Below is an excerpt of an article written for ENR Magazine.
Wilford Clyde Named 2024 Intermountain Legacy Award Winner
By Brian Friar
There was a time when Wilford Clyde did not see himself being involved in the family business. By the late 1970s, when he neared graduation from Brigham Young University, W.W. Clyde, the heavy civil construction company founded by his grandfather, had spawned a collection of construction-related businesses ranging from ready-mix concrete, lumber and hardware supply to bonding and insurance—all with Clyde family members involved in some way. That firm has now become Clyde Cos., with an estimated $2.5 billion in revenue and nearly 5,000 employees, largely under Wilford Clyde’s leadership.
“I wasn’t going to be a construction guy. I got my degree in accounting,” says Clyde, company chairman and its former president and CEO, from a spacious office at the firm’s Orem, Utah, headquarters. “I’d always liked working summer construction jobs, but I had an older brother Paul who I saw being out on jobs all week and he only saw his family on weekends, and I knew I didn’t really want that,” he explains. “I had older cousins that were involved with the business ahead of me and it just didn’t seem like there was the right opportunity.”
But his father, Blaine, president of W.W. Clyde at the time, saw an opportunity for his son at Geneva Rock, the ready-mix and aggregate company Clyde’s grandfather formed in 1954. Wilford Clyde became Geneva’s first full-time accountant in 1977 and began a 46-year career trajectory that included 20 years as the leader of the collective Clyde Cos.
The organization expanded under his leadership, acquiring nearly 40 companies from around the Intermountain and Great Plains regions and “bolting them on to our existing businesses,” says Clyde, who retired as president and CEO at age 70 in February 2023.
Click to read the entire article on the ENR website.