Creative Brief

Carl Salas and Dan O’Brien founded Salas O’Brien in 1975 with a passion for making a better world through resilient, energy-efficient buildings. Those values underpinned the firm’s success over the next 40 years and were the core of our brand messaging.

In 2012, CEO Darin Anderson and COO Paul Silva led us into an era of unprecedented growth through strategic M&A, carefully developing partnerships with teams that shared the same core values. From 2016-2021, we’d grown 618% in team size and 323% in revenue, yet our focus on high-quality expertise remained the same.

Our former brand communicated our values through the narrow lens of our original capabilities. But our growth had significantly expanded those capabilities, and we needed a new brand that:

• Honored our past
• Included representation for our new capabilities
• Could support continued growth
• Offered incoming merger teams a place to belong within the brand

We began research in 2021 and launched the new brand in March 2023. We carefully crafted new messaging that reflected our post-growth identity and vision for the future and created a modern aesthetic that symbolizes the Salas O’Brien traits are critical to our success—progress, upward momentum, authenticity, energy, confidence, and curiosity. The new tagline, “Engineered for Impact,” is a triple entendre that conveys what we do, how we do it, and why we do it.

Our rebrand helped us increase backlog and revenue, compress merger integration timelines, improve internal collaboration, energize our team around the brand, and engage more people on social media.