What happens when the business you built needs more than you can personally give it?

Michael Daniele started Cap City Landscaping in Edmonton in 2008 with four teenagers and a determination to build something that would let him be home with his family. Nearly eighteen years later, the company has 47 employees and takes on major municipal landscaping projects.

In this episode of McStay on What Matters, we talk about what changed along the way, including Michael’s realization that doing every job himself meant giving each one only part of what it needed.

We discuss:

• Starting small and earning the trust to take on bigger projects.• Why keeping employees through the winter matters beyond the revenue from snow removal.• Hiring people who are better at their jobs than the founder was.• Bringing the honest conversations of an Italian family dinner table into company meetings.• Sharing the pressures of ownership and finding people you can talk to.• Making room for health in an industry that talks a lot about safety.

Michael also shares the story behind Cap City’s “Where the Grass Is Greener” tagline, which started with a teenager asking a very reasonable question: what actually makes us better?

A conversation about learning as you build, keeping your word, and giving other people the trust and support to help the business grow.

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Larry Clay taught high school for seventeen years — PE, mechanics, math, English and built houses on the side to feed a family of eight. In 2004 he had eight houses to build and a teaching job, and he made a choice. He told me he didn’t want to be seventy, on a porch, wondering if he could have made it.

He also had a deathly fear of public speaking. Bad enough that he once stood at the back of a church and watched a high school girl read the announcements because he couldn’t do it. He made himself a vow that day, joined Toastmasters, and eventually became national president of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association.

We talked about the three levels of becoming a builder and why level three breaks so many companies. His framework for where any builder sits: McDonald’s, White Spot, Keg, or Michelin. What integrated design actually means when the architect, the engineers and the trades are all at the table before anything is drawn. Why affordability looks completely different in Newfoundland at $220,000 a house than it does in Vancouver. And the clients fifteen years ago who turned down the efficiency upgrades because they were only staying five years and what Larry wishes he had done anyway.

The last part is about legacy. Larry watched a six-time national champion stand unrecognized in a room full of wrestlers, and worked out what that meant for him. His answer is worth sitting with, and it starts earlier than most people think.

Larry Clay runs Clay Construction in the Greater Vancouver area and is past national president of the CHBA.

Ian Morgan of Next Architecture on renovating Edmonton’s law courts without closing them, putting AI to work on RFPs, and why a flat, mid-sized firm is a competitive advantage.

Ian trained at the Bartlett and in Cardiff, landed in Edmonton in 2002, and in 2016 co-founded Next Architecture with Alan Partridge, carrying forward a legacy that traces back to 1938. Thirty-four years into his career, he leads a deliberately mid-sized firm that competes with companies ten times its size, and in this conversation he explains exactly how.

We get into the parts of running a firm they don’t teach in architecture school: cash flow, forecasting, the months where payroll keeps you up at night, and the planning tools that turn those months back into sleep. Ian walks through the renovation of the Edmonton law courts, where the building couldn’t close, so his team built the new envelope outside the existing one and worked four storeys above an operating courthouse. We talk about laser scanning heritage buildings, what point-cloud data reveals that the naked eye can’t, how his firm trained AI on twenty years of project sheets to answer RFPs, and where he thinks the technology stops and the architect begins.

We also dig into how he builds his team: a flat structure where the partners sit at the same desks as everyone else, hiring for technical grounding, and why staying mid-sized on purpose is a client-service decision, not a growth failure.

Topics include: firm succession, leading through cyclical markets, budgeting and value engineering with clients, energy performance in Edmonton’s climate, WELL certification, historic preservation, BIM and Revit, AI in architecture, and building a team built to last.

Connect with Ian and Next Architecture: [link]

McStay on What Matters: conversations with experienced leaders about how they actually navigate the hard calls: developing and coaching people, building teams, and leading for the long game. New episodes twice a month. More at seanmcstay.com.

Until next time, focus on what matters.