Great Northwest, Inc.: 'success is respect'.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: 2016 Top 49ers - Dialogue with John Minder - Interview

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Great Northwest, Inc.'s President and CEO John Minder started his first business in the fourth grade. "My father had six or seven greyhounds, and he got me a contract for all their bedding," he explains. The bedding was made of shredded paper, so he bought a paper shredder and an old cast iron straw baler. He says one of the delivery boys of the local paper would drop off excess copies in the morning, and he'd spend the day shredding and baling paper. "I was making so much money," he says. "We didn't have paper money in Montana back then, it was all silver dollars. I was the most popular kid in twenty blocks, my pockets just full of silver dollars," he laughs.

In the fifth grade he started playing competitive sports, and spending the summer months indoors "trapped in that garage" just wasn't working. "My aunt gave me a set of used golf clubs, and the municipal course was maybe six blocks away from where I lived, so I hired two kids and taught them how to do it and was golfing for six weeks," he says. Minder's early entrepreneurial endeavor ended abruptly: "One day I was on the green putting and I felt this big paw on my shoulder, and it was my dad. 'I didn't get you this job so you could be some entrepreneur, I got it so you could learn how to work,' and he yanked the contract from me." Minder says.

Minder didn't really need that job to learn how to work, as he'd grown up on a ranch, but it did give him a taste for leading a company. "I just never have liked working for anyone else," Minder laughs.

Humble Beginnings

But he has been working hard ever since. He came to Alaska in 1974 and brought with him $509, a 1953 Chevy Pickup, and a D21 Martin guitar, "all of which I still have, except for the $509. I have a couple more dollars," he says. It was in 1975 that he and a friend of his brother's started a small landscaping business with three or four employees. They did landscaping for Fred Meyer when it came into Fairbanks. Shortly thereafter the company began working as a subcontractor on projects for parks and recreation: "We put the topsoil [which Great Northwest manufactured] down and seeded it, but then I would watch [the other work] and say, if we're going to do parks, we should buy some equipment and be able to do the planting, the grubbing, the excavation, all of it. And so I went into huge debt and bought all this heavy equipment and we did, we started building all the parks from scratch," Minder says.

In 1985...