Stantec’s C$9.2B Backlog Gives Susan Reisbord a CEO Head Start
Most CEO handovers are expensive panic dressed up as strategy. Stantec is doing the smarter thing: changing leaders with C$9.2 billion of contracted work already in the bank.
Most CEO handovers are expensive panic dressed up as strategy. Stantec is doing the smarter thing: changing leaders with C$9.2 billion of contracted work already in the bank.
That is the real story behind Stantec’s second-quarter numbers and today’s August 13 investor call. The company is not asking Susan Reisbord to walk into a burning building when she takes over as president and CEO on October 1. It is handing her a business with momentum, margin expansion, a record backlog and, most importantly, a runway long enough to make decisions without flinching.
That is what proper succession looks like. And it is rarer than it should be.
The numbers give Reisbord something most new CEOs never get
Stantec reported C$1.8 billion in second-quarter net revenue, up 11.5% from the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA rose 17.1% to C$332.9 million, while the adjusted EBITDA margin reached 18.7%, up 90 basis points. Its C$9.2 billion contract backlog was up 17.5% year on year — roughly 13 months of work already contracted.
That last number matters more than most people realise.
A CEO can talk about culture, transformation, innovation and purpose until everyone falls asleep in the boardroom. But a C$9.2 billion backlog gives a leadership team time. Time to hire properly. Time to fix systems. Time to choose which markets deserve more capital. Time to say no to bad work. Time to improve the business instead of merely surviving the next quarter.
Stantec also lifted the lower end of its full-year adjusted EBITDA margin target from 17.6% to 17.8%, while raising the top end from 18.2% to 18.3%. That is not a fireworks display. It is better: evidence that the company is extracting more profit from the work it already has.
The firm’s adjusted EPS of C$1.61 rose 18.4% in the quarter. It repurchased 1.67 million shares for C$175.9 million in the first half. Net debt to trailing adjusted EBITDA sat at 1.3 times, within its internal target range of 1.0 to 2.0 times.
In plain English: the incoming CEO is inheriting growth, decent financial discipline and enough balance-sheet room to keep playing offence.
Gord Johnston is leaving the job, not throwing the keys over the fence
Gord Johnston will retire as Stantec’s president and CEO on October 1 after eight-and-a-half years in the role. He will remain on the board as vice chair. Reisbord, currently chief operating officer for North America, will become president, CEO and a board member on the same date.
That detail matters.
The lazy view is that keeping the outgoing chief around is always a problem — a former boss lurking in the halls, second-guessing the replacement, creating two centres of power. It certainly can be. I have seen founders and CEOs claim they are “supporting the transition” when what they really mean is they cannot let go.
But the answer is not to banish every outgoing leader. The answer is to define the lanes before the change happens.
Stantec’s structure gives Reisbord the operating job and the board seat. Johnston gets a governance role as vice chair. One person runs the company. One person supports continuity at board level. That is the right order of things.
The test will be whether the company sticks to it after October 1. If Johnston becomes the unofficial escalation point for worried executives or clients, the transition will get messy quickly. If he remains available without becoming a shadow CEO, Stantec gets the benefit of institutional memory without the usual political nonsense.
This is a succession built from inside the machine
Reisbord is not being parachuted in from a rival with a glossy biography and no feel for how the place actually works. She has more than 30 years of industry experience, joined Stantec in 2021 through its acquisition of Cardno — where she had been CEO of Cardno Inc. — then ran the Environmental Services business before becoming North America COO in 2025.
North America is Stantec’s largest operating unit. That makes the role more meaningful than a fancy title on an org chart. It means Reisbord has already been running a large part of the engine she is now being asked to lead.
There is a lesson here for boards: succession is not a last-year project. It is an operating system.
If your most credible successor cannot run a major business line, deal with clients, manage a serious P&L, survive a difficult personnel decision and explain the numbers to investors, they are not a successor. They are a promising executive with a nice LinkedIn profile.
Too many companies confuse visibility with readiness. Someone speaks well at town halls, gets praise from the CEO and looks polished in front of analysts, so the board assumes they can run the company. That is how you end up paying a fortune for a leadership search after reality arrives.
Stantec’s board says this has been a long-standing, board-led succession plan. The proof will not be in the phrase. Corporate statements are full of phrases. The proof is that Reisbord has been given a real operating platform before the top job, and the company has announced the handover months ahead of the effective date.
That is how you reduce risk: not by predicting the future, but by giving the next leader enough exposure to the ugly, commercial parts of the business before the title changes.
The overlooked issue is not growth. It is integration.
Stantec’s quarter was helped materially by acquisitions. Acquisition growth accounted for 7.1% of the 11.5% rise in second-quarter net revenue, primarily reflecting strong results from Page in the United States. Organic growth was 3.7% overall, although the Global business grew organically by 12.8%.
On July 31, Stantec also acquired Niche, a 200-person Australian engineering and environmental consultancy, to bolster Environmental Services.
None of this is automatically bad. Acquisitions can be a terrific way to add capability, talent and customer access. I have made money from buying businesses, and I have watched plenty of operators wreck good assets by buying too much, too quickly, then calling the chaos “synergies.”
The trick is simple to say and hard to do: buy capability, then actually integrate it.
For Reisbord, the most important leadership work may not be announcing a grand new strategy. It may be making sure acquired teams do not become little islands with separate cultures, duplicate systems and quietly departing talent. Professional-services businesses are people businesses wearing spreadsheets. Lose the good project leaders and technical operators, and the acquisition model starts looking far less clever.
Stantec’s margin improvement suggests management has been disciplined on operating costs. But cost control alone is not integration. The better measure is whether acquired talent stays, whether cross-selling actually happens, whether project delivery improves and whether clients feel the benefit rather than the disruption.
That is a management job, not a press-release job.
The contrarian view: boring succession is a competitive advantage
Markets and media love dramatic CEO changes. The founder exits. The activist fight. The emergency board meeting. The celebrity hire on a giant package. Everyone gets to have an opinion and the company gets a few days of attention.
For operators, that is mostly rubbish.
The best succession story is often boring: an internal leader, a clear date, an outgoing chief with a tightly defined role, strong operating numbers and no need to invent a turnaround narrative.
Boring is underrated because boring compounds.
Clients do not want drama from their engineering and design partner. They want the project delivered. Employees do not need a new CEO to arrive with a flamethrower and a 100-day manifesto. They need clarity on who decides, what will change and what will not. Investors do not need theatre either. They need confidence that growth is real, margins are improving and the next leader can execute.
Stantec’s C$9.2 billion backlog does not guarantee Reisbord will succeed. Nothing does. A backlog can be poorly priced, delayed, disrupted or chewed up by execution mistakes. Public-sector spending can change. Integration can go sideways. Demand can soften.
But it does give her the one thing a new CEO cannot manufacture after the fact: room to operate.
What this means for you
If you run a company, stop treating succession as a private conversation between the CEO and the chair. Build it into the business now.
First, identify two people who could plausibly run the company within three years. Not people you like. Not loyal lieutenants. People who can own a number, lead through conflict and make commercial calls when the facts are incomplete.
Second, give them a proper operating test. Put them in charge of a major division, a difficult integration, a turnaround market or a customer-heavy business unit. If they have never had genuine accountability, you are guessing.
Third, write down the outgoing leader’s role before the transition, not after the farewell drinks. Who makes operating decisions? Who owns the board relationship? Who speaks to key clients? What is the escalation path? Ambiguity is where politics breeds.
Fourth, do not wait for a crisis to change leaders. If your next CEO needs a heroic rescue story to prove themselves, you have already made the job harder than it needs to be.
Finally, measure succession the same way you measure any serious investment: does it reduce risk, preserve momentum and improve the odds of long-term compounding?
Stantec’s handover is worth watching because it is not trying to be exciting. It is trying to work. For anyone building a business that should outlive their own ego, that is the whole bloody point.