Bernadette Ericksen Talks Supporting FDL Manufacturing + Attracting Young Talent

Introduction

Adam: This episode of the WiLL Cast is
with Bernadette from Envision — our friends over at Envision.

Becca: I love our friends at Envision.
They’re awesome, they’re great people. And Bernadette does amazing work here in
Fond du Lac. She’s an advocate for manufacturers and young professionals. While
she doesn’t have a formal manufacturing background, her journey has led her
into manufacturing and supporting that community. It was great to hear her
perspective coming from outside the manufacturing world.

Adam: I know Bernadette more through
the manufacturing role that she has at Envision.

Becca: I’ve met her more through the
young professional role and helped her a little bit with her Summer Series,
which brings in interns that come for the summer from all over the country and
work at different organizations in Fond du Lac — think big ones like Mercury
Marine or J.F. Ahern, but also smaller ones. She’s doing great work through
that program, through the Young Professionals organization here in Fond du Lac,
and is really just a lovely human. She grew up in Fond du Lac, left to go to
school, came back, and is a great advocate for the community.

Adam: She does a great job with the
MIT committee. She recently organized an event over at Moraine Park. The
networking and knowledge collective that Envision and Bernadette help support
is super important. This episode is sponsored by the Ledge Games. Registration
is open for the 2023 event, Saturday, September 30th, at Red Cabin at Green
Acres. The Ledge Games are an amateur lumberjack competition with the goal of
raising funds for local technical college education and supporting students
interested in the trades like manufacturing. It’s a great day celebrating local
manufacturers. Lots of fun even if you aren’t competing — great spectating,
family-friendly event. Visit LedgeGames.com.

The MIT Event at Moraine Park

Adam: Tell me about the event from
Tuesday that you set up at Moraine Park. I was there — it was a great event.
How did that come about?

Bernadette: Absolutely. As you know,
it was for our Manufacturing Innovation and Technology group, which we lovingly
call MIT. It’s a group that formed about five or six years ago, designed
specifically for individuals that are either owners or senior leaders within
manufacturing businesses, or suppliers of the manufacturing industry, across
Fond du Lac County. We try to bring them together to either tour different
businesses or tour resources like Moraine Park. We wanted to make sure that our
manufacturing industry was aware of the great resource in Moraine Park — the
training programs they have and what’s to come with their potential referendum
this fall.

Adam: It was cool touring what I think
they called the B-Wing — the manufacturing wing. Having more of a manufacturing
perspective now, going through and seeing all the resources available to the
community — a great room with a bunch of Haas CNC machines, little automation
cells set up that are very similar to the automation cells at Wells
Manufacturing, which you set up that event a couple months ago. You can start
to connect the dots on how, from a manufacturing community standpoint,
everybody’s kind of working on the same stuff.

Bernadette’s Background: Sociology to Manufacturing Advocacy

Adam: Have you always been into
manufacturing? What’s your background?

Bernadette: With my position at
Envision Greater Fond du Lac, a lot of what I’ve been focusing on is the
manufacturing industry, given that it’s the largest industry in Fond du Lac
County. But my involvement in it has varied a lot. What you saw with that event
at Moraine Park and the MIT group is much different than my work with Project
Grill and high school students, which is a year-long project-based learning
experience. We pair technical education students with an area business, and
they go through the whole design process of creating a functional charcoal
grill from scratch. But it’s so much more than that — they have to tour all of
the sponsor businesses, this year about 11 tours. They have to present to those
businesses, manage a budget, fully fabricate a project. My point is, the way
I’ve been involved is different, but it’s all ultimately about trying to
elevate our manufacturing industry in the county.

Adam: Who are some of the major
players in the manufacturing space that you work with?

Bernadette: We have a lot of major
players. With Project Grill, for example, it’s a wide range as far as scale —
Mercury Marine, all the way to smaller businesses like Integrity Saw &
Tool, Manowski Welding, or even yourselves. I feel very honored because I get to
tour a lot of these businesses and learn about what they do. Our reach is
across the entire county — we started working with Lions Laundry Systems in
Walsworth, Ripon, things like that. We’re trying to be more deliberate about
not just being city-centric.

Adam: Is Project Grill a template that
we’ve adopted through Envision?

Bernadette: It actually started in
Sheboygan. Johnsonville Brats started it with folks in the community. Before I
started with the organization, there had been a conversation with them about
recreating it for Fond du Lac County. They said, absolutely, go for it. We created
a program — it’s been 15 years now, started in 2008–2009. I’ve been running it
for seven. Other communities have since adopted it, but we’ve kind of made our
own program unique. I like to think the best.

Summer Series: 128 Interns, 24 Universities

Adam: What else are you involved with
at Envision?

Bernadette: One of the other programs
I wanted to talk about was our Summer Series for college interns that we
started about three years ago. I found a program down in Oklahoma that had
something similar and thought, this is fabulous — how can we create something
like this for Fond du Lac? We now call it our Summer Series, which is a series
of events for college students who are here in our community just for the
summer, interning at a business in the area. We’re trying to show them the best
of the best. It’s a workforce retention program — we’re trying to make sure
they’re aware of the amenities here, what life could be like if they chose to
accept a position, and really help the businesses with selling the community.

Adam: What’s your background? You’re
from Fond du Lac originally?

Bernadette: Yes, born and raised.
Fifth generation — I have a long line of family on both sides from the area. I
went to St. Mary’s Springs, then college at the University of St. Thomas in St.
Paul, Minnesota. I studied sociology, minored in psychology and justice and
peace studies.

Adam: I was almost a psychology major.

Bernadette: When I graduated college
in ’09, in the midst of the recession, it was really hard to find a job. Many
of my friends decided to keep going to school. I had been looking into master’s
programs but ultimately didn’t choose that path, and it’s worked out just fine.
I had a social work job straight out of school. I’m a pretty empathetic person,
and it was very challenging for me. I’m glad I had that experience because then
I didn’t pursue further education and end up overeducated with no experience.
I’ve had a variety of very unconventional jobs. I also spent a year guiding
canoeing and backpacking trips in northern Minnesota — Boundary Waters.

Adam: That’s really cool.

Bernadette: It was for a nonprofit
focused on making the outdoors accessible to everyone despite physical or
cognitive ability. Some trips would be with families who just didn’t have the
gear, or a Girl Scout troop. Other trips would be with folks living with limited
abilities — some in wheelchairs, or living with blindness. We’d take them in
and out of the boats. It taught me a ton. Then I was living in Madison,
managing a retail store with a big team. We did a lot of events in the
community — yoga studios, CrossFit boxes, organizations like that. Then I
wanted to get home and found this job, and here I am.

The Perception Shift in Manufacturing

Adam: You have all this experience.
Now, having that manufacturing perspective — my family’s been in manufacturing
for some time. Aunts, uncles, cousins — everybody was a machinist, a mechanic.
But there was almost this push to get people out of manufacturing. Don’t end up
in a factory, go to college. What’s it like coming back with this experience
and really trying to support the manufacturing community?

Bernadette: That’s such an interesting
question. I grew up with many family members working in manufacturing too.
Coming back in general was an interesting experience. When I left, I was like,
I’m never coming back. But I love Fond du Lac now. A boomerang. Being the new
kid in my own hometown was a very strange experience — trying to find what’s my
niche, who are my people. When it comes to manufacturing, it’s been really
eye-opening. Just getting into the four walls of a lot of those businesses
helped me understand that it is such a great career path, whether you’re doing
marketing or you’re the welder. There’s so much opportunity. I think we don’t
do a good enough job of being proud of what we create here. I feel very
privileged to try and help turn that around, whether through Project Grill and
showing students, or helping them find a placement at a job where they can
grow. There’s a lot of work to be done, but that also means there’s a lot of
opportunity.

Adam: There’s so many people that
drive by these big boxes on the side of the highway called factories and they
never even think to visit them or appreciate where products come from. The
factories need to be turned inside out. I do think there’s a major shift happening.
We had 20–25 kids from North Fond du Lac High School here earlier in the week,
and I was super impressed. They were very polite, very pleasant to be around,
really interested in what was going on. They had more of a sales and marketing
focus. That’s exactly what’s needed — you have to get other interests and other
people through manufacturing, not just more manufacturing people.

Bernadette: That makes me think about
how upset I get when people talk about the younger generation and the lack of
work ethic or lack of interest. I don’t think that’s fair. Every generation
says that about the next younger one. Those students — I promise you there’s so
much more of that in a lot of the other schools. It’s not their fault that
they’re not interested. They just don’t know. And frankly, companies and
company leaders and communities have not made manufacturing exciting. So why
should they be excited about it?

Adam: That is shifting, which is
great. Companies get so guarded about revealing all the secrets inside their
facilities. There’s so much more that you gain by interacting with people and
bringing people through. Back to the idea of turning the factory inside out for
everybody.

Summer Series: 128 Students from 24 Schools

Becca: You’re way underselling the
Summer Series. How many kids did you have in that program?

Bernadette: We had 128 students this
past summer. They represented 24 different universities and colleges across the
country. Here they are in little Fond du Lac for the summer, doing internships
or co-ops at businesses — anything from Mercury Marine to J.F. Ahern, Excel
Engineering, you name it. We bring them together for this series of events —
professional development, fun. We took them to a Dock Spiders game. We teach
them about networking and interviewing. It’s the only one in the state of
Wisconsin that we’re aware of, so we’re proud of that.

Becca: I went to a YPF event that did
an Amazing Race. Most of them were interns. They were all super engaged, really
excited to be there. It was a great tie-in — going to 20 different Fond du Lac
businesses. We started at Thelma, it was a Thursday night, they got to see the
music. I spent a summer in Milwaukee when I went to school there, and if I
would have had something like that — just more students like myself who are
stranded for the summer — it would have been a really great asset.

Bernadette: One thing we’re working on
is having some of the individuals who’ve gone through it now be on our planning
committee. We want their perspective — how do we make this the best it can be?
We’re also trying to get a handle on how many have been hired and since moved
to the community, because a majority are from all over. Since many are
interning as juniors, it’s kind of a long game for tracking.

Concierge Luncheon & Community Retention

Bernadette: Another program we’re
launching on November 3rd is what we’re calling our Concierge Luncheon. It’s a
workforce retention program meant for newcomers in the community. What we hear
from a lot of employers is, if they’re struggling to retain people, sometimes
they feel like maybe the employees just don’t know what’s going on in the
community or ways to put roots down here. We’re trying to highlight the
amenities, the workforce and economic development initiatives, and some of the
nonprofits and community organizations — almost like a Welcome Wagon event.

Adam: When you think about retention
issues at the community level, what percentage is job opportunity related, what
percentage is food and culture and all the other things that larger cities have
to offer, and what percentage is cost of living?

Bernadette: I personally would say in
the last three years we’ve come along for sure. Downtown, there’s been this
resurgence of small businesses popping up. But more things to do is always what
everyone says. We have great selling points like our cost of living and quality
of life, and there’s this new breath of fresh air coming into the community.
But I think we could have a few more amenities to get people drawn to not only
visiting but staying.

Adam: I wonder how much of that will
naturally happen over time with some of the boomerang folks. There are formal
programs across the country now to make use of people who moved away and are
now coming back, bringing all these perspectives.

Bernadette: I hope it doesn’t take a
decade. Things will happen naturally to a degree. We’re trying to move things
forward as best we can. Even the Young Professionals group is a great platform
for boomerangs or people who’ve had other worldly experiences to say, if
there’s something you want here, what are you going to do about it? Because
there is opportunity to make it happen. You have to create the community you
want to have. It’s really easy to sit on your hands and complain.

Downtown Fond du Lac & the Night Market

Adam: I like all the electrical boxes
that have art designs painted on them.

Bernadette: There’s a lot of art
flowing into downtown Fond du Lac. The bike shop has a huge mural — it’s
beautiful. The parking structures everywhere look great.

Adam: We’re going to do a mural on our
wall over here — a cinder block wall that kind of sticks out. We just have to
come up with a concept and find an artist.

Bernadette: I think of the Night
Market in downtown Fond du Lac. I volunteer on the committee that plans that.
It’s an example of, hey, we see an amenity in other communities — actually many
of them — why not Fond du Lac? A number of us came together, put our ideas on
paper, and made it come to life. The Downtown Fondy Partnership runs that, but
it’s made up of a lot of volunteers. It’s just one example of why not.

What’s Next at Envision

Adam: What does the next 12 months
look like for the Envision calendar?

Bernadette: Super busy. We have our
annual meeting coming up in February. We continue with all of our YPF
programming. Our Senior HR Group does monthly programs. Project Grill is
underway. We do a lot of business retention and expansion calls. Agribusiness
is doing a huge fundraiser — if you need some cheese boxes for the holidays,
they’re beautiful, filled with goods from all over the county. All kinds of
really phenomenal programs.

Adam: Rumor has it you have a really
cool Business Connection next December?

Bernadette: Yes — it’s here! WiLL is
on the calendar.

Adam: That gives us enough time to get
some stuff done inside. We got our building, the exterior all done, and now we
have a bunch of new automation equipment and other machinery. So 14 months —
good.

Adam: Well, Bernadette, thank you very
very much for all you do. I think there’s some good energy and momentum in the
community. You and Envision do great work. Come back anytime and let us know
how we can help.

Bernadette: This has been awesome.
Honored to be here.