Todd Vigil
Vice president of project development for Knutson Construction Services
Todd Vigil, 49, has joined St. Louis Park-based Knutson Construction Services as vice president of project development. Vigil has more than 20 years of commercial construction experience, most recently with M.A. Mortenson Co., where he was vice president of business development. Before joining Mortenson, he owned and operated the Vigil Group-Architectural Products for more than 14 years. Vigil's experience includes professional and collegiate sports facilities, casinos, performing art centers and educational facilities.
Knutson moved to a new corporate headquarters in December after acquiring and renovating a 24,000-square-foot, two-story office building along Interstate 394. The company, which relocated from the Colonnade in Golden Valley, has four additional offices in the Midwest.
Q: One of your areas of expertise is sports facilities. How many have you worked on?
A: I've worked on probably 30 different collegiate sports facilities and probably half of the NFL stadiums and 25 percent of the NBA stadiums and NHL arenas.
Q: What opportunities do you see at Knutson?
A: I was looking for a company that had more of a focus on a regional part of the country and one that was very customer-centric. That's what drew me to Knutson. I've been hopping on airplanes for 25 years, and I was thinking it would be nice to have more of a regional position with a really good company that's involved in the front end of the project all the way through construction — and involved in the intimate details of it.
Q: What are your primary responsibilities in the new position?
A: Providing leadership to all five of our offices and helping Knutson strategically become indispensable to our customers from the beginning of the project all the way through construction.
Q: What are a couple of Knutson's recent high-profile projects?
A: The Mother Baby Center in Minneapolis, and we're working on the Target Field Station, or Interchange project, in downtown Minneapolis — right behind Target Field. [Knutson was awarded the design-build contract for this central multimodal transportation hub and community gathering space in Minneapolis' North Loop neighborhood; it's scheduled to open this spring.]
Q: What are you most looking forward to in your new role?
A: Flexing the Knutson muscle. We have 100 years' worth of work in the area and a very strong résumé. We built a lot of projects that people don't even know about. We're very strong regionally and have financial strength. Once people get familiar with Knutson, they see all the health care work that we do; all the parking structures and higher education and K-12 work. People are pleasantly surprised.
Liz Wolf is an Eagan-based freelance writer. She can be reached at wolfliz99@aol.com.
