Eriez, Erie, Pennsylvania, has announced that Chet Giermak, who served as the company’s president and CEO from 1971 to 2003, died March 16, 2015.
“Chet was a great man who has left an indelible mark on Eriez’s business, people and culture,” says current Eriez President and CEO Tim Shuttleworth. “His legacy lives on at Eriez every day.”
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| Chet Giermak, former president of Eriez |
In a news release summarizing Giermak’s career, Eriez says he “blended lessons from his days as a two-time All-American college basketball player at William and Mary together with his business acumen and applied them successfully during his 33-year tenure as Eriez president and CEO.”
Eriez reports that when interviewed in 2012, Giermak said the greatest legacy he left to Eriez was the team he left behind to succeed him—a commitment he said he made to Eriez’s board of directors.
“Chet’s active, hands-on managerial style led him to walk through the offices and plant on a daily basis talking with as many employees as possible,” says Charlie Ingram, Eriez vice president of sales and marketing. “Able to address every employee by name, he maintained an ‘open door’ policy that encouraged any company employee to come in and discuss any issue with him at any time.”
Along with the respect he accorded every employee, Giermak also treated everyone with an uncommon degree of trust, according to Ingram. He ordered time clocks removed “as a way of saying to our people that we trust them to arrive and leave at designated times,” says Ingram. He then removed all bells and buzzers that signaled start and quit times and coffee breaks “in Pavlovian fashion.” He also eliminated the mandatory vacation during summer shut-down, opting to trust each individual to determine his or her own vacation schedule.
Giermak also introduced a variety of improvement programs, including first-aid instruction, blueprint-reading classes, financial planning sessions and pre-retirement seminars. A free counseling program was put in place to help employees and their family members deal with estate and personal problems. He initiated a 10-year program to first limit and then eliminate smoking at Eriez. Under Giermak, the equipment company announced there would be a completely smoke-free environment at the company by July 1, 1992.
Giermak was active in industry organizations and community groups. A past president of the Processing Equipment Manufacturers Association (PEMA), he also served as a director of the National Association of Manufacturers. Locally, he was active in ACES (Americans for the Competitive Enterprise System) and the Sales and Marketing Executives Club of Erie. A member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, he was also a corporator of Hamot Medical Center and trustee and past president of the Saint Vincent Foundation for Health and Human Services.
During Giermak’s time with Eriez, the company developed a variety of products for more than 80 industries. Eriez’s product line grew to hundreds of types of permanent magnetic, electromagnetic, vibratory, conveying and metal detecting equipment, ranging from simple plates, grates and traps to highly sophisticated devices such as rare earth roll separators, eddy current separators and superconducting high-gradient magnetic separator systems. When Giermak joined Eriez in 1960, sales were $800,000. Sales were about $8 million when he accepted the reins as president in 1971 and rose to $80 million in 2003.