Cory Bell and Devin Hartnell of Lindsay Construction walked into the Atlantic Construction Podcast with a combined career arc from Dal engineering grad to Cape Breton Regional Hospital — and a growth story that works precisely because neither of them rushed it.
Lindsay Construction has been building in Atlantic Canada since 1959. By the time Cory Bell (President & CEO) and Devin Hartnell (COO) sat down with host Daniel Arsenault, the company was running 200 to 250 projects a year — everything from small service calls to a $200M-plus hospital JV with one of the country's biggest contractors. Over the prior decade, revenue had grown roughly five to seven times. The question worth asking is not how they found the work. It's how they kept from breaking the machine while they were doing it.
Their answer is unglamorous and highly transferable: grow in jumps, pause, find your blind spots, backfill the people you need, and only then go again.
Grow in jumps — or not at all
The single most useful thing Cory Bell says in 78 minutes is that a revenue jump only earns the right to continue if you stop and interrogate it first. "we kind of felt like are we feeling a little bit out of control? That's the pause — next year get used to where we are, make sure we don't have blind spots," he says. Then you hire the CFO. Then HR. Then a director of legal and risk.
That sequencing is deliberate, not accidental. Bell came up through project management and estimating. When he moved into ownership in 2009 he had to rebuild his professional identity from scratch — learning to read a balance sheet, learning what he didn't know. "I needed to understand the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet — literally — and taking it from scratch," he says. The discipline of that transition shaped how he thinks about company-level scale: you can't outrun your own infrastructure without paying for it later.
For a GC in Atlantic Canada, that's a particularly sharp risk. The region runs on relationships, and relationships take time to build. Blow up your delivery capacity and you lose two: the project and the next referral.
Hire for the thing you can't teach
Both Bell and Hartnell came through the field before management, and that origin shapes Lindsay's hiring philosophy. The company runs a "director series" for continuing professional development and sends new hires toward situations where they have to communicate under pressure — change orders, competing trade schedules, unhappy clients.
That's because the technical side, Bell argues, can be taught on the job. The rest can't. "the physical experience of construction can be taught; it's all of those other intangible characteristics that will define who the highest performers are," he says. Work ethic, communication, commitment, willingness to be in constructive conflict — those are the hiring criteria. Credentials are a floor, not the ceiling.
Hartnell arrived in Halifax from Michigan Tech on his wife's Dalhousie PhD opportunity — his first job was the QE2 hospital expansion, two years on site absorbing the project from field worker to architect to owner. He describes the lesson as learning to hold multiple perspectives at once before opening your mouth. "in order to get better we need to have conflict — if we keep agreeing you're going to make the same mistakes over again," Bell puts it directly. The company culture deliberately surfaces disagreement rather than papering over it.
Bat singles until you've earned the swing
Lindsay's healthcare portfolio didn't start at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital. It started at $7 to $10M projects, year after year, building a sector resume that eventually supported a bid for something twenty times that size.
"we don't swing for the fences — we bat singles all day long and that's how we generate our runs," Bell says. That eight-year staircase is the evidence: the IWK NICU/PICU renovation, the QEII work, smaller healthcare builds across the region, each one a proof point in a sector that demands them before it trusts you with the large work.
When the Cape Breton Regional Hospital tender appeared, Lindsay still didn't have the full resume to bid alone. So they went to Pomerleau — one of Canada's largest general contractors, with a deep institutional healthcare track record — and structured a joint venture. The logic was straightforward: "we want this project — we say okay well this is where we'll play, this is where you'll play, put together the package real seamless with an MOU." Complementary resumes, divided scope, a formal MOU before the bid. Neither party outranked the other; they each had the piece the client required.
Cape Breton also presented a compounded operational challenge: a limited local labour pool, multiple concurrent mega-projects competing for the same trades, and a mobilization premium that Bell estimated at roughly 30% above normal. The JV with Pomerleau was partly about credentials and partly about capacity — two firms sharing the load on a market that was already stretched thin.
Build the team that wants to stay
Retention at Lindsay isn't managed through a loyalty program. It's managed through growth. The company has added new divisions and service lines deliberately as a way to give talented people somewhere to go besides the exit. "our growth is a product of our young smart energetic staff pushing us — we're not losing them, so what do we need to do?" Bell says.
That created the L360 maintenance and energy-retrofit arm (Lindsay360 / LMMW Group Ltd.), launched in 2022. The model is straightforward: buildings need warranty service, facility management, and eventually energy retrofits, and the GC that built them is the most credible vendor for all three. "you buy a car and it comes with a warranty — most construction warranties are a year; this is a program that allows you to stay connected and maintain the buildings," Bell explains. From a business standpoint it extends the client relationship past the ribbon-cutting, captures the last-mile close-out problems that drag on GC profitability, and opens a recurring-revenue stream as building owners face pressure to decarbonize.
For trades professionals watching where construction is heading, that post-construction services tier is where a lot of the next decade's work will sit.
Indigenous partnerships as a labor and community strategy
Lindsay was Atlantic Canada's first contractor to hire a dedicated indigenous relationship coordinator — brought on, Bell says, simply to teach the company. That hire preceded the formal partnership structures by some margin. "we were the first Atlantic Canadian contractor to hire an indigenous relationship coordinator — just to teach us," he says.
What followed were structured labour and mentorship pipelines with First Nations communities, including a formal MOU with Millbrook First Nation covering construction management on Millbrook-procured projects. The explicit goal isn't just filling job slots — it's building community capacity. "our goal is always to bring people on, help train and mentor, and then have them go back into their community and start a small business," Bell says.
In practical terms, this is a talent-sourcing strategy and a community-development program running simultaneously. In a region with a documented skilled-trades shortage, that combination has real competitive weight — particularly on rural and remote mega-projects where the local labour pool can't be manufactured on demand.
The 600 weekly paychecks
Bell chairs the Halifax Partnership's new five-year economic growth strategy. He's sat on the IWK Foundation board (chairing fundraising for the NICU renovation his company built). He's incoming chair of Make-A-Wish Canada. The community board work isn't separate from the business — it's part of how Lindsay signals and attracts the kind of people it wants to keep.
But none of that framing accounts for the rawest line in the episode. Bell describes what keeps him up at night and what gets him up in the morning in the same breath: 600 weekly paychecks. That's the number. Not the revenue, not the hospital project — 600 people depending on the machine working correctly every week.
Post-pandemic, that weight showed up internally too. Bell led a Bell Let's Talk Zoom call for 120 staff and disclosed his own mental health struggles publicly. "I led a zoom call for 120 staff and just said I struggle at times — normalize it — and then people started sharing stories." When a CEO does that, staff open up and the hidden attrition — the quiet exits that nobody talks about until the person is gone — starts to slow. It's a management choice, not a wellness initiative. And it cost him exactly the vulnerability he had to learn to tolerate on the way from PM to president.
The builders behind the projects
Lindsay Construction Limited has been building across Atlantic Canada since 1959 — design-build, construction management, and general contracting across commercial, healthcare, multi-unit residential, industrial, and recreational sectors. A specialist tilt-up concrete builder since the 1970s. Follow them on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Pomerleau Inc. — one of Canada's largest general contractors, delivering building, civil, and infrastructure projects coast to coast. Their institutional and healthcare portfolio made them the right JV partner for Lindsay on Cape Breton Regional. LinkedIn · Instagram.
Guests: Cory Bell, President & CEO, and Devin Hartnell, P.Eng., MBA, COO — Lindsay Construction Limited. Episode 30 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast, published 2022-05-23. Watch the full episode.