The JP Cullen family gathered earlier this month for our annual meeting, and it was an incredible experience! This year our theme was all about celebration and recognizing all the hard work our employees have done this past year in hitting all our strategic goals. Keeping our mission in mind, to identify, hire, train, and retain the best people to serve our customers. At the beginning of the meeting, we celebrated our most important asset of them all, our people, from interns to retirees. We thank them for all their hard work throughout the year as well as giving recognition to some amazing accomplishments. Finally, we went over the current year’s performance then celebrated together with dinner!
The Best People
Following tradition, we had employee of the year awards! These awards are to honor our exceptional employees. Below are our 2022-23 Employees of the Year as well as a snippet of their nomination submissions!
Safety Champion of the Year – Recognition for demonstrating and promoting outstanding safety leadership.
- Recipient: Doug Ransom, Assistant Superintendent
- Nomination Submission: “I had the pleasure working with Doug for about seven months at UW Health EastPark. Doug is very organized, detail orientated, and truly a safety leader. Doug held superior morning huddles with his crew and led by example. Not to mention, when an issue arose, he just took care of it. The people who he works for respect him, and we worked the duration of the project (still to this day) without a recordable incident.”
Mission Statement Champion of the Year – Recognition for going above and beyond to uphold our mission statement and enhance the morale of the workplace.
- Recipients: Hannah Jost, Site Engineer & Brian Hesse, Superintendent
- Nomination Submission: “Since starting at JP Cullen in September, I have had the pleasure of working with and being trained by Hannah Jost on the estimating team. Every day working with Hannah is a testament to the way she goes above and beyond to live out our mission statement…”
- Nomination Submission: “I have never known a more dedicated coworker Brian is always the first on site and the last to leave. Rarely do I find him without a smile and a hello. In the 26 years I have been in construction, Brian has been one of the most open and beneficial resources I have known. He is always looking to help you and doesn’t hold information back to promote himself.”
Preconstruction Champion of the Year – Recognition for outstanding contributions made toward enhancing preconstruction services.
- Recipient: Erik Munoz, Estimator
- Nomination submission: “Erik Munoz was asked to travel and be an onsite real-time estimator (Pre-Construction) / site engineer (Operations) for Confidential Client project in Ohio. He was originally asked to go for a few months (2-3) which ended up being a total of 8 months due to project schedule delays and design changes. He jumped in after only having been asked 2 weeks before he had to leave. He stepped up and took the challenge and headed out to be at the site and provide the expertise needed to keep the project rolling through design change after design change.”
Process Improvement Champion of the Year – Recognition for demonstrating and promoting JP Cullen’s process improvement philosophy.
- Recipient: Shawn Constantini, Carpenter
- Nomination Submission: “Shawn is always looking for the best way to perform his duties. Thinks outside the box and is passionate about succeeding every day.”
Support Champion of the Year – Recognition for superior performance or innovation: initiative, work quality, work quantity, attitude, job skill, response, to unanticipated situations, efficiency, response to supervisory direction, money saving, or contributions.
- Recipient: Krystal Wiskia, Administrative Assistant
- Nomination Submission: “Krystal has taken the lead in many committees she is involved in. She has dug into every new process that the admins have been learning and has been extremely important in training for the Industrial Division.”
Whale Hunting Champion of the Year – Recognition for creating a better public image of JP Cullen (such as public awareness and improving relationships or collaboration) and successfully procuring work.
- Recipient: Cory Huschka, Project Manager
- Nomination Submission: “Over the last year, Cory has consistently been hit with requests and changes as Epic has tried to understand their own growth and the impact it will have on their campus needs. His input and opinion are always highly regarded by the Epic facility team. As dates, workloads, and timelines continued to rapidly change, in typical Cory fashion, he has always kept his cool and never shown any frustration with this. He demonstrates great leadership and willingness to teach others as our team reassembles to take on the upcoming swing in work. Cory continues to win over Epic as the preferred contractor by their facility team.”
Operations Champion of the Year – Recognition for outstanding contributions made toward enhancing company operations.
- Recipient: Mitch Danner, Engineer
- Nomination Submission: “Mitch works late daily to keep up with project requirements. Mitch coordinates the BIM model, designs changes for the owner, pricing, RFI’s, submittals, plant and sub coordination, and supports five crews with information. No one on site has a better knowledge of the job than Mitch.”
Strategic Plan Champion of the Year – Recognition for distinct and extraordinary accomplishments that have made significant impacts or improvements towards our Corporate Strategic Initiatives.
- Recipient: Cameron Weinbrenner, VDC Manager & Julie Borgwardt, Project Coordinator
- Nomination Submission: “I am nominating Cameron for his efforts related to the Procore implementation. This submission could also be for the operations champion of the year, but I could only pick one category.”
- Nomination Submission: “Julie has been an instrumental piece to the puzzle to implement Procore throughout JP Cullen. She was a unanimous choice to be on the Procore committee representing the support group. She helped lead the charge vetting out new processes and creating training documentation. She assisted with the mass training and roll out of Procore company wide. She led the training for the Support Group and in conjunction with Cameron Weinbrenner, she also performed a majority of the testing.”
JP Cullen College Graduates
We have given a special award to some outstanding accomplishments. Now we can’t have an annual meeting without congratulating our graduates!
Alex Trollop – Superintendent Masters
Scott Erickson – PM Bachelors
Andy Braatz – PM Masters
Savannah Skinner – Support Group Associates
Tabetha Ishmael – Support Group Associates
Paige Jimenez – Support Group Associates
Christina Ford – Support Group Associates
Jaime Jackson – Support Group Associates
Jessica James – Support Group Bachelors
Shawn Blaser – Superintendent Bachelors
Ben Sayre – Superintendent Masters
Mark Eske – Foreman Associates
Tom Lindgren – PM Bachelors
Last but especially not least, we rounded out the meeting portion of the night celebrating three important individuals that retired this year – Dan Swanson, Todd Christenson, and Liz Hasenstein.
With that said, the future is very bright for the company, and we could not be more excited about the team of individuals we have to go out and make it a special and memorable year!
