Joel Veenstra grew up around his father’s lumberyard in the small, now unincorporated town of Tracy, south of Pella in Marion County. By the time he graduated high school, he knew he would work for a construction company. He just didn’t know what that would look like. Today, he is the president of Baker Group, a multi-disciplinary company that has touched many prominent buildings in Central Iowa, such as the Zinpro expansion, the Iowa Events Center, Krause Gateway Center, the Wellmark campus, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and Applied Digital Data Center, among many others, big and small.

He began his new role in October 2025, and wants to maintain the culture that his predecessors and company founders have set in place and continue the momentum and growth Baker Group has seen since he joined it as a project manager in 2001. The company now employs more than 1,300 people with 500 employed at its main campus in Ankeny. Baker Group also has offices in Cedar Rapids, Fort Dodge, Davenport, Louisville, Ky., and Kansas City, Mo.

Before he joined Baker Group, Veenstra, now 57, worked for the old Pittsburgh Des Moines Steel company, which did work all over the world. His experiences there included working at a job site at a Nevada gold mine, a stint along the Gulf Coast in Texas and about a year at a copper mine in the Andes Mountains in northern Chile. 

The Business Record sat down with Veenstra recently at the company’s Ankeny campus to learn more about his vision for the company and what he’s most proud of in his work with Baker Group.

Where did your interest in construction come from?

Both my grandparents were farmers right outside of town, and my dad owned the local lumber yard and was a contractor, so it’s been in my blood from the beginning. I wasn’t old enough to work there, but this childhood experience of running around the piles of lumber and seeing customers come in and out buying lumber and hardware store items, it was a pretty good life as a young kid. 

What was it about those experiences that triggered your decision to pursue construction as a career?

I watched my dad do it as a contractor. He just supported the local farm community around there. Everything from doing field tiling and running a backhoe. And he had his cement truck, so anytime people needed concrete for everything from houses and building basements to grain silos, and then on the side he and his brother were building houses and barns, chicken houses and everything else. I was just immersed in that my whole life. I loved being around it as a kid and even when I went to school to be an engineer, I think it was always in the back of my head I knew I’d land at some sort of a construction company. What that looked like, I had no vision of that as an 18-year-old, but I think it’s just in my blood.

Growing up in a small town, do you sometimes have to pinch yourself when you think about how you went from running around your dad’s lumberyard to now leading a company that has been involved in some of the biggest projects in the metro?

I think there’s a great appreciation and gratitude of where I came from, and when my dad would come to town and I would take him around to some of these projects, he would be mesmerized by the size and scope of projects we were working on. I just lost him this past spring. It was always a joy for him and for me to bring him along and show him and have a good time together.

You have alluded to the growth Baker Group has seen, what do you attribute that growth to?

The leadership has always hired people with an entrepreneurial spirit to them. They give them a lot of responsibility early. They hire talented people and get out of their way. The leadership here has always said, ‘Let’s just find quality people. We’ll train them to do what they need to do and just unleash them to be successful.’ I think that’s part of the formula to our growth. There’s all sorts of examples over the history where it might be something outside of the norm of what we typically do but somebody has an idea and they say, ‘Hey, I have this project coming up, should we give it a shot?’ And people rally around and take a look and figure out how to go do it and be successful. And out of that, you just continue to grow both the size and the complexity of the projects you’re looking at. I might be the poster child of this because I was a structural engineer coming into a mechanical engineering world. I knew a fair amount about construction, but I had a steep learning curve the first few years in understanding this mechanical world we have here at Baker Group. I would rather have a really good person, a solid core valued person without much knowledge of the industry and train them than have someone that knows a lot about the industry but can’t get along with people that leaves all sorts of collateral damage behind them. 

What goals do you have for the company under your leadership?

The people in this organization, whether it’s the training and development, the mentoring, the encouragement of new and young leaders. We have a wonderful crop of young leaders in their 30s and 40s who give me a great sense of optimism for the future of this organization. The other is I’ll continue to focus on the processes. We can look around this organization and we talk about it all the time about how our processes are not keeping up with our growth. So part of what I do is bring people and resources in place to continue to improve our processes to continue to deliver a really good product to the customer.

How has Baker Group adapted to changes in the economy?

In the past 12 to 24 months in Central Iowa, the typical commercial construction market has been relatively soft. People don’t use the word recession and I don’t think we’re there yet, but it’s been softer than it was in previous years coming out of COVID when we had a big wave. So we’ve been able to manage that but through that we’ve grown significantly and it’s been specifically related to the data center market. There are two vertical markets we’ve gotten involved in within that data center market. One is the projects over in Cedar Rapids. They’re large construction projects. We will have boots on the ground from multiple disciplines on those job sites. Those projects are so large there’s 4,000 to 5,000 people working on those two sites across the street from each other. These are massive sites, so there’s people from all over the U.S. that have come to Cedar Rapids and work on this. 

The other facet of all these data centers is this race to be first in AI, an AI arms race, right? It’s going on all over the United States and these designs that have come up for these plants are very piping intensive. They need a lot of cooling capacity and they’re water cooled, so they require a lot of piping and engineers know speed to construction is super important because these guys have a lot of money at stake and they’re wanting to get these data centers online. So, a huge part of our business now is building these modulized skids in a shop in Altoona and we ship them to data centers from Texas to North Dakota. That has become a huge part of our business. About 18 to 24 months ago, we had 20 to 25 people working in our piping prefab shop in this facility. We now have 86 people working in that piping shop. If we add in the sheet metal shop and electrical, there’s a lot of disciplines that go on these skids, too. They’re very complicated skids and they’re as large as you can fit on a flatbed trailer, so you need a lot of space to build these modules. So, in the midst of a soft, typical commercial market, we’ve figured out strategically where we could play in this data center market.

What about changes in technology?

You can be on the bleeding edge of technology. You can be on the cutting edge of technology. You can ignore it and put your head in the sand. We try to look ahead and we’re constantly looking at new technologies that are going to affect us in the field, in the shop or affect our processes internally. We’re constantly looking at those technologies and investing in those. We prefer not to be on the bleeding edge because those tend to be pretty costly. Sometimes, if you guess wrong, that’s not going to provide the ROI you think it might. But there’s been a lot of technologies in the past few years as it relates to GPS technology on the job sites. We’ve fully incorporated a lot of 3D scanning of facilities.

What keeps you motivated each day?

It’s rooted in my faith. I love getting up every morning and figuring out how I can be a positive influence on people around me. I love thinking about the future of this company and the people who are going to come after me. It’s mentoring, training and coaching. That’s something that brings me joy when you see people take that next step in their career, the next step in leadership. That’s something that lights me up. I boil it down to the simple things in life.

What book have you read recently that you would recommend?

One of my all-time favorites is “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. There’s some really simple leadership traits that come out in that book that anybody can grab ahold of and use in their day-to-day life. “Atomic Habits” by James Clear is another one. If you want to know and understand how your own brain works and how to establish good habits and what prevents you from starting and maintaining good habits, it’s a really good read.

What are you most proud of during your time with Baker Group?

One of the dirty little secrets in the construction industry is if you’re a male working in the field, you are four times more likely to commit suicide than the national average. It’s an industry statistic that hit the headlines five or six years ago, and believe me, it opened a lot of eyes. There has been this push in our industry to change that. We love our people so we’ve got on board with all the training and understood that this is a macho sort of environment. We understand people work long hours, sometimes in a harsh environment and out in the field. We understand that substance abuse is an issue in our industry. And to a certain extent, mental health is an issue in our industry. So, part of it is just saying all this stuff out loud and then bringing along some education and training. In addition to that, as a service to our employees, what we’ve done is hired an organization who provides, we’ll call them chaplains or care coaches, to come alongside our people day-to-day, week-to-week, in our facility. They’re just getting to know people and have to build that trust. And I should say, Baker Group has been affected by suicide in the last five years. A couple of years ago we went down to Vermeer and we saw what they were doing with their chaplain ministry, so we’ve kind of used that as a template. I’m really proud that the Baker Group took a step to offer another way to come alongside our people. It’s not just about the suicide statistics, but it’s also supporting those families as they go through whatever rough patches they go through.

At a glance

Family: Married, three children, four grandchildren.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in engineering from Dordt University in Sioux Center. Master’s degree in structural engineering from Iowa State University.

Activities: Spending time with family, being involved in church, playing golf and being outdoors.

Contact: VeenstraJ@TheBakerGroup.com