Twenty-five years, steady by design
Twenty-five years ago, True North started as one engineer with a home office and an idea. Today it’s a five-person team in Zeeland — still design-first, still deliberately small.
Where it started
Before there was a company, there was Mark Lanser — hired as Extol’s first full-time engineer while still a sophomore at Calvin, concepting, designing, wiring, programming, and debugging machines end to end. That whole-machine fluency became the DNA of what came next.
Mark at his home officeA machine company with no machine shop
Mark founded True North on an uncommon idea: design excellent machines and partner with outside builders to make them — no machine shop required. The whole company ran remotely from a home office in Cadillac, stitched together with the technology of the day — dial-up internet, a fax machine, and a lot of phone calls.
The name carries our mission in two ways: true north is a fixed point to steer by and count on. For machines that’s design — and for us that is God.
Original True North logo
Beyond the one-man shop
For its early years, True North ran the way many design shops do — Mark at the center, work flowing out to a rotating bench of subcontractors. Around 2007 that began to change with the first full-time engineer, Brian Talaga, coming aboard and developing deep complex-line experience in lasers, bending, gantries, and ovens. It marked a shift away from the subcontractor model toward a real, in-house team.
Gen 2 logo
The second hired engineer
Brad Lanser became True North’s second full-time hire, arriving from machine-design work at a different company and diving straight into the deep end — a 150-foot wax line for a cardboard producer in North Carolina. He’s since become the go-to for surfacing and heavy work: cooling fixtures, hydraulics, and the largest line systems.
A home base in Zeeland
True North opened its first brick-and-mortar office — not to become a full-on build shop, but to give the team a place to trade ideas quickly, build cohesion, handle tooling assembly and machine modifications, and sit closer to key customers in the Zeeland area.
The Zeeland OfficeHitting our stride
Ben Casey moved from intern to full-time on EOAT and press-side integration as Michael Lanning followed on prototyping and assembly machines. Just as important, the in-house systems built up over years hit their stride — and with more hands, capacity grew without losing the small-team feel.
Steady by design
Twenty-five years in, the through-line holds: cultivate real relationships with clients, team, and community; deliver high-quality systems built on effort, trust, and collaboration; keep a genuine family-work balance and grow slowly, on purpose. A team-driven shop that still starts every project on the screen — and still steers by the same true north.
Full team, 2025Have a project in mind?