Success Underfoot

View This Article in BOSS Magazine

On the cusp of 100 years in business, dedication to excellence remains the Peckham Industries way

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." This perceptive assessment of the nature of work from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a favorite of Damian Murphy, CEO of Peckham Industries.

It’s an apt metaphor for the essential work that Peckham has undertaken over the last 99 years. As the Northeast’s premier paving services and materials specialists, the family-owned enterprise has built a lasting reputation for high-quality craft work, supported by a platform of safety, integrity, dedication, and experience. “I believe that you must give people a vision and a purpose to make them more interested, more productive, and more satisfied in what they do,” Murphy told BOSS. “It's really about giving people a way to contribute.”

The Peckham vision is one that reinforces the excitement of reshaping the world beneath our feet with a fierce dedication to mastery, promise-keeping, and community. The company brings together a host of local tradespeople and craft workers who build the infrastructure of daily living with stone, sand, and bitumen. Since its founding in 1924, Peckham has grown into the area’s leading experts in customized road construction and maintenance, offering expertise in asphalt pavements, aggregates, asphalt binders, emulsions and liquid capabilities, paving and construction services, recycled pavement solutions, milling, quality control, and manufacturing of precast parking garages.

Peckham’s experts produce products that meet and often surpass the most stringent specifications of local, state, and federal authorities. Peckham’s extensive network includes hot mix asphalt plants, stone quarries, bulk asphalt terminals, ready mix concrete plants and liquid and emulsion terminals throughout the Northeast. Every facility is equipped with a full quality assurance laboratory.

The Peckham family of companies includes 11 established and highly successful subsidiaries across New York and New England, including Peckham Materials Corp., providing hot-mix asphalt, warm-mix asphalt, aggregates and emulsions; Dailey Precast LLC, specialists in the construction of parking structures, building systems, sports facilities, bridges, and retaining walls; and commercial paving and construction firms Peckham Road Corp., Palmer Paving Corp. and T. Miozzi, LLC, to name a few

Peckham’s dedicated team embodies a commitment to building strong customer relationships and continued customer satisfaction. It is this dedication to excellence and unmatched experience that has made Peckham into one of the largest road construction and maintenance material suppliers in the Northeast.

As they look toward doubling the company’s size over the next decade, the culture that’s so important to the company’s success has become not just a set of ideals, but the Peckham Way. “It’s about honesty, about respecting and engaging with transparency, learning, having an ownership mentality, about caring for how we contribute and being obligated to do the right thing,” Murphy explained. That goes from safety and sustainability to business performance. “We aim to optimize everything that we measure.”

Safety is a fundamental part of the Peckham Way. Over the last several years, the company’s on-the-job incident rates have dropped precipitously, from a recordable incident rate high eclipsing 8.0 just six years ago to roughly 1.0 in 2022, exemplary performance for a firm employing around 1,000 people. “It’s a testimony to the engagement we've fostered with our workforce at the front line all the way through the middle management to the top. It’s the representation of our values, we protect our family and friends.”

Peckham’s business strategy is important from the perspectives of safety, environmental stewardship, sustainability, and value, as well as family. The organization refers to itself as a “family by choice,” facilitating success on the job site and beyond. Work life rhythm provides a much-needed balance in a trade that often requires long hours in challenging climatic or weather conditions. “We want to be competitive from a compensation standpoint by being realistic, having that right rhythm so we can get our work done in a way that gives people time for their families, for their friends, for their hobbies,” he said.

Murphy is quick to point out that as large public companies increase in scale they change their cultures, and these days that’s happening faster than ever. In contrast, multi-generational family businesses have very defined and lasting cultures. “There's a handful out there that have focused on their culture and used it as the foundation for their multi-generational success. Fortunately, Peckham Industries has been one of those,” he noted. As we accelerate our growth profile, our goal is to really capture and codify our culture, so that as we add new people to the business we will still be instantly recognizable as Peckham Industries even 100 years from now.”

“Our ambition is to grow and bring more family businesses into our organization through acquisition,” he said. “That will sustain us into the future.”

The construction materials workforce is aging with a wave of tradespeople approaching retirement age, attracting young talent is key. Peckham offers abundant opportunities for trainees and craftspeople from every background and educational level. Company leadership is also dedicated to bringing much needed diversity into what has long been a male-dominated, predominantly white industry sector. “We’re offering a great local opportunity for women and for people of color,” he noted. “We just have to be more deliberate about where we source the future workforce.”

Civilization building occurs in a dynamic, constantly changing environment, an exciting draw for anyone desiring to making their mark in their local communities. As Murphy put it, “Whether it’s a paving job with a hot mix plant or work at a quarry or in precast, these environments are not staid. They're continually challenging, continually interesting and we need capable people to deliver in those environments, and it's a great opportunity to make a real contribution locally.”

One of Peckham’s enduring differentiators is the connection workers have with the company and each other. “People spend their career and their lives in our family by choice because we keep a safe and respectful workplace,” Murphy concluded. “We are guided by our mission to empower our people to provide value that serves, members’ purpose, customers growth and communities’ interests. We educate, innovate, and apply technology in a way that is safe, sustainable, inclusive and profitable. We invest a great deal into education, training, and innovation, and applying technology to help us work smarter. We are as thoughtful of each person, as well as each service we perform, or product that we make. Civilization that lasts generations is built upon promises kept.”