Officer Biographies

Dan Cappello, CEO – MEI, LLC

Dan Cappello, President and Chief Executive Officer of MEI, LLC, in Albany, Ore., is about as far as he can be from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Yet that is where he stood for 10 years – from 1994 to 2004 – shouting orders across the trading floor through one of the headiest bull markets in the exchange’s history.

Prior to Wall Street, Dan had been at The Paul Revere Life Insurance Co. By age 26, he had been promoted to Regional General Manager in the Chicago sales office. There he applied his double degrees in economics and mathematics from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. and Master’s of Business Administration from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, to growing Paul Revere’s market presence in the upper Midwest.  Dan was increasingly drawn to the manufacturers he insured, but the runaway bull market of the mid-1990s proved more attractive. In 1994, he left the insurance business and Chicago for trading stocks in Manhattan during the glory days of the New York Stock Exchange.  “I was there to witness the last hurrah of the auction market,” Cappello recalls, explaining that trading is mostly computerized now.

Cappello remained interested in manufacturing. After work, he began sifting through long lists of small, manufacturing operations- looking for a business he thought could use his background and experience   After almost 2 years Cappello came across MEI, a family-owned manufacturing, crating and specialty fabrication company that had started in an Albany garage in 1990.

In MEI, Cappello saw a match.“I realized that these guys were good at what they did, but nobody knew about them. They had grown by reputation and word of mouth. They weren’t trying to sell something cheap – there were selling something of value that they were proud of. They had hardworking employees, with an intense focus on customer satisfaction. They were very self-sufficient, having machinists, electricians, fabricators, and powder coaters. They had created the company I would have wanted to create if I was starting from scratch. MEI fit me, and I fit it.”

In 2004, Cappello bought a controlling interest in MEI, moved to Oregon, and took over leadership of the company, embarking on a directed program of promotion and strategic expansion. The new venture called on all his past experience.“I couldn’t do this if I hadn’t cut my teeth in the insurance business. Running a regional office was like having my own small business. My years on Wall Street made me tough, self-reliant, wiser.”

Cappello’s vision is to grow the Wet Processing Equipment & Services division of MEI, expanding globally to include both the semiconductor and solar manufacturing industries.  As for the Rigging & Crating division, Cappello would like to see strategic acquisitions in targeted regions along with solid growth in current markets.  In both instances, he is very optimistic about the future of MEI.

Seth Christensen , Chief Financial Officer- MEI, LLC

Oregon native Seth Christensen is MEI’s Chief Financial Officer. He joined the company in 2005 as Director of Finance and was promoted to CFO in 2006. His duties include overseeing all finance, administrative, and accounting functions.

Christensen earned a Bachelor’s degree in economics and psychology from Willamette University in Salem, Ore., in1997, then earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Oregon in 2001.

After graduating, Christensen worked as general manager of a small business in Eugene, Ore. In 2002, he was hired as a financial analyst by PALCO, a large redwood lumber manufacturer and timberland owner in northern California. He left Oregon for Scotia, Cal., one of the last remaining company-owned mill towns in America. Within a year, he was promoted to run the department of strategic planning and financial analysis. In 2005, Christensen left PALCO and returned to Oregon to be closer to his family.

As CFO at MEI – a much smaller company – Seth gets a much more hands-on view of the business.

“Working as the CFO of a small company exposes me to many areas of the business. I’m more involved in the day-to-day HR and IT issues. As a financial analyst at PALCO, I had to understand how the business happens, and why it happens. At MEI, part of my job is making sure that it happens.”