People Over Profit: How CEI Keeps Making the Best Firm List

By Liisa Andreassen 

Comprehensive Environmental Inc. (CEI) has built a culture that outlasts trends, growth spurts, and industry norms – and its leadership says the secret is refusing to treat employees as a line item. 

Plenty of AEC firms can point to revenue growth, expanding project rosters, or a widening geographic footprint. Fewer, however, can point to a workforce that consistently tells outside surveyors that they genuinely like where they work. CEI has done the latter long enough that it’s become part of the firm’s identity. And as a repeat honoree on the Best Firm to Work For list, their presence is not built on marketing copy but on anonymous employee data. 

For Stephanie Hanson, PMP, CSE, Principal Scientist and Project Manager at CEI, the recognition isn’t a surprise so much as a confirmation.  

“The results confirmed that we are on the right track with regards to company culture, flexibility, work/life balance, project content, project variety, compensation and interpersonal relationships,” she says.  

It’s validation of a strategy the firm has pursued deliberately, not accidentally. 

Why This Award, Specifically 

In an industry that loves to celebrate growth – fastest-growing firm, most profitable firm, biggest backlog – Hanson says CEI has always prioritized a different metric. She points to feedback from a new hire who had worked elsewhere in the industry before joining CEI. That employee’s former firm collected plenty of growth-and-profit accolades, but never once landed on a “Best Firm to Work For” list. The distinction stuck with Hanson. 

“It’s great to show growth and boast profits, but if your staff isn’t happy, it will only get you so far,” she says. “If profits are high because wages are low and/or staff are overworked, that profitability is really just a temporary, unsustainable illusion.”  

For firm leadership eyeing their own long-term retention numbers, that’s a pointed reframe that profitability built on burnout is borrowed, not earned. 

Culture as Infrastructure, Not Initiative 

Ask Hanson what’s harder – building a strong culture or sustaining it through growth – and she pushes back gently on the premise. At CEI, she says, culture was never a program rolled out by HR. It was a byproduct of how leadership behaved from day one. 

“Building a great culture may seem daunting, but it happens from the top down,” she explains. “The onus is on firm leadership to create and maintain a positive and meaningful work environment, and the resulting culture cultivates itself.” 

CEI never engineered friendships or mandated buy-in to a stated set of values. Instead, the firm’s employee-ownership model reshaped what “upper management” even means. It means  leadership is composed of working engineers and scientists, not a layer of executives detached from the technical work. That structure, Hanson argues, produces a team rather than a hierarchy and employees notice the difference.  

Looking ahead five years, Hanson doesn’t describe a pivot so much as a continuation.  

“We’ve been trending in this direction for a long time and we’ve made great strides over the years to continually improve our employees’ work experience and our company culture,” she says.  

A Different Starting Point 

CEI’s culture also traces back to its founding. The firm’s president established CEI in 1987 as a woman-owned business in an industry that, at the time, offered little room for women in technical leadership. Some of CEI’s earliest women employees are still with the firm nearly four decades later – a retention statistic that speaks for itself. 

Hanson is careful not to overstate the mechanism, though. 

“Being woman-owned has not necessarily shaped hiring practices, but it has certainly helped prevent the ‘closed circle’ feel from ever rearing its head at CEI,” she says.  

Today, roughly half of CEI’s staff are women, a ratio Hanson attributes to simply recruiting top talent without filtering for a preconceived image of what an engineer or scientist should look like.  

“Many firms seem to still hold onto the notion that the stereotypical carbon copy of what an engineer should be is the way it must be,” she says. “We’re so far removed from this notion that it’s genuinely difficult to imagine working in an environment that supports it.” 

The Business Case for Staying Employee-First 

For firm leaders weighing whether culture investment pencils out financially, Hanson offers a straightforward argument that retention is a cost-avoidance strategy as much as a moral one. Low turnover means CEI isn’t sinking budget into constant onboarding, new-hire training, recruiting, and interviewing. These expenses eat into margins at competitor firms with higher churn. 

Her advice to peers chasing the same result is simple.   

“Find talented staff, provide them with all the resources they need to succeed and get out of their way,” she shares.  

It’s a straight forward formula, but CEI’s multi-year run on “Best Firm to Work For” lists suggests that it’s one that compounds. In an industry where project pipelines shift and margins tighten, a workforce that stays may be the most durable competitive advantage a firm can build. 

source https://zweiglist.com/people-over-profit-how-cei-keeps-making-the-best-firm-list/