In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money has flowed into Wisconsin for infrastructure projects.
That's including nearly $400 million in Rural Digital Opportunity Funds, which helps fund the construction and operation of rural broadband networks.
Five Star Energy Services, based in Waukesha, has been completing those projects with local workers.
Five Star is a utility construction company working in the fiber optic, water, gas, and power utility space. Since its founding in 2019, the company has grown from 45 employees to 370.
“With all of the money that’s coming into the state, we want to build Wisconsin locally," said Justin Coolidge, vice president of telecommunications.
The company started as two separate companies: Five Star, which specialized in water infrastructure at the time, founded by Mike and Shawn Klumb and Scott Zeitler, and another company called Unite Utility specializing in telecommunications infrastructure, founded by current Five Star chief operating officer Grant Klumb and his wife Katie.
“We merged together in 2021 in the grand scheme to scale the business basically,” said Grant Klumb.
Klumb and Coolidge attribute part of the company's growth since then to its scale.
“A lot of the smaller contracts are always going to the local vendors here in Wisconsin, but the bigger contracts — the ones that were kind of bringing in the most money — a lot of those were going to these national firms that would bring in workers from down south or out west," Coolidge said.
The founders of Five Star saw enough work and workforce in Wisconsin, but little competition in the middle.
"You just needed someone who was able to scale and take on these big projects and also want to take on all of that risk of the in-house employees, in our case union employees to do the work and there just wasn’t a lot of people who could get to that scale to take care of these and that was one of the avenues we saw,” Coolidge said.
A large part of their Wisconsin workforce works on Rural Digital Opportunity Fund projects, which is a government grant program that gives money to telecommunications companies to provide service for areas that otherwise are overlooked. In Reedsburg, near Wisconsin Dells, the company is doing a similar project with ARPA money.
Five Star also builds cell towers; does cross bore mitigation, which are inspections that help prevent the intersection of utility lines; and replaces more than 1,000 lead water pipes in Milwaukee yearly.
Leaders also attribute the company's growth to its aggressiveness, which has helped it attract projects, expand to nine Midwest states and maintain a workforce.
"It’s kind of an in-house marketing pitch that there’s always work because we’re always getting more and we’re always looking to expand,” Klumb said.
“That aggressiveness spills downward. We were able to get a lot of people to come work for us because they trust that we’re going to keep getting them jobs and getting them work,” Coolidge added.
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Photo courtesy of Five Star Energy Services[/caption]
