Kidwell, a commercial security and IT company based in Lincoln, Neb., has expanded its physical presence to Iowa with the purchase of a building at 3000 Westown Parkway in West Des Moines.

Kidwell purchased the building from Westown Partners LP for just over $1.2 million, online property records show. The sale closed on June 30. 

While Kidwell has done work in Iowa, this is its first office in the state, and Gabe Kidwell, the company’s executive vice president, said it suits the company’s mission and goals perfectly.

“Having the right facility for the right thing has always been a mindset of ours,” said Kidwell, whose grandfather founded the company in 1948 in Lincoln.

Kidwell’s parents bought the business in the mid-1970s, and his father still has a hand in its operation today, he said.

The original building in Lincoln was built by Kidwell’s grandfather for use as a rental and a place for the family business. Later, in the 1980s, his father sold that building and bought another and rented two-thirds of it to tenants, with the company growing into the rest of it.

Kidwell said that’s the same concept he has in mind for the West Des Moines building.

At 15,000 square feet, it’s too much space for Kidwell so half the building, 7,500 square feet, will be available for lease, creating opportunity for smaller office users looking for space, Kidwell said.

“The concept has always been to get a space that works well for us long-term, live in what we need and work with the community to fill the rest of it,” Kidwell said.

Kidwell is currently working to “revamp” the building, renovating the bathrooms and common area.

“This was a single user building originally, and now we’re demising the space to be able to accept tenants and work with the community on what we can do there,” he said. “There’s going to be about 7,500-square-feet of freshly renovated space with convenient parking right behind it.”

The building’s last occupant was engineering firm Veenstra & Kimm Inc.

Kidwell and his team visited the area around January 2024 looking for a mix of office and warehouse space. What he found was available spaces that met their needs were “few and far between,” with high costs per square foot.

“With what we’re going to invest into this building, it just conceptually didn’t work, and we were able to find this building because it works great because we have a little bit of a garage that we can accept pallets in and then send back to our jobs. We didn’t need much but it was just the right fit for us.”

Kidwell said the company plans to invest around $400,000 in renovations.

Cooper Hatten, who will be leading Kidwell’s Iowa office, said the location is perfect with its proximity to the Interstate.

Todd Long, Kidwell’s executive director of innovation and marketing, said the company began doing market studies several years ago.

“We were naturally doing business in Iowa on the western edge, and we kept getting more and more requests from Central Iowa, so the draw and the market was there,” he said.

The company also has offices in Sioux Falls, S.D., Omaha, Neb., Columbus, Neb., and Kearney, Neb.

Kidwell, which serves the commercial sector’s security and IT needs, has more than 350 employees. The West Des Moines office is starting with six employees, but Kidwell said he expects that to grow to at least 20 in a short period of time.

Kidwell said the opening of an Iowa office is close to his family’s heart because his father was once a mechanical engineer with appliance maker Maytag in Newton.

“He was one of the engineers that when they had a problem he’d figure out a solution,” Kidwell said. “For example, he and this other guy were put on dryers, and they couldn’t ship a dryer without crushing it, so they had to figure out how to package a dryer so they could ship. So he and my mom lived in Iowa for three years, and my older sister was born in Iowa.”