30 Years Strong | Leadership Series 9 of 12: Strategic Leadership & Vision

Every Customer we work for is buying the same outcome: the work gets done right, and everyone goes home safe. That was true in 1996, and it will be true in 2036. 

So, when people ask me what the next decade holds for OE, I don’t start with technology or growth. I start with what we owe the Customer on the next job. There are three things we won’t trade away, whatever changes around us: a safe site, thirty years of experience standing behind the work, and one team accountable from the first scope to the last. 

A safe site is the first thing a Customer buys 

Safety gets treated as a separate topic in our industry, and I want to be direct about why that’s a mistake. Safety isn’t a program running alongside a Customer’s project. It is the project. 

When something goes wrong on a job site, people could get hurt, the Customer’s schedule stops. Their assets are damaged. Their name ends up beside the event, and no amount of speed earlier in the job buys any of that back. An incident costs more time than it ever saves. That’s the whole argument, and in thirty years we haven’t seen an exception to it. 

So, the standard doesn’t move when the season gets busy, when the weather turns, or when a deadline is tight. Locates are read and confirmed before any excavation begins. Traffic is managed so the public is safe around the work. Everybody goes home at the end of the day. If a Customer takes one thing from this article, I’d like it to be that one: our first commitment on every project is that the site is safe while the work is happening. 

Thirty years is a deliverable, not a milestone 

An anniversary is easy to celebrate and easy to overvalue. What matters about thirty years isn’t the number. It’s what thirty years of Ontario ground has put in our crews’ heads. 

The line that isn’t where the drawing says it is. Soil that behaves differently at depth than it did at the surface. The restoration that has to beat the weather. Our operators, and the supervisors and dispatchers working with them, have been through those situations enough times to recognize them early — and that is usually the difference between an adjustment and an incident. 

That judgment can’t be bought in, and it can’t be rushed. It has been developed on real job sites over the years, by people who were taught by people who came before them. It’s the difference between a crew that follows the plan and a crew that knows when the plan needs to change. Protecting that — training it, passing it on, and keeping the people who have it — is the most important investment we make. 

End to end, so the gaps belong to us 

The third commitment is structural. Utility work is rarely one scope. It’s excavation, restoration, traffic control, soil handling, and the coordination that keeps all of it in sequence. 

When those scopes are split across vendors, something predictable happens: the gaps between them become the Customer’s problem to manage. Every handoff is a place for a schedule to slip and for accountability to get vague. Under one team, we close these gaps. Hydro excavation, restoration, traffic control, soil recycling, and project coordination sit with people who answer to the same standard and to the same Customer. 

That’s also what makes capacity mean something: 180+ assets on the road serving communities across Ontario, matched to the work rather than whatever is left. What comes out of the ground matters as much as how the work gets done — material is handled responsibly through our ECA-approved soil recycling facility, instead of becoming an open question at the end of the job. 

What the next ten years add 

Ontario’s infrastructure is being renewed while the communities around it get denser. More of our work  happens in tighter spaces, closer to people’s homes, with more people watching. That raises the bar, and it should. 

Our response is practical rather than visionary. Equipment gets chosen for the communities it works in — our NextGen units are still working trucks, but they run roughly ten decibels quieter than conventional ones, and that’s noticed on early starts in residential neighborhoods. Technology gets adopted where it takes tedious work off our people and gives the time back to work that needs their attention. 

I’ll admit to some skepticism there, and I think it’s healthy. No tool has ever made a judgment call on a job site. The test I apply is simple: does this help a crew do safer, better work for a Customer? If the answer is no, we’re not interested. 

In closing 

Ten years from now the trucks will be different and the paperwork will have moved somewhere else again. What the Customer needs from us won’t have changed at all: a site that stays safe while the work happens, people who have seen the conditions before, and one company that owns the whole job. 

That’s the next chapter. It isn’t a forecast; it’s a commitment — and one our Customers, and our people, should hold us to. 

The next 30 years start on the next job. 

And if you’re someone who wants to do this work — experienced, or ready to learn it properly — we’re growing, and we’d like to meet you. Visit careers.oeservices.ca. 

Keith Boulton 

Chief Executive Officer | OE Utility Services | www.oeservices.ca 

What does your organization treat as non-negotiable, no matter how the work changes around it? I would welcome your perspective in the comments.