Haala Industries

September 1, 1998May 2, 2008 Roger Matz

Eight magic words give job applicants an edge anywhere in Brown County. All they need to say is “I grew up on a farm near Leavenworth.” To prospective employers, that short sentence means an applicant understands order, discipline and hard work.

Leavenworth is a tiny settlement southwest of Sleepy Eye with a few houses and a large Catholic church, the Church of the Japanese Martyrs. Big families from small farms make up most of the congregation.

That’s where Dave Haala grew up (on land homesteaded by his great-grandfather) and that’s where he went to church. And, like most kids from Leavenworth, he’s exhibited a propensity for hard work for most of his 51 years. In just 24 years, he transformed a tiny welding and repair shop into the relatively massive Haala Industries in Sleepy Eye. (He’s looking forward to the company’s 25th anniversary next year.) Haala Industries still helps farmers with welding repairs, but devotes much more time to fabricating and manufacturing steel products used by a variety of customers including concrete culvert companies, road builders, railroads and the swine industry. “When they need metal products, we probably can build them,” Haala said.

From its beginning in 1974, the Haala Welding Shop matured from a one-man enterprise with 3,500 square feet to 30 employees, including office personnel, welders, machinists, assemblers and production workers. They labor beside Haala in a 56,000 square-foot building along Hwy. 4 on the south edge of Sleepy Eye. That transformation would be enough of an accomplishment for most farm kids from Leavenworth or anywhere, but along the way Haala also accumulated deeds to at least half a dozen downtown business buildings and several apartment houses, developed bare land into subdivisions, acquired a little farmland and collected a few motorcycles, antique tractors and autos. He even raises 22 sheep right now, juggling all this because “I need a lot going on to keep me interested in things.”

Achieving success meant long days at the shop, going home for supper, then coming back and surrendering most nights to the business. It’s meant spending weekends on call, standing by to service malfunctioning heating and air-conditioning units. It’s meant continually searching out new products, then struggling to build them, which often involved concocting a machine to do the work rather than buying one. “I built the business, but I paid a price,” Haala admitted. The price included a divorce in 1992 (“I didn’t spend as much time at home as I should have.”) and chest pains in 1997. (“That was a terrible scare. It makes you realize your priorities in life.”)

Still, Haala doesn’t come across as a scowling, nose-to-the-grindstone type who’s all work, no play. He’s kept his smile and an easy laugh that seems to say, “Hey, life’s not that serious, not that big a burden.” He retains a youthful resilience, a flexibility that keeps him casting about for new ideas, new possibilities, new opportunities, new customers, more buildings to buy, more lots to develop, more antique equipment to restore. By his own admission, his only sustained quiet time comes during Sunday morning Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Sleepy Eye. “That seems to be the time when ideas come to me. That’s when I can really think. It’s my reflection time,” he said.

“We’re always looking for something new to manufacture. You think you have something, then trends change.” However, Haala Industries has never lacked for work, not even when it was a one-man shop. “We’re always busy. We’ve made money every year,” he smiled. “There’s tough times too, there’s always tough times. But they make you appreciate the good times.”

When Haala graduated from St. Mary’s High School in 1964, he left the farm and headed for a two-year course in refrigeration at what is now South Central Technical College in Mankato. “My goal was to get in the sheet metal business and refrigeration was usually connected with that,” he said. When he graduated in 1966, he joined Ahrens Heating and Air-Conditioning in New Ulm.

He made the leap from employee to owner on March 28, 1974, buying a small welding shop on a side street in Sleepy Eye after the owner died. “I bought that business with $17,000 I didn’t have, and my dad had to sign so I could borrow it,” he said. “I started out doing farm repairs, but what really got us going was I got an account with 3M in New Ulm, which kind of made things work. That really got us going.” Revenue at the welding shop was $44,000 in 1973, the year before Haala bought it, but “we did more than double that in our first year.”

Haala had done work in 3M before with Ahrens. When he acquired his own shop, “I called up 3M and bid on projects that I knew Ahrens wouldn’t bid on,” he said. “I’d go in their plant and build machines for them. We made the fixture that held the coils of wire that makes the spring that goes into their wire connectors.”

Another boost came from the Aufderheide family, which owned the home Haala rented in New Ulm. “They owned the New Ulm Brickyard, so I started welding and fabricating a tie rod they used to hold concrete pipes together. That was (and still is) a big part of our business,” he said. Haala now makes a variety of steel parts for a number of concrete culvert companies. “Our relationship with Elk River Concrete Products came after years of persistence, meeting with them in the pre-construction season,” he said. If things slowed down, Haala didn’t. He kept contacting potential customers, trying to earn their confidence. “As I look back, I’m happy and thankful for the relationship we’ve been able to develop with so many companies and their employees,” he said.

He’s never been bashful about picking up the phone and asking for business, a habit that’s become ingrained. Two years ago, when a new bridge was being built across the Minnesota River near Fort Ridgely, Haala rode out on his Harley Davidson one Sunday afternoon to inspect the project. A lot of the steel at the site looked familiar tie rods to hold pipe together, cable loops to lift concrete, mesh mats and guards because he already made them for other companies. He found a telephone number at the site and Monday morning called the company in Wisconsin. “I said I could make those products for them,” he said. Now they’re a regular customer.

During his first years in the shop, Haala commuted to Sleepy Eye from New Ulm. “But one morning coming over I got a speeding ticket, so that day I went to a Realtor’s office and bought a big old house in Sleepy Eye,” he said. He used the garage for his inventory of furnaces and air-conditioning units, which may seem like a strange sideline for a welding and repair business. He took it on because he was familiar with it after seven years with Ahrens. “When farmers came in to get their welding done, I sold them furnaces or air-conditioning.” He finally spun off that sideline two years ago. “Another person was starting up in town and I said to him, ‘why not buy me out rather than go through the hassle of starting your own?’ Within six months, we worked out a deal,” Haala said. “My time was getting torn between that and manufacturing, and I couldn’t do justice to either. A large part of the service work was ending up on my shoulders, and I didn’t need that anymore, having done it for 31 years. I wanted to get more into manufacturing, so we were happy to sell it.” (The buyer was Mark Osmonson, who runs the business as Osmonson Heating and Air-Conditioning.)

Another early sideline, which continues today, was building bleachers for athletic fields. When Fairfax High School needed new bleachers about 1976, Haala decided to bid. “I came in my workclothes and these guys from other companies were all wearing $300 suits, giving me dirty looks,” he recalled. But Haala won the bid and showed up for the first football game that fall. “People came filing in and the bleachers were starting to fill up. I was worrying that they would collapse,” he said. “I worry about things, but I don’t let it get me down,” he said. “I don’t dwell on things and carry them with me,” he said. (The bleachers didn’t collapse and Haala continues to build them for area athletic fields and ballparks.)

In recent years, Christensen Farms of Sleepy Eye has become a mainstay customer alongside the culvert companies. “We’ve developed a lot of things for Christensen Farms. That’s a major part of our business,” he said. Products for the swine industry range from loading chutes and separating gates to generic brackets used in confinement barns. Haala designed two styles of wheeled carts with small winches for removing dead hogs from barns and is perfecting the design of an incinerator for hog and poultry carcasses.

Working alongside Haala these days is his son, Steve, 29, who serves as supervisor of manufacturing and has become involved in purchasing and sales. His other son, Scott, 24, is a heavy equipment operator for Mathiowetz Construction Co. of Sleepy Eye. “Both those boys grew up in the business and they know it backwards and frontwards,” Haala said. “I’m at the point where I’m turning a lot over to Steve, and I have a lot of good people who’ve been with me for 20-plus years, people like Dominic Sellner, John Sellner and Mike Schroepfer. They’ve made it easy for us to succeed the way we have.” Although Haala makes vague references like this to the possibilities of slowing down, he still greets each day with enthusiasm and curiosity. “I’m an early riser (5:30 a.m.). I just don’t know what the day’s going to be like. It’s always different.” When he leaves home, his first stop generally is Schultz’s Cafe in downtown Sleepy Eye for morning coffee with friends and fellow businessmen, a routine he’s followed for 25 years. “It’s amazing how much can be accomplished over a cup of coffee in a small community,” he said.

In 1984, tired of adding on to the original shop, Haala bought 4-1/2 acres and put up a new building of 7,000 square feet, then expanded it again in 1987, 1992, 1994 and 1996. A walk through that sprawling building reveals plenty of raw steel in sheets, bars and rods, all sorts of machines for bending, threading, shearing or forming, and showers of sparks from welders and grinders. Many of the machines are one-of-a-kind creatures, built by Haala to perform one-of-a-kind tasks, like crimping and bending cable into hooks for lifting concrete. Haala credits this knack for mechanical inventiveness to his formative years on the farm. “One thing about my dad, he never denied us the use of anything. He had a welder and we were always building go-karts or tearing things apart,” he said. “We were never restricted in any way from learning mechanics. Dad would come home with a bag of welding rods and I’d have them burned up in a day, welding things, making things.”

Although most of the mechanical dilemmas he solves are his own, he’s a natural magnet for the problems of others. “People know what we can get accomplished, so they come here and ask. That’s the challenge and then you accomplish it,” he said. “I just enjoy doing it.”

Two problems that came Haala’s way have resulted in patents. Once, an area turkey grower walked into the shop and said, “you’ve got to find a way to hold these turkeys while they’re being vaccinated!” Haala pondered the problem, played around with it for six months and finally brought back a sack of live turkeys from the man’s farm to experiment with. “I finally figured out that if the turkey is on her back, she’s immobilized, so I designed it to hold the turkey upside down and it worked great,” Haala said. “We sold them all over, down to Georgia, up in Canada. But now the turkey market’s down.”

The second patent had nothing to do with farming. Haala had listened to a service technician talk about the problem of moisture in hearing aids and how the technician tried to deal with it by drying them in a microwave, a process that can be harmful to the instrument. “In refrigeration units, if you want to get the moisture out, you create a vacuum,” he said. Haala began experimenting, making a small vessel in his shop, hooking it to a hose and a pump to produce a vacuum and suck the hearing aid dry. “It worked, so we started manufacturing that machine here in 1992,” he said. “We did well with it for awhile.” But that project is off the track at the moment because the distributor is behind on payments for the device’s he’s sold. “Situations like this are upsetting, but they help you value even more your good paying customers,” Haala said. Rather than dwell on it, he appears to shrug it off and focus instead on other priorities. “There’s no end to the things that need to be developed or done,” he smiled. “It could go on forever.”

In 1995, he put up a 30,000-square foot warehouse to rent space to other businesses and he’s considering expanding because the occupancy rate has been good. A year ago, he bought a 100-acre farm that runs along the east side of Haala Industries and is developing 16 acres of it into 42 residential and commercial lots. “I see a lot of opportunity and growth in the community,” he said.

Haala rents out the remaining cropland and plans to tear down the old farmhouse. Maybe he’ll build a home there someday. Meanwhile, he’s repairing the barn, grazes his 22 sheep on the farmstead and tends a small garden near the barn. He sometimes disappears to the farmstead on weekends. “It’s my lake cabin,” he grins. Although that may be another hint he’s thinking of slacking off, he isn’t going to exile himself to his office. “I’m not one to sit behind a desk all day and keep my hands clean.”