Chief Executive Officer

Earnest Products is a privately owned manufacturing company with significant growth opportunity, strong customer demand, a large facility footprint, and a history of reinvesting in equipment, people, and systems. The business has enough opportunity in front of it, but it needs a CEO who can turn opportunity into organized execution. The next CEO must simplify the operating structure, raise accountability, improve customer execution, and help the company scale without losing the practical, entrepreneurial strengths that built the business.

Position Purpose

The Chief Executive Officer will lead Earnest Products as the senior operating executive responsible for company-wide performance. This is not a plant-manager role and not a narrow operations role. The CEO must own the full strategic vision and culture of the company which includes; sales, operations, engineering, quality, finance, people, customer commitments, systems, and long-term development.

• Build a disciplined operating system that converts demand into reliable delivery, margin, cash flow, and customer trust.
• Hold the leadership team accountable without micromanaging.
• Improve OTD, labor performance, engineering flow, quote-to-job release, purchasing discipline, inventory readiness, quality systems, and customer communication
• Develop the leadership team by building a strong culture of ownership, accountability
• Protect the customer relationship while improving profitability and avoiding cost-cutting decisions that may damage customer confidence externally.

Leadership Profile Needed

The preferred CEO profile is a manufacturing-oriented enterprise leader with turnaround, transformation, and growth experience. The leader must be comfortable with a mid-market, owner-led business that has large-company opportunity but small-company constraints.

• Whole-business operator:

strong enough in operations to understand the factory, but broad enough to lead sales strategy, engineering, finance, customers, systems, and people.

• Customer-first decision maker:

understands that margin improvement is not useful if it weakens customer trust, delivery reliability, or market position.

• KPI-driven, not report-driven:

uses data to create a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement that will strengthen leadership behavior, not to create dashboards that people ignore.

• Practical transformer:

starts by understanding the current state (listen \& learn), then align clear priorities that lead to execution.

• People builder with accountability:

gives people a fair chance to perform, trains them where needed, recognizes contribution, but removes or restructures weak accountability when required.

• Growth-minded but disciplined:

can evaluate organic growth, acquisition opportunities, customer concentration, capacity, cash requirements, and operational risk before pushing the business too hard.

Primary Responsibilities

A. Company-Wide Leadership and Accountability

• Lead the executive and department leadership team with clear goals, weekly/monthly accountability, visible commitments, and documented follow-up.
• Establish a practical operating rhythm for leadership meetings, KPI reviews, issue escalation, and cross-functional decisions.
• Create a culture where managers own results, not explanations.
• Develop leaders through direct feedback, coaching, measurable expectations, and role clarity.
• Separate urgent issues from important system improvements so the company stops living in firefighting mode.

B. Customer Execution and Commercial Strategy

• Lead sales strategy with a focus on profitable growth, market opportunity, customer segmentation, customer contracts, pricing discipline, and customer expectations.
• Manage the outside sales strategy, including trade show expectations, strategic customer visits, engineering-firm influence, reseller/integrator relationships, and market development.
• Build compensation and commission structures that pay for the behavior the business actually needs: new customer development, profitable growth, customer retention, and strategic market expansion.
• Strengthen customer communication so customers understand commitments, lead times, risks, changes, and escalation paths.
• Ensure the company grows through execution reliability, not just quoting more work.

C. Manufacturing Operations and Delivery Performance

• Improve on-time delivery, schedule adherence, labor productivity, capacity planning, material readiness, and daily production flow.
• Use plant-floor engagement to understand reality while leading through managers and supervisors rather than personally chasing jobs.
• Drive root-cause analysis and problem solving around missed schedule, late material, quality escapes, incorrect standards, rework, labor misses, and engineering delays.
• Improve throughput by connecting estimating, engineering, purchasing, programming, production, quality, and shipping into one closed-loop system.
• Support capital planning and equipment utilization decisions using ROI, bottleneck analysis, reliability, labor impact, customer need, and cash impact.

D. Engineering, Front Office, and Systems Improvement

• Improve engineering flow from quote to job release, including manufacturability, standards, revision control, part history, programming handoff, and feedback from actual production results.
• Lead front-office process improvement, including quoting discipline, order entry, documentation, customer communication, project management, purchasing triggers, and job readiness.
• Use AI and business systems to shorten quoting, improve sales intelligence, reduce engineering bottlenecks, improve purchasing decisions, and surface operating data in simple dashboards.
• Lead ERP/data-system improvement with practical sequencing. The CEO should not allow software projects to become disconnected from daily operating performance.
• Develop a 3PL/customer logistics strategy where it improves service, inventory responsiveness, or customer capture without adding uncontrolled complexity.

E. Financial Performance, Cash, and Value Creation

• Own the operating plan, budget performance, margin improvement, cash discipline, working capital, and profitability improvement.
• Improve EBITDA through both revenue growth and cost discipline, not by cutting service levels that customers rely on.
• Work closely with the controller, fractional CFO, owner, and banking partners to align growth plans with cash, debt, covenants, capital needs, and risk.
• Build financial understanding across the leadership team so managers connect daily behavior to revenue, margin, cash, and customer outcomes.
• Prepare the business to become more valuable by making performance repeatable, documented, measurable, and less dependent on owner intervention.

F. People, Culture, and Organization Structure

• Clarify the organization chart, roles, decision rights, and accountability between operations, engineering, quality, sales, finance, purchasing, HR, and project management.
• Create a leadership structure where direct reports know what they own, how they are measured, when they must escalate, and what decisions they can make without permission.
• Build a culture of problem solving, customer service, safety, quality, continuous improvement, and respect for measurable commitments.
• Set an organizational culture, embodying human-centric and collaborative approach to management and accountability.
• Support compensation, bonus, and incentive structures that reward company-wide performance and reduce department-level silos.
• Make hard personnel decisions when leaders cannot or will not perform, but do so with fairness, clarity, and documented expectations.

Governance and Decision Rights

The CEO must be comfortable leading inside an owner-led company where the owner is stepping back from daily management but remains involved in strategic matters.

• CEO owns daily operating performance, leadership accountability, customer execution, department coordination, and execution of the approved plan.
• Owner remains involved in major capital decisions, M\&A, real estate/lease decisions, major customer strategy, senior leadership transitions, and subject-matter guidance where useful.

Required Experience and Qualifications

• Senior executive experience leading a manufacturing business or complex manufacturing division with measurable responsibility for P\&L, customer performance, operations, people, and growth.
• Demonstrated success improving EBITDA through both top-line growth and operating discipline.
• Experience with engineered products, sheet metal, fabrication, electrical/mechanical assemblies, machine tools, aerospace/defense, industrial equipment, or similar high-mix manufacturing environments preferred.
• Strong command of KPIs, operating cadence, visual management, lean/continuous improvement, emotional intelligence, and cross-functional accountability.
• Experience improving OTD, labor performance, engineering handoff, purchasing/material readiness, quality systems, and customer service.
• Commercial capability: able to lead sales strategy, customer expectations, pricing, contracts, market development, and strategic account growth.
• Comfort with ERP/data systems, dashboards, AI-assisted process improvement, and practical digital transformation.
• Ability to work with an active owner without needing either total independence or daily direction.

Notations:

All applicants must be authorized to work in the United States.

The Company conducts background checks, and drug screening as a part of our drug-free workplace policy and in support of our commitment to the health and safety of our employees.

Due to the expected high volume of applicants, we will not be able to respond to all applications received.

Thank you for your interest in the CEO position at Earnest Products Inc..

Regards,

Earnest Products Inc.