Page 40 - BusinessWest March, 21, 2022

Elevating an Industry
O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun Continues to Grow Its Critical Services
By Joseph Bednar
When she was named president of O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun at the start of 2020 after two decades at the engineering firm, Ashley Sullivan knew she was in for a time of transition.
What she didn’t know was ... so was every other business, thanks to a pandemic that shut down much of the economy for a time, and con- tinues to reverberate today.
“It’s not about competition with the person next door, it is about elevating the whole industry. We believe in the services we provide. We believe in what we do.”
“You had to adapt; everyone did,” Sullivan told BusinessWest. “So I do think it was some- thing that helped us work through so many things and put another name to the transition. There was an external reason for us to look at everything: what are we doing? Are we shutting down the office or not? What’s our COVID policy?
How are we going to work remotely? And our ser- vices for some projects were deemed essential. That’s good, but how do we keep our people safe?
“In a way, I think that gave us time and a rea- son to move through our own transition and the change of leadership,” she went on. “We looked through our business practices, looked at our services, reconnected with clients ... we had time to think of our culture and our brand and do some marketing, which we knew was going to be important. And how were we going to get to the other side of this? It was quite the ride.”
At the same time, “it was almost easier, in a way, to ask for help during that time because nobody knew what they were doing,” Sullivan added. And what she was hearing was, “‘hey, you need to keep marketing, you need to reach out to your clients ... don’t stop those things right now because, when you get to the other side, you’re going to have to make sure all those investments into your company were happening, investments in your people.’”
Investing in people, and growing the team,
is something Sullivan wanted to emphasize
from the beginning, aiming to create a company where people would want to work, she said, list- ing her core values as respect, togetherness — “we found that people did want to work together; they do like to collaborate, network, and be on
Ashley Sullivan says OTO’s workload is higher today than it was pre-pandemic.
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40 MARCH 21, 2022
ARCHITECTURE & ENGINEERING BusinessWest
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