Sadie Vander Velde, Envision, Discusses FDL Economy, Manufacturing, Future + More

Introduction

Adam: This WiLL Cast was with Sadie,
the president and CEO of Envision Greater Fond du Lac.

Becca: I think I met Sadie through YPF
a bit ago, but you've known her for a while.

Adam: A couple years. She's been with
Envision for a couple years. She actually got in right before COVID — I think
it was immediately before, like within a couple of weeks of the state shutting
down. It was a fun talk. Understanding her background — she was interested and
involved in politics early on in her career, has a lot of experience in the
manufacturing space, has toured many manufacturing facilities. I actually saw
her last week at Wells Manufacturing here in town. It was nice to get her
perspective on what's happening in Fond du Lac and kind of the vision of how to
continue to double down and promote the manufacturing sector, learn about her
team, and some of her leadership approaches.

Becca: She was very forthcoming with
her thoughts about what's going on in the county. Really refreshing, just a
really positive person, super honest. She talked about her leadership style and
working with different types of individuals within an organization. A lot of it
aligns with what we're doing here at WiLL. She's from the Fond du Lac County
area, grew up around here, went to school, came back. She's really a champion
for bringing more business, more people. She talked about some of the
initiatives that Envision has in place to attract more talent this direction.

Adam: It was also fun diving into the
agriculture sector. We touched on some of the automation happening in that
space and some of the things Envision is doing to support that sector. I think
it would be cool to have some farming and agriculture guests on the WiLL Cast.

Becca: We have a couple on the
schedule in September. Stay tuned.

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Wells Manufacturing: Machines That Make Machines

Adam: It's just amazing.

Sadie: It really is cool. I think what
is the most amazing — so back up, I've toured a lot of manufacturers. In my old
job, when I worked for Congressman Grothman, he went all around the 6th
District touring manufacturers. So I've toured a lot. They're really cool, I
love doing that. Wells is the only manufacturer that I've ever toured that
makes all of their own machines too. That was really cool to see. They make
them and then they can fix them. So you're not waiting for whoever from Italy
to come and fix your giant machine. They make them, they fix them. They're
incredibly efficient.

Adam: My observation too — they're as
much of a machine-making and robotics company as they are a parts maker. That
was really neat to see.

Sadie's Background: From Journalism to Government

Adam: You used to work for Congressman
Grothman. What's your background?

Sadie: A lot of federal government and
political campaigns. I started out in college interning for Tom Petri.

Adam: Where did you go to school?

Sadie: UW–La Crosse. Was an economics
and pre-law major.

Adam: I was an econ and finance major.

Sadie: I was an econ major — I don't
tell a lot of people. I was a journalism major first. I met with an advisor,
and they said, well, you're one of 6,000 students. This was when I was at the
University of Minnesota, in our journalism program — number one in the nation
for journalism. I just thought my odds out of 6,000 are pretty competitive. So
I asked the advisor, what's the major that has the least amount of women in it?
And she goes, economics. I said, I'm going to change my major to economics. I
thought I was going to be the hard-hitting CNN investigative journalist. But
gosh, I'm so glad I didn't, because I freaking love government and figuring out
bureaucracy.

Adam: What do you like about it?

Sadie: Figuring out the bureaucratic
process — so rather than fighting it, you can understand it and figure out,
okay, I need to do this, and I'm going to get the result I want a lot faster.
And I loved the constituent services part. I was with Congressman Petri for a
little over five years, and with Congressman Grothman for a little over five
years. The majority of that was doing or overseeing constituent services.
Helping people navigate the bureaucracy.

Local Government Matters More Than You Think

Adam: If people don't like what's
going on in government, what is the path? A lot of people want to change things
but don't always know the path, even if it is as simple as calling up your
congressman.

Sadie: It is that simple. Email, call.
Emails honestly get processed just a lot faster because that's the world now.
But we were still processing a lot of phone calls and a few letters. If you
called or wrote a letter, you got a response, and somebody was reading it. I
think sometimes people think it's not even worth reaching out because a
congressman and a senator are so big that nobody's ever going to read it or
listen to it. But we did, and we do. It is really important to reach out when
you're unsatisfied.

Adam: A lot of people focus so much on
what happens at the national level, and it seems like the most change can
happen when people focus on their city, their state, at a local level.

Sadie: We have an advocacy committee
now at Envision, which is new to us. Essentially, standing up for business and
listening to the business needs. National politics get all the attention and
all the hype and distraction, but you are much more impacted when your local
city council or county board raises your property tax or your mill rate, or
zoning approves something you didn't want. Local government and local politics
affect us so much more day-to-day. And if you go to a town board meeting, the
likelihood is those members have probably been on there for 40 years and are
stuck in their ways. It's really hard to get people into local government.

Adam: One of my observations has been
how much more closely aligned both parties are behind closed doors. In the
public arena, they end up putting on this fighting match, but everybody has a
lot of the same incentives and the same goals when it's a meeting behind closed
doors.

Sadie: For sure. Especially out in
D.C., you would be shocked to know who's going out to dinner together and
having drinks together that are on opposite sides of the aisle.

Starting at Envision During COVID

Adam: At what point did you get to
Envision?

Sadie: I joined Envision in April of
2020. My first day was Monday, April 20th. About a month into it, 6:30 a.m., I
had a phone call with County Executive Allen Buechel about what we could do to
help the business community survive and thrive during COVID. And so we started
the Reopen Fond du Lac County Task Force, which was crazy how quickly we
brought it together without really knowing what we were going to do. We just
knew we had to get all different industries and people throughout the whole
county at the same table to start talking about the topic.

Sadie: Through that task force, with
about 50 other people throughout the county and organizations, we put out
resources, guidelines — how to reopen, how do you screen your employees, what's
your responsibility as an employer, what's your responsibility as an employee,
how to protect yourself, how to get into e-commerce if you've never done
e-commerce before, signage. No surprise that in Fond du Lac County, we all came
together and helped each other out. Fond du Lac grew through that time.
Unemployment stayed very low and actually shrunk.

Adam: When we had Joe on the WiLL
Cast, he'd mentioned there were several national articles written about this
area and how it thrived throughout that period.

Sadie: I believe we were the
number-one MSA to come back to pre-COVID unemployment levels fastest. We were
also ranked number one — the city of Fond du Lac was ranked number one in wage
growth. I grew up around Fond du Lac and I've always heard, well, Fond du Lac's
always behind, the wages are never catching up. To see that we were number one
in wage growth — you can see it everywhere you drive around. Starting wages are
rising.

Adam: And there's really two sides to
that equation — cost of living and wage growth. The cost of living around here
is very reasonable, and if wages are growing at the same time, it's great from
an individual purchasing power standpoint.

Making Manufacturing Exciting

Adam: You've seen a lot of different
manufacturing facilities. What do you think manufacturers can do better to
attract young people?

Sadie: That was my question for you.
How are you — you are a leading manufacturer, not just the city, the county,
the region. You have expanded, you're adding a giant expansion.

Adam: I think it has to be exciting.
So many industries and markets have gotten all the excitement the last couple
decades. When I was going to college, it's like, go to California, go to
Silicon Valley, do software development for an iPhone application, go into
financial services. I think that same excitement has to be applied to
manufacturing, because frankly it hasn't been super exciting. If people want to
attract younger talented people, they have to find a way to make it exciting.
It's probably the products they're developing, it's their brands, it's getting
people in sales and marketing interacting with people in engineering and on the
shop floor. I think maybe factories try and trick people into getting excited,
but once somebody's at a job for a couple weeks, they're going to know if it
was real during the interview process or not.

Adam: There are some really good
examples in Fond du Lac. Look at Excel Engineering — they design manufacturing
facilities, they've got hundreds of engineers. Look at Wells, look at Mercury.
There are some really good examples. I think it's as much of a marketing issue
in the manufacturing space as it is an issue at the individual company level.
You look at the Teslas and the SpaceXs of the world — they're trying to make
manufacturing more exciting. But it can happen in small business too. We're a
small company. It doesn't just have to be huge companies where all the
excitement is.

Hiring & Recruiting: Treat Applicants Like Customers

Adam: We are always open to hiring
good people. We have a guy starting next week in the sales department that used
to ride his bike up and down the street. He went back to school, was working at
a supper club, and he knew about us. The owner of the place he was working at
knew us. A lot of it is word of mouth. Back in 2019, we did a pretty extreme
hiring push — hired one salesperson every month, got beyond our network, using
recruiters. I think it's thinking about HR and recruiting as a sales and
marketing position. It's not just something to do when you need to hire
somebody — give off a cool vibe, attract people to the operation.

Sadie: Chris Zarnick was our speaker
at our annual meeting and he made that comment: treat job applicants like you
treat your customers. How many times have we all heard, “I applied for a job
and I never heard,” or “I went through an interview and I never heard.” We're
all guilty of that. But could you imagine doing that to a customer? Your
employees make you $200,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year. If a customer says, I
want to order something for $500,000, you would never not respond to them.

Sadie: It is an employee's market
right now. That is not always ideal for businesses. It's something they've
never had to go through before — marketing to a job applicant and convincing
somebody that they should work for you, rather than saying, I'm giving you a
paycheck, you should be thankful. We've had quite the change in company culture
at Envision — remote work, half-day Fridays, dress for your day. All these
tangible and intangible things to make it the total package, a better place to
work.

Culture: Be Real, Not Just Buzzwords

Adam: Do you agree with the statement
that culture comes from the top down?

Sadie: I think the culture should
reflect what actually happens versus what people pitch as the culture. People
know it's a buzzword — people know they should have a cool culture. But it has
to go beyond just the job description and the website. When people come
through, I'm 100% transparent, and I want them to be 100% transparent. The
applicant can only trick the employer for so long, and the employer can only
trick the applicant for so long. At some point, they're going to know if it was
a good decision or not. So try and be real. Young people are pretty good at
picking up on that. Authenticity is a form of currency now.

Adam: I don't think top-down is a good
approach entirely. Everybody should try and embody the culture. If the culture
is only isolated to a couple people and those people aren't here, everything
falls apart. You hope it can be more of a grassroots effort. We change a lot.
The expectation is that if we discover a better way to do something, even if it
means somebody's position might change a little bit, or we reorganize, the
expectation is that we're always going to do the right thing. That's definitely
not for everybody. Some people want to know what the next few years look like.

Rock Stars & Superstars: Radical Candor

Sadie: I was talking with one of our
team members about their next growth decision. We're growing at Envision, and
it's like you said — sometimes it might be a little too fast, a little too
slow. This is the first time I've ever led an organization. I make mistakes all
the time. Which is okay. That was hard to learn. I gave her this book called
Radical Candor by Kim Scott. There's a chapter about rock stars and superstars.
I've always been a superstar — always, what's next, what's growth, how can I
learn? That growth mindset is great. But you also need rock stars — people who
genuinely love their job. At a manufacturer, they're somebody whose job
probably feels like a cog in the wheel, and they love it. My dad worked at
Mercury Marine for 38 years, in the lost-foam plant, Plant 17, the foundry. Did
the same thing every day, and that's okay.

Sadie: The conversation I had with a
team member was, if this next step isn't what you want, that's okay. I would
not have been able to say this two years ago, because I would have been telling
you what I would have wanted to hear — which is, how could you not want to
grow? We need rock stars in our companies and we need superstars. Let them be
who they are.

Adam: I'm reading a really good book
right now called Build — a guy that was one of the engineers who led the iPod
project, then the iPhone, then the Nest thermostat. He calls it individual
contributors versus team leaders versus managers. Individual contributors are
absolutely as important as team leaders. Some people are perfectly happy being
super successful as an individual contributor, and that's okay.

Becca: I also think there's a
misconception about growth. Growth doesn't necessarily have to be vertical. You
can be growing and really thriving within your role, getting better at those
skills. Maybe it doesn't change your title, but that doesn't mean it's negative.

Envision: Chamber + Economic Development

Adam: You guys are doing great things
in the community. You've been super helpful over the last two years. The
networking side of things has been really awesome.

Sadie: We're a chamber of commerce, so
that's a member organization. And then we are the economic development
organization for Fond du Lac County, which is an anybody organization.
Sometimes that's a hard concept to grasp — we're a business member organization
that serves any business needs whether you're a member or not. An entrepreneur,
a mid-size, a large-size. I would like to think that you're not a member or an
investor yet just because you don't know us. Because once you know us, how can
you not like what we do?

Sadie: Who else in the county is
leading economic development, business attraction, talent attraction? At WiLL,
you're doing that for WiLL because that's your company. We're doing it for the
county and the region because we're not beholden to just one industry or one
business. Being in it, it is easy to become a junkie about the cool stuff we
get to do.

Agribusiness & Robotic Milking

Sadie: We have an agribusiness
council. We're the only chamber that we know of in the state of Wisconsin —
really anywhere — that has an agribusiness council as part of us. We love our
ABC group, the farmers and agribusinesses. This year they hosted Breakfast on
the Farm, over at Dodger Acres just outside of Rosendale. Small farm, about
105–110 dairy cows, family-owned. They don't want to grow, but they want to
keep it sustainable and in the family.

Sadie: If you know anything about
dairy farming, 100 cows is not a lot. And they have a robotic automatic milking
machine. They're the only ones in Fond du Lac County who have this — one of the
first ones in the state, because it's really new technology. The cows go in on
demand to get milked, which is very different from the usual scheduled milking
times. They could get milked up to five times a day.

Sadie: This piece of technology is
just incredible. The cow comes into the stanchion, the stanchion locks. It's
almost like a car wash — the arm comes over, cleans, disinfects, automatically
puts the milker on, and then it goes through. This machine is also measuring
how much fat, how much protein, what's the output. And all of that is tracked.
My first job was milking cows out in Mount Calvary.

Adam: The automation at Wells and the
automation at a farm — it's a lot of the same concepts and principles.

Sadie: Absolutely. You just gave me a
great idea. We should invite some of our agribusiness members to the MIT group
and do a tour.

Adam: That would be cool. You
sometimes wonder, because people are so busy and working so hard, they kind of
get isolated with their own little groups. That's what's great about the events
you guys put on — there are some nice paradigm shifts when you get people doing
similar things but in different industries.

MIT Group: Manufacturers Talking to Each Other

Sadie: When MIT was formed a few years
ago, one of the reasons was because we get to talk to everybody in any
industry. We're not the competitors. We're the confidential, trustworthy
connector. And what we were hearing is that, as a business owner or especially
a manufacturer owner, you don't talk to any other manufacturers.

Adam: I was just going to ask about
that.

Sadie: We thought, well, that's crazy.
We thought you all go to the tavern every Friday night to swap secrets and
information. The first MIT event we held — in the industrial park in the city,
there was a steel manufacturer next to a steel producer. They had never talked.
They were buying all of their steel from Ohio. And they never knew about the
company next door because they're small. So now they buy their steel locally.
Or Paul Reetz at Integrity Saw & Tool — he has a recent-ish customer, same
thing. They were sending all of their blades and tools to get sharpened out of
state and had no clue that Integrity Saw & Tool was here in town.

Sadie: Lisa McArthur was speaking with
one business — Davis Plastics in Brandon, small, 11 people. They make farm
machinery equipment and implements. They wanted to sell, but they didn't want
to close, because that's 11 jobs in little Brandon — that's a lot. Lisa had
known about another company in a similar agribusiness, and she said, could I
say something to Dean Burschbach and make an introduction? He said sure. And
then Dean bought it. Now those 11 people still get to be employed, still
creating the same farm machinery. That never would have happened if it wasn't
for Lisa and what we do at Envision.

Sharing Ideas Between Manufacturers

Adam: I've been thinking about that
concept of touring factories and sharing ideas. We're setting up a video shoot
where we're going to follow a 50,000-pound roll of coil steel from a foundry to
a stamping and fabricator — Paul's going to be part of it, talking about the
tools he makes — to our plant to watch a product get assembled, then to the
field to get installed. It's interesting how many people are concerned about
bringing a camera into a facility, taking pictures. I think there's so much
more to be gained by sharing this stuff and bringing people together. The odds
of somebody taking a picture of a piece of equipment and then having the $5–10
million in capital to go recreate it — that's pretty low.

Sadie: We have a lot of non-direct
competitors. I feel there's a lot more opportunity to become a sub-vendor or a
subcontractor to one another than competitive.

Adam: The people that are super
concerned about exchanging ideas might be the ones in trouble in the long term.
The people that are open to it — it's give and take. I've never run into a
situation where we were as sharing and giving as possible that did not come
back to us in much bigger ways.

Worker Relocation Incentive & Housing

Sadie: Did you know that you can get
$15,000 if you move to Fond du Lac County?

Adam: Oh, really?

Sadie: Through our Worker Relocation
Incentive program. We created this in conjunction with Fond du Lac County
capital resources — using a portion of sales tax dollars earmarked for economic
development. We kept hearing talent shortage, talent shortage. Is this going to
solve everything? No. But it's another tool for our businesses. If you are
attracting somebody to come and live and work in Fond du Lac County, you can
offer them up to $15,000. After a year of employment and living here, we will
reimburse you half of those costs. We've had just about 20 companies utilize
it. We're at about $150,000 allocated. And actually, we have four people on a
waiting list to approve — they can't find housing.

Adam: We need housing. Joe Moore was
talking to us about that — the housing shortage in Fond du Lac. It's
everything: townhouses, multi-family, all the way up to luxury homes and lake
homes.

Sadie: There are apartments going up
down the street. Those are going to be fantastic. It's really great to see.
Brook Street's getting a nice facelift. The changing face of Fond du Lac.

Adam: Cool. Well, thank you very much
for coming on.

Sadie: Thank you.