Two driving factors have fueled the success of Mathiowetz Construction, a family operation in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota for 93 years: the old-fashioned value of treating employees like family, paired with investments in the latest technology. Brett Mathiowetz, representing the company’s fourth generation of ownership, says his family’s company wouldn’t have lasted to this point “without a lot of great partners—whether it’s on the equipment side or contractors who work with us regularly—but especially the family of the people who work with us: the family of the owners, the wives who support the guys who work for us, or the guys who support the wives who work for us.”
Mathiowetz is vice president and assistant project manager for Mathiowetz Construction Company: a general contractor providing services in earthwork, site preparation, underground utilities, demolition, and aggregate in the lower two-thirds of Minnesota, as well as in neighboring states. The company’s projects are primarily in heavy highway work, big-box stores and other commercial development jobs, and drainage improvements. During the seven-month peak season, the company employs up to 180 people. Mathiowetz Construction mostly runs Caterpillar equipment: dozers, scrapers, excavators, scrapers, motor graders, and specialty equipment, and uses Topcon Positioning Systems’ 3D-MC² on the motor graders, mainline dozers, and scrapers, as well as grade control units and rover systems.
What He Does Day to Day
Mathiowetz serves on the project management and estimating staff, assisting in those endeavors. He also is the manager of technology, conducting all of the training and providing in-house support for those in the field utilizing machine control and grade control technology.
What Led Him into This Line of Work
Mathiowetz grew up learning the trade from his father and grandfather who would take him on jobs. At the age of 13, he was already working on projects. “It’s ingrained in you from a young age to have a respect and reverence for the amazing power to affect lives in being an owner in a business,” he says. “I went through a period of time when I was in denial that this wasn’t really what I was passionate about or called for.” His wife Lori pointed out that when he spoke of the business, he did so as if nothing was more significant. “I came to terms with the fact that it is important and appreciated, the impact we can have on people’s lives with safety improvements, providing employment or volunteering, and donating to charitable causes,” says Mathiowetz. “The ability to do that here was really strong. Being in a family business and us being able to be the ones pulling the strings at the top end, we can really affect our culture, instill our family values into our workplace, and have it be a place people want to be loyal to and have fun.”
What He Likes Best
“We want to support the guys who are supporting us,” says Mathiowetz. “For us to be able to be successful, our employees need to be successful. They need to feed their families and be able to fulfill dreams and we want to be able to help them with that, so we always look at it as a partnership. They can help us be a successful business and we want to make sure they’re successful on a personal level as well.”
