When first starting a new company, the first few employees you hire stick in your mind for decades to come, and that’s no different for Ray and Nancy when they started Nunn Construction. From the beginning, they both felt it was important that anyone working for Nunn felt part of a bigger family, that everyone is equally important, and no one should feel as if they are merely filling a desk.
We want to send our thanks and appreciation to those first few critical employees who stood behind Nunn Construction and supported the kind of company that Ray and Nancy were trying to build from day one.
Grant Hall & Dave Vanderham
Grant was Nunn’s first superintendent who had worked with Ray when he was with GE Johnson and who Ray convinced to come out of semi-retirement to help him once we landed our first job. He also helped train and mentor Dave Vanderham, an early Superintendent who started in 1984 and worked with Nunn Construction for over 25 years mentoring staff and solidifying Nunn’s reputation in the field. Grant felt like a true part of the Nunn family and even lived with Ray and Nancy for a little while in the beginning. Tyson remembers him from his sense of humor, particularly a vivid story involving a finger that a shark bit off, or maybe it was an accident from fixing a tricky garage door…
Dave Knoecke
After leaving Indiana, where he worked as a unionized steel worker, Dave joined Nunn Construction as a foreman. He was detail oriented, patient and obsessed with quality, and he helped train our crews to self-perform concrete work at Center for Creative Leadership project and other state-funded jobs. At the time, state-funded projects required general contractors to perform 20% of the project with their own crews. Without Dave, Nunn Construction wouldn’t have had the expertise or skills to be able to secure and perform on the types of larger jobs which helped us grow.
Carl Wohlfert
Carl was a Nunn Superintendent who worked on the very challenging UCCS Dwire Hall Renovation which was one of our first projects in higher education with intricate structural designs. Driven by quality and schedule, Carl was praised by Ray for being among the most dependable superintendents in the company’s history. The company gifted Carl, an avid hunter in his spare time, a trip to Africa when he retired to reflect Nunn’s deep appreciation for him.
Ray knew that he couldn’t be effective and grow Nunn Construction’s early reputation without strong leadership in the field. Looking back, he was able to count on these folks to do the job right the first time, one of his keys to success and represented Nunn well. When first starting out and even today, each job’s success is key to getting the next job and both sides of a construction company – the field and the office staff must be strong.
