2007 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame

Mort Mortenson, Jr., remembers sitting with his wife, Alice, in the restaurant atop the Minneapolis Athletic Club—and not enjoying the view. “I’d see somebody else building some really neat structure close by,” he says. “And I’d say to Alice, ‘Oh gosh! If only we could do something like that someday.’”

When Mortenson became president of his father’s construction business in 1969, it had only 15 non-trade employees. Today, M. A. Mortenson Company has 1,200 employees; branch offices in Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Seattle; and 2006 revenues of $1.4 billion.

John Wood, a senior vice president, remembers his job interview there 30 years ago.

“Mort said he wanted to build an organization that one day would be able to build the next IDS tower in Minneapolis,” Wood says. “He’s certainly fulfilled that ambition—and then some.” He also recalls frequent visits from Mort, Jr., over the years: “He’d have driven by a construction site somewhere, and would want to know why we weren’t building that project!”

“I can say for sure that I always wanted to do bigger projects,” Mortenson acknowledges. “But I always said, ‘It’s not how big we are, but how good we are at what we do that counts.’”

In the 53 years since M. A. Mortenson, Sr., founded the company, it has built structures of all kinds, valued from less than $1 million to more than $220 million—in 47 states and overseas. The work has often been high profile: the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Coors Field in Denver, the Trippler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, the Gem State Hydroelectric Plant in Idaho Falls. Closer to home, it’s included some of the most familiar shapes on the skyline: the Wells Fargo Center, the Xcel Energy Center and Target Center arenas, the Minneapolis Convention Center, Thrivent and Carlson Companies headquarters, the Radisson Plaza Hotel, the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota, much of the Abbott Northwestern Hospital and Hennepin County Medical Center complexes, and other properties too numerous to mention.

For all that, there’s nothing high profile or flashy about the company’s chairman and CEO. Mort Mortenson, Jr., 70, drives a weather-beaten 1988 Volvo, which he parks outside the front door of headquarters in Golden Valley. “It’s got 208,000 miles on it,” he says with a grin. “My wife won’t ride in it!”

David Mortenson, senior vice president, says his father’s “energy and everything else is focused on putting the resources back into the company. What motivates him is building something that can have a lasting benefit to the communities we serve.” The same focus has made the firm a Minnesota Keystone company since 1991, donating 5 percent of pretax profits to the community.

Jonathan Morgan, the company’s general counsel and vice president for 10 years starting in 1983, says, “Mort is very straightforward, but unassuming. When we’d meet with the bonding company, he’d wear a threadbare suit that looked like it came from the Goodwill. But he would, in his quiet way, cause them to have nothing but the greatest respect for how he led his company.”

Mortenson started in the family business at age 15 as a “mason tender,” toting mortar and bricks to the bricklayers. “One day, I overfilled my wheelbarrow with mortar,” he recalls. “There was a little, narrow plank that I had to take the wheelbarrow over, and, sure enough, I tipped it. The bricklayers were all up on the scaffold, watching the boss’s son—waiting for the ‘mud,’ as it was called, and beating their trowels on their mortarboards.”

In 1960, after earning a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Colorado and serving two years in the Navy, Mortenson became an estimator and project manager in his father’s employ. His first project was an education wing of the Richfield Methodist Church. He remembers waking at midnight every night, driving to the site, and climbing a ladder to the second floor while lugging a five-gallon pail of fuel oil. It was winter, and the heaters that warmed the air beneath the roof slab needed to be refueled every eight hours. He’d go home and be on the job again a few hours later. “It was kind of a short night,” he says. “But I wanted to make sure we met our estimates.”

His father retired in 1969, leaving the business in Mort Jr.’s hands. Milestones soon followed. In 1976, United–Children’s Hospital in St. Paul was the first project for which Mortenson did both construction and design work. In 1981, the company opened its first branch office, in Denver, and in 1984, it built its first project valued at more than $100 million, the Veterans Administration Hospital in Minneapolis. Two years later, M. A. Mortenson Company ranked as the largest general contractor in Minnesota.