Beyond the Skyline

Even during a year unlike any other, Minneapolis-based North Lion Capital Management found success and opportunities to grow.

Chad Anderson founded the hedge fund in 2016 after spending several years at Piper Jaffray Cos., now called Piper Sandler Cos. North Lion primarily focuses on small-cap investing, allowing the fund to be flexible in its investments and address a need that Anderson identified when launching the fund.

“People are kind of fascinated by hedge funds and the hedge fund industry, but there’s not a lot of opportunities to invest in them locally in Minneapolis,” says Anderson.

The investments are typically in the technology sector, along with energy, consumer, and financial services sectors. But Anderson has his eye on other sectors, including health care and communication infrastructure, due to ongoing government interest and possible subsidies.

“We think the potential for an infrastructure bill that may include a lot of money targeted towards that area, as well, could be a nice tailwind for those companies,” Anderson told Reporter Kelly Busche in this episode of Beyond the Skyline.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Jena Cogswell’s prowess on the soccer field took her all the way to a collegiate national championship, a roster spot on the U.S. women’s national team, and a stint with a Boston-based professional team.

These days, the Mahtomedi native is taking her competitive juices to the business world. In her new role as senior vice president and director of marketing for Bell Bank, Cogswell oversees marketing for all of Bell’s divisions, including her home turf at the Minneapolis office.

Cogswell has 17 years of experience in her field. She kicked off her business career as a financial analyst with Goldman Sachs, and then moved on to marketing positions with J.P. Morgan and private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.

In the following interview, Cogswell speaks with reporter Brian Johnson about her new job with Bell, her soccer days, and the outlook for commercial lending as the world emerges from the pandemic.

Solutions for some of the construction industry’s most pressing challenges are starting to materialize while others are showing signs that they’re here to stay.

As a construction professional for decades, Peter Hilger has direct insight into what’s driving the issues and how they may be alleviated. High material prices, especially for lumber, present one of the leading challenges. Prices are just starting to stabilize as production increases. However, one of the industry’s other challenges — labor shortages — may be here to stay, he says.

Hilger has been the faculty director and instructor and internship adviser for the University of Minnesota’s Construction and Facility Management Program in the College of Continuing and Professional Studies since 1997. As a practicing architect and construction manager since 1983, he consults on development planning and zoning approvals as well as providing expert testimony at his firm.

“I’m an architect by training, I was a builder by passion, and I’m a teacher at heart,” says Hilger, who speaks with Reporter Kelly Busche in this episode of Beyond the Skyline.

Landscape architect Lydia Major recently received a career achievement award from the Minnesota Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Major is LHB’s landscape architecture and planning studio leader, where she oversees a team of mainly women in the firm’s Minneapolis and Duluth offices. Her leadership and mentorship of this team — which is unique in the industry — helped Major attain the award, she says.

Major began at LHB in 2007, after a former co-worker asked her to join the Minneapolis-based firm. She started her career at Westwood Professional Services after graduating with a master of landscape architecture from the University of Minnesota and a bachelor of arts in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I sometimes feel like I use my English major more just in daily communication and how we kind of describe [design] to people,” she says.

Her work has spanned public, residential and commercial spaces, including the Promenade of Wayzata, the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District Comprehensive Master Plan Document and the Central Riverfront Regional Park Master Plan.

In this episode, Major speaks with Reporter Kelly Busche about her career, and how over the past year, she has seen the public’s expectations for public spaces like sidewalks, streets and parks, change due to the pandemic and social justice transformation.

Alan Arthur, a longtime developer and advocate for affordable housing in the Twin Cities, is moving on after more than three decades as CEO of Minneapolis-based Aeon, a prolific provider of homes for low- and moderate-income households.

Aeon recently announced that Arthur is “transitioning out of his role” with the company. He’s expected to stay on the job through the end of the year as he assists with the search for a successor, among other duties.

Arthur became president and CEO of Aeon in 1988, two years after the company’s founding. In recent years, Aeon has obtained $100 million in funding to create and save more than 3,000 affordable homes.

A national expert on affordable housing finance and development, Arthur has won numerous industry awards and honors. In 2019, the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business inducted him into the Minnesota Real Estate Hall of Fame.

In the following interview, Arthur speaks with Reporter Brian Johnson about his career journey, how he got into affordable housing development, and more. He also shares some thoughts on the state of affordable housing from the 1980s to today.

Kelly Veit took a hammer to the proverbial glass ceiling last month when she became the new CEO of Veit Cos., a Rogers-based specialty contracting firm.

In announcing her new role, the company noted that Kelly Veit is the first woman CEO in the 90-plus year history of the family-owned business, and one of the few women to hold that title among big companies in the U.S. construction industry.

Kelly Veit fills the shoes of Vaughn Veit, the company’s CEO since 1975. Vaughn Veit’s grandfather, Frank, started the company in the late 1920s with a Chevrolet truck and a vow to “never let anybody outwork him,” the company’s website notes.

For her part, Kelly Veit takes the reins of a company that now has 700 employees and offers services that include earthwork, foundations, demolition, underground utilities, hydraulic dredging, industrial cleaning and more.

Kelly Veit, who started as CEO in early May, has played an active role with the company since the mid-1990s. As CEO, she says she will take on a “visionary” role in close collaboration with Veit Cos. President Tim Reimann.

In the following interview, Kelly Veit talks with Reporter Brian Johnson about the company’s history, her new job duties, the big-picture outlook for construction, the role of women as industry leaders and more.

Along with partners Brendan Dillon and Dan Rogers, Julian White started their company, Nokomis Energy, around four years ago when they noticed a shift in the solar energy industry — a change that came with a business opportunity.

Larger solar developers were pulling out of the industry due to narrowing revenue and increasing project difficulty. White had experience doing this work on a national scale and launched his own company to bring national experience to a regional market.

To date, Nokomis has created nearly 250 acres — or 50 megawatts — of solar. A majority of this is in community solar sites, or the creation of solar sites that landowners, organizations, utilities and residents can utilize.

Clean Energy Economy MN reports that renewable energy sources made up nearly one-third of Minnesota’s energy sources last year. President Joe Biden has also laid out a plan to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the decade.

White tells reporter Kelly Busche that he expects the solar industry to continue growing. But first, he says, the industry needs to overcome misaligned incentive structures and rethink energy distribution systems.

As president of Eagle Ridge Partners, Kristin Myhre oversees a Minneapolis-based development, acquisition and asset management company with a portfolio of more than 3 million square feet of space in the Twin Cities.

Myhre joined Eagle Ridge in 2012. During her time with the company, she has completed 2.6 million square feet of acquisitions and 1.3 million square feet of dispositions.

In the following interview with reporter Brian Johnson, Myhre talks about current market trends in commercial real estate, and about some of her own projects, including a major remodel at International Market Square, where Eagle Ridge is based.

As brokers on Colliers’ multifamily team, Ted Bickel and Jeff Budish have first-hand knowledge of who’s investing in the Twin Cities real estate market – and, most importantly, why.

Investors view the Twin Cities metro region favorably compared to other metros of its size, thanks to the region’s stability, numerous transit-oriented developments, a general pro-development climate and more. However, this wasn’t enough to help office and retail real estate safely weather the pandemic’s impact, the Colliers team says.

Senior Vice President of Capital Markets and Investment Services Ted Bickel and Jeff Budish, vice president at Colliers International’s Minneapolis-St. Paul office, belong to a team at Colliers focused on the multifamily market. It’s a market that hasn’t skipped a beat during the pandemic, despite struggling with high supply costs and uncertainty in the market’s future. They speak with reporter Kelly Busche.

TKDA’s bridge group has a new manager and a heavy workload as the 2021 construction season ramps up.

The St. Paul-based engineering, architectural and planning consulting firm recently promoted Lindsey Lawrence to lead the group. At present, the group includes 12 employees with another coming soon.

A senior registered engineer and experienced bridge inspector, Lawrence is a member of the Minnesota Surveyors and Engineers Society. She joined TKDA in the mid-2000s after graduating from North Dakota State University.

During her time with TKDA, Lawrence has helped plan and design more than 50 bridges and has inspected and rated upwards of 250 municipal and county bridges for the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

TKDA Surface Transportation Division Vice President Matt Christensen describes Lawrence as an “extremely talented design engineer” who “values the high professional standards and key relationships needed to build on our success in the bridge group.”

In the following interview, Lawrence speaks with Reporter Brian Johnson about her new duties at TKDA, notable projects, the bridge group’s workload, and her love of salmon fishing in Alaska, among other topics.