More than $15 million | 2020 Revenue: $535,221,654
Asked about his inspiration for becoming an entrepreneur, Brian Putzke was quick to respond.
“My wife,” he said. “That’s easy.”
Putzke, CEO and founder of Momentum Transportation USA Inc., said he was working long hours for a logistics company in 2001 when his spouse, Karen, posed a question to him.
“I was seven days a week, 12-, 14-, 15-hour days, always for someone else,” he said. “She said, ‘Why are you working so hard for someone else?’”
His answer led him to start his company and sign an agreement on Sept. 11, 2001, to join the Landstar network of independent logistics agents. He recalls the exact time of the signing, which occurred as the second of two hijacked airplanes hit the World Trade Center.
Putzke said he chose Landstar because of its business model, which in addition to independent agents uses trucks leased by owner-operator drivers and other third-party providers. As Landstar says on its website, “We empower these entrepreneurs to offer customized shipping solutions.”
From his early days of working out of the garage of his home, Putzke has built Monument into a company with about 150 employees providing service to ship products and goods, via trucking, air freight, rail and shipping.
The company is headquartered at 5220 Belfort Road, where it occupies the entire top floor of a four-story office building and is preparing to expand to the third floor. Monument also has offices in Columbus, Ohio; Dallas; Denver, and Houston.
On a wall near the elevator, Momentum displays custom baseball bats that chart the company’s annual revenue, from $67,807 in 2001 to $7.59 million in 2002 to $512 million in 2025.
The bats are a reference to the football phrase, “Bring the wood,” which means to hit hard. Only a few of the bats have numbers smaller than the previous year.
For that success, Putzke credits the company’s workforce. He says Monument invests in attracting and retaining talented employees by paying above-average wages, providing attractive benefits and bonuses, and offering office activities including a regularly scheduled beer-and-wine Friday during which employees can enjoy a beverage in the late afternoon.
“If I want our employees to obsess over our customers, I have to obsess over them,” Putzke said, adding that 38% of Monument’s staff have been with the company 10 years or longer.
Along with Karen, with whom he owns the company, Putzke credits his father for inspiring his business success. Duane Putzke operated a family dairy farm in Barron, Wisconsin, where Putzke and his four siblings grew up caring for the herd of about 20 cows, tending crops and doing other farm chores.
“He told me, ‘Son, you never have to be the smartest person in the boardroom if you’re willing to outwork everybody in the boardroom,’” Brian Putzke said. “And I can attest – and most of our 150 employees can attest – I’m not the smartest in the boardroom. But I can outwork anybody in the boardroom. As long as I can work a little harder than the person who is a little smarter than me, I win.”
He said his father also taught him the value of being frugal, a lesson he learned after asking Duane as an adult why he duct-taped his boots instead of buying new ones.
“He said the sole would rot away from the shoe, and he couldn’t afford new boots,” Brian Putzke said. “Then, as a joke, he’d say, ‘Good shoes are never worn out until you go through two laters of duct tape.’”
Brian Putzke’s first paying job was at 16 making pet food products at a food processing plant where he later went into the transportation department, getting his start in logistics. A Jacksonville-based company that hauled shipments from the plant hired him in 1986, starting him on his career path in Northeast Florida.
He remains proud of his Wisconsin roots, as displayed by the Green Bay Packers carpet, helmet and other memorabilia in his office. His stress ball resembles a cube of cheese. To co-opt a phrase, you can take the Wisconsin boy off the farm, but you can’t take the Wisconsin farm out of the boy.
Putzke says he attends all Packers home games, something he has more time to do after stepping back and handing off his president title. Mike Cobb now is president and COO of Momentum. But the company isn’t slowing down, Putzke said.
“We’re not tired of growth,” he said. “We have acquisitions in mind that we’ll be making down the road, so I’d be very, very surprised if we’re not over $600 million by the end of the year.
“From a snotty-nosed son of a Wisconsin dairy farmer who used to duct-tape his shoes, I pinch myself.”