Word on the Street: Issue 292

Application Window for Industry M&A Awards Opens Today

Each year, the Excellence in Acquisitive Growth Awards recognize those AE and environmental consulting firms that are setting the standard for acquisitive growth—and being named a recipient puts your firm in distinguished company. If your firm is driving best-in-class deal-making or delivering exceptional post-acquisition results, this is your opportunity to earn industry-wide recognition alongside some of the most accomplished acquirers in the business.

Today, the application window opens for two of the three annual Awards: the M&A Best Practices Award and the Best Post-Transaction Performance Award.

The 2026 M&A Best Practices Award

To be considered for this Award, applicants must describe a process, initiative, technique, or strategy their firm deploys in either (a) deal-making or (b) integration of acquisitions that they consider worthy of recognition as an industry best practice—one that could be emulated by other acquirers seeking to achieve superior results. Previous recipients of this Award include Ardurra Group (Miami, FL) (ENR #48), Terracon (Olathe, KS) (ENR #19), and Trinity Consultants (Dallas, TX) (#66 on the ENR Top 200 Environmental Firms). If you would like to be considered for this Award, please submit an application below.

The 2026 Best Post-Transaction Performance Award

The Best Post-Transaction Performance Award recognizes those firms that deliver superior business results through their acquisitions. Applicants are evaluated using our Acquisition Performance Indicator (API), the AE industry’s only objective benchmark for post-transaction performance, which assesses results across revenue, profit, backlog, and voluntary turnover in the 12 months following the closing of a transaction. Previous recipients include UES (Orlando, FL) (ENR #39), Atwell (Southfield, MI) (ENR #70), True Environmental (New York, NY) (ENR #203), Tetra Tech (Pasadena, CA) (ENR #3), Salas O’Brien (Irvine, CA) (ENR #31), and KCI Technologies (Sparks, MD) (ENR #50). If you would like to be considered for this Award, please submit an application below.

The Awards Ceremony

The Awards ceremony for this year’s M&A Best Practices Award and Best Post-Transaction Performance Award will take place at the M&A and Capitalization Symposium in October. The venue for this year’s symposium is once again the beautiful five-star Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston, where attendees can learn and network with more than 120 AE and environmental consulting industry CEOs, M&A executives, investors, and experts.

Recognition and Engagement

In addition to the Awards and industry recognition, Morrissey Goodale will make a $1,000 donation to an AE industry-related 501(c)(3) organization chosen by each recipient. Award recipients will also have the option to be featured in an episode of the Morrissey Goodale Word on the Street podcast.

The Excellence in Acquisitive Growth Awards 

We created the Excellence in Acquisitive Growth Awards Series to recognize those acquirers that are improving how consolidation occurs in the AE industry and to share best practices so that the industry achieves better outcomes in terms of client satisfaction, employee engagement, and value for shareholders. The series is composed of three annual Awards and also includes the Most Prolific and Proficient Acquirer Award—awarded earlier this year to ZenaTech (Toronto, Canada).

Application

You may apply here for the M&A Best Practices Award. And the application for Best Post-Transaction Performance Award may be accessed here. You may of course apply for both. The application process for each Award should take you no more than 20 to 30 minutes to complete. 

The application window for both Awards closes at midnight Eastern on September 11, 2026, and Award recipients will be notified by September 19.

If you have any questions, please contact our Awards department at [email protected].

“Improve Communication” Means Different Things for Different-Sized Firms

Over the last eight weeks, I’ve facilitated six strategic planning sessions with AE firms ranging from fewer than 100 employees to several thousand. While the firms differed in size, geography, ownership structure, markets, and strategy, one theme (not surprisingly) continued to surface: “We need to improve communication.”

That statement is probably more than familiar to you. It shows up in employee surveys, leadership interviews, focus groups, management retreats, and board discussions. It is one of the most common concerns employees raise and one of the most common priorities leadership teams identify.

The interesting thing, however, is that people rarely define what they mean by it.

Communication has become one of those business terms that everyone understands in theory, but few people describe with any precision. When employees say communication is a problem, they may be talking about transparency, alignment, collaboration, trust, decision-making, information overload, leadership visibility, or any number of other issues. Different people can use the exact same word to describe completely different experiences.

Like it has in just about every strategic planning session I’ve ever run, it became apparent during these recent meetings. In some firms, employees feel disconnected from leadership decisions. In others, employees are overwhelmed by the amount of information they receive. Some firms struggle with collaboration between offices or service lines. Others wrestle with ensuring that strategic priorities are understood consistently throughout the organization.

All of those concerns get labeled as communication challenges, but they are not the same challenge.

What also is clear is that communication issues tend to evolve as firms grow. The communication challenges facing a 75-person firm bear little resemblance to those facing a 750-person firm, and both are very different from what a 7,500-person firm experiences. Understanding those differences can help leaders focus less on communicating more and concentrate more on solving the right problem.

Small firms: Informal communication

Many leaders I’ve known over the years assume communication should be relatively easy in smaller firms. People know one another, leaders are accessible, and employees see principals and executives regularly. Information tends to move quickly, and there are relatively few organizational layers separating decision-makers from the rest of the organization.

From what I’ve observed, most small firms do not suffer from a shortage of communication. If anything, they often experience the opposite.

Information travels through project meetings, office conversations, client discussions, leadership meetings, impromptu gatherings, and countless informal interactions throughout the day. Employees generally know what is happening around them. They hear conversations, observe decisions being made, and have access to leaders. But what they do not always receive is a consistent interpretation of what those decisions mean.

In smaller firms, communication challenges often emerge because information is shared through people rather than through systems. One manager explains a decision one way while another emphasizes a different aspect of the same decision. One principal talks about growth opportunities while another talks about profitability. Employees begin framing what they know about their own firms from dozens of conversations, yet those conversations do not always point in the same direction. The result is often less about a lack of information and more about a lack of alignment.

A leadership team may have complete agreement about where the firm is headed, yet employees can walk away with entirely different impressions depending on which conversations they happen to hear. Over time, people begin creating their own narratives about priorities, opportunities, and concerns.

Another common issue in smaller firms stems from the visibility of leadership. Because employees have direct access to leaders, executives often assume employees understand the reasoning behind important decisions. They know the leadership team discussed opening a new office, hiring a market leader, making an investment, or pursuing a new service line. But what employees may not understand is why those decisions were made or what effect they might have. That distinction matters because people are pros at filling information gaps. When context is missing, assumptions take its place.

For smaller firms, communication often improves when leaders focus less on increasing the volume of communication and more on ensuring consistency. Are leaders delivering the same message? Do employees understand not only what decisions were made but also why they were made? Are strategic priorities being reinforced intentionally rather than left to circulate informally?

Those questions tend to have a greater impact than adding another meeting or another email to the calendar.

Medium-sized firms (Communication as a systems challenge)

As firms get well into the triple digits of employees, communication becomes considerably more complicated.

The organization begins to outgrow proximity. Additional offices are opened, new service lines are added, and management layers begin to emerge. The CEO and executive team can no longer maintain direct communication with every employee, and the informal methods that worked well in earlier stages of growth begin to fray at the edges.

Many firms in this size range find themselves caught between two realities. They are no longer small enough to rely on relationships and informal communication, but they have not yet fully developed the systems and processes necessary to maintain alignment across a larger enterprise. It’s at this juncture where communication problems often shift from information-sharing issues to translation issues.

One of the most common frustrations expressed by employees in medium-sized firms is that they understand the firm’s strategy at a high level but struggle to see how it connects to their day-to-day responsibilities. Leadership teams spend significant time discussing market opportunities, geographic expansion, acquisitions, diversification strategies, technology investments, and long-term growth objectives. But by the time those discussions reach project managers and technical staff, much of the practical relevance has been lost. As a result, employees may understand what the firm is trying to accomplish but are unclear about what role they are expected to play in achieving it.

This misfire is more often poor translation than it is a communication failure. The strategy was communicated, but it was never converted into operational priorities that employees could connect to their roles and their work.

Medium-sized firms also begin encountering challenges that are less common in smaller organizations. For example, offices develop their own identities, service lines become increasingly specialized, and different business units establish their own priorities and ways of operating. While those developments are often signs of organizational maturity, they can create barriers to information flow across the organization.

During strategic planning sessions, these issues frequently surface as communication concerns such as one office does not know what another office is doing, one service line is unaware of opportunities being pursued in other parts of the firm, or expertise exists in one part of the organization but never reaches another part that could benefit from it. In many cases, what gets labeled as a communication problem is actually a collaboration problem.

The information already exists. The challenge is connecting people and creating mechanisms that allow knowledge, opportunities, and experience to move throughout the company.

At the same time these challenges are mounting, communication overload begins to emerge in earnest. Employees receive emails, newsletters, dashboards, Teams messages, project updates, meeting invitations, and company announcements in increasing quantities. And that reality creates a different leadership challenge. Rather than asking how to communicate more effectively, leaders often need to ask what information matters most and how to ensure it cuts through the noise.

The firms that navigate this stage successfully tend to be those that establish clear communication systems without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. They develop reliable methods for translating strategy into action, reinforcing priorities through management layers, and connecting people across offices, disciplines, and business units.

Large firms (Communication intertwined with trust)

By the time a firm reaches 1,500 employees or more, communication takes on yet another form.

Large firms often possess vast communication resources, including communications teams, sophisticated intranet platforms, company-wide meetings, newsletters, leadership videos, collaboration software, and carefully developed communication plans. Distributing information across the organization is rarely the primary challenge. The more difficult question is whether employees view that information as credible.

As firms grow, the distance between leadership and employees naturally expands. Executives become further removed from the daily realities of project teams, technical staff, and client-facing professionals. Employees hear the messages being delivered, but they evaluate those messages against what they observe in their own experience. And it’s at this point where communication becomes closely tied to trust.

Employees pay close attention to whether leadership actions reinforce leadership messages. If collaboration is described as a priority while compensation systems reward individual behavior, employees notice. If innovation is celebrated but risk-taking is discouraged, employees notice. If culture is highlighted as a strategic differentiator but important decisions appear inconsistent with stated values, employees notice. In organizations of this size, communication is often judged less by what leaders say than by what employees see.

Another challenge involves maintaining a shared sense of identity across a large and increasingly diverse organization. Geographic expansion, acquisitions, new service lines, and organizational growth create a situation in which employees may experience the same company very differently depending on where they sit.

Someone working in an environmental practice in the Northeast may have a completely different perception of the firm than someone working in transportation in Texas or water resources in California. Over time, people can become more connected to their office, practice, or region than to the overall firm. Therefore, communication plays an important role in helping employees understand what connects those experiences. It reinforces the organization’s purpose, priorities, values, and direction while creating a common understanding across groups that may rarely, if ever, interact with one another.

Large firms also face a challenge that receives far less attention than downward communication. While most organizations invest significant effort in pushing information throughout the enterprise, fewer devote the same energy to ensuring information moves effectively in the opposite direction.

As information passes through multiple organizational layers, important concerns can be softened, filtered, delayed, or unintentionally distorted. Leadership teams may receive summaries rather than realities. Over time, that degradation of information and feedback can create a meaningful gap between what executives believe is happening and what employees and clients are actually experiencing.

When communication challenges emerge at this scale, they often have less to do with information flow and more to do with credibility, culture, trust, and organizational awareness.

What I’ve noticed is that the firms making progress on communication aren’t necessarily communicating more than everyone else. They’re usually the firms that have figured out what their communication problem actually is.

Market Snapshot: Morrissey Goodale Confidence Index

Weekly market intelligence for AE and environmental industry leaders.

Despite geopolitical instability and economic uncertainty, architecture, engineering, and environmental consulting firm leaders are solidly optimistic about the industry’s continued growth.

That’s among the key findings in Morrissey Goodale’s inaugural AE Industry Quarterly Snapshot publication. Using data from our exclusive survey of AE and environmental consulting firm leaders about projected outlooks for project starts, headcounts, backlogs, RFP activity, and overall business outlook, Morrissey Goodale developed a weighted diffusion index measuring sentiment about the ensuing quarter—a score of 50 or above reflects a positive outlook, while a score below 50 indicates a negative outlook among survey respondents.

The Morrissey Goodale Confidence Index score of 59.0 for the second quarter of 2026 indicates continued robust industry expansion. Here are further details:

• When asked about the overall Q2 outlook compared to the prior quarter, nearly three times as many firm leaders express optimism than pessimism. More than 40% say they are “much more optimistic” or “somewhat more optimistic,” compared to 17% who say they are “much more pessimistic” or “somewhat more pessimistic.”
• AE firms continue to be in hiring mode—overwhelmingly. More than two-thirds (67%) of respondents expect to increase headcount in Q2, and only 3% forecast shedding any staff.
• Backlog expectations remain extremely healthy. Nearly 59% of respondents expect backlogs to increase in Q2, and less than 5% predict declining backlogs.
• Projections for RFP activity remain extremely positive. Forty-one percent of respondents forecast RFP to increase in Q2, while less than 10% expect RFP activity to fall.
• Project starts are the only index component in negative territory, creating a drag on sentiment. More than 35% of respondents report clients are delaying projects somewhat or significantly, and only 7% report clients are accelerating schedules.

Click here to download and read a free copy of Morrissey Goodale’s inaugural AE Industry Quarterly Snapshot for additional survey results, market intelligence, and data on AE industry M&A activity, private equity investment, and financial performance.

For questions about our market intelligence and research services, contact Rafael Barbosa.

Weekly M&A Round Up

The Southern U.S. led active deal flow across markets: Last week saw 19 M&A transactions across domestic and global markets, with private equity driving 17 deals. U.S. activity was concentrated in the Southeast and Texas, spanning CO, FL, CA, PA, AR, TX, LA, NY, GA, MI, IL, WV, and NJ. Three deals also took place in Ireland and the UK. Check out all of the week’s M&A news here.