Our Leg of the Race: Mike Munn on Employee Ownership, Growth, and Building a Legacy Firm at McAdams
“We want to do our leg of the race extraordinarily well and prepare the next generation to take it even further.”
- Mike Munn
Episode Summary:
Mike Munn is president and CEO of McAdams, the Raleigh-based civil engineering, land planning, landscape architecture, transportation, and geomatics firm. He joined McAdams in 1997 as an entry-level project engineer and has led it since 2010. In that time, the firm has grown revenue by more than 300% since 2012, expanded from its Carolinas home base into Texas and Central Florida, and been named to Zweig Group’s Hot Firm List and Best Firms to Work For every year since 2014, all while staying second-generation and direct employee-owned, with no private equity.
In this episode of The Zweig Letter Podcast, Randy Wilburn and co-host Luke Carothers sit down with Mike, an old friend who started in the industry the same year Randy did, to unpack how McAdams pulled that off. They talk about why founder John McAdams treated growth as a retention strategy, why the people who create the firm’s value should be the ones who own it, how McAdams chooses new markets and builds a local “team of all-stars” after an acquisition like AVID Group, and how to keep a culture strong when 80% of your firm is millennial or Gen Z.
Listeners will come away with a clear-eyed case for long-term, generational thinking in a market reshaped by private equity, along with practical lessons on expansion, recruitment, and stewardship for AEC firm owners, principals, and emerging leaders.
Key Takeaways:
- Growth is a retention strategy: John McAdams preached growth not to raise his own profile but because the best people want room to grow, and McAdams still tells every new hire they can build a whole career there 07:03.
- Let the people who create the value own it: McAdams stays direct employee-owned because the designers who serve clients and solve big problems should be the ones who capture the value they create 12:41.
- Don’t romanticize the past: Change can make a culture better, and listening to a workforce that is now 80% millennial and Gen Z, then explaining the why, keeps it strong through growth 16:38.
- Closing the deal is where the work starts: Choose markets for client synergy and cultural fit, then do the real work of building a local team of all-stars around the acquired firm’s vision 18:53.
- Expand deliberately, with outside eyes: Before entering a new market, get market intelligence and outside counsel to check your blind spots, and resist trying to be everything all at once 29:36.
All this and more on this episode of the Zweig Letter podcast.
Links referenced in this episode:
- Mike Munn on LinkedIn
- McAdams Website
- McAdams Acquires AVID Group
- Jerry Allen Courage in Leadership Award
- Stambaugh Ness and Zweig Group Combine to Launch SNZweig
- Zweig Group & ElevateAEC Conference
- Learn about the Zweig Letter and subscribe: https://thezweigletter.com/
- Connect with Randy Wilburn on LinkedIn
- Connect with Luke Carothers on LinkedIn
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Call-to-Action & Next Steps: To connect with Mike Munn, find him on LinkedIn or learn more about McAdams at mcadamsco.com. If today’s conversation sparked something, whether it’s ownership at your own firm, a market you’ve been hesitant to enter, or a reminder that the long game is worth playing, share this episode with someone who needs to hear it and subscribe to The Zweig Letter Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Stay tuned for more enlightening content from the Zweig Letter podcast, and make sure to subscribe for regular updates!
Other episodes you’ll enjoy:
Architecture with Heart - Carley Chastain
From Specs to Stories with Cherise Lakeside
Bridging Design and Construction with Dan Crist
AI Transforming AEC with KP Reddy
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