Louis Frits, P. Eng., Bermingham Foundation Solutions
Describe your current job at Bermingham.
Louis Fritz: I’m a sales engineer – what I do is sell equipment that we engineer and manufacture. The area I cover is all of Canada, and the northeastern and northwestern U.S.
What are your areas of responsibility?
LF: My role is mainly a sales function. I handle the sales and rental of all of our equipment, but I also spend a lot of my time supporting my customers with a bid scheme and a site startup. I think that puts my role on a bit of a different level than simply sales.
How did you get to where you are now?
LF: I have a civil engineering degree from the University of Manitoba. I started off as a field design engineer for I.D. Engineering in Winnipeg (now Stantec). I also did technical sales for a variety of companies, and worked for a heavy civil contractor building bridges.
What do you love about your job?
LF: The travel, meeting incredibly interesting new customers and working on unique, challenging projects. My customers are definitely my favourite part of the job.
What does a typical day look like for you?
LF: My day usually involves travelling (I was on 160 flights last year). Once I land, I meet with customers to review bid drawings to see how our equipment can be utilized. Other than that, it’s rigging up the equipment we provide on site.
I get to follow the project through from initial drawings to teaching the customers how to use the equipment on the construction site. That’s unique, and I love it.
What are the challenges you experience in your job?
LF: Flight delays and unknown site conditions!
What are your future goals?
LF: I truly love what I do, so it’s either continuing with what I do now or owning my own sales consulting company. However it works out, I want to continue in a technical sales and marketing function doing what I’m doing.
What are your predictions for the future of deep founda-tion construction in Canada?
LF: Canada is a very diversified construction market. There are areas that get slow, but then another part of the country gets busy. Generally, there is always a “hot spot” of develop-ment – there’s always a place that someone is doing a new type of project. We’ve been busy in Vancouver, Halifax, Fort McMurray – but we’ve also been slow in places like Fort McMurray. I think that this trend – pockets of high construc-tion activity throughout the country – will continue to be the case. 
