Playing the Long Game: Bartlett & West
By Kim Gronniger
Photos by Brian Peters
Bartlett & West is celebrating its 75th anniversary of “leading communities to a better tomorrow” by working on projects ranging from clean drinking water and safe roadways to rail planning and more.
Founded by Harry (“Bus”) Bartlett and Charlie West in 1951, the civil engineering firm began with land development projects, including working on a portion of the Kansas Turnpike. In 1956, Bartlett & West designed the state’s first rural water system and has since expanded its services to include transportation, water, wastewater, surveying, construction inspection, architecture, mechanical-electrical-plumbing, structural, site civil, technology, environmental planning, design-build and construction projects.
The firm has several offices throughout Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Texas, as well as locations in Jerseyville, Illinois, and Tampa, Florida.
EVERYONE’S GOT A STAKE
During its lengthy tenure, the firm has received several best-place-to-work accolades, including Forbes’ Best Small Employer recognition in 2023 and a spot on Prairie Business magazine’s 50 Best Places to Work list in 2025.
Locally, the company has worked on downtown Topeka revitalization efforts, the Oakland Wastewater Plant master plan and several projects for BNSF and its predecessor, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.
Joe Caldwell, chief executive officer, said one of the company’s defining moments came in 1985 when the employees bought the firm from Charlie West and converted the profit-sharing plan into an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP.
The ESOP was originally a C corp, which allowed some owners to hold different types of stock. In 2009 the company transitioned to an S corp, requiring all employee-owners to hold the same class of stock.
“Employee ownership drives our culture,” Joe said. “Establishing the S corp created a level playing field and every one of our 475 employees has the same kind of influence. We expect our employee-owners to act like entrepreneurs, with freedom and flexibility, and that message resonates with them.”
STRATEGIC MOVES
Around 1990, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reached out to Bartlett & West to help with an issue that was more technology than engineering in nature.
“Instead of saying that sort of thing was out of scope for us, Steve Briman [a former Bartlett & West executive] listened to learn what the client needed, and that launched us into a new area of work that has continued to grow,” Joe said.
The firm also hired Herb Bailey, a Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) retiree, as a consultant.
Joe says Herb helped the firm position itself to enter new markets and now MoDOT is one of its biggest clients.
“We’re always playing the long game, looking out 15 to 25 years down the road and planting seeds while continuing to nurture the saplings and mature plants we already have,” Joe said.
Starting in 2015, the company began purchasing companies in Texas, Missouri and Kansas to expand its footprint. In addition, the company has strengthened its capabilities through investments in architecture, power delivery and renewable energy services.
“We’ve made strategic moves to create greater diversity in our offerings and locations to better serve our expanding markets,” Joe said. “When one market is up and another is down, we can maintain our business for sustainable long-term growth.”
WE BEFORE ME
Joe describes the Bartlett & West culture as “We Before Me,” a philosophy based on five core behaviors: proactive communication, accessibility and responsiveness, quality, integrity and understanding clients’ needs.
The company no longer breaks out profit and loss by division or location, instead tracking progress across the organization as a whole.
“We’re in the business to develop people, so we provide a lot of opportunities around leadership and soft skills through our Bartlett & West University program,” he said. “We want our employee-owners to be better at interacting with clients but also outside of work engaging with their families, churches and organizations they belong to.”
The company hosts a quarterly Zoom conversation with employee-owners to discuss company culture, and administers a one-question pulse survey every other month to gauge perceptions. In March and September, the company sends a 10-question survey to employees to assess how they’re feeling.
“We love feedback, the more robust the better,” Joe said. “We ask our clients for feedback too.”
Joe says his mentors influenced his management style, which is focused on helping others succeed, whether it’s a client or an employee-owner.
“I love collaborating with people and exploring ideas and having an open door for impromptu discussions,” he said. “We like to make sure everyone’s on board with decisions as much as they can be.”
ROOTED IN TOPEKA
Joe moved to Lawrence from St. Louis to pursue an engineering degree at the University of Kansas and joined Bartlett & West in 1983.
“I figured I’d stay two or three years and then get out of Dodge, but I fell in love with the area, the people and the company,” he said.
Joe says the Topeka community and the company are closely linked and share similar values: hard work, honesty, optimism and resilience.
“We’re gritty people,” he said. “I can’t fathom working anywhere else. This is where we started and where we want to be. We’ve invested a lot into the community and the community has also invested a lot in us.”
The company gives generously to several initiatives, including the Greater Topeka Partnership and Topeka Civic Theatre. Its giving guidelines encompass social services, quality of life and education, especially STEM initiatives.
“We want to be involved and engaged and support things our employee-owners are passionate about,” Joe said. “It’s core to who we are as a company.”
Joe points to the firm’s relationships with the City of Topeka and Shawnee County as central to its local accomplishments.
“Over time, we’ve worked with so many people and they’ve helped us because we’ve built trust with them,” Joe said. “When our employees, wherever they work, want to pitch new business ideas to us, the first thing we ask is whether they’ve taken time to develop a relationship with party, and if the answer is no, then it’s no-go for us.”
Joe says he is eager to see the results that will come from Topeka’s new Link Innovation Labs startup ecosystem.
“It will make our community more robust and attract entrepreneurs who will challenge us and make us think differently,” he said.
He says he’s also excited about the potential for the city’s financial services sector to expand and efforts to further leverage Washburn University.
Joe, who has an MBA from Washburn University, called it “a hidden gem” and said the university’s progress over the past 20 years has been incredible.
His advice to other business leaders is consistent with how he has run Bartlett & West: invest in people, listen and learn, ask open-ended questions and follow up.
“We don’t hand potential clients a brochure when we meet them,” he said. “We want to know about them and what’s important to them first. It sets a different tone.”
RUNNING CLEAR
Noting that employees don’t always get to benefit firsthand from their ideas and their labor, Joe shared a story about a long-time employee who could trace the company’s work back to his childhood in Linton, North Dakota. That employee, Joe Bichler, joined Bartlett & West in Bismarck, North Dakota, but finished his career in Topeka.
“He shared that the well water he grew up with looked like tea or even coffee, definitely not the quality you would want as a consumer,” Joe said. “His dad would have to get up in the middle of the night to get the well restarted so there was water in the morning to get ready for school. Eventually our engineers and our rural water system work reached Linton and when Joe went back home from Topeka to visit family, he could drink clear water. Clean water you could count on was a cause he was passionate about.”
The firm’s early work making clean water available in rural communities still resonates with Joe.
“We’ll never leave that market,” Joe said. “One of our company’s operating principles is to make things better than how we found them and stories like Joe Bichler’s reinforce why the work we do matters.”
