Kris Hanchette
Founder
30+ years in manufacturing, sales, and technology, from the seventh employee at a CNC machine startup to its CEO. Kris helps companies grow sales, fix operations, put practical technology and AI to work, and get through big moments like selling the business.
Kris grew up in Rome, Illinois, a small river town outside Peoria, where his dad worked the factory floor at Komatsu Dresser and his grandfather ran the local Phillips 66. The family fixed everything themselves, from roofs to transmissions pulled at the junkyard. Kris learned early that most problems give way to someone willing to dig in.
He paid for college making pizzas at Chuck E. Cheese for $3.35 an hour, worked his way into the game room doing board-level repairs with an oscilloscope, and met his wife there. He was the only student in his robotics program who didn’t already work at Caterpillar. When he graduated into a recession, employers saw a pizza guy, so he took over a struggling restaurant in Ohio as manager and turned it around.
On a vacation to Dallas, he answered a small newspaper ad and met Ken Koelling, the founder of what would become MultiCam. Ken couldn’t hire him yet. Kris showed up at his door six weeks in a row until he did, at a $4,000 pay cut. Kris calls it the best pay cut he ever took.
He was employee number seven. Over 21 years, MultiCam grew about 20% a year, from roughly $1 million to $50 million and nearly 200 people. Kris installed machines in more than 20 countries, often rewriting the machine software in his hotel room at night based on what a customer had asked for that day. He had taught himself to program in sixth grade on a Commodore 64, and at MultiCam he taught himself Linux, Perl, PHP, and MySQL and built the company’s entire quoting and ordering system. Nobody told him he couldn’t. He sold $1.6 million in his first year in sales, grew sales more than 200% as VP of Sales, and became CEO. He led the company through the Great Recession and two private equity sales, growing revenue more than 50% and EBITDA more than 100%.
One of his best lessons came from someone on his own team, who closed the door and told him he said “me” too much and “we” not enough. He has built teams around “we” ever since. He also learned plenty the hard way, including what an owner or executive should negotiate before selling to private equity. Those lessons are now some of the most useful advice he gives.
“A lot of what I’m good at today, I survived doing wrong.”
Since MultiCam, Kris has been Executive Vice President of a concrete materials fabricator with eight facilities and 300 employees, led a factory automation and robotics branch, and grew an industrial manufacturer’s revenue 40% in a single year. Today he is building a European software company’s name in North America from scratch, using LinkedIn, YouTube, trade shows, and AI-driven tools.
Outside work, Kris runs, rides, and maintains 24 miles of mountain bike trail on Lake Grapevine. He volunteers on the senior leadership team for a regional Alpha program through his local church, and helps friends market their podcast. He and his wife have two grown children. And yes, he’s the one who started Hwy2Help, back when it wrote CGI scripts for webmasters.