President Factory Automation

President Factory Automation | Greater Chicago, IL

The Opportunity

A well‑capitalized, established industrial products company is conducting a confidential search for a President to lead its Factory Automation business — a core segment serving machine builders and systems integrators across North America.

This is a full P&L leadership mandate for someone who wants to build, not maintain. The company has real infrastructure, real market presence, and real customer relationships already in place — what it needs now is an operator who can rebuild the commercial engine, modernize how the business goes to market, and scale it meaningfully over the next several years. The right person will have the autonomy to make real decisions on product, pricing, supply chain, and team — and the mandate to move fast.

What You'll Own

• Full P&L accountability for the Factory Automation business, including product and assortment strategy across standard, configurable, and custom offerings
• Pricing strategy , including standing up and owning a Pricing Center of Excellence
• Supply chain and fulfillment , including transformation work across international manufacturing and sourcing partners
• Application engineering and the technical relationship with machine-builder and integrator customers
• Segment strategy — defining the ideal customer profile, where to play, and how to win in the machine‑builder ecosystem
• An organization of roughly 200 people spanning sales, product, operations, and engineering
• A direct operating partnership with a Chief Revenue Officer, in a clean model where you own what gets sold and the business outcomes, while your CRO partner owns how it gets sold day to day

What Success Looks Like

In your first 90 days, you'll be diagnosing operational gaps, upgrading key leadership across the business, and establishing a real operating cadence and accountability structure. Within the first year, you'll be delivering strong double-digit growth, meaningfully improving customer experience metrics, and standing up a field‑enabled go‑to‑market motion built for larger, strategic accounts — evolving the business beyond its historical e-commerce-led model. Over the following two to three years, the goal is to build a recognized, high‑performing growth business and become a top‑tier partner to machine builders and integrators across the market.

What You Bring

• Proven, full P&L ownership of a business in the $200M–$500M range — ideally, you've personally led a business through that growth trajectory, not simply inherited one already at scale
• A background in factory automation, industrial distribution, motion components, or the broader machine‑builder/integrator ecosystem
• A genuine transformation or turnaround on your track record — you've walked into something that needed to be fixed and rebuilt it, not just kept a healthy engine running
• M&A or integration experience — you've been part of bringing organizations or businesses together and making the combination work
• Strong commercial instincts: you can talk fluently about field sales buildout, strategic account growth, territory design, and pricing strategy
• Operational depth to match — you understand supply chain and product, not just the sales side of the business
• A track record of building strong teams quickly: you know how to upgrade talent, and you don't wait to make hard calls on underperformers
• Comfort operating in a faster‑paced, performance‑driven environment, with genuine autonomy and a self‑starter mindset — this is a role built for someone who wants to own outcomes, not follow a playbook

What Won't Be a Fit

This role isn't right for someone who has only managed stable, mature territories, who has operated inside a highly centralized, headquarters‑driven structure without real decision‑making authority, or whose track record is mostly optimization of an already‑working business rather than building something new.

Location

Strong preference for candidates based in or near Chicago, IL, or open to relocating within a few months of starting. The broader team operates in a largely distributed model, with in‑person time reserved for high‑value collaboration rather than day‑to‑day oversight — so this is a role for someone comfortable leading without needing to be in a building full‑time, while still being genuinely accessible to the team and to Chicago‑based leadership.

This search is being conducted on a confidential, retained basis. If you've led a $200M–$500M industrial or automation business through real growth — and you're looking for the next mandate rather than the next maintenance job