Before the big client portfolio, before the diversified business units, before the recognition from OSHA, before the sprawling headquarters with the gleaming boardroom and the multiple fabrication shops and the on-premises welding school—before all of that, there was just Mark Mosley and a new company he called United Industrial Piping (UIP), set up in a 3,000-square-foot building in the manufacturing landscape of suburban Cincinnati.

It was 40 years ago almost exactly, in March of 1982. Mosley had just left his father’s mechanical contracting company, a union shop where he’d worked since he was a teenager, first driving a truck before moving into pipefitting and welding and then transitioning into project management. When he lost two big customers in one year and another, favorite customer told him that nonunion competitors were significantly underbidding the company, Mosley decided he’d had enough. He went back to the office and told his father he was leaving to start his own, nonunion piping outfit. When his father asked where he was going to find the people to hire, “I said, ‘You know what? You trained me. I can train other people how to do this,’” Mosley says.

His father believed him, or in him, and gave him a loan to get started. Eventually, his father shut down his own company to work for Mosley. Forty years later, UIP is now called UGS, for United Group Services—and UGS is a mid-sized contractor that routinely punches above its weight, offering not just piping but rigging, fabrication, HVAC, maintenance and other services for commercial and industrial clients across the United States. It’s also ABC’s 2022 Contractor of the Year, an honor sponsored by Travelers and presented as part of the Excellence in Construction® Awards Gala at ABC Convention 2022 in San Antonio last month.

Recipients of Contractor of the Year, which are chosen by the ABC National Executive Committee, are committed to ABC’s mission and values, including safety, quality, workforce development, community engagement, advocacy and the merit-shop philosophy. UGS ticks off all those boxes and more. Brendan McAndrews, chief operations officer and co-owner of McAndrews Windows and Glass in Cincinnati, nominated the company in his capacity as the Executive Committee’s mid-America region vice chair.

“I’ve worked with UGS’ executive team for about the past decade,” McAndrews says, “and I noticed that every time we talked about safety, innovation or standing up for the industry at our local chapters, they were an immediate loud voice. But it wasn’t a ‘rah-rah’ loud voice. It was the loud voice of change or direction. They either had a program they were willing to share to bring people along, or they were willing to allocate work hours to blaze the way. They’re a model ABC company at all levels of their organization.”

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN OHIO

On an unseasonably warm day in early February, Mosley sits in a conference room a few miles away from UGS’ headquarters facility in West Chester, Ohio. UGS has been so successful and experienced such growth that Mosley, the company’s chairman, has been evicted from HQ to make room for additional employees. He’s set up shop in a nearby office condo park, where today he’s joined by UGS CEO Daniel Freese and Chief Values Officer Kevin Sell.

Together, they’re sharing the story of UGS with Construction Executive. Freese, a third-generation construction worker whose father served as an estimator for the company, has been with UGS for 35 years, finally giving in to Mosley’s longtime recruiting campaign and coming on board in 1987. “We had just one agreement—that he’d let me go as far as I wanted to go,” Freese says. Mosley was a man of his word, and by 2002, Freese had worked his way up to president.

Sell joined up in 2004 as director of employee health and development, also after being chased for years by Mosley, whom he’d gotten to know at various ABC Ohio Valley Chapter events. At the time, Sell had a dual career, working as a firefighter as well as a safety officer for another construction company, one of whose owners passed away unexpectedly, leading to an unpleasant shift in the organization’s dynamic. “Within a week, I was up here talking with Mark and Dan,” Sell says, “and at that point, I thought, well, you fool, you probably should have gone to work for them a lot sooner, because there were things they wanted to do that were directly in the wheelhouse of what I was doing.”

The three men share an easy camaraderie as they plot out the major beats of UGS’ growth narrative, casually interrupting one another with corrections, clarifications and details that add color and shape to the last 40 years. UIP’s first job right out of the gate was a big one: building test cells for General Electric Aviation. Mosley handled sales and marketing while also training his workers. “I’d have a meeting with my guys and say, ‘I just sold a project that you’ve never seen been before or never done, but I have, so I’ll work you through this and we’ll get through it,’” Mosley says. “And we did. We were very successful.”

In fact, they were successful enough that Mosley soon had to form an office infrastructure that could handle purchasing, accounting and estimating. Within five years, UIP was adding on to its original 3,000-square-foot facility in West Chester. “We decided the only way we were going to grow organically was to either acquire or start other phases of our business, other trades,” Mosley says.

Around 2000, UIP started its rigging division. From there it acquired a fire-protection company and then an engineering company, and in 2005 changed its name to UGS, having grown far beyond just piping. After that came an insulation division and another acquisition—an HVAC company called Innovative Mechanical that became a UGS business unit. Two additional business units eventually followed: a labor-management agency called Core Crew and the Elite Welding Academy (EWA), a for-profit school that’s grown to three locations in Ohio and Texas.

Today, UGS has about 450 employees, with craft professionals working on projects all over the continental United States. Core Crew supports not just UGS but outside companies as well, while EWA graduates 250 students a year who go on to work throughout the industry. The headquarters campus now spans tens of thousands of square feet and includes office space, fabrication shops for carbon pipe as well as stainless-steel and polyethylene pipe, a vast staging area for materials, a training area that features a huge metal tank for practicing both confined-space welding and rescue procedures, as well as the classrooms and labs of the original EWA school.

“If you would have told me 39 years ago that we’d be as large as we are and doing the type of technical work that we do for clients, I would have laughed at you,” Mosley says. “There’s no way we were going to get this big and do these types of projects without good people like Dan, Kevin and so many others. When I looked at other contractors, their downside was they had a bunch of old people running their companies. I thought, you know, they’re destined to fail, because when those guys retire, there’s going to be nobody there to run the business.”

QUALITY, SAFETY, SERVICE

As you might guess from Freese’s and Sell’s recruitment stories, Mosley has always prioritized people, and not just the ones he’s trying to hire. Throughout UGS’ headquarters, you see signs posted with a mission statement spelled out in a homespun font: “Every day, every crew completes a quality daily work assignment and production goal effectively and efficiently in a safe, well-prepared work zone without incident or defect.” It’s no coincidence that these words center workers within a framework of quality, safety and service—because those are the company’s core values, which Freese describes as being deliberately “simple but broad.” “We don’t have 15 or 20 of them,” Freese says.

When Sell was hired, Mosley and Freese told him that his number-one goal was to make UGS the first industrial mechanical contractor to be recognized under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Volunteer Protection Programs (VPP) initiative, which, according to OSHA’s website, acknowledges companies that “have implemented effective safety and health management systems and maintain injury and illness rates below national Bureau of Labor Statistics averages for their respective industries.” “I felt like our program at least met that standard,” Mosley says, “and I wanted our employees to have recognition for what they had accomplished and for the culture that they had created.”

Until that point, the VPP for construction mostly had been obtained by larger companies, and Sell—who actually co-authored the program for OSHA—relished the fact that a scrappy outfit like UGS wanted to go for it. “We got it done in less than a year,” Sell says, “and it just kept moving.”

As did Sell, through different titles and functions, all related to UGS’ organizational culture, with an emphasis on health and safety, training and education, and industry engagement. His current title, “chief values officer,” is a little different for the construction industry. Sell describes his role as “ensuring that what we say we do, we actually do.” Freese adds: “Even though the role is fairly new, it’s evolved even since we started it. We found that, while our values don’t change, the operations need to change to continue to meet them.”

From when Mosley first started UIP, he emphasized training and education for all his employees, conducting much of it himself in the early days using a custom-modified version of ABC’s since-retired “Wheels of Learning” curriculum. He was never afraid to get his hands dirty. Freese remembers once being assigned to a jobsite where stainless-steel tubing was being run and never having done that before. “And Mark said, ‘Well, come on out,’” Freese says. “We spent, I don’t know, an hour or two hours out in the shop, and he showed me how to run stainless-steel tubing.”

UGS’ in-house training is more sophisticated these days—“We’re not just living up to what OSHA’s standards are, we’re actually creating higher expectations for them to hold others accountable,” Sell says—but it’s no less hands-on. In addition to the ongoing training requirements for the individual craft professions, UGS has invested in an online library of more than 1,000 professional-development classes that every employee can access. Freese or Sell greets each new employee personally during orientation and explains “our expectation of their involvement within our safety, within our company, within our quality and within our culture,” Freese says. “Each person in our company, whether they like it or not, by donning our hard hat is now a leader within our industry.”

GREATER GOOD

Everyone at UGS seems to have gotten that memo. People aren’t just welcoming and hospitable—it’s the Midwest, after all—but noticeably motivated, visibly efficacious. From the executive team shepherding CE’s visit, to the craft professionals on the fabrication floor, to faculty and students at EWA, they want to figure out what you need and make it happen.

This attitude of fierce, friendly competence isn’t something UGS keeps to itself. The company projects its ideals not just internally but externally, throughout the industry and across its professional community. UGS wants everyone in construction to practice quality, safety and service, and has no qualms about sharing its expertise and best practices—including serving as an often-consulted resource for OSHA, being actively involved in the Construction Users Roundtable (CURT) and providing subject-matter experts to NCCER for curriculum revisions.

In addition to being heavily involved in ABC at the chapter level, UGS is highly active nationally. The company is both an ABC Top Performer and an ABC Accredited Quality Contractor, annually achieves Diamond-level recognition under ABC’s STEP Safety Management System and has participated in ABC’s Workforce Development Assessment System as well as its Total Human Health Initiative.

Sell has served on a variety of ABC national committees, and in 2013 founded the ABC Users Summit, which brings together contractors and project owners for conversations about improving the planning and delivery of health-care, industrial and multisite construction projects. (See “ABC Users Summit 2022,” below.) “That was really created out of just spitballing some ideas here,” says Sell, who chairs the Users Summit, “with ABC being the conduit to have an event with people we do business with—our customers—to talk about merit shop construction. Because we can’t go anywhere else.”

Spinning out of the Users Summit is Project Summit, in which UGS and other contractors are working with owners, legal counsel and university researchers to develop a new collaborative, results-oriented model of construction planning and execution. “Our industry has shifted from being focused on how to build this the most effectively to what does the contract say,” Freese says. “One of the things that Project Summit is designed to do is to allow the owner to trust the contractor enough and allow the contractor to trust the owner enough that they’re working together to get the best construction result.”

As interested as UGS is in pushing construction innovation forward, the company never loses sight of the individual professionals who provide the industry’s heart and soul, or the greater community of which they’re a part. That translates into everything from serving as an early and vocal advocate for suicide awareness in construction, to supporting local organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club of West Chester/Liberty, where Freese serves on the board, to giving all honorably discharged veterans who work for UGS off on Veterans Day, to producing an annual safety calendar featuring artwork from UGS employees’ children.

“As we talk about our core values being so simple—just the three of them—you can actually condense it down to one word, and that is ‘United,’” Freese says. “It’s our name, and that’s because Mark picked it 40 years ago and said, ‘That’s how I want to do things.’”

“United” is how Mosley sees UGS’ accomplishment of being named Contractor of the Year. For him, it brings everything full circle. “I almost fell out of my seat when I heard, because you look at the big companies out there that are doing billions of dollars of work,” Mosley says, “and I still think of us as a medium-sized contractor doing very large projects. The award means that for the 40 years that I’ve been involved in owning this business, we did something right. We have the right people working for United, and all the credit goes to them; it doesn’t go to me. If I could, I’d split the trophy up and give it to every one of my employees.”