Mankato Magazine: Chad Surprenant

By Drew Lyon
Special to The Free Press

June 06, 2007 11:30 pm

— More than 30 years after Ken Surprenant co-founded I&S Engineers and Architects, Inc., his son, Chad, is the Mankato firm’s president. The second Suprenant, who became president in 2002, has high goals for the company’s future.

“I got brought up in the business pretty quickly,” Chad says from his office in I&S’ headquarters on North Riverfront Drive. “The line between family and business was pretty blurry, but it gave us something interesting to talk about. It’s been a darn good industry, and we’ve enjoyed being a part of it.”

Being a medium-sized firm in a medium-sized Minnesota town suits Surprenant as both a family man and a businessman. “I like what’s happening in Mankato,” he says. “I love the fact that we have a lot of citizen involvement and people who truly care about the area. We do a lot of traveling, and very rarely do we find a place we think is better than Mankato. This is a great place to raise a family.”

Q: Tell me about the history of I&S.
A: The company started back in 1973. My dad started it up with another gentlemen (Gene Isakson). It was a relatively small engineering outfit, specializing in structural, civil and a little bit of mechanical engineering. For various reasons, in 1974, Gene wanted to get out of the business. So it’s really been our family business for quite some time.

Q: How did you become involved in the business?
A: It was something I naturally gravitated towards. It was never something that was forced upon me. I’d follow my dad and see the things that he was involved in. We had a really tight relationship. … But it wasn’t until I got down to Iowa State that I realized this is truly what I like to do. The nice thing was I’d learn stuff during the school year and I’d come back here during the summer and do some interning and see the real-life aspect of what it is you’re learning.

Q: How involved is your dad currently?
A: He’s more project-oriented that I am. We’d always stayed a relatively small company when he was totally at the helm. Partly, it was the economics and the times, before Mankato had gone on any kind of growth spurt. You couple that with the fact that my dad has never been a guy who wants to manage a whole bunch of people. He’s a pure engineer, in the sense of ‘Give me a problem and I’ll solve the problem.’ Management and human resources and those types of things aren’t where he necessarily wants to spend his time.

Q: What developmental evolutions have you witnessed in Mankato?
A: The River Halls Mall ushered in a lot of things that were probably necessary and good, but there’s some things that you kind of scratch your head about and say, ‘Are we just becoming the same old thing that everybody else is?’ You start seeing more of the chain restaurants, and there’s nothing wrong with that and in fact that helps to create Mankato as somewhat of a destination from a retail perspective. However, there’s a reaction to that as well, and I think a lot of people in the last two or three years are wondering, ‘Are we a little bit too much?’ and ‘How do we establish our own identity, or perhaps re-establish our identity?’ Maybe there already was an identity that was already here, and can we touch back to that?

Q: How has I&S responded to Mankato’s growth spurt?
A: Fairly early on, I thought that Mankato was changing and becoming much more vibrant and active. Because of that, I&S had to grow a little bit just to answer the challenges that were coming into our door. We started growing pretty cautiously, just adding one person here and there, and all of a sudden we realized we were absolutely out of space in our old office. We had the place packed full of people when we headed out in 1998. We came in here and it quite literally gave us room to breathe and grow as a company.

We’re just going through a re-thinking of how we do things. Honestly, we’re changing from what we’d consider a small firm to a medium-sized firm. We’re striving to take on more of a larger firm perspective and approach. Our projects are becoming more complex and what’s being required of us by our client and reviewing agencies [is too]. They’re so much more savvy now than before. It’s a larger firm in a small town, so we definitely try to provide that personal touch, but we’re kind of in this middle ground, I guess.

Q: What have you enjoyed most about working with family, and how has a family atmosphere in the office affected the rest of the company?
A: You never remove the family. My mom is part of the company, too. You go to work and you always have somebody to bounce ideas off of, and people that you trust implicitly. I think it rubs off on other employees. It’s partly in how you’re treating other people, too. You want to have trusted people who you can deal with. So you end up choosing people perhaps a little differently. It extends that feeling of a family business because we’re rooted so strongly in those relationships. From my perspective, I’m looking for people who I can lean on, who I can count on in the same fashion that I’ve been able to lean on and count on family members.

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