Mark Korman founded Fluid Power Support in 2000, starting with a focus on hydraulic consulting and a straightforward goal of helping customers solve problems. Over the years, the company has grown well beyond its original roots into a full-service manufacturing and metal fabrication operation serving industries like agriculture, energy, construction, and industrial manufacturing.
Today, Fluid Power Support employs more than 100 people and offers a broad range of capabilities, including metal fabrication, robotic welding, metal forming, finishing, machining, and design. The company works with businesses of all sizes, from local manufacturers to Fortune 500 companies, earning trust by delivering quality work and building lasting relationships.
Throughout that growth, Korman has stayed focused on creating opportunities for his team and building a company where people can develop long-term careers. His practical, hands-on leadership style continues to shape Fluid Power Support as it expands its capabilities while staying true to the values it was built on.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
It starts with knowing where things stand. Our systems give me the picture — what ran, what is behind, what is at risk — and my managers own their areas and bring me what actually needs me. By the time I am making decisions, I am working from real information rather than from whoever spoke to me last.
That is what makes a day productive: the information reaches me without me having to go extract it. My job is to spend the day on the decisions only I can make, not on assembling a picture of my own shop.
How do you bring ideas to life?
We test them on real jobs. Almost any idea about scheduling, quality, or throughput can be proven or killed within a week here, and I would rather watch a rough version fail on one machine than design it for three months and fail later at ten times the cost.
The harder discipline is committing. Ideas die from being perpetually piloted. At some point you declare that this is how we do it now and absorb the disruption.
What’s one trend that excites you?
Work returning to domestic shops. Between freight, tariffs, lead times, and everyone’s memory of the supply chain seizing up, customers are running the numbers again — and a shop four hours away that answers the phone looks very different than it did a decade ago. It rewards exactly what a small American shop is already good at.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
Letting my managers finish. When someone brings me a problem, the instinct is to solve it in the first thirty seconds, and I am usually wrong when I do that. They know their area better than I do. If I wait, I generally get a better answer than the one I was about to give — and they stop bringing me problems at all if the answer is always mine.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Start sooner. And understand that the goals are reachable — most of what I treated as out of reach simply was not, and the only real cost was the time I spent waiting before I began.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.
Most of this industry runs on close enough, and I do not think it has to. We set a tolerance, we confirm the part falls inside it, and we call that good. But a tolerance is a range you are allowed to land in, not the right answer — and for any given material and application there is a genuinely optimal setting for the weld, the laser, the plasma, the cut.
My belief is that the composition of the metal and the settings we run it at should be matched far more closely than anyone bothers to match them. Most people hear that and think we are already close enough. I think close enough is leaving quality and consistency on the table that we could be capturing, and that the shops who go find those settings instead of accepting the range will end up producing work nobody else can match.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Ask the person doing the work what would make his job easier, then go do one of the things he tells you. The first several times you will get very little, because he has been asked before and nothing came of it. Once people learn that speaking up produces a change, you get information about your own business that no consultant will ever find for you.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
I go fishing. No phone, no agenda. There is something about stepping away from a problem that cannot be solved by working harder at it that resets the part of your brain that has been grinding on it. I rarely come back with the answer in hand, but I come back able to find it.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Adding capability before the demand shows up. The cautious move is to wait until a customer commits to volume before buying the machine. The trap is that you never win that work in the first place, because you cannot do it yet — so the volume never materializes and you feel vindicated for not buying.
Nearly every real step here started with adding something we could not fully justify that day, then going out to find the work for it. Keep the bets small enough to survive being wrong, because some will be.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
My own impatience, for a long stretch of it. I would take small mistakes personally — mine or anyone else’s — and carry far more anxiety about them than they ever warranted. A minor error would sit with me for days.
What eventually got me past it was recognizing that those mistakes were the useful part. Nearly every one of them was a lesson available for the next time, and treating them as failures instead of information cost me more than the mistakes themselves ever did. The impatience was the real failure. The errors were just the tuition.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
A shared capability map for small manufacturers, organized by drive time rather than category. Every shop within an hour of us has machines idle most of the week and a list of jobs they turned down for lack of one capability. Those lists overlap constantly and nothing exists to notice it. Not a broker — just honest availability, so you can find the press brake forty minutes away instead of handing off the whole job.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
Our ERP. It is not glamorous, but in a job shop information either lives in the system or it lives in somebody’s head, and the second option stops working around a dozen people.
What I use it for is knowing what I cannot see by looking — what is due, what is late, what a job actually consumed against what we said it would. Without that you are running on instinct, and instinct is wrong more often than anyone likes to admit.
What is the best $100 you recently spent?
My fishing pole. It is the cheapest stress relief I have ever found and it has probably saved me from more bad decisions than any consultant could.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?
The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It puts you on the path to finding what is actually constraining your growth rather than what you assume is constraining it. Most of the problems I have chased over the years turned out not to be the real one, and that book is what teaches you to go looking for the real one.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
Landman, by Taylor Sheridan. It is an honest picture of what life actually looks like when you carry a lot of responsibility — the decisions do not wait for you to be ready, and there is no version where everybody walks away happy. It gets that right in a way most shows do not.
Key learnings:
- A tolerance defines an acceptable range, not an optimal setting — treating “within tolerance” as the goal may leave meaningful quality and consistency unclaimed.
- An executive’s job is to decide, not to assemble the picture; when information has to be personally extracted, it arrives late and incomplete.
- Capability generally has to precede demand, since work requiring a machine a shop does not own is rarely offered to it at all.
- Solving a manager’s problem for them produces worse answers and eventually stops the problems from being brought forward at all.
- Small operational mistakes function as information rather than failure, and anxiety over them tends to cost more than the mistakes do.