When he started college, Scott Carrick thought he wanted to be a police officer, but then he realized he didn’t want to fix society. He wanted to fix stuff. All kinds of stuff, like the printing press he rebuilt for his father when he was 13 or 14.
After graduating from St. Petersburg College with a degree in electro-mechanical engineering, Carrick got a job designing bottle inspection equipment (think old-fashioned returnable soda pop bottles).
Now he’s fixing stuff for Haskell.
Carrick worked with Haskell on a contract basis for 25 years, 16 of them as the owner of his own company. Five years ago, he closed his company to join the Haskell team full-time.
“I couldn’t ask for a better company to work with. I like everybody. They have respect for me,” Carrick said. “I like the autonomy I have working for Haskell.”
A member of Haskell’s Automated Manufacturing Systems team, he’s headquartered in the Atlanta office. Although his title is Construction Manager, Carrick says emphatically, “I’m not in construction. I’m in packaging. I’ve been in packaging for 40 years.”
“I’ve been doing execution installation work for probably 30 years,” he said. “I’ve done toilet paper, baked goods, soda. I did rolled pie dough for Pillsbury.”
Most recently, he managed the installation and start-up of the packaging systems on Project ECO in Fort Lawn, S.C.
“I like the challenge of thinking through issues that the engineers can’t figure out,” Carrick said. “Early in my career, I did a lot of design work and learned a lot of skills. I can do drawings and fabricate things. I start walking the production line, and I see, ‘Wow, this isn’t going to work.’ I know who to call, who to get pricing from and how to get it organized to get it done.”
Jeremy Triplett, Chief Packaging Systems Integrator, first worked with Carrick in 2001 when Triplett was fresh out of college. The project was for Tropicana, working on one of the first aseptic bottling lines for shelf-stable juices.
“I was the design engineer, and he was the construction manager. I’ve worked with Scott my whole career,” Triplett said. “He makes my life easy.”
Triplett said that in those early days, Carrick taught him a lot. “He’s really got the art of teaching people if they are willing to learn. Sometimes he’d bring his own tools to the site for us to use.”
Carrick said he works with a lot of people fresh out of school.
“If they’re willing to listen and learn about how things really work, I’m happy to work with that,” he said. “None of this is what you learn in school. I can hear a motor that’s bad. That’s not a teachable skill.”
Triplett said Carrick knows packaging and processing. Not all construction managers do.
“We are system integrators. We don’t make equipment. We buy it in the marketplace and put it in the right sequence,” Triplett said. “It takes a long time to get it, and it takes a while to get it installed. If it’s not right, your options for fixing the problem can be limited. That’s when Scott’s skillset kicks in, and he does everything to rectify the problem. He knows what to do.”
“Scott has the mechanical aptitude to understand the equipment. He’s worked for an equipment manufacturer and run their assembly shop. He’s very hands-on. He’ll spend four hours on his back fixing a conveyor to get it just right. He’ll take something to the machine shop or get some tools and get it done and get it done right.”
When Carrick isn’t working for Haskell, he’s at home in the mountains outside Asheville, N.C. In the summers, his wife keeps him busy with her honey-do list, and they spend time with his son and two granddaughters. In the winter, he’s in the basement fixing vintage motorbikes.
“I’ve got several that are torn down. I tear ‘em down and rebuild the motors,” Carrick said. ”That’s what I enjoy doing.”
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