Business of the Month: Timing and opportunity opening doors for Sudbury engineering firm

There’s a lot going on at Prospec Engineering and Architecture.

In the last two and a half years, the Sudbury company has expanded to Timmins, acquired an existing firm, grown its scope of practice, and hired new staff.

But as principal engineer Greg Milks can tell you, the path to success doesn’t always follow a straight line.

Launched in 2016, the firm has had to spend a bit of time on the backburner while its sister company, Prospec Fabrication, got all the glory.

The latter was created in 2019 as a design-build firm, designing, engineering and fabricating custom work for clients primarily in the mining sector.

Work was plentiful and the shop stayed busy, setting the stage for the engineering division to start taking shape. But then COVID intervened and threw a wrench in their plans.

“One of our fabricators that we were using quite heavily actually shut down, so we had an opportunity to purchase them and we, overnight, became a fabricator,” Milks said.

“So that really pulled away from the engineering side of the business and put us almost directly in the fabrication spotlight.”

Prospec Fabrication has been humming along since, from its 20,000-square-foot shop west of Sudbury, which employs 24 people.

As things levelled out, thoughts returned to the engineering division, Milks said, and in 2023 they began onboarding employees to that side of the business.

With a background in mining engineering, Milks said he saw the potential to expand to booming Timmins, where a number of mining and mineral exploration projects are underway.

The company set up an office with a part-time employee and started making inroads to the community.

Around the same time, Milks connected with Barry Martin, the proprietor at Barry H. Martin Engineering and Architectural Consulting Firm, who’d been providing services to Timmins and the surrounding area since 2012.

Martin, as it turned out, was looking to retire, and suddenly Prospec was presented with an opportunity for an acquisition, which is now underway.

“That just catapulted us into Timmins,” Milks said.​

​Prospec now has five full-time employees in Timmins, and a sixth that shares their time between the Timmins and Sudbury offices. The move brings their staff to 41 across locations, and has enabled the company to add architectural design to its list of services.

In Sudbury, the oldest staff member is in their early 30s. By contrast, Timmins’ oldest staff member is in their 70s. Together, they bring a unique mix of youthful exuberance and time-earned knowledge to the firm, which Milks believes gives Prospec a solid base of expertise to draw from.

“We've got a pretty good range of people, and it's neat to see the integration between the younger group and the older group, and how they work together,” he said. “It's very, very fluid.”

Specializing in residential, commercial, institutional, and mining-related projects, Prospec works with clients from initial concept design through to project completion, providing architectural and engineering design services, contract procurement assistance, construction administration, and project close-out certification.

In Timmins, Barry H. Martin had had a long association working with Indigenous communities, and Milks said this is one area in which he anticipates seeing more growth.

“The push for certified engineered projects is heavier than ever, and there's also a lot of development going on,” Milks said.

“So, the communities are growing in size and, fortunately, we're able to assist in that from the design perspective, from the architecture perspective, making sure that everything is built to code.”

Prospec has also recently had the opportunity to take part in a research and development project with a major Northern Ontario mining company.

After answering an industry call to devise a solution for cleaning out blast holes underground, Prospec was paired with a research partner to mock up a 3D model and design specifications on a solution.

Two years into the project, Milks said, the first prototype has been built and is now undergoing initial testing before being sent underground for real-world trialling.

He's optimistic about the impact this new solution can have on the sector as a whole.

“That unit has the potential to be supporting mines in different areas, because it's an ongoing issue that affects most operations,” Milks said.

As Prospec finds its place in the engineering landscape, he said the company continues to grow the business and expand its profile Sudbury, Timmins, across the North and beyond.

"It feels great to have different teams in different areas, and then when we have a larger project, be able to bring the teams into that project and just work with a team on how we approach different things."