Female-led Stratford engineering firm wins OHBA’s first-ever Service Professional of the Year Award

A relatively new female-led Stratford engineering firm has gained provincial recognition after being named the Ontario Home Builders’ Association’s first-ever Service Professional of the Year.

The award was handed out along with several others at the provincial association’s annual members meeting in Collingwood on Sept. 19. Presented for the first time as part of the association’s Awards of Distinction gala, the Service Professional of the Year Award was given to GRIT Engineering Inc. in recognition of the company’s “outstanding professionalism and integrity with business, industry and community.”

“We were up against Enbridge and all these big players, so I thought, ‘OK, there’s no chance,’ and then we won,” GRIT Engineering founder and CEO Montana Wilson said. “I’m just really proud of my team. The business was only started two years ago, and we’ve really made lots of strides and we have a really great team. It speaks to them, to be honest.”

After working for other companies in the geotechnical, environmental and civil engineering sectors for roughly a decade, and noticing there weren’t a lot of female-led engineering firms in the game, Wilson launched GRIT Engineering in 2021 as way to get back into consulting without having to work for anyone but herself.

Since then, Wilson said the firm, which she says specializes in anything underground, has grown organically. It currently employs 23 staff across four divisions, and the company just moved into a new office on Romeo Street.

“We’re pretty big on culture and doing things differently from a staffing perspective. Our workforce is entirely remote, so you can work at home or in the office. We love to see people in the office but provide them the flexibility depending on their job. …The other thing we’re trying to do is keep gender parity in our office. We don’t quite have that, but we’re pretty close. …We’ll hire the right person every single time, but we try to provide more opportunities to women. …We work a lot with the Conestoga Career Center to bring in people that don’t necessarily look great on paper, but have really good skills and we can work with them,” Wilson said.

Between offering her employees a fair work-life balance with plenty of flexibility for family responsibilities and providing professional development opportunities for new hires, Wilson said the GRIT team gives back as much as it gets with respect to both customer and community service.

“Yes, we’re engineering, but we’re also very much a customer service-based businesses,” Wilson said. “People will give us work if we call them back, and we try to give back a lot too. We sponsor numerous hockey teams and try to support whatever (cause) is closest to our employees’ hearts. We like to say we hire community leaders, so we’re always looking for people who volunteer and are active and engaged.”

As vice-chair of the Perth Huron Home Builders’ Association, Wilson said she wants GRIT to be a leader in the community when it comes to encouraging young women and girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math, as well as with helping to build a community where housing can once again be affordable for future generations.

“It’s not an easy path to be a female in engineering, but I’ve had really great mentors all the way through and we’re really hoping to continue that moving forward,” she said. “We’re in the high schools, we’re on the Women in Transportation board in Kitchener-Waterloo. We’re putting a lot of time and effort into that space. …I think we have to be open that as much as we want (the engineering world) to be equal and the same (for men and women), it’s not.

“Men can’t have children, so we need to recognize the differences and embrace them instead of trying to treat everyone as equal.”

And for young women and girls considering a career in engineering, Wilson said the most important thing is finding a good mentor and surrounding themselves with a good team.

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