Tom Roeser
Purdue University '70 

DSF: Tell us about yourself.

 TR: I have lived in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago my entire life except for the years I lived at Purdue. I have lived in Barrington Hills, Park Ridge, Arlington Heights, Hoffman Estates and Rolling Meadows.

 DSF: What made you decide to go to Purdue and what was your major?

TR: I have both a BS and an MS from Purdue in Mechanical Engineering. The reasons I went there were reputation and proximity.

DSF: Once you got to campus, what made you decide to join the Fraternity's Delta Delta chapter?

TR: I was interested in association with people that are like-minded to me. And as I reviewed through rush, I found that the Fraternity environment was what I was interested in. The relationship with Delta Sig was one that looked like it was going to work best for me.

DSF: Tell us about how you and some of the members of your dorm all joined at the same time.

TR: I lived in the dorm and pledged Delta Delta and brought friends from the dorm to future rush events. These were all great guys, and I was able to help expose Paul Truskey, John McDonald, David Eisenhauer and Jerry Muncie to the Fraternity. These five guys were all friends from the same dorm who lived within 10 dorm rooms of one another, and joined in the same timeframe.

DSF: Once you got into the chapter, did you hold any leadership positions?

TR: I was Social Chairman and the President of the chapter during my time.

DSF: Tell us a little about your career path after you left Purdue.

TR: I left Purdue and after taking a 10,000 mile tour of the western United States with my fraternity brother David Eisenhauer, I settled into my job at Baxter International. I was a machine designer. I had several different jobs there, the last of which I served as Director of Engineering. I left there in 1987 to join my father's business. I did that because I got caught in a cutback at Baxter and was out of a job. I had a pregnant wife and a job offer in New Jersey. I decided that I could take the first Grandchild out of the town for probably ever, or I can go work in this small business and if I didn't like it, I could leave and be no worse off. There was no turning back, as it was a great opportunity, and the rest is the American dream. The company today is 15 times bigger than it was then and it's just terrific.

DSF: Can you tell us a little more about your company, Otto Engineering? 

TR: My father started it in the basement of our home in 1961. When I got here in 1987, it was $7 million in revenue, and this year we will do $100 million with 525 employees.

We make two kinds of products, all of them used in demanding applications. One group is accessories for two-way radios (aka walkie talkies). We manufacture under our own trade name of Otto, and we also private label for every radio manufacturer in the world. Motorola is our biggest customer.

I also make switches, push button, toggle, and rotary. If you were to fly an F-15, the controls would be made by us. About 10% of what we do goes into military or aerospace and what does go into those areas is very high tech. We would make switches in the Space Shuttle.

DSF: What are your responsibilities as the company's president?

TR: When I worked for Baxter as Director of Engineering, I would go across the United States in a corporate jet and had two secretaries. My first day on the job here, a worker came into my office and said, “She threw my radio in the garbage.” That is a day in the life of a small businessperson. As we evolved, my talents are to provide strategic direction for our future. It is to ensure that we have the best staff and management team that we can have, because I think that the most important thing in business, even more than a product, is management.

DSF: How would you characterize your leadership style? Are you hands off, a micromanager, or a hybrid?

TR: My style would be that a manager should do his job without my involvement, but I should be sufficiently aware of his involvement such that if I had to represent him in a meeting, I would know the subject material. That's not micromanaging, but you can't get that subject material unless you are involved. A lot of guys think that there are only two ways to manage – hands off or micromanaging. What I will share with you is that the guy who thinks I am a micromanager is a guy who isn't doing his job. Some guys are not hands on enough, because if they have a bad staff person, they may not be able to uncover it. What I tell people here is that I'm the last guy who's going to lose his job. So my job is to make decisions so that nobody loses their job. My management team has to think that way as well, because if they make a bad decision, somebody else's career will be affected before theirs.

DSF: How many guys are on your management team and how many are manufacturing the products?

TR: There are 300 people who are factory workers and 225 who are design engineers, salesman, accountants, etc. We also have a full-time teacher, because we teach everyday. We teach blueprint reading. People should know how that works because you make mistakes if you don't know how to do it. We teach soldering. We won't hire you if you can't pass a 6th grade math test, and ultimately only about 1/3 of the people pass it. I've had engineers fail it. If you're not as good as a 6th grader, I don't want you. If you are that good, I'll make you better. They have to pass a reading test, so you have to know how to read and speak English. I will teach you English if you need it two hours a day and will pay for it until you are proficient in speaking it and writing it. It's terrific. It gets better people for me, and the guy who doesn't need it says “Boy I'm working for a company that really invests in its people.”

Now, not every teacher knows every subject, but they ought to be able to find someone who can teach different subjects appropriately if they can't. We might teach mold design or design for manufacturability too, because we don't just want to teach the lowest level. I went to school and my calculator was a stick. I had a slide rule. (Laughs) We're laughing, but I'm not that old. So, if you don't keep re-learning stuff even at the high end, you're lost.

DSF: Talk a little more about your post-graduation Delta Sig involvement.

TR: I was a member of, and served as president of the Delta Delta ACB. I was a member of the Foundation Board and was the president of the Foundation Board as well. I am currently Secretary of the Foundation Board.

DSF: What made you decide to step up into that capacity on the Foundation Board?

TR: First thing is that I was asked. I didn't really know what the Foundation was about. Many times, undergraduates don't know the value of the national. Tony Smercina is a man with passion and vision, and as that kind of leader, he was able to articulate the value of what the national was trying to do. That was sufficient to say “let me take a look at that.” I didn't seek them.

DSF: Talk about what it was like to visit with your chapter brothers at Delta Delta's 50th Anniversary in 2007.

TR: It was terrific. I say the unusual common theme was that there were people I had not seen in 35 years, and brothers who had married Little Sisters. Here were people I knew from the Fraternity, and 35 years later, I was comfortable with them and they were comfortable with me as if I lived next door to them. If you run into somebody from high school, the odds are that you are going to talk about something that's pretty simple, like “Remember when we…” It isn't showing pictures of your kids or even “it's great to see ya”. But after spending three years living with the people in the Fraternity, that was very rewarding. I think that if I needed help, I could call those people and if they could help me, they would. Where I might call a guy down the street who knows me but doesn't know me that well and asked him for help, even if he is capable, he probably wouldn't do it. I think if I said to Jerry O'Brien, John McDonald, Dean Patten or many other that I had a problem and needed them to fly to Chicago, they would re-arrange their schedules.

DSF: Talk a little about your hobbies and what you like to do in your spare time.

TR: For 20 years, my father and I raced sailboats on Lake Michigan. He continues to, but I have kind of retired from the sport. I play racquetball. I am also president of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra, which you would think is as good as the Chicago Symphony. It is not a little local band. It is the real thing. My latest hobby is irritating the government of Carpentersville who have been a hindrance rather than providing help to my business. I am frequently in the paper because of these idiots.

DSF: What advice would you give to undergrads or recent graduates about being successful?

TR: Don't give up. They can beat ya, but they can't eat ya.