After beginning the process of moving its corporate headquarters from suburban Philadelphia to Milwaukee last summer, Gardner Denver Inc. officially announced its relocation earlier this year.
“More recently we just solidified the decision to keep the headquarters in Milwaukee,” said chief executive officer Peter Wallace. “It’s been an evolving thing over the last six months.”
Gardner Denver relocated its corporate headquarters from Wayne, Pa., to an office building located at 222 E. Erie St. in the Historic Third Ward. The headquarters for the large multinational firm’s Industrials Group, which was previously located in Quincy, Ill., also relocated there.
Wallace said the company, which occupies the entire fifth floor of the building, recently acquired an undisclosed amount of space on the third and fourth floors to make room for future employees.
“That helped to solidify our decision that (the headquarters) is Milwaukee,” he said. “We’re going to continue to move in and hire for some positions.”
Gardner Denver employed about 25 people in Milwaukee as of last June, and Wallace said that number is up to around 60 now. The plan is to hire an additional 20 by the end of 2015. Those employees will work in areas including information technology and finance.
“We’re going through plans to determine which other functions or people we want to bring in from Quincy or from other parts of the world, or if they’ll just be new hires coming in,” Wallace said.
Many of the employees being hired are replacing those who did not choose to move to Milwaukee, as Wallace said only “a handful” relocated from Wayne and Quincy. Wayne had about 90 employees; Quincy has several hundred employees that include manufacturing workers and about 20 corporate service personnel.
Gardner Denver still had operations in Pennsylvania throughout most of 2014, but they were closed a few months ago, according to Wallace.
Gardner Denver ultimately has plans to employ about 200 in Milwaukee, although Wallace said that would be at least a couple of years away. The company would subsequently outgrow its current space, but Wallace said at that point it would have options, such as separating the Industrials Group from the Corporate Group. Nevertheless, he said its operations would likely remain in the Milwaukee area.
“I don’t think anybody wants to pick up and move again,” he said. “We’ve put enough disruption into the business than anyone would ever care to do in a short amount of time. We’re looking for stability, getting back to basics and running the business.”
To Wallace, whose career as a senior executive in global industrial equipment manufacturing spans nearly 40 years, that means achieving double digit top-line revenue growth and producing differentiated, superior products in critical niche markets.
One current challenge for Gardner Denver, for which the oil and gas industry is a key segment, is the decrease in the price of oil. To offset that negative hit, however, Wallace said the company has some initiatives underway, including plans to grow its compressor business and its industrial manufacturing business.
Luis de Leon, chief executive officer of the firm’s Industrials Group, told BizTimes Milwaukee last summer that the company was considering the creation of a training center in Milwaukee, but Wallace said that decision has not yet been made.
“We’re still kicking that idea around and trying to identify what it is we want to centralize here in Milwaukee,” he said.
As a company with worldwide operations, Gardner Denver currently has training facilities in a number of locations, including Quincy and Atlanta. If a training center is established in Milwaukee, Wallace said it would most likely replace an existing one.
Gardner Denver, a manufacturer of industrial compressors, blowers, pumps, loading arms and fuel systems, was established in Quincy, Ill., in 1859. Although the company still has a large manufacturing operation in Quincy, as well as some corporate service personnel, it moved its corporate headquarters to the Philadelphia area in 2010, citing the need to be based in a major metropolitan area.
The decision to yet again move the corporate headquarters, this time to Milwaukee, was made by former Gardner Denver CEO Tim Sullivan, a Milwaukee business executive who is also the former CEO of South Milwaukee-based Bucyrus International Inc. (now part of Caterpillar Inc.).
Wallace became CEO in June 2014, at which point he said the company was in the transitional phase of moving. Like Sullivan, Wallace has Milwaukee connections. Raised in Whitefish Bay and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Wallace previously served as CEO of Milwaukee-based Rexnord Corp.
Wallace believes Milwaukee is an ideal location for Gardner Denver.
“It’s a great city,” he said. “We like that it’s easy to maneuver throughout the city, it’s fairly easy to attract people in this kind of community, and there’s a lot of universities in the area that allows us to tap into and hopefully hire future Gardner Denver employees.”
Gardner Denver is a Fortune 1000 company with annual revenue of $2.5 billion and approximately 7,000 employees in 35 countries.
About 40 percent of its revenue is from U.S. customers, another 40 percent is from sales in Europe and the Middle East and the remaining 20 percent is from Asia.
Gardner Denver contains three business groups. Besides the Industrials Group in Milwaukee, it has an Energy Group in Houston and a Medical Group in Munich, Germany.
