DLC Manufacuring
Photo by Jeff Silker
Lazer Blazer
New Ulm entrepreneur with exceptional gift and legacy cuts metal manufacturing niche.
Exactly 165 years ago in March 1847, the last survivors of the Donner Party reached safety after spending a cataclysmal winter caught in the snowy clutches of Hastings Cutoff, a dead-end pass through the Sierra Nevada in California. The original 87 members, led by 62-year-old George Donner, had naively believed a trading post owner claiming a fresh wagon route to California blazed by Lansford Hastings could save the Donner Party hundreds of traveling miles. Instead, it was their journey through Hell. The 48 surviving members persisted through blistering Great Salt Lake Desert heat, Indian raids, severe malnutrition, twelve feet of Sierra Nevada snow, and having to make the ultimate choice of life or death.
Now in March 2012, Brent Donner, of New Ulm-based Donner Laser Consulting and DLC Manufacturing, speaks of surviving his own hellish journey, which is only fitting: according to family lore, his great-great grandfather George Donner was a nephew of the Party leader. Like his progenitor, Brent Donner is a survivor.
Donner Laser Consulting helps metal manufacturing businesses all over the nation reduce production costs and increase quality by maximizing their laser cutting potential. In addition, a sister company founded a year later in 2008, three-employee DLC Manufacturing, offers a niche service Donner believes no one else in the world can provide: cutting mild steel up to an inch and a half thick and stainless steel and aluminum one-inch thick using one of the most powerful lasers in the world, a 6,000-watt Trumpf laser. The fledgling company makes one-of-a-kind metal parts for about 70 manufacturers based mostly in the Upper Midwest.
In this interview, Donner freely shares his own pockmarked history with surprising ease. It’s his ancestors’ legacy that causes pause. In a Connect Business Magazine interview, 39-year-old Brent Donner says, “All I know is I’m part of the heritage. I’ve read books about what they did to survive. It was something my family tried to hide. My grandfather knew things about what his grandfather went through.”
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Brent Donner has had his own demons to exorcise. Born in 1973, Donner somehow persisted through a trying upbringing in New London, near Willmar, Minnesota, that involved an alcoholic father and mother, with the latter chronically absent from home due to personal challenges.
Says Donner, “To make a long story short, a lot of bad things happened to me and my sister as kids growing up. My upbringing was very rough. I have an uncle who died in prison because of [breaking the law.] I haven’t seen my mother since I was 21. I have gone through hell and somehow survived.”
His late father dropped out of school in fourth grade and never learned to read or write. He couldn’t even write a personal check, said Donner. But to his credit, and probably from having experienced the personal cost of a wayward lifestyle himself, his father literally every day encouraged his son when growing up to “make something” of his life.
His mom and dad divorced in 1981, which began for Donner an awkward time in foster care that abruptly ended in 1983 when his father regained custody of him. Then his father began dating and with each new girlfriend another strange family would move into Donner’s home, each with its own set of prickly issues. Donner himself was becoming hardened, angry, volatile.
One evening in 1987, when Donner was 14, his father’s latest girlfriend was doing everything she could to force Donner out of the home. His father was away—so he was vulnerable. The arguing all came to a head at 10:30 p.m. that night as Donner retreated in tears to his bedroom to pack his valuable belongings and leave.
“We lived on a hill, and I started walking down it,” says Donner. “When I got to the bottom of the driveway, my aunt was waiting for me there in her car. She told me to get in. I had no idea she was coming to get me. She said she had been in bed at 10:00 p.m. that night and God had told her to get up right then and go get me. From then on, I moved in with Uncle Rudy and Aunt Verna and stayed until I graduated. Their taking me in changed my entire life. I didn’t believe in God before that.”
His aunt and uncle soon took him to a professional counselor in Willmar, to whom Donner unloaded all his dirty laundry. He received spiritual sustenance from his New London youth pastor, Kevin Melin, who later became senior pastor of Crossview Covenant Church in North Mankato. Buoyed by a loving home atmosphere, Donner excelled at sports and was becoming a top student. The “darkness” was turning into “light.”
He says, “I didn’t know God until I was 14 years old. By the time I was 16, He ruled every part of my life. That was a huge change. Instead of being on the dark side and not knowing anything about God, I embraced Him with my aunt and uncle.”
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On November 7, 1989, another event caused radical change. He was 16 and maturing. While in the third pew from the front with his aunt and uncle at Sunday morning church, a “weird” feeling came over him. He stood up. All eyes went his way. His uncle asked what was wrong. “And all I could say was, ‘Dad,’” he said.
Similar to the spiritual moment his aunt had experienced in rescuing him, Donner had towards his father. He instinctively knew his father was in trouble at that moment. He began running up the aisle and before he reached the back, a chorus of pagers of volunteer fire and safety personnel began chirping. He ran seventeen blocks to his father’s auto body shop only to see his father being loaded onto an ambulance. They met again at the Willmar hospital emergency room, where his father was screaming out Brent’s name. About 98 percent of his body had third-degree burns. Both lungs—collapsed. His beard and head hair—gone. He had accidentally set his auto body shop on fire. Doctors placed him in a coma to blanket pain. Over a three-week period, Donner and his aunt and uncle were called into Hennepin Burn Center numerous times when doctors thought his father would die.
“It got to the point where my aunt and uncle would come to the school to get me, my name would come across the loudspeaker, and I would just start bawling. I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said.
On one of those burn center trips he says, “I told everyone to leave the room and I took an hour by myself with my father. I just sat there and talked to him. He was in a coma. One thing that had never happened in my life: he had never said he loved me and I had never told him. When I said, ‘Dad, I love you,’ a tear came out of each eye, and I know he heard me.” Donner’s father passed away three hours later.
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Until his father’s death, most students at New London-Spicer High School and most people in the community hadn’t recognized the sea change that had been washing over Donner the prior two years. But now they would. “A million things changed for the better in my life after my father died,” he says. “People saw a side of me they’d never seen before. They saw I had really cared about my dad.” Nearly the entire high school showed up for his father’s funeral. In due time, he became president of his high school’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) chapter and involved in the lives of 150 students who had promised in writing to call him if they became drunk and were tempted to drive. He traveled all over the school district on weekend nights ferrying tipsy students home.
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Donner was letting his light shine—that is, until college revealed a surprising lack of self-control that nearly snuffed that light out. It was an improbable start to what many thought would be a promising career. At a Christian college near Minneapolis his first semester, Donner was a star football player, became heavily influenced by a wayward roommate to join the wrong crowd, started drinking alcohol heavily, and skipped almost all his classes. Being away from his aunt and uncle’s protective nest had left him surprisingly vulnerable. What was happening ran counter to his father’s daily prodding of Donner to make something of his life.
“I got drunk and I never stopped drinking,” says Donner. “I may have gone to class a total of twice over three months. The school said I would be expelled and for the first time in my life I lied to my aunt and uncle. I told them none of my credits would transfer and I needed to get out of that school.”
His departure from Minneapolis in 1992 renewed his life. He moved to Hutchinson to major in “non-destructive testing” at the vocational college and simultaneously took on a position as a sandblaster at Hutchinson Manufacturing. His major involved, in part, learning metallurgy and testing welds to make sure they wouldn’t deteriorate under stress. Soon after starting work there, the break of a lifetime occurred—no pun intended. While using a sandblaster, a task went awry and Donner seriously injured his leg. No longer able to perform that company task, his boss reassigned him to a fabrication area in which he learned how to run a “punch and plasma” machine.
“So they put me on that machine figuring I’d be there until my leg healed before putting me back on the sandblaster,” says Donner. “But I quickly taught myself how to read code and within a week I was programming things they never thought possible on that machine. I was only 19.” He doubled the machine’s production. His duties expanded into learning other plasma and laser machines, including a 1,500-watt Trumpf laser. He was suddenly a hot commodity—and no one even had the slightest clue how he was able to run his laser so much more productively than his co-workers.
Along with a salesman, he left Hutchinson Manufacturing in 1998 for Millerbernd Design to run a 4,000-watt Trumpf laser and within three months was cutting 1.25 inch-thick mild steel. His bosses couldn’t understand how he was doing it because the laser was supposed to cut up to only .75 inch. “In fact, even the manufacturer (Trumpf) said I couldn’t be doing it,” says Donner. “But I was way beyond their understanding of steel and I owe that to my metallurgy background at Hutchinson. I understand steel, it’s breaking point, and what it takes to cut it.”
He switched employers in 2005 to AWI, another company in the metalworking industry, to run a 5,000-watt Trumpf laser. As a new AWI employee and while flying to Connecticut with two others to look at a new 5,000-watt laser, he befriended David DeWald, who quickly recognized Donner’s amazing and marketable talent for cutting thick steel. “DeWald (eventually) said, ‘I have money and you have a gift,’” says Donner. “And he said he wanted to be part of the gift.”
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Donner left AWI in 2007 to start Donner Laser Consulting and promptly began marketing his unique services in an improbable way: he sent email to prospective companies using Trumpf and Han Kwang lasers. The email read, simply: “How would you like to make your laser more profitable and efficient? If you would, contact me, Brent Donner.” The bait brought immediate responses from manufacturers in North Carolina and Indiana. These companies found his services attractive because his ability to cut thicker metal reduced the number of steps from two to one to produce many heavy metal parts. It was faster and substantially cut costs.
With his consulting business off the ground—seven customers the first two weeks—Donner called friend DeWald seeking help in purchasing a new 6,000-watt Trumpf laser. The laser arrived in November 2008 and was assembled inside an old auto parts store just off South Broadway in New Ulm, directly behind Kwik Trip. Donner finally had a home for his business and was near dozens of potential customers within a 100-mile radius. New Ulm also had several trucking companies to ship out his product.
“When I came to New Ulm, I thought (people in the industry) would know who I was because I had been around a long time,” says Donner. “However, they knew the companies I’d worked for, but not Brent Donner. Then we hit a recession and there was no work out there (for the laser). In order to survive, my business partner (DeWald) put in money every month. After a year, he said I was on my own.”
He paid business bills using consulting earnings, which hadn’t been affected by the recession.
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DLC Manufacturing sales tripled from 2009 to 2010. Business in November and December 2011 was so heavy between DLC Manufacturing and Donner Laser Consulting, Donner couldn’t take a day off. The company doesn’t manufacture any completed retail products—only specific parts for manufacturers.
Says Donner, “We do work for 69 manufacturers and each is seasonal. For example, the manure spreading manufacturers (which we supply with parts) are selling left and right come October. With all these different companies, our unique ability to do 1.5-inch steel has put us into a different class than other laser companies.” He says his company does business with customers placing orders ranging from $175 to $350,000. They don’t turn anyone away.
Both his businesses received a huge break in December 2011 when Metal Forming magazine ran a short mention of their ability to cut 1.5-inch steel. Donner received telephone calls from potential customers in California, Oregon, Florida, Texas—you name it, he says.
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To whom does he attribute his company’s success? In large measure to co-workers Doug Evers and Todd Pfaff, who generate quotes and sales. “Without these guys, this company does not exist,” says Donner. And what about his uncanny ability to cut thick steel? “It’s all in my head,” he adds. “I don’t know how I know what I know, but I know God has given me one hell of a gift.”
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First Time
CONNECT: What’s the story behind your first consulting customer?
DONNER: I had a telephone call from a metals company in Indianapolis. They brought me down for two days to work with their employees. I thought charging $700 a day was a pretty good rate and billed them $1,400. They had a 4,000-watt Han Kwang laser and had been unable to cut steel thicker than .5-inch. I walked to the machine, programmed it, cut through one-inch steel, and the parts fell off. I taught them. On my second day, the owner said I wasn’t earning enough and gave me a check for $4,000 for two days (instead of $1,400). I learned I was worth a lot more than $700 a day.”
THE ESSENTIALS
DLC Manufacturing
Contact: Brent Donner
Address: 1510 South Minnesota, New Ulm, MN 56073
Phone: 507-359-8050
Web: donnerlaser.com
