“I couldn’t wait to get off the bus at 13 or 14 years old and run up to the gravel bank and run those loaders,” Boyce recalls. “When I got in trouble as a kid they’d take my keys away from the equipment. That’s how I got punished.”
Boyce kept working his way up in the company from operator to foreman to vice president and then to president before buying the whole thing from his father in 2005.
Started by his great-grandfather as a trucking business in 1929 and run by his great-grandmother through the ’30s after her husband’s sudden passing, Boyce Excavating now employs as many as 100 and made an estimated $23 million in revenue last year, experiencing a significant growth spurt from its previous year’s revenues of $14 million.
“It’s not often that you Google a construction company that has been in business for more than 80 years,” company vice president Brian Cutler says. Cutler joined Boyce after leaving a career at IBM. “Garry didn’t know much about the office end of it, the bookkeeping. I had an accounting degree. I kind of reversed things.”
But Cutler didn’t simply jump into the office as VP. He says he wanted to learn about the business first, so he started at the company as a laborer and eventually became an equipment operator. “I started with a shovel in a ditch,” Cutler recalls. “I did that for like a year and then I would run equipment once in a while and then I started paving. We had a really good paving operator and he taught me a lot.”
Now, Cutler mostly works on the paving side of the business but still oversees accounting. “I’m out in the field now more than I am in the office,” he says.
