Brian-Kyles Construction has transitioned to a new generation, into snow and ice work, and now to a second location. In business, as in life, times of transition can be the trickiest to navigate. In the last decade or so, Brian-Kyles Construction, Inc., has undergone several major transitions simultaneously, and the company has emerged stronger than ever.

Doug Maurer started the company, based just west of Cleveland, OH, in 1982, after being laid off. His wife Debbie was the official owner and he served as president. The company, called Brian Builders in honor of their son, Brian, focused mainly on residential remodeling and landscape installations. An offshoot, Kyle’s Landscaping (named for Brian’s younger brother), followed in 1984. In 1988, the entities merged to form Brian-Kyles.

As the years passed, the company shifted from interior work to landscaping; but it remained small, with only a few full-time employees into the early 2000s, when Brian graduated from college and came on board. Since then, Brian Maurer has taken over ownership of the company and expanded it dramatically by ramping up winter work, switching to a commercial focus, growing to some 40 employees and, most recently, opening a second location in Indianapolis, IN.

A time of transition

When Brian joined the business, "it was basically a summer company," he recalls. His father had a philosophy of working hard in the summer and using the winter as a time to unwind. Getting out in the snow meant going snowmobiling or on family ski trips … not getting behind the wheel of a plow truck.

"That’s great for an owner-operator, but not so great when you have employees who have families that they have to feed in the wintertime," Brian says. He realized that a new approach was required to attract talent and grow the company – which was his goal, though not necessarily his father’s.

"My father would have been content with probably four or five employees. I don’t think I have a limit just yet," Brian says.

To increase cash flow, Brian added maintenance clients to supplement its landscape design-build business. He also moved away from residential work to focus on commercial. Today, the company manages a handful of residential accounts for year-round clients, and in some cases, subcontractors manage the snow portion. Commercial winter work makes more sense in the company’s northern Ohio climate, Brian says, noting that there weren’t enough residential plowing opportunities to keep employees busy. "We realized that if we wanted to keep our employees busy, the focus had to be more on commercial and zero tolerance service."

Maurer notes that the shift had a profound impact on the company. "It required a different approach, equipment, number of employees," he says. "It’s taken a while. There was a lot of equipment investment. In terms of personnel, it required a little bit of a different culture. It took some time to make that transition."

Making it his own

By 2012, annual revenues were topping $1 million, far larger than Doug had ever envisioned. Brian had taken over day-to-day operations, but he still wasn’t necessarily in charge.

Like most intergenerational family business transitions, the process was slow. "For my father, this was his baby. It’s what he had been doing for decades," says Brian, who took formal ownership of the company in 2015. "It’s not that he was uncomfortable transitioning, but it was more like, ‘What am I going to do when I’m not here?’" Ensuring his parents’ financial security in retirement was also key. A win-win solution was found: Doug and Debbie retained ownership of the company’s headquarters site and became its landlords.

Building a winter portfolio

The days of winter being play time are long over at Brian-Kyles, as snow and ice management has become a prominent part of the portfolio.

"I really don’t remember how it got started, whether it was me convincing my father that we needed a plow truck to make some money in the wintertime, or if it was from summer clients who asked if we could plow their driveways," Brian says. Either way, the company’s start in snow was slow and cautious. The company subcontracted for a local company for 4-5 years before securing its own clients and starting to grow the snow business. Today, Bryan-Kyle’s Construction services mostly retail, Class A and B commercial buildings and a little industrial.

Embracing technology

Maurer says the company strives to provide the highest quality service, and he credits technology with helping the team deliver. The company’s entire fleet is equipped not only with GPS tracking but also a forward-facing camera system that allows Brian and anyone working in the dispatch room to see exactly what the operator sees in real time.


This is critical because there can be dramatically different conditions on the west and south sides of Cleveland; being able to see those conditions without constantly calling drivers to check in, and putting them in danger, has proven to be a huge advantage.

In addition to utilizing feeds from the in-vehicle cameras and Ohio Department of Transportation cameras, Brian-Kyles Construction has begun installing cameras on sites to constantly monitor conditions. That equipment not only provides video coverage of site conditions but also pavement temperatures, dew points and other key weather data.

"I could be in Cleveland or I could be in Indianapolis, and I could dispatch trucks in the Cleveland market almost as if I’m on each property," Brian says.

Expanding westward

Brian-Kyles Construction continues to grow; 2022 revenues were up 25% over the previous year. One reason for this increase is the opening of the Indianapolis location, a giant leap that Maurer says has been a positive experience.

"It’s a beautiful city, and I just saw a lot of opportunities there," he explains. "Initially the thought wasn’t to look that far away (Indianapolis is about a 4.5-hour drive from the company’s headquarters). I thought maybe somewhere in the Cleveland area, and then gravitate outward from that. But it was one of those things where, late last spring, everything just kind of fell into place."

He credits Shaun Keefer, who manages the Cleveland location, with successfully getting the new Indianapolis location off the ground.

Technology has helped make the opening and operating of a new location relatively smooth.

"Maybe the one silver lining of Covid is that technology systems have really improved," he says. Brian has been to the Indianapolis branch a handful of times, and usually makes it a two- or three-day trip, but most interaction with that office is electronic. "We can have a virtual meeting and be just as effective as being in the same room. And the great part is I’m not wasting time driving."

Maurer, 41, grew up with technology and has embraced the efficiencies that it can build into a business. It was relatively easy to add the second location to the company’s business management software, with the back-office functions still being handled at the home base.

"Billing can be done from anywhere with the systems we have in place," he says. "So now you don’t have to have people in four different locations doing billing. As long as the systems are in place, everyone knows what is going on."

Maurer hopes to follow a similar model – combining a knowledgeable, capable local manager with good technology to provide high quality service – when opening additional locations in the coming years. "I don’t have to go out and just be the biggest and dominate," Brian says. "It’s more that I just I love what I’m doing. I feel like we have a good recipe for success, and I love to see people develop, so let’s just keep doing it. It’s fun."

Adapting to employee's changing needs

Brian-Kyles Construction has about 40 employees, and like most snow and ice contractors has found labor in scarce supply since the Covid pandemic. "I feel like as soon as Covid hit, the mentality about work shifted," says owner Brian Maurer.

Employees coming into the industry now tend to be younger and may have different needs – a 19-year-old still living at home will have different priorities than a 29-year-old, he points out. Catering to those needs will help companies attract and retain hard-to-find employees. Maurer says: "We have a generation today that wants to know what’s in it for them."

For starters, Brian-Kyles recently introduced an internal system to put a dollar figure to each type of prospective employee in order to speed hiring. When someone calls and says, "I’ve got this much experience and I worked for a company that’s this size," the manager can go down a checklist to understand how they will fit into the Brian-Kyles culture, how much attention they will require from managers, and can then offer that applicant a pay rate on the spot. Mauer says this expediency is important, because the current generation of younger workers is accustomed to the immediacy of technology and isn’t used to the process of going around to interview and then await an answer. "When they are looking for opportunities, generally within a few hours they have selected an organization," he states.

Easing them into operations

For those who are hired, Maurer says the company has made a real effort to slow its onboarding process. Instead of having someone start and handing them a shovel or a rake, they go through a week-long process to go over safety, who’s who, and the fundamentals of what they need to know. They’re introduced to staff at a pizza party so they can get to know managers on a first-name basis.

"Then they’ll go out in the field, and they’ll be with a team leader; then they’ll go out with a maintenance supervisor. We slowly introduce them to the staff, so they feel a little bit more comfortable," Maurer explains. "Once we started slowly introducing them to the culture and the workload, people stayed a lot longer, because we were finding that many people would only last a day or two."

New approach to benefits

Brian-Kyles recently introduced a program to make benefits more flexible to fit the employees’ individual needs and desires. Basically, every employee receives a company contribution, for every hour they work, based on what their health insurance would cost.

"We call it Health and Wellness, because it’s intended to cover those costs," Maurer explains. "We found that not everyone wanted health insurance. So we have given them the power to do what they want with the money." Some younger employees, for example, who might be still living at home, would rather have the extra money to spend.

All employees can see a clear career ladder, Maurer says, and the company pays for professional training and development, whether industry-specific, or more general like training for a CDL license. "We want to show them what we’re doing to make their lives better," he states.

Warming up to liquids

Skepticism surrounding the power of liquids as an ice management tool is common. The same held true for Brian-Kyles Construction owner Brian Maurer, who was introduced to the concept about 15 years ago.

"Back in 2007 or 2008 someone sent us a gallon of liquid deicer and said that it was supposed to melt ice on sidewalks," he recounts. "And I remember waking up one morning, and sweating just to go try it out, because we were supposed to get like an inch of snow. I sprayed it down on a driveway and went back after the snow had come down and tried to figure out what did it actually do?"

After that initial test, Maurer says he attended the SIMA Symposium to learn as much as possible about liquids from people who had used them. "I just started asking around, talking to different people, writing down names of people I could call," he explains. "It’s funny because everyone had a different level of what they used it for, and a different product they were using."

When the company began using liquids, it started with walkways, eventually transitioning to treating salt at the spinner. He says the results have been positive in the winter, and even better in the spring.

"We were spending thousands of dollars replacing grass due to salt damage, and nobody wanted it reseeded, they all wanted sod," says Maurer. "With liquids we’re no longer doing that, so we have found them to be a huge advantage."

While he’s found walkways to be "the sweet spot" for liquids, the company just purchased a brine maker and has some trucks that are exclusively used for liquids applications. But he doesn’t ever see making that shift completely.

"I know some companies use liquids exclusively, but they tend to be in very different markets than Cleveland with completely different humidity levels and climates," says Maurer. "For us, liquids are one tool that’s in our toolbox."

Maurer says that one mistake he made in the beginning was becoming overwhelmed by the countless products, formulations and costs.

He’s done a lot of experiments over the years, so much so that he was labeled "a mad scientist" around the office; but he’s found that a salt brine/calcium chloride blend works in most cases. "But being an entrepreneur and trying to find ways to become more efficient, and trying to make a little more money, I’m still experimenting with different products."

Patrick White has covered the landscape and snow and ice management industries for a variety of magazines for over 25 years. He is based in Vermont. Contact him at pwhite@meadowridgemedia.com.