Accepting Challenges and Growing Teams

Belong Dickinson
Nov 4
8 min read

Coaching and mentoring teams at work and on the field

Meet JT Haelterman

I wanted to relocate back to the U.P. I just wanted to be in a stable community. And I knew that Iron Mountain was the place that we needed to be.

I already knew about the community, as I was actually born in Iron Mountain. My family moved from Michigan to Florida. I didn't really have a sense of a home or community, but we used to always come back to Iron Mountain for the summers and spend time with my grandparents on the rivers and lakes.

JT Haelterman in blue shirt stands smiling under a large "LOADMASTER" sign with a blue frame. Background shows a brown industrial building and fence.

I am JT Haelterman, plant manager at Loadmaster. I've worked here for going on three years. Previous to that, I was an operations manager at BOSS, moving up from a supervisor working on the floor in the machine area and in the assembly area. I spent ten years there. Previous to that, I was a machinist in Florida.

When moving here, as a machinist, I knew I wanted to work in manufacturing. Coming from a small machine shop in Florida, when I went to BOSS, it felt like a bigger company, and I wanted to experience that. It was awesome. I knew when I came up here and interviewed that it was the place I was going to work.

Working at Loadmaster

I went back to school at NWTC for an operations management degree, and that obviously opened up many new doors. The plant manager position opened up here at Loadmaster, and it was a good opportunity for me to take on a new challenge.

It's the entire operation, so I felt like in my career I needed that challenge, and share with Loadmaster what I had learned, and help this company grow. I was excited to be able to share with the Brissons what I had done.

They already had a great business, and we are all aligned that we want to take the company to another level together. I believe we're doing that. It's something that's going to take some time, but it starts with the commitment from the owners and the reinvestment back into the business that they've shown, so far, to be able to grow the company.

The most rewarding part of my role is working with the employees every single day. Being able to help them work through the challenges they have every single day and offer a different perspective to help them resolve the problems.

Manufacturing is not an easy process. Every day you come in, you know that there's going to be something happening. We work together as a group to find the root cause of our problems and, hopefully, put long-term corrective actions in place so that we can eliminate those things from happening in the future.

You can see it in the employees. It's one less thing down the road that they have to

Two men in a factory setting, one in a blue jacket, the other in a black graphic tee, talking. Yellow machinery and tools in the background.

experience that makes their job harder. I love being able to offer that point of view, work with them, and make the job easier. Whether it's "hey, we need new equipment, the equipment just isn't up to date," or "we can refine this process a little bit more," or "could we get the engineering crew in to redesign this product to make it easier to paint, assemble, or weld." I feel like that is probably the most rewarding thing for me.

I'm an atypical kind of guy. I like things really tight, really neat, and fast. I like how fast manufacturing is, because you're just not settled on one thing at one time. You're constantly working on a multitude of different things. And there's no lack of work in manufacturing.

We stage our finished products on the highway outside the factory. One day, you'll see a small truck out there, and one day you'll see a big truck. One's orange or green… It's just a nice way for us to display our product out on the highway. And it's funny for me, though, when I drive into work, if I don't see a different truck, then I know we might have had a rough day. So when I come in or when I leave, I want to see different trucks out there because that shows that, you know, we're delivering trucks to the customers and they're picking them up.

I think the employees look at it that way, too. They want to see different trucks. They want to show off what they've built.

Continuing Education at NWTC

It started online, and I had never taken online classes, but I did like the flexibility of the schedule. The first two years were all online, and then the last year was a lot of lab work. The labs had to be done at the school. NWTC has campuses in Niagara, Marinette, and Green Bay. The classes I needed to take weren't offered in Niagara or Marinette, so I did end up having to drive to Green Bay for the last year on Saturdays. It is pretty easy to get to Green Bay from here; take 141 South for an hour and a half. NWTC has an awesome campus.

The program was great. It was tailored specifically for manufacturing operations management. I was getting everything that I needed while still working. I was able to apply what I was learning directly to the roles that I was taking on. I had an advantage in a way where I wasn't starting from scratch.

I have continued to work with them. I have gone back to that school a couple of times and spoke to students in the operations management program about how it helped me and some key things that were meaningful.

I was also part of an advisory council there with the teachers on things I felt weren't relevant in the field, but they were teaching. It was kind of cool to just give that perspective and have an open conversation with professors. I was like, wow, they really want our point of view, which is cool that they want to tailor to what's going on in the field, and what are some things that aren’t being taught in the program that could be coming.

Locally, at the Dickinson-Iron ISD Career & Technical Education (VOC) center, I’ve been invited to go in and speak to the students there so they see a face and get to know you. I think it is important for them when they are selecting a career, and the communication that I have with them could be the difference between them saying, “hey, I'd like to join that team. That seems like a fun team.” I educate them on the same thing: What is this field of work? What can you expect when you get to work? How should you act? What are, you know, the little things that the teachers try to emphasize, that it's how you got to show up to work. It's hard work, fast-paced, and you're in a team setting, so you gotta have good communication skills, all those things. It is fun.

Living in the Dickinson Area

Florida was a different setting. It was the beach. It's hot. You don't have the seasons in Florida. Here, you have the summers at the lakes and skiing in the winters. Change the colors in the fall, and being able to just get outside and walk around… different animals. It's gators and snakes versus deer, bear, and moose.

At the zoo in Florida, everything is behind a glass wall. Here it's like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. You go feed deer, and there are just so many different benefits to this community. Dickinson County is only one piece of the U.P.

A green speedboat with passengers speeds across a lake, surrounded by lush greenery. Wakeboards are mounted on the boat. Mood is lively.

One thing my family and I do once we get out of hibernation from the long winter is we love to spend time at the lake. We wakeboard, fish, and water ski. If it's sunny, from April until October, we're taking the boat out on the lake.

My wife and I have four kids, so we are active all summer as well, with soccer and baseball. In the fall, football. We spend a lot of our time watching games and going to parks. And because we're so close to Iron Mountain, you just get to know everybody, and everybody's kids have grown up together, and it's just this awesome community, whether it's Kingsford against Iron Mountain or Kingsford against Norway. You've seen these individuals for the last decade. So it's fun to go to the parks. It's fun to interact with people.

For people coming to the area, there's just such a wide variety of things to do, especially for kids. When the kids were young, it was you're fishing and you're wanting to explore, and get them to see the animals and just be in nature. And now it's kind of shifted as the kids get older. At least my kids are less about those interactions and more about going out and physically doing things. They love to ski at the ski hill. For the last 5 or 6 years, we get them ski passes and drop them off Friday night, and we really don't see them till Sunday. My wife and I will go up to the ski hill and socialize all weekend. There's something for every single age group here.

We live in the city, too. We are right on top of the hill from downtown, so we go on Saturdays to the markets or ride our bikes down to friends and hang out downtown.

JT and his wife walk hand in hand on a sidewalk in a small town. A hotel and vibrant autumn trees are visible, with a clear sky above.

The safety is great. The population of larger cities, obviously everything increases and here

when I talked about that sense of community, no matter what city you live in, you all know each other and there's almost an unwritten, respectful thing that I'm going to watch out for your kids, and I'm going to watch out for your family, and I'm going to help. When people have a need, you're going to lend a hand. It's bigger than that one community. It really does extend across the U.P.

Flivver Football

I've been a football coach now for five years in the Central U.P. Youth Football League and with the Kingsford Flivvers. It was easy because my kids wanted to get into sports, and I had played sports.

I just love working with the young kids and being able to educate, teach, train, challenge, and mentor them.

Football players in yellow gear and blue helmets on a grassy field, with a coach JT in black pointing directions. Trees in the background.

I currently coach the freshman football team at Kingsford. A coach is different than a parent. To be that guy that gives back in that way, one of the best parts of my day is to be able to go coach these kids.

The community is a sports community, so you get to know everybody.

Favorite Things to Do

My wife and I love Spiros, and it's downtown. We can walk there, have dinner and walk back. I wish it were open seven days a week because I would eat there seven days a week.

Greenleafs has a great family sports bar atmosphere where you can take the kids. There are always games on TV. If there's something big sports-related, especially for our family, we like to go to dinner there.

The Braumart is something that we also experience when there are things coming into town. Every year, we look forward to going to The Nutcracker ballet. I mean, there's just so many other cool places – 51st State Brewery. I actually don't think there's enough of them. It'd be cool to bring in more craft beer places. There are just so many other places that are great, locally owned businesses.

I'm glad that they have an EV charging station in Norway. It's one of the places that does it. So, having an electric vehicle. It's the next wave that's coming. Attract more people, a lot of people coming up from the Chicago or Green Bay area.

What do you like most about living here?

What's funny, and I'm going to make a comment before I answer it, is when I'm interviewing, I always ask the candidates, I need your elevator pitch, right? And a lot of them know what it is, but a lot of them are like, “What's an elevator pitch?” And I said, “Give me the 30-second pitch of why Loadmaster should hire you.”

The elevator pitch for the community would be, number one, it's a beautiful community. It's fun. There are things to do. The people are great. It is a safe community. The history of the community really speaks for itself, and people carry that responsibility. They want to be able to respect what their ancestors had done and make this a better community.