All Craft Exteriors owner Brent Beck has been hiring his friends since the farm stand
Brent Beck built his Rochester roofing and siding company around the best installers he knew, and many of them came from the small towns where he grew up.
Rochester, MN
Before he hung siding, Brent Beck sold vegetables. Growing up in the Elgin-Millville area, northeast of Rochester, he worked at his aunt’s farm stand. According to the biography his company publishes, he soon figured out that he could serve more people, and sell more vegetables, if he hired his friends to carry the produce door to door.
He is still hiring people he knows. All Craft Exteriors, the roofing, siding, window and gutter company Beck started in Rochester in 2011, takes on everything “from a $500 job to a $500,000 job,” he says. Depending on the time of year, it has 20 to 50 people in the field.
The company runs on the logic of that vegetable route: find people you trust and put them to work together. Many of the people on the payroll grew up in the same handful of small towns, and some are family.
Beck took a short road into the trade. After high school he joined the Minnesota Army National Guard, and after basic training he went to work as a siding installer. Before long he was running his own crew of siders. Later, selling home improvement jobs around Rochester, he kept crossing paths with a friend, Chad McCarty. The two often bid on the same work, in what the company calls friendly competition, and they started planning the company they would build if they could.
Beck’s own explanation is shorter. “I just started it,” he says. “Just, you know, sick of working for other people.”
The company’s website tells it as a conversation. Tired of an industry that often encouraged cutting corners, the two men asked what it would be like to hire the best salespeople, installers and support staff they had ever worked with and put them all in one company.
The paperwork for All Craft Exteriors, LLC went to the Minnesota Secretary of State on Nov. 10, 2011. State records list Beck as its manager. McCarty started as the company’s salesman and is now its president. The first office was in a basement. Within 10 years, the company writes, it had moved into an office building and warehouse built for the purpose, and in 2022 its crews worked on more than 1,400 projects. It lists contractor license numbers for Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa.
The staff page on the company website reads like a reunion of the towns between Rochester and Plainview. Siders, foremen and estimators list Plainview-Elgin-Millville High School, or the older Elgin-Millville, as their school. The company writes that it is still built around a core of friends who grew up in those small towns.
General manager Jewels DeCorsey, who joined to run finances and human resources, describes the place as one big family in her company biography. The org chart backs her up. Lori Dondlinger, Beck’s aunt, is one of the voices on the office phone. She came on part time, her biography says, when her nephew needed more help in the office. Mark Erwin, an installer, is Beck’s cousin-in-law and, his biography says, farms around the clock, all year. His children are regular visitors at the office, the company notes, since their grandmother, Lori, and their great-grandmother, Ginny, both work there too.
Others came through work rather than family. Eric King, foreman of one of the gutter crews, worked with McCarty at another company before McCarty invited him over. Jesse Kellner, a carpenter and installer from Millville, spent 19 years at a building supply company before he joined. Alex Slawson started on the installation crews, working beside his father, and later moved into sales.
The work covers the outside of a house: roofs, including metal and steel; siding from vinyl to James Hardie fiber cement and LP SmartSide; ProVia and SoftLite windows; gutters, doors and storm damage repair. Estimators measure and price the jobs. A scheduling manager juggles crews against the weather and the supply of materials. When a job is finished, an in-house quality control team inspects it. On roofs, that falls to inspectors like Chad Grutzmacher, who takes pride, according to his company biography, in setting foot on every roof the company does.
All Craft puts a written lifetime warranty on its labor, on top of whatever the manufacturers offer on the products. The company writes that it was the first in Rochester to do so, and its warranty page promises that it stands behind whatever it builds.
One customer, Shane M., wrote in a Google review that he had been in the trades all his life and could judge the craftsmanship of siders and roofers. Of the All Craft crew, he wrote that they did not cut any corners at all.
Off the job, the company’s name turns up on the sponsor lists of the Elgin volunteer fire department, the Wabasha ambulance service, Plainview-Elgin-Millville athletics and the Kasson-Mantorville youth fishing team. Beck still lives in the Elgin-Millville area, close to most of his extended family.
Some of the hiring still happens the old way, in person and a little stubbornly. Josh Streich, a Plainview-Elgin-Millville graduate who once worked roofing jobs beside Beck from Minnesota to Ohio, now coordinates the company’s storm damage team. By his account on the company website, Beck offered him a job and he said no. The next morning, an All Craft truck was parked in his driveway.