Frank Bouten’s first job at Gus J. Bouten Construction Company was emptying wastepaper baskets in the main office. He was six years old.
The first college graduate to join the company, Frank was already well on his way to a distinguished military career when he received a phone call in 1960. His father, Gus, had suffered a heart attack. “I’m either going to close the company,” Gus told him, “or you’re going to come and join us.”
Frank said he’d have to think it over. He’d never planned on working for the family business. But he was also concerned that, if he didn’t come home and help, he’d let down all those people he’d grown up with. They were family too, after all. So Frank obtained an early discharge from the Army, resigning his commission in the Quartermaster Corps at Fort Dix, New Jersey. And he, his wife Sharon, and their newborn child headed for Spokane.
The construction business was a “schooling” for the twenty-four-year-old, who was sent out to the field to perform cost accounting and to serve as project manager. And within two years of his arrival, the bottom fell out of the market—and the company likewise hit a low point with Gus and Frank, along with one superintendent, a labor foreman, and an estimator comprising the entire Bouten team.
While Gus’s leadership eventually saw them through, it was one particular decision—or, rather, two related decisions—that transformed Gus J. Bouten Construction Company from a $2 million-a-year business to a multimillion-dollar concern: major renovations at Seattle’s Mt. St. Vincent for the Sisters of Providence, and the new St. John’s Hospital for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace in Longview, Washington.
Gus was initially reluctant to pursue such sizable projects on the other side of the state, but Frank sensed that each presented an opportunity the company couldn’t pass up. He made a compelling case—and Gus agreed. It was a move that would have far-reaching effects, reinforcing the company’s strong relationship with the Sisters of Providence at Mt. St. Vincent, further strengthening itself as a healthcare contractor with the St. John’s project, and demonstrating that Gus J. Bouten Construction Company could operate effectively well outside of its home base.
Mt. St. Vincent and St. John’s opened in 1967; both ushered in a new era for the company, setting it up for the successful completion of Spokane’s own fourteen-story Sacred Heart Medical Center—and the passing of the torch from father to son. Frank eventually became head estimator, then vice president, and, following Gus’s retirement in 1971, president of the newly named Bouten Construction Company. While Frank’s vision pointed the company in new directions and quite literally reshaped the Spokane skyline; his leadership meant it stayed true to the Bouten commitment to quality and value.
“We’d tell owners,” Frank later recalled, “‘You know, you can go out and get other contractors to bid your job. And you can give them the same set of plans. But you won’t get the same result.’ That’s the Bouten difference.”
