The Construction Source

THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA with Omar Miller, now HSS’ Director of Field Operations. He recalls that Omar was “able to connect with workers on site like no other manager could, includingmyself.” In turn, Omar recognized an organizational talent in Brandon, and he invited Brandon to join his team within the scaffold division of the company they both worked for. “I was personally fascinated by the scaffold trade,” Brandon says. “Scaffolding is like big boy K’nex, with an added level of sophistication and engineering. So I joined Omar’s team.” Omar, meanwhile, has been in scaffolding for close to 30 years, and he’s long been recognized as one of the industry’s leading experts. “Omar is driven, and highly- skilled,” Brandon says. “There’s almost nothing he can’t do when it comes to scaffolding. There are times where people have said: ‘That’s an engineering impossibility,’ only for Omar to find a way to accomplish the task. That’s why he’s known as the ‘scaffold guru’” across Canada. A worksite tragedy on the scaffolding team forced Brandon’s role with the team to pivot drastically as soon as he joined. There was a site fatality on the night shift, which greatly affected Omar and his team. In the aftermath, Brandon was designated as a “safety eye” for the scaffold division. This allowed him to study the inner workings of a scaffold division in the industrial setting and identify inefficiencies and issues with the way the industry treated scaffold. “This is what inspired me and Omar to team up and form Hinton Scaffold Solution,” Brandon says. “We both believed you have to be the change you expect to see. So that’s what we did.” Brandon and Omar’s previous company was based in Western Canada, but they came to Ontario to start HSS, which meant they didn’t have a lot of existing relationships to