Impact at scale: Douglas Dayton

Douglas Dayton had barely started as CEO of MEI Industrial Solutions – then MEI Rigging & Crating – when he told his wife of 38 years that she probably wasn’t going to see much of him over the next couple of months.

He had joined in November 2023 just as one fiscal year was ending and planning for the next was beginning. The company had a new private equity partner in Olympus Partners. Its Founder was stepping back. And Dayton, taking over a business with locations across the United States, knew there was only so much he could learn from a spreadsheet. So he hit the road.

"I physically went to every single office," he tells The CEO Magazine. "You need to get out there and meet the people and experience the culture. And you need to listen, listen, listen."

A strong foundation

At the time, MEI Industrial Solutions had close to 20 regional locations. Dayton visited them all, talking to senior leaders and field crews, looking for things no typical due diligence process could fully reveal. What he found surprised him. From one location to the next, the same values, pride and commitment to clients and employees kept showing up.

"The commonality I found early on was the uniformity in MEI’s core values," Dayton says. "The core values were so ingrained in every single operation. I didn’t need to rebuild the foundation – the foundation was already built.

"What I needed to do was essentially build and scale the infrastructure to support that growth: professionalize the organization, build out the infrastructure, grow the team and then scale the business from regional operations to a national footprint."

Less than three years later, MEI Industrial Solutions has 29 locations, more than 2,500 employees and is projected to exceed US$1 billion in revenue this year – up from roughly US$325 million. Revenue and EBITDA have both tripled during Dayton’s tenure.

"We, quite candidly, established ourselves as the go-to premier national industrial solutions provider," he says with a smile.

Built to lead

The company’s transformation may have accelerated under Dayton, but the instincts behind it were developed much earlier. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with an architectural engineering degree and joined Professional Service Industries, where, at just 22, he was handed responsibility for a small eight-person branch in Louisiana.

"I remember thinking that I had made it," he says jokingly.

The significance went well beyond the size of the team. Suddenly, Dayton was responsible for sales, revenue, profit, quality and safety. It wasn’t lost on him that this was an unusually early introduction to the business side of engineering.

"If I didn’t get thrown into that early in my career, I think I would’ve probably taken the more technical route," he reflects.

Instead, it set him on a path toward senior leadership and, eventually, the CEO seat.

At MEI Industrial Solutions, Dayton has applied that same problem-solving mindset to growth. With two-thirds of the company’s expansion over the past three years coming organically and the rest through acquisitions, he focused on building the infrastructure to support a national footprint, adding leadership across mergers and acquisitions, legal, business intelligence, safety, sales and operations.

"We had a lot of dots on the map and they were phenomenal locations, but they were more regional and local," Dayton points out.

"When you go from local to regional and then from regional to national, you have growing pains. And that played well to my strengths – organizing us from a regional provider to national where we could start approaching larger clients with nationwide operations."

Following the customer

As MEI Industrial Solutions set out on its expansion journey, it naturally began taking on a bigger identity led by customer demand. Founded around rigging and crating, the company was increasingly being asked to provide logistics, storage, millwrighting and other services involved in the movement and installation of mission-critical equipment.

Eventually, Dayton and his team called a timeout, allowing them to step back and evaluate.

"It became apparent that we had become far more than just a rigging and crating company," he says. "We had grown to become an industrial solutions provider, solving clients’ problems and doing it with the greatest quality and safety."

That realization prompted the rebrand in 2025, shifting the company from one link in a fragmented vendor chain to a trusted partner capable of solving more of the customer’s needs – and it came just in time.

Not long after, MEI Industrial Solutions was approached by one of its largest national data center customers who needed support in Chicago, an area the company wasn’t yet operating in. With the strength of the company behind him, Dayton didn’t hesitate before saying, "We’ll go there for you."

Within roughly 45 days, a lease was secured, operations were established and the customer’s equipment was stored.

"For us, it’s customer-first and listening to them and responding to their needs. Basically, it’s being a trusted partner to our clients," he says.

"When you’re a trusted partner, the client will take you in. But you have to gain that trust. You can’t do it after one project, you have to perform and provide value to the client consistently. That is a mindset we’ve instilled into our culture."

Everyday impact

In this line of work, trust arguably matters even more since the equipment MEI Industrial Solutions handles is often critical – even if most people will never know the company was there.

"MEI impacts the everyday life of every single person in the world," Dayton points out.

"It’s behind everything from the manufacturing of cars and planes to the medicines we take and the food and beverages we digest. Smartphones, laptops, semiconductors, data centers – everything people use on a day-to-day basis, MEI touches."

Its teams could be installing mission-critical equipment inside a data center one day and moving a full-scale prototype space shuttle built by NASA through the streets of Los Angeles another.

Or they could be contributing to something far more consequential. Dayton recalls stopping a couple of employees during his Southern California road trip as they were heading out on a job to see where they were going. They told him they were installing a piece of equipment at a medical facility. Dayton kept asking questions and the story became even bigger – the equipment was being used to make artificial heart valves.

"I stood back and was like, ‘Wow, you are actually putting in equipment that’s going to save lives,’" he recalls thinking. "It hit me – at MEI, we save lives. That story still resonates with me three years later."

Ready for what’s next

The work may be bigger than the numbers, but Dayton isn’t losing sight of them. Crossing US$1 billion will give MEI Industrial Solutions reason to celebrate, but he is already looking beyond the milestone.

His sights are set on doubling again over the next three-to-five years and he is excited to announce that the company’s next chapter will be with a new private equity partner, 26North, which recently signed a definitive agreement to acquire MEI from Olympus Partners. International markets could eventually follow, while reshoring and investment in advanced manufacturing, data centers and semiconductors continue to create demand at home. Yet the further the company grows, the more important people and culture become.

"You can buy all the equipment in the world and have so many leases and warehouses, but if you don’t have the people to run it and foster it then you’re going to get nowhere," Dayton insists.

"The number one thing to us is taking care of our people. We’re here to serve our employees and support them."

For Dayton, safety is one of the clearest ways that commitment shows up in practice.

"A lot of companies say they’re safe, but we live it – and our record proves that," he says.

As MEI Industrial Solutions enters its next chapter, the ambition is to keep growing without losing sight of what makes that growth possible.

"We’re always going to strive to be the undisputed national leader in the mission-critical industry solution market," he says. "There’s a lot of pressure that comes with being number one – and it’s not just in revenue either. It’s in quality, safety, employee satisfaction, customer centricity and innovation.

"That takes a team, and we’re very proud of the team we have."