Mark Wanner Plows Ahead: The KRÄM Group could soon be one of the dominant names in northern Michigan trades
April 2025
Mark Wanner isn’t your typical entrepreneur.
He grew up in the Amish community, has no formal business training, and says his education only “goes to the seventh-and-a-half-grade.”
He’s a construction industry guy, but gambled his entire career to diversify into the car wash industry five years ago. And despite starting his business journey in Reed City 75 miles south of Traverse City, Wanner absolutely belongs on any list of up-and-coming business leaders in the Cherry Capital, thanks to his ambitious plans to buy and run no fewer than 50 companies throughout northern Michigan.
Wanner is likely best-known locally as the founder of KRÄM Construction & Design, a building company that specializes mostly in custom home projects. But he also owns a 60% stake in Traverse City’s Green Mitt, the “luxury” car wash built in 2020 on the site of the former Hooters restaurant in East Bay Township.
Both businesses and several others are owned under the banner of The KRÄM Group, a parent company that Wanner plans to diversify in the years to come through an acquisitions-driven growth strategy.
An unusual path
Wanner has come a long way from his upbringing as part of an Amish household near Reed City. It’s because of that upbringing that Wanner never saw high school, let alone a college education.
“In Amish culture, they only go to the eighth grade; they don't really go high school,” Wanner explained. “So, I really was kind of fed through that system, even though my family actually ended up leaving the Amish community when I was around seven. My dad, they excommunicated him for a religious belief that they didn’t agree with. But I still ended up being homeschooled for all of my schooling, and once I got through seventh grade, the attitude was, ‘Oh, you kind of know everything now; let’s go to work.’”
“Going to work” for Wanner, meant working for his father, who had recently bought a vinyl replacement window company. By the time he was 16, Wanner was running his own installation crews for that business. Then, in 2003, at the age of 20, he got married and started his own construction company.
For years, Wanner mostly took on small construction projects – a roofing job here, a pole barn there – and did the majority of the work by himself or with very small crews. He changed his approach in 2017, paving the way for what KRÄM Construction & Design is today.
“In 2017 I started realizing, ‘Oh, I’m still thinking in an old-fashioned way,’” Wanner said. “I saw that there was probably a whole other level to business that I wasn’t pursuing. I didn’t really have any business training, and not a lot of people in my life were in business, so there was a lot I didn’t know.”
The KRÄM team.Wanner started growing his inner circle, hiring an assistant and bringing on a more solid construction crew. In 2020, he even hired a company called Unleash CEO to coach him through more formal best practices of running a business, from articulating a vision to adopting core company values.
In the years since, Wanner says he’s continued to be “extremely intentional” about learning as much as possible about the business world, whether through coaches, mentors, colleagues or books.
All that behind-the-scenes work has coincided with big changes to Wanner’s public-facing business entities. In 2022, he hired an in-house architect and consolidated his two existing construction-related DBAs – Northern Castle Homes and Pole Barn Living – as KRÄM Construction & Design.
The rebrand, he says, has helped the company build a reputation as a high-end custom home design-build company. Fast-forward to 2025 and the business is doing some 75% of its work in the Grand Traverse area, a high-demand, high-value market where Wanner soon hopes to establish a second KRÄM office.
Growth is the name of the game
“I'm never afraid to learn. I'm never afraid to fail," Wanner said. "There’s either winning or learning, right?”
These days, that’s Wanner’s philosophy when it comes to business, which probably explains why he decided five years ago to add “car wash mogul” to his resume.
Green Mitt opened in TC in 2021.“I'm always looking for ideas and options, just kind of living that visionary side of life,” Wanner said. “I’d heard car washes do well, so I did a little research and found a company called Car Wash Pro Designers, out of Chicago, that advises clients on building those types of businesses. So, in 2019 I dove into that.”
Looking back, Wanner acknowledges that the project, even if everything had gone perfectly, would have been a risk. He had no personal knowledge of how to run a car wash, and the property he was eyeing in East Bay Township was one of multiple long-dormant remnants of the township’s once-thriving restaurant row. At the time, the Hooters, Schelde’s, and Ruby Tuesday were all closed down and vacant, still waiting for a revitalization that, half a decade later, is much further along.
Everything did not go perfectly. In March 2020, the economy cratered amidst the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The Green Mitt project, which was still in its early design phases and hadn’t even gone to the township for approval yet, was one of several local business openings stalled or otherwise affected by COVID-19.
Despite the uncertainty of that time, Wanner decided to stay the course, with full awareness that he might live to regret it.
“I went to my wife and said, ‘The worst thing that could happen is we could lose everything,’” he said.
Green Mitt opened in 2021, and for the first year, it did lose money – a lot of it. In its second year, it narrowly broke even. It wasn’t until year three that the car wash started making a solid profit. Now, Wanner says the business is on track for an “amazing” year four – so strong that “if we hit our projections and goals for the first two quarters of 2025, we definitely would be looking to open a second location.”
The acquisitions king?
A TC office for KRÄM Construction & Design and a second location for Green Mitt are just the tip of the iceberg for Wanner’s growth plans. Right now, The KRÄM Group is in the process of buying a tile and flooring business in Paris, Michigan, not far from Reed City. Once purchased, that company will be “rebranded and updated,” as Aspen & Stone Interiors, becoming a “one-stop shop for all things interiors.” The business will serve KRÄM clients and other customers or builders with everything from flooring to countertops to cabinetry.
That acquisition will likely be the first of many: Per Wanner, the primary growth strategy for The KRÄM Group is to “buy out other small businesses” in northern Michigan and beyond, particularly those that touch the construction sector in some way. In particular, Wanner is interested in acquiring businesses that specialize in specific building trades, like plumbing or framing. Those types of acquisitions, he explains, would provide advantageous diversification for KRÄM's core construction business with the added benefit of preserving institutional knowledge and customer loyalty in an ever-changing landscape of local businesses.
“We’re primarily looking for folks in the area that are operating good quality businesses, but maybe the owners are ready to retire,” Wanner said. “A lot of businesses just kind of fold and close, but they have a lot of life into them. With the right vision, they can be updated and refreshed. The KRÄM Group is a good wheel for that.”
In other words, The KRÄM Group could soon be one of the dominant names in northern Michigan trades.
“Long term, The KRÄM Group has a goal of owning 50 companies at some point,” Wanner said. “I don’t want to rush that growth, but my guess right now is that we will add two to three companies to our portfolio every year.”
