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Rocket-lab engineer runs Iowa machinery empire Vermeer Corporation - founded 1948 - Pella, Iowa ~4,400 employees - ~$1.3B annual revenue Third generation at the helm since 2015 Left NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for hay balers 2018 tornado: 400,000 sq ft lost, rebuilt stronger Rocket-lab engineer runs Iowa machinery empire Vermeer Corporation - founded 1948 - Pella, Iowa ~4,400 employees - ~$1.3B annual revenue Third generation at the helm since 2015 Left NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for hay balers 2018 tornado: 400,000 sq ft lost, rebuilt stronger

THE GRANDSON WHO CAME HOME. Jason Andringa traded a badge at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the corner office in Pella - population roughly 10,000.

Person / Executive / Engineer

Jason Andringa

He could have spent his career pointing instruments at other planets. Instead he pointed a family company at the ground - at the trenches, fields and job sites where its machines actually work. Jason Andringa is the third-generation president and CEO of Vermeer Corporation, and his resume only stops making sense once you understand Pella, Iowa.

ROLE President & CEO, Vermeer Corporation BASE Pella, Iowa PRIOR Engineer, NASA JPL

The story now

An engineer runs the shop

Walk the Vermeer campus in Pella today and you are walking through a decision Jason Andringa keeps re-making: that a machinery company can grow without going public, without leaving Iowa, and without forgetting whose name is on the building. He runs a business of roughly 4,400 people that pulls in about $1.3 billion a year, and he runs it the way an engineer reads a system - looking for the variable everyone else missed.

Vermeer builds the unglamorous machines that make modern life possible. Trenchers and horizontal directional drills that lay the fiber and pipe under your street. Tub grinders and horizontal grinders that chew wood waste into mulch. Balers, mowers and rakes that turn a hayfield into winter feed. Vacuum excavators that dig without slicing a gas line. It is B2B equipment sold through a global dealer network, and it is exactly the kind of durable, physical work Andringa decided was worth coming home for.

His motto is not a poster. It is a formula: "Optimize the equation." Not maximize revenue, not minimize cost - optimize the whole system, tradeoffs and all. It is the sentence of a man who studied aeronautics before he studied balance sheets, and it explains why he measures his own performance against a horizon most CEOs never look at.

The long game, on purpose

"Stay oriented to the long term," he says. "I'm more concerned about what we look like a decade from now than whether we make the quarterly numbers." Coming from a public-company chief that would be a platitude. Coming from a family owner it is a strategy - and, he argues, an unfair advantage. Because Vermeer answers to family rather than to the market, it can make promises a quarterly company cannot: to keep supporting a machine, a dealer, a town, a job for the long haul.

Origin

A cabin, a grandfather, a career change

The grandfather in that cabin was Gary Vermeer, and he had already changed manufacturing once. In 1948 he built a mechanical wagon hoist because he was tired of unloading grain by hand. Neighbors wanted one. That single homemade tool became a company that now ships equipment across six continents.

So the family origin story is not a boardroom. It is a workshop. And when a teenaged Jason spent a summer measuring boards and swinging a hammer alongside the man who invented his way into business, something rerouted. The would-be political scientist became an engineer.

The engineering took him a long way from Iowa. He earned a master's in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and went to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the lab that lands rovers on Mars. He picked up an MBA from USC's Marshall School while he was there. Then, in 2005, he did the thing that makes his resume finally cohere - he came home to the family business.

The climb

He did not start at the top

BEFORE 2005

NASA - Intern at the Johnson Space Center, then staff engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

2005

Joins Vermeer as Segment Manager for New Products and Markets in the Environmental business.

2005 - 2015

The long apprenticeship - Managing Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, based in the Netherlands; VP of Dealer Distribution and Global Accounts; President of Forage and Environmental Solutions; then President & COO.

2015

Named President & CEO, succeeding his mother, Mary Andringa - a rare mother-to-son handoff at the top of a family firm.

2018

The tornado - A twister tears roughly 400,000 sq ft off the Pella campus. He leads the rebuild.

2020 - 2022

Through the pandemic, the company keeps growing.

The test

Never waste a crisis

On July 19, 2018, a tornado hit the Vermeer campus during a workday. It destroyed something like 400,000 square feet of manufacturing space. Thousands of people were on site. The remarkable part of the story is what did not happen - and what Andringa decided to do with what did.

"We've dealt with several challenges during our 70 years of doing business and we've survived them thus far," he said afterward. "We plan on doing it again." Then he reframed the whole thing. "Almost immediately, our mantra became, 'Never waste a crisis. Instead turn it into an opportunity.'"

It was not spin. It was a rebuild that came back bigger, and then had to absorb a pandemic on top of the reconstruction. Andringa has called steering the company through both - tornado and COVID, at once - his proudest business accomplishment. "Not only are we rebuilding what we had," he said, "but we're becoming stronger than ever before." The employees gave it a two-word name that stuck: Vermeer Strong.

The machines

What Andringa's company actually makes

If it moves earth, chews wood, or bales a field, Vermeer probably builds a version of it. The catalog is a tour of the work that keeps the lights on and the pipes flowing - the stuff you never notice until it stops.

TrenchersDirectional drillsVacuum excavators Tub grindersHorizontal grindersBalers Disc mowersRakes & teddersBale wrappers Brush chippersStump cuttersMini skid steers Compost turnersTrommel screensRockwheels Pipeline equipmentFeed & mix systemsReclaimers

SECTOR 01

Underground

Trenchers, directional drills and vacuum excavators that lay fiber, power and pipe beneath streets - the hidden infrastructure of everything you tap on a screen.

SECTOR 02

Forage & Ag

Balers, mowers, rakes and wrappers that turn a standing field into a stacked, wrapped, winter-ready supply of feed.

SECTOR 03

Environmental

Grinders, chippers and compost turners that convert wood and organic waste into mulch, energy feedstock and reclaimed land.

The person

Six things that explain him

People who work with him reach for the same words: humble, curious, willing to look at a problem from a different angle. That last one is engineer temperament more than executive polish - the instinct to rotate the object until a new face shows.

He credits his mother, Mary Andringa, for the operating religion he inherited: continuous improvement, lean manufacturing, and a near-obsession with the customer. His grandfather gave him the founding gene. His own contribution has been to fuse the two with something the previous generations did not have - a technical training aimed, once, at outer space.

Beyond the plant he keeps busy in the industry's rooms, serving on the boards of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Iowa Business Council, plus the board of advisors at Camcraft, Inc. He and his wife, Carrie, are raising three children in Pella. The rocket engineer stayed home.

The horizon

Where he wants this to end up

Ask Andringa what winning looks like and the timescale gives him away. The goal is not a quarter or a year. It is a company that is independent, family-owned and demonstrably stronger a decade out than it is today - one that can keep the promises a public firm cannot afford to make to its employees, its dealers, its customers and its town.

That is the quiet radical idea underneath the trenchers and the balers. In an economy that rewards flipping and optimizing for the exit, Jason Andringa is running a system built to still be here. He measures it the way he was trained to measure anything worth building - not by how bright it burns this quarter, but by whether it holds together over the long arc. Optimize the equation. Then leave it better than you found it.