Planning for its future, Enginuity adds younger partners to ownership group

The company recently announced that Daniel Maurer, its vice president of finance, and Michael McHenry, vice president of service, have become partners in the ownership group.

It’s one of the first big steps in an early succession plan for the company’s three founders, Jim Mooney, Jim Elash and Jeff Winterborne.

“We’re all getting older and looking down the road,” said Mooney, the company’s president and CEO. “We wanted to perpetuate the business for our own good and for the benefit of our employees. This is a great opportunity to have them come in to start the transition process that will take years.”

The three owners range in age from 48 to 64, while the new partners are in their 30s.

“We’ve been working on a transition plan for a few years waiting for the right people to be in place to pull the trigger,” Mooney said. “I think there will be more (partners) as time progresses.”

Maurer joined the company in 2014 after serving as director of finance for the Harrisburg Regional Chamber and Capital Region Economic Development Corp. He called the move into ownership a “dream come true.”

McHenry was the COO of a venture-backed technology company called TheUsic.com before he was hired at Enginuity in 2013.

The decision to grow the leadership team also helps ensure that Enginuity, a company with 85 employees spread between the Mechanicsburg area and Williamsport, doesn’t lose top talent at a time when construction-related companies are looking to grow but can’t find enough skilled workers, Mooney said. “That is the No. 1 problem.”

Service technicians are always in great demand, as are pipefitters and welders, Mooney said. 

Enginuity’s top service techs making upward of $70,000 per year, he said. And business is steady.

There are three major reasons for the lack of workers. The workforce is getting older; not enough young people are pursuing construction jobs out of high school; and many people in Generation X — the experienced group of people born between 1965 and 1980 — left the construction industry during the last recession to pursue other jobs.

“I think we really have to start with parents changing their expectation that a four-year college degree is the only way to get a good job,” Mooney said.

He hopes the company finishes the year with about $22 million in revenue. But that might be a conservative estimate, he added, as construction activity, namely in the commercial and industrial sectors as well as health care, has continued to pick up.

“A lot of it is business we’ve been working on for years and projects that have been delayed,” he said.