Brian Baker, president and CEO of Oconomowoc-based Sentry Equipment Corp., joins BizTimes Media managing editor Arthur Thomas on the podcast. They discuss his journey from finance expert to company leader, how Sentry has expanded from a manufacturer to also a service provider, the benefits and challenges of employee ownership and how the current economy is shaping business for Sentry Equipment. Whether you’re a manufacturer or not, this episode has a number of interesting insights to help your business grow.
The benefits of starting in finance
Baker started his career in finance and was chief financial officer at Sentry Equipment before becoming CEO. He said he often tells younger people it is a great path into general management because those in finance need to know a lot about every part of the business.
“If you look at the value you provide as a finance person, everybody assumes you can close the books and deliver the financial statements and run the banking relationship, and that’s necessary, that’s part of your core job,” he said. “But if you want to make yourself extraordinary, you take the step into being a business person, helping run the business, manage the business. And that’s one of the things that really I was attracted to is not just being a finance person, but also being a business person and helping run the business. And a couple of ways that really helped me learn that process was Sentry did a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the middle part of my career.”
Adding service to manufacturing
In addition to making equipment for chemical monitoring, Sentry Equipment has seen its business grow by offering additional services for customers, whether it’s instillation, startup, training, removing or maintenance.
“We found that our customers really value that because a lot of industries have reduced their workforces over the years,” Baker said. “In the power industry in particular, they had a lot of baby boomers working in power plants. They retired over the last 10 or 15 years and didn’t replace ’em. So now they don’t have the skillset and they don’t even have the hands to do the work. So when we can deliver that to them as a solution and install it, start it up and run it for them, they love that. So that’s one of the ways that we’ve really been innovative by providing full lifecycle service.”
