Sept. 4, 2023

Todd Stone’s career in architecture started in seventh grade on a Friday afternoon sitting at the kitchen table.

His dad was talking with his grandfather – who was in development and construction – about building an addition on a guesthouse for a neighbor, who was using an architect out of Minneapolis.

Stone, who grew up in Sioux Falls and Brandon, was drawing pictures and listening to them talk.

“He was telling my grandfather things, and he was like, ‘that won’t work,’” said Stone, principal and CEO of Stone Group Architects, a 35-person firm based in Sioux Falls.

“He’s talking to my dad, and he looks over at me, and he says, ‘you should grow up and be an architect – one who actually knows something.’”

So he did, starting at SDSU in 1993 and then, when the university dropped its architecture program, graduating from NDSU.

But not right away.

“From then (that conversation) on, I always wanted to do something that was related to construction,” Stone said.

He grew up living primarily with his mother, who was “raising kids on food stamps, so I didn’t have the means to go off and start college.”

So he joined the military, serving in the Army out of high school and eventually the Army Reserves.

“I needed to get some things out of my system,” Stone said. “I wasn’t a great student in high school – too busy playing sports and chasing girls and working to care about my grades.”

His time in the military helped him mature and get ready for college – and has led to a lifelong passion for helping other veterans. Earlier this year, Stone was awarded the South Dakota Veteran Small Business Owner of the Year from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

“Todd Stone is an excellent example of how a military veteran can continue service to a community through small-business ownership,” said the SBA’s Jaime Wood. She notes that 10 percent of the small business in the nation are owned by veterans. “Leadership, teamwork and technical skills acquired during military service provide the skills needed to run a small business.”

Family history, career building

Stone comes from a family used to making a mark in Sioux Falls.

“My great-grandfather used to own all the land across from Fuddruckers and developed and constructed things,” Stone said. “My grandfather did the same, and my father and all his brothers worked for him. Ever since I can remember, we were involved in construction.”

For a while, his grandparents and dad were in Park Rapids, Minnesota, where they bought a resort and ran it for a few years. Then, they got into building high-end log homes in the area.

“I grew up spending my summers up there and working with my dad and uncles and learning the construction business,” he said.

Stone retired with more than 23 years of military service, including as a combat engineer, construction supervisor and military instructor.

“I saw the world – and how bad the world was in a lot of places, and I saw great places,” he said. “I realized how great we have it here in South Dakota. You can’t appreciate everything we have until you move away.”

While Stone was in the military, his grandfather continued to push him to study architecture, but it was an easy sell.

“I knew it was something in my blood I needed to go do,” Stone said. “I joined architecture because not only could I take an idea and make it into something tangible, but my grandfather just really thrived on making his clients happy and doing whatever it took. It wasn’t always about money. I have that same vibe for wanting to help people.”

He transferred to NDSU in 1995 and worked at several firms in the area while his wife taught. But they knew if they wanted to raise a family, it would be in Sioux Falls.

While his active-duty military service ended in 1993, he was called up as a reservist in 2004 and 2011.

Like many veterans, Stone didn’t connect with the Department of Veterans Affairs right away.

“Most veterans don’t – they just want to get home and be home,” he said. He eventually went, and his architecture work with the VA evolved organically after that, after some discussions with a friend.

At any given time, Stone Group Architects has more than 30 VA projects going, through its offices in Fargo, Rapid City, the Twin Cities and Sioux City. But the work is all over the nation.

It’s not easy to land a government contract. “You’ll put in 30 requests for proposal before you get one,” Stone said. But that’s all it takes. “Once you start getting one, word gets around that ‘these guys are the real deal.’ We did one, then we did two, and now we get called a lot.”

Wood notes that Stone has created jobs for other veterans – and that veterans understand the importance of a robust government supply chain.

“The federal government is the largest purchaser of small-business goods and services,” Wood said. “Todd and his team have provided engineering and architectural expertise to many government projects across the nation.”

And it’s about more than the work for Stone, he said.

“We get to say we are veterans taking care of veterans,” he said. “It’s part of our culture of giving back and our culture of doing things that are honorable and doing the right thing even when nobody is looking.”

He thinks it means something for his clients, too, when they find out he’s a veteran.

“If it’s a veteran project, there’s some legitimacy there,” he said. “When we go open up a clinic or remodel something and there are a bunch of veterans, they want to shake your hand and say thank you. They open up to you and talk to you. It means a lot in the VA network.”

Stone currently is working on the Sioux Falls VA Medical Center – including a design that will redo the face of the hospital and add a primary care addition and a new front lobby. There are interior remodels going on, and crews just finished replacing the roof and doing exterior improvements.

For Stone, winning an award that focuses on work with veterans is the most meaningful. “You can give me all the awards in the world from the architectural community on great design, and none of that would mean as much as the veteran business of the year.”

New projects

Stone Group Architects recently launched a division centered around golf club development.

Right now, it has five projects in the works and is talking about a dozen more. Stone credits some of his recent hires, including Skip Avery, who has a long history of club development. “He knows everyone and knows how to talk to people,” Stone said.

“The club stuff gets us excited,” he added. “I think it helps us on recruiting and helps keep our team solid and focused.”

Projects have included work for clubs in Aberdeen, Brookings and the new Elmwood Golf Course clubhouse in Sioux Falls, in addition to a preliminary study for a club in Florida.

“We come in and do an assessment of what they need and master plan it for them,” Stone said.

Other nongovernment projects include the Graystone Heights apartments in southeast Sioux Falls and Sioux City’s Seaboard Triumph Foods Expo Center.

His own office building is on the east end of downtown, where he attended nearby Whittier Middle School years ago.

“There’s always this sense of pride when you get to tell your family, ‘I did that,’” Stone said. “We have learned that matters to our team. Each one of our offices has a percentage of their business that has to be in the community.”

It’s more than just building things, though. Team members serve as mentors, serve on boards and look for opportunities to “walk the walk” as Stone said. “If you can’t give back to your fellow man, then why be here?”

Wood agrees.

“The Stone Group Architects exemplifies what SBA sees as the small-business journey,” Wood said. “Todd Stone returned home to South Dakota after a military career, applied his leaderships skills and engineering expertise into starting a small firm, hired top performing architects and operational support staff, expanded his business to many branches across the region and provided architect services to both commercial and government domains.”

And Stone’s award will continue to resonate in the community, Wood said. On Nov. 1, during National Veteran Small Business Week, Stone will be a featured guest speaker during an SBA Government Contracting and Exporting Expo event at the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance in Sioux Falls, she said. More information will be available at sba.gov/southdakota as the event approaches. The expo is open to small businesses from all backgrounds that want to start and grow in government contracting and exporting.

Stone also continues to give back to the community of veterans. He’s sponsoring a tiny home for homeless veterans as part of the Veterans Community Project and will be on the fundraising committee for its services building that kicks off this fall.

Even on his own company website, there’s a growing tribute to military heroes. A section catalogs memorials and names of veterans nationwide.

Stone got the idea from a national conference where he learned “there was nobody really documenting veterans memorials,” he said. “Every community has one, and as our people were out and about on projects, they would take pictures. So we just started archiving that stuff and putting it on the website and giving it exposure. We’ve had people all over the U.S. send us stuff when they’re traveling, and we’re excited to see the memorials that are out there and bring it to the surface.”