President and CEO Gary Knudson is looking to the next generation as his metal construction pioneer seeks to reinvent itself in a booming market.
It’s a story written throughout American history: An inventor’s garage or basement is the incubator for a successful business. So it was with Colorado’s Knudson Manufacturing, a 60-year-old company based on an idea of how to better use metal in construction.
Metal buildings had been around many decades when Arthur Knudson came up with an innovative way of doing things in 1957. Sheet metal for buildings mostly had been fashioned into roofs, gutters and other components at a central location and then transported and assembled at the construction site. Knudson thought it would be more efficient to locate that process on-site. At his home in Cedar Falls, Iowa, Knudson created a portable machine that would do just that.
