PGC COO John Bower, is known for “making things happen.” The growth of his manufacturing, engineering and prototyping business along with his leadership at work and within the community makes him an important member of the team.
John’s success lies in his ability to provide progressive solutions to customers, while continually checking in with his employees. Steve Hanson, Co-CEO and Owner of PGC said, “John understands supply chain relationships and how employees impact trust and confidence of our customers regarding the products they purchase. It’s why we call him our Vice President of Relationship Vitality; he combines communication with innovation to proactively help our customers and employees.”
When John joined PGC, he navigated leadership turnover and gathered input from customer-facing groups. This feedback gave him the insight to propel the business forward. He recruited a passionate marketing and sales team and developed marketing processes and a go-to-market strategy that overhauled the brand, logo, website and invested in digital marketing.
John didn’t stop with sales and marketing, under Bower’s leadership, he hired a customer-facing account engineering team; with the expertise to help clients innovate quickly. This led to organizational kudos as a top supplier performance achieved and an award by an OEM brand leader in the Ag, Turf and Forestry industry for 7 years in a row. Other achievements include successfully completing an ISO PCA (Product Configuration Audit) for the first and only time in customer history. When PGC’s military customers spent 2.5 days on-site, they were the only supplier out of 15 to pass successfully the first time.
John Bower takes his leadership skills in sales and marketing, recruiting and manufacturing out of the office every day to help children who are interested in STEM projects. John’s ability to see the broad picture and then hyper focus on solving a need came into play as he developed and launched Edina High Schools Partnership, Lead The Way Engineering. This unique program connects the girl’s robotics team with the PGC account engineer team. The engineers help the team build their robots and guide them to be successful when they have ideas on how to improve their robots.
In fact, this project led him to being recognized as a STEM Mentorship Innovator and Edina’s Business Person of the Year. John’s ability to anticipate problems and find quick solutions helps the girl’s team, but it also benefits PGC. The fresh contribution of ideas helps the account engineering team stay current on methodologies and forces the team of engineers to stay innovative on their current projects, look for opportunities within their supply chain relationships and review solutions from different perspectives. This support of the girl’s robotics team also has another layer, it helps support the global initiative of recognizing women in manufacturing. PGC has many women on its team with 20 or more years of experience and it is great for the girls to know that manufacturing can be a career path worth exploring. It’s a win-win-win-win in the creative solving problem projects for the girl’s team, the professional development of the team of engineers, for PGC clients and for the manufacturing industry.
Written by: Sarah Manley