The Boldt Company

The Boldt Company traces back to 1889, when Martin Boldt opened a carpentry shop in Appleton, Wisconsin, where the firm is still headquartered. Boldt works as a general contractor, construction manager and design-builder across healthcare, industrial, pulp and paper, power and renewable energy, data centers, education and corporate office work, and it self-performs concrete and carpentry. The company helped pioneer Lean construction and trademarked its Integrated Lean Project Delivery method. Its first billion-dollar contract was Sutter Health CPMC’s Van Ness Campus Hospital in San Francisco. Boldt also built the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, Wisconsin’s first LEED Platinum project. It’s an ENR top-100 contractor with revenue in the $900 million to $1 billion range and more than 1,000 employees.

Ownership is the recent headline. After four generations of family leadership – Martin Boldt from 1889 to 1931, Oscar J. Boldt to 1950, Oscar C. Boldt to 1998, and Tom Boldt as CEO from 1998 to 2024 – the company completed a transition to 100 percent employee ownership during the 2020s.

The Appleton presence is split across two addresses. Corporate sits at 2121 E. Capitol Drive; a second office on N. Roemer Road serves both the greater Fox River Valley and Boldt’s national power and industrial sector. Local project credits include the Building for Kids Children’s Museum and its Welcome Center, Lawrence University’s Warch Campus Center, and a production facility expansion for Salm Partners in Denmark, Wisconsin.

The Integrated Lean Project Delivery method now central to the company’s pitch was proven on a job rather than a whiteboard: the rebuild of Stora Enso’s No. 64 paper machine, a piece of work in Boldt’s own backyard industry.

Growth has come in steps. Revenue moved from roughly $50 million to $300 million across the 1980s. More recently the firm launched Bildt as a modular and prefabrication business and acquired Calnin & Goss to deepen self-perform capacity – a hedge against the trade shortages that have shaped scheduling for the past several years.

From Appleton the market list is broad: commercial, community, cultural and religious, corporate office, education, healthcare, industrial and manufacturing, power and energy, public sector and municipal, science and technology, and a special projects group for small and fast work.

One piece of company history is worth keeping. During the Second World War the shop was turning out artillery shell boxes at a rate of up to a thousand a day – an early version of the production thinking the firm later formalised as Lean.