Hiring an intact project team from a competitor buys years of working chemistry in one move. It also concentrates legal, client and cultural risk in the same move. Do it only for a sector or market you have committed to, hire each person on their own decision, bring no documents across, and get employment counsel involved before the first conversation.
The pitch always arrives the same way. A project executive you have been courting for a year says yes, and then adds that her senior project manager, her superintendent and her estimator would come too. In one lunch you have been offered a healthcare group, or a Nashville office, or a way into data centers. A whole project team is on the table. It may be the best hire your company makes this decade, and how you handle the next two weeks decides whether it is also the most expensive.
What does hiring an intact project team buy?
Speed and proven chemistry. A team that has delivered together already knows who checks the buyout, who calms the owner and who catches the superintendent’s blind spots. Assembling the same capability one hire at a time takes years and may never produce people who trust each other.
Consider what such a group carries. Say the four of them deliver $60 million of work a year for their current employer at a 4 percent margin. That is $2.4 million of annual gross margin produced by people who need no introduction to each other.
The number explains both sides of the event. It is why you want them, and it is why their employer will not shrug when they leave on the same Friday. A contractor that loses a single project manager grumbles. One that loses a profit center calls a lawyer.
What legal risk comes with a project team move?
Three kinds: agreements the individuals signed, duties they owe while still employed, and information they might carry. None of them prevents a team from moving. Each shapes how the move has to happen, and each is a question for employment counsel in the states involved.
Restrictive covenants. Non-compete and non-solicitation terms are governed by state law. The Federal Trade Commission issued a rule in 2024 that would have banned most non-competes, a federal court set it aside before it took effect, and in September 2025 the agency dropped its appeal. So the answer still depends on the state and the contract. Employee non-solicits matter most here: a leader who agreed not to recruit colleagues cannot be the one who brings them. Our note on non-competes in estimating and project management covers the state picture.
Duties while employed. A manager who organizes a group departure on the employer’s time, using its staff list and its client meetings, is exposed whatever she signed. The safer pattern is that each person hears about the opportunity separately and decides separately. Each should also judge your firm rather than the leader, as the note on following a former boss advises.
Information. Federal trade secret law gives employers a civil claim when confidential information leaves with an employee. Estimates, subcontractor pricing, pursuit lists and client budgets are the obvious examples. The instruction to every arriving person is short: bring what is in your head and nothing that is on a drive.
| Risk | What triggers it | Practical guard |
|---|---|---|
| Employee non-solicit | The leader recruits her own team | Each person approached independently |
| Non-compete | Same role, same market, restricted period | Counsel reviews each agreement first |
| Duty of loyalty | Planning the exit on company time | No coordination before resignations |
| Trade secrets | Files, bid data, client lists taken | Written no-documents instruction |
| Client interference | Soliciting live projects | Finish current work; win the next job openly |
A table like this makes the move look like a compliance exercise. The harder judgment is commercial.
How should a contractor run a project team hire?
Treat it as several individual hires made close together. Each person receives an offer on their own merits, makes an independent decision and resigns on their own timing. The acquiring contractor decides in advance what it will do if only two of the four say yes.
A workable sequence:
- Decide the strategy before the people. If you would not enter the sector without this team, you are buying a team and should price the risk of losing it the same way.
- Interview everyone as if they applied alone. A team’s reputation hides its weakest member. You are allowed to want three of the four.
- Use an intermediary for approaches. Conversations that do not run through the team leader are cleaner, legally and practically.
- Stagger the starts where you can. Four resignations on one morning reads as a raid. A few weeks apart reads as a market.
- Plan the first project. A team with no work in its first ninety days starts taking calls from its old employer.
Think about the owner too. Clients follow people they trust, and that is legitimate. Encouraging a client to pull a live project is a different act with different consequences, and the client’s own contract may name the individuals who are leaving, as our note on the key personnel clause explains.
Why do lifted-out project teams fail after they arrive?
Mostly because the host company treats the team as a finished product. The group arrives with its own habits, pay expectations and loyalty to its leader, and the existing staff watch to see whether the newcomers got a better deal. Integration is the work, and it is seldom planned.
Pay is the first fracture. If the arriving superintendent earns noticeably more than the one who has been loyal for twelve years, the cost of the lift-out includes a second negotiation you did not budget. The second fracture is systems: an estimator fluent in one cost database and one way of leveling bids is slower for six months in yours. The third is dependency. A team loyal mainly to its leader can leave the same way it came, and you will have taught it how.
Markets differ in how public all this is. In Houston’s industrial community or Charlotte’s commercial market, everyone knows within a week who moved and what was said. A contractor entering Texas or the Southeast by lift-out should assume the former employer’s version of events reaches subcontractors and owners first, and should behave so that the true version is defensible. Entering a new state this way also raises licensing, since in many states the license depends on a named license qualifier. Our note on a division president for a new region covers the build-it-yourself alternative.
Situations where a team hire is the wrong tool
- You need one seat filled. Hiring four people to get one is an expensive way to avoid a search.
- The team’s value is one client. If that client does not follow, you have bought overhead.
- Your existing leaders were not consulted. A group that arrives as a surprise to the people it must work beside starts with enemies.
- Counsel has not seen the agreements. Everything above is general description and not legal advice on any contract.
Handled well, this is ordinary hiring done carefully and quietly. Selah Talent Partners runs such approaches one person at a time: confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, in the manner our note on confidential search describes, for contractors across the United States. The employers page explains how to begin. The test of whether you ran it properly is uncomfortable and useful: would you be at ease if a competitor hired from you in exactly the same way?
Sources and further reading
- Rule, Federal Trade Commission, Non-Compete Clause Rule
- Dropped its appeal, Federal Trade Commission press release, September 2025
- Trade secret, US Patent and Trademark Office, trade secret policy