Our Team
Aaron Lehto
President
Nick Skoog
Operations Manager
Anita Pinoniemi
Business Manager
David Daavettila
General Manager
Jeffrey Johnson
IT Manager
Keith Haataja
Project Engineer
Jeremy Hendrickson
Project Engineer
Kyle Skoog
Automation Programmer
Jon Kicker
Automation Programmer
Jamin Lehto
Automation Specialist
Davin Torola
CAD Designer
President & Control Systems Engineer
After high school, Aaron got his first job running a machine that cut paper and stacked the pieces on a pallet. After one day of manning the paper machine, he borrowed the boss’s car, purchased parts, and rewired the machine to run on its own. “So I guess I’ve always had automation in my blood.”
Aaron was always interested in manufacturing. He graduated from St. Cloud State University with a degree in manufacturing engineering. He discovered the field of automation as part of a class, and he’s worked in automation since 1994. Aaron has worked on projects across the country and internationally.
Aaron moved to Northern Minnesota and founded APQ Engineering in 2012 to combine his interest in manufacturing and experience in automation with the mission of helping manufacturers in our area.
Nick Skoog
Automation Engineer
Nick worked on dairy farms during high school where all of those manual chores convinced him that automation was the way to get things done.
He graduated from Alexandria Technical College with manufacturing engineering technician and machine assembly specialist degrees. After college, he started his career with Beckhoff Automation and has unique experience with high-speed machine controls, Codesys and TwinCAT programming. Nick has always been interested in the latest technology; he was one of the early adopters of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) and has successfully implemented MQTT for widely distributed controls.