Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

The Right Approach: Electro-Tek—A Williams Family Legacy, Part 2

(Editor’s note: Part 2 concludes the story of one of the earliest and most enduring PCB manufacturers in the industry, and completes the story of the Williams family’s contribution to moving the industry forward. As discussed in Part 1, the closing of Electro-Tek after 56 years prompted Steve to tell his family’s story.)

Smooth Sailing, Rough Waters
After bringing in additional equipment and PCB manufacturing talent, production, quality, and technology were finally coming together and the company was on the rise. But with the burden of the equipment and startup overhead debt, Electro-Tek was still not making a consistent profit, and investors were becoming uneasy (remember the very optimistic business plan?).

Eventually, CSB decided to cut its losses and wanted to close the company in 1970, so my Dad, Chuck Williams, asked Harry if he had any other investors who might be interested in the business. Harry set a meeting with Jerry Klein, an entrepreneur with quite a colorful background. Klein made his fortune during Prohibition, smuggling liquor from Michigan into the Milwaukee area in a custom-built car with fake leather seats that opened to store the cases of liquor. At the end of Prohibition, he opened a company called Midland Plastics. After selling the business and retiring, Jerry was bored and looking for another investment opportunity. He was excited about the upcoming PCB business and bought Electro-Tek. With the equipment overhead now paid off, the business was profitable within six months, and Electro-Tek’s reputation and customer base grew exponentially, including landing one of Wisconsin’s earliest companies, Kohler, founded in 1873, just 25 years after Wisconsin became a state.

Fun Fact #5: Years later, I had the rare opportunity to golf at two of the legendary Kohler courses and stay at the American Club. Sitting in the spa’s hot tub and sporting a full beard, many confused employees asked if I needed anything while wondering why current owner Herb Kohler, Jr. was slumming it in the public spa.

Electro-Tek truly was a family business, with my younger brother Scott working inside sales and my mom Toni running the office (billing, payroll, HR, accounting, and occasionally logistics). She later founded her own company, ALW & Associates, to manage these functions as an outsourced service. Then there’s me, kicking off my 49-year (and counting) career in the industry. My sister Becki (the youngest) was the only one smart enough to go straight to college and stay out of the printed circuit board business.

We had frequent employee celebrations, summer picnics, and annual Christmas parties. Electro-Tek was the founding sponsor of our softball team (Figure 1), with our logo and a PCB on the jerseys. Many employees were part of the early roster, and the core of our legendary teams played together for over 40 years and never had a losing season. Dad outlasted us all, playing in his last game at age 67. I retired from baseball at age 55, following the effects of 10 surgeries, and Scott played another few years before hanging it up. 

The employees were like an extended family, spending time outside of work together and staying involved in each other’s lives. Everyone genuinely enjoyed working together, and my fondness for this family-owned, small-business culture remains to this day.

Integrating Electronics Assembly
During this time, Rex Chain Belt asked Dad to consider building the electronics assembly associated with the PCBs we were providing. Despite not having electronics assembly experience, but seeing the market opportunity to vertically integrate, he agreed. Feeling stretched quite thin, Dad hired one of Louis Allis’ colleagues to run this portion of the business, and took over an unused front of the second floor. Using Jerry’s plastics expertise, they successfully built their first PCB and assembly enclosure. Word spread, and Generac and Kohler soon placed assembly orders.

The day Dad called on a small company called Electro Measure (EM) in Neenah, Wisconsin, would inexplicably link two industry icons—Chuck Williams and Pete Strandwitz—for over 30 years. Pete was EM’s general manager, which was formed to provide electronics inventory management systems via the cash register for liquor dispensing in the restaurant and bar industries. The owner of a prominent local four-star restaurant in Appleton, Wisconsin, had complained to Pete that his bartenders were losing a large part of his liquor sales by “pouring heavy” for tips and buying drinks for friends. He wanted Pete to set up and run a company to produce an automated system to dispense exact volumes of ingredients based on the drink ordered via the cash register.

Leveraging EM’s relationships with Cornelius Corp., a beverage dispenser, and National Cash Register (NCR), they successfully developed and installed the system throughout the industry, becoming particularly popular with bowling alleys. This was a precursor to the “micro-dosing” medication dispensing technology and Coca-Cola’s Freestyle systems, both of which Dad and I would be intimately involved in later in our careers. Electro-Tek was building all of EM’s circuit boards, and while it was a major customer, EM’s cash flow problems greatly affected Electro-Tek’s receivables. Probably heavily influenced by the amount of money EM owed, the idea was floated that it might make sense to purchase the highly profitable Electro-Tek to provide customers a one-stop shop for PCBs and assembly. Jerry Klein wanted to retire again, so after several months of negotiations, the company was sold.

The new entity’s leadership team, which basically comprised Dad and Pete, wanted Electro-Tek in a more professional facility, so Dad found a company completing construction of a multi-bay facility on 10th Street, south of Layton Avenue in Milwaukee, that allowed him to customize the interior of two bays to accommodate PCB manufacturing (Figure 2).

Everyone agreed it made sense to transfer the Electro-Tek assembly business to EM, which gave it a ready-made PCB customer base needing assembly services, particularly Kohler. As Electro-Tek grew, it brought in more PCB talent and equipment. It was in this facility that we had our first CNC equipment, an Excellon OPIC programmer and Mark IV drill/router.

I remember when the plant manager, who had come from the nearby Delco PCB operation, said, “Steve, come check this out!” In addition to the single-station bottom drills, we had a “quad drill,” which had four spindles manually controlled by an operator following a “roadmap” path in a manually bottom-drilled template. The operator would lower a stylus into a template hole and pull a trigger to initiate the drilling of a single hole in the four stacks of panels. The quad drill and the Excellon both had four stations, each with a spindle that would drill a stack of one to three panels. I saw the juxtaposition of the Excellon drilling 20 cycles in the time it took the quad drill to cycle once (240 holes vs. 12 in three-panel stacks). This was the first of many technology game-changers I was fortunate to be part of over the years. We then published our first four-page brochure featuring many of our employees hard at work. 

Fun Fact #6: I think we only had one white smock, and had to pass it around to all the employees featured in the brochure.

Adding Design to the Mix
A few major events then happened that would change the landscape of the electronics industry, and the careers of our family. First, EM wanted to create a separate operation for its electronics assembly work and decided on a very creative name: Electronic Assembly Corp. (EAC), which folded in EM. Pete’s vision was always to offer a complete cradle-to-grave solution to customers for product development, design, and manufacture of electronic and electromechanical products, which checked off two of the three services. There was a company in the Appleton area designing and installing electronic security systems, and Pete was familiar with the owners. The engineering group, “Technology Group Inc.” (TGI), and as part of EAC, finished the trilogy under Pete’s vision.

Both companies grew in revenue, employees, and technology, with Electro-Tek maintaining its family-oriented, small-company culture.

When Pete wanted to increase the mechanical engineering capability, he approached Norland Corp., in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Norland wanted to break off its mechanical engineering group because it didn’t have a way to market its expertise, and it soon became part of TGI. Dad and Pete believed they needed to create a separate marketing arm to represent EAC, Electro-Tek, TGI, and the Norland Group, so Dad started a marketing office called Sequence near the Milwaukee airport for him and Mom to work from.

In 1979, Pete said he would like to have all these separate entities under the umbrella of a parent company. Like Electro-Tek, that name also became an industry icon: Plexus Corp. Business was growing for all divisions, but Electro-Tek far outpaced the others and was the cash cow keeping Plexus above water. Plexus sold Electro-Tek to Norland because it needed capital to expand, and Electro-Tek was its most valuable asset. The deal returned the Norland engineering group, along with Electro-Tek, under a strict non-compete agreement. Electro-Tek had outgrown the current two-bay facility in Milwaukee, so Dad found a property about five miles south of the current location, designing and overseeing construction to greenfield the current facility in Oak Creek, Wisconsin—the first of the three Electro-Tek facilities built specifically for PCB manufacturing (Figure 4).

Fun Fact #7: The last two buildings were coincidentally both located on 10th Street, one in Milwaukee and the other in Oak Creek.

Years later, Dad said he regretted overlooking the proximity to the Delco PCB operations a mile away because Electro-Tek was often their training center, and we could not compete with Delco’s compensation package. Things ran smoothly until Norland executives decided they wanted someone from their company to oversee operations onsite and installed someone without PCB or manufacturing experience. This was not only problematic for the business but also the beginning of the end of the Williams family’s association with Electro-Tek.

While Electro-Tek was doing well, there was constant pressure from Norland to grow the business faster. We all saw the writing on the wall: As with any business or sports team, any new leader at the top wants to put in their own players. First, Norland wanted to do all the bookkeeping and billing at its corporate offices, thus eliminating Mom’s position. I left next for a position with a competitor. Shortly after, Dad was unceremoniously forced out, with Scott following the same day. Not to be undone, and being a bit of an entrepreneur herself, Mom eventually got a degree in sales and marketing and bought a local Dunkin’ Donuts franchise, which she ran for many years, with Scott and Becki working part-time with her while they were in college.

I remember getting the call from Dad one day, which was heartbreaking as Electro-Tek was my parents’ baby. But remember that little assembly company from many years ago? It had grown into a $10 million design and contract manufacturer, and Dad soon rejoined his old colleague Pete Strandwitz there and served as vice president and executive officer of Plexus for the next 20 years until he retired in 2002. Under his marketing and business development guidance, Plexus became an industry juggernaut and is set to break the $4 billion revenue mark this year.

Where Are They Now?
We recently celebrated Mom and Dad’s 89th birthdays and 69th wedding anniversary. They are still traveling the world while having fun with their eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Scott has followed in Dad’s footsteps in business development and is the vice president of a global conglomerate with over 50 brands. Becki has spent the past 30 years in director, VP, COO, and CEO positions with various divisions at one of the most prestigious financial services companies in the U.S. As for me, 2026 will mark my 50th year in the business: 22 years in PCB manufacturing leadership, 15 years as the global sourcing commodity manager for Plexus, and the 12th year serving the electronics industry with my consulting business, The Right Approach Consulting. My biggest regret is that my time at Plexus only overlapped with Dad’s by a few years before he retired.

Conclusion
When Electro-Tek was founded, there were fewer than 80 PCB shops in North America, many extremely small and now gone. When I entered the industry full-time in 1976, there were over 2,500 shops. We’re now approaching a full circle, as today we have under 150 shops. We are very proud that Electro-Tek was one of the early PCB pioneers and survived for almost six decades. Although the family has not been involved with Electro-Tek since the early 1980s, it will always be our family business, and its closing was emotional and bittersweet.

Dad doesn’t like it when I compare him to Steve Jobs, but it is hard to overlook the similarities:

• They were visionary entrepreneurs who saw opportunities before others recognized the need
• Neither had a college degree
• They ran their flagship businesses out of their homes
• They created tens of thousands of jobs
• They changed their respective industries, one with technology and the other with love, grit, and determination
• They created companies that stood the test of time
• They were both forced out of the companies they created, only to move on to bigger and better things

That's not bad for two guys with only a high school education. I know I’m biased, but as I often say of Steve Jobs, the world needs more of Chuck Williams.

This column originally appeared in the October 2025 issue of PCB007 Magazine.