Great Northwest Inc.: steady growth from branching out.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Corporate 100

One way to track the growth and changes in Fairbanks over the last 38 years is to look for the footprints of Great Northwest Inc. The general construction firm has moved a lot of dirt over the years. It worked on the city's parks, roads and utilities. It landscaped major commercial projects and laid the groundwork for the giant retail outlets on the city's outskirts. In the mid-1990s, Great Northwest branched out into road construction and has left its mark on Interior Alaska's highways, as well as a major rebuild of the Tok Cutoff after the 7.9 magnitude Denali Fault Earthquake in 2002.

Steady growth has taken Great Northwest from its roots as a landscaping business in the 1970s to a major general construction firm that did $55 million in contracts in 2012, CEO and President John Minder says of the company he founded in 1976. It is one of the largest independently owned and operated civil construction firms in Interior Alaska.

"We started growing and growing," Minder says. "It just kept getting bigger and we started acquiring more people."

Today, the company employs from 25 to 250 workers, depending on the season. Despite that growth, the company, including Minder, keeps its boots firmly on the ground.

"This company is a blue-collar company with a white-collar mentality," he says. "I have three civil engineers with Stanford degrees, but no one's too good to pick up a shovel in this company, including myself."

The company logo is a simple graphic showing a pair of well-worn work boots and the company name--no frills.

Minder says the logo came from a job he was working on in Valdez in 1979. Alyeska was building a subdivision with 40 or 50 units in it and Minder and two other workers, one of whom was a talented artist, were putting in the yards. They were living in a one-bedroom apartment.

"One night I came home, I just kicked my boots off and lay on the couch and went to sleep," Minder says. "When I woke up, he had drawn a picture of my boots."

Minder liked the drawing and thought it was more representative of Great Northwest than the spruce tree the original logo sported. "I sometimes get asked if I repair shoes," he says, laughing.

Brought Up by the Pipeline

Building a cabin, not a company, is what propelled Minder to Alaska almost four decades ago.

In the early 1970s, Minder was a ski bum in Whitefish, Montana, who had his eye on a 40-acre lot near the ski resort. He wanted to buy the lot and build a cabin, but lacked the cash, so he...