Rebranding for the Future: Why Delta Changed and What’s Next

Change isn’t easy—but it’s essential. In this episode of On the Surface, Seth Stevens, Brad Marotti, and Jordan Janet unpack the big moves Delta made in 2025: a major rebrand and a complete organizational restructure.

Discover:
 ✅ Why we kept the Delta name but refreshed our look
 ✅ The thinking behind shifting from geography-based to line-of-business structure
 ✅ How these changes position us for growth and efficiency in a competitive market

If you’ve ever wondered what drives strategic change in a century-old company, this conversation is for you.

Thanks for listening!

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Transcript

*Transcript produced automatically

Seth Stevens (00:05)
Welcome back to On the Surface, where we're talking all things heavy construction, material supply, and general business. I'm one of your hosts, Seth Stevens, and this week I'm joined by fellow regulars, VP of Operations, Brad Moratti, and division sales manager, Jordan Janet. This week we're discussing branding and structure changes made during 2025 and the thought process behind them.

here's the conversation.

Jordan Janet (00:34)
How long have you been in the division manager's role?

Seth & Brad (00:39)
I close to two years. Two years? A year and a half. Yeah.

Jordan Janet (00:44)
Feels longer than that.

Seth & Brad (00:46)
I'm sorry.

Jordan Janet (00:47)
No, not in a bad way. mean there's a lot has happened in a year and a half to two years. Yeah. So I mean, that's a heavy first two years as a VP or as a division manager, right? And I guess was the first major change, the rebrand.

Seth & Brad (00:51)
It's a lot of change.

the first major change was. Yeah, I think we're just a few months, I was a few months into the role. Yeah. Trying to make a decision on, you know, we want to look, you know, we're a division of Reeves. how do we connect ourselves with Reeves, but also remain, you know, keep the culture that we have at Delta because it's special. So we went through this big rebrand.

Jordan Janet (01:06)
For you?

Seth & Brad (01:33)
Mm-hmm initiative and ⁓ came to decide that keeping the Delta name was the best choice Just changing up the logo to look more similar to Reeves connect us with our our parent company and Reeves Yeah, that was the first major initiative took yeah change management. It took it takes a long time I remember being in Denver last fall. I think I was there for like mentoring matters and

Like I'm just getting blown up on text messages of like proofs of logos and all this stuff. And I'm just like drawing on my iPad and everything. yeah, I was like, oh boy, here we go. And I'm just trying to mock stuff up, like play around, get any sort of creative juices going. And if you can believe it, they all sucked that I drew. Yeah. I liked them. Oh, thanks man.

Jordan Janet (02:26)
I do believe them.

But I think in like obviously what we ended up settling on definitely is reflective of Reeves brand image, right? ⁓ But I don't know, maybe to me, maybe I'm making more something than what it really is, but you know, it's bigger than that too. I mean, we needed, we were looking for a refresh. We were looking to modernize things. We were looking to, I mean, obviously a lot of changes have been made since, but ⁓

Seth & Brad (02:58)
Hmm.

Jordan Janet (03:00)
rebranding and freshening the brand, I think kind of kicks off that momentum of.

Seth & Brad (03:05)
We're going to change. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. That's good point. It is. We did want to initiate this mentality of we need to be something different. We need to be something new in our market. And that really kicked off that, you know, the reorganization today, which at the time that wasn't really, that wasn't a thought. we knew at that time that we needed to be something different in our market.

challenging times were ahead. mean, we were already thinking that way.

Jordan Janet (03:35)
So had the reorganization conversation started that long ago.

Seth & Brad (03:40)
No. No it was. was this year.

Jordan Janet (03:44)
It kind of came with that same mentality of recognizing we probably need to be something different or something more in our markets than we currently are, speaking in the past, right?

Seth & Brad (03:57)
For sure. I I'm thinking, you know, I guess I hadn't really thought about this in hindsight. You button that up pretty well. It makes it look like, yeah, for sure. I mean, the rebranding was, but I'm thinking back now and I can, I don't know that a week has gone by where at some point I wasn't thinking about what do we look like in the future? What does the market look like?

Jordan Janet (04:06)
this was all planned.

Seth & Brad (04:24)
Like, can we stay as successful as we have been? Who are the players? What do we need to do?

To your point earlier, do we have the right people in the right positions? Are we set up financially for it? You know, all those things. Two years ago, mean, a year and a half ago, we knew that maintaining the success, the level of success that we were at at the time was not, you know, was not gonna be easy. Seeing what was coming over the next few years, we have completed some very large projects that we were successful in getting at good margins in them.

⁓ While we're completing these projects, we're seeing new competitors enter our market, new aggregate competitors, new construction competitors in Arkansas. I mean, knowing that funding levels are either going to stay the same or possibly decrease in the next few years. we were looking, we were in good times looking ahead and saying, we can't, we can't say the same. We're going to, we've got to do something different. We've got to shake things up. We've got to...

How do we shake up the default mindset that we've got right now? That what we've done is what we've done, we've had success with, and this is who we are, and this is who we're always gonna be. And that's hard. Especially when you've got a lot of good people that are doing good things at the time. ⁓ It's hard to get everybody on the same wavelength.

Jordan Janet (06:00)
Any organization, despite their success, if you're not dynamic in changing with the times and morphing with the times, you're not going to have longevity. My grandpa worked for Kodak, ⁓ so I always think about them as a perfect example. You talk about an ultra-successful company from one year to not the next just because ⁓ they were slow to morph, they were slow to react, to be dynamic. it's interesting, it kind of started with this notion of recognizing that piece of it.

right? Hey, we've got success, we've got good people. ⁓ But we're in a dynamic world, we're going to have to be dynamic with it. ⁓ maybe that's part of what and maybe, you know, again, maybe I'm reading too far into it, but that rebranding kind of kicks that off. And it's kind of representative of that, right? ⁓ So then maybe that kind of led to, you know, that way of thinking led to we got to reorganize, right? Is that kind of how that came to be?

Seth & Brad (06:58)
Yeah, yeah, so we.

That's fair. You're saying that mindset just exists.

Jordan Janet (07:07)
Yeah, the mindset of, know, we've got to, we have to, I keep using the word.

Seth & Brad (07:10)
Yeah. Who

knows what the correct order of doing all this stuff was, right? ⁓ Where we are is where we are. But we knew at the time, whenever we were looking at rebranding was we need to be fresh in the market. We know that we maybe even need to be fresh just as a company in how we represent ourselves to ourselves and think about things differently.

And I think what you're saying is like that mindset has existed the whole time. And so that's like a lot of the same mindset that started talking about the reorganization and restructuring back to like a line of business type regions with manufacturing and construction rather than a north and south region by geography.

Jordan Janet (08:03)
I feel like we've talked about it a lot. And when I say we, maybe the three of us and myself and others in the organization, maybe everybody knows. But talk a little bit about that. Why the reorganization? Why did we reorganize, number one, and why did we settle on the organization that we are today? What's that look like and what are the whys behind it?

Seth & Brad (08:27)
in no particular order. I think for me, I mean, there's a couple of reasons. One of the reasons if we're just going to talk about efficiencies would be that just just looking at our structure, looking at the amount of revenue that we did in each region with the management structure that we had and the processes that we had, we're duplicating a lot of functions. And we do, you know, we've got different business lines of business. We've got shops, we've got logistics, we've got construction, we've got asphalt plants, we've got quarries and

They're all split within two states and some of those businesses perform better than others. Their efficiencies are better than others. And you know, there's not a lot of geography between the two of us. The size of our entire division is not too big to combine certain businesses. So you just get to thinking like, are we, why do we duplicate all these functions if we are managing

Asphalt plants and I'm saying these in no particular order but if we're managing asphalt plants better in one state because of the processes that we have Why why do we not have the same processes for both same thing with the shop same thing with construction? So we got I've got the whole efficiency piece which I've truly feel like breaking it into lines of business and managing them that way is going to reduce duplication and

force best practices, because we're putting the right people in place that are managing those businesses, to force best practice for the whole group. So I think we're going to see improvements from that, cost improvements. And then the other piece to me is growth, and it's more mindset change. We do things well in both states.

Construction, we'll talk about construction for a minute. So construction we're doing in both states, we perform very well in both states. There are certain people with more of a mindset for growth naturally. They just have a mindset for growth and they have a mindset for pushing in a new ground. They just have a passion to grow things. that's, I'm talking about Brian in that instance.

Darryl is very efficiency driven. He's going to manage whatever he's put in charge of very well. ⁓ I think just looking at construction.

We've got the frontline supervisors that are going to take care of business no matter who their boss is. They do really good work. We need to shift our construction into ⁓ management that's going to push the growth. We've got to push outside our geography norms, geographic norms. We've got to push outside of the norms for our scope of business. And feeling like moving that under Darrell and Brian was going to get us there faster.

And then also having a dedicated estimating team under Cecilia. She's so good at estimating and the health of our organization is only as good as our ability to pick up work. And she's the best person that we've got for that. So why do we not have her in charge of estimating for the entire group? So that was the mindset there ⁓ under the growth piece. So you've got efficiency piece, you've got growth, ⁓ our manufacturing, our aggregates. We've had some

a history of some inefficiencies there and we really had to make sure that we had the right people in place leadership wise. That's got the technical, aggregate technical knowledge that we've needed and breaking that out and really looking at our aggregate region on its own instead of propping up construction or asphalt plants would force us to make sure that we're managing that business to be as efficient as it can be.

and putting someone in place that has the knowledge, the technical knowledge and experience ⁓ over that, because it's a huge, part of our business. Yeah, well, that's even just externally. I mean, if you count internal sales, it's huge. Like the amount of transactions and stuff that, you know, we're self-supplying What I was thinking in is going to say is like,

know, Colas is a big company, so that's ultimately our parent company based out of Paris. And like we have a Colas subsidiary that owns all of our decentralized named companies, Reeves, Barrett, Simon, Sully, Colaska. Now I just had to name them all, otherwise people might get upset. Colas ⁓ is on...

a top chart as a construction company like in the US and globally like we measure ourselves against Old Castle and Vulcan and CRH and like all of these big companies and they're not they're not nearly as focused on construction as we are like they've really moved into being more material companies and I'm not saying that that's what

we should also be doing, but they definitely are taking an approach where they know that they need to focus on one, growth and acquisition in the US, but two, like being as efficient as they can be in what they do. So historically, we've been very construction focused and construction is just a very different type of business and different mindset from manufacturing.

having that construction leadership and management over manufacturing, I don't think is like the wrong answer, but I don't know that it's made us as efficient as we could be versus somebody who has the mindset of let's be as, let's make this product as cheap as possible. And I want this to like run so smoothly that we have zero issues and construction has nobody to blame. Yeah. Right.

Yeah, so we started looking at a lot of different businesses, how they were structured, how we could best structure our business to manage all of our lines of business the most efficiently. And we decided on breaking it apart before we started putting people into places. You I kind of made it sound like we had these people. We didn't that around them. We didn't. We built the structure. Building a strategic org chart, right?

Jordan Janet (15:13)
built to strike.

Seth & Brad (15:19)
thinking about here's what we need done and here's what positions should probably exist to get that accomplished. And now. And we talked about it for a while. It felt like it was going really fast through it and then I've thought about it recently and weeks flew by where we just talked about different iterations of it and. Back and forth, is this a good idea? Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. There are a lot of those conversations. Yeah.

Jordan Janet (15:52)
And speaking of that org chart, you did post that in GroupMe, another GroupMe plug, by the way. For those of you listening that do want to, if you want to have that visual in front of you and see what that looks like, the org chart that Brad walked us through is posted on GroupMe.

Seth & Brad (15:59)
Yeah, that's

That's the final iteration with you know, what we feel is best placement of people on our team I mean can't even tell you we didn't save different versions. ⁓ yeah, I did. you did went through a lot Like Brad said, mean if a lot of the time is like is this even a good idea? Mm-hmm. Are we really dumb for thinking about doing this? Like then, you know, we we talked about it we created a

We mapped it out a few different ways and then we went to Zach and went to Tracy, went to a lot of the folks that have a lot of experience and are managing at a higher level and everyone thought it would be a good thing for us. ⁓ yeah, this isn't something that we threw together ⁓ in a few weeks and are completely going rogue.

Jordan Janet (17:08)
I think what you said, I guess I kind of walked you into it with when I was talking about, it started with the mentality of, we're going to have to be flexible and dynamic and change with the changing environments that we're in if we're going to continue to grow and not just maintain or worse. And we were successful with the organization that we had before and I think what you did was just kind of looking forward as we've, yes, we had success with the structure that we,

operated under up till this point. What structure is going to allow us growth and success in the future in these changing environments? Because things have changed. Big competitors come into the market like you said, both on construction and in aggregates, in manufacturing. ⁓ So yeah, again, I think I just keep looping back to that. It's ⁓ looking for that, you know, remaining dynamic and how can we change with changing times and...

Seth & Brad (18:06)
Well, I think the idea is to change in order to sustain before you hit the bottom, right? Which we might have been, you know, in some areas of our business, we might have been a year or two too late in some of that. ⁓ But I think that the idea of change in general and what you're talking about is stay ahead of the curve or at least with it so that you don't get left behind and you're not...

fighting for your life at the bottom. And then every move feels like a thousand pounds on your chest. Because we just want to be... And I'm excited about it. I'm confident in all the changes that we've made, not because they're maybe the best ideas, but we have great people to carry it out, right? That's the only way that this is going to be successful.

We've known that and we wouldn't have proposed such a large change if we didn't know that we had an awesome team to carry this out. So, I mean, we still got a long way to go. Yeah. We've still got a lot ⁓ of things that we're working through and working out. ⁓ People still aren't completely clear on their new, you know, their new role and their new responsibility, their new responsibilities.

We're officially rolling it out in January. We're kind of working the rest of the year to map out what it looks like and making sure that we don't have any holes. We're not going to leave any gaps in management.

Jordan Janet (19:42)
And most importantly is we're supporting those individuals in those roles. They've got to know that this is your new role, this is what it looks like, and they've got support from management ⁓ that's going to get them the resources, the knowledge, the training, if there is any, that they need to be successful in those roles. They're the right people for those roles. ⁓ they've to know that we've got the support.

Seth & Brad (19:54)
yeah.

Yeah.

Follow-up to all that is super key as well. I mean, it's pretty fresh right now, but following up and leaning on everybody that's actually experiencing all this stuff firsthand is key as far as seeing how it's going for them, testing the water, seeing what was wrong and what we need to change to fix it and all that kind of stuff. Taking all their ideas and their experiences to tweak it to make it the best way possible is going to be key.

We're not there yet. We can't talk about this thing like it's a success. No, this is we're after. I'm confident that it will be because of the people that we have in place. I've got confidence in them. Not as much our plan. no matter what plan that we would have come up with, with the people that we have executing it, then I think it's going to work out well. from looking at the efficiencies and looking at what we want to do,

Jordan Janet (20:41)
work.

Seth & Brad (21:05)
of what we want to do as a business as far as our vision for three to five years out, we feel like this is the best path to get to that quickly. yeah, we've still got a lot of work to do and we need some wins. We need some quick wins. We need to celebrate those. There's a book called Eight Steps to Change. Leading Change is the name of the book.

Jordan Janet (21:12)
Yeah.

Seth & Brad (21:35)
and it's eight steps to get to that changes by John Cotter. There you go. Working through that right now and it's really good. It applies to this situation and it kind of lays out some steps and I feel like we've done a pretty good job so far of working those steps. But we still got, you know, we're on step like two. Right? We've still got a long way to go. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

I mean, it'll be a long process with the intent of it being to support us in years from now. I mean, I don't think that it would be fully the best it could be until years from now, you know? And that's the purpose of getting ahead of the curve is to go through the growing pains while we can support it and then be ready for the...

I don't want to call it a war, so somebody come up with another. The journey. Be ready for the journey. Yeah. Because I don't think it'll be a war, but you know, it's fun times. Feels like that sometimes. With me? Yeah. Maybe with you, no. Yeah, that's right. We've been doing a lot since, you know, over the last year and a half.

Jordan Janet (22:52)
No, I'm kidding.

Seth & Brad (23:03)
That's true. There's been a lot of change and something that we're always pushing and trying to get by in and it...

Sometimes. ⁓

Jordan Janet (23:14)
Yeah, change is not easy. But it's for the better.

Seth & Brad (23:19)
But what? For the

better. for the better. Yeah. Agreed. There are a lot of good quotes that I can't think of. The exact way to say them with change. If you don't change, you die. Yeah. I don't think that's the quote. No, that's exact. Bradman. Yeah. Look it up. You're the Google guy. There are a lot of good change quotes. That's true. Very fair. ⁓ One thing you can always count on, and that is change.

I thought it was death and taxes, but...

Like I said, look it up.

⁓ man. yeah, here's a good one. This is what you're looking for. Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Yeah, that was close. Wow.

Jordan Janet (24:12)
You were almost there.

Seth & Brad (24:15)
Yeah, maybe only missed a couple words, but...

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.

I'm just kidding. They're all, it's, I was just thinking about change at in general, as we were talking and I was talking with somebody the other day and they were just talking about how it's kind of an interesting like interview question sometimes for them is to ask people what their appetite is on change from like a one to a 10, one being I never change anything to 10 being I changed just for the fun of it. And some people answer.

you know, it'd be pretty low or whatever. for some people it's high just because they're of the mindset of, you know, if you don't change, you don't know if something doesn't work. I think you can just turn right back around. I naturally like it. Yeah, me too. Because I feel like things can be better. It's a way to rule things out, Like you don't know if something doesn't work unless you try it.

Seth Stevens (25:31)
All right, I hope you now have a better idea of the thinking behind decisions made on a regular If you have enjoyed the episode, please rate our show and leave a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and check out Delta on all social media platforms at Delta Companies and our website at deltacos.com. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next week.