Bagley company expands

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

June 30, 1997

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

BAGLEY -- Whoever says a company can't survive in rural Minnesota hasn't been here recently, where Product Research and Development announced two weeks ago its sixth major expansion since opening in 1986.

The newest expansion to the company will add 33,000 square feet of space to an already-existing 44,000 square-foot building, and it's expected to provide for an additional 50 jobs when the project is done.

PRD, a subsidiary of Technology, Engineering and Manufacturing Industries based in five Minnesota towns, provides precision machining, design, engineering and product design services mostly to Polaris Industries' all-terrain vehicle division.

The newest expansion will boost the firm's expansion capabilities, according to Finance Manager Scott Sonstegard, and even though there were plans to expand in 1997 already, they were moved forward thanks to a $199,000 grant from the Minnesota Investment Fund. The fund is managed by the state's Department of Trade and Economic Development.

The grant was actually issued to the city of Bagley, which will loan the money to PRD -- in return increasing the city's local economy. This is the second such grant to be awarded to the city to be used by PRD. The first -- $150,000 in 1994 -- is still being repaid, and the newest grant will be repaid in $50,000-per-year payments.

The first two payments go to the city, which it can then loan to other business entities to promote local growth, and the second $100,000 will be paid back to the state.

Additional funds for new equipment and working capital will be provided by local funds and company equity to complete the almost $900,000 project, nearly doubling the company's size, according to Stonstegard.

"This expansion will allow us to keep up with Polaris' growth," he said Thursday in an interview at the plant. "ATVs are becoming a bigger and bigger part of their sales, and we need to keep up our production with them. Our whole purpose in this company in Bagley is to design products and assemble them ... primarily for Polaris."

Stonsegard said the company will probably hire an additional 50 employees to join the firm's current 130 employees when construction is complete. And everything from highly trained engineers to computer support and assembly people will be needed.

PRD, incorporated in 1986, began small on a plot of land near Roy Lake, 20 miles southwest of Bagley -- the fourth of five TEAM Industries' companies. TEAM, a holding company of the five companies, is owned and operated by Donald Ricke, a native son of Bagley, and his son, David Ricke, both of whom wanted to create well-paying jobs in small, rural communities in northwest Minnesota.

The first company was started in Cambridge, Minn., and since then has added companies in Audubon, Park Rapids, Detroit Lakes and Bagley.

PRD operates four departments in engineering, machining, assembly and prototyping, and mainly designs and produces transmissions for Polaris' ATV division. The company also does some testing prototyping. Annually, PRD produces more than 100,000 ATV transmissions for Polaris, a job it took away from a Japanese company in 1993. That year, PRD had $4 million in sales, but sales grew to $34 million in 1996.

Together, TEAM Industries sells $100 million annually and supports a payroll of $20 million.

"We're committed to being Polaris' supplier of ATV transmissions," Stonstegard said, "and we'll do what we need to do to be that reliable resource for their production, including expanding again."