Press conference: Norm Asbjornson's $50 million gift to engineering at Montana State University

I did not come with a prepared speech. I thought I would wing it once I saw what was going on. And I have a couple messages that I would like to try and convey. Number one, I will walk you through very quickly a little bit of my background, which is portrayed up here on the upper level—and I'm shocked that it is, but I'm glad that it is—and a little bit of the philosophy I've tried to live my life by. On the far left, there is my first baby picture in the backyard of a house which still exists, looking at a house which still exists in Winifred. Both of them have been upgraded considerably and added on from then. My father holding me, and my mother standing there, and my dog Spike off our sign. As I wander around here and follow them, I see you have my aerobatic flying aircraft there. Then I see that you have a picture that was taken earlier this year when I was in Korea at their war memorial, looking at a tank which I believe I probably worked on because there weren't many of that particular model in Korea during the war. I was there after the war as a mechanic, and I pulled engines out and tuned up engines and changed oil and did a lot of things to make them run. I checked the 90 mm guns out to make sure they'd fire, 50 caliber machine guns to make sure they would work. Next one happens to be when I received my honorary doctorate here. The next picture—oh, there's Winifred, Montana. The following one happened on September 30th when I opened NASDAQ with a bunch of my employees and my directors, and we celebrated our 25th anniversary. And as we come on around, I cannot see—oh, one of my early pictures as a child, and then when I was a teenager standing by a '47 Studebaker in the street in front of my house in Winifred, Montana during the winter. My high school graduation picture, and my first really major business venture. I was very fortunate for having been born in the United States, and while I think most of you share that good fortune, some of you are here maybe from other countries, but I consider it an extreme privilege that we all share to live in this fine country. I also happen to have had very, very good fortune of having absolutely exceptional parents. And while they went through their early years during the Depression, I do remember some of the hardships as a child. I remember my mother counting pennies to find out how much we could eat. I remember a lot of things which fixed my character to some degree. And they decided that the best thing they could give to me as a child was the ability to survive regardless of whatever. And in that thought pattern, they never gave me any allowance. I was never given a penny of allowance in my entire life. What they had were certain jobs that were my problems because I was a member of the family, but there were other jobs they could give me a penny or nickel for. And at that time, my biggest money-making venture I remember was collecting pop bottles and beer bottles and selling them back to the store and back to the bar for a penny a piece. I delivered papers, did a variety of things, worked for farmers, shocked hay, did all kinds of shoveling of wheat and driving tractors and all the various things that farm kids do at that time. I don't know that they are so privileged today because our federal government has made that illegal for a lot of those endeavors. Real shame, real shame, because today's children don't get that opportunity as I did to learn responsibilities. And my first big man venture, what she told you about: if you had your garbage in a 55-gallon drum, I charged a quarter; if you threw it out on the ground and I had to collect it up, it cost you 50 cents. I was a real hard businessman.

When I came down to Montana State College at the time, I was not the best prepared student they ever received because of Winifred having a lack of certain things. I had only had one year of algebra and one year of solid geometry, no chemistry, no physics. And I came down here thinking I was going to be an engineer because I knew how to do mechanics work. Well, it wasn't quite mechanics work down here. So they sent me off to take remedial math so that I could get into the college level of math. That automatically kind of displaced me from my original class. I started here in the fall of '53, should have gone out of here in the fall of '57, but I was already behind the eight ball when I walked into chemistry and I walked into physics and all these other students had had those courses, and I was sitting there wondering what's going on in this course. It was a trial, and I struggled. I struggled. When I came here first, my parents gave me $1,000. I had about $500 to $600 of my own, and that got me through the first year. I worked the summer between. I came back here with probably $500 or so in the fall of '54, and I went through the fall quarter—it was on a quarterly system then—started the winter quarter and realized I was going to have to go ask my parents for money because I was running out of money. I also realized at that time that most everybody went through the military, so I said, 'Why don't I just go ahead and solve two problems at one time? I'll go in and get my military service over with, and I won't have to ask my parents for any money.' Now my parents at that time had had a fairly good lifestyle; they had grown to be fairly prosperous, one of the most prosperous families in the town of Winifred, so they could easily have afforded me money. And I look back at what I did and say, 'Was I really very smart right then?' Like a lot of things. And one of the things that I will tell you for sure that I fully believe: those who are the most successful are also those who have failed the most, because you don't get successful unless you reach far and try hard, and when you reach far and try hard, the likelihood of failure is greatly magnified. And so I reached hard down here to get my education, and I didn't set the world on fire. I was not one of the star performers in this school. I had a lot of good friends, I had a lot of good classmates, but I was kind of the middle section of the class. But I did do one thing at that time: the college had to accept all the graduates of Montana State high schools, and they had an abundance of classmates in here, and the thing of the faculty at that time was to thin it down so they didn't have to work so hard, because we didn't pay too much money, so why do they want to keep us around? And so they flunked out about two-thirds of my starting class. They didn't quite get me, but they came close.

So when I came back out of the military—I spent nine months on the DMZ sleeping with a machine gun in my sleeping bag with me. There was no fighting going on, but it was within 15-minute walking distance from people who wanted to kill me. And when you go to bed every night, get in your sleeping bag in an unair-conditioned, unheated tent or hole in the ground—which is what was there—it was after the fighting, but it was still pretty primitive, and you lived a very primitive life. You worked seven days a week all the time because there was nothing else there. Because above the Imjin River and the fence that surrounds the DMZ, there were no Koreans allowed up there. We were told, 'You see anybody that's not obviously an American citizen, shoot them.' And it was a serious thing. I grew up quickly under that scenario, realized what life was about. I left Korea fortunately on a plane on December 25th, 1956, and I was enrolled in school back here on January 4th, 1957—a handful of days from the time I left Korea until I was sitting right here back in school. I was a much more serious student. I realized that if I were going to achieve my goals and not live the life I had just come from, I was going to have to get very serious. And I got very serious. I graduated from here in 1960 with a mechanical engineering degree. I had a little economy car called a Rambler because you got a lot of car for little money. I put all my personal belongings that I owned in the trunk of the car—didn't even have to use the back seat—and started for Minneapolis, where I began my first job.

I've had a very fortunate career because I had a very fortunate thing happen to me: I was a graduate of MSC. And what I found out in the world was, while I was in awe of people from these very prestigious colleges and universities that are within the United States and some foreign, a funny thing happened as the conversations went around engineering: I never got lost. I was always there with them. I might not be quite as adept in a particular field and be able to talk in as deep depth as they were, but the conversation could switch from one subject to the next, and I was there. I came to realize how tremendous my engineering education was—absolutely tremendous. I also realized there was a deficiency in my education: I was very technical, I was very much an engineer, but I wasn't very much of a manager, and I wasn't very much in a lot of other areas. So by that time I was working as a salesman in Omaha, Nebraska, selling commercial heating and air conditioning units largely to schools, hospitals, office buildings, shopping centers, things of that nature. And there was a university there called Omaha University, now known as University of Nebraska Omaha campus. And so I enrolled in night courses to try and broaden my obvious lack of knowledge in areas that I realized that if I was ever going to rise above a technician in an engineering world and be a manager or be something greater, I needed more knowledge. And I went many years to night school to obtain that. And then I started getting promoted. I started having a reputation of being a fixer for problems in the sales world, and I was moved from manager of that office to manager of the Detroit office, manager of the Chicago office, and then they put the midwestern United States over me, and they sent me for a while, and then they sent me to Dallas, Texas, and I covered the West Coast and the Southwest for a while, and then I was made national sales manager for a large corporation. That was my first 12 years out of school. So I've been in an executive position with four large corporations since 1972, in charge of worldwide sales, in charge of product management, in charge of engineering for some of them, a variety of jobs. And throughout that time, failure, success, failure, success—just went back and forth because I was always reaching higher. I was never satisfied with what I obtained, never satisfied with what the company had done. The most crucial thing that I've realized, what was taught to me so clearly by my parents, was honesty and forthrightness. And honesty doesn't come just for being honest from me to you. The biggest lack of honesty we all have is with ourselves. We say, 'You know, I could have done that, but that person or that situation prevented me from doing it.' No, no, no. You were part of it. Look in the mirror and correct that which you have control over. Find out what you did wrong and correct it. These are some of the lessons my life has taught me, and it has worked extraordinarily well for me.

I was an executive in a firm in Minneapolis at the time that I was courted by a headhunter to come down and take over an extremely small firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And they courted me for approximately one year because I had a reputation of being able to fix companies and fix situations. So what did I do? I shoveled the snow again when it snowed—Minneapolis snows a lot—and I got more tired of doing that, of getting up at 6:00 in the morning to see if I had to shovel my driveway so I could go to work in the morning. And so I finally said yes after they gave me a nice golden parachute. The company that gave it to me was Allegheny Industries out of Pittsburgh. They owned a company called John Zink Company, which was a Tulsa firm that had an air conditioning component to it, but the bulk of the company was in heavy industrial burner technology—all the flares you see at all the refineries were built probably by that company. And so I said yes, and I went down there and started work on May 18th, 1987. And in July of 1987, Allegheny Industries, who was having financial problems and had all their various divisions up for sale, sold John Zink Company. So I looked at my golden parachute letter and I said, 'That didn't last long.' And I said, 'What do I do now?' Well, they told me come down here, they said I had a blank check and I was to totally change this company and make something of it. I'm just going to go right ahead and do it. So I did. Most of the people in the firm who had been there a long time thought, 'Whoa, you're going to get fired.' I said, 'No, that's the way it goes.' I had already made an awfully big commitment. And the big commitment I had made by that time was when I went down there, I had had a 25-year marriage, raised two wonderful children, a daughter and a son. And when I said I was going to take all of our money—which was considerable at that point in time—and I was going to invest in this company, my wife says, 'No, you are not going to do that.' I said, 'Yes, I am going to do that.' And we collectively said, 'You know something, a marriage is not working real well. Maybe this is the time that I'm going to go do what I want, and you go do what you want.' And we sat down and divided it up, recognizing as I did that she had had an extraordinarily fine education, had given it all up to raise the children. I said, 'There's your half.' And her half was almost all of our net worth. So what did I have? I had my experience, and I had what I felt I needed to do what I wanted to do. And I didn't need to be able to buy all of John Zink and own it all. All I needed to have was the ability to take my talent and employ it. And so we split. She took the money, never worked a day in her life since, has had—is worth several million dollars—and I left with kind of change in my pocket. But I was able to sell my skills to a group of investors. And by the way, I maneuvered the ownership. I ended up with a significant ownership for not very much money, and they ended up with—the way I structured it—they ended up with 95% loan and 5% equity. So when their 5% was equity and all of their loan was subordinated to the bank loan, we didn't start out with very much equity in this corporation. And if you had had $1 of that equity, then—I haven't run it here recently, last time I read it—your $1 would be worth $25,000. That's how much that $1 of equity. So I made a lot of people very wealthy, people myself included. And I pursued that, and because now I'm no longer married, I pursued it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the thing launched, because we didn't have anything. We were a highly leveraged company. It comes down to: do you believe in yourself? If you believe in yourself, then why aren't you willing to put the money where it belongs? Why aren't you willing to invest in yourself? Because I knew I knew how to pump gas, I knew how to change oil, I knew how to do a lot of things. I wasn't going to starve if I went bankrupt. I was 52 years old. I could go bankrupt, I could survive until the time that I was going to retire. But it didn't happen that way. I was right. I was right on myself. And we have in 25 years had 10.8% compounded growth for 25 consecutive years. Sometimes up and sometimes down, but take the 25 years and that's what it figures. Profitability has increased 24% per year for 25 years, and the equity in the company has increased 26% in that time. So at any point when somebody got on—and there's probably a few of you who have some of our stock—and realize that sometimes it wasn't doing real well, but if you kept it long enough and you got that total, you did extremely well.

And then I was totally convinced, as I said, that I had to give back to the college. And I got on the foundation board for a while, helped raise more money. In one stop raising of money in the early 2000s, we equaled all the money for scholarships that had been raised since the 1950s till that time. We passed that up in three years. So I felt very good about that. I was part of that. Done a lot of other things here. I've done a lot of things for Winifred, done a lot of other things for people in other parts of the state you don't know about. But the big point is, it comes back to me: somebody's looking out after me, because sometimes when things could go wrong and I think they're going to, they go right. Why do they go right? What I'm trying to tell everybody here is how to be successful. If you follow what I have done—because it's very obvious looking at that picture that I didn't start out with a silver spoon in my mouth. So we get to a point in here and doing a lot of things, and certain people—Jake Jabs stands up and he gives a big amount of money to the school, builds a beautiful building over here. I say, 'Hmm, I think he's got a good idea.' And so we're in conversations earlier around here, and I funded a study by a retired professor to see how the school could change its technology a little bit—not drastically, just modify it a little bit—because I didn't think that it wanted to change a lot to give me a better education, but with a little slight modification of a little bit of cross-disciplinary training and business and a little bit in some other areas, I could have been better prepared. And fortunately, the study that he ran by talking to all the deans in the school came up so that they said that was a good idea, and that has materialized. It's been carried by the school on, and I've been a part of this conversation. And it finally got to the point where they said one of the biggest problems we have is we don't have a building that's appropriate for innovative teaching, and we also have a second problem: we are short on engineering classrooms. And so, okay, let's combine the two and put them central to the campus, and really try and create something bigger than it is—bigger than this building. Let's try and make it more, let's try and change the dynamics of the school. And so across the street, which is kind of where it's been talked about and chosen to be, there's going to be phase one of what ultimately might be—if the school and everything goes—an additional portion of the campus. They have to have other places to grow. It's going to grow to the south, and this will be the anchor point to that growth that hopefully will occur sometime in the future. And so it has to be thought out very thoroughly. It can't be just dump a building out there that's not going to do it. You've got to integrate it, and it's got to have assurance it's going to go forth. And so we have come up with a plan that I was going to contribute $50 million to kick this plan off. But it's going to take more money, so I hope there's some people sitting here or hearing this conversation that are going to come up here and say, 'You know, this is the time for me to contribute to my school, or to this school, which might not even be their school, because it is such a superior school, it is doing so much for the society, it is giving out such good results, giving such good graduates. It's a good place to invest your money.' And so the foundation board has taken it upon themselves to raise some more money and put this together. I have put stock equal in escrow so they're assured the money's going to be there. I haven't done it yet; I've got to go back and get it done, but I will have it done. It'll be there in probably a couple three weeks. And I ask of you, if you have any ability to influence anybody, or if you are capable of yourself in any way to help move this forward, because I think the school has done an enormous, complete analysis of how they can change the dynamics of not just an engineering education but of other schools' educations also in this innovative, collaborative educational structure. Thank you.