After four years of college, a stint in the Marine Corps, married with a baby daughter, Ralph was still clueless about his career. What direction should a young man, whose college major was Poly-Sci head? He had a lucky break, answering a newspaper want-ad for an engineering aid. With zero experience, he entered manufacturing, sales, service and never looked back.

In 1982, after seven years of selling machine tools for a regional supplier, Ralph departed and started up Hegman Machine Tool, Inc. covering Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas. His company focused not only on CNC metal cutting machines, but additionally included fabricating and laser cutting machinery. The products HMT represented were major machine tool builders from Japan, Germany, Switzerland and the US. The company he founded, provided marketing, sales, service and engineering support to both manufacturers and suppliers.

It was a regular occurrence for Ralph and his team to provide vision and implement the strategy needed to run large programs won by their manufacturing partners. This included robotic integration, and flexible manufacturing systems. The manufacturing/machining challenges ranged from tiny medical, implantables to huge, monolithic aerospace structures.

Over the years, Ralph was very involved with the MPMA (Minnesota Precision Machining Association). He served as a board member and was awarded the prestigious Kurt/Remmele award for service to the industry. He was also involved with youth education projects and spent time working with NIMS.

Ralph was also involved with AMTDA (American Machine Tool Distributors' Association), serving as its chairman in 2002-2003. After the integration of AMTDA into AMT (Association for Manufacturing Technology), he continued his involvement, starting the Distribution Group which he chaired from 2012-2014. He is still involved with this group and AMT.

Currently, he facilitates three Leadership groups, composed of 30+ young men and women leaders in the industry.