Like so many successful business enterprises, the story of Mike Anderzack’s success began in his garage. It was from there in 1992 that Anderzack began running an operation taking on the small commercial and industrial construction projects unwanted by the larger contracting companies. In the beginning, Anderzack and seven employees were doing underground construction, mostly building roads.
Today, the Anderzack-Pitzen Construction company—located in a renovated turn-of-the-century barn in Northwest Ohio—has 60 employees and provides a full range of services including grading and earthwork, underground sewer and waterline utilities, heavy highway and roadways, bridges and structures, cold asphalt milling, full-depth reclamation, soil stabilization, and railway roadbed preparation for clients in the Midwest and on the East Coast.
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A hands-on company president, Anderzack oversees all of the company’s field operations—including the maintenance shop—checking in with the supervisors of each one of the operations. “We have quite a few operations going on,” he notes. “I’m in contact with them daily to make sure everything is being handled right.” His days may take him into the maintenance shop, the field, or to the Detroit operation where the company does milling, soil stabilization, and full-depth reclamation.
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What led Him Into This Line of Work
“I have been infatuated with construction equipment since I was a kid,” says Anderzack. “My dad was a cement finisher and I always rode with him to job sites when I could. He worked with the general contractors who were building roads as a finisher. I was always around the equipment.”
He also spent summers on his uncle’s farm and was always around machinery. “That was my first love,” he notes.
Inspired by those summers, Anderzack earned an agricultural degree from Ohio State University, but there was no family farm to take over nor was it easy to acquire farmland in the early 1980s. “I did the next best thing—I went into construction,” he says.
Anderzack would go to work for a sewer contractor, starting driving a lowboy trailer and working in the shop. He got into an apprenticeship program for operating engineers and found work as an operator and after five years, got into supervision. In 1996—four years after the garage-based operation Anderzack started had attained a healthy measure of success—Jim Pitzen joined him as a partner, bringing to the table his administrative experience and construction knowledge and together they expanded the scope of the business.
What He likes Best About the Work
Anderzack enjoys the versatility his company provides and takes pride in meeting clients’ requirements. He believes that it’s in those relationships that growth will continue as the industry strives to move past the past several difficult years brought on by the recession.
His Biggest Challenge
Anderzack’s biggest challenge is common industrywide: finding qualified workers. “You’re only as good as the people are behind you,” he says. “We strive to employ competent and talented people. That’s going to be a challenge in the future because they’re not out there anymore. There’s a lack of qualified people. People don’t know how to work. We’re going to fail if we don’t start training people.”
As Baby Boomers retire, Anderzack predicts finding people qualified to do construction work will become an even more significant problem. “Fewer people are getting into the trades,” he points out. “We’re training people to get college degrees and get into service-oriented areas of business, but there’s a glut of those out there right now, and there’s not enough trained people in the trades.”
