by Rick A. Richards
Michael Pound has become fully Americanized since coming here on a two-year temporary
work visa 23 years ago. Not the fast-food, shopping mall kind of Americanized, but the full
embrace of freedom and opportunity kind of Americanized.
Even so, he still misses the ability to drive his car very fast whenever he wants, dark
English beer and Radio 4, the BBC's news and talk channel. He also doesn't get to run as much as he used to (he's completed six marathons) and he misses out on the annual National Three Peaks Challenge in the United Kingdom, a 24-hour marathon that has relay teams climbing the highest peaks in Scotland, the U.K. and Wales.
Even so Pound wouldn't give up the opportunities and experiences he's had in the United States.
He grew up in Nottingham in the industrial midlands of England where his father was a manufacturing engineer for Raleigh Bicycles. That's where Pound got his love of engineering and manufacturing.
As the chief executive officer for Koontz-Wagner in South Bend, Pound is following in his father's footsteps, albeit a few thousand miles from home.
“I grew up from the age of five visiting factories with him every so often,” says Pound. “There would always be designs and doodles in the margins of newspapers so I always say I was doomed to be an engineer from day one.”
Pound says the word “doomed” with a big smile because he clearly enjoys what he does. He especially likes visiting the production floor and showing visitors the company's control rooms that are shipped all over the world.
The custom-built control rooms range in size from a phone booth to a small house and are used around the world in oil and gas exploration and electric generation. A typical control room is 15 feet by 60 feet, 13 feet high and weighs about 150,000 pounds. The control rooms are packed with sensitive monitoring devices and inside the control room, they're protected from the harsh elements of a desert or rain forest.
After graduating from Loughborough University of Technology in England, Pound worked briefly for two manufacturers before joining Ohmeda (a division of BOC Group) in 1985. He was on the medical equipment side of the company that designed and manufactured anesthesia vaporizers.
“We had a global strategy meeting for company executives and it ended up in a bar one night with the president,” says Pound. “He asked me what I wanted to do next. At the time I was plant manager and I told him I'd like to run the whole thing.
“He said, ‘We'll have to get you some sales and marketing experience. How do you feel about coming across to the States?'” Pound said he would, but he didn't think much about the conversation. After all, it was being held in a bar.
Three months later, the president called Pound and he found himself bound for Murray Hill, N.J. “I arrived on a temporary two-year visa. After a year, they asked me to go and run a division in Atlanta,” says Pound. He did and wound up spending seven years in Atlanta and when he was asked to return to the U.K. He didn't want to.
“By this time my kids had gone through the education system here and I enjoyed life in the U.S. so I went looking for something else,” says Pound. That something else was Koontz-Wagner, so in 1996, he moved to Indiana to run the company's South Bend Controls division.
In 2002, Pound became a U.S. citizen. “That was a big step, but I've always considered myself a kind of global citizen. I enjoy travel and I enjoy other cultures. Like my accent, it's rather difficult to give it up like my roots in England, which I'm always going to have.”
Pound says he became fully assimilated seven years ago when he married a Chicago woman. They now live in Michigan City.
Koontz-Wagner is a portfolio of companies that provide industrial maintenance services, industrial controls, aerospace and medical design and manufacturing. “Koontz-Wagner is a diversified electrical engineering company and until recently I would have said they're involved in everything from aerospace to medical to power and gas to steel,” says Pound. “Those are the industries we serve.”
The array of different businesses has had a moderating effect on the company through the current economic downturn. “We have some businesses that immediately went into recession in 2008,” says Pound. “We had a maintenance services business that repairs the big electric motors up to 13,500 horsepower in steel mills. It was like someone switching a light off. Business just stopped.”
But other businesses weren't hit as hard. When one segment was down, another was up and when that segment began to fall, another business group was doing well.
“My challenge is balancing all of that,” says Pound. “A lot of the difficulty in the recession is that there is a fair amount of business out there, but customers were slow to pull the trigger. Everybody wanted to do projects, but they weren't sure when and where the money was going to be available.”
In spite of the sluggish economy, Pound says Koontz-Wagner is on track for its best year ever. The company has hired nearly 60 people this year, bringing employment up to 327. At the same time, the company sold its South Bend Controls business, even though it was turning in great numbers.
So why sell? “We're owned by an investment group, and that's what they do,” says Pound.
As he walks through the sprawling complex on South Bend's west side near the airport, he says he is excited about the future of the company. “One of the biggest things I have to do is grow the business. We're looking at acquisitions and becoming more diverse geographically.
“Right now we're at probably $75 or $80 million in sales and I'd like to see this company over the $100 million range in sales. I want us to be successful in bringing products to market and in customer service.
“The two things we've built our company on are customers and employees. It's that simple,” says Pound. “I love interacting with customers. This week, I've had three visits from international customers.
“That's when I put my sales hat on. That's really fascinating to me,” says Pound. “I never would have been a good salesman; I'm not good at cold calls and I'm not good at rejection. But once the fish is on the hook, I can explain to people why they should deal with Koontz-Wagner. That collaborative work with the customer, that's what turns me on every day.
“On the employee side I've always loved leading a team. I prefer to lead and not tell. That's not to say all interaction is smooth and wonderful, but we have some amazingly loyal people. We had a guy retire today who had been here 41 years. That is so rare this day and age.”
Pound says one other responsibility Koontz-Wagner has is to support the community.
“We rely on the community around here to provide our workforce, educate our workforce. It's important to give back to the community. We try to do a few things, especially on the education front like sponsorship of local high school robotics teams and things like that,” says Pound.
Beyond that, Pound has become a big booster of South Bend and northern Indiana. “Over and above those kinds of charitable and community things, one of the biggest things I can do is sell the area,” says Pound, who points to the University of Notre Dame, Indiana University South Bend and Ivy Tech as valuable assets for the community.
“We still have a fairly thriving manufacturing industry. It's not as large as it used to be, it's not Studebaker and not Bendix, but it's small world leading companies,” says Pound. “One of our roles is to make sure the word gets out.”
Pound sees that as a duty that comes with the opportunity and freedom he enjoys in the United States. “This country is big in all kinds of ways – geographically and in opportunity. And it's exciting.”
