Solid Business Venture - Paving the Way for Nearly Four Decades

Even though their titles are president and vice president, you won’t catch Kip or Chris Spray wearing a suit and tie at work.

Yes, they must tend to the administrative duties at Venture Corporation but they also may find themselves in the maintenance shop, at the company’s sandpit near Dundee or lending a hand at one of their many job sites.

Venture has been producing and laying asphalt all over Kansas since Jan. 23, 1973, when the late Butch Spray started the business. And now Kip and Chris are carrying on their Dad’s tradition of long hours and hard work. Their brother-in-law, Bob Holt, is the other family member working for the locally owned business.

“Dad taught us how to work,” Chris said. “We owe it all to Dad and Mom (Doris Spray of Great Bend). The business plan from the beginning was simple; Dad said it was ‘quality work and efficiency.’ That philosophy hasn’t changed.

“Kip and I can run every piece of equipment we have, and all the managers can do the same,” Chris added. “To teach someone how to run the machinery, you have to know how to do it yourself. We will do what it takes to get the work done.”

The brothers noted that their Dad taught them this “do-what-you- have-to-do” philosophy too. They cited the time just a few years ago when Butch was on flagging duty on a 24th Street project in Great Bend.

Phase 1: Batch Work – A Venture Corporation employee uses an automated sifting machine and a series of stacking trays to separate raw material that comes to the plant in large bags.

“Yeah, Dad was out there holding up a stop sign,” Kip said. “He did it all. His hobby was the company. He didn’t golf, hunt or fish. But he did enjoy his retreat in Oklahoma now and then, and he also enjoyed flying planes.

“Now, five of our employees are licensed pilots,” Kip added. “We use airplanes to run parts to our plants. They were licensed while they were working for Venture; this was one of Dad’s perks for them.”

Phase 2: Lab Work – Once the raw material has been sorted, lab employees then create the exact mixture of materials that will later be batched in much larger proportions.

The Spray boys began working at Venture during summers in high school. They both earned business management degrees – Kip from Fort Hays State University and Chris from Kansas State University. They then returned to work for their Dad full-time.

Butch, who died in September 2008, had been vice president of J.H. Shears in Hutchinson but then bought an existing firm in Larned called Broce & Smith in 1973. He changed the name to Venture and moved in 1976 to the current Great Bend location, 214 S. 281 Highway.

Phase 3: Loading Up – A Venture Corporation employee uses an automated sifting machine and a series of stacking trays to separate raw material that comes to the plant in large bags.

“We are sitting in the original office,” Kip said during a recent visit. “We have had three additions since then – shop and office add-ons. Dad began with between 15 and 20 employees and now we have over 160.

“When he bought Broce & Smith, he worked like everyone else. He owned the company but was running the equipment as well,” Kip recalled.

Phase 4: Paving – Venture Corporation employees pave a Rush County highway using one of the many pieces of sophisticated proprietary pieces of equipment owned by the company. The asphalt is mixed and melted at extremely hot temperatures, then applied to the roadway to form a smooth blacktop.

Of today’s 160 employees, about a dozen are office personnel and another five are mechanics in the Venture shop. The Spray brothers noted that they are always looking for seasonal workers.

“But they have to be willing to travel,” Kip commented. “They could be four or five hours from home and have to stay away all week - Monday through Saturday.

“Our bread and butter is asphalt paving,” he continued. “This is everything from parking lots to major interstate highways, and everything in between. We have to be where the jobs are.”

The company also offers dirt work, subgrading, milling and rock crushing.

“We were the largest contractor for the Kansas Department of Transportation in 2008,” Chris said. ‘We did more work for the DOT than any other contractor in the state.”

Mechanic Magic – A Venture Corporation mechanic services one of the company's numerous trucks used to haul equipment and materials to and from job sites around the state.

This year, Venture has 25 K-DOT projects on the calendar and up to about 75 other jobs, which include parking lots and driveways. Venture also paves city, county, township and federal roadways.

While the Spray brothers prefer to stay in Kansas, they are currently working on 5 jobs in Oklahoma. The company is also qualified to bid jobs in Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas and New Mexico.

Venture has also enjoyed numerous awards for its asphalt work for many years. It has earned at least one Quality in Construction (QIC) award for each of the last 10 years; it was the first company in the nation to receive four of these national awards in one year. They are presented by NAPA, the National Asphalt Pavement Association.

Once a firm wins a QIC, it is eligible for the Sheldon G. Hayes Award. Three of Venture’s projects have reached the top three nationwide in this competition.

"This success is attributed to the hard work and dedication of all our employees," Chris Spray says. "The managers are the reason we are efficient on a daily basis."

Behind the Scenes – While the orange-clad field workers are what most people would think of when they think of the Venture Corporation, there are a handfull of employees who make the operation run smoothly behind the scenes. Estimators, secretaries, managers, and accounts payable/receivable employees keep the Venture Corporation running smoothly.

In addition, Venture was named the Great Bend Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year in 2005.

The company has four asphalt plants, which are temporary sites that move from one project to the next. There are two separate crews at each plant – one for asphalt production, the other for asphalt laydown. There are 40 people on a crew and about 400 pieces of machinery are involved in their many projects.

“Our plants produce a total of 700,000 to 800,000 tons of asphalt a year,” Kip said. “That’s quite a volume when you consider most of our work is done in nine months out of the year. It is too cold from December through February.”

Venture uses more than one million gallons of diesel annually and 1.5 million gallons of burner fuel to heat the asphalt.

Asphalt production and laydown are obviously specialty services, but Venture also stands out in another way.

“We do 98 percent of our work out of Great Bend,” Kip said. “We bring a lot of money in here. For example, a job is Neodesha brings money back to Great Bend to buy fuel, housing, parts and tires. And it pays salaries and property taxes.

“We are not like national companies here that send money out of town,” Kip added. “We are the opposite of them. We bring money in instead of sending it out.”

Venture Corporation
S. Hwy 281
Great Bend, KS 67530
620-792-5921