Nearly four years after Mike Neal offered eight senior executives the opportunity to buy into KAST Construction, the West Palm Beach, Fla.-based contractor is completing its leadership handoff.
Sean Ouellette, KAST’s president and chief operating officer, will succeed Neal as CEO in December, the company announced. The move follows an internal succession plan that Neal says began in early 2023. KAST publicly announced the eight executives’ admission to its ownership group that June. The eight partners will hold full ownership of the company after the transition; KAST did not disclose the transaction’s value.
“I’ve already retired twice,” says Neal, 70, who spoke with ENR after accepting the 2026 Southeast Legacy Award during the recent ENR’s Southeast Best Projects Awards event in Orlando. Since he joined KAST in 2010, its annual revenue has grown from about $50 million to $702.5 million in 2025. He says the timing leaves him room to pursue other interests.
He points to KAST’s three Florida offices in West Palm Beach, Miami and Tampa as the reason the company is ready.
“They can manage their own business, build their own relationships, and they have a great group of people supporting them,” he says.
“I wanted this to be a really good transition,” Neal adds. “We’re right where we need to be.”
Neal and his existing partners ruled out an outside CEO from the start, wanting to preserve continuity and show employees they could advance into the company’s top positions. Neal says KAST has also identified another generation of leaders who could eventually succeed the current partners.
Ouellette, a 26-year industry veteran, joined KAST in 2016 to launch its Tampa office. He became COO in 2023 and president in October 2025.
As COO, Ouellette spent two and a half years modernizing accounting, human resources, IT, operations and preconstruction. “He had the energy and passion to just immerse himself in that,” Neal says.
Ouellette says KAST had invested heavily in project teams, but rapid growth left its back-office systems in need of support.
“Sometimes you’ve got to take a tactical pause and look in the mirror and say, ‘OK, where are weak spots and what do we need to do?’” he says.
Ouellette is one of the eight partners, who include the top two leaders in each main office: Michael MacDonald and Sean Martin in West Palm Beach, Modesto Millo and Neil Levy in Miami, and Kristine Retetagos and Alex Cervera in Tampa. Jim Rhinehart, who leads market diversification, rounds out the group.
Under that structure, Neal says, a customer building in Miami works with an office led by two shareholders, which reinforces discipline in choosing projects.
“It’s gotta be the right work,” he says. “The right margins, the right contract, the right risk profile for our company, not too big, not too small.”
All three offices report to Ouellette, who regularly reviews their deals and operations.
Ouellette says ownership has sharpened his focus on employees. “You realize very quickly that the only asset that you have as a company is the people that are out there representing you every day,” he says.
It has also changed how the partners work together. “We all worked at the company for many years and were friendly with each other. But we had not worked as partners,” he says. The longer transition gave them time to learn to lead together, which he says a quicker, more transactional handoff would not have allowed.
“Now that the inside of the business is shored up and strong, we can go look forward,” Ouellette says.
Beyond Orlando, where KAST recently signed a lease for an office and is building out a local team, the company is also exploring opportunities in Southwest Florida, including Naples and Fort Myers. “We really think that’s a great market that aligns with our core markets well,” Ouellette says.
The broader shift may be in the project mix. KAST remains heavily concentrated in residential construction, Neal says, but Rhinehart has spent roughly three years developing K-12, higher education, municipal, public safety and other nonresidential work. Nonresidential projects accounted for less than 5% of KAST’s revenue in 2025 and are trending closer to 15% in 2026, according to the company. Neal says the goal is 25% to 30%, diversifying KAST into markets that may be countercyclical to its private-sector work.
Ouellette says pursuing public work has prompted KAST to examine which capabilities from its private projects offer the most value to public clients. One example is its quality-control and quality-assurance program, developed largely through high-rise condominium construction. The program starts in preconstruction, with KAST helping guide the design in a design-assist role. “It’s a service that they don’t always get to the level that we’re providing,” he says.
At the top of the company, some pieces of the leadership structure remain undecided, including whether to fill the corporate COO position or rely on operations leadership within each office. KAST also has no board. Ouellette has discussed forming one and asked whether Neal would serve, though the timing is undetermined.
Whatever Neal’s formal role, Ouellette credits him with showing him how to lead beyond the nuts and bolts of construction.
“He’s very focused on people and relationships, and he has made that absolutely the focus of our business,” Ouellette says. Neal, he adds, “provided the playbook that really works.”
Neal, for his part, plans to stay available.
“I would love to see them become more successful than they already are, and if I can help Sean in any way, I will certainly continue to do that,” he says.
Source: www.enr.com
