Piling Canada

Meet a Piling Professional

Louis Frits, P. Eng., Bermingham Foundation Solutions
Written by Piling Canada
July 2017

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. Piling Canada


Category: Profile

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Piling Canada is the premier national voice for the Canadian deep foundation construction industry. Each issue is dedicated to providing readers with current and informative editorial, including project updates, company profiles, technological advancements, safety news, environmental information, HR advice, pertinent legal issues and more.

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