Bruce Herrala (Foam Tek)

Bruce Herrala is the owner of Foam Tek, an insulation company in Monticello.

Arguably, insulation is boring, but it is necessary.

“It holds the heat in your house in the winter, and the cool in your house in the summer,” explains Bruce, who has been insulating homes and commercial buildings for the last half decade.  

For context, Bruce grew up in Buffalo Wild Wings.

I mean, Buffalo, Minnesota, a rural space where buffaloes are likely slaughtered and then sold to corporate entities so suburbanites can joyfully consume meat.

Before we delight in a double cheeseburger with mayo or a basket of hot wings, our food travels through many portals.

The same can be said of Bruce’s journey into insulation.

“It was an unconventional route to get there,” says the man who once upon a time dug dirt and built city parks.

Yet, it was during those laborious days under the scorching, excruciating sun that the Bruce noticed how good concrete was being ripped up, simply because it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing.

First we are talking about insulating homes, and now we have veered into concrete lifting, which Foam Tek also does.

Sometimes I hate it when contractors offer multiple services, because you can’t properly keep track of them all, and even though concrete and insulation might seem more mismatched than chocolate and pizza, the reality is Bruce has built a successful business by incorporating both of them into his LLC.

Of note:

Concrete lifting occurs when someone wants to avoid collateral damage by removing perfectly good concrete, and instead wants to preserve what is currently in place.

By returning concrete back to its original position versus disposing of it, Bruce saves his clients money.

Concrete lifting was actually the first component of his business, but that is not a year-round endeavor.

“We had this equipment for foaming that was just sitting idle in the winter months, and that was our opportunity to get into spray foam,” Bruce says.

Cellulose, fiberglass, and spray foam insulation.

Foam Tek offers them all, and this is no disrespect to Bruce, but the topic of insulation likely won’t stimulate the casual reader.

So let’s add a personal element to the proceedings.

“Business is hard,” Bruce, a father of 37, declares.

“Especially when you get multiple people in your system and start dealing with real humans.”

Okay, Bruce and his wife didn’t actually sire 37 offspring.

That number is actually only 8 or 9, which still seems impossible until I remember that both my mom and dad each had about the many siblings.

Different era, they say.

And regardless of if you were selling windows in 1963, or insulation in 2026, business is still immensely challenging.

That being said, I do believe all business is a conduit for human relationships, a vehicle that allows us to connect with people while simultaneously solving a problem for the free market.

In theory, business is easy.

Generate more revenue than expenditures, but anyone who has ever risked their sanity and their savings account to spearhead a venture can tell you that business is not linear.

Your hard work and good intentions don’t always equate to fat paychecks and societal influence.

“I would also say that business ownership can be pretty lonely,” says Bruce, who I can’t imagine ever feels lonely when he goes home, but the Buffalo native is not talking about physical proximity to others when he touches on the loneliness that afflicts so many striving for more.

“There are hard decisions you have to make as you are learning and growing, and when you’re a sole owner, there is nobody else in the system that has skin in the game like you do.”

As a business owner, the pressure to perform never wavers, and no one guarantees that your paycheck will arrive, so you constantly have to innovate, get punched in the face, frenetically scramble, lose your mind, and agonize for a breakthrough in the free market.

Finding solace and shelter from that sort of environment is more evasive than a politician answering questions at the White House podium, but thanks to Forum, a networking organization in Brooklyn Park, peace and tranquility aren’t as distant for a business owner like Bruce as you might think.

“That group makes the ownership side of business less lonely because there are so many people there who understand what you are trying to do, and the hard decisions that come with it,” Bruce says.

Forum offers an open forum and a reprieve from the pressurized business landscape, but one might then ask why someone willingly subjects themselves to the rigors of entrepreneurism.

Surely, there must be something mere employees like me are missing.  

“Is it worth it?” I ask Bruce, whose beaming smile intimates that no force on earth could deter his genuine positivity.

“No,” Bruce deadpans, before erupting into a joyous fit of laughter.

“But it’s really satisfying because there are a lot of hard problems to work through.”

The grind.

Both Bruce and past subject of this platform, Casey Bloemke, revel in the unknown, that vast ether that is brutally unforgiving but also wildly generous, should one successfully navigate the rocky terrain of business ownership.

“The challenging problems that are solved through the day-to-day grind are really satisfying as you work through them,” Bruce mentions.

“And they just keep coming. One after another.”

Mentally, if one can accept that turbulence is imminent, and not necessarily representative of one’s failings as a business owner, then a spirited individual can lean into their bigger vision, the true reason they went into business.

For Bruce, he’s not proactively trying to become the largest insulation and concrete lifting company of all time.

“But that could happen by virtue of the continuous growth that we are looking to have,” he admits.

“Our philosophy is more around the people, and realizing that if the company quits growing, then the opportunity for the people working within it dies as well.”

A sagacious statement from one of Forum’s most popular members, but here is what people should know about Bruce and Foam Tek:

“We place a lot of value on our customers, as most businesses should,” he says.

“We try to go the extra mile with them and make sure they are 100% satisfied.”

Meaning, if something isn’t completely satisfactory, within reason, Bruce is making a concerted effort to rectify the issue at hand.

“We have a system where we create work orders for those complaints, and we schedule them in just like any other project,” he outlines.

“We go back and reconcile some of the things that might be trivial on our end, but to the customer mean a lot.”

Adds Bruce:

“We value that feedback loop from our customers as a way to improve our method of setting expectations, so that they are satisfied when we are done with the work.” QS

**

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