Amentum is a global leader in engineering and technical services, providing advanced solutions in defence, intelligence, energy, and environmental sectors.
STEERING TRANSFORMATION
Insights from Justin Barnhill on Leadership and Operational Excellence at Amentum
In the dynamic world of technical and engineering services, effective leadership is crucial for navigating challenges and driving success. Justin Barnhill, the Managing Director at Amentum, exemplifies this through his commitment to innovation and operational efficiency. With over two decades of experience leading manufacturing turnarounds and managing complex projects, Justin shares his insights on fostering high-performing teams, embracing change, and steering Amentum towards a future of growth and sustainability. In this interview, he reflects on his career journey and outlines the strategies that position Amentum as a leader in its field.
Career Journey
Can you share your career journey and what led you to your current role as Managing Director at Amentum?
I’ve spent most of my career doing manufacturing turnarounds for private equity firms that are looking to recondition a P&L prior to exiting. Two of the largest turnarounds were an approximately $100M annual EBIT improvement for Norwest Equity Partners and a $13M annual improvement for Advent. I also spent four years as EVP for Ocean Alexander, helping them start up new operations and go public. I’ve worked in over 30 industries, and in all of my roles, we follow a similar playbook of growing revenue while increasing operational efficiency to optimise the P&L. A few key fundamentals include:
Improving the Function of the Team: Bringing together thought diversity in a high-trust environment where it’s okay to try something and fail is crucial; in fact, it’s encouraged to fail small so we can scale big. Until there is trust, productive debate, and good decisions, there can be no accountability. Without the team committing to each other and holding themselves accountable, results will remain elusive.
Setting the Right Goals and Prioritising Activities: Many people talk about the 80/20 principle today, and goal setting is yet another area where Pareto applies. Everyone feels overwhelmed, yet results are underwhelming. We use Lean Daily Management to focus on cascading goals, prioritise the right actions, and measure the right things daily. If you have more than five KPIs, you aren’t measuring the right things. We can use metrics to measure departments all the way to the operator level, but those aren’t KPIs; they are the guiding light that steers the ship. The executive team must focus on the critical few and let the trivial many solve themselves.
Profit Engineering: Once the team is working together on the right priorities with a good management system, we start profit engineering. Managing a profitable business isn’t about working the business and then checking the piggy bank at the end of the month to see if there is anything left; profit is engineered. It takes a lot of creativity, sometimes doing things that are counterintuitive and going against the grain. It requires confidence and courage from the team, but it can pay off big.
Company Overview
Amentum is known for its expertise in technical and engineering services. Can you provide an overview of where your group is heading?
Amentum is, at its core, an engineering and technology company that delivers a broad array of critical services. We tend to specialise in areas where failure is not an option. In my group, which services private sector clients, we focus on data centres, large manufacturing operations, and utility systems, where operational issues are unacceptable.
What we’ve found to be our sweet spot is multi-billion-dollar manufacturers that recognize the value of giving their teams the ability to focus on making their products. They come to Amentum for partial to full infrastructure support. This includes services like production equipment maintenance and reliability—core competencies of Amentum—as well as overall facility maintenance, including janitorial, landscaping, and snow removal.
Once a site hands off all infrastructure responsibilities to Amentum, their leadership team becomes much more effective at managing the safety, quality, delivery, and cost of their core products. Any team with increased focus tends to improve results. We provide this focus within an operation’s current budget, which has been the key to my segment’s triple-digit growth percentages.
Project Management
Amentum handles complex, large-scale projects. How do you ensure successful project management and execution across diverse sectors?
We have been managing challenging projects for most of our 120-year legacy. The recent merger with Jacobs Engineering’s iCMS spin-off has only enhanced this competency. Whether we’re taking on a long-term project, like the chemical weapons demilitarisation project we recently completed, or a shorter-duration capital project, such as refitting multiple hundred-ton chillers at a site, we follow dedicated, tried-and-true processes to ensure we safely deliver the customer’s desired outcomes while adhering to schedule and budget.
In my group, this can include significant vendor consolidation projects, where Fortune 100 companies come to us to reduce their site infrastructure vendors from literally thousands down to just one, all while saving them money. When we undertake this, we use Amentum’s LaunchRight® process, a 317step system that ensures we don’t miss a step.
Technological Innovation
How does Amentum integrate cutting-edge technology into its operations, and what recent innovations are you particularly proud of?
There are two things I’ve seen our group using that really stand out in our industry. One of the tools we are particularly proud of is MerlinMX. While everyone is touting AI, Amentum focuses on Solving What’s Next®, which means we started planning for how to implement AI four years ago. We built a team of data scientists and challenged them to develop a proprietary AI tool to solve engineering challenges using big data. It’s been a long process, and anyone who is just starting out is late to the game. MerlinMX has proven effective at accurately detecting patterns in CMMS activity that can predict reliability issues.
Another noteworthy innovation is our Remote Expert program, where we use augmented reality (AR) glasses combined with our centralised Centers of Excellence teams to give us a competitive edge during this skilled labour shortage. We have found that by deploying AR glasses in combination with CoE teams, we can execute work that previously would have required specialists or OEMs to fly out to sites. This approach has significantly reduced our costs, expedited our response times, and improved our service levels while helping us meet sustainability goals by reducing travel.
If a key system is struggling in LATAM, a technician can call into our central support team and be guided through complex troubleshooting and/or repair in real time, restoring operations for a fraction of the cost and downtime. Most companies would schedule a member of their travelling team to fly to the site, which typically adds at least a couple of days from detection of an issue until resolution. Now, we can resolve issues within just hours of detection. Though I used an international example, we are implementing this daily with our domestic accounts as well.
Sustainability Initiatives
Sustainability is increasingly important in technical services. How is Amentum incorporating sustainable practices into its projects and operations?
I think every operational leader will agree that sustainability initiatives can be challenging. We must embrace improving environmental stewardship while simultaneously managing our P&Ls. Some of our programs, like recycling, can have minimal cost impacts that are often offset through other initiatives, such as improved energy efficiency. I truly believe that clean energy is the path to sustainability. Amentum offers Clean Energy as a service for clients with larger sustainability targets to meet. We partner with organisations that can often provide funding for these initiatives, allowing us to offer a complete Engineer, Procure, Construct, Operate, and Maintain service. This approach helps companies achieve their sustainability goals within realistic budgets. Ultimately, that’s where Amentum really shines—helping clients reach objectives they might not be able to achieve alone, and doing so within a reasonable budget.
“Amentum is, at its core, an engineering and technology company that delivers a broad array of critical services.”
Competition
What sets Amentum apart?
Amentum competes in various sectors, from Engineering as a Service (EaaS) to the Department of Defense (DoD) to Intelligence. My team focuses on private sector growth. In my sector, we specialise in providing infrastructure solutions that allow our clients to concentrate on their core business. Many companies choose to outsource services like snow removal, landscaping, and janitorial work. However, when it comes to maintaining their full infrastructure—from boilers, HVAC systems, and overhead cranes to production assets like CNC machining centres, AGVs, and robots—they are often extremely hesitant to outsource the reliability of these areas.
As an engineering and technology company that delivers infrastructure support, we are very different from the market, which is filled with real estate companies, janitorial companies, and even food service and uniform companies that provide infrastructure support. If I were in charge of a mall, I would likely consider one of these companies, as they excel at commercial infrastructure. However, when it comes to critical asset maintenance for high-production manufacturing operations, that is where Amentum truly differentiates itself.
Global Market Strategy
How does Amentum approach global market expansion, and what regions are you focusing on for future growth?
I see 2025 and 2026 as strong years for global expansion at Amentum. Most of our global growth in the past has been with existing U.S.-based customers’ foreign operations. Recently, we’ve received a much higher volume of requests from international companies, and our executive leadership team has fully embraced global expansion. Europe, in particular, is very mature in the concept of improving operational focus through outsourcing non-core work that can be performed at a similar cost to internal performance. This concept of delegation is something European leaders have embraced for decades. The same formula for success we’ve deployed in our domestic market translates well to the international market, and we fully expect our European footprint to continue to expand.
With the recent merger with Jacobs Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber & Intelligence, we have significantly increased our global service strength. We are already strong in EMEA and will continue to focus on commercial infrastructure growth in Europe. Mexico continues to show strong opportunities for growth, as do several countries in LATAM. Amentum has a philosophy that we will go nearly anywhere for the right opportunity, as evidenced by our footprint in about 80 countries across all seven continents. Not many infrastructure companies can say they operate in Antarctica.
“Amentum offers Clean Energy as a service for clients with larger sustainability targets to meet.”
Future Vision
What are your future plans for Amentum in terms of
Growth: Our private sector work has been growing at triple-digit percentages over the last several years, exceeding 750% in pipeline growth in just the last 3 years. Although maintaining those percentages gets tougher as we scale, I expect our private sector sales pipeline for our Commercial Infrastructure to continue to grow rapidly for many more years.
Innovation: We’ve already established some great partnerships that are advancing execution in several areas. Expect the Commercial Infrastructure team to continue to lead the industry in reliability technology deployment.
Maintaining Industry Leadership: Innovative leaders must challenge themselves to identify problems others haven’t seen yet. If we don’t anticipate our customers’ challenges 1-2 years before they arise, how will we develop solid solutions that are ready to deploy when needed? Solving What’s Next® is what makes Amentum different; it’s in our DNA.
Our own Senior Director of Operations, Steve Bragg, is the current Chair of the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP), and Vlad Bacalu, SVP of Technology, is a past chair. Both have been instrumental in developing our reliability processes, and retaining key talent like this is how Amentum consistently leads the pack.
Leadership Philosophy
What is your leadership philosophy, and how do you inspire your team to uphold
Amentum’s
standards of excellence?
I believe in the power of high-trust, high-performing teams that embrace thought diversity to achieve innovation. Everyone loves to talk about high-performing teams delivering innovation, but if you attend their meetings, it’s incredibly easy to see that there is no trust. Everyone is hiding behind some metaphorical cover, afraid to step up. Because of this, companies make terrible decisions while leadership teams sit quietly, afraid to speak up.
The work from Adam Grant at Wharton and Peter Coleman at Columbia University changed my thinking on conflict versus apathy. Everyone wants this mythical harmony in business, but they’ve proven that the opposite of conflict is not harmony; it’s apathy. So, you can have conflict or you can have apathy—choose. The key is that our teams need healthy task conflict, where they debate all sides and opinions, not harmful personal conflict. We have to appreciate people for sharing ideas and recognize the difference between debating and arguing, which usually comes down to maturity. I praise people for disagreeing with me, acknowledging that they are making me better. I don’t want a team of yes people. What value would they bring other than making me feel good about making bad decisions?
In a high-trust team, we can get all thoughts out on the table, debate root causes and potential solutions, and ultimately agree on a path forward together after all ideas have been discussed. The problem is that not every leader creates a safe environment where teams can debate ideas without taking them personally. Team members don’t feel safe admitting they don’t know the answer to questions regarding key challenges in their departments, or fearlessly say, “I was wrong” or “I screwed up,” or even have the confidence to own that they need help. If you sit in a leadership meeting for 30 minutes and you haven’t heard people owning their struggles, they are just hiding them. No business is free from struggles, and no team or leader is perfect. Pretending just burns trust to the ground. Once a team can openly discuss our challenges and ask each other for help, then reaching everincreasing standards of excellence just happens as part of the company culture.
Amentum is a global leader in engineering and technical services, providing advanced solutions in defence, intelligence, energy, and environmental sectors. With over 53,000 employees worldwide, Amentum delivers mission-critical support to government and commercial clients, ensuring success in the most complex and demanding challenges.
Justin Barnhill Leadership and Operational Excellence