Minnesota Control Company

Waseca-based Minnesota Control Company owner has pedigree to automate just about any factory.

Photo by Kris Kathmann

The proposed sale had caused electrical engineer and project manager Mike Behsmann a great deal of discomfort. His employer, Mankato-based pet food and feed behemoth Hubbard Milling, had been only days away from being sold in 1991 when the mega-million dollar deal evaporated almost overnight.

Then one day in 1993, Behsmann learned Hubbard Milling would be shedding eight of its eleven top engineers, yet keeping him on.
In a Connect Business Magazine interview, said Behsmann (pronounced Bess-man), “Our eleven (engineers) were like a machine. It was so sweet. Each of us had our own discipline—mine was electrical engineering—and yet one hand always knew what the other was doing.  It was like a marriage.”

Disappointed in suddenly losing a high level of camaraderie and concerned about his future given the 1991 near-sale, he started having second thoughts about continuing on. Only age 38 and having an entrepreneurial spirit, Behsmann decided to strike out on his own rather than risk staying with Hubbard Milling and eventually losing his job or having to relocate. So he massaged a business plan and offered Hubbard Milling a tempting deal: Behsmann would purchase all of Hubbard Milling’s electrical engineering equipment, including computers, software and parts inventory, if the company would hire him as his first client. After all, who knew the company’s electrical engineering needs better than he? Not surprisingly, Hubbard Milling accepted.

Today, Minnesota Control Company still has that account and dozens of others. In short, his company designs, builds, and programs industrial and computer control equipment for industry. Even shorter:  It automates factories. Over the years, this Waseca-based business has taken Behsmann to China, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Honduras and more than 20 U.S. states.

Besides being intimately involved with Ridley, an eventual parent of Hubbard Milling, the company maintains a business relationship with All American Foods, Kato Engineering, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, among numerous others.

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“Things my mother hates me for,” began 55-year-old Behsmann from his Waseca headquarters in the city’s industrial park, laughing, “includes one night when I was around eight or nine years old. My mom and dad had one of the first color televisions in town. They went out for supper that night and mom’s instructions were to dust the house. When they came home, I had the color television in pieces all over the living room floor, back when televisions had tubes. My mother went ballistic, but 45 minutes later I had the TV reassembled, turned on, and they were watching the ten o’clock news. I had just been dusting the room and weren’t the tubes and wires inside the TV part of the room?”

Born naturally curious, he enjoyed tearing apart radios and televisions, taking apart his mother’s coffee pot, and in high school making good money building elaborate lighting and sound systems for community events, school concerts, and plays. As for the coffee pot: “I wanted to know what made it turn on and shut off,” he said. “I was inquisitive and nosey.”

In 1972, he began at Faribault Area Vocational and Technical Institute waist-deep in mechanical and nautical engineering coursework and earned a 4.0 grade point average, until a disquieting family turmoil moved him to join the Air Force.

“So I tried a different direction in life,” he said, preferring not to express any intimate details. “The Air Force liked my background, tested me, and must have seen something because they put me into very high-end technology, such as nuclear weapons and guidance control equipment. I got to play with the big boy toys.” Even today, he still carries certain military security clearances.

At Luke Air Base near Phoenix, Arizona, a training base, he became familiar with military members from more than 15 foreign nations learning to fly and service U.S.-made military aircraft. At this base, he said, “You might have an Israeli sitting next to someone from Iran, which was our friend back then when they had the Shah.”

The work came easier to him than most. The Air Force promoted him accordingly. In 1975, just when he was feeling good about having a 20-year Air Force career, his rapid launch upward suddenly reversed direction downward.

He told this story: “In my [Air Force] job, we would test all the guidance control systems and nuclear weapons for deployment on aircraft. We would computer simulate a MIG-28 and have to electronically sight and calibrate the missiles and guns. We walked into a hangar one night to do a test. Apparently, someone hadn’t prepped an aircraft properly and left on some hydraulic pressure. A steel pin about a quarter-inch in diameter and six-inches long shot through my glasses and severed my right eye. I had a hell of a surgeon and see today because of him. Yet I have side effects, such as ocular migraines, and bright lights create a prismatic effect.”

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It was a paradigm shift. At first, he returned to Faribault to finish a two-year course at the technical college, yet ended up practically teaching the courses. He had an advanced Air Force electronics education far beyond that of his instructors and finished with a 4.0.

While there, the State of Minnesota hired him to repair the school’s audio and video equipment.

“I then went to work in Mankato for a company that became Ortley Motor and Marine,” he said. “Over more than two years, I worked my way up from a mechanic to shop foreman and service manager. I was fixing boats, building, and rigging whatever they wanted.”

He left that position for a five-year stint at Kayot, a successful pontoon, houseboat, and deckboat manufacturer off Third Avenue, to design electrical power controls for boats and electrical systems in boats and generators. “I never looked at anything other than engineering (as a career) once I got to Kayot,” he said of his employment there that lasted into 1983. “Its president, Denis Daly, and Denis’ father, were the owners and good people. Denis ended up being a vice president at Hubbard Milling. From them, I learned all the aspects of owning, running, and managing a business. I learned how to treat and work with employees. I learned cost accounting, inventory control—everything. It was a very big stepping stone I needed to take before eventually starting my own business.”

The Dalys sold Kayot to a company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Behsmann’s job was to help design and build a new Kayot factory in Indiana and then relocate there along with five other employees. “But after we built the new factory, I wasn’t happy with the big picture,” he said. “The people in Indiana were very nice, but our family was here in Minnesota. So after I finished establishing the factory down in Indiana for two or three months. I returned to Mankato and got everything shipped to Indiana. They knew I wasn’t coming back to Indiana. Everything was done above-board and discussed. I personally closed the Kayot building in Mankato, locked the doors, and turned off all the power. I still have the keys. They never asked me for the keys because they hoped I would return one day.”

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A Waseca native, he then spent eighteen months at hometown Brown Printing, building controls and wiring multi-million dollar printing presses and designing robotic equipment. “I was on the cutting edge of technology,” he said. “I got to play with all the toys. But then in the newspaper in 1984, I read about a job opening at Hubbard Milling in Mankato.”

It wasn’t just any opening. It was for an experienced electrical engineer who had the background and wherewithal to wire and automate Hubbard Milling’s new Third Avenue plant. Said Behsmann, “I went through four or five interviews before they offered me the job. It was an ugly interview—not ugly in terms of being bad, but having a lot of back and forth with questions and answers. They wanted the right guy because they were getting into technology in a big way, and that’s what I did and do. Hubbard Milling was a very choice employer.”

On his first interview, Hubbard executives showed him the Third Avenue plant in which 42 miles of unmarked electrical wire from all parts of the plant had been fed into a control room that resembled more a jumbled bowl of angel hair pasta. From this one room, one person potentially could run the entire plant. It would be the future engineer’s job to connect the wiring to the appropriate electrical cabinet and computers, they said.
“My first thought was, I can be a kid in a candy store here,” he said of the Third Avenue plant. “They needed someone who could eat, live, breath, and die to get it done. It took me three months to wire it together and I was there eight months total. I did all the onsite work and decoded the computer bugs. This mill made animal feed, such as that for cattle, horse, chicken, duck, and turkey farms.”

The new Third Avenue plant was “his baby,” he said, in that he had been personally responsible for coordinating all the electrical and computer aspects of automating the plant. Today, that Hubbard plant remains one of his proudest achievements.

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With Hubbard Milling, he often flew the company jet to plants in the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Ohio—all over. He enjoyed working for Hubbard and the camaraderie among the eleven top engineers. What did he do? Just one example from southeast Minnesota: a number of relatively new Hubbard turkey farms were burning down for no apparent reason, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of turkeys and costing Hubbard millions of dollars. Behsmann was brought in as the company inspector to figure out why. During one inspection, he discovered contractors had used aluminum wiring. Caustic turkey droppings over time had corroded and dissolved the wiring, causing the fires.

Though enjoying Hubbard Milling, Behsmann still could see the handwriting on the wall. In 1991, the Confer family had nearly sold the company. Two weeks before the sale was to close, the buying company’s market value fell almost 80 percent. Two years later, the company decided to outsource eight of its top eleven engineering positions, keeping only Behsmann and two others. Rather than risk losing his job in a potential sale of the company and having to relocate, he decided to ask Hubbard Milling if they would consider being his first client in a new business venture, Minnesota Control Company. Potentially, they could have fired him and outsourced his position. It was a risky strategy that succeeded famously.

He said, “I was young enough—only 38—and always had the desire to try it on my own.”

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Over the years, Minnesota Control Company has done business in China, a few countries in South America, and all of North America. Sales tend to be counter-cyclical. “In fact, I love a recession,” he said. “Businesses don’t have the same financial resources in a recession and they tend to outsource. The other time I do well is when the economy is going gangbusters. When it’s in between, the business often is lean.”

Besides Behsmann and family members, the company employs two Minnesota State University electrical engineering graduates. Behsmann holds contractor’s and master electrician’s licenses, and formerly employed electricians, but began subcontracting that work in 1997. Depending on the economy, the company can have anywhere from one to 20 projects going on simultaneously. The company custom designs, builds, and programs industrial and computer control equipment for industry.

Besides Hubbard Milling (now Mankato-based Ridley), his next biggest client since 1997 has been Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport. “Anything at the airport having to do with water has my electrical and computer controls on it,” he said. “That includes the rainwater on the roof, all the domestic water used throughout the building, hot and cold water in concession areas, the washrooms, and the flushing of toilets. It includes water temperature, flow rates, and cut-off control.”

Ridley is still a very good customer, one that possibly could be “100 percent” of Minnesota Control’s business this year if Behsmann so desired, he said, referring to Ridley’s aggressive 2010 plans.

Two jobs over the years have stood out. One was in China, where Minnesota Control worked through a Hubbard Milling contact to build a modular feed mill that could be taken apart and moved from place to place before reassembling. Fully assembled, the feed mill occupied perhaps 4,000 sq. ft., and had six sections corded and cabled to a central control unit. It was moved from town to town in China on flatbed trailers.

Another job involved Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois, and came about due to a contact Behsmann had with Taytronics of St. Peter. Minnesota Control built the controls that test-scanned excavator cabs in a Caterpillar manufacturing plant. Said Behsmann, “The first day we tested the machines coming down the production line, all the top Caterpillar executives were there. There was a sea of black suits standing and watching. The first excavator test went fine, but then we found a flaw with the second excavator. The vice president of operations told us we had just saved them $50,000 because normally they wouldn’t have caught that flaw until final assembly. They would have then had to tear down the machine to fix it. They were all applauding.”

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Responsible Man

“My entire life has always been on the front edge of responsibility,” said Minnesota Control Company owner Mike Behsmann. “I have always been the one in charge or put in charge or looked to with questions. It has been that way my entire life. My childhood was one of learning responsibility. My parents always gave me everything to do, and it was my responsibility to make sure all the chores were done or tasks readied. My difficult background definitely helped funnel me down a certain path.”

Waseca Freedom

What does Mike Behsmann enjoy most about owning a small business? “I like the freedom and the ability to take my life where I want it to go,” he said from his company headquarters building in Waseca. “I also like the variety and diversity, which is a form of freedom.”

It is this exposure to variety that continually adds to his industry knowledge, which in turn has increased his skill base to make new and different jobs possible and help him think on a different plane, he said.

“I am able to bring the best of all worlds together,” he said. “I have a working knowledge of all the industries I’ve been in, including food, fiberglass, printing, and metal fabrication. So many people get hung up living inside the box. I’ve learned to live outside it. Often, everybody in an industry says you have to do something a certain way to accomplish a task. I’ve learned to get outside the box in order to get a job done easier, faster, and stronger.”

He added, “I jig and fixture anything and everything I do. I like to prototype. I am designing or building something every day for somebody. Everything I do is customized. What I do you can’t buy on the open market. It takes someone like me to sit down and think through the process and come up with a solution to reach the end product. This business is a hobby to me. I just enjoy it.”

The company has automated processes in the following industries: feed production, food production, fluid handling, fiberglass fabrication, metal fabrication, glass coating, mining and mining equipment, plastics, printing operations, water filtration, fresh water and water treatment, and agricultural equipment control.