This blog content comes from an interview conducted on December 18, 2025. For more information or context, watch the full episode where you get your podcasts.
Pape-Dawson began in 1965 as a San Antonio land development firm. Today it is one of the fastest-growing names in AEC. On the first episode of the AEC GrowthCast, host Greg Hart sat down with third-generation president Trey Dawson to ask how the firm did it, and what it has refused to give up along the way.
1. Add M&A to the toolbox
“We thought a better strategy outside of Texas would be expanding through M&A, mergers and acquisitions, instead of the open-an-office-one-person-at-a-time kind of strategy. Since 2022, really about two and a half years ago, we have partnered with 15 companies, mainly in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee. We are still opening offices organically. Savannah, Georgia, was one of those last year, but we’ve kind of added M&A to our toolbox and doubled the size of the company in the last two and a half years.”
2. Diversify on purpose
“We’re about 60% private and 40% public. And that’s not by accident. That’s by design. We kind of view that as your stocks and bonds, your investment portfolio, because you have your private sector, which is higher profit, a little more volatile. And then you have your public sector, which is less profit, but less volatile. It allows us to move people around. When land development or the private sector slows down, we’ll move people over into the [public] sector, the transportation or water teams. When DOT funding slows down, we might have to shift some people over to the private sector. That really helped us during COVID.”
3. Protect the back door
“To grow any company, you have to bring people in the front door. But at that same time, you have to protect the back door. We had about 1,000 people before we started expanding outside of Texas. And if you have 10% turnover, you’re automatically going to lose [100] people a year. So if you want to grow by 100 people, you have to hire 200, which means you have to interview 500.”
On hiring:
“It can be tempting to hire that first person that you interview, or to settle for somebody that’s not a perfect fit. I think you do have to be patient. You can’t be cheap on what you want to pay people. You have to pay for talent. Usually the more you’re willing to pay, the better talent you will get. It’s funny how that works.”
4. Compete externally, not internally
“We do not have profit centers at Pape-Dawson. No one is compensated off of the revenue that their team does or what projects they get. We are just one team across the board. Of course, we have KPIs and scorecards so that the managing principals can run their business units. But we want to compete externally. We don’t want to compete internally. When you’re bonusing people off of individual or team performance, they’re going to be inclined, as human nature, to act in the best interest of themselves or their team, not in the best interest of the company. So the way that we overcome the hero culture is through the no-profit-center mentality. And we do a lot of work share. We do a lot of cross-selling.”
5. Keep the business model simple
“It’s always amazing to me. Professional services business is extremely simple. High utilization, charge it to the job, bill it, don’t write it off through a revenue adjustment, and control overhead. We try to have about 75% utilization for our production teams. That’s total utilization. In-office would be about 85%. About 2% revenue adjustments net at the most. Support hours need to be about 11% or less of total hours. And if you do all that, you’ve got a great business.”
But he cautions against managing by the numbers alone:
“We try to not be too metrically driven. Don’t let the metrics drive us. We’ve got to let the people and the clients and the projects drive what we do.”
6. Hire for culture, then test it during the deal
“My uncle says, ‘You can hire people that appreciate your culture, but that’s not good enough. You need to hire people that embody your culture.’ And the same goes with partnerships and acquisitions.”
On what retention says about culture:
“Our turnover level is going down throughout this time that we’ve been expanding, which is the single most thing that I am proud of at Pape-Dawson. It shows that our employees are engaged. They’re excited for what we’re doing. They understand why we’re doing it. They trust the leadership. Turnover, I think, is a great measure of what the employees feel about the company and how they feel about the culture.”
On vetting acquisitions:
“Our average time to close is about 91 days from signing LOI to signing on the final line. You get to see everybody in their best and their worst during those times. We almost mandate that they come to San Antonio and have a two-day thing with our leadership group, and dinners, and you spend a lot of time with people throughout all of that. All but one made it to the finish line, but one just wasn’t a great culture fit, and it was best for both firms to part ways.”
Hear the full conversation
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