With 28% growth in regional revenue, 2015 was a GEM of a year for Steve Johnson and his colleagues.
But no single year’s results can define GEM Inc., says Johnson, president of the Walbridge, Ohio-based firm named ENR Midwest’s 2016 Specialty Contractor of the Year. “Our focus is really not chasing projects; we want to find customers,” he says. “We want customers for life, and sometimes we’ll sacrifice an individual one-off project to maintain that. We can do projects of size, but is it a good fit for us at the time based on what our current customer base has in front of us?”