Most construction companies, based in Pinehurst, North Carolina, operate within a 4-6-hour drive from home base, but by building a diverse range of commercial projects across the United States, it is itself I've created a name for Innovative use of remote teams.
Industry veteran Clark Lowe joined the company in 2022 and later took the helm as CEO, with O'Connor Co. tripling revenues, increasing 49% year-on-year to $55.7 million in 2024 I did.
Going forward, the company has set an ambitious $85 million target in topline revenue for 2025, reflecting a 55% growth projected to expand its national footprint. To support this trajectory, O'Connor Co. plans to add 10 full-time employees in the first quarter, further expanding its remote-based workforce throughout the year.
In the following interview, compiled for Space and Clarity, Lowe shares strategies for success and highlights the power of a high-performance “self-regulating” team. His extensive career in construction and business management includes launching successful departments, optimizing budgets and driving significant revenue growth. His deep industry knowledge and global network of contacts enabled major project builds across sectors such as high-end retail, healthcare and hospitality.
How did you successfully expand your operations across the country, but have improved your efficiency and profitability?
Most general contractors (almost all construction companies actually) have an area footprint of around 250-350 miles. This will maintain close relationships with business partners and remove the complexity of the national footprint. For the O'Connor team, we immediately envisioned a remote work footprint that allowed us to access multiple markets across the country.
A great differentiator for developing a national footprint is market availability. It was able to identify and penetrate markets that local contractors thought were underserved and thought to be ripe for underserved growth or markets. New York and North Carolina are two strategically meaningful markets, working to expand to more markets in 2025 and 2026.
A large part of the nationwide expansion is how to manage jobs and lead diverse and complex construction teams. To allow for more movements, certain positions could shift workloads and travel less other positions. We reorganized our workflows to support remote work and achieved great success across the platform with this approach. Currently, about 90% of our workforce is working either travel or remotely.
There is a unique approach to working remotely and hybridly. What strategies do you use to build a high-performance, self-regulated team?
I adopted this idea as “self-regulated individual contributors.” In a self-regulated place, the focus is on training people in how to run and lead themselves first. How to employ different daily routines when working remotely.
I also want to leverage and emphasize how people behave within their frameworks and make that framework work with O'Connor. Our idea is that individuals are the most important. Contributors are a partnership with the company.
We believe that if we can develop someone to self-regulate and continually improve as an individual, the output will be a very effective contributor. I wanted to create this culture where people didn't have a guardrail about how they behave.
How do you help remote workers succeed?
We rarely talk about financial or project goals. It's about how to conquer all remote work. So we can all do what we love. A unilateral focus on this goal generates enormous amounts of cooperation and energy throughout the company.
I think many companies miss out on a major opportunity to drive business-related goals through cultural-related goals. In my experience, people work twice as hard as their cultural goals, such as remote work, rather than financial goals. For us at O'Connor, finance is not a goal, but a symptom of a strong culture.
