Adolfson & Peterson Construction

Adolfson & Peterson Construction is a family-owned general contractor and construction manager founded in 1946 and headquartered in Minneapolis, with regional offices in Colorado, Arizona, Texas and the Upper Midwest. AP builds for healthcare, education, industrial, multifamily, hospitality and civic clients, and works through construction management at risk, design-build and general contracting delivery. The firm is general contractor on the $200 million Energy and Minerals Research Facility at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, a six-level, 192,000-sq-ft laboratory building shared by the U.S. Geological Survey and the university, run out of AP’s Aurora, Colorado office. Complex laboratory mechanical systems and constrained campus sites are a recurring part of the firm’s institutional work.

The founding story is specific enough to be worth repeating: George Adolfson and Gordon Peterson started the company in 1946 in the basement of George’s home in Richfield, Minnesota. Eighty years on it is still family-owned and operated, with more than 800 team members.

Growth has been steady rather than sudden. Annual revenue passed 500 million dollars in 2007 and one billion dollars in 2012. The company currently sits at number 91 on the ENR National Top 400 Contractors list and number 25 on ENR’s Top 100 Green Contractors, and reports an experience modification rate of 0.60, which is a safety record that will matter to any owner running a prequalification.

The market list is unusually long at sixteen named segments, and several of them are not the usual categories. Alongside healthcare, education, industrial and multifamily sit aquatics and recreation, correctional facilities, tribal projects, mission critical, and water stewardship. Aquatics and correctional work in particular carry their own code and sequencing problems that general contractors do not pick up by accident.

Five services are offered: construction management, preconstruction and estimating, virtual design and construction, self-perform, and MEP services. Carrying MEP capability in house is the notable one for a firm of this size, because it changes how mechanical and electrical risk is priced on a CM at risk job.

The office network runs well beyond Minnesota. Minneapolis and Duluth and Rochester in Minnesota, Aurora and Johnstown and Colorado Springs in Colorado, Austin and San Antonio and Dallas in Texas, Bismarck in North Dakota, Cheyenne in Wyoming, and Tempe in Arizona. The Minneapolis office is led by David Grandstaff, regional president for the Midwest and Southwest.

Recent named work includes the Carlton County Justice Center in Minnesota, the PGA of America headquarters in Frisco, Texas, and Greeley West High School in Colorado.