By Kris Leonhardt
MARSHFIELD — After graduating from the Mid-State Technical College Machine Tool program, Ken Hastreiter took a job as a machinist with a Stevens Point aerospace company.
“He was always an entrepreneur at heart, but it was actually a situation that pushed him into starting his own business,” explained Ken’s son, Kylan, vice president of Hastreiter Industries.
“He left the aerospace company to go to Cincinnati, where my mother was getting her masters degree. The company had a policy that if you left in a two-year time period and came back; you had to start at the bottom again.”
Rather than start all over again, Ken’s wife Sondra suggested he start his own business.
“They came back to Marshfield when she graduated. She worked in (Marshfield), and he started the business with a single manual lathe,” Kylan said. “It was originally called Universal…