Gaines Turns Jobs Into Careers
W.L. Gaines, Sr. established Gaines and Company in 1954. It has since earned a reputation as a premier site development organization in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Over the last 70 years, Gaines has done more than develop land and communities. They have also invested in their employees, developing jobs into careers.
Creating a Career
Gaines has always believed in training employees not just for the job they have, but for the job they want. They get to know their employees – their strengths, their goals – and help them reach those goals while keeping projects on track.
In fact, that’s how Lee Rogers, retiree after 44 years with Gaines, progressed his career. During his time with Gaines, Lee Rogers held a lot of titles, including laborer, equipment operator, brick layer, foreman, and superintendent.
“I learned how to become an operator by just asking questions,” said Lee Rogers. “I would watch and listen to the operators. And when I got the opportunity, I put it to the test. I did all the jobs my supervisors asked me to do – even when it wasn’t within my normal job – and learned so much from doing that.”
The opportunity to advance wasn’t unique to Lee Rogers. Gaines encourages this mindset throughout its crews.
“I lost a lot of my crew not because they moved on to a different company, but because they moved up within the company,” said Retiree Rod Naylor, who spent 44 years with Gaines. Rod recalled the time he was oddly promoted. “Two years after Myrt (Gaines) came back from college, I was working for him. He said, ‘Watch my crew for a couple hours. I have something to do.’ And he never came back,” said Rod Naylor. “I was foreman and didn’t even know it!”
Retiree Ron Rogers (Lee’s brother who retired from Gaines after 46 years) described how he become an operator.
The job of a site development operator is not always an easy one. Gaines learns employees’ strengths and goals to develop the best operators in the industry.
“If the guys thought you had the talent to run the equipment, the mechanical ability, competitive spirit, and – quite honestly – were crazy enough, they’d help you learn. They saw that in me, so they taught me how to become an operator. Over the years, I passed that knowledge along and taught other people to run equipment, too.”
CREATING A FAMILY
Throughout the 70-year history of Gaines and Company, many crews treated each other as family.
“I had a good crew,” said Lee Rogers, who recalled his crew’s nickname was “Lee’s Crazies” for taking jobs no one else wanted. “They worked not just for the job, but for each other. And I was out there with them. It was a real team camaraderie. And when inspectors would come look at our work, they couldn’t believe how good it was.”
“There are so many examples of how Gaines employees look out for one another,” said Safety Director Dominic Pope, who runs the Safety Excellence Program. “No one asks them to do this. It is just the character of Gaines employees to care about their co-workers and jobs.”
Lee Rogers added, “During the day, we would hustle. But when we were off the clock, we didn’t rush to get home. We would have fun together. I remember the bus line came right beside one of our jobs. After work, we would play Hacky Sack. It was all of us, and none of us would leave until it was dark. That’s the kind of crew we were.”
Safety standards are definitely more robust now than when this photo was taken in the early days of the organization. Gaines and Company – through the Associated Utility Contractors (AUC) – was an integral contributor to the establishment of OSHA’s excavation standards for safety.
CREATING A LIFESTYLE
Throughout three generations of Gaines family leadership, the mentality is constant – Gaines takes care of its employees. It hasn’t changed over the last 70 years and won’t change in the future. Gaines and Company offers competitive employee benefits and gets to know each individual employee.
“They really do care about their employees,” said Lee Rogers. “They’ve worked hard to make sure we’re taken care of. They helped me provide for my family and put my two girls through college. And they’ve even gone out of their way to make sure I’m taken care of in retirement.”
Gaines and Company is not a site development company that just gets the job done. They work with professionalism, expertise, and care to deliver professional site development work on time and within budget. They hire employees who stay for the long-haul, put their heart into their work, and become part of the Gaines and Company family.
Throughout Gaines’s 70-year history, its crews deliver industry-leading site development work while looking out for one another.
“Their mentality is, ‘If you work hard for us, we’ll take care of you’,” said Lee Rogers. “And they certainly lived up to that.”
Gaines and Company is a full-service grading and excavation company with offices in Maryland and North Carolina. The organization has 70 years of experience in underground utilities, grading and excavating, sediment and erosion controls, and road work. Gaines and Company delivers safe, reliable, turnkey site development services in Maryland, North Carolina, Washington D.C., and Delaware on time and within budget.
