Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1539509
76 PCB007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2025 PCB requests continued to come in, he quickly re- alized that he couldn't continue to do this in the basement as a side job. As one of the early in- dustry visionaries, he recognized the tremendous transformational opportunity of printed circuits and the lack of available manufacturing companies. After much consideration and discussions with Mom, he made the decision to start his own PCB company. The first step was to find a financial part- ner to help fund the startup. One day during a lunch with Harry Titus, Dad mentioned this, and Harry said he had some contacts that might be in- terested and would introduce him to them if he could come up with a business plan. After researching "how to develop a business plan," he came up with a 10-page plan that showed that the company, very optimistically, would be prof- itable in less than a year. Harry set a meeting with two Wisconsin companies, Hamlett & Smith (H&S) and Crown Screw and Bolt (CSB). CSB seemed like a perfect fit as it was cash-rich and looking to di- versify, and H&S represented General Electric, the dominant manufacturer of PCB laminate substrates at the time. An agreement was reached with CSB, and Dad's vision began to take shape. The next step was to create a name and logo for the new company. After hours of brainstorming and moving words around, Dad eventually thought it would be a neat idea to combine electronics and technology, and after many iterations and permuta- tions, came up with Electro-Tek. T H E R I G H T A P P ROAC H ▼ T h e o r i g i n a l E l e ct ro -Te k fa c i l i t y at 2 1 2 3 W. M i c h i g a n S t re et , M i l wa u ke e. Fun Fact #3: Future owners of Electro-Tek never realized that the lightning bolt in Dad's original hand- drafted Electro-Tek logo was meant to replace a hyphen, later rebranding the logo as Electrotek.