September 26, 2018
WGI Announces Transformative Leader and Industry Veteran Gregory Sauter, PE Joins Firm as President
West Palm Beach, FL — David Wantman, PE proudly announces that he will be sharing the leadership of WGI with newly hired president, Gregory Sauter, PE and that he will step fully into the role of CEO – a carefully crafted strategic initiative more than a year in the making.
The move, identified last year in WGI’s Strategic Growth Plan, as well as under discussion of its Board of Directors for months, promises to deliver on the firm’s aggressive goals that are rapidly coming to fruition.
“I will be bifurcating my title from President & CEO to just CEO,” says Wantman, who assumed leadership of the firm from his father, Joel, who founded the company in 1972. “Greg has a tremendous reputation in our profession as part of the leadership team with one of the largest firms in the world as it rocketed from a few thousand employees to over 100,000 professionals and the ENR 500 top ranking.
“We are at a unique time in our industry and Greg also has exceptional experience in advancing cutting-edge technologies that are transforming how we envision, design, and deliver infrastructure. That provides WGI with a special opportunity to follow the example and experience of someone fully qualified to assist with the many challenges that WGI will face as we execute our 2025 vision of 1,000 associates and $200 million in revenue.”
Greg Sauter’s qualifications and experience are both broad and deep. He is best characterized as someone operating, “at the intersection of culture, technology, and performance; driving success for organizations via cultural transformation, leveraging advanced technologies, with a commitment to ethics, integrity, and authentic leadership.”
“I am very excited to be joining a dynamic and rapidly growing firm like WGI with such a strong culture and team which punches way above their weight. I am particularly enthusiastic about David’s clear strategic vision for the future and the opportunity to leverage both my industry and technology experience as part of that vision. Digitization is changing our industry and we are excited to be at the forefront of that change,” says Sauter.
During Sauter’s 15 years with the largest design firm in the world, his commitment to ethics, people, leadership, corporate social responsibility, excellence, sustainability, and safety garnered national and international awards including Ethisphere’s 100 most ethical companies list, the Gold American Business Awards, multiple International Business Awards, andNewsweek’s Top 500 Greenest Companies. Sauter is also the co-founder of Smart City Works, the world’s first business actuator, helping to accelerate early stage companies focused on civil infrastructure and advance technologies in mature organizations.
“It is more than just Greg’s leadership and commitment to transformative technology that attracted WGI,” Wantman adds. “His reputation as a civic leader, teacher, humanitarian, entrepreneur, and global thinker dovetails with the vision I and the WGI Leadership Team have for our associates, our corporate culture, and our future.”
The last several years, Sauter’s time has been well spent, beginning with his involvement in Engineers Without Borders as past president and board chairman; as an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York City teaching global entrepreneurship and innovation in civil engineering; as board director of OmniEarth, working with companies that recognize the Earth is a vibrant and interactive system, and therefore these modern global businesses need to understand, manage, and predict the world around them with quantitative geoanalytics; president and chief executive at Crossroads Advisory, a consultancy committed to advancing leadership through executive and organizational transformation, ethics, integrity, and authentic leadership; and as founder of Smart City Works, a business accelerator working to improve livability and resilience in cities through focus on the built environment, dramatically changing the way civil infrastructure is designed, built, and operated.
Greg Sauter will divide his time between New Jersey and WGI’s South Florida headquarters, as well as WGI’s 13 other offices in Florida, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, and Texas.
ABOUT WGI
As a multidisciplinary consulting firm, WGI has 14 offices in six states, serving an active client base in over 30 states, specializing in the following disciplines: Land Development/Municipal Engineering, Transportation Engineering, Parking Solutions, Geospatial Services, Subsurface Utility Engineering, Structures, Water Resources, Landscape Architecture, Environmental Sciences, Architecture, Land Planning, and Creative Services. The Zweig Group ranked WGI #11 on its 2018 Hot Firms list and #23 on the 2018 Best Firms to Work For list. South Florida Business Journal ranked WGI #5 on its 2018 Top 25 Engineering Firms, WGI #61 in its 2017 Top 100 Private Companies, and #16 in the $25M and over category as a 2017 “Fast 50” Honoree from the same publication. In 2018, ENR ranked WGI #250 on its list of the Top 500 Design Firms, #24 on its Top Southeast Design Firms, and #10 in the Florida market. In 2018, WGI ranked #4380 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. For more information, please visit www.wginc.com.
