The steel tower is supposed to vanish. A phone connects, a radio signal travels, a network stays up, and almost nobody thinks about the structure holding the equipment in the air. Dave Lewis arrived in that hidden business by way of a much more visible one: selling software. His career moved through account management, enterprise sales, strategic partnerships, and business development before it reached Varcon, the Canadian engineering firm he now leads. The material changed from dashboards and data to steel, concrete, wind, and risk. The commercial problem remained familiar. A specialist company still has to explain its value, earn trust, build a pipeline, and deliver what it promised.
Lewis is Varcon's chief executive officer and a co-owner. From Fredericton, he sets strategic direction and oversees daily operations, working across engineering, operations, and business development. It is a connective job. Engineers decide what a tower can safely carry. Field teams inspect, document, and repair. Clients need clear choices, predictable timelines, and confidence that the person answering the phone understands what failure would cost. Lewis's contribution sits at those handoffs.
A commercial education
The public outline of Lewis's career begins with ownership. From 2008 to 2010 he operated a venture called Pool Collector. He then entered the marketing technology world, holding account roles connected to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. He moved through Sysomos and Marketwired, where his titles included account executive, strategic account executive, and strategic partnership manager. Sales at Affinio followed, then a vice-presidency in business development and partnerships at Eyesover Technologies.
The company names place him inside a particular Fredericton story. Radian6, later acquired by Salesforce, helped make the city visible as a centre for social media technology. Sysomos, Affinio, and Eyesover each worked on turning online conversation or public opinion into something organizations could understand. Lewis learned to sell products whose mechanics were complex but whose value had to become plain quickly. He learned the distance between a feature and a reason to buy.
His University of New Brunswick education in marketing gave the career a formal starting point. The practical curriculum came from moving between accounts, agencies, enterprise buyers, and partnership conversations. Those roles reward curiosity about the customer's organization. Who owns the problem? Who feels the risk? Which internal team will use the product? What must happen after the signature for the relationship to survive?
Buying an operating history
In 2019, Lewis crossed from advising or selling into acquiring. He joined Sean Hayman and Trevor Bolt in purchasing Varcon from founder Tom Vardy. The transaction was announced in January 2020. Varcon was 32 years old at the time, born in a Newfoundland basement and grown into a professional services business with offices across Canada. Hayman and Bolt were experienced Varcon engineers and executives. Lewis arrived with the commercial background.
That ownership structure is the useful detail. Buying a specialist engineering firm did not require three people with matching résumés. It required a group capable of seeing the whole system. Deep technical judgment had to sit beside market development, client communication, and growth strategy. Lewis did not need to recast himself as the structural engineer. He needed to make the engineering organization easier to align and easier for clients to understand.
The complementary-owner model
In their shared statement, the new owners said Varcon had excelled in specialty areas for decades and that they intended to maintain that strength while exploring new opportunities. The wording is slightly awkward and revealing. Acquisition language often reaches for transformation. Their promise began with continuity. The asset was expertise and trust accumulated over time. Growth would have to preserve it.
The timing supplied an immediate test. Weeks after the transaction announcement, two monopole towers belonging to a large telecommunications carrier collapsed within three weeks. The company identified fatigue and broken bolts as the cause and faced the prospect that hundreds of towers could be at risk. Travel restrictions were spreading. Varcon mobilized teams across Canada, triaged the highest-risk structures, and eventually inspected, repaired, and documented more than 300 monopoles. The technical response was led by the engineering and operating teams. For the new ownership group, it also clarified the business they had bought: one where urgency, documentation, coordination, and reputation meet under pressure.
Owner and operator of Pool Collector.
Account, sales, and partnership roles across Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Sysomos, Marketwired, and Affinio.
Vice President of Business Development and Partnerships at Eyesover Technologies.
Joined Hayman and Bolt in the Varcon ownership group.
Publicly introduced by Varcon as chief executive officer.
Making expertise purchasable
Varcon's work offers unusually concrete examples of an abstract marketing principle: customers buy the consequence, not the process. A structural analysis matters because a carrier needs to add equipment without compromising safety. A maintenance inspection matters because corrosion and cracked components do not announce themselves politely. A repair plan matters because an outage can isolate communities and send costs climbing.
One project involved a transmission tower on a tiny island in the Bay of Fundy. Salt water, severe tides, lost grout, and corroded anchors had left the structure at risk. Varcon designed and supervised emergency repairs, then a refurbishment intended to add more than 25 years of service life. Another project dealt with a vibrating 30-metre monopole in Calgary. Engineers designed twin liquid dampers around an access constraint and measured a damping improvement beyond the target. These are engineering achievements credited to Varcon's technical teams. Lewis's strategic task is to ensure that clients can see the pattern beneath them: assess risk, coordinate disciplines, produce defensible work, and stay accountable through the outcome.
Turn field conditions into evidence a client can act on.
Convert evidence into a safe, code-conscious design decision.
Bring crews, contractors, documentation, and timelines together.
Reduce downtime and extend the useful life of critical assets.
A marketer inside this business can create value by refusing to flatten those details. The easy version of infrastructure marketing is a photograph of a tower and a claim about reliability. The harder version shows why an access hatch changes a damper design, why a tide schedule changes a concrete repair, or why photo documentation becomes part of a national maintenance standard. Specificity earns attention because it shows the work rather than decorating it.
Lewis also appears to value the human network around the technical one. When Varcon highlighted engineer and business developer Chris Morgan in a public post, Lewis left a short comment: “A genuine great guy. Varcon lucky to have him.” It is a small artifact, but a useful one. Companies that sell expertise depend on people whose credibility travels ahead of the proposal. Recognizing them is part of building the institution.
The CEO at the seams
Varcon now describes Lewis's role with a string of linking verbs: he aligns teams, works with the executive group, strengthens client relationships, and identifies long-term growth opportunities. The ambition includes expansion across Canada and into the United States. Each phrase sounds ordinary until the trade-offs appear. A new market can outrun delivery capacity. A sales promise can become an operating burden. A technical team can solve the right problem but explain it in a way the buyer cannot carry through procurement.
His software years offer a playbook for those seams. Build a pipeline, but understand what the organization can deliver. Translate complexity, but preserve the parts that affect the decision. Develop partnerships, but make the handoff explicit. Measure growth, but keep the client's recurring problem in view. These are not tricks imported from technology. They are operating habits that travel.
The stated destination is larger than a sales target. Varcon wants to enter new markets, deepen relationships, and extend its reach in Canada and the United States. Doing that from a specialist base creates a sequencing problem. Licences, local standards, field coverage, and client expectations all have to move with the commercial story. Lewis's background makes the front end of expansion familiar. His CEO role makes him responsible for everything that must follow. The useful test is whether a new relationship strengthens the operating system instead of merely adding volume to it.
There is a quiet symmetry in the move. Social media software helps organizations detect signals in noisy streams of conversation. Tower engineering helps communication signals keep moving through the physical world. Lewis left one layer of the network for another. His role at Varcon is less about mastering every calculation than about making sure calculation, fieldwork, client need, and company direction meet cleanly.
The tower still disappears when everything works. So does much of an operator's best work. Priorities are understood. Teams know where decisions live. A client sees the risk clearly enough to act. The structure holds. Lewis's career suggests that changing industries can be less about abandoning an identity than discovering where its useful parts belong next.