The Ever Expanding Naylor Group

electrical contracting) had ever been recognized in this regard which really helped differentiate ourselves in the market.

We hired an outside human resources consultant to help us formulate plans to improve the areas and issues where we were not operating effectively. A year later we checked in, and determined that there was progress in most cases. We also redid the survey in 2012, and our company score showed improvement from the previous study. The survey that year rated the top 50 companies, and once again Naylor was recognized as a top employer. Our employees were telling us that we were on the right track, and we were thrilled to hear it.

The Ever Expanding Naylor Group

To further expand our product and service offering, we bought a compressed air service business called Pneumequip in 2005. It was located in Cambridge, so we moved the business into a building with our local Naylor service operation, changed the name to Naylor Compressed Air, and became an Ingersoll Rand dealer. After several years of running this company as a standalone, we decided to absorb it into Naylor, which we completed in 2013 ... We believe we will be able to grow the company quicker as an integrated unit rather than a separate entity, especially with having access to Naylor’s existing industrial customer base.

A couple years after acquiring the compressed air business, we became a partner in another company called Viridian Automation Inc. in 2009. I had known Jeff Volkers for several years and he had run a successful controls company. He had built a company around intelligent automated building technologies, but the company came under financial pressure not because of the controls piece. The other half of the business was in providing

Paul Breedon at Gambles Produce in Etobicoke, November 1998.