XeteX breaks ground on new manufacturing facility in Holmen

Heather Graves

Staff

August 19, 2024

HOLMEN – XeteX (pronounced x-E-tex) is setting up shop in one of Wisconsin’s fastest-growing communities.

“You look at the Holmen community, and it’s growing,” XeteX CEO Andrew Wilcox said. “If you stand on our factory site, and look in one direction, there’s new apartments that have been built.  If you look in the other direction, there’s new family housing going up. It’s a rapidly growing community that offers a lot to our employees.”

As XeteX celebrates 40 years in business, Wilcox said the industrial machinery manufacturer is looking toward the next 40.

The company broke ground on its manufacturing facility in the Village of Holmen earlier this month, which Wilcox said will double capacity, add jobs and meet growing customer demands for high-quality custom air handling and energy recovery ventilation products across North America.

Background

XeteX currently operates out of a space in the Norplex facility in La Crosse (1309 Norplex Drive), as well as in another 16,000-foot space just down the road.

“All of our manufacturing operations in La Crosse produce the XeteX’s custom handling equipment, Aventus packaged air handling equipment and ITM4 injected foam panels and doors, all of which are sold into the industrial and commercial HVAC markets,” he said.

Wilcox said the new facility is needed for various reasons – the most pressing being “we are out of space.”

“We’ve been struggling for space over the last few years as we have grown,” he said. “We ran out of space at the Norplex facility that we currently operate out of, so we rented an additional 16,000 square feet on Miller Street, which is about half a block away, and we just continued to grow the business.”

Since XeteX changed ownership in 2022 – with equity firm Brass Ring Capital assuming majority ownership of the company – Wilcox said there has been a “large infusion of capital” in new manufacturing equipment, paving the way for the development of this new manufacturing facility.

New facility

Spanning more than 116,000 square feet, Wilcox said the state-of-the-art manufacturing facility on 13 acres will enable XeteX to double its capacity, as well as “dramatically improve efficiencies.”

“The facility that we’re in at Norplex, we’ve been in since 2005, and as we’ve grown, we’ve taken more space within that facility– but it hasn’t been ideal for our operations,” he said. “So, we hired a company called Carrus Group that came in and analyzed our operations and pointed out inefficiencies due to our existing factory space limitations.   They identified a significant amount of savings that we will realize once we are in our optimized factory.”

Operation specifics after the Holmen facility is completed – which is expected by summer 2025 – Wilcox said, “are a bit of a dynamic situation.”

“Our lease at the Norplex facility runs out at the end of 2025, so we’re certainly going to continue to operate there through next year,” he said. “We move into the new facility in July 2025, but we’ve got some orders coming at us that, if we’re successful in obtaining these orders, we’re going to have to operate out of both facilities, for sure, through 2025 and possibly into 2026.”

Before deciding to build a new facility in Holmen, Wilcox said XeteX looked for manufacturing space within La Crosse.

“We did a year-long search, and there were no properties in La Crosse that were viable,” he said. “Holmen had a built industrial park that was ready to go, and it just was an ideal situation for us.”

At the groundbreaking, Wilcox said he found out that a YMCA will be constructed next to the new XeteX facility.

“That is going to be another great benefit for our employees,” he said.

Located about 20 minutes north of La Crosse, Wilcox said the new facility’s location has received mixed reactions from employees.

“We’ve had several employees state that they’re going to move to the Holmen area,” he said. “And we’re looking forward to being able to tap into the labor markets of Holmen, Winona and Sparta.”

Current, future staff

As a custom-project manufacturer – “that’s our primary revenue” – Wilcox said XeteX’s greatest asset is its employees – “it’s craftsmen” – which is why the new facility remains in La Crosse County.

“Craftsmen are hard to find,” he said. “Many of XeteX employees have been with us for, in a lot of cases, more than 10 years. It’s very hard across the country to find employees – so why would we lose them? We wanted to maintain our core employee base, and that’s why we are building in the La Crosse area.”

By the time the facility opens, Wilcox said XeteX will have hired an additional 20 employees, bringing the total company headcount to 200.

He said over the next three years, the plan is to add 30-plus jobs in Holmen.

“Quite honestly, there’s a couple of large orders that we’re in the hunt for, and if successful, we’re going to have to hire several people to operate in both facilities,” he said.

Wilcox said XeteX’s corporate headquarters will remain in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

Big orders in the works

Wilcox said the infrastructure bill passed by Congress a handful of years ago is providing XeteX with “tremendous opportunity” in terms of revenue-generating workloads.

“Some of the key work that’s coming at us, that’s really cool, is infrastructure work,” he said. “We just got done shipping units for the Panasonic electric vehicle factory down in Kansas – that was a large job for us.  And we are competing for other work on new manufacturing plants being built in the U.S.  And we’re doing a significant amount of work on infrastructure for airports.”

The Holmen facility, Wilcox said, signifies a new chapter of growth and innovation for XeteX as it continues to go after large-scale projects.

For more on XeteX, visit xetex.com.