001 - Erik Struebig
Your Work Is your Signature
A profile of Erik Struebig, North American Technical Coordinator, MGX Equipment Services, a Manitowoc Company
Portrait of Erik Struebig in Las Vegas, Nevada at ConExpo 2026. Shot on 35mm Kodak Tri-X 400 film with Leica R6.2.
There's a moment on a job site when a crane quits and nobody can get it running again. The problem gets passed along until it lands with someone who can solve it.
A lot of the time, that someone is Erik Struebig.
"If somebody is calling me," he says, "they have a problem they can't resolve. So me being the subject matter expert, that's on me to do it."
Erik is the North American Technical Coordinator for MGX Equipment Services, a Manitowoc company. He lives in Minnesota, and as he puts it, he supports the machines and the technicians that service them. Crane technicians and customers alike call him for support. If Erik can't solve it over the phone, he gets on a plane and goes to fix it on site.
Uncle Sam's Dime
Erik didn't plan his way into this industry. He went into the Army first. The military paid for his schooling, "Uncle Sam's dime," he calls it, and when he got out, he wasn't sure what came next.
"I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I remember seeing all these John Deere dealerships, and John Deere had a military program where they train you for free and get you ready to go as a veteran, and then kind of put you out on your own. And I just realized I had a pretty good aptitude for mechanics. That's how my brain worked. So I just kind of dug into it. Just tried to get as efficient as I could. Bite off more than I could chew."
He spent about three and a half years on yellow iron before making the jump to cranes, where he worked as a field mechanic for another three and a half years before moving into his current role.
The path wasn't always intentional. "Sometimes you just get thrown in the fire," he says. "You got to figure it out."
The Beauty Is Always in the Basics
What does it take to do this work well? Erik is direct about it.
"The biggest thing is really, really honing your craft. And the beauty is always in the basics. Diagnostics, understanding the machines, understanding the problems that are going to be presented with it."
In his current role, supporting techs more than turning the wrenches himself, the technical knowledge is only half of it.
"Your communication has to be really, really good, because you have to be able to understand that every mechanic or technician is going to come from a different background. So how you give them information needs to be different. If he's a very seasoned mechanic, you can be very technical with him, and he's going to be like, yep, yep, yep, check, good to go. If he's greener, he may not be able at the same level. So you have to be able to communicate on whatever level works for them, because if you speak Arabic and they don't speak Arabic, they're not going to understand."
Pride and Accountability
Erik talks about pride the way a craftsman does, not as ego, but as accountability.
"You fix it once, and your work is your signature. So if you do crummy work, everybody's gonna know you for that. So really trying to be thorough, and exhausting all resources to make sure that that customer machine that has your company's name on it, it's up and running and good to go. That's a big sense of pride."
What keeps him going when it's hard? "I have always been somebody that really likes to help people. Acts of service. So knowing that if somebody is calling me, they have a problem they can't resolve."
He's proud of where he's landed, and clear-eyed about what it took to get there. "A lot of nights away on the road, a lot of hours put in, and really just spending extra time trying to figure stuff out, always volunteering."
Raise Your Hand
One of the clearest things Erik took from the military was this: no one is going to push for you the way you will.
"Nobody's going to advocate for you more than you. So if there's training, hey, I want to go, always raise your hand for it. Start going to the ones that maybe nobody wants to go to. Then when the slots open up for the cool ones, they're like, well, he already went to it, he obviously wants to be here. So just putting the effort in and being dedicated to it."
From a Farm Field to a Neighborhood
Working in this industry changes how you see the built world.
"When you're young, you just see buildings and stuff like that. But if you see how it goes from a farm field to this big, gorgeous neighborhood with all these custom homes and stuff, you're just much more appreciative of everything. Indoor plumbing, gotta thank plumbers. Lights. You're just more aware of what it takes to have a normal society."
And he sees value in the trade that the wider culture has been slow to recognize. "It's a very rewarding and it can also be a very lucrative industry to get into. Whereas most of us grew up, college, college, college, gotta go to college. Well, there's a lot of money to be made, and there's a lot of value in it, and it's super rewarding. If you're a home builder watching something from nothing, it's somebody's dream home being built, and you're part of that. That's super cool."
The People
Ask Erik what his favorite thing about the industry is, and he doesn't talk about the machines.
"The people. Hands down, the people. Other walks of life, every background, every flavor of people, and they all have a common goal, usually. And it's to leave it better than they found it."
He thinks about the negativity he sees outside the work, the social media, the litter on the road, the indifference. Then he thinks about the people he works alongside every day.
"Everybody in this industry is trying to build something, whether it's infrastructure or homes or roads, they're trying to make it and improve it from what it was before. And everybody in the industry, in their own way, they believe what they're doing is making it better. And they take a tremendous amount of pride in that."
Erik Struebig is the North American Technical Coordinator for MGX Equipment Services, a Manitowoc company, based in Minnesota.
