“If you want something done right, do it yourself,” as the adage goes. After many years of repairing and servicing centrifuges for water and wastewater treatment purposes, Michael Kopper, founder and chief executive officer of Centrisys Corp., decided it might be time to design his own — one that needed less maintenance and would be more energy efficient.
The Kenosha company’s reputation for service became so widely known that one municipality, Honolulu, wanted to order a centrifuge that would be manufactured in Germany, but serviced by Centrisys. That order was jeopardized when the foreign manufacturer decided it could not make what Kopper wanted.
He knew he could not fail. He had to fill the order. “I shut myself up in my office and began designing my own,” he recalled. “I knew what I wanted because I had worked for another German company that made them here in the U.S. I’m the kind of person who sees a need and then will see if I can fill that need.”