Employee-owned Wiley & Wilson sees growth in tough times

This week a 107-year-old architecture and engineering company in Lynchburg will move into its new, larger headquarters on Nationwide Drive.

Wiley & Wilson is having its most successful year yet, said the company’s president, Tim Groover. It has outgrown its current headquarters — a crowded building that was built in 1962 on Langhorne Road — in terms of space and in terms of ideology.

“This building, for us, speaks more of the past than of the future,” said Groover. “We absolutely are proud of where we are, … but we see that there are very bright things ahead.”

Wiley & Wilson, founded in Lynchburg in 1901, has about 120 employees in Lynchburg and about 60 more in satellite offices.

The company has been involved in a variety of U.S. defense projects, as well as with local governments and businesses.

Its local projects include The Home Depot on Graves Mill Road, a lab at Areva’s Mt. Athos Road site and sewer work for the city of Lynchburg.

Groover said the company is growing its Lynchburg work force by eight to 10 people per year. But the 30,000-square-foot Langhorne office is essentially full.

The new 40,000-square-foot headquarters on Nationwide Drive gives the company room to grow. Groover said the building also reflects the changing ways in which the company works.

In 2000, the company completed a transition to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. That means the company is owned by its employees instead of outside stockholders. Employees help make decisions for the company, and share in its profits.

The new building, designed by Wiley & Wilson architects, reflects that change.

It has more open spaces where employees can gather to collaborate on projects.

Employees got to choose whether they wanted to be closer to windows or farther away, and had a say in the height of their cubicles, Groover said.

While the Langhorne Road headquarters had a tiny employee break room that doubled as storage space, the new building has a large break room. It’s next to several training rooms with removable walls, creating a room large enough to host all the employees, something missing in the old building.

Groover said the employee ownership program has helped the company grow in the past eight years. Employees feel a part of the company, he said, and it motivates them in their work.

That is an opinion shared by workers in cubicles throughout the building.

Jeff Chapman, a mechanical designer who has been with Wiley & Wilson for 20 years, said the company has become a better place to work since going employee-owned.

“The harder you work, the more your company grows and becomes profitable,” Chapman said. “And when your company becomes profitable, it makes you want to work harder.”

Corey Clayborne moved to Lynchburg to work for Wiley & Wilson in 2004 after he graduated from Virginia Tech. He said he liked the company right from the job interview, and found the people he met honest and caring.

In 2006, Clayborne’s mother died. Groover and two managers in the company drove several hours to attend a short viewing, Clayborne said. It impressed him that top-level managers would do that.

He said the company’s reputation is helping it to continue to grow. “In spite of the economic trends, this is the best year of our history,” he said.

Groover said that the company’s continued growth is the result of the reputation it has built in areas that don’t slow down.

“We strategically have positioned ourselves in markets that would not have the peaks and the troughs that other companies would,” Groover said. “The markets we’re in are not … driven by trends or short-term thinking.”

One of the firm’s specialties has been sewer work with the city of Lynchburg. “That’s something that doesn’t depend on gas prices or consumer confidence,” Groover said. “It’s something that must be done.”

Wiley & Wilson has a good relationship with Areva, the local nuclear company undergoing a 500-employee expansion.

“For the last five years, every day, we’ve had at least one project going on with Areva,” Groover said. Wiley & Wilson is designing Areva’s new office building on Old Forest Road.

The company also works on many projects for the military. It is designing a building that will allow the Navy to test equipment in a variety of simulated environments, from humid swamps to hot deserts.

Projects like that are what will continue helping the company to grow, Groover said.

“We’re crossing our fingers and hoping that if we continue to make our customers happy, that we’ll come out of this economy better than most.”