infrastructure
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Koppers makes wood outlast the weather
A railroad tie looks like a block of wood. Koppers sees a chemistry problem, a logistics problem, and a business that can last for decades.
Vulcan Materials Company: The value of staying close
Rock is cheap. Moving it is expensive. Vulcan Materials Company built its business around that stubborn fact - and keeps finding ways to make proximity pay.
Xylem: Think before you dig
A sewer in Indiana explains Xylem’s wager: better information can make old infrastructure do more. The water company sells the pumps, sensors, treatment systems and software that turn that idea into working machinery.
Brookfield owns the things the future needs
The cloud needs a power plant. A pension needs decades of income. Brookfield has built a business putting those two needs in the same room.
Tutor Perini builds big. Getting paid is the plot twist.
Tunnels, hospitals, casinos. Tutor Perini takes on construction at a scale few firms pursue. Its recent turnaround reveals the less visible job: turning complicated contracts into cash.
Parsons makes the complicated work
A metro, a missile defense network, a contaminated airfield. Parsons works where separate systems have to behave as one - and its own setbacks show how hard that promise is to keep.
Jacobs makes the future work underground
Before a city can grow or an AI factory can think, somebody has to solve the water, power and engineering. Jacobs has built a business around those inconvenient details.
Sixth Street buys time.
A football club needs cash today. An insurer thinks in decades. Sixth Street builds the deals that bring those two clocks together.
HCSS catches the cost of yesterday.
A construction job can lose money long before the office notices. HCSS puts the estimate, the crew, and the daily cost report into the same conversation.
Prozeal Green Energy: First, move the mud.
Solar panels are the visible part. Prozeal’s business lives in the roads, permissions, power lines and financing that make industrial clean energy possible.
The Boring Company bets the city on a smaller hole
A two-minute ride beneath a Las Vegas convention center explains the appeal. Turning that shortcut into a citywide transport business is the harder excavation.
Dili found 1,393 problems hiding in the payroll
Fourteen solar projects, hundreds of payroll reports, and a compliance process that could collect the numbers without checking them. Dili sells a way to close that gap before the money is at risk.
The Road Is Approved. Then the Doorbell Rings.
Arrow Land Solutions works in the peculiar interval between a line on a public plan and a family, storefront or utility easement in its path. The company’s job is to make that interval legible - and keep Pennsylvania’s infrastructure moving.
The PR Firm That Builds the Room Where Deals Happen
Sacks Communications calls itself an integrated communications firm. Its more revealing product is a carefully engineered room - part classroom, part marketplace, part public forum - where small firms learn how to win large work.
Arellano Associates and the business of being heard
A railway needs engineering. Its public meetings need engineering, too. Arellano Associates turns maps, text messages and neighborhood conversations into the working machinery of community engagement.
CPOG and the business of explaining the detour
A road project has two schedules: the one engineers draw and the one people live through. Costin Public Outreach Group works where they collide.
MBI Media’s business starts before the concrete
A California communications firm turns infrastructure plans into public conversations. Its working materials include virtual meeting rooms, multilingual fact sheets, and the surprisingly useful comment card.
Katz & Associates and the public permission to build
Before a water project can change a city, the city has to understand it. Katz & Associates built a communications business around that problem - with facility tours, neighborhood meetings and, occasionally, beer.
Look Left Marketing makes the invisible business of tech worth talking about
A London cab supplied the name. The harder problem came later: helping infrastructure companies explain why anyone outside the engineering team should care.
Convey makes the public part of public works
A civil engineer built a communications agency around a stubborn problem: a technically sound project still has to make sense to the people who live with it.
JKH Consulting and the question the room keeps asking
A new development can promise gardens, shops and jobs. JKH Consulting works where those promises meet a harder question: who gets to benefit?
California Strategies knows where California gets stuck
A wastewater plant, a children’s policy contract and a bench of former public officials reveal what this Sacramento consultancy sells: an understanding of how decisions actually get made.
Bodewell Group and the business of getting to yes
A water plant can work perfectly and still lose the public. Bodewell Group sells the patient, practical work between a sound proposal and a community willing to live with it.
Communications LAB brings the freeway meeting to your cul-de-sac
Coffee, doorhangers and a working knowledge of public hearings: this Orange County agency makes big infrastructure projects a neighborhood conversation. Its record also shows where persuasion reaches its limits.
Cannon makes the places we take for granted work
A flooded street, an aging pier, a launch facility: Cannon builds its business around the engineering details that make places usable. After 50 years, the interesting story is still in the work.
The Consultancy That Refuses to Leave at the PowerPoint
Morson Praxis has folded several specialist firms into one engineering consultancy with a blunt promise: define the problem, design the answer, then stay for delivery. Its work stretches from 29,000 railway bridges to the tooling around a four-passenger electric aircraft.
The Hosting Company That Refuses to Put a Robot Between You and a Human
A bootstrapped host from Chicago spent 13 years betting that real humans and owned hardware beat cheap resellers and chatbots. In 2023 private equity agreed - to the tune of roughly $19 million.
Apollo Built a Trillion-Dollar Machine on the Boring Middle of the Balance Sheet
It started as a distressed-debt shop picking through the wreckage of the 1990 junk-bond collapse. Thirty-five years later Apollo runs close to a trillion dollars and is trying to sell private credit to your 401(k).
The Boston Firm That Buys Into Everyone Else's Funds - and Manages $161 Billion Doing It
It started in 1982 as an insurer's venture arm with two employees and $200 million. Four decades later, HarbourVest sits on roughly $161 billion and a simple idea: you don't have to pick the winners if you own the whole board.
The Logistics Giant That Sold Its Trucks and Kept the Map
Agility built a freight empire across the emerging world, sold it to a Danish rival for stock, and used the proceeds to buy airports' ground crews and fuel tankers instead. Here is how a Kuwaiti warehousing company became a holding company for the plumbing of global trade.