How O’Connor Co. CEO Clark Lowe Is Redefining Construction With A Remote-First Approach

While most construction companies operate within a four- to six-hour drive from home base, O’Connor Co., based in Pinehurst, North Carolina, has made a name for itself by building a diverse range of commercial projects across the U.S. through its innovative use of remote teams.

Since industry veteran Clark Lowe joined the company in 2022—and later took the helm as CEO—O’Connor Co. has tripled its revenues, achieving a 49 percent year-over-year increase to $55.7 million in 2024.

Looking ahead, the company has set an ambitious target of $85 million in topline revenue for 2025, reflecting a projected 55 percent growth as it expands its national footprint. To support this trajectory, O’Connor Co. plans to add 10 full-time employees in the first quarter and further grow its remote-based workforce throughout the year.

In the following interview, edited for space and clarity, Lowe shares his strategies for success, emphasizing the power of a high-performing, “self-regulated” team. His extensive career in construction and business management includes launching successful divisions, optimizing budgets, and driving significant revenue growth. His deep industry knowledge and global network of contacts have enabled major project builds across sectors such as high-end retail, healthcare and hospitality.

Tell us how you have successfully expanded operations nationwide, while also improving efficiency and profitability.

Most general contracting companies — really most all construction companies — have a regional footprint of about 250 to 350 miles or so. This maintains close relationships with business partners and removes the complexities of a national footprint. For our team at O’Connor, we immediately envisioned a remote work footprint that would allow us access to multiple markets nationwide.

The great differentiator about formulating a national footprint is market availability. We could identify and penetrate markets that seemed ripe for growth or markets that were underserved by local contractors. New York and North Carolina were two markets that made strategic sense, and we are working on expanding into more markets in 2025 and 2026.

A big piece of national expansion is how to manage the work and lead diverse and complex construction teams. We have shifted workloads around to allow certain positions to travel more, others to travel less. We have realigned our workflows to support remote work and we have seen significant success across the platform with this approach. Right now, about 90 percent of our workforce is either traveling or working remotely.

You have a unique approach to remote and hybrid work. What strategies are you using to build a high-performing, self-regulated team?

I adopted this idea of a “self-regulated individual contributor.” Self-regulated places the emphasis on training people how to operate and lead themselves first. How to adopt day-to-day routines that are different when working remotely.

We also want to harness and emphasize how people operate within their own framework and make that framework work for O’Connor. Our thought is the individual is most important. A contributor is someone’s working relationship with the company.

We believe that if we can develop someone to self-regulate and continuously improve as an individual, the output will be highly effective contributors. I wanted to create this culture where we did not have guard rails on how people operate — we only had goals on the horizon that everyone was moving towards.

How are you helping remote workers to be successful?

We rarely talk about financial or project goals—it’s all about how to do we conquer remote work, so we can all be doing what we love, from the place we love to do it, next to those we love the most. The unilateral focus on this goal breeds an enormous amount of cooperation and energy throughout the company.

I believe many companies miss huge opportunities to drive business-related goals through culture-related goals. In my experience, people will work twice as hard for a cultural goal, such as remote work, than for financial goals. For us at O’Connor, financials are a symptom of strong culture, not the goal.