BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — With just over three months before the year ends, McFarland-Johnson, Inc. has already logged record growth for 2022, increasing its staff by nearly a quarter and opening four new locations.

“We’ve increased about 22 percent just since the beginning of the year,” company President Chad Nixon says of the Binghamton–based planning, engineering, consulting, environmental, and construction-services firm’s employee growth. McFarland-Johnson now employs just under 200 people across its 22 offices.

Four of those locations are new this year — Buffalo; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Tampa, Florida.

 The new offices are primarily the result of an increasing amount of infrastructure projects taking place and the need for talent, Nixon says.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Biden last November, provides
$550 billion from 2022 through 2026 in federal financial investment in infrastructure including roads, bridges, mass transit, water infrastructure, resilience, and broadband.

That funding is pushing new projects such as bridge replacements and airport improvements, Nixon says. The work is out there, he says, driving the need for employees at the company.

“We can win the work, but we need to make sure we have the people to do the work,” he says. The new Buffalo office brings the company further west in New York, while the other three offices continue the company’s push into the mid-Atlantic region and down the east coast. “That’s where the people are,” Nixon says.

The new offices will also help bring in new clients, he adds. For example, McFarland-Johnson hired Jason Shevrin to lead its new Philadelphia office. Shevrin is well known in that area and has done a lot of work in that region, Nixon notes. The hope is that will pay off with some clients following Shevrin to McFarland-Johnson.

Once those clients are with McFarland-Johnson, Nixon is confident they will stay. Why? The company’s current returning client rate is about 98 percent, he says.

 “I think there are a few things that really make our company different,” Nixon says. First, the company is 100-percent employee owned. 

“The people who are working on your project are company owners,” he says.

On top of that, McFarland-Johnson’s turnover rate is extremely low, Nixon notes. At less than 4 percent, it’s a fraction of the industry average, which trends around 13 percent.

“We have people that have been working for our company for 47 years,” he says. Clients know they can come back and work with engineers and others they have worked with on projects previously.

“We’re able to attract some talent because we have such interesting projects,” Nixon contends. Those interesting projects include a terminal expansion project at the Monroe County Key West International Airport in Florida, the Marmen/Welcon offshore wind tower manufacturing plant at the Port of Albany, and even modeling over 21,000 miles of roads for the state of Vermont to identify amphibian-crossing areas.

“Being a smallish company allows us to be much more nimble than our competitors,” Nixon adds. “We’ve come a long way, but our best years are still ahead of us.”

McFarland-Johnson has served clients for 76 years. It’s newest offering is its InfraSolutions by McFarland-Johnson division, which offers technology-based infrastructure management solutions.