When the country’s leading builders were ranked in 1992, a firm from a small Ohio town landed among companies out of Dallas, San Francisco, and Honolulu.
The Field brothers had spent two decades earning the spot.
In September 1992, Qualified Remodeler published its Top 500, an annual ranking of the nation’s leading remodeling professionals. The names at the top came from the places a national list usually favors. AMRE out of Dallas. K-Designers out of Sacramento. Mayta & Jensen out of San Francisco. Allied Builders System out of Honolulu. On that list sat a company from Marion, a small central Ohio city north of Columbus: Field Bros. Contracting.
A Marion address was not supposed to keep that kind of company, and it was not the first time Field Bros. had crashed a national list. Two years earlier, Inc. placed the firm at number 131 among the fastest-growing private companies in America, crediting it with sales growth of roughly 1,000 percent across the late 1980s. Both rankings raised the same question. How does a contractor from a town of that size end up on a national leaderboard at all?
Part of the answer was that the brothers refused to stay put. The company branched out into commercial construction in Columbus, Ohio. It chose the upscale end of the market on purpose, the kind of project where finish and detail counted for more than the lowest bid.
What separated Field Bros. from an ordinary regional contractor was a plan to grow on purpose. Jon Field, the company’s partner, said the firm would pursue the design-build market through the 1990s, going after small-business owners who had outgrown their buildings and needed one company to handle both the drawing and the construction. The ambition came with real scale behind it. The firm employed about 175 workers and was projecting millions in sales.
The 1992 list threw the achievement into relief. The companies seated around Field Bros. came from Earth City, Missouri; Richmond, Virginia; Falls Church, Virginia; Pittsburgh; and Dearborn, Michigan, most of them working out of bigger metros than Marion. Field Bros. had reached that tier by doing the same thing it had done from the start: treating each job as a sample worth showing off, then letting the finished work recruit the next client.
The brothers had started with almost nothing. Joe, Jon, and Dave Field bought a used pickup truck in 1973 and painted the company name on the doors, building out of Marion when nothing about the address hinted at a national ranking two decades on. The lists did not change what the company was. They confirmed it. A small-town builder that had quietly made itself one of the best in the country at the narrow kind of work it chose to do. The Field Brothers still have corporate offices in Marion, Ohio, and Nashville, Tennessee, and have expanded into projects all across the United States.