Stanpro’s Robert Nadler — A Young Professional Forging Success with Each New Project
April 11 2016
Take a deep breath. Following Rob Nadler through the Stanpro facility and showroom requires stamina. The career of Stanpro’s Executive Vice-President reflects the path of someone who has pursued a passion for customer service by exploring, evaluating and involving himself in every aspect of the production process, from product design to testing, certification and distribution. Stanpro lighting products, all manufactured on site, are displayed using the most advanced applications in a showroom recently set up within the company’s Dorval, Quebec premises. Let’s follow him.
Rob Nadler has been with Stanpro for almost 15 years. As it happens so often in our industry, he started his lighting career through a friend of his family, Sam Rimoin, actual president of Stanpro. “After I finished college, I wanted to experience the real world. Sam suggested I get a summer job in the lighting industry. It was love at first sight. Nineteen years later, I am still in the same industry and I’ve never left.”
“I think I am what you could call home grown,” says Rob. He worked for a well known lighting company when he was 23 but felt restricted. “It was a good company, but it was an established business and I wanted more responsibilities, to feel closer to every aspect of a product from design through to distribution. I met Sam for dinner and told him that I would like to be involved in the new company he was running. This was in May 2001. I started as a sales specialist, working on the road for HID products. One day, I came into the office and saw a pile of purchase orders in the window. I said, ‘I’m taking the inside sales too, I will do both.’ Production was then moved from Ontario to Quebec and shortly after we needed a new computer system, which also became my responsibility.”
Being Vice President of Sales and Marketing made him happy, but he wanted more. “I was engaged to be married, and I needed to know I had a future with the company. I knew every aspect of the company and I was then named Executive Vice-President responsible for the operations of the business.” He is now happily married with three children 4, 6 and 9 years old.
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“We were 12 people including production when I arrived here.” Stanpro is now a full-line lighting company. Its 155,000 sq. ft. facility in Dorval has a CSA test lab, showroom and more than 200 employees. “We were very cautious to enter the LED market. There were a lot of unknowns, we held off for a while, but in the last 24 months our R&D and production have concentrated on LED.”
Once Rob was named Executive Vice President, Stanpro hired Jeff Beare to replace Rob as head of the marketing department. The two of them are responsible for the new state-of-the-art showroom at the Dorval facility.
“Our main focus was to get our product line-up to market. Then we wanted to show what our products were able to do. It took us almost a year to put the showroom together. We looked at every aspect of it. We wanted to show our clients our manufacturing process and our engineering capacity first, and then our product applications to close the loop.”
As you tour the showroom, you find yourself in a bar, a museum, a motorcycle dealer, and a grocery store. Other applications on display including emergency lighting. Each interactive station describes the lighting system and allows you to change the rendering or colour temperature to see what suits your needs. “Clients can stop anywhere and watch videos on the different applications, but more importantly touch and feel.” The same attention to detail is evident here as elsewhere in the facility, from the warehouse to the offices through to reception.
Still under 40 years old, with three children, a high profile job, lots of travelling… that’s a lot. I asked Rob how he balances his personal and professional life. “I like to think I am efficient,” was his immediate response, and it seems to be true as he manages to spend lots of time with his children while his wife works evenings as a math teacher. He continues, “We have a strong staff and my travel schedule is not too bad as I concentrate my trips during the fall and the spring.”
It took me six months to get this time with Rob, but he made sure I felt welcome. This is probably part of his recipe for success.
Line Goyette is Managing Editor LDS; linegoyette@kerrwil.com.
