Publication: Charlotte Business Journal, July 28, 2025

What began as a war veteran’s one-man carpentry venture has grown over the last 45 years into a construction business that has reached more than $400 million in annual revenue.

In 1980, Charles Poettker established Poettker Building Co. in his hometown of Breese, Illinois. Just two years later, he incorporated the business and changed the name to Poettker Construction.

The family-owned construction company opened a Charlotte office in April 2019 at Parkway Plaza Corporate Park, with three in-office employees and about 20 people in the field. Keith Poettker, son of Charles Poettker and the company’s chief executive, said the regional office has since grown to seven in-office employees and more than 40 in the field.

Keith Poettker said that, since planting roots in Charlotte, the company has worked predominately in the industrial and manufacturing space but is beginning to branch out. Poettker Construction is now working with Food Lion, Amazon and Walmart — its longest-standing relationship — on projects in the region.

In 2024, Poettker Construction logged $404 million in annual revenue, a milestone driven by the completion of 1.3 million square feet of new facilities and renovations in the Southeast across distribution and warehouse, federal and defense, and retail assets. The projects included the 702,000-square-foot Gaston Commerce Center logistics park in Gastonia and the 472,000-square-foot Innovation Logistics Center in Salisbury.

“Charlotte is and will continue to be a transportation hub. You have several ports that are doing significant expansions — Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington — and all of that feeds relatively easily either through a rail or the highway system in and around (the city),” Poettker said. “From there, you can get up to the northeast within a day, and that’s really what generates this warehousing and industrial boom.”

Poettker sat down with the Charlotte Business Journal to talk about the company’s early days and how its presence in the local market over the last six years has spurred continued growth across the Southeast.

What was the decision=making process behind expanding to the Charlotte market?

We went through strategic planning in 2017, and in going through that process, there are various surveys that went out to our clients. The feedback was they were allocating significant capital for their own expansion efforts in the Southeast. In addition to that, we already had some employees out here because we had some projects underway in the Southeast.

We realized that if we wanted to retain those employees, with the growth in the market, we needed an office to show them we were serious about our presence here. Putting an office (in the Southeast) became the number one strategic initiative. I short-listed six cities: Charlotte, Raleigh, Charleston, Atlanta, Columbia and Greenville/Spartanburg, all for various reasons.

I visited Charlotte and got an entire day with the (former) chamber of commerce. They drove me around, took me to lunch, and about halfway through the day, I was wondering if I miscommunicated something about our intentions. So, I made sure to say, “We’re not relocating our headquarters. We’re just planning on opening a regional office here.” And they told me they’d done their research and wanted us here in Charlotte. The next time I was in town, they set up lunch with Compie Newman (currently executive director of private clients at CBRE). The whole thing was an open-armed, heartwarming experience.

How has your father influenced how you run this office?

We lost dad in 2021, and six years prior to that, he wanted to go through significant succession planning. I told dad I felt like it was a waste of time, and he said, “One day you’re going to wake up, and the proverbial bus is going to hit me, and you’ll be running this company.” And that’s exactly what happened. Had he not done that in 2015, it would’ve been a much more difficult situation to pull through.

You go through all these challenges as a company … and it was a devastating situation because at the time I was out here in Charlotte and concentrating efforts on the Southeast expansion. Dad wasn’t really involved in the operations or strategic planning side at that time, but he was involved in the culture. Everybody had this connection with him.

One thing he instilled in me was servant leadership. Growing up, one of my first jobs when I was about 8 years old was picking up nails around the shop, and dad explained how important that job was. One time I missed some nails, and we had a flat tire. What he was getting at was to always treat people with respect and you’ll get that respect back because everybody has a job to do, and everybody’s job is the most important job. That’s how I run this business and how I run this office. I want everybody to understand that I realize how important their job is.

What are your goals for this office over the next five or 10 years?

We’re in growth mode and planning a Southeast headquarters. We’re working right now on where that will actually be. We have a potential site in Rock Hill, but we’re also working on some other sites. In the next five years we’ll have that Southeast HQ up and running.

We have an equipment leasing company called Poettker Leasing & Supply, and in order to bring that down here we need a maintenance shop and an equipment manager. It’ll also support a power infrastructure company called Poettker Industrial, which does transmission distribution stuff. It works for companies similar to Duke Energy but needs a lot of heavy, specialized equipment.

The headquarters will give us the capacity to bring both Poettker Leasing & Supply and Poettker Industrial down here. All of our companies feed off one another to create a robust operation.