Grant Kueper refers to himself as the “black cat” of the family. He was certainly an outside cat, and a natural for the construction industry.
Early on weekend mornings, he wanted to go outside and get dirty building things. “It could be 20 or 100 degrees outside and Mom’s like, ‘I don’t know why the heck you want to go outside.’ But that’s just where I wanted to be.”
His mother also was a little confused when he started asking for tools as Christmas gifts, like a good ladder when he was in fourth grade. “Every construction guy has to have a ladder, so I needed one,” he said.
The rest of his family were housecats. Dad is an Edward Jones agent who spent his life in finance and banking. His brother works at the same office. Mom recently retired as a campus recruiter for PWC, focusing on accounting students at the University of Missouri.
“You probably hear some of these construction stories of ‘I’m a third generation union carpenter.’ Well, that’s not the case for me,” he said. “If my dad has a door that needs to be replaced, he’s not the one fixing a door. His construction knowledge is slim to none.”
Grant took a different path, choosing to work in construction management. But when he looks back on it, he has a lot more in common with his family than he might’ve thought.
A black cat finds his own way
Grant Kueper was born in 1994 and grew up in Breese, Illinois. It’s a small community with a population of about 5,500. Breese is in Clinton County, a friendly, tight-knit town where everyone knows everyone.
Grant’s brother is four years older, but they still managed to share a football rivalry despite not getting to play together.
“Football is where it was in our family,” he said. “That’s the rivalry between my brother and I — who was better in high school and whose teams were better and stuff like that.”
But football is about where the similarities between Grant and his brother end. “In hindsight, my brother and I are totally opposites and it’s not in a bad way.”
Unlike the rest of his family, Grant studied building trades rather than advanced math classes. It allowed him to gain hands-on experience during his high school years. Like building a house from start to finish.
Before then, Grant didn’t know what he wanted to do after high school. But he was inspired by the process of building homes. And then Greg Walker came to visit his high school class and provided the direction Grant was looking for.
“Greg Walker, who I learned a lot from and still stay in communication with today, came and talked about his associates in construction management program with our building trades and that’s when the fireworks went off to me. I’m like, ‘Yep. Construction management’s where it’s at.’”
With his career plan solidified, Grant pursued a two-and-two program, starting at John A. Logan College in Carterville, Illinois, where he earned an associate’s degree in construction management in 2015. He then transferred to Southern Illinois University of Carbondale. Two years later, he completed his bachelor’s degree in technical resource management with an emphasis in construction management.
Appreciating construction management
When Grant was a kid, he wanted to be the one who got his hands dirty building things. But as he got older, he realized the value of overseeing the work and making sure everything goes according to plan.
“When you’re young, you ask yourself ‘What produces the music?’ Well, the people sitting with the instruments. They’re the ones that produce the music. Well, if you’ve pulled back another notch and you look at it from a full picture, it takes additional people to make that happen, like the conductor.”
After college, Grant had a short list of places he’d like to work, and The Korte Company was at the top. He grew up just a county over and heard a lot about the company throughout his life. One of his college teachers even had a Korte helmet in their office.
The Korte Company hired him as a project engineer directly out of school. He’d got a head start applying for jobs during his last semester and got an interview with Brent Korte, who thought that Grant made an excellent culture fit.
That’s when his true education began.
“What you learn in school is not what benefits you in your long-term career,” he said. “It’s what you learn from your coworkers. It’s what you learn from the people in the field. It’s what you learn in your day-to-day operations early on in your career that I feel like paves the real path in your career.”
Starting ready to learn and grow
Right out of school, Grant was always eager to take on new responsibilities and looking for new opportunities to learn from past projects.
“If I was working on an Amazon project, I would go back to an Amazon project that maybe got completed two months ago and say, ‘OK, how do they do this?’ So, I would always pull up those past examples to learn from them. I feel like that’s why I was a fast learner.”
His first major project was an Amazon warehouse job in Springfield, Virginia. While project engineers usually work in the office, Grant traveled to jobsites as much as possible, still eager to get his hands dirty when he could. “How much do you learn sitting behind your computer screen besides typing emails, doing conference calls and stuff like that?” he asked himself. “When I was early on in the career, I took every opportunity to be on site.”
Amazon kept expanding the footprint, and the project seemed like it might never end. But Grant stuck it out from start to finish, learning a lot from the team.
For example, while Grant went into a different field than his family, he learned there’s a lot finance and construction have in common.
“In construction management, they say, ‘Here’s a $90 million, $50 million, $60 million, and here’s your project, get it done. Here’s your money, here’s your schedule and here’s your plans.’ You got to work to get that project done under budget. Whatever it takes. So, there’s a lot of finance in construction. There are a bunch of financial impacts.”
Proving himself as management material
It only took Grant a year and three months to become a field engineer. And this meant he got to be on jobsites full-time. The first of which was the USPS Nashville project. When the prior project manager had to leave the job, Grant stepped in and successfully completed all the PM work.
It was a big job, but Grant knew he was ready for it.
“I feel like I was involved heavily enough on previous projects from the PM side that it wasn’t much of a huge learning curve when I became a project manager, just because the fact of I always tried to take a load off of the project manager’s plate when I worked with them.”
By the time the project ended, just eight months later, he was officially promoted to project manager. It took him just two years to earn his dream job, and he’s since been there for almost six years.
Grant wasn’t climbing the ladder alone. He had the help of mentors like Tyler Unterbrink, the PM on Grant’s first project who now works as the vice president of field operations.
Grant learned a lot from Tyler over the years and appreciates his wisdom and patience. Now he wants to provide that same kind of mentorship to others.
Legacy goals
Now it’s Grant’s turn to mentor younger coworkers. His advice to new project engineers? Get in the field. Understand construction by seeing a project take shape. And find ways to contribute.
“If I walk around to all the project engineer areas, there’s probably not one project engineer sitting in this office today because they’re all in the field engineer roles, they’re all on site, they’re all traveling. So that’s where I think the victories lay at.”
Grant wants to serve as a mentor in the company for years to come. His primary career goal is to establish a legacy in The Korte Company, like Tyler and so many others have before him.
“I just want someone who sits here 30 years from now to say, ‘Oh, Grant Kueper has been with the Korte Company for 40 years or 35 years.’ I want to be that person.”
