Jans Corporation

Here is what I knew about Brian and Brad Jans before I started paying attention: they run Jans Corporation, one of the more quietly prolific commercial construction firms in Sioux Falls, and they started a podcast called Two B's In A PODCast that has, at the time I'm writing this, fourteen episodes in the can and a guest list that's gotten quietly impressive. Here is what I did not know: they could get Mayor Paul TenHaken to sit down for an hour and answer basically anything — and then they could turn around and do the same thing for The Directory, on camera, for fifty-eight minutes, and make the longest episode of our first season earn every single one of those minutes. That's a specific kind of credibility. You don't land an AMA with a sitting mayor on the strength of a business card; you land it because the rooms you walk into already respect you.

Jans Corporation is a Sioux Falls commercial general contractor and specialty services firm — industrial builds, steel erection, environmental and industrial services across South Dakota and the broader region. That's the thirty-second version. The longer version is that if you drive past a steel-frame ag-facility going up south of town or a healthcare expansion downtown, odds are the crews on site either work for Jans or respect who does. This is the lane of commercial construction where relationships do most of the selling — repeat clients, repeat architects, repeat engineers. The company has been doing that work long enough that the calendar writes itself.

That's the thirty-second version.

Brian and Brad are the operator-and-operator story here. Brothers running a family firm is one of the older stories in Sioux Falls business, and they're doing a modern version of it — operational rigor, transparent process, a podcast that's effectively a public document of how two thoughtful operators think about leadership. The TenHaken episode is the one worth watching first, but Two B's In A PODCast has fourteen episodes across business, leadership, and Sioux Falls civic life, and the pattern across all of them is the same: Brian and Brad ask better questions than most interviewers, they let guests talk, and the conversations get further than most podcasts get because nobody is performing.

Where Jans fits in the Sioux Falls construction ecosystem is the commercial-industrial middle — bigger than a residential builder, smaller than the national outfits that parachute in for a single project. They're here, they stay here, and the work ships. The scope includes specialty environmental and industrial work that most GCs don't touch — the remediation, the hazardous materials, the complicated industrial retrofits where the project scope is as much regulatory as it is structural. That niche is harder to enter than most people realize, and it's one of the reasons Jans' client roster stays sticky.

They're here, they stay here, and the work ships.

The mixed-truth paragraph, because Grace always tells you one true mixed thing: Jans is not your guy if you're a homeowner. This is the part of commercial construction that doesn't do residential — not because they couldn't, but because the business model is built around facility-scale projects and repeat industrial clients. If you're trying to build a custom home, Ryan Senden is a better directory pull. If you're trying to build a 40,000-square-foot industrial facility or retrofit a manufacturing floor, Brian and Brad's phone is where that conversation belongs.

If you want to understand why Jans Corporation matters to Sioux Falls, don't start with their website. Start with the TenHaken episode. Watch how Brian and Brad run a conversation with a sitting mayor — no press secretary, no talking points, no performative questions — and ask yourself who else in this city is doing that. Then watch a couple more episodes of Two B's In A PODCast for range. By the time you circle back to the GC work, you'll understand what the construction scope is really the expression of: two operators who think carefully about everything they touch.

Start with the TenHaken episode.