After a 35-year career, Bill McKoskey is gearing up for retirement. As he prepares to pass on the baton to a new generation, he sat down with Brian Johnson from Finance and Commerce for an insightful conversation about his journey with Horwtiz.
Article originally published in Finance & Commerce // By: Brian Johnson
Bill McKoskey was just finishing up his mechanical engineering studies at the University of Minnesota when he took some good advice from his mother and applied for a job at Horwitz, a Twin Cities-based MEP specialty contractor.
He got the job and has been with Horwitz ever since, eventually advancing to the position of company president and CEO. Now, after 35 years with the mechanical, electrical and plumbing company, McKoskey is transitioning to retirement.
“Construction was a foreign language to me when I started, but I enjoyed the challenge of learning this new language and I was enthralled by the competitive manner in which a contractor acquires work,” McKoskey said in a company bio.
McKoskey’s retirement officially takes effect on Thanksgiving 2024. In the meantime, he’s staying busy with pre-construction work.
In the following interview, McKoskey talks about how he got into the business, his career journey and the outlook for the MEP industry in 2024. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell us a little bit about the history of Horwitz.
A: Horwitz is over 100 years old, so we’ve been around for a long time. A gentleman named Harry Horwitz started this on his own in 1918. [The company] did primarily plumbing for probably the first 50 years, and slowly we’ve expanded to a full menu specialty contractor over time.
Q: How long have you been with the company?
A: I started in ’88, so 35 and a half years at the moment.
Q: Tell us about how you ended up at Horwitz after graduating from the University of Minnesota.
A: It was a fluke. I used to post on my wall all my rejection letters from my various interviews my senior year at the U. My mom called me one day and said, “Hey, I saw this sign.” And on the sign, it apparently had the words “mechanical” and “HVAC.” And she knew I had had a class in that. So she said, “You should give these guys a call.”
I did. And they said, “We were just talking about hiring a young engineer today. Why don’t you come in and we’ll chat with you?” And the rest is history.
Q: And then you just worked your way up?
A: Yeah. I did pretty much everything when I started. I’d be delivering to a job site one day, I’d work in accounting the next day, because they were short-staffed. And I’d be doing engineering projects on the buildings we were building and just supporting the entire team.
Q: What types of work do you primarily do: residential, commercial or all over the map?
A: Primarily commercial. We’ll do multi-housing type residential, but we don’t get into any private residences.
We’ve done a lot with Target. We did their downtown office towers. We did their North Campus. We’ve done a lot with Medtronic, the Best Buy corporate campus on Interstate 494 in Richfield. Lots of corporate clients, lots of high tech: Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Polaris, companies like that.
We’re primarily design-build. We like to design in-house and build it. So that’s kind of our differentiator, the fact that we can design it and build it.
Q: How did you become interested in engineering as a career choice?
A: I had to do something. You’re in high school, you’re in college, you’ve got to figure something out. I just went to engineering probably because my dad said, “Hey, this would be a good thing for you to do.”
He wasn’t an engineer. He worked for Ecolab for 35 years, but more on the business side. But I’m guessing he saw a lot of engineers in his daily activities and thought there was something there.
Q: What do you like about it?
A: I like the competition. I’ve always been into that piece. We compete for every job to get it initially. And then you compete to make sure you’re going to make money on it and keep everyone happy. So that’s probably the one aspect I’ll miss when I’m done is that competitive environment that we’re in.
Q: How much has the company grown in recent years?
A: We’ve changed a lot. I think I learned a lot in 2008, 2009 and 2010 that we needed to diversify. Prior to that, we were primarily a wet side and plumbing, mechanical contractor. And those were really tough years. We were not diverse enough. Because of that, I had to lay a lot of people off and pay a lot of people less. And that was very painful.
So, I’ve kind of had this theory, going beyond that, of growth through diversification, where we started adding different items to our menu. We bought a service company, we bought an insulation company, we bought a temperature control company. Organically, we started electrical divisions and millwright divisions. We also bought an industrial ventilation company.
So we’ve changed a lot over the years, our menu has expanded. And the theory was that that’s going to help us get through the next tough economic times whenever they do present themselves.
Q: What is your outlook for the MEP industry in the coming year? I know a lot of companies have struggled to find workers. What kind of workloads do you expect to see?
A: We’ve been struggling to find people for probably 10 years. And even today, I think we have 13 positions out there, where we’re looking. And this is all from an office perspective, not necessarily the field. We’re a union company, and we go to the halls that we’re signatory to when we need field people.
But we’ve been struggling to find project managers, struggling to find engineers, pre-construction managers. That’s been a real challenge and that continues. We’re constantly trying to figure out a new way to solve that. We haven’t yet. Whether it’s headhunters or hiring our own internal HR hiring folks, that’s been a challenge. And I don’t see that changing.
As far as the work, I’m always nervous about it. I’m always waiting for the next downturn because it freaks me out. What comes with it are ugly, ugly situations of having to get rid of good people or pay them less than you should.
But I’m not seeing it. We certainly lag. We get work from someone who decided to build something a year ago. And then it takes us two years to build it, so we can be busy while things are beginning to slow down. We currently have the largest backlog we’ve ever had. In 2023, we were awarded more work than we’ve ever been awarded. So we’re in a great position for ’24 and most of ’25.
I often talk to the architects. They see it before us. And then the GCs start to see it and they’re a little more nervous than I am. I’m grateful for what we have. And we’ve just got to make sure we do it well. I’ll worry about the downturn when we’re done being successful with what we have on our current plate.
Q: What are your plans for retirement? Will you do any traveling?
A: I’m a long weekend guy because the work is too substantial to be gone. So we’ll definitely do some trips to Europe and we’re planning a safari.
I’m going to turn my alarm off. That’s the first thing I’m going to do so that I can just wake up at a normal time and not super early. And I’m just going to relax. I’m sure after a couple of months, I’ll start itching and I’ll figure out what I’m going to do next. But those first couple months should be pretty awesome.