“If the gears in Tom’s head made noise, you’d hear them,” says Michael Le Jeune, president and CEO of Savage-based manufacturer Fabcon. “He sits there and stares at the whiteboard. All of a sudden, he’ll come up with an idea that’s completely different from what we’ve been discussing. Right out of the chute, his idea will sound kind of crazy. But he starts drawing on the board . . . and selling it . . . and pretty soon, you realize it’s not crazy—it’s brilliant!”
When 23-year-old Tom Kuckhahn joined Fabcon in 1994, the $45 million company made heavy, poorly insulated, windowless, hollow-core concrete wall panels. Today, Kuckhahn is vice president of engineering and Fabcon is a $225 million company whose innovative VersaCore products—lightweight, energy-efficient, foam-core panels with windows and doors—are used to build big-box stores (Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, Wal-Mart, Menards), schools, warehouses, office buildings, and ice rinks.
Le Jeune says Kuckhahn’s “extraordinary creativity” transformed Fabcon. “Ten years ago, I started the R&D department with one employee: Tom Kuckhahn. Now innovation is at the core of what we do. We’ve got over a dozen patents in process—all with Tom’s name featured prominently.”
Kuckhahn calls Fabcon a “percolating-ideas-from-the-bottom-up kind of company.” He grew up in Gibbon, where his dad was a Lutheran minister, and started working early, delivering papers and picking the family’s cucumbers for sale to the Gedney Company in Chaska. He joined Fabcon four months after earning his BS in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota, and soon became known for his non-engineer-like thinking.
“I’m not necessarily a linear thinker,” he says. “I use a lot of logical processes, but I tend to jump around a lot in my head, too. I connect dots that don’t at first seem logical.”
That served the company well during the 2001 recession. “Our product had aged, and we didn’t have the best mousetrap anymore,” Le Jeune says. Kuckhahn drove the creation of VersaCore products, which put the company back in the game. Since then, he has championed two iterations that are even more lightweight and energy efficient: VersaCore Plus and VersaCore Green.
Kuckhahn now manages 95 drafters and engineers, including 20 draftspeople in Pune, India, a group he plans to triple within two years. He heads quality assurance and R&D, and has launched a plant-automation project to improve quality and efficiency.
“Tom’s competitiveness is contagious,” Le Jeune says. “He’s surrounded himself with people who are invigorated by the same challenges that he is—the opportunity to develop new ideas and new products. We’re all whiteboard junkies!”
Outside of work, Kuckhahn spends time with his family, volunteers for his church, plays community men’s volleyball, and cooks. “I like things that are a blend of art and science,” he says. “Cooking has a lot in common with what I do at work, which is to explore the creative side of engineering. There are some fairly unbreakable rules, but within those constraints you can get really creative.”
