Sibling dynamic builds Guyer Brothers into successful company with a family atmosphere

When talking with successful contractors, you often hear them credit the people that work for them. There’s a reason for that. Most people in this business understand that their success is directly tied to how well their employees do their job. Happy employees tend to be the best employees and the business owners that make their employees’ well-being a priority tend to do very well.

That being said, it’s not all that often that you meet a contractor who says his or her motivation for starting a business in the first place was in big part their passion for treating people the right way. Typically, it’s a love for the work itself that leads the charge.

But that’s exactly how things got started for Kevin and Shawn Guyer.

The brothers established Guyer Brothers Inc. in New Enterprise, Pennsylvania, in 1999, after deciding it was time they blazed their own trail in an industry they had known since childhood. The special dynamic the brothers share – Kevin works the office while Shawn leads the workers on the site – has helped the company grow each year. The company does mostly sewer and water line construction with a bit of site work.

“Growing up, our dad had his own construction company. He did smaller jobs and site stuff along with building construction. When Shawn was 12 years old he was running equipment. But by the time I got to that age, Dad had gotten out of the industry,” Kevin Guyer recalls.

And though they both took jobs in construction once they grew up, the brothers never got to work together on the same crew, though they did carpool quite a bit while working at the same company. Kevin said he and Shawn decided to take the plunge after years of wanting to work together and being treated poorly by managers at past jobs.

“That was probably the biggest thing was the way we got treated. I can remember getting called ‘retard’ for stuff. That’s not us. You can only take that for so long,” Kevin Guyer says.