and healthy links with both employees and the community is also exemplified in the way that Gil-Son approaches its customers. Dan affirms that much of the company’s dealings with clients are relationship-based and that it prides itself on developing long-term connections with its customers. “We try to stay in constant contact with past and present customers to keep relationships strong,” Dan says, and this includes keeping tabs on clients even outside of the parameters of a job or contract.

He admits that Atlantic Canada has a unique way of doing business that differs from other parts of Canada; as the market is limited by smaller communities, a company like Gil-Son must work to build trust with each client to be successful. The relationship-based model is all too important in finding new business as well as keeping clients on board, but with such an approach woven into multiple facets of the company, it has become second nature.

Dan is positive about the state of the construction industry in the Atlantic provinces, seeing no end to its operations or government investment in the region. A popular perception has been that the Atlantic provinces handled the pandemic well with health and safety measures. According to Dan, this, in turn, enticed more people to move to the area, and as such, more living and working spaces will be needed as the population grows. To meet this demand, construction will likely keep compounding year on year for now, as evidenced by the sheer amount of construction work visible in the company’s home of Halifax today.

As with many areas globally, obtaining materials continues to be a challenge due to global supply chain problems, meaning that construction costs more. As well, though work is abundant in areas like Atlantic Canada, construction is generally still seeing a labour shortage. Gil-Son, however, has positioned itself well in the construction industry and is fortunate to have secured and retained great employees throughout the years.

Dan believes the business is up to the challenge of these ongoing situations if it keeps clients aware of the rising costs. All involved must adapt and concede to market conditions that will likely become the new norm, and Gil-Son has adjusted to do so. “Companies need to be a lot more flexible with long-term business models to adapt to modern realities,” he comments, underscoring the ability of the company to do just that.

Now operating with seventy vehicles on the ground between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the company has come quite far and plans to stake its claim even farther in the coming years. It will be constantly looking to strengthen its existing client relationships with the approach that has won it respect in the past eight years. There are many large clients in the Atlantic Canada region that will enable expansion, which will allow the company to be at the forefront of its area and industry and meet its goals.

Dan reveals that the company will be looking to expand regionally into new areas, such as further into New Brunswick and even into nearby Prince Edward Island. “We want to follow the opportunities as we grow and expand,” while making sure not to grow beyond a manageable size, he says. It continues to examine other options very closely. With a surge in local construction still swelling, Gil-Son Construction will be keeping busy for the foreseeable future. With the help of his newly restructured management team, Dan is convinced that Gil-Son will continue to grow and expand for years to come.

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The company found its niche early and stuck to it. “We put ourselves in what I call the mid-to-higher-end [market]. I didn’t want to be the most expensive; I didn’t want to be the cheapest. We have offerings at every price point,” states company founder Robert Taylor.

The company specializes in flooring finishes, including all manner of carpets, hardwood, tiles, luxury vinyl, laminate, vinyl, and waterproof flooring. Laminate and luxury vinyl are the company’s top-selling product categories, with tile remaining a popular choice. Water-resistant laminate is rapidly becoming a burgeoning sub-category.

Customers can choose from an enormous range of products, in person or online. In addition to the Dartmouth headquarters, the company has branches in Sydney, Bridgewater, and Halifax, Nova Scotia.

For clients who cannot visit a branch in person, the Taylor Flooring website offers an extensive look at the company’s wares. In the carpet category alone, the company carries a huge array of colours, brands, and fibre types from major manufacturers. It also offers advice on décor to help customers make selections.

The company has more than flooring and household products, however. The team can also provide professional installation, and in addition to flooring, can install cabinets, lighting, custom showers, custom area rugs, and staircases. Installation duties are performed by company staff and trusted subcontractors. Clients can request estimates for installation services through the Taylor Flooring website.

“Lighting and cabinets are new for us. Those are areas we’re just starting to get our feet wet with. Our longstanding services would be full-home flooring renovations, new home builds, and then custom showers, backsplashes, and area rugs,” Patrick says.

Full-home renovation is “probably the biggest,” revenue-generating service at present, he adds, noting, “That’s really where we focus.”

While private homeowners make up a substantial portion of the company’s client base, Taylor Flooring also provides products and services for multi-unit apartments, hospitals, offices, and retail outlets.

Robert Taylor launched the company that bears his name in the early 1990s. “It was incorporated in ’92, and we opened the doors in February of ’93,” he recalls, chuckling at the company slogan with its deliberate play on spelling: “Need a floorist? Call a Taylor.”

Then, as now, a strong emphasis was placed on providing superlative customer service. “It’s been pretty much the same concept right from day one,” he says. “I’ve had thousands of letters from customers over the years with compliments but not one of them ever said, ‘Thank you very much for the great price.’ It was always, ‘Thank you very much for the great service—the install was professional.’ This tells me our customer service was doing its job.”

He sold the business in 2012 and today, it operates under the auspices of Creative Flooring Solutions Inc. (CFSI). This parent company also owns a roster of other flooring-related businesses. After completing the sale, Robert left the company for a time. He returned in March of this year and currently manages the Taylor Flooring retail segment.

The company employs roughly thirty people across all its branches, up from approximately twenty-two at this point last year. This total only covers Taylor Flooring; when the company first started, it had a separate division devoted to commercial work. Currently the majority of the commercial segment now operates under “the CFSI label, not Taylor Flooring,” explains Robert. However, some branches of Taylor Flooring still perform their own commercial work because of location or relationships with contractors.

When it comes to hiring new staff, there is a preference for workers who are outgoing, self-motivated, team players who are able to absorb information quickly. “There’s a lot to learn in flooring: products, measuring, installation,” notes Robert, adding that the company wants “somebody who can use a measuring tape, as silly as it sounds.

The company also likes new hires who show a “high attention to detail,” adds Patrick.

Clearly, the public likes what the company is doing. It has won consecutive Consumer Choice Awards for Halifax for over a decade. These annual wins are evidence of the company’s excellent customer service and ability to “keep the Taylor brand fresh in the minds of the people out there,” says Patrick.

When it comes to vendors, Taylor Floor likes to establish long-term relationships with suppliers of high-quality goods. That does not, however, mean that the company is content to rest on its laurels. An effort is made to keep up with new trends, designs, and technology, says Patrick, pointing to recent “innovations in porcelain and ceramic tile. We push our installers to up their game and gain new skills by working with different products. This helps keep us at the forefront,” he adds.

Quality is further maintained through staff training and customer care. As with any construction-related service, problems can sometimes arise during an installation. In such cases, Taylor Flooring works hard to identify the root cause of the problem, satisfy the client, and determine ways to avoid repeating the error.

“When you go out and do a job and it goes off without a hitch, [the client] will tell a couple people. But if you went out and did that same job and something went wrong and you go and fix it right away, they’re ecstatic. They’re going to tell twenty people,” Robert says, noting that the company’s mission “has always been to make sure we don’t let the customer down.”

This supportive ethos is also demonstrated by the company’s commitment to the communities it serves. Among other initiatives, Taylor Flooring sponsors kids’ hockey teams around the province.

Like all North American businesses, it has had to cope with the COVID crisis. The company was deemed an essential service and allowed to remain open. Installation crews were equipped with face masks and hand sanitizer.

“That was a complete re-work for us. We had to learn how to be in a space and keep our clients and workers safe. We had to find new ways of working. A lot of the [practises] that we used then, we continue to use because they are better practices and make us a little bit sharper,” recalls Patrick.

While pandemic lockdowns stifled some business activity, “We have a lot of new home construction [in Nova Scotia] which really helped to keep the economy going. [Taylor Flooring] survived a little better than some did, because we were able to keep going, although on limited staffing… but we had the same impacts as a company as anybody else,” he adds.

These impacts include COVID-related supply disruptions and price increases.

“Ten, twelve years ago, to bring a trailer load of product from Asia would be $3,000 to $5,000 a container. Back a year ago, it was anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000 for the same container. So, pricing has become a huge issue,” says Robert.

Some companies switched to European-made products, only to find supply chains in that part of the world thrown into disarray because of the brutal war in Ukraine, he continues.

The supply chain for many flooring companies “has shifted back to Asia a little bit, and the pricing has come down but I don’t think we’ll ever see it where it used to be… Supply is definitely an issue and pricing but that’s not unique to this industry,” he adds.

Manpower has also become a challenge, in part due to the company’s success. A rising volume of work means it takes longer to carry out installations. It is an ironic problem to be facing, but further proof of Taylor Flooring’s growing popularity. Still, the company would like to shorten the lead time for installation work, in keeping with its customer-first focus.

On top of COVID, Nova Scotia also recently endured the wrath of Hurricane Fiona. Taylor Flooring worked with insurance companies and contractors to deal with some of the fallout from this massive windstorm.

Moving forward, Patrick says “lighting and cabinetry” are “the new services we’re really trying to focus on.” For the future, the general aim is to “get to a place where we’re really that one-stop shop, to be able to meet flooring, lighting, and cabinet needs all in one place, so we can service our customers with more features and make the whole experience a good one from start to finish.”

The post There is No Ceiling for This Thriving Nova Scotia Team<p class="company">Taylor Flooring</p> appeared first on Construction In Focus.

With experienced personnel available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Safety First provides equipment for roads, sales and rentals, detailed traffic control plans, assistance during natural disasters, and also teaches 30 safety courses throughout the Atlantic Provinces and Ontario.

Whether it’s highway equipment for utilities, construction, film and special events, barriers, or arrow boards, Safety First offers a wide range of traffic control and safety-related products, many manufactured in Atlantic Canada, and the most experienced and knowledgeable instructors in the Atlantic provinces.

The initial owners, Ed Hennessey and James MacDonald, founded Safety First in Newfoundland in 1993. The business flourished and in 2018 was acquired by private equity firm The Riverside Company. Safety First will celebrate its 30^{th anniversary in 2023.}

“We’re excited about it,” says General Manager Jason Hiltz. “It’s a huge testament to the quality of service that we provide out there. It’s also interesting that not only are we the largest traffic control company operating in Atlantic Canada, but also the longest-running, so it’s kind of cool.”

When it comes to the qualities that have contributed to the company’s success, Hiltz has an immediate answer. “I always say it’s all about the people you have working for you. It truly is all about the people. I’m very thankful for all of our employees and managers that have contributed along the way.”

As General Manager for the past 10 years, Hiltz has experienced a variety of challenges during his tenure and is visibly proud of Safety First’s people and what they’ve accomplished.

“We provide traffic control service, and it’s a 24/7 job,” he says. “We provide emergency services to many of our customers, whether it be power utility groups such as Nova Scotia Power or NB Power, or even the Bell and Rogers companies of the world.”

When internet service or the power grid goes down, the expectation is that Safety First operates with a high degree of urgency and gets crews out there quickly, he adds. “In the event of an emergency on a Saturday night or Christmas morning, Safety First is there to provide a service, and that comes with a ton of hard work and dedication by our people.”

While the people are what certainly have tied the company to 30 years of longevity, success is also about making bold moves, says Hiltz.

“Running a business isn’t easy and sometimes you’ve got to take some risks,” he says. “Thankfully, I think we’ve made and taken appropriate risks along the way and they’ve worked well for us.”

Bold moves enabled business diversification and a customer-first approach has contributed to success in the long term.

While Safety First is predominantly and primarily a traffic control service provider—what it does day in and day out and where 95 percent of its energies are focused—the company is also quite diversified, Hiltz says. “A lot of folks are surprised about everything we do.”

Safety First has two divisions with a natural fit to support its traffic control operations. The first is the traffic safety products division, which makes, manufactures, and sells traffic safety products used in the field while completing the task of providing traffic control service.

“We sell cones and traffic control signs and stands, pavement tape, anything you see in the roadways including speed radar signs, all the arrow boards and trailers and everything that gets used out in the field,” Hiltz says.

The second is the industrial safety course division, supporting its safety control operations, which Safety First brings to its long list of business-to-business contacts and customers. “Everybody on the road needs to be trained on various courses and certified; each province has an additional course tied to understanding the provincial traffic-control manual.”

Each of the company’s eight brick-and-mortar offices in the Atlantic provinces provides facilities for in-person classroom training for traffic control and first aid courses. Additional training includes fall protection, confined space, bucket evacuation, and other safety certification courses in an ongoing push to diversify the company.

“We have a parking enforcement division where we help municipalities with their winter parking bans. We put our workforce to good use and look for opportunities where Safety First can find a nice fit. Another example of this ‘can do’ attitude can be shown through our meter reading services division as well as our work at city landfills.”

Over the years, that fit has also included dealing with hurricane relief efforts such as during Hurricane Dorian, a rowdy visitor that blew in at the tail end of 2019, and the more recent Hurricane Fiona, the company’s largest hurricane-response effort to date.

“That was five weeks of full utilization of every crew we could put out in the field, seven days a week, 24/7, night shifts, and day shifts,” Hiltz says. “It was truly a multi-province effort. We sent crews from one province to another, from New Brunswick to PEI and to Nova Scotia to help them out. It was a record storm for Atlantic Canada.”

The last few years in particular have also seen labour costs rising 24 to 36 percent, and fuel costs exceptionally high, two significant variable strikes against the profitability of the business.

But despite the ongoing challenges, Safety First continues to embrace the promise of its name, ensuring safety in the workplace is always a priority.

“These days, health and safety workplace procedures are important for the well-being of both employees and employers,” Hiltz says. “Human loss is immeasurable and we can’t tolerate it. Every person who leaves their home for work in the morning should come back to their home in the evening in good health.”

The trouble with traffic control is it’s truly a high-risk environment, he says. “When you think of what it is we do out there, unfortunately when it comes to vehicles travelling at sometimes very high and excessive speeds, should a collision occur, you don’t get a second chance.”

With distracted driving seemingly at an all-time high, the risks imposed on workers also continue to rise.

“Our employees must have their head on a swivel to avoid a potentially catastrophic incident,” says Hiltz. “Workplace safety is important for every employee because all workers want to work in safe and productive conditions. It’s the company’s duty and moral responsibility to look after employees’ protection.”

Safety First does things differently, starting with referring to its flaggers as “protectors.” “The reason is that the primary objective of our business is to provide temporary work zone protection for our customers while they work on the streets and highways,” Hiltz explains.

“One of our company mantras is, ‘protecting your people, your time and your business.’ Taking a step back and considering what that means correlates well with safety and why it’s so important in the workplace. It speaks to the reduction of accidents and incidents as well as running a profitable, efficient business. That’s why selecting reputable traffic control service providers to complete your work is so important.”

The 24/7 nature of the environment means managing a variable workload, he adds. Safety First is entirely business-to-business as related to traffic control; if the company doesn’t need traffic control one day, it might not have work for everybody versus another day when the phone could be ringing off the hook. There are not enough people to supply the demand.

“It’s that variation of one day to the next and trying to find the correct ratio of the staff. That’s always a moving target and it’s hard to hit, especially in today’s labour market where finding quality employees is so hard.”

The job is not only hard, it’s risky, and the competency of protectors in complex situations is obviously essential. “It’s more than just flipping paddles out there,” Hiltz says. “It’s a skill set and takes a certain type of person, one, to enjoy the job and, two, do a good job of it.”

Along with diversification and qualified employees putting Safety First on the road to success, it also has reliable partners, such as JP’s Garage, says Hiltz.

“We can explore efficiencies, as we have a fleet of approximately 175 ‘company assets.’ We’ve converted some to a dual fuel system so they run on propane and gasoline to combat the rising fuel cost,” Hiltz says. “It’s that attitude that keeps you in business for 30 years, the bold moves that allow you to try different things that hopefully work out.”

While Hiltz has a host of milestones in mind for the company, a notable one is expanding business outside of Atlantic Canada. Currently operating across Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and PEI, together with parent company Area Wide Protective, Safety First is the largest traffic-control-service provider in North America and maybe the world, Hiltz says. Operations stretch to California and Hawaii, and throughout Atlantic Canada.

Being the largest brings with it the largest workforce, the greatest ability to manage changing workloads, and allows the company to diversify into other industries, says Hiltz, as well as giving access to capital, the latest technologies, and the best practices in the industry.

“Being the largest and the longest-running company is again proof of the state of the practices we provide in putting safety first and putting the customer first. When a storm such as Fiona hits, you can count on Safety First to have the largest workforce to satisfy the recovery effort, whether we’re moving crews from Newfoundland to New Brunswick or New Brunswick to Nova Scotia. That workforce is impactful.”

It certainly is: another milestone has 700 protectors out conducting traffic control activities in one day, he says, beating the previous record of 600 earlier in 2022.

Of course, protecting those protectors is the top priority for the company every year.

“Going a full year accident and injury-free is the goal and that would be just an extraordinary milestone to achieve,” Hiltz says. “Everyone coming home safe the same way they started out. Safety is always at the forefront of what we do. It has to be, it’s our name. That’s our shooting-for-the-star milestone.”

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