People walk all over Steve Janke’s work, and he couldn’t be happier about it. In fact, there’s no higher compliment for the owner of Janke General Contractors Inc., who has capitalized on a narrow but profitable market niche: building pedestrian boardwalks and converting old railroad bridges into walkways and bike paths.
Established in 2000, the Athens, Wis., company has become one of the state’s leading builders of recreational pathways. Forging a reputation based on strong word-of-mouth referrals, the company has taken on projects from all corners of the state.
Fueled by Janke’s risk-taking mentality, the company also has branched out and tackled challenging jobs that don’t fit neatly into any category, like canal restoration and tunnel repair. Combine that with a fleet of more than a dozen machines, more than two dozen employees and a knack for innovative fabrication of both machines and parts for projects, and it’s easy to see why Janke has become a go-to company in this unusual market.
MACHINES IN HIS BLOOD
“I saw a niche ... because the big guys with off-road equipment - dump trucks and scrapers - weren’t going to bid on $100,000 bridge jobs,” Janke says. “We don’t own real big equipment, just a lot of skid-steers and small excavators. So these kind of jobs were well suited to the equipment we own.”
After starting his business, Janke figured his path to contractor success would travel through more traditional channels, such as building streets and laying water and sewer lines. He certainly had the background for it, with three uncles who all worked as contractors, performing everything from water intake work to paving jobs to “more off-the-wall stuff,” he recalls. Janke and his father worked for all three uncles.
“I got to learn about all their businesses,” he says. “When I was 5 or 10 years old, I used to ride with my dad with his Low Boy on Saturday mornings and move equipment from one site to another. I always thought it was pretty cool.”
Later, Janke gained experience with heavy equipment working for a residential developer. He worked there for seven years, starting as a pipe layer, graduating to an estimator’s position and finally running a crew of 40 to 50 employees, doing earthmoving and sewer- and water-line installations.
But the company ran into financial problems, and Janke got laid off. He’d always wanted to run his own business, and suddenly the planets seemed aligned to do just that.
“I knew I’d run my own business some day, and the time was right,” he recalls. “I figured that at that point, I knew enough to try and do something on my own. At the time, I figured I’d do sewer and water installations, or street building, because I had the background and estimating experience.”
HIGH RISK, HIGH REWARD
Unfortunately, a lot of other contractors had the same idea. Faced with what he called “brutal” competition, Janke gambled and bid on a job outside his area of expertise: retrofitting an old railroad bridge in Wausau to serve as part of a pedestrian/bike trail. Only two other contractors bid on the project, and Janke was the low bidder.
“We finished the job and made a little money on it, so we decided to look for similar work - anything that had to do with recreation,” he says. “Many times I look back and think about how fluky it was (getting into this market). We didn’t know much about it, but we had a lot of versatility because we could do excavating, pile driving, carpentry, cement finishing and the like.’‘
Often enough, Janke is confronted with something he’s never done before, which requires some off-the-cuff innovation. “Engineers trust my ability to understand how a project might need to be completed,” he says. “Sometimes we run through a couple different scenarios, and use a medium-priced option as a starting point.
“Then we get our guys together and talk about what we can do to make it work - maybe fabricate something, if needed,” he says. “We just figure it out. We don’t mind flying by the seat of our pants. Then, when we’re done, we look at each other and say, ‘Well, it worked again!’ ”
TUNNEL TESTED THEIR METTLE
To see a good example of Janke’s ability to improvise under difficult conditions, take a stroll or ride through the 1,200-foot-long Stewart Tunnel near Exeter, south of Madison in south-central Wisconsin. The tunnel is part of the 40-mile-long Badger State Trail, a “rails to trails” pathway for snowmobilers, hikers and bicyclers that follows an old railroad line.
The roof of the 120-year-old tunnel was collapsed in a couple spots, and elsewhere its walls were falling in. Janke’s job: Make it passable again.
“We worked from November through Christmas,” Janke says. “We put up plastic sheets at each end, which kept the temperature about 52 to 55 degrees inside. To see in the dark, we had to string 100-watt lightbulbs, powered by a generator on top of the tunnel.”
After cleaning out loose debris on the tunnel floor, Janke’s crew probed and scraped the tunnel’s limestone walls with the bucket of a mini-excavator to dislodge any loose sections. “We expected pieces the size of footballs to come down, but sometimes a sheet of limestone the size of a pickup truck would fall,” Janke says.
Janke rebuilt those fallen sections with concrete walls that were bolted to the tunnel walls. The crew had to pump concrete into the tunnel, because the tunnel roof - only 15 to 20 feet high - didn’t allow enough headroom to use an excavator bucket to fill the concrete forms.
A critical portion of the repair involved a bad seam of rock that, when fully exposed, left about a 50-foot-high rift in the tunnel roof. To fix it, the crew bolted together half-sections of heavy-duty, 25- or 35-foot-diameter culvert pipe, then attached the entire unit to the tunnel walls. That still left space between the culvert and the top of the bad rock seam; to fill it in, the crew bulkheaded off the open ends with concrete, then pumped in silica sand through a pipe placed in one of the bulkheads.
CANAL RESTORATION CHALLENGES
A canal restoration project in Portage, north of Madison, also put Janke’s skills to the test. There, city officials and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation wanted to restore about a 2,000-foot-long stretch of the 2-1/2-mile-long Portage Canal, originally completed in 1876 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It connected the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, enabling fur traders to more easily travel in canoes from the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan.
After decades of neglect, the waterway was nothing more than an eyesore, with failing sidewalls. But in an effort to spur development, the city wanted to spruce it up in a four-phase project. Because the canal is a historic site, Janke’s crew had to make the waterway look much like it did in the 1800s; old pictures and sets of original engineering plans helped show the way.
First, Janke employees dredged the canal, which had been sealed off from the Wisconsin River by a dike in the 1980s. Then it was refilled with water, pumped from the Wisconsin River. Next, workers reinforced the canal walls with metal sheeting, then bolted rough-sawn, treated 2 x 12 pine boards onto the sheeting to mimic the original walls.
“Some of the nearby houses stand right on the shoreline,” Janke explains. “In some stretches, there wasn’t enough room to drive a riding lawnmower through. So we had to work off a barge.”
That’s not all. Janke also had to remove and restore the old, welded-shut gates on each end of one of the canal’s locks. Each gate consisted of two sections that weighed about 15,000 pounds apiece.
“The barge wouldn’t hold a piece of equipment as big as we needed, so we rented a big Caterpillar 345 excavator to lift out the gates,” Janke says. “The gates were so big we had to first cut them in half, then sandblast and paint them before re-installation.”
To top off the first phase of the project, Janke also built a pedestrian/bike trail along one side of the canal.
EQUIPMENT PLAYS KEY ROLE
Completing tough jobs requires equally rugged and well-maintained equipment. Janke says he spends about $50,000 to $100,000 a year on equipment rental, but mostly buys new equipment.
“I always buy new equipment if I know we’re going to use it a lot - key machines,” he says. “If it’s a grader, which we’ll use only here and there, I’ll buy a used one. Our downtime is virtually nil, because we buy only good equipment.”
Janke’s stable of machinery includes a 1978 Koehring 440 crane, made by Koehring Cranes Inc. and bought from Belvidere Construction Co. Inc.; a 1963 Allis-Chalmers DD grader, made by Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co. and purchased from Central WI Equipment; a 1993 SK300LC Mark III excavator, made by Kobelco and bought from Miller-Bradford & Risberg Inc.; and Mack 1981 DM686 and 1989 DM680S dump trucks, purchased from Paul Bugar Trucking Inc. and Scaffidi Motors Inc., respectively.
The company has several pieces of Caterpillar Inc. equipment, including: a 2008 D3K XL dozer; 2007 and 2008 277C multi-terrain loaders; a 2004 262 skid-steer CED; a 2004 307C SB excavator; a 2004 D5G XL dozer; a 2004 CV16 skid-steer compactor; a 2004 320CL excavator; a 2003 CS-433C compactor; a 2008 T9 trencher; and a 2003 924G loader, all purchased from FABCO Equipment Inc.
Strict maintenance standards minimize downtime. Janke requires supervisors to fill out weekly maintenance spreadsheets that keep track of machine hours, which makes it easier to track scheduled maintenance. “I don’t even like scratches on our equipment,” Janke says. “Every winter, I touch up or totally repaint our machines, so they go out in spring looking like new. If they’re dirty, they get washed. If there’s a light out or a mirror cracked, we fix it right away.’’
LESSONS LEARNED
What’s the most valuable lesson he’s learned in business? “You’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with,” he replies. As such, Janke attracts and retains good employees by offering health insurance and 401(k) retirement plans, plus an unusual perk: a four-day work week for field employees.
“We try to work four 10- to 12-hour days a week,” Janke says. “If we’re on the road, it cuts down on hotel costs. Plus, instead of being gone all week, the guys get an extra day off to spend with their families or do whatever it is they like to do.
“I came up with the idea because I run the jobs, and I need to be in the office at least one day a week,” he adds. “They were fine with the idea. We do it about 90 percent of the time. The only time we can’t do it is if there’s a time crunch on a job.”
Janke says he also asks employees for input and opinions about projects, then incorporates as many of their ideas as possible to achieve a better overall result.
What does Janke see for the future? More competition.
“There are more guys bidding on projects,” he says. “It used to be we’d compete with just a local contractor or two. Now there’s one or two guys (contractors) that also go anywhere in the state, just like we do. We’ve worked with almost every engineering firm in the state, so people know who we are.”
On the plus side, Janke also sees a steady stream of recreational projects, which accounted for all of the company’s sales volume in 2007 and 2008. “We’ve been busy, and I think we’ll see more of it,” he says, noting many of these recreational projects are more recession proof because they’re government-funded, including money from the federal stimulus program.
That’ll give recreation lovers even more chances to step all over Janke’s work.
