By Sara Gilbert Frederick
In November, Bolton & Menk opened a new office in Maplewood, a northeastern suburb of the Twin Cities. The Mankato-based engineering and surveying operation had been considering adding an office in that area for several months when the deciding factor fell into place: a trio of engineers contacted the company about potential employment, and all three of them lived in or around Maplewood.
“It was really quite coincidental,” says Jon Rippke, the president of Bolton & Menk Inc. “Here we had been doing market research on that area, targeting potential clients and deciding on a strategy when suddenly we have the opportunity to hire these individuals who are from that very neighborhood. We knew it was meant to be.”
Rippke may have been pleasantly surprised that the stars aligned so quickly for the project; others in the industry might be more surprised that the expansion was under way in the first place.
Many engineering firms have struggled during the recession. Instead of hiring new employees, some have had to lay off workers. Instead of opening new offices, some are making cuts just to keep existing locations open. And although Rippke admits that Bolton & Menk has had a tough couple of years as well, he also says the company’s focus on serving municipalities has been its saving grace.
In its 60 years of operation in southern Minnesota, Bolton & Menk has developed the specialties that cities need, including water and wastewater treatment, traffic and transportation engineering, and water resources engineering. It developed an innovative and award-winning wastewater treatment plant for Buffalo, Minn., for example, and was honored for the sanitary sewer system it helped implement around Green Lake near Willmar.
Thinking long term
Stimulus dollars, as well as the low-interest loans that are available to municipalities for certain projects, have helped keep the 250 Bolton & Menk employees at the company’s nine offices busy this year. Rippke appreciates that — although he also worries that because so many projects have been pushed ahead due to available funding, fewer jobs will be out there in years to come.
“There have been a lot of incentives for cities to do the things they know they need to do now,” he says. “A lot of projects have been advanced, which affects what they’ll be doing in the future. So we need to continue to look two or three years, not just focus on the fact that there is work to do right now.”
Such long-term thinking has been a hallmark of Bolton & Menk’s business since the beginning. The company has tried to remain on the fiscally conservative side, which means it avoids being overly aggressive in seeking new business. Rippke doesn’t set goals to double the company’s size every five years. “Our goal is to grow at a rate that we can manage. It’s a more granular kind of growth. We work hard to be a profitable company, so that we can reward our people and so that we can continue on even in times like this.”
The longevity of the company’s leadership team, as well as a strong core of its employees, has played into its stability as well. Rippke joined the company in 1973; the two vice presidents each have about 26 and 39 years of service with the firm. The average tenure of the company’s 37 majority employee owners is 18 years.
Rippke cites several reasons why employees stay at the company for so long. One is the employee stock ownership plan, which allows for everyone to share in the ownership of Bolton & Menk. The employees as a whole own 30 percent of the company, which means they have a vested interest in the success of the company.
The company’s expansion into the Twin Cities metro area since it opened its first office there, in Burnsville, in the 1980s is certainly strategic. The projects there tend to be bigger and more complex, Rippke says, and can help garner more attention and respect for the company statewide. “As a Mankato-based company, we flew under the radar for a number of years. Now, we’ve really become one of the more highly respected firms in the state.”
