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July 6, 2026
CRANDON – A chance connection that began in Boy Scouts, Chris Geske said, eventually led to a 35-year career at Northern Lake Service.
Now, as he and a handful of other employees of the Crandon-based private environmental laboratory – which serves customers throughout Wisconsin and across the country – highlight milestones this year, Geske said it underscores what could be considered a testament to the culture the Krueger family built.
While working at a local printing press, Geske said then-owner Ron Krueger – who was his Boy Scout scoutmaster – offered him a part-time role that grew into a full-time career at Northern Lake Service.
Over the years, Geske said he’s held positions in nearly every department, starting in the field.
He said he now oversees the lab’s information management systems – appreciating the variety of challenges the role presents.
“Every day has something new,” he said. “The technology is changing so fast, getting incredibly better every day.”
Current Company President RT Krueger said the business is IT-intensive and Geske’s role is an important one.
“Our lab information system runs the entire place, and… everybody is on a network computer running some sort of platform or program,” he said. “That’s been a gigantic role that has evolved and consumed us for a lot of years, and that’s been [made] Chris’s baby.”
At one time, RT said results were hand calculated.
Now, he said, the lab handles a couple of million pieces of data in a year – which “would not be imaginable without having those systems in place.”
“We deliver a lot of results electronically, file different formats, but almost every client who wants their data electronically has a different format, so there’s no real standardization,” he said.
RT said Geske isn’t the only team member who has reached the three-and-a-half-decade mark.
Tracy Huber, he said, has also achieved 35 years of service at Northern Lake, while Lisa Frizzell has more than 30 years of employment and Troy Armstrong has surpassed 25.
RT said it was a similar sense of community and familiarity that led to Huber’s hiring.
Having been laid off from a previous job, RT said she began at Northern Lake Service after a referral from a Krueger family friend.
RT said his mother, Winnie, hired Huber in 1991, where she started in a secretarial role that later expanded into shipping and receiving, management and today, client services and project management.
Each day, Huber said she assists clients with price quotes, test results, sample bottles and expedited sample submissions.
She said the role requires balancing customer needs without placing unnecessary strain on the lab.
“The Krueger family is very great to work for,” she said. “They’re very flexible, very generous. It’s very much a family environment here – you’re treated like family.”
From local lake studies to nationwide PFAS testing
RT said the private environmental compliance laboratory has been in business for more than 50 years and employs 40 people.
He said it is currently the only private lab in the state performing PFAS analysis.
RT said his father, Ron – a former DNR district biologist – established the lab after beginning with lake studies.
As the company grew, RT said its scope of work evolved, and much of what it does today involves testing safe drinking water samples for a wide range of clients, including municipalities, rural businesses and schools, as well as supporting groundwater monitoring around large landfills.
“We have about six people who spend time in the field collecting samples around those sites,” he said. “We have about 100 sites across the state and into Michigan, [and we do] a lot of testing that is not available from other laboratories in the state – so that means we end up getting a lot of subcontract work from other laboratories.”
RT said that despite being based in a rural setting, the lab conducts highly technical work that is not widely available elsewhere, including PFAS testing.
“We’re still the only private laboratory in the state that is doing that testing…,” he said. “We’re doing projects all across the country related to those PFAS analyses.”
Though the rural nature of the Northwoods can make recruiting talent challenging in some industries, RT said Northern Lakes has addressed those barriers through an internship program that supports students from high school through college and helps provide a post-graduation career path.
“[It’s] not as much of a challenge right now, because we have been able to… nurture some students from the area [who] we know are really good, [who] we know like to live here and grew up here,” he said. “We now have, I think, more than a dozen… employees [who] are in their 20s, and they really keep the bar raised on each other, and they do a really, really nice job.”
Keeping jobs local with employee ownership
RT said Northern Lake Service is in its fifth year of transitioning from a family-owned business to employee ownership.
He said the shift was necessary to support continued growth, noting his siblings pursued careers outside the business and his father was approaching age 60.
When a sale was first discussed, RT said his father – then still an active owner – insisted any sale would keep the business based in Crandon.
RT said his brother, who found success in a separate business in town, said the only way to meet those conditions was to sell the company to the people who built it and had continued working there.
He said the company explored options to make employee ownership available, but opted against a formal ESOP because it would not allow enough flexibility to scale ownership up during strong years or slow it down during weaker periods.
“So, we created kind of an open market where the company buys shares back from my brother and sister and me, and a couple of times a year, employees get an opportunity to buy some shares,” he said. “I’m knocking on wood now, but it’s been really successful.”
RT said employee ownership has grown to nearly 40%, with both long-tenured employees and younger staff investing in company shares.
Valuing employees, nurturing a family atmosphere
As the family-owned business continues to evolve, RT said it is focused on ensuring employees understand the importance of their work.
As part of the broader public health system, he said some days are hectic, others are routine, and the lab’s results are not always what clients hope to hear.
Regardless, RT said he works to ensure his staff feels valued.
“We try to instill in them how important this stuff is, and the answer is the answer,” he said.
RT said the lab does not yield to pressure from regulators or customers, emphasizing its role is to provide the most accurate results possible while trusting that clients value the information they receive.
“The science is the science,” he said.
Amid an ever-changing employment landscape, RT said employees continue to value the work environment the family built and has continued to nurture over the past five decades.
For more on Northern Lake Service, Inc., visit nlslab.com or find the company on Facebook.
