Grasso is laser-focused on OmniTRAX and the communities it serves
2/10/2023
By Julie Sneider, Senior Associate Editor
As the recently appointed vice president of business strategy at OmniTRAX Inc., Lucy Grasso will play an integral role in developing the next long-term strategy for the Denver-based transportation and infrastructure company.
It’s an exciting move for Grasso, who’s in her early 30s and has been with the company since 2016. When she was one of few female students majoring in global logistics and transportation at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Grasso hadn’t really thought about working for a railroad — even after becoming familiar with them while serving as a college intern at the South Carolina Ports Authority.
“I didn’t really ever think I wanted to work for the railroad, to be honest with you,” she says.
But after graduation and a move to Colorado to accept a supply-chain job at a Denver manufacturer, a family friend recommended she get to know the folks at OmniTRAX.
“[The friend] said, ‘Maybe they don’t even have a role for you, but just go and meet with them.’ So, I did,” Grasso says. “And that’s how I ended up in their real estate department — there was an opening and they liked me and wanted to get me in the door.”
Grasso came in through OmniTRAX’s door as manager of real estate assets for the rail properties. At the time, the real estate business was “really just a one-person show,” she says. The company was looking to expand the team that — under OmniTRAX parent company The Broe Group — would help customers with industrial development opportunities on and off the OmniTRAX rail network. Today, OmniTRAX owns 25 regional and short-line railroads in the United States and Canada.
After helping build revenue for the real estate side of the rail business, Grasso moved on to the company’s operations side — just as it was developing a five-year strategic plan for the operating group. She was named to the team that would implement the plan.
“My introduction to the railroad operations was a bit of a crash course,” she says. “I was going to work with a lot of the senior individuals in that group, so it was a great experience to get pulled into that role.”
Back to basics, then ‘in the weeds’
The long-term plan required the operations team to focus on questions such as how best to manage and develop the company’s employees; how to improve service to customers; and how to improve safety. During the plan’s early years, Grasso was assigned to look for immediate “low-hanging-fruit" solutions to needed improvements.
“It was very back-to-the-basics,” she recalls. “We started doing property optimizations, looking at our operating plans, right-sizing our assets, our fleet; looking at what does our safety culture look like and how can we improve it driving more structure throughout our approach to safety. And, how are we developing our people? We were creating ad hoc development plans.”
After the first couple of years that the plan was in place, Grasso led the team charged with implementing it across the railroads, asking their leaders to “get into the weeds a bit more on their service plans,” she says.
In December 2022, OmniTRAX affiliate Winchester and Western Railroad (shown) announced it had a new agreement to serve Commercial Metals Co.’s latest steel mill. CMC’s selection of Falling Waters, West Virginia, for the new mill’s location was the result of a collaborative economic development effort by OmniTRAX, West Virginia state and local officials. OmniTRAXBy January 2022, Grasso became senior director of the strategic plan’s execution and took on oversight of the Network Operations Center, which manages all electronic data interchange for rail cars. The center troubleshoots issues for OmniTRAX crews and customers, and provides service metrics related to on-time performance, Grasso says.
About that same time, she also was wrapping up a master’s degree in supply chain and transportation management at the University of Denver.
Fast forward a year later to January 2023, and Grasso was promoted again — this time to her current role as vice president of business strategy.
"Lucy has demonstrated an exceptional ability to identify opportunities that make us stronger and collaboratively engage stakeholders,” said OmniTRAX President and Chief Operating Officer Sergio Sabatini in the Jan. 19 press release announcing Grasso’s promotion. “She’s been an integral part of our senior operations team and this expanded role leverages her strengths.”
In her new role, Grasso will continue to oversee Network Operations Center, as well as begin preparation for and plan a new strategic plan. “We’ll be thinking about what the next evolution of what it will look like,” she says. “And then I’ll be working on a few more corporate strategic initiatives.”
ESG now a long-term strategy
The new role also has her addressing another challenge: developing OmniTRAX’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts. Although OmniTRAX has pursued “ESG-type” initiatives by individual departments for years, the goal now will be to make ESG a key focus of its corporate strategy, Grasso says.
“That will mean bringing all of the disparate initiatives underneath one ESG strategy umbrella,” she says. “We want to focus on employee engagement, employee development, sustainability, governance and our social impact in the communities where we operate.”
For example, previously an operations team developed a plan to address voluntary employee turnover on the ballast line. Now, under the broader ESG strategy, the human resources leaders will be part of the team to tackle employee turnover, recruitment, retention and development actions company-wide.
Ensuring diverse representation within the OmniTRAX workforce is another focus, says Grasso. To that end, OmniTRAX in 2022 launched a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) committee that has established relationships with agencies specializing in recruitment of diverse candidates. The DEI group also is working with local urban leagues, Hispanic chambers of commerce and community colleges that can help refer candidates for jobs. And in summer 2022, OmniTRAX offered a new internship program that included several students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Grasso says.
Seeking diverse perspectives
As one of a small but growing number of female leaders in the rail industry, Grasso appreciates the broader perspective diversity brings to a business. Moreover, casting a wider net outside the traditional job-seekers pool has paid off by increasing the total number and quality of applicants at OmniTRAX, according to Grasso.
“Since the pandemic, we’ve gotten more thoughtful in how we approach hiring,” she says. “We’ve been able to find people who fit within our safety culture — and we’re attracting higher-quality candidates.”
In addition to its internal ESG strategies, OmniTRAX is pursuing ESG goals in the cities, villages and towns where the company operates. Having a social impact on the community is an essential part of being a short-line railroad, says Grasso.
“You have to realize that the short-line space is unique in that we are hometown railroads,” she says. “Our people live in the communities where we operate. We're invested in the success of those communities just as much as the people who live there are.”
That means being a safe railroad operator, as well as limiting the railroad’s environmental impact, she adds.
It also means creating jobs in those cities and towns, either on the railroads themselves or through OmniTRAX's economic development efforts, such as the Rail Ready Sites program.
“That’s how our ESG approach has developed,” says Grasso. “It’s that local community focus and doing things across our network that can help the communities.”