Employee Spotlight: Video Edition with Dave Foster

In this Employee Spotlight: Video Edition, we feature Dave Foster, Vice President of Engineering and Operations at Patti Engineering. With nearly 30 years at the company, Dave has been instrumental in guiding growth and success at Patti. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness while preserving the original context and intent of the speaker’s words.

What is overview of your current position?

My current position is something that has been sort of an evolution. Having been here since essentially the first days of the company, I’ve kind of become what I’ve needed to become. As vice president of engineering and operations, it’s sort of an all encompassing role — not only do I deal with everything project related in the project team, but also the things prior to the beginning of the project, the sales process, the vetting and the proposal building, then all the way down to the project closeout, financial analysis and the lessons learned.

How long have you been working with Patti Engineering?

April of 2025, so not too far away, will be my 30th anniversary. 30 years here at Patti Engineering. Now, when I started, even Sam (Hoff) was out in the field doing startups. It was funny because I remember my first week or so of starting here, I had a key to the door and I would unlock it and I’d turn the lights on and I’d come in and I’d sit and I’d work all day. I’d get up for lunch and I locked the door. It was just me because everybody was on site, everybody was working. Little by little people were in and out, but there was only five of us including Patti (Hoff) at this point. Really, Patti engineering is as much a part of me as is any other part of my life.

What are some of the major initiatives you have been involved with?

While there are certainly lots of project related things I’ve been involved with, probably the most significant things are the growth. The footprint growth in terms of facility growth, the location growth, the hiring growth. Now we have people who are dedicated for HR here and all the different facets that back in the early days, it was just us. So, we’ve lived that whole cycle. It’s been quite a journey. What’s great about Patti I think, is that we’ve never lost who we are. I can honestly say that that same excitement and enthusiasm that was here when I started in 1995 about what we do is still here today. I credit that to the fact that if you start with Sam and you move to me and all throughout the organization, every single one of us has done this job. Every single one of us is a controls engineer at heart. Every single one of us has been in the field with a laptop hooked up to a machine. From Sam on down, everybody in our organization who is in a position of leadership like that has done this job.

Where are you from originally? Where do you live now?

I was originally born in northern Michigan. I was originally born up in Cadillac in the lower peninsula, but way up North. I lived there until I was probably about 10, 11 years old. My dad’s buddy had just finished working on the Epcot Center down in Florida. He was actually a construction supervisor when Epcot was built and he had taken a job down in Grand Cayman. At this point, it’s 1980, 1981. Grand Cayman was really kind of just up-and-coming, developing as a tourist destination. So, there was a lot of construction going on and a local construction company had hired my dad’s buddy and said, “Hey, we need help bring people down.” He called my dad up and, I think I was in fifth grade at the time, and my dad said, “Hey, we’re moving to Grand Cayman.” I go, “Grand, what?” Keep in mind it’s 1980, so for us to figure out where we were going to move, we went and bought a National Geographic, they had a map of the Caribbean in it so we could open it up and figure out where we were going. Then I graduated high school down there and ultimately chose to come back to Michigan where I was from originally, and chose the beautiful town of Flint, Michigan.

What school did you graduate from? Degree?

I went to what started as General Motors Institute, but in the 1980s, GM divested itself from it. When I started there in 1990, it was just GMI. Then when I graduated, it was shortly thereafter, the school got a huge donation from a gentleman named Charles Kettering. Just unbelievable, Charles Kettering has just the most amazing amount of patents to his name, he invented the starter, the automatic starter. Before that people would have to crank their cars as a starter. So, his family gave a huge donation to the school, and they renamed it after him to become Kettering University. It’s great as both Sam and myself still have connections to the school to this day. In fact, we even did a project for the school this year. We put two robots and a vision system that’s going to go into a laboratory, that’s going to teach kids how to program that cell. It’s going to be a Patti engineering cell in a laboratory at Kettering. Then also in the learning commons, we sponsored a study area. There’s a Patti Engineering patio studying area. So, we still have a really great connection to the school.

Tell us about your family!

Let me go back. I went to school in Flint and met my wife in Flint. She was going to a different college there, and I met her at a party. It stuck. Then we started dating and actually she’d fly down to Grant Cayman to visit me. Then we got married right around the time I started here at Patti in ’95. We currently live in a little town, Clarkston, Michigan, just north of here, we have lived there for almost 30 years. When I pick something, I just stick with it, I guess. We have two boys, pretty grown now, and both of them are first responders. So my older son is a policeman and my younger son is actually all three. He’s police, fire and EMT.

What are your hobbies or interests outside of work?

Growing up in Grand Cayman, I loved boating. I’ve always loved boating. I just have a passion for the water, I have to be on the water. We took that to kind of its peak for about 15 years. We owned a boat that we kept in a marina and on Lake St. Clair. And we would boat the Great Lakes, we’d boat all of Lake Huron, we’d boat Lake Erie. We would boat down to Cedar Point, go to amusement parks, buy the boat, stay in the marina. We did the marina life thing for about 15 years with the kids when they were little. I mean, just the greatest family experiences on the water. There’s nothing like you and your family on this fiberglass hub, you can’t see land in any direction and you’re just heading west. But then for the adrenaline side of it, we’re a racing family. So when the boys were little, we got into what’s called quarter midget racing, and it’s kind of like little carts, but it’s circle track. When they were little kids, we raced quarter midgets and then we stuck with it. We bought a big race car for my older son and we’ve raced Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee. We raced Winchester Speedway.To this day, we still have a EF35 race team. So, we actually have a family race team.

Give us any final thoughts you have on working at Patti Engineering!

We know who we are, we know what we do, we know what we do well, and we’re willing to go up against anybody and take it on. There’s not many challenges we don’t think that we can surmount. I really think the key to Patti Engineering is this depth of knowledge and passion about what we do, and it allows us to be so good at what we do. I think that’s the key to longevity, is you just need to be really good at what you do.