Face Behind the Fertilizer: Brianna Stecklein

As a senior at the University of Kansas, Brianna had already completed an internship with another company and was planning to take a permanent role with them after graduation. One day on campus, she caught wind of a career fair for engineering students and decided to check it out.

“I thought to myself, ‘What’s the downside?’” Brianna said. “Let’s see what other opportunities are out there. So, I stopped by the Koch booth and talked with them, and they asked if I would come back for an interview the next day.”

After her initial interview, Brianna was invited to visit Koch’s headquarters in Wichita for more interviews. She didn’t find out which specific engineering role she was interviewing for until the night before. When she realized it was an environmental engineering role, her enthusiasm dwindled. In short, she wasn’t very interested in environmental engineering.

“I was looking more for a process engineering role,” Brianna said. “In all honesty, I had second thoughts about going to the interview the next day. I pushed myself to go but was blatantly honest that an environmental engineering role was not where my passion was or what I thought I would be best at doing.

“I figured that was the end of my opportunity with Koch.”

Integrity Opens the Door

It turns out it was just the beginning for Brianna at Koch. After the interview, she received a call from the recruiter who told her they appreciated her honesty. The recruiter also explained that through the interview process they determined she would be a good fit with Koch’s culture and values and wanted to find her a role that would be better suited for her individual interests and talents.

Not only was it a different role, but the position they found for Brianna was with a different Koch company altogether.

“My experience is a prime example of how Koch wants their employees to be fulfilled and be in the right roles to create the most value,” Brianna said. “It speaks a lot to how Koch thinks about hiring.”

When she graduated in 2013, Brianna’s career journey started in Wichita, Kansas, where she took part in a rotational engineering program for Koch Pipeline that included 6-month stops in Pine Bend, Minnesota and Corpus Christi, Texas. After a second 6-month stint in Minnesota, she completed the program and put down roots there for three years as a project manager.

New Doors, Same Foundation

It was during her time as a project manager that Brianna discovered how much she enjoyed the planning and coordination part of the industry, but after being away from her family for several years she decided it was time to move closer to home. She wanted to stay at Koch, so she started looking at opportunities with other Koch businesses and found one that led her to Koch Fertilizer in Enid, Oklahoma in 2017.

Brianna’s first role at Koch Fertilizer was as a plant engineer. Within a year she had moved into a reliability center coordinator role, where she spent three years and got her first taste of a turnaround — or scheduled plantwide maintenance event — in 2021.

Turnaround events are an extremely large undertaking with a myriad of moving parts. As a result of her strengths, experience and passion for planning and coordination, Brianna earned her current role as turnaround manager at Koch Fertilizer Enid in 2022. She now leads a team of four people to plan and execute turnarounds.

“I saw an opportunity to be close to some of the things I found that I like, which are planning an event and leading a team,” Brianna said. “The most rewarding part of my job is seeing my team continue to grow and succeed.

“For me, having a team mentality and working together to execute a complex vision is huge.”

After 13 years and multiple roles with different Koch companies, Brianna still thinks back often to her hiring experience and how things might have turned out differently if she didn’t speak up with honesty in her interview.

“Integrity is the foundation,” Brianna said. “If you don’t have integrity or the courage to do the right thing in difficult situations, nothing positive results from that.”

As she prepares for the next turnaround, Brianna continues to approach each day, each challenge and every opportunity with integrity first, always.