David Krings:  

nd doing some maintenance work. It was a fun job, but dirty and dangerous at times. It paid for my educational expenses, and I worked some really great people there. Then, I worked for Champion International Paper Company as a mechanical engineer. The plant was nearly brand new, and I worked all over it as a project engineer, and later as an Area Engineer. It was great place to work, and I learned a lot while I was there. I left this job when I got a job offer from Potlatch in Cloquet, MN at the same time as my wife got accepted to grad school at UMD. It was hard to leave, but I was happy to move back to Minnesota. I miss my buddies over there, and what an awesome facility. They have a paper machine there that is really impressive, and of course, the pulp mill and utility areas are enormous and well-designed. At Potlatch, I started out as an engineer, but soon found myself working in maintenance, which was a huge shift for me, and a fantastic opportunity. I was fortunate enough to get involved in a big corporate initiative to modernize the maintenance practices for equipment and processes. My previous experience at Champion was a real asset, and I had a blast on this project. In 2000, we had some really tough economics in the paper industry, and there were a ton of cutbacks. As a superintendent, I had to lay off some good people who were adding a lot more value then they were costing us, and it was personally tough to handle. That time was a turning point for me, and I made up my mind to start my own company, soon. By 2002, the plant was sold to Sappi Ltd., which probably saved it from a terrible fate. I left there shortly after the takeover, to run my company full time. So, what about my company? In 2001, I formed my company, 20/20 Foresight, Inc. Lori and I knew it was a risk, but we decided to tackle running our own business. At first, I did some maintenance management consulting and speaking, but supplemented that with a venture doing residential and commercial building inspections. We made $600 the first year. Yeehaw! Those were tough times. In about a year, we sold the inspection division, because we were getting to busy with maintenance consulting to keep up. That was a relief for me. Now, in 2007, 20/20 Foresight has been expanded, and we have moved into a more web-based position, and now call ourselves Nobreakdowns.com. We do equipment maintenance and reliability consulting, training and sell a lot of services and products related to that. People always ask us if we repair equipment, but we don't. We teach people to manage their maintenance program to eliminate failures completely. Doing maintenance work the way we teach it is 100% different from just fixing things when they break. We show our customers how to avoid the failures entirely. This might sound kind of unrealistic, but we do it all the time, and the savings are HUGE. It's pretty fun to see people light up when they get control of their equipment. I had one person tell me that we gave him his life back. It's a rewarding thing to be the owner of a company that helps people so much. We have clients all over the world, and work with companies and organizations of all sizes. One week, we work for a government of an entire country, and the next week, we might work with a local manufacturer with 10 employees. Lots of variety. We also publish a ton of material, including a weekly newsletter called The Drift. It is a sarcastic, fun maintenance newsletter with tips and ideas in it for maintenance managers and engineers. So, that's about it. My daughter says, "Daddy, how come you used to be an engineer, but now you don't do nothin'?" She got me in the heart on that one! Military I never spent any time in the military. It was my dream to fly helicopters, and the Marines were ready to sign me up, but when they found out I was a little color blind, I was told it was not possible for me to fly for them. The Canadian Air Force said I could fly for them if I had only one eye, and it had a cataract. Just kidding. So, I moved on. Bummer, though... I wanted to do that pretty badly. Oh, well. Looking back on it, I would probably be in Iraq right now, and the choppers are getting shot down a lot right now. Things work out like they should. I wish those guys the best over there, and I work hard to keep them flying safely in my job.