LITTLE CHUTE, Wis. — Austin Dorsey and his co-workers at Excellerate are doing much of the work that used to happen in the field in a bright, climate-controlled facility in Little Chute.
He’s working on one of the products the company supplies to construction sites.
“These are temporary power skids. They’re the first power on the job site,” said Dorsey, a journeyman electrician. “They help contractors light the building and power their tools.”
Excellerate focuses on electrical assemblies for the sustainable energy and construction sectors.
The business is seeking to fill a range of careers from apprentices and entry-level workers to material handlers, preproduction engineers and journeyman electricians.
“There are a lot of cool things I’ve been a part of and that we do here,” Dorsey said. “A lot of the solar panels and the battery skids. Basically, the energy the solar panels collect is stored in these battery skids and they’re able to output for different things that use power.”
Excellerate is a division of Faith Technologies Incorporated (FTI).
Patrick McGettigan is one of FTI’s vice presidents in charge of Excellerate.
“We take construction projects and products that would normally be done onsite and take them offsite into a manufacturing environment and apply manufacturing principles to things that would normally get built in the field,” he said. “We do a lot of renewable energy products for our EnTech division. We also do control panels … and a lot of integrated products, which would be big electrical skids and e-houses.”
To keep up with demand, Excellerate is building a new 385,000-square-foot facility in Little Chute.
“We’ve really rapidly expanded over the last three years,” McGettigan said. “Through COVID and now past COVID has really been the growth.”
Mason Vande Kolk is an electrician apprentice who has been with Excellerate approximately 10 months.
“I like working with my hands and you also have to do some problem solving here as well,” he said. “It’s a good balance between the both of them.”
Dorsey said one of the appeals to the job is the changing technology they’re building into the products and projects.
“Ten years ago, I never thought I would be coming up to a job site with a laptop and tool bag,” he said. “It’s really cool to build stuff, and then when it’s built, plug in your laptop and see it all come together.”
More information on careers at Faith Technologies Inc. and Excellerate can be found here.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled Mason Vande Kolk's name. This version has been updated to reflect the correct spelling. (Aug. 7, 2023)