From a podcast interview featuring Mike Clarke, CEO of Hanto + Clarke General Contractors, LLC
In this episode of CEO Growth Talks, Mike Clarke, President of Hanto & Clarke, joins Pete Hayes to share the journey of scaling a Gulf Coast commercial construction company from a small family operation to a regional powerhouse. With projects ranging from hospitals to car dealerships, Mike discusses how culture, trust, and intentional communication have fueled the firm’s impressive growth—from $5 million to nearly $60 million in annual revenue in just over a decade.
Mike explains how implementing EOS, clarifying Hanto & Clarke’s mission of “building peace of mind,” and partnering with a fractional CMO from Chief Outsiders transformed both their marketing and internal operations. He also reflects on the power of servant leadership, early involvement in design, and community investment as key elements of their success.
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“The reason we're gonna have our best year ever this year is a lot of our hard work, but also a lot of the work that our Chief Outsider has done with us." Mike Clarke |
Hanto & Clarke grew from an 8-person startup to a $60M commercial contractor by focusing on people, clear communication, and community commitment.
Their differentiator—“building peace of mind”—emerged through work with Chief Outsiders, capturing their culture of trust, reliability, and service in a single, meaningful message.
The company leverages EOS for operational alignment and used strategic marketing guidance to sharpen proposals, improve owner communication, and support geographic expansion.
Mike emphasizes getting involved early in the design process to balance budget, schedule, and scope—and to build lasting trust with clients.
Hanto & Clarke lives its values through charitable giving, employee volunteerism, and strong ties to the Gulf Coast community, reinforcing a culture of service and integrity.
Follow Mike Clarke on LinkedIn
Follow Pete Hayes on LinkedIn
[Episode Transcript]
Pete Hayes: Hello everyone and welcome back to CEO Growth Talks. I'm your host, Pete Hayes, and I'm delighted to have Mike Clark, owner of Hanto and Clark and Hanto and Clark is commercial construction all over the Gulf. Tell us about your business, Mike.
Michael Clarke: Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Pete. I'm excited to be here.
We are a commercial general contractor here in Pensacola, Florida, which is, just on the edge of the Florida, Alabama border. We've been in business now for going on 11 years. We have been blessed to have the opportunity to grow here in our community. Over the last 11 years.
I think back to when we started it was basically eight of us, myself, my dad, my brother, and my partner Don, and then four guys in the field, and we were. Doing it all. So we were serving as receptionist, estimator, project manager, all of the above. And luckily we've been,
Pete Hayes: yeah. What's the profile now from those?
Michael Clarke: So we've been blessed here. We started about 5 million dollars in construction that first year with eight people. We're up to shooting for about $60 million this year with almost 40 employees. We've started off doing just about anything for anyone. Now we've got to be picky and do some exciting projects here.
Pete Hayes: Wow. That's most companies don't find that trajectory. Congratulations. Thank you. And for most of that 10 plus years, you've been a Vistage member. And I think that's how we met.
Michael Clarke: Yes, that is how we met. I had the pleasure of receiving a presentation from Karen about a year ago and everything, we've done lots of stuff advertising and marketing wise over the years, and some of it's successful, but unfortunately most of it not, we're a unique industry construction is, and listen to what Karen told me.
It was just a no-brainer, y'all's approach to how we present ourselves and how we reach out to prospective clients and opportunities.
Pete Hayes: Wow. And that's Karen Hayward, for those of you who may not know Karen by the first name, but she is a Vistage speaker. She's one of our managing partners.
Anyway, I'm glad that worked out. So what kinds of things was Karen talking about that caught your attention? That 'cause I, full disclosure, 'cause we're gonna spend a little bit of time on it Mike and his team have been a client of ours. And that's one reason why we're talking, wanted to get the story behind the story.
Michael Clarke: Yeah, I think the biggest thing first and the most important of regardless of what you're doing for marketing and advertising, it ha there has to be intention behind it. So there has to be a process, there has to be a way to measure. What you're doing and the success of what you're doing.
And so a lot of it we're a, a traction company and so KPIs are important to us. And so that was one of the first presentations or talks I've heard from somebody in the marketing industry that. Was so data driven. And then the second thing is, not everybody, it's not a one se size fits all approach is.
It's important what the message is what you're trying to say to your clients. And it's, how you deliver that message in the avenues in which you do that are also different. Again, depending on what your outcomes are.
Pete Hayes: So you're an EOS company. Have you been doing that for a long time?
Michael Clarke: We have. That's one of the blessings of Vistage is lots of the companies in, in, in that network are EOS companies. And we've been running it pretty, successfully here. At least we've been trying for the past eight or nine years, been doing it real successfully. The past three to four.
Pete Hayes: So EOS is a pretty complete operational framework, and it does include some, I'll call it marketing things. Your uniques and your market objectives and your customer profiles and such. What else did you need? What else were you looking for? And you started to describe that, but I'd just love to hear what w what were the pain points, if you will, that you were trying to jump on top of?
Michael Clarke: Yeah, I, again, I think, vision is obviously, it's the first part of EOSI think it's the most important part is, we're a company. It's myself and I have two, two partners and a non-equity partner. And so getting people on the same page for what you're trying to accomplish and what it is you want to build in a company and really what you know.
What it looks like both internally and externally, culture has been important for us. And so that's another thing that I think EOS is very good at, is setting up your organization from a, not just a nuts and bolts perspective, but also from a cultural perspective. People is the biggest thing for us, for sure.
Pete Hayes: So it was and you mentioned, the message and telling the story. How has that shifted? How would you articulate it? It now? I'd just like to hear more about the business Yes. And how you see yourselves and.
Michael Clarke: Absolutely. And so we've been, in that vision piece you talked about the three uniques and you guys call it something different.
You call it the differentiator, but it's, one and the same thing. And I think we knew we had it. We just weren't, we weren't packaging it and selling it the way that, that we really wanted to. And for us, it's about how we treat people. That was always our unique and for us as leaders of the company there being three of us, we set the tone for how we treat people both internally and externally.
And we spent a lot of time talking about this but came up with our mission is building peace of mind. And the little tag on construction building and then peace of mind for us is something we've always tried to do is solve people's problems and relieve their anxiety.
Whether it's our own employees, whether it's our customers, whether it's our partners being subcontracts, architects, engineers, whoever. Is we wanna leave them in a better place than they started having worked with us. And so again it's trying to build that peace of mind that, we're providing.
Careers and career growth opportunities for our employees. It's when we partner with a client, we want them to know that we have the expertise. We're gonna communicate to them exactly what to expect, how the process is gonna go. There's no surprises. Again, building that trust. And it goes with it, with all our relationships that we've got here.
Pete Hayes: I'll jump in. 'cause it's like what company doesn't say PE it's all about the people. Sure. And I'm sure the advice you got from your CMO pair was, okay, if we're gonna go this way, we're gonna have to support it with Yes. Things that we actually do. And we were talking earlier about, okay, yeah, you build hospitals and.
Neonatal care units, but then your company turns around and participates and does things tell me about that.
Michael Clarke: Yeah, obviously this is just the way we were taught growing up was that we're a, a. A faith-based organization. So giving back has always been important to us.
The community has blessed us with the growth opportunities that we've had and we wanna give back to the community because, we've all got kids and this is what's important to us here is the city of Pensacola and the great, the really, the Gulf Coast community in general, but. We've had tons of opportunities to, to partner with the Children's Hospital here.
In Pensacola, we give to other organizations, manna Food Bank. We give to other organizations that help underprivileged kids. Really just giving back to what the community. Needs here law enforcement, blue angels, things like that. It's just any opportunity we get out to get, have to get out there we jump on and take advantage of, because again, we're just proud of what this community means to us and to everybody that lives here.
Pete Hayes: I bet you find that's not only something that your clients enjoy and respect, but it probably is the basis of your culture then, is that perspective of being part of the community and giving to the community a
Michael Clarke: absolutely, and again, there's, everybody talks about six degrees of separation.
We always say in Pensacola, it's really one or two degrees of separation. So it's great when you hear stories about people that you've touched based on the things that you've done, ronald McDonald House is a big one for us as well that I didn't mention, and we are able to help. We've got personal friends that we've been able to help through Ronald McDonald House where their kids are in the NICU and they need some support there and things like that.
But yeah, again, and we do lots of volunteer stuff. We give our employees PTO days off so they can do volunteer opportunities and matching. Charity give backs and things like that. And it just a, again, it's the giving sense that we're trying to instill here in what we're doing.
Pete Hayes: Wow. That's awesome. So hospitals on one side and you do kinda anything commercial, but you've mentioned that car dealerships is something you said they're both difficult. How I can understand the complexities of a hospital. I'm not so sure about the complexities on a car dealership, but why do you need to use a company like yours to go develop those?
Properties.
Michael Clarke: Sure. I mean it, everything. And I, again, you're working on cars, not people, but everything's about coordination for us. And there's quite, the car dealerships aren't just a lot of what car dealerships are these days. They're both the sales side as well as the service side.
And there's a lot of coordination with equipment whether it's lifts or air pumps, compressors, alignment racks whatever it may be. It's, it's not just a kind of plug and play thing. You can't just build it and then the guy shows up and throws it in. There's a lot of coordination that has to go on to make sure that everything's gonna be ready and fit when it comes on site and things like that.
And we love doing stuff like that. We love coordinating complex complex things. We're doing a lot of work. Right now we're doing a big key dealership renovation where they're selling cars and servicing cars all while we're tearing the building apart and adding things on and things like that.
That kind of coordination, that kind of complexity while obviously maintaining people's operations is important to us.
Pete Hayes: If I read this right I believe you have a little bit of a mantra that encourages owners to reach out to you early in the design process, which sometimes you just get left with the blueprints and say, here you go.
Here's your assignment. But te tell me about that. Tell me about why you would want to get pulled in. Early.
Michael Clarke: Yeah, the biggest thing for us in one of our values is communicate expectations. And owners have an expectation at the start of a project of. What they want to accomplish from, not just from the building itself, so what the scope of that project is.
But everybody's got a budget. Everybody's got a schedule that they can meet, and us getting involved early helps them kind of balance those three things of, okay, when do you need to be in? We work a plan backwards from there saying, all right, here's our design milestones, here's our permitting milestones, here's our construction milestones.
What do you need to build this thing for? And we can give them preliminary budgets and budgets as the design progresses to make sure we stay within that. And then obviously, we're trying to make sure that they get all their wishlist, everything they want, but sometimes, you gotta look and say, okay, is it worth that cost?
How much is this worth to me? And we're able to give them that feedback. So again, allowing us to be involved in that process and we do this for the most part, at no cost to the owner. And help coordinate that with the design. Their design team or our design team, whichever it may be in them really helps set you up for success.
'cause by the time you hit the field, you better have a plan for how you're gonna deliver it to meet their expectations. And that's what we do so
Pete Hayes: Well, it sounds like it gives you a jumpstart on. Building the trust because Yes. And a building project, nothing ever goes wrong or nothing ever.
Nothing ever goes, there's
Michael Clarke: Never unforeseen conditions. Yeah. No it's inevitably and we tell that it, every, issue that we encounter is just, we call 'em opportunities to overcome. So we don't talk about it as a problem or a challenge.
And so again, having that trust and establishing it early, like you said is important. And everything we do, we try to be very transparent in how we do it. The pricing process is very transparent. It's everything's open book that we do. It's clear that at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is serve them.
And, again it's a team. Everything's a collaborative approach and that, that's, it's just, it's too hard to do it any other way really is what we find.
Pete Hayes: Mike, let's talk about your leadership style and even, and challenges. You mentioned that this, you're working with your father initially.
You have a younger brother involved and you have a partner. How does that team work?
Michael Clarke: Yeah when we started it was interesting we all knew how to do construction, but maybe not as much know how to run a business. And obviously those are two different things. And so as we.
Kind of settled into our roles it became clear to me that the vision and the culture piece of it were the two things that I really enjoyed working on. And we transitioned into I established myself as the president of the company. And again, my responsibility was to decide or spend time thinking about, where we wanted to go as a company.
And help steer that path. But then also really just set the other guys up for letting 'em do what they like to do. 'cause they still love to build and they're still very involved in that piece of it. They're still very involved. We're all involved in relationships, but they really get in the weeds on some of this stuff.
And let them spend time, really doing the things that they're great at, which is, pre-construction design estimating and building it. And I've enjoyed watching how that has unfolded for us.
Pete Hayes: Wow. You did mention that business seems to be pretty good right now and, yeah, tell me what's behind that and maybe share whatever you can that isn't confidential about what's ahead.
Michael Clarke: Sure, yeah, absolutely. We, when we started with Pair it was maybe, I think it was about nine months ago, maybe nine, 10 months ago. I couldn't have pictured, we would be where we are right now.
It, when he got involved, it really helped us clarify. Exactly what our focus was gonna be and how we were gonna grow. Both here in the Pensacola area where we've had so much success already. And then also, we've been coming up with a plan to expand geographically and we're.
Getting into our first opportunities there. I don't wanna say exactly where we're going 'cause it's still a little bit of a secret, but there's some great opportunities in the other, in a couple other areas in the Gulf Coast that we think are gonna be great for us. But I also, I don't wanna dismiss that it hasn't had an impact on what we would we had been doing.
I really feel like it helped us level up and become more professional. Our message and how we deliver that message, how we prepare proposals, how we talk to owners, how we communicate with them. And it's just, I'm so excited where we are and I'm even more excited that I think we have a lot of, still a lot of room for growth in how we're doing things.
And, PAIR has helped us tremendously. That even to the point where we're doing some internal promotions to focus on more marketing and even team development stuff that, while you don't think marketing is team development, Paris has been great for us in helping train our team and sales and business development and things like that.
A again, it's, the reason we're gonna have our best year ever this year is a lot of our hard work, but also a lot of the work that p has done with us. So
Pete Hayes: Tell me p this is Para Ostrom, the the Chief marketing Officer, fractional Chief marketing Officer from Chief Outsiders that that you tapped through Karen's help.
Yep. How is your how is your view of what quote marketing is evolved in this process?
Michael Clarke: Yeah, I didn't know, we'd always argue what's business development, what's marketing? Is that, where does advertising fall within that? I think it's more. For us it's, I don't wanna call it brand 'cause a lot of it is brand, but it's really talking about and clarifying what it is that you want to be and where it is that you want to go and learning how to communicate that message and in what avenues you communicate that message.
A again it's not, when you stop thinking about it as, I'm gonna sh you, I'm gonna push a lot of this stuff out there. Whether people want it or not, or, and start saying, if I can just do a better job of telling what we're already doing, 'cause we're very good at what we do. The results are gonna be there and people are gonna notice.
And that's what he is helped us do again, is it's the message and what we're saying and how we're delivering it.
Pete Hayes: How did you know it was the right message?
Michael Clarke: It's funny, when we sat there and we went through our differentiator and we came up with building peace of mind with everybody in the room, it was like, I, you're always driving for consensus.
You, you never, ever get it. That was the most consensus we had ever had. As a group in our 11 years of existence. And it was just, we walked out. We're high fiving each other. Yeah we got this, did what we just talked about in the words we boiled it down to, that, that's,
Pete Hayes: yeah,
Michael Clarke: that's it.
It wasn't a magic.
Pete Hayes: Tagline. It sounds like just a really crisp de description of who you're Yeah. And
Michael Clarke: it's more, again, it's more what it means to us. Yeah. And the way we communicate it to our people and the way we communicate it outside is that's what we've always been doing. But this, again, this just boils it down to, building peace of mind, which is relieving, solving people's problems and relieving their anxiety.
Pete Hayes: So Ha. Had at the time, you heard Karen's talk at your Vistage meeting. Had you been looking for help to solve some things or did just did that up some I. Yeah, no I,
Michael Clarke: we were not looking at all and again, we had been through a handful of local and not local marketing and advertising agencies who promised a lot and unfortunately just didn't deliver.
And, just hearing her, I knew we needed to do better. I needed, I knew we needed a better approach and. To me, once I heard her talk, it was a no brainer. And that's not always the case when you hear speakers. But with Karen, again, we c we connected on a different level.
She, I could tell she really understood what. We were trying to accomplish and what we needed. And she was instrumental in obviously connecting us with pair and yeah. It's been great.
Pete Hayes: So let's talk about that. So you heard Karen give a talk and then you had a conversation with her.
Yep. We get feedback from clients that, that conversation is it's not a sales call. It's a, peel back the onion discussion. Yeah. Tell me about how, what that was like.
Michael Clarke: So I had always, again she was the first and she has the benefit. Her son is in construction, she told me and they, he's in a similar situation.
She convinced me seller doer model was, is the avenue that we needed to go. But I talked to so many people in the marketing groups and what people don't understand about construction is, we're probably doing 40, 30, 40, 50 jobs a year. People aren't typically Googling who do I need to build my $10 million car dealership?
It's a lot of referral based stuff, and it's a little bit different than your high volume, lower, lower each revenue target will be in a lower revenue target. So she was the first person that talked to me that said, I know exactly what you're saying. You're not crazy.
You are right. And I have somebody that I think can help you with that. It was just, it was very refreshing to hear it, know somebody talk about something that intuitively I knew, but I just couldn't get people to, to get on board with us on.
Pete Hayes: Wow. That, that's good to hear. Any parting advice for your fellow CEOs and other Vistage folks that are walking, watching?
Shout out to your Vistage chair, whose name is.
Michael Clarke: Joe M--his last name is hard to pronounce--here in Pensacola.
Pete Hayes: Okay. Joe M Thanks, Joe. Joe M
Michael Clarke: Yep. And thank you for setting that up. Again and one of, and I should say too and I'll give him a shout out. Brian Ward with Quality Roofing is in my group as well, and he uses Chief Outsiders and he found y'all before Karen presented.
Love loves you guys. So again, what I'll say is, you obviously have to first is and most importantly, have a vision for where you want to go. And second, listen to what, the process that you guys have. You've got this down to a science and again it's not a one size fits all shop.
So the ideas that you've come up with have been fantastic. Catering specifically to our needs, everything is, database where we're tracking what we're doing how, what's the ROI on this stuff and it's, again, it's just been. Great for us. And I can't recommend you guys enough. It's honestly been one of, one of the best decisions that, that we've made in our company history,
Pete Hayes: wow. That's great to hear. And I'll just say if you have any sort of commercial building project and you'd like to build peace of mind to give Mike a call, and anyway, congratulations on building a successful business. It sounds like you're just, in some ways, just at your infancy.
You've got big plans. I'm so excited for you and the team.
Michael Clarke: Yep.
Pete Hayes: I appreciate it, Pete. Thank you very much. All right, thanks Mike, and thanks everyone for joining us on CEO Growth Talks.