Southern Minnesota Construction

May 1, 1997 Roger Matz

Condensed From Connect Business Magazine.

Every Spring, Southern Minnesota Construction’s massive equipment snorts out of hibernation, eager to rearrange earth, rock and asphalt into long ribbons of roads. It’s happened every Spring since 1914. But that’s no longer the beginning of SMC’s year, and when freezing temperatures force the graders and pavers back into storage, that no longer signals the close of a year’s business.

“We’ve diversified,” said Larry Nurre, president since 1988. “Diversification to us is salvation. It gets down to that.”

In the past nine years, SMC has become a classic textbook example of how a company can refocus its equipment ($17 million worth), its primary skills (moving and shaping dirt) and its peripheral assets (rock quarries and sand pits). But there’s more to SMC’s strategy than just diversifying and refocusing. To borrow a phrase from the pioneer era, Nurre has “circled his wagons” to encompass an area SMC can defend by being highly competitive. It doesn’t move crews, equipment or truckloads of rock beyond the range of efficiency.

SMC still builds roads, maybe 30 miles a year, anything from bike paths to interstates. But today, highways are only a category on the financial statement, not the company’s lifeline. “If you’re just in that one segment of the construction business, you can be rained out. It’s very sensitive to weather, and if there’s too much rain in a summer, it’s physically impossible to build a road,” Nurre said.

By bringing its equipment, skills and assets to bear on projects that are only distant cousins to road building, SMC has become a dominant player in Mankato-area development. “We don’t build buildings and we don’t lay sod,” laughed Nurre. But expect a bid on almost anything else if your project is within 50 75 miles of Mankato.

SMC buries sewer and water lines, excavates and prepares sites for buildings, installs footings, builds curbs and gutters, clears and grades land. Wherever dust chokes the humid air or mud sucks at monster treads, it’s likely that SMC crews and equipment are shaping the area’s commercial future or providing new infrastructures for society.

Often SMC is the first to set foot, scoop or blade on a construction site – and the last to leave it. “We’ll come in to dig the footings and prepare the site, then come back to pave the parking lot. We’ll even put the stripes on it,” Nurre said.

Drive by any sizeable new building or major development in the Mankato region and the odds are good it sprouted on land prepared by SMC. “We’ve done the site preparation for virtually all the buildings at Mankato State University,” Nurre said. SMC prepared sites for the Immanuel-St. Joseph’s Hospital and Bethany College expansions and the Archer Daniels Midland soybean processing plant. It moved 220,000 cubic yards of earth so developers could create River Hills Mall, an impressive project that’s dwarfed by the 750,000 cubic yards being rearranged now for a bypass road linking Hwys. 22 and 60 south of Mankato.

Tons of steaming asphalt come from its River Bend Asphalt Plant in Kasota for roads, bike paths, driveways and parking lots within a 50-mile radius. From its quarries at Mankato, Kasota and Owatonna, and its sand and gravel operations at St. Peter, Kasota and south of Mankato, SMC feeds its own requirements and fills the orders of others. (For example, it funnels immense quantities of sand and gravel to Wells Pre-Stressed Concrete and Wells Redi-Mix.)

It takes on demolition projects, rents heavy equipment, hauls for other companies and maintains a $1 million crane “to lift anything that needs lifting in southern Minnesota,” Nurre said. That might include hoisting heating and air conditioning units to the roofs of buildings, or making repairs to the tallest Honeymead and ADM structures. With the strength to lift 150 tons and a boom extending 265 feet, the all-terrain crane is the single most expensive piece in SMC’s arsenal of equipment.