Milwaukee Tool has nearly completed renovation work on its new downtown Milwaukee office building, located at 551 N. 5th St. in the former Assurant building, and for the first time on Wednesday invited members of the media inside to see the space.
The company has not had a city of Milwaukee address since the early ’60s, when the company constructed a manufacturing facility in Brookfield, which is now its global headquarters.
Nicknamed the Red Beacon, the downtown Milwaukee Tool building houses 900 employees currently, which will eventually increase to about 1,200. Most of the company’s employees work primarily in the office, although about 20% of Milwaukee Tool’s workforce is traveling at any point in time.
“We have a predominately in-office culture, though we have a lot of employees here that spend a lot of time traveling out to job sites,” said Tim Brasher, senior vice president of brand marketing. “The majority of the people here in the offices downtown are focused on the business and work functions.”
Milwaukee Tool’s brand marketing team, apparels business, laser and lighting business, hand tool business, several engineering teams and more are housed at the downtown Milwaukee office. While a fair portion of the employees in these departments have relocated from the Brookfield office to the downtown location, the company has no desire to change which office serves as its headquarters.
“There has been consideration (to move the headquarters) and it is off the table,” said Brasher. “Our philosophy behind it is instead of Milwaukee Tool having a (single campus), we’re really quickly becoming a company made up of many campuses.”
At the center of the five-story downtown building is an amphitheater/stadium-style seating area created to encourage employees to gather. Milwaukee Tool removed some office space from the building, which was originally 370,000 square feet, to create a more open layout in which employees can see across their own floor, as well as the floors above or below them. Before the remodel, Brasher said you could barely see 20 feet away from where you were sitting. The company also doubled the number of windows in the building.
All said and done, the company removed 80% of the exterior of the building and all of the interior. While the budget for the renovation project was originally $30 million, several challenges, including inflation, caused the total to come in closer to $40 million.
Brasher said the company’s downtown office building will serve as a tool to continue recruiting young talent for the rapidly growing company. Milwaukee Tool saw its revenue grow 22% in 2022 and committed to creating another 1,000 jobs in Wisconsin as well.
It’s that growth that originally led to the need for the downtown Milwaukee office. In 2019, the company had employees scattered all over the region in approximately 15 satellite offices that were rented.
“That expansion is what led us to this,” Brasher said. “We had a lot of people. We just didn’t have enough seats for everybody.”
