At the start of the month, Hoskinson Contracting and Hoskinson Concrete sent reduction in force letters to 136 employees in Gillette. The governor’s office called it “one of the most significant layoffs Wyoming has ever seen” and raised alarm bells about the state losing skilled construction and trades workers.
Charles Hoskinson cofounded the companies, along with the Hoskinson Health and Wellness Clinic, which is looking at an expansion in the next few years. He’s also the CEO of Input Output Group, a blockchain research and engineering company.
He said Gov. Mark Gordon’s claim overlooked several large coal industry layoffs in the past decade, adding his family’s focus has been and will be on revolutionizing healthcare.
He spoke with Wyoming Public Radio’s Nicky Ouellet about the role he sees his companies playing in Gillette and the state.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Nicky Ouellet: What was your vision when you formed Hoskinson Contracting and Hoskinson Concrete back in 2022? Were these meant to be forever companies, or were they just formed to help build the Hoskinson Health and Wellness Clinic?
Charles Hoskinson: It's kind of an accidental company. We wanted to build a massive medical facility in Gillette, Wyoming that would become kind of a regional hub, like a Mayo Clinic is to Rochester.
The challenge is that in Campbell County, no one's ever really built anything quite like this. It's not a small town, but it's not a big town. It's not really set up for a massive medical facility with tier one surgeons and cancer treatments and medical research and all these types of things.
So when we started building it, we used local contractors, and the first phase was over budget. It took an extra nine months. The quality really wasn't there. We were deeply frustrated and we said, ‘You know, it would be really cool if we just built a companion construction company to help facilitate the construction of the clinic.’
We set up the contracting company. We started scaling and expanding it, and we really grew it, because the next phase of the clinic went from 10,000 square feet to about 60,000 square feet.
Then, what we were doing is trying to make a strategic decision: Did it make sense to stay in the construction business? Taking custody of that medical facility is gonna take one to two years. What did the construction company do in the meantime while we're waiting for the next major phase?
We looked at some local contracts and bids, and they came at various sizes, but we really couldn't find anything to justify $20 million in payroll and hundreds of people floating around.
So we said, what makes sense is to change the model a little bit. Let's preserve the really good locals, the master electricians, the plumbers, the architects, the project managers, which is about 43 people. Then let go of people, starting with people who were out of state, like the Californians that came over and the Floridians and the Texans and some of the divisions that came from South Dakota, like concrete, for example. Let's let those guys go and give them a 60 day severance and try to work and see who can go to other places, either my other companies or throughout the state.
It's a natural thing about construction. There's ebbs and flows.
NO: This doesn't apply to many companies in Wyoming because we're so small, but federal law requires most employers to give a 60 day heads up to workers and state and local representatives, if their company employs more than a hundred people and they're planning mass layoffs. Did you file a WARN notice [Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification]?
CH: Yes, we did. And that's why the governor knew and commented on it.
Editor’s Note: WPR asked the governor's office to share a copy of the WARN notice, and the Department of Workforce Services sent it over. It says Hoskinson has decided to focus their energies on the clinic, and don't plan to do any construction. It says "your last day of employment will be January 31," and set a follow up meeting for information about separation, benefits and final compensation.
CH: We're following all the requisite laws. Sixty-day severance is the salary and all the requisite benefit tails and these other things are being followed.
What we tried to do is see if we could relocate people to other business divisions if they had these skills. That's why we were able to hold on to more than 40. We also gave referrals to other construction companies where and when that made sense.
NO: In the past couple years, you've created a pretty large presence in Gillette. So I've got two questions. How do you see these layoffs affecting the local community? And are you planning to continue that presence – why are you putting roots down here in Gillette?
CH: It's kind of a funny thing. We've put $200 million into Gillette. We built the largest medical center in the entire state that's family owned and operated. We take care of 18,000 people and that center continues to grow, and it's the center of excellence for not only patient care, but also medical research.
It's the only center in the entire state that has a mandate and focus to do clinical trials for stem cells and actually heal our wounded warriors and heal burn victims and treat people who post cancers who have been damaged by chemotherapy, regrow limbs – all the kinds of sci-fi stuff that we've been promised for 30 years is gonna come, but never seems to come. We're actually doing that stuff.
My parents live in Gillette. I have a residence in Gillette. My brother lives in Gillette. We have very strong roots there. They've been physicians there for nearly 10 years and they've taken care of thousands of people. We deeply care about this community, and I wouldn't have invested hundreds of millions of dollars and I wouldn't have brought some of the most talented people in the world there.
These are the jobs that Gillette needs. When we look to the future in the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, we need new industries like biotechnology. We need a revolution in medical education and medical practice, and I really do believe the clinic can become one of the economic backbones. It still continues to grow, [it’s] one of the largest employers in the town, and I have a belief that over time it'll become the largest employer in the town.
The construction company was a means to an end, meaning it was there to build this facility.
NO: You've talked a little bit about phase three [construction of the clinic].
CH: Phase three is gonna add surgery and cancer. It's probably gonna be well over a hundred thousand additional square feet, so we're probably not gonna be in construction on that until optimistically early 2027, pessimistically the end of 2027.
Now, in parallel, we're also talking about biotechnology. There's stem cell manufacturing, stem cell harvesting. Some of that's in Gillette. Some of that's with partner organizations like the University of Wyoming. We've already given $2.2 million to the University of Wyoming.
We're developing devices to extract stem cells much more easily for older people, because it's very invasive right now when you extract adipose-derived stem cells. I just wanna make it like a patch.
NO: Do you see your construction company scaling back up to meet those needs when you start building again in 2027?
CH: No, I think the issue is we're gonna do owner rep now. I think for what we do, it's a better model because, really, when you think about construction, there's three things you care about: time to completion, the quality of completion and the cost. Those are your three big things.
You bring a GC [general contractor] in and now you have a firm to attach to the GC that acts as your quality control gate and your timekeeper. Also, it acts as the purse keeper. They regulate the money flow.
You write a contract with the GC where our people work alongside with the GC and they inspect the work in stages and they make sure everything's in Procore [Construction Management Software] and everything's done right.
Then we release money in tranches after the fit and finish is to our satisfaction. There's a lot of institutional knowledge that we've built up over the last two years that where we know what good looks like, and that's really the value of what's happened over the last two years.
