The 30 Best Business Decisions We’ve Made Over the Years

Rather than worrying about which office gets credit for a project or where revenue is booked, our managers focus on assembling the best team for the customer regardless of location. Engineers collaborate freely across offices, knowledge is shared openly, and resources flow to where they are needed most. By avoiding the territorialism that often comes with office-level P&Ls, we’ve been able to provide better service to customers, create more opportunities for employees, and build a stronger, more unified company.

Having your “BFD” at DMC means everything is set up and ready. It means a Welcome Lunch in your first week and after-work events to connect with your new teammates. BFD was created because we know there’s never a second chance at a first impression.

As engineers work on more projects and gain experience, we provide feedback after each project to reinforce their technical skill development. That way, engineers are constantly growing and evolving their technical knowledge and confidence. CDIP also offers opportunities to partner with an experienced engineer and advance their career with guidance from a mentor.

As customers trusted us with more complex challenges, we added new technologies, industries, and service offerings that allowed us to solve a wider range of problems for existing clients while reaching new markets. This strategy helped us grow without becoming dependent on any single technology or industry and created a culture of continuous learning and innovation that remains a core part of DMC today.

Now, having opened up 15+ offices across the country, I can say that this has been the best decision we’ve made to drive our growth. I’d be a bit remiss if I didn’t mention my oft-quoted geographic growth strategy, weasel words and all: “We will have an office in every major metro area in the country…where it makes sense”

As I said, we don’t just collect the data and file it away. Teams review every response, identify themes, route feedback to the appropriate leaders and committees, and use the results to drive improvements and shape future initiatives. Over the years, the survey has helped us identify problems earlier, prioritize the issues that matter most to employees, and take action where it really makes sense. Listening to our people has been one of the most effective ways we’ve found to keep improving.

Over time, that focus became part of our culture and one of our strongest competitive advantages. Many of our customers have been with us for years, and many of our new customers come from referrals. That’s not because of marketing. It’s because people like working with companies that genuinely care about their success.

We work hard to share information openly, explain the reasoning behind decisions, and maintain an open-door policy throughout the company. I regularly tell candidates and new employees that I’ll answer almost any question they want to ask—with the exception of confidential HR or compensation information.

Over the years, this approach has helped build trust, reduce rumors, and create a workplace where people feel respected and informed. Transparency doesn’t mean everyone always agrees with every decision. It means people understand why decisions are made and feel comfortable asking questions.

From the DMC Team Award and PAFOAITFOE (our Periodic Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, a nod to The Simpsons) to the Webby Award and Community Award, employees have numerous opportunities to nominate and recognize their peers.

What started as a way to celebrate accomplishments evolved into something bigger. These programs help reinforce our values, strengthen relationships, and remind people that success at DMC is rarely the result of one person’s effort. Culture is shaped by what gets recognized, and we’ve found that creating structured ways to celebrate great work helps make DMC a better place to work.

We not only want our engineers to have a high degree of technical skills, but we also want them to be skilled at managing teams, clients, and project dynamics. LIFT teaches you how to communicate clearly, quickly resolve challenges, and be better partners and advocates for our clients.

The size of the Kingsbury office was putting both a mental and physical constraint on our growth. We moved into our current offices on Elston in 2011, and the amount of physical space we gained changed things significantly for us.

A ping-pong table, a big lunchroom, some outdoor space, a gym, bike racks, kitchens stocked with snacks and drinks. Certain constraints, like budget, never really go away, but we made a concerted effort to prioritize building spaces that people want to be in as we’ve expanded across our offices. Plus, snacks and caffeine = more productivity.

So, the decision to embrace hybrid work was an easy one. That said, we haven’t gone fully remote, and that was a conscientious decision, too. In-person connection is still very important to us.

Project recuperation time, sabbaticals, a flexible sick time policy. It has helped tremendously with our retention, engagement, and managing burnout in a job that can be really, really hard. That decision was a no-brainer for me, and our engineers certainly appreciate it.

I was thinking bowling, going to the movies, happy hour, but the ski event turned out to be one of the best uses of DMC resources I could ever imagine. As we grew our geographical footprint, Yearly Office Events became a way for different cities with DMC offices to come together and connect despite the distance.

The company health dashboard, for example, gives us a better sense of overall business performance. Like each of our performance dashboards, it’s readily available to everyone in the company, and that transparency has helped us make informed decisions over the years as conditions change.

While we still do partner with other fabrication companies, opening DMC’s Manufacturing Center has made us more responsive and agile for a lot of our projects, strengthening our relationships with both our customers and our vendors.

While we certainly follow best practice techniques for our website, what we have found most effective is having our engineers share their expertise in blogs, case studies, and other content. Of course, our goal is to drive new business. If it also helps people in the technical community solve problems on their own, we’re more than ok with that as well.

Over the years, we’ve met in hotels, rental houses, the Chicago Guest House, my lake house in Holland, and most recently just across the street from our Chicago office. The location itself isn’t the important part. What matters is creating even a small amount of physical separation from day-to-day work.

Getting people out of their normal environment changes their mindset, encourages more creative thinking, and allows us to focus on long-term improvements that often get pushed aside by daily responsibilities. Just as importantly, these meetings build relationships across offices, service areas, and leadership teams. Many of the initiatives, process improvements, and strategic decisions that helped shape modern DMC trace their roots back to conversations that began at an offsite.

Instead, we’ve generally preferred to evaluate expenditures individually and ask whether they’re likely to create value. If they are, we should spend the money regardless of whether it was planned months earlier. If they’re not, we shouldn’t spend it just because a budget says we can. Looking back, avoiding the “use it or lose it” trap has helped us make more thoughtful decisions and keep resources focused on things that genuinely improve DMC.

We’ve built systems that support everything from sales and recruiting to employee well-being and client responsiveness. We don’t build our own tools because we enjoy reinventing the wheel. We build them when doing so allows us to create something better suited to our business and the way we work.

This approach reflects a core belief at DMC: the people closest to a problem are often the best equipped to solve it. Rather than changing our processes to fit a piece of software, we’ve often chosen to create systems that fit our needs exactly. The result is tools that are simpler, more effective, and aligned with the way our employees and clients actually work.

Employee-led recruiting reflects a lot of what we value as a company. It demonstrates ownership and reinforces teamwork because every great hire strengthens the entire organization. It also helps us maintain the culture that has made DMC successful by ensuring we bring in talented people who will contribute to and improve what we’ve built together.

The strongest companies aren’t built by a few people making hiring decisions in isolation. They’re built when employees take an active role in attracting and selecting colleagues they’d be excited to work alongside every day. That’s one of the reasons employee-led recruiting continues to be such an important part of who we are.

That connection over meals was the important thing and so, as we’ve grown, we’ve morphed that tradition into ordering lunch three days a week in office so we can all come together regularly and share a meal.