Burns & McDonnell Moves up to No. 9 on Widely-Watched ENR Top 500 Design Firms Ranking

04/25/2018 2 minute read

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (April 25, 2018) — Continued growth in all major service specialties has fueled a substantial jump for Burns & McDonnell in the Engineering News-Record (ENR) annual ranking of Top 500 engineering and design firms. Burns & McDonnell ranked No. 9 on the Top 500 Design Firms list on overall design revenue of $1.47 billion, up from No. 16 on the 2017 list. It is the first time in the firm’s history it has finished in the top 10 on the ENR Top 500 ranking.

Burns & McDonnell also ranked No. 1 in the ENR listing of top firms in the Power category, thanks to continued demand for electrical transmission, distribution and generation projects. Despite a leveling in overall demand for electricity nationwide, the power sector remains a strong business sector for Burns & McDonnell due to the accelerating movement toward renewable sources of energy and a nationwide imperative to improve reliability and resiliency of the power grid.

“This is an exciting time for companies like ours that specialize in delivering large-scale capital projects,” says Burns & McDonnell Chairman and CEO Ray Kowalik. “Between new corporate tax law changes and relatively cheap energy prices, we’re seeing some major investments come back to the US. Those factors, plus continued movement toward design-build/EPC project delivery have been the key drivers of our year-over-year growth.”

“Renewables and new technologies have already impacted many of the projects Burns & McDonnell is now doing,” says John Olander, President of Burns & McDonnell’s Transmission & Distribution Division. “Storage, distributed generation, and electrification, especially electric vehicles, have had an impact in some areas and as technologies advance, will further impact our grid. We anticipate a substantial effort around distribution modernization as we require our systems to do many new things. We see these trends driving continued change and growth in this sector.”

In addition to the Power ranking, Burns & McDonnell continued to climb among the top 20 rankings in these categories:

No. 14 in Manufacturing
No. 15 in Sewer & Solid Waste
No. 16 in Water (first time in top 20)
No. 16 in Industrial Process/Petroleum
No. 8 in Telecommunications (first time top 20)

About Burns & McDonnell

Burns & McDonnell is a family of companies made up of more than 6,000 engineers, architects, construction professionals, scientists, consultants and entrepreneurs with offices across the country and throughout the world. We strive to create amazing success for our clients and amazing careers for our employee-owners. Burns & McDonnell is 100 percent employee-owned and is proud to be on Fortune’s 2018 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For.