Husco CEO Austin Ramirez: "We're at the Beginning of a Manufacturing Renaissance!"
From robots and vision systems to addressing Milwaukee's severe education gap, Austin believes we can (and should) keep talent from running to the coasts.
Who I’m talking to in this interview:
Austin Ramirez, CEO at Husco, a 1,600-person, Waukesha-based manufacturer of hydraulic and electromechanical components.
Austin came back to Milwaukee in 2001 after school on the East Coast and work in California, meaning to stay only a year but never left.
He’s proud of the K-12 school his family built that serves ~3,000 kids across two campuses and has ranked #1 in the state for several years running.
Connect with Austin on LinkedIn.
The quick snapshot of my conversation with Austin:
Husco’s nearly 500 degreed engineers design the guts of machines the world’s best-known brands put into the world.
There’s a staggering amount of data his company collects and doesn’t yet use. The number he threw out surprised me, and it’s exactly why he thinks a US manufacturing renaissance is just getting started.
Austin also shares something about Milwaukee’s kids that he directly calls out as a tragedy and what his family is doing about it.
I love when Milwaukee companies care so much about their city that they do something about its biggest challenges.
A lot of Milwaukee business leaders talk about the city’s challenges. Let me emphasize the a lot part of that sentence.
Few actually move on it. Do something. Get involved.
The Ramirez family, which owns Waukesha-based manufacturing company Husco, actually did something.
They started a school, Augustine Prep, to address the education gap in Milwaukee.
If you live here, or are familiar with the state of K-12 education in the city, you know what they did was big. Really big. Because Aug Prep shares on its website that “The 2024-25 State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction report card shows that Aug Prep remains the top K-12 school in Milwaukee, and continues to deliver one of the state’s highest rates for student academic growth.”
What does a K-12 school in Milwaukee have to do with a manufacturing company in Waukesha?
On the surface, one might say Aug Prep is a way to attract kids into the Husco’s talent pipeline.
Well, not exactly.
Though it’s great that, as Austin shares, some of the kids who have attended Aug Prep are now becoming ready recruits for the family business, in reality, the Ramirez family has a broader vision to equip students for the modern economy, whether that’s at Husco or elsewhere.
I think this is the kind of vision that makes Husco a successful manufacturer, too.
With a focus on manufacturing’s bigger picture and potential, the company moves into the future with agility and purpose.
In my interview with him, Austin shares how tech-forward Husco has been and will continue to be to build business and attract new talented people to the company.
Austin’s wisdom hit home as I reflected on our conversation over the next couple of days.
Austin doesn’t separate the school and the shop floor like I was in my mind.
For him, building a great business and building up the city aren’t two projects competing for his attention. They’re the same project.
That’s the part I wish more business leaders around here understood.
We all talk about Wisconsin’s brain drain problem like if we just told a better story, the kids would stay.
But Austin’s point is simpler and harder: you can’t retain talent you never developed or engaged in the first place.
The kids are here. We’re just not giving all of them a shot at the economy we’ve built.
And the economy he’s building is a good one. Robots. Vision systems. Hundreds of engineers. Even a pile of manufacturing data he says they’ve barely scratched.
If you love tech, Austin will tell you there’s not a better place to be right now than in manufacturing. And there’s not a better place to do manufacturing than in Milwaukee.
Aug Prep certainly isn’t charity. And it isn’t recruiting. It’s what happens when someone decides the city they came home to is worth the f***ing work.
Take a listen below or on Spotify.
This is a good one.