SRF Consulting Group

SRF Consulting Group started in 1961 as a transportation boutique with seven employees. It’s now a multidisciplinary engineering, planning and design firm headquartered in Minneapolis, with regional offices in Illinois, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Florida. Roads, bridges, transit and traffic remain the core of the business, alongside water and environmental work. The firm says it’s 100 percent employee-owned through an ESOP and describes its Minneapolis office as home to hundreds of consultants. On the Stone Arch Bridge Rehabilitation in Minneapolis, SRF sat on the design team that lead engineer LHB assembled in 2019 for MnDOT. LHB’s account doesn’t break out which discipline SRF handled.

Fourteen expertise areas are published, and the two-thirds of them that are not roads is where the surprise sits. Beyond roadways, bridges and structures, and traffic and technology, SRF lists transit planning, design and implementation; urban mobility; parks, trails and recreation; land development; municipal engineering and utilities; water and environment; resilience and sustainability; community engagement; funding and grants; and real estate, construction and project delivery.

Two of those are not engineering at all. Community engagement is a discipline here, with its own staff, because a road or transit project in a built-up corridor is won or lost in public meetings before a design is finalised. Funding and grants is the other – someone inside the firm works on assembling the money, which for a city with a trail gap or a bridge nearing the end of its life is often the binding constraint rather than the design.

Headcount is now published: over 350 people, up from the seven the firm started with in 1961. That is worth noting against the summary above, which says only that the Minneapolis office holds hundreds of consultants.

Eight offices, not five. Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota; Bismarck and Fargo in North Dakota; Chicago; Madison; Omaha; and Tallahassee. The Saint Paul office is the addition – having staff on both sides of the river matters when the client is a city rather than a state.

On ownership the firm is unambiguous: 100 percent employee-owned, with every employee holding a share and exposed to the result. SRF frames its culture around accountability and technical excellence, and the practical reading of that is that the engineer stamping a plan set has equity in how the project turns out.

The firm also publishes work on diversity, equity and inclusion, community outreach and professional development, which for a firm of this size in public-sector work is less decoration than a prequalification requirement on many agency contracts.

The headquarters is at 3701 Wayzata Boulevard, Suite 100, Minneapolis, on (763) 475-0010.