A Legacy of Customer Care
Nancy Lien Berndt carries a tradition of strong company culture at MME
Ever since Nancy Lien Berndt started sitting in on client meetings with her father, she remembers her dad telling everyone she was the future of the company.
“I have three sisters, and my dad was constantly thinking of succession, and of who would take over the company,” Lien Berndt said. “He worked so hard, and he wanted us to be a part of what he had built, and of his success.”
Now, Lien Berndt has been in her role as President of Brooklyn Park-based Modern Manufacturing & Engineering, Inc (MME) for almost a decade. But in many ways, her story with MME began even before she was born.
Lien Berndt’s father, Hue Van Lien, moved to Minnesota from Vietnam in the 1980’s. He was a machining school student when then-owner Chuck Larson hired him to work as a tool crib attendant, and was promoted to machinist shortly after graduation. As Lien worked his way up to partner and eventually owner, he maintained the same commitment to his customers — an employees — that MME had become known for.
“I think he naturally thought of family first,” Lien Berndt said. “He had four daughters, and even though the field is very male-dominated, he wanted us to be a part of it.”
As early as middle school, Lien Berndt remembers helping out around the office anywhere she could, and she worked most summers between school learning all the aspects of how MME ran. Although she remembers initially being resistant to studying business, she took a few classes in college and fell in love with the field.
After graduating from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management with a business degree, she started working for MME full-time. Her first role was in production, where she got to build relationships with everyone in the machining process from the customer to the employees on the floor.
Initially, Lien Berndt says, there was some pushback from longtime employees around her rising through the ranks of the company.
“I kind of started feeling like I had to prove myself, because people saw me as young and inexperienced,” Lien Berndt said. “But at some point, I realized I didn’t need to prove myself — I just showed people respect and didn’t act like my title made me above them, and that mutual respect came naturally.”
In 2015, Lien Berndt officially was promoted to President of the company by her father, who continues to lead alongside her as CEO. She still gets to work with two of her younger sisters, currently the company’s HR Manager and Lead Controller. Together, Lien Berndt says, their biggest strength is their shared commitment to continuous learning and improvement.
“When I first joined management, we were a fairly small company, and we had kind of been doing things the same way for a while,” Lien Berndt said. “When I would meet with customers I learned that it was good to ask questions, and that people were willing to share their resources and solutions if we just asked.”
A Culture of Respect
While high performance, quality and on-time delivery all contribute to MME’s success, the number-one driver of their growth over the past few decades has been placing a high priority on customer service, Lien Berndt said.
“We've just always treated the customer with the utmost care, and we try to make their jobs easier,” said Lien Berndt. “Not only do we want to give them the best price, but we’re always really respectful to them and what they do, and we do everything we can to help them out. That’s kind of the number-one for us.”
That respect extends beyond customer relationships, too. MME is known within the industry for both their high retention rates and their high employee satisfaction — and a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that they’re family-run. Both Lien and Lien Berndt’s leadership philosophies involve showing up to the office and seeing their employees in-person, and an open-door policy when it comes to taking feedback from members of their team.
“We've had a lot of people who have worked here for 10, 20, 30 years, and they retire from here . . . we get to know their families and build really close relationships over time,” Lien Berndt said. “My dad has always made it a priority to treat employees well. It didn’t matter that he was the owner — everybody could talk to him, he knew everybody’s name. I do the same thing — we just care a lot for our people.”
That care is evident when any members of the team leave. Lien Berndt said it’s been increasingly difficult to hire in recent years, especially as they seek to fill the roles of several long-time employees who retired or moved on to different opportunities.
Even through changing seasons, Lien Berndt remains intentional about seeing potential in new employees and creating room for them to grow.
“We have so many good stories of people that have joined the manufacturing industry and they had no idea what it was, and now they're managers and very high technical experts. I love being a part of that, and seeing how proud it makes them to step into that new piece of their career journey,” Lien Berndt said.
Demetrio Guevara, who's been with Modern Manufacturing for over thirty years, is one of them. Originally from Mexico, Guevara started working in manufacturing at the age of 15, repairing and replacing bicycle parts. Shortly after moving to Minnesota to join his wife in her home state, he started working at MME, and has been there ever since.
“There’s opportunities for anyone [here], it doesn’t matter your age, ethnicity, or background, they want to provide you with ways to learn and keep advancing,” Guevara said.
Pong Thao has a long tenure with MME, too — almost two decades, first in his role as a Painter, and now as part of the machining team. While he’s been with the organization, he’s navigated marriage, parenthood and the demands of raising a family while getting more education. Part of what’s kept him at MME is the feeling that he’s valued as part of a larger team.
“Even just looking around, you can see that they value diversity — we have all different races, ages, ethnicities . . . people who just graduated high school, all the way up to older generations,” Thao said. “We also do a lot of stuff not only within our organization, but in the larger community, and that really brings a positive energy to our team.”
Paving the Way for Others
In addition to a culture of caring and respect, it’s important to Lien Berndt that she creates a culture of constant growth and improvement among her team.
One of the biggest things she’s done to grow as a leader, she says, is building relationships with other industry leaders, including those she’s met through MPMA.
“I'm not too worried about sharing information with other shops, and I'm not worried about the competition,” Lien Berndt said. “I just want to learn from others, so I'm always seeking people that can help give me ideas and help me think about the future.”
Lien Berndt thinks it’s important for her team to be involved in the community, too, and has facilitated that by planning volunteer events outside the building like Feed My Starving Children and Toys for Tots, and inside the building by hosting tours for students to inspire and educate the next generation of manufacturers.
If Lien Berndt could give one piece of advice to someone just starting out in their manufacturing career, it would be to lean on others.
“Don’t be afraid to ask questions, or to seek out the right experts to help you,” Lien Berndt said. “I regularly ask people to take things on, and it not only helps me, but it helps them to learn more and
do more, too. I’ve learned that I don't have to do everything myself, so I'm always ready to ask for help, and I don't feel bad about it.”
Overall, the culture of passing on knowledge from one generation to the next is the lifeblood of MME.
“We know our employees are proud of their work, and I know that there's just so much to be proud of, and then it just starts to speak for itself,” Lien Berndt said. “That’s a really big part of our success, that we have a lot of employees that want to be here.”
October 15, 2024
