Development, Environment, Community: A Q&A with Stantec President and CEO Gord Johnston.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: ARCHITURE & ENGINEERING

In mid-2022 Stantec President and CEO Gord Johnston visited Alaska to meet with clients, partners, and Alaska Stantec employees. He generously carved out time for an interview with Alaska Business Managing Editor Tasha Anderson, in which they talked about the company and Johnston's role and vision for leading Stantec in continued growth.

Tasha Anderson: What's a little bit of Stantec's history, and how did the company come to Alaska?

Gord Johnston: The history of Stantec dates back to the mid-'50s. We were started by a one-man show, his name was Don Stanley, from Edmonton [Alberta, Canada], which is where our head office is now... He came out of [Harvard University] with what they called at the time a doctorate in sanitation engineering and an offer to play professional hockey for the Boston Bruins. While professional hockey sounded interesting, he wanted to start an engineering company.

So he started Stanley Associates Engineering, although there were no associates [he laughs].

The western Canadian economy, particularly Alberta, is resource dependent, so Doc Stanley (as we called him) would build up to 200 people when times were good, and then he'd go down to 50, then he'd go up to a 1,000, and then he'd go down to a couple hundred. Over time he said, "I have to diversify from water and wastewater."

They started doing buildings engineering and then oil and gas work, environmental work, architectural work, and so on. The company grew across Canada, and then in the early '90s we moved into the United States and acquired our first company in Phoenix, which was a land development company.

When we moved into the United States, we wanted to register the name Stanley Engineering, but there was one already. That's where Stantec came from, [the combination of] "Stanley" and "technology," because we do more than just engineering.

We acquired a company here [in Alaska] called USKH back in 2014, which is how we really got our presence here, and then when we acquired MWH [in 2015] they had offices here also...

And so we just kept going with that diversification strategy, geographically mostly. Our story is one of growth, really, and it's growth both through acquisition and growth organically. We always say anybody can grow through acquisition, all you have to do is open your pocketbook, but growing organically is the real beauty...

[Even] through COVID our financial performance was record-breaking every year, and our backlog, which is how much work our...