Power line pros

SEI wraps up 42 years with final auction

A longtime North Big Horn County family-owned company with a proud legacy spanning 42 years of operation throughout the West is winding down.

S.E. Incorporated, also known as SEI, was founded in Deaver in 1983 by father LaMoine and sons Mark, Steve, Craig and David Sorenson, though the Sorenson family history in the power line business extends well before that genesis.

LaMoine and Verla Sorenson came to North Big Horn County in 1964 when LaMoine was contracted to build a new power line through the Big Horn Canyon area. They liked the area, settled in Deaver with their six kids and helped build a community and a company, becoming community leaders and, eventually, the founders of SEI, a highly successful and well-regarded power line construction company.

The four Sorenson brothers operating SEI are the third generation of Sorensons working in the power business. LaMoine’s father, Denit, of Rapid City built substations in the late 1950s as Sorenson Construction, involving his three sons LaMoine, Lowell and Warren.

After performing a variety of work in his younger years, LaMoine started doing line and substation work out of Nebraska. He worked on power lines for $2.50 per hour. Then he started sub-contracting out on portions of projects, at first framing structures.

In 1964, LaMoine came to north Big Horn County to install the east three-phase transmission line through Big Horn Canyon, working for contractor Hall-Baravich. He and his crew hauled in all of the poles and materials and erected all of the support structures – 46 miles worth. Then he started stringing the conductors, and after 12 miles, the Baravich side of Hall-Baravich, which performed the bonding for the company, went broke. The project came to a screeching halt and Sorenson had to leave the job. A new company was hired to finish the job.

LaMoine started picking up other work as an independent contractor, starting with smaller distribution lines and moving up to larger transmission lines, and gradually the five sons, including son Jhan, got involved. The company grew, incorporating as Sorenson Inc. in 1970.

By then, the boys had been working with their dad on power lines for years during the summer, starting as young as 11 or 12 years old “back before the rules against that stuff,” Craig Sorenson joked.

“You remember when we went to Medicine Bow on Thanksgiving Day and pulled wire out of the snow?” Mark Sorenson asked during an interview with Craig on Tuesday.

“Elk Mountain?” Craig responded. “Oh, I remember that like it was yesterday.”

“We were all climbing poles and digging it (the conductor) out of the snowbanks on the side of the road and laying it up on top of the poles. And we got it pulled up and got it all tied in on this stretch, except for maybe five or six structures,” Mark said. “And the next day the wind was blowing 100 miles an hour. We had to go out there and climb these poles, and we were, you know, shaky little kids and trying to get up and down these poles with the wind. There was only one way you could go up. You had to have your back right square into the wind. If you got sideways it would blow you right around your gafs and come out, and you’d fall. It was ugly.”

Sorenson Inc. worked closely with Belgrade Enterprises of Billings, which also worked earlier with LaMoine’s father, Denit.

In 1981 Sorenson Inc. merged with American Line Builders of Missoula, but the brothers yearned to be back on their own, so in 1983, LaMoine, Craig, Mark, Steve and David formed S.E. Inc., and LaMoine retired in 1984. Jhan remained in Missoula with American Companies, which has ties to Lovell through the Frame family. Sister Ronda Peer lived in Deaver for many years before passing in 2024.

In a way, SEI came full circle in 2012 when the company returned to Big Horn Canyon country to replace the power line west of the canyon for the Western Area Power Administration – the same location LaMoine worked upon coming to North Big Horn County in 1965.

The decision

For 42 years, SEI has worked all over the western United States, continuously bidding, staging, working and completing projects in 15 states.

But all good things must come to an end, so a few months ago, the Sorenson boys decided it was time to hang it up. The company stopped bidding jobs and began winding down, then hired Hunyady Auction Company to liquidate SEI’s massive inventory of equipment.

Craig Sorenson said it was a combination of things that led to the decision to get out of the power line business, including the age of the brothers/partners and the current regulatory climate.

“Probably one of the main reasons, I believe, is the business environment in terms of regulations,” he said. “I mean, you just had to re-educate yourself every year on the different regulations that would apply to your business. And that just got to be a pretty big burden.

“But I think age is probably the biggest thing.” 

The brothers range in age from 71 to 61, Craig being the oldest, followed by Mark, Steve and David.

Craig said the brothers considered selling the business, but nothing ever developed, and they came to believe that liquidating the equipment was the best option.

“We didn’t have any real prospects for someone buying the company,” he said. “We worked on that for several years, but when you get right down to the negotiations about purchasing, the terms just never really did fit with the way we’ve done our business over the past 42 years. The different people we’ve talked to over the past six or seven years would have required us staying on for five years or something. I’m sure they would have paid well, but we wouldn’t be calling the shots, and when you’ve been independent for that long, that would be a tough thing for all of us to do.

“So we just decided that we’ll just run the company for five years, take the profits and liquidate. That was always Plan B, and we talked to a lot of our competitors that had either been sold or just liquidated at the end of their business life. And we found the happiest group of people were the ones that just liquidated, if you can believe that. I think a lot of that has to do with, when you’re used to running it, you run it your way, and all of a sudden you’re being told how to run it.”

Craig said SEI hasn’t actively bid on projects for the last two or three years but worked with entities they had previously worked with on projects in more of a negotiated process. He said the partners let their employees know the end was coming and told them SEI would “make it worth your while, as long as you stick it out with us, and this is the work we have to finish.”

“So right up until six or seven months ago, we were pretty busy doing the same sort of work we’ve been doing for 42 years,” he added. “We cleaned up most of the work we had by the end of 2024, and we had a little bit of work that we did in the first couple of months of 2025.”

The final project SEI completed was an 80-mile project for the Southwest Region of the Western Area Power Administration that included reconductor work, some structure changeouts and 80 miles of fiber optic wire for communication between substations.

The auction

The auction, conducted online, was held June 10-12 from three sites: Deaver, Nunn, Colorado, and Quartzsite, Arizona. The first two days were live online, with bids issued by computer, and pre-bidding was allowed. The third day was timed online bidding.

 Craig Sorenson said there were 1,052 different lots in the auction and 442 individual pieces of equipment sold including most of the wheeled stock and licensed and titled vehicles. With most of SEI’s work being done out of state, people in the area were shocked by the number of pieces of equipment brought to Deaver for the auction, Mark Sorenson said, adding, “And that was less than a third of it.”

The equipment included several boom/aerial lift trucks with man baskets, cranes of various sizes including some that would reach up to 150 feet, aerial lifts, bucket trucks, winch tractors, pickups, flatbed and utility trucks, dump trucks, water trucks, log loading trucks, semi tractor trucks and trailers, slow boys, various diggers, augers, forklifts, skid steer loaders, backhoes, excavators, trailers, a Gator ATV, tools and much more, plus specialized equipment like rope and wire pullers, tensioners and rewind machines.

The pullers and tensioners are important in power line construction because the wire must be kept off the ground as it is being strung to protect the wire and cultural sites below, Craig and Mark said. There’s a lot of helicopter work with the projects, as well, they added, and at one point brother Steve took lessons to become a helicopter pilot, but in the end his partner brothers rejected his plan, telling him, “You’re not expendable.”

The auction was run very well, and the Sorensons have known Mike Hunyady for many years, Mark Sorenson said, calling Hunyady Auction Company ethical and very good. Craig said there were 658 registered bidders from 45 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, along with 10 Mexican states, five Canadian provinces and 11 foreign nations. Five auctioneers sold for approximately 15 hours.

Asked if they were pleased with the results of the auction, Mark joked, “We’re glad it’s over,” then added, “It came out just slightly above what they predicted. The first day I was sick to my stomach, but it all averaged out.”

Proud legacy

With SEI being a strong company for four decades, the brothers were asked what made the company successful.

“In my opinion, it’s the owner involvement in the actual work going on,” Mark said, “from the relationship Craig has had at the administrative level, with all the people and the bankers and the bonders that we dealt with, to the other three of us actually doing the jobs. Craig and I would put the bids together. But everybody had their role, and we kind of stuck to the same roles from start to end.”

“I think one reason people really wanted to work with us is because, when a decision was made out in the field, it was an absolute decision, it was a done deal,” Craig added, “because we had owners out there representing the company, and what they said went, where they didn’t have to check with the home office or anything like that.

“I think it’s pretty unique to have a family, four brothers, basically be involved for that many years and get to the end. I think that’s a pretty major accomplishment.”

Craig Sorenson said SEI has done more than $400 million worth of business since 1983 and has had more than 800 different employees working for the company over the years. He estimates that the company has laid more than 2,500 miles of transmission line, 175 miles of distribution line and worked on 45 different substations.

And Mark added that SEI tackled the tough jobs, noting, “What I think I’m the most proud of is we always sort of leaned toward more challenging jobs, because we could compete better if the jobs were more challenging with terrain or if there was some kind of an issue that it was harder to hire supervision for because we had owners on the job.”

“Skin in the game,” Craig interjected.

“And then for me, also, I think it’s the fact that we have provided a good living and a good livelihood for not a huge amount of people but for the core group of people that we care about. They’ve all made a good living through SEI and had a good life through SEI.”

Mark added that, while the work took the brothers away from home for distant projects, “I wouldn’t know how to operate any other way,” which is one reason he became a pilot and bought an airplane, to fly home on weekends.

SEI usually had two and sometimes three projects going at any given time, Mark said, adding that if the number got to four it would spread the supervision too far, though he noted cousin Larry Sorenson joined the company and moved into a leadership position several years ago.

The company has completed the most projects in Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

The largest job involved building line from Seminoe Dam south of Casper 150 miles to Cheyenne. With subcontractors, more than 80 people worked on that job, though the average was to have 50 to 60 people in the field in a given year.

Besides the four brothers, the longest SEI employees are administrative staff members Cindy Phillips, who has worked for SEI for 40 years, and Colleen Wagner, 35 years.

Though they are finished with projects, it will take the Sorensons some time to close out work from the various states they have done work in, from audits to setting up charitable annuity trusts to spread out the tax burden. The process could take five or six years, they said,

All in all, it’s been a great ride, they said.

“I kind of feel like, ever since we’ve been here, we’ve been a pretty big part of the community and the school district and all that,” Craig noted.