Doug Burgum played on his company basketball team, dressed up like an elf at the holiday party and took his co-workers to round up cattle when he was a tech boss in the 1980s and 1990s.
Decades before he was set to become a key player in the second Trump administration, Burgum was a cowboy boot-wearing entrepreneur who put Fargo, North Dakota, on the map as a technology hub.
As president and CEO of Great Plains Software, Burgum lured top talent from around the country, ranked as one of the top employers in the U.S. and caught the attention of Microsoft, which bought the Fargo-based accounting software firm for approximately $1.1 billion in stock.
His early days as a star in the tech world launched Burgum into his high-powered business career followed by a stint in politics. Now 68 and the governor of North Dakota, Burgum is poised to become one of the most important figures in setting energy policy under President-elect Donald Trump.
As Trump’s nominee to lead the Interior Department and serve in a new post coordinating energy policy from the White House, Burgum could soon be in a position to sway Trump on everything from oil and gas drilling and endangered species protections to whether offices inside the Interior Department are relocated or eliminated.
As Burgum prepares to take the helm of the expansive department with about 70,000 employees across the country, POLITICO’s E&E News interviewed six of his former employees from his early days as a boss at Great Plains Software.
One of Burgum’s first employees, Tami Reller, was the 36th staffer hired at Great Plains in the mid-1980s.
She initially took the job as a part-time gig while she was paying her way through college. Reller stuck around, working her way up to become the company’s chief financial officer; she later became an executive vice president at Microsoft.
Burgum and his family bought the nascent software company in 1984, and although he wasn’t the founder, it felt as if he was at that time, Reller said in a recent interview.
“As people hear about Doug, they think he sounds almost too good to be true as a leader,” Reller said. “But he really is an exceptional leader. And I think he’s stayed true to that through every phase of his leadership and career journey.”
When Burgum launched his presidential primary bid in 2023, Reller chaired a super political action committee supporting his candidacy. She’s among the Burgum allies who have remained in his orbit dating back to the Great Plains days.
Burgum has long been known for his unique style.
He wasn’t fond of business suits, so he would wear jeans and either sneakers or cowboy boots, said Tracy Faleide, who started at Great Plains Software just out of college. (She estimates she was the 100th employee).
“He’s quite a horseman,” Faleide said. He wasn’t like some politicians who wear faded jeans for appearance, she said. “This was legit. He actually wore real faded jeans and scuffed-up cowboy boots.”
The staff was all pretty young in those early days, Faleide said. The company had a softball and a basketball team. Burgum has always been a fiercely competitive basketball player, she said.
When Burgum hurt his Achilles tendon playing basketball with his staff during the presidential campaign last year, Faleide wasn’t surprised. “Doug is one of the most competitive people I’ve ever encountered.”
He played on the company’s softball team, too. “I’m fighting to play right field,” he told the Associated Press in 1998. “But my feeling is that if I can’t find nine or 10 players better [than] me, I’m not doing my job.”
He would hold a staff retreat at a working ranch in North Dakota, where the leaders of the software company would ride horses and round up cattle, Faleide said. “We had some competition involving the horses,” she said. “It was a well-known thing that [Burgum] would stack his team.”
At the company holiday party, it was encouraged to poke fun at the leadership team and wear costumes, Faleide said. One year Burgum dressed like an elf “complete with the green tights.”
‘Making believers’
Great Plains Software had about 15 employees when Burgum’s family acquired the company and Burgum took the helm in 1984, the Bismarck Tribune reported. By 1998, the company run out of a former shopping mall in Fargo had grown to more than 750 employees around the world.
That year was one of several when Burgum’s accounting software firm landed on Fortune Magazine’s list of the top 100 companies to work for in the country.
“Employees have strong feelings of belonging to a family,” Fortune reported in 1998. “One told us: ‘Work feels a lot more like hanging out with your friends than going to work.’”
The staff “worked hard together and played hard together,” Faleide said.
Burgum built the company in part by attracting skilled staffers to North Dakota.
“He’s good at making believers of people,” Faleide said. “He did attract a lot of people. … They moved to North Dakota and with their families and everything.”
Robert Keuroglian was among those who joined Great Plains Software in the late 1990s.
Burgum is “astute and whimsical,” said Keuroglian, who was a field service product engineer for the software company. “He can take you on a journey with his thoughts and mesmerize you, but at the same time bring the essence of what he wants to impart, which is wisdom and knowledge to the audience.”
In 1999, Burgum hired Don Morton — the former head football coach at North Dakota State University, the University of Tulsa and the University of Wisconsin, Madison — to be his assistant at Great Plains.
Burgum wanted to hire the former coach because he understood teams and team building, Morton said in a recent interview. Morton was an assistant to the president at North Dakota State University at the time and he told Burgum, “I know nothing about technology.”
But Burgum wasn’t dissuaded. “He says, ‘Well, come and work for me, be my chief of staff, and I’ll teach you,’” Morton recalled.
Morton signed on and still considers Burgum to be a great friend. Morton isn’t as enthusiastic about Burgum’s new boss. “I’m not even close to being a Trump fan,” he said. He feels a little bad for Burgum. “I don’t know if that’s going to be a great environment for him, but that’s neither here nor there,” Morton said.
Burgum expects a lot from his staff, but it’s reasonable. Morton said. “He likes to be around people, and he enjoys a good joke. You can make fun of him.” He’s “very positive, very easygoing. The people that work for him will be delighted, believe me.”
Burgum is a “very high-IQ human” with lots of energy and ideas, said Dave O’Hara, who worked for Burgum at Great Plains and at Microsoft.
“He’s a really good listener,” O’Hara said. “I think he does a good job of making sure that all voices are heard before decisions are made.”
He’s also persistent, O’Hara said. “He would say you need to work issues right up until the last minute. Never stop working an issue to try to make things better.”
He’s been known for sending late emails, “but he’s gotten better at it,” O’Hara said.
Egg on his face
Once, by way of apology, Burgum broke eggs on his head.
At an annual tech gathering hosted by Great Plains in the 1990s, Burgum discussed glitches with one of its products. In a reference to having egg on his face, he literally cracked a few on his head, the North Dakota outlet The Dickinson Press reported years later.
That was before O’Hara joined Great Plains, but it was a memorable event, he said. Burgum “didn’t just get up and say, ‘Hey, our bad.’ He made very clear that this was something that he took accountability for and was gonna get fixed.”
The vibes weren’t always good at Great Plains.
In 2000, the company announced that it would lay off 170 employees to cut expenses.
“We’ve reached a very difficult and painful decision,” Burgum told investors at the time, according to the Associated Press. Prior to that, Burgum said, Great Plains had gone its entire 19-year history without a layoff. The company had grown to about 2,200 employees by that time.
Rebecca Knutson, who had worked at Great Plains for about 10 months, was among those laid off.
She worked on recruiting for what was called the “people team,” which would have been called human resources at other companies, Knutson said in a recent interview. Because the company was scaling down and not recruiting, “unfortunately, my stint at Great Plains was short, but it was a really positive experience,” she said.
The company had “a really cool vibe,” Knutson said. She credits Burgum with creating a culture of trust in the organization.
“When we would have company meetings, he would talk about the importance of trust and how much time we can lose when we don’t trust someone, when we don’t trust a co-worker or when we don’t maybe trust an idea,” she said.
Burgum was always willing to take questions from staff, Knutson said.
“He would basically not turn away any question that was asked of him,” she said. “Maybe it was an answer that he’d have to give that wasn’t that great and popular, it might have been a little bit more of an uncomfortable answer, but he was willing to listen,” Knutson said.
Burgum would hold regular question-and-answer sessions for employees, she said. “We were just called team members. We weren’t called staff. We weren’t called employees. We were called team members.”
