westernallied.com

Letter From a Principal

Zachary Russi, P.E.
President

2019 was an exciting and busy year for WAM. Looking back, I feel that it was not only a big growth year from a revenue perspective (this was the first year we broke 100 million in total volume), but we also spent the time defining our core values and vision.

We know that WAM is growing and with that growth comes change. We wanted to keep the essence of WAM as we grow and keep the same “family feel.” The core values were derived from input from our employees, trade partners, and clients to define our most important attributes. We also had a marketing team re-design our logo and website. If you haven’t seen the new website, go to www.westernallied.com. Yindy, Jeremy, and Joe spearheaded this work and did a fantastic job!

Now I want to show you how we are using those core values to drive us into the future.

Driven by Innovation

We are investing in modernizing our shop and have purchased a new Bystronic laser table that will allow us to cut ductwork off-hours (lights-out) so we can have ductwork ready for fabrication in the morning. We will eventually have automated towers that stack material and ready our shop staff for the next day. Our goal is to have our shop personnel shift into more prefabricated assemblies so we can install faster in the field. We are also investing in a coil line, water jet, gore locker, and automated robot welder for piping prefab.

Grounded in Care

It gives me great joy to brag about our people. We have a group that shows great care to each other, our trade partners and clients, and the community. I wanted to highlight Mike Aurelio. My son Payton had expressed a desire to learn to weld. I asked Mike if he might be willing to let us hire him to teach Payton for an hour a week after work. Mike spent many sessions of his own time teaching Payton to weld and would not accept payment. Payton learned a ton and fabricated a rocket stove. Payton’s future may be in the trades and Mike went above and beyond to give him some training. There may be a future where SMACNA contractors and the trade unions collaborate to put classes together to train our youth that sees the trades as a career path. Thanks Mike!

Dedicated to Teamwork

We saw a need in our service group for experienced project management and were having trouble finding that from the outside. Greg Russell, a Sr. Project Manager on our construction team, came to us with extensive experience in service project management and we thought he would be a good fit for the position. As we want to grow our service group we asked if he would be willing to shift to service and he emphatically accepted, “Anything that I can do to help the company.” It is a big change and we thank Greg for his dedication to teamwork and Western Allied Mechanical.

I am so proud of the team we have here and look forward to our future together! Thank you for all you do to make Western Allied such a great company!

Zachary Russi, P.E.
President