Bill and John Hasse readily admit that if you'd asked them
during high
school or college if they wanted to take over dad's business
someday, both
would have said no.
Neither really expected to work with their brother, either.
But three years after John joined the family construction firm
that Bill has
headed since 1985, it's hard to remember a time when working
together wasn't
the norm.
"I'm working better with him than I ever have before," John
Hasse says.
"I'm very happy to have him with us," says Bill, president of
Calumet
City-based Hasse Construction Co.
Together, the Hasses build industrial and commercial projects
primarily in
Northwest Indiana and the Chicago suburbs.
Despite the horror stories they hear about families working
together, these
brothers live near each other in Munster with their wives and
children and play
basketball together in their free time.
The second-oldest and youngest in a family of six siblings, both
were
swimmers at Munster High School and then Purdue University in
West Lafayette;
both earned degrees in civil engineering; both found jobs
elsewhere in the
field when they graduated college.
"The opportunity to work here was always available, but we both
wanted to go
out and do our own thing, to learn other things," Bill says.
Bill (or William A. Hasse III) worked at Energy Cooperative
Inc., a former
ARCO oil refinery, for three years before joining the family
business in 1981
when his father, William A. Hasse Jr., was ill. He became
president of Hasse
Construction in 1985, after his father died.
Like most small, family businesses, it is a firm founded on a
stroke of luck
and kept afloat through hard work, hard knocks and
experience.
The Hasses' grandfather, William A. Hasse Sr., entered the
construction
business as a bookkeeper for Independent Paving Co. in Hammond
during the early
1930s. The company, owned by Charlie McCay and John Jaranowski,
was based on
Hohman Avenue in Hammond and had a shop and yard at Lincoln and
Plummer Avenues
in Calumet City.
As luck would have it, William Sr. bought a $1 ticket in a
sweepstakes to
support the Allies' war effort two months before Jaranowski was
elected mayor
of Calumet City.
William Sr. won $18,000. That was a lot of money in those days,
enough money
to buy Jaranowski's share of the business.
William Sr. and McCay ran the company until 1956, when McCay
retired. Hasse
bought out his partner, renamed the firm Hasse Construction Co.
and moved its
headquarters to the Calumet City site, where it remains
today.
William Jr. joined his father in the business at that point. The
company
built such well-known area projects as the Calumet City Memorial
Pool (in 1958)
and the Wicker Park Social Center in Highland (in 1975). William
Jr. became
president of the company in 1966, when his father retired.
"Dad was a firm believer in teaching us the business from the
ground up,"
John Hasse says. The four Hasse boys labored at construction
sites while their
two sisters worked in the office during their teen years.
John, 30, graduated from Purdue in 1986 and joined Cowhey
Associates, an
Itasca-based consulting engineering firm. He worked there for
five years and
gained his professional engineer designation.
And he talked at times to his older brother about whether he'd
ever come
back to the family business.
"I grew up in the '80s when steel was really down," John says.
"When I left
I didn't think I'd be back.
"But Bill and I talked and I thought, OK, it was a good time to
come back."
He credits his brother with turning the company around. When
William Jr.
died, Hasse Construction was struggling and no succession plans
were in place.
William III was just 27 when he became president.
"Bill is not the type of a person who will sit upstairs in his
chair and
wait for someone else to do the work. He'll get dirty," says
Roger Ferguson, a
professional engineer and the company's estimating manager who
worked with
Bill's father and grandfather before him.
Bill shakes his head.
"My grandfather and my father left a good reputation. They did
good, quality
work," he says. "For me to come in and take over, it was like
starting over.
The business was not stable and I was young.
"But Dad's reputation allowed me to go in and sell to corporate
clients,"
says Bill, now 38.
He and Ferguson also credit the people who work for Hasse
Construction. The
firm employs about 50 to 100 at any time, plus subcontractors.
As union
contractors, the Hasses work with the building trades unions to
find highly
trained crafts people.
"We do the simple work here (in the office) - the estimating,
the planning,"
Bill says. "The real expertise is out in the field with the
supervisors and
craftsmen. These guys ... make our business successful."
Today Hasse Construction offers general contracting,
design/build services,
excavation and site work, sewer and underground utility work and
hazardous
waste remediation as well as building office and industrial
structures. Its
clients range from food, steel and chemical producers to
schools, parks and
public utilities.
"We've grown over the years," Bill says. "We have diversified
the
operations, so if one industry is not going strong, we have
others."
Both Bill and John have followed their parents' lead by becoming
involved in
trade and philanthropic organizations.
"I think you have to give back," Bill says. "You can sit here
and run
a business and get so in depth you don't look outside. This
broadens your
horizons."
Bill is vice president of the Indiana Chapter of Associated
General
Contractors of America, a past president of the local
Construction Advancement
Foundation and a member of the Calumet Builders.
John is president-elect of the Calumet Chapter of the Indiana
Society of
Professional Engineers and was named Indiana's Young Engineer of
the Year in
1993 by the society.
Both brothers find running the business more fast-paced than the
engineering
work they were trained for.
But it seems to be in their blood. Although neither planned on
following in
Dad's footsteps and Bill didn't even begin college as an
engineering major,
they naturally gravitated toward the field they've known all
their lives.
And both love to come to work.
"Working for a family business is nice," John says. "You have
more interest
in it because your namesake is on the line."