2023 Person of the Year: Beth Wozniak

2023 Person of the Year: Beth Wozniak Beth Wozniak, Chair and CEO of nVent fierce competitor since she was a high school swimmer, Beth Wozniak, CEO and chair of , is striving to lead her company to $5 billion in annual revenue. It’s a huge leap, because nVent’s total sales for electrical products and solutions were around $2 billion a year . But Wozniak, an engineer with an MBA, isn’t content to savor the fact that she led the public company from $2 billion to $3 billion in total revenue within five years.

She’s focused on accelerating the sales growth of nVent even further. “It’s conceivable that within three years, while doing acquisitions, that we can get from $3 billion to $5 billion,” Wozniak says during a interview in a conference room at nVent’s management headquarters in St. Louis Park.

Like other large manufacturers that primarily supply business customers, nVent doesn’t surface in national or local headlines as frequently as consumer businesses such as retailers or banks. But Wozniak, who works from a seventh-floor office in a suburban office park, has been getting noticed by Wall Street and her peers in the manufacturing and industrial sectors. During 2023, nVent hit the five-year mark as a free-standing company, and the year has been dominated by good financial results and key acquisitions destined to fuel additional growth.

In February, nVent reported that full-year 2022 sales reached $2. 9 billion—an increase of 18% over the prior year. In late October, Wozniak announced that third-quarter 2023 sales jumped 15% to $859 million.

For the first nine months of 2023, nVent’s sales hit $2. 4 billion and net income was $312 million. The company will easily surpass $3 billion in revenue for 2023 as nVent leaders estimate sales for the fourth quarter will be up 15% to 17%.

CEO John Stauch says Wozniak also is carefully tracking the value of nVent. Stauch and Wozniak worked together at and Pentair and then were selected to serve as CEOs when Pentair was split into two public companies in 2018. Pentair kept the water business, while the electrical business was spun off into the new company called nVent.

Stauch, who regularly meets Wozniak for lunch at in the in St. Louis Park, has firsthand experience with Wozniak’s competitive nature. He says that Wozniak points out to him that nVent is getting closer to Pentair’s market capitalization.

By mid-November, Pentair’s market cap on the New York Stock Exchange was $10. 15 billion, while nVent’s was $8. 51 billion.

The market cap for nVent has more than doubled, as it was $3. 9 billion in 2018. On the Move in Europe On a quarterly basis, Wozniak flies to London, where nVent has a principal office, for board meetings.

On a September trip to Europe, Wozniak took part in three events that show her determination to expand nVent’s footprint and sales in Europe. For 2022, 69% of nVent’s sales were generated in North America, while 22% came from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. “We brought our top dozen growth leaders across Europe—following the board meeting—to meet with myself, my presidents, CFO, and CHRO (chief human resources officer),” Wozniak says.

“We had discussions on growth opportunities and challenges. ” Those talks involved sales, marketing, product management, customer care, and customer service leaders. In addition, Wozniak conducted a virtual town hall with nVent’s European employees.

Read more from this issue “In Europe, what’s really important for us is we still need to do some work with respect to our brand development and marketing messages,” she says. But she’s excited about nVent’s potential in Europe. “The opportunity for us as an electrical company in Europe is just as strong as it is in North America,” Wozniak says.

“If you think about Europe, sustainability is a big theme, [as are] electrification and renewables. ” At its core, she notes, nVent’s mission is “driving a more sustainable and electrified world. ” Following London meetings, Wozniak was off to Italy to visit , a company acquired by nVent that’s located within a 45-minute drive of Bologna.

TEXA is a relatively small company that nVent bought for $38. 5 million because nVent wanted a company in Europe that manufactures a cooling product that’s in demand by commercial users of electricity. “Our largest business is enclosures that are protecting electronics,” Wozniak says.

“Electronics are getting more powerful, and there are higher heat densities. It gets hot, and so you have to have some cooling capability. ” In Italy, Wozniak met with TEXA’s former owner, walked the shop floor, and talked to members of the integration team.

The business has been manufacturing industrial air conditioners and chillers, which nVent saw as a way to serve customers engaged in industrial automation and energy storage. “We have a very detailed integration plan of everything we need to do,” Wozniak says, so her TEXA visit gave her insight into how the merger was going after a few months. On the last leg of her September trip, Wozniak traveled to the outskirts of Brasov, Romania.

That’s the location of an enclosures plant that . Eldon was nVent’s first acquisition, and it purchased the European-based company for $128 million. Wozniak says she walked through the entire campus, meeting with HR, engineering, and supply chain teams.

“We did a factory tour, and then we did a town hall,” she says, speaking through an interpreter about how the Romanian employees fit into nVent’s business plans. —Beth Wozniak, nVent Chair and CEO Aggressive Growth Strategy Wozniak’s business defines itself as a “high-performance electrical company focused on connection and protection. ” In 2022, its enclosures business segment brought in 52% of its revenue, followed by electrical and fastening solutions at 27%, and thermal management at 21%.

The nVent board, Wozniak, and her executive management team are pursuing a four-pronged growth strategy. Across all three business segments, they want to grow globally and expand around the world. Second, they also want to use acquisitions and partnerships to drive growth.

From 2019 through this year, nVent has acquired four companies in the United States and two in Europe. As nVent expands its global footprint and increases the number of facilities it operates, Wozniak says that three trends—electrification of everything, sustainability, and digitalization—will boost demand for nVent’s products and services. “If you are on a factory floor and you are running an industrial automation, those electronics need to be protected from the environment,” Wozniak says.

Consequently, more nVent enclosures are needed to house those electronics. As the economy shifts to greater utilization of automation and electric vehicles, nVent is poised for growth. On the sustainability front, nVent manufactures specific enclosures and power connection products used in the renewable energy sector, including wind and solar facilities.

So the movement away from fossil fuels is another business opportunity for nVent. The digitalization trend manifests itself in the expanded construction of data centers. Within those data centers, nVent’s products and services include cable management, sensing, enclosures, and liquid cooling.

Revenue from data centers has skyrocketed for nVent. “Data centers revenue was less than $100 million when we started,” Wozniak says. “Last year, it was $375 million.

Next year, that will be half a billion dollars. ” Data centers also play into nVent’s third growth strategy, which is to seize business opportunities in “high-growth verticals. ” Those are business areas in which the growth rate is outpacing the gross domestic product.

Within the industrial, infrastructure, energy, and commercial/residential sectors, nVent has identified several targets for high growth. Those range from smart buildings to clean fuels to automation. The fourth growth strategy is to expand revenue through new products and innovation.

In 2022, nVent launched 59 new products, and Wozniak is implementing a variety of actions to support new product development. This year, in late November, nVent held its first companywide technology summit at an Edina hotel. “We’ve really been strengthening the technology capability,” Wozniak says.

“In some parts of our company, we have scientists and Ph. D. s who are working on specific problems to create breakthroughs.

” She viewed the summit as a vehicle to provide “technology sharing and thought leadership” among nVent’s top talent, including attendees from China, India, and Europe. On an ongoing basis, Wozniak is keeping an eye on a metric called “new product vitality. ” That’s a percentage of revenue derived from products developed over the past five years.

That percentage was in the low teens in 2018. “We crossed the 20% mark last year, and we set a new target to get to 25%,” Wozniak says. “We are launching new products faster.

” —Sara Zawoyski, nVent CFO Establishing a Diverse nVent The financial success that nVent has enjoyed in 2023 was built on the business strategy and culture that Wozniak defined in 2018 as the first CEO of the company. “We put a focus on people and culture right from the start,” Wozniak says. “We wanted nVent to be a place where people could grow their careers, that they come in and learn our values and they learn our culture.

We are performance-driven, but we really value everyone’s ideas. ” Globally, nVent employs more than 11,000 people. In Minnesota, about 275 people work at nVent’s St.

Louis Park offices, while about 1,400 people work at nVent’s manufacturing facility in Anoka. Plans are unfolding to expand Minnesota operations. “Anoka is our largest manufacturing facility for all of nVent,” Wozniak says.

“This is where we do the data center liquid cooling [work]. We have had to recently find a new location for our distribution center, which was attached to the facility. ” Liquid cooling product manufacturing will expand into the distribution space in Anoka, while nVent will open a new distribution center in Dayton.

“It just speaks to our growth that we had to find a way that we could expand,” Wozniak says. Wozniak, who grew up in Canada, earned her bachelor’s degree in engineering physics. With her STEM background and talent for business, she built a long career at Honeywell, was hired in a key role at Pentair by former CEO Randy Hogan, and has been a public company CEO for five years.

In 2023, it’s still a rarity for a woman to be the top executive of a manufacturing company. When Wozniak became the inaugural CEO of nVent, she chose to set a tone that supported diversity at all levels of the company. Her actions in 2018 predated the common use of the DEI acronym.

“The first [principle] was just around inclusion and diversity, that we wanted this to be a culture where everyone felt that they could be their authentic self,” Wozniak says. Her charge to everybody in the company: “Be your authentic self. Bring bold ideas.

Work on building a more sustainable and electrified world. ” From the outset, she says, “we had a very transparent, open culture and we communicate a lot. ” Wozniak took several steps to ensure that diversity would become a reality at nVent, not simply something people said they supported.

“What we did early on is we set goals and incentives for our senior leadership to ensure that they were having diverse [job candidate] slates, that they were engaging in our employee resource groups, or, if they were senior leaders, they were sponsoring them,” Wozniak says. Sara Zawoyski, nVent’s CFO, says today nVent has nine employee resource groups with more than 1,500 members spread across 32 countries. Zawoyski is the executive sponsor for the Conductors, the Black/African Ancestry Employee Resource Group.

Every person on the executive management team has developed an action plan focused on attracting and retaining diverse talent, which is reviewed throughout the year, she says. In June, nVent released its 2022 Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Report. The document included progress updates on diversity initiatives.

Globally, nVent has increased representation of women in management. In the United States, nVent’s professional employee population has become more racially diverse. In the ESG report, nVent said that 52% of new U.

S. hires in 2022 were racially diverse. The compensation of nVent officers is tied to the achievement of goals on the ESG scorecard, Wozniak says.

To advance racial diversity, she says, nVent leaders made multiple changes in the hiring process. “We had to make sure that we had written job descriptions that were very inclusive,” Wozniak says. For example, she says, someone might say they want to hire someone with 25 years of experience.

Instead, she adds, it’s better to focus on the position’s desired skills, such as business acumen and the ability to build teams. “We found that sometimes people weren’t really thinking about what that job description was and whether it was excluding people,” she says. The company also made a commitment to create diverse slates for open jobs.

“The data actually shows it’s not necessarily taking all that much longer, a week or two,” Wozniak says. —Beth Wozniak, nVent Chair and CEO In 2023, Wozniak emphasizes a thoughtful hiring process at nVent. Her path to nVent began several years ago when Hogan, a veteran Pentair CEO, started hearing good reports about Wozniak’s work at Honeywell.

“I arranged to have a couple of one-on-one meetings with her just to get to know her,” Hogan recalls. “She was articulate. She was an engineer who had become a successful businessperson.

She had global assignments. ” He was impressed with her accomplishments and her leadership presence. “I was looking for someone who had the potential to be the CEO of Pentair,” Hogan says, meaning someone who could succeed him when he retired.

Wozniak joined Pentair in September 2015 as the president of flow and filtration solutions. “People matter to her,” Hogan says. “She quickly got in place the fixes to get that business back on the right track.

She did that and rallied the troops. ” Hogan isn’t surprised by Wozniak’s success at nVent. “Just look at the financials,” he says.

“Sales went up 50% in the last five years. Income went up 75%. That’s pretty extraordinary when you consider everything that has gone on with Covid.

” Current Pentair CEO Stauch, who served as Hogan’s CFO at Pentair, was among those who encouraged Hogan to consider hiring Wozniak for a leadership role at Pentair. Stauch and Wozniak had worked together at Honeywell. Stauch knew Hogan would be retiring in the coming years, and he thought Wozniak might succeed Hogan as CEO.

When Pentair’s board was ready to choose a new CEO, he wanted Wozniak to be an insider on the list of options. “Selfishly, I wanted to have an internal candidate that I’d be willing to work for,” Stauch says. But by 2017, Pentair’s board had decided to split the company in two.

On May 1, 2018, Wozniak officially became the CEO of nVent, which consisted of Pentair’s electrical business. Meanwhile, Stauch took the reins at Pentair, leading the water technology company. As a leader, Wozniak doesn’t engage in drama, Stauch says.

Instead, he adds, she deploys resources to execute a clear strategy and does so with a “no-nonsense” leadership style. “She focuses on delivering against key performance indicators,” he says. “She’s really solid on holding people accountable.

” Zawoyski, nVent’s CFO, started working for Wozniak in 2015 when Wozniak came to Pentair. She cites several traits about Wozniak that make her a good leader. “She is a really effective listener because she is like an avid learner,” Zawoyski says.

“She intentionally listens, and she often says that there are always three sides to every story. ” Wozniak has a reputation for going out to talk to customers, channel partners, employees, investors, and people in the community. “That allows us to always be forward-looking, very strategic, and not caught in silos or the past, because she is always listening,” Zawoyski says.

She appreciates the fact that Wozniak is a “connector of people,” who often introduces employees to nVent workers in other parts of the business. Wozniak’s penchant for linking people and ideas fosters growth and innovation, says Zawoyski, who has been on the receiving end of Wozniak’s people pairings. “I always felt like I was learning something new,” she says.

“She cared enough to connect me with somebody else, either to share my best practice or learn from that individual. ” And Wozniak inspires employees, Zawoyski says. While she notes that Wozniak and other leaders dissect problems and constantly examine ways to improve processes, she adds that Wozniak has the capacity to convey a larger purpose to nVent’s work.

Wozniak’s mantra, Zawoyski says, is: “How do we, as leaders and as a broader nVent organization, strive for something to live up to?” Beth Wozniak’s Path to nVent Gender Parity on nVent’s Board After serving as nVent’s CEO for five years, Wozniak was granted the additional title of board chair in May. Hogan was the non-executive chairman of nVent for its first five years until Wozniak succeeded him. “It’s a sign of how confident we are as a board in Beth and her leadership,” says Hogan, who remains an nVent board member.

Five women and five men serve on nVent’s board. Gender parity is uncommon on a public company board. “When we first started out, we had inherited some directors from Pentair,” Wozniak recalls.

In February 2018, Pentair announced who would serve on nVent’s first board of directors. It consisted of eight men and two women, including Wozniak. As CEO and chair, Wozniak believes in using a skills matrix for board selections so it’s possible to choose people with relevant experience to serve on the full board as well as committees such as audit and compensation.

“As directors would retire or roll off the board, we would look at the skills matrix and make diversity a priority,” Wozniak says. “I recall that I really felt we needed to have some more technology leadership on the board,” she says. “We happened to find two women with technology backgrounds.

” Both women were invited to join the board, and ultimately nVent’s board reached gender parity. “It honestly was not that hard to find great women leaders,” Wozniak says. “You may not find women CEOs, but I don’t think you always need CEOs.

You really have to open up your perspectives. ” What’s the difference when a board has gender parity? “We have a great balance on our board,” Wozniak says. “No one person is trying to own the conversation.

Everyone contributes where they think it is their area of expertise. We have different viewpoints. ” She maintains that gender diversity benefits the nVent business.

“That’s one thing about having both men and women on the board— they see things differently,” Wozniak says. “It’s made us better and stronger because we’re more inclusive and we’re getting some different perspectives. ”.