Team

Tom J. Gillcrist , Strategic Services

Tom is an aggressive leader, with a history of successfully building and/or restructuring businesses to achieve revenue and profitability goals, while fostering a safe and professionally challenging work environment. As General Manager of the Western Region for MODTECH HOLDINGS, INC., a $130 million modular building manufacturer Tom turned the division around into a profitable enterprise. He was able to re-engineer the company’s functional areas and turn around a previous operating loss of <$5 million> by implementing Lean Manufacturing, re-evaluating over $150 million of sales backlog, consolidating three manufacturing facilities across the Western region into one, elimination of $15 million in fixed cost and overhead, effective reduction in headcount, a 90% reduction in lost time incidents by restructure of the safety program, reduction in worker’s compensation costs by 37%, and a 53% reduction in inventory from fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2006. In addition Tom’s initiatives in the way of engineering improvements to the manufacturing process created standard product offerings through R&D and joint development activities with other school districts/architects. By implementing Revit design software, Tom dramatically improved the ability to generate structured bills of material, provide the basis for a perpetual inventory rollout and the development of standard products, and the generation of simplified production shop drawings. Because of his familiarity with finance and accounting he also directed the reduction of accounts receivable from a high of $28 million in 2004 to a more manageable level of $21 million in 2006.

As the General Manager of Ionics, Incorporated, a $600 million global water and wastewater treatment equipment and services provider, located in Phoenix Tom successfully consolidated all microelectronic wastewater technologies and assets into a single division. His accomplishments included global strategic direction with a focused selling effort in Asia, geographic wastewater reclaim/reuse from a product perspective, and the start up and management of a new division with complete P&L responsibility. With his talent for evaluating and improving the company’s technical product offerings Tom was able to generated $4.5 million in sales in the first year of operation including six Asian projects, four of which were reclaim systems, execute the first three projects through customer acceptance including three “serial number one” process applications, and create new product offerings through R&D and pilot and joint development activities with other technology providers, which led to the introduction of five new process developments generating $3.5 million in sales.

In 1995 Tom began a highly successful tenure with U.S. FILTER CORPORATION as Vice President of Operations. During his involvement, U.S. FILTER CORPORATION, a global water and wastewater treatment equipment and services provider had achieved historic growth and success with over $6 billion in global sales. Tom’s responsibilities included the management of a 160,000 square foot facility staffed by both union and non-union personnel. The company’s market dominance flourished with his contributions, which included execution of the largest and most complex capital equipment contract in the history of the company ($33million), which was delivered on time and under budget, successful negotiation of a new three-year labor agreement, successful turn around of the safety program through extensive training and employee involvement (achieving over 1.2 million labor hours without a lost time incident), implementation of vendor managed inventory programs, which reduced inventory by over $1. million, reductions in operating costs by $.5 million and inventory write-offs by over 50%, respectively, and assisting in the development and introduction of a new line of standard products that generated $25 million of new sales and significantly enhanced the competitiveness of the business. Due to his financial training, Tom was also tapped to simultaneously manage the Finance Department as Vice President.

Tom’s career began with Arthur Andersen, Prudential Capital Corporation, and First Wachovia, where he specialized in the management of their large industrial clients.

Tom earned a Bachelor of Arts, Economics, at The College of Arts and Sciences University of Virginia and a Master of Business Administration from the Colgate Darden Graduate Business School at University of Virginia.