Vandalia native Dan Themig talks about the start, growth of Packers Plus

By Editor | September 4, 2013 |

A Vandalia native known as an innovator in his field remembers that his successes in recent years came after tough times in the beginning.
Dan Themig, back in town for a family reunion, spoke to a small group of community leaders and government officials last Friday at the Vandalia Country and Golf Club.

Themig told of how he and two partners, Ken Paltzat and Peter Krabben, developed Packers Plus, a small company in Canada that is now known for its innovations.
Packers Plus introduced horizontal, multi-stage fracturing technology, and it was first to apply robotics in that field.
About that type of fracking, Themig said, “It’s probably the most-efficient way to recover hydrocarbons.”
In 2009, Packers Plus was named Oilweek’s Supplier of the Year and received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for both the Prairies Region and all of Canada.
“We decided to start a company that was innovative,” said Themig, a Canadian resident who holds dual citizenship.
“Our start was innovation,” he said. “And innovation is great, but we needed to be operationally great.”
In starting Packers Plus, Themig said, “We pretty much put everything on the line.
“We bought used furniture from Salvation Army,” he said, also recalling when he and his partners started buying trucks from General Motors.
“We had a quarter of a million dollars worth of trucks; GM shut us off as we were growing,” Themig said, adding that the partners were eventually able to increase their fleet by going to Ford.
They took a lot of risks early on, and “we never had a balance sheet,” he said.
In addition to talking about his company, Themig expounded on the idea of innovation.
“How do you innovate? I think a lot of it comes from when you’re really young,” he said, recalls time he spent in the family garage with his father, Ed, who worked at the Patoka Tank Farm for Chicap Pipeline.
He showed an old photo in which he and one of his brothers, Jerome, and a friend, Ken Torbeck, are with a bicycle for two that they had built.
“It’s either genetic or something from when you’re young, playing around with different things,” Themig said.
Now, he’s a partner in a company with a goal to “truly have an impact, not just on our industry, but also on the world … and it all started in my garage in Vandalia,” he said.