Location: Anaheim, CA
Company: Pen Manufacturing, a Metal Solutions Holdings company
Industry: Metal Fabrication & Manufacturing
Role: Full-Time, On-Site Leadership
The Business
Pen Manufacturing is not a traditional low-tech job shop.
The business has invested in modern systems and technology to improve visibility and accountability across quoting, engineering, production, job costing, and overall business performance.
Pen also has an experienced management team with deep technical and manufacturing knowledge.
The company maintains AS9100 certification and serves demanding customers across markets including industrial, infrastructure, data centers, aerospace & defense, space, and OEM manufacturing.
The Site Leader's job is to leverage this infrastructure and management talent to grow revenue, improve the quality of revenue, make better commercial decisions, and convert growth into EBITDA and cash flow.
What You Will Own
Full P&L
You are accountable for Pen Manufacturing's results, including:
- Revenue
- Gross margin
- EBITDA
- Cash flow
- Working capital
- Budget and forecast performance
- Customer profitability
- Overall site performance
You should always know where the business is performing relative to plan, why variances exist, and what the team is doing about them.
Commercial Growth
Growth is a major part of this job.
You will:
- Lead the overall commercial direction of Pen Manufacturing.
- Work closely with sales leadership to drive profitable organic growth.
- Build executive-level relationships with key customers and prospects.
- Expand existing strategic accounts.
- Help penetrate attractive markets including industrial, infrastructure, data centers, aerospace & defense, space, and OEM manufacturing.
- Participate directly in major sales opportunities and negotiations.
- Hold the commercial organization accountable for pipeline, wins, customer retention, and profitable growth.
We do not want a Site Leader who views sales as someone else's department.
You should be comfortable getting directly involved when winning or expanding an important customer requires senior leadership.
Pricing, Bids & Commercial Judgment
One of the most important responsibilities of this role is deciding what work Pen should pursue and at what price.
Our engineering and estimating teams can determine how a job should be built and what it should cost.
The Site Leader needs to turn that technical information into the right business decision.
You will:
- Review and sign off on significant bids and quotes.
- Understand estimated labor, material, overhead, capacity requirements, risk, and target margin.
- Decide when Pen should increase pricing because of capacity constraints, complexity, risk, customer behavior, or market conditions.
- Recognize when Pen should lower pricing strategically to win attractive work, utilize available capacity, enter a new account, or expand a valuable customer relationship.
- Know when to walk away from unattractive or high-risk work.
- Challenge estimating assumptions when economics do not make sense.
- Evaluate customer and job profitability rather than simply chasing revenue.
- Balance margin percentage against throughput, available capacity, strategic value, and total gross-margin dollars.
- Ensure lessons from completed jobs flow back into future pricing and quoting decisions.
We need someone capable of looking at a major opportunity and answering:
Should we bid it? Can we win it? Do we want it? What should we charge? And will it actually make us money?
Gross Margin & Operational Performance
The Plant Manager owns day-to-day factory execution. The Site Leader owns the economic outcome.
You will:
- Hold the Plant Manager accountable for labor efficiency, throughput, scheduling, quality, scrap/rework, and on-time delivery.
- Review job-level profitability and estimated-versus-actual performance.
- Understand why jobs beat or miss estimated margin.
- Ensure lessons from job reconciliations are incorporated into future estimating and pricing.
- Identify recurring causes of margin leakage and ensure corrective actions are implemented.
- Ensure sales, engineering, estimating, purchasing, production, and quality operate as one team.
- Make hiring, capacity, equipment, and capital allocation decisions based on customer demand and economics.
- Drive continuous improvement in gross margin and operating performance.
You need to understand manufacturing deeply enough to challenge experienced operators and engineers.
But you should not become the Plant Manager.
Customers
You will be the senior operating leader responsible for Pen's most important customer relationships.
That includes:
- Executive-level customer relationships
- Strategic account development
- Major commercial negotiations
- Pricing discussions
- Customer escalations
- New-market development
- Ensuring Pen delivers what it promises
We want our largest customers to know who you are and view you as the person ultimately accountable for their relationship with Pen.
Leadership & Accountability
You will lead an experienced management team and establish a culture of measurable accountability.
You will:
- Manage and develop the Plant Manager and other functional leaders.
- Leverage experienced leaders across engineering, estimating, operations, quality, and sales rather than replacing their expertise.
- Establish clear KPIs and weekly operating rhythms.
- Recruit or upgrade talent where necessary.
- Break down silos between sales, engineering, estimating, purchasing, production, quality, and finance.
- Create clear ownership for problems and ensure they get solved.
- Develop leaders rather than becoming the bottleneck for every decision.
- Build an organization capable of scaling substantially beyond its current size.
Who We Are Looking For
We strongly prefer a commercially oriented operator.
Our ideal candidate spent a meaningful portion of their career in industrial/manufacturing sales leadership and subsequently developed into a successful General Manager, President, or P&L leader.
The ideal candidate has:
- 10+ years of leadership experience in manufacturing, industrial services, or a closely related industry.
- Prior experience as a VP of Sales, Head of Sales, or senior commercial leader strongly preferred.
- Experience as a General Manager, Site Leader, President, Division President, COO, or similar operating leader.
- True P&L ownership, including revenue, gross margin, EBITDA, and cash flow.
- Demonstrated ability to drive profitable organic growth.
- Experience reviewing major bids, pricing work, and making commercial tradeoffs.
- Strong customer instincts and experience working directly with sophisticated B2B customers.
- Experience managing manufacturing operations through a Plant Manager or senior operations leader.
- Strong understanding of pricing, gross margin, job costing, labor efficiency, capacity utilization, working capital, and cash flow.
- Experience building and holding leadership teams accountable.
- Comfort using ERP, CRM, job-costing, and other operating data to make decisions.
- Comfort operating in a fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment.
Our Bias
If choosing between:
A great factory operator who needs to learn sales
and
A proven industrial sales leader who has developed into a strong P&L operator,
we strongly prefer the second profile.
Pen already has experienced technical and operational leadership.
We need the Site Leader focused on growing the business, making smart pricing and bid decisions, owning the P&L, leading customer strategy, and holding the organization accountable for profitable growth.
Strongly Preferred Industry Experience
Experience in one or more of the following is highly valuable:
- Metal fabrication
- Precision machining
- Sheet metal
- Welding and fabrication
- Contract manufacturing
- Engineered-to-order / build-to-print manufacturing
- Aerospace & defense
- Industrial equipment
- Infrastructure
- Data centers
- Space
- OEM manufacturing
Candidates do not need to come specifically from metal fabrication, but they should understand technical B2B selling and industrial/manufacturing economics.
The Person We Do NOT Want
This role is not a fit for someone who has only managed production.
It is also not a fit for a corporate executive who manages primarily through presentations and meetings.
And it is not a fit for someone who claims to be commercially minded but has never actually been responsible for winning customers, setting prices, or growing revenue.
We need someone who can:
Read the P&L. Win the customer. Sign off on the bid. Set the price. Challenge the quote. Walk the floor. Lead the team. And deliver the number.
What Success Looks Like
The Site Leader will be measured primarily on:
- Profitable revenue growth
- Gross margin
- EBITDA
- Cash generation
- Working capital
- Customer retention and expansion
- New customer wins
- Pricing and bid quality
- On-time delivery
- Leadership team performance
The objective is to build Pen Manufacturing into a substantially larger, more profitable, and more strategically valuable operating company within Metal Solutions Holdings.
Compensation
Competitive executive compensation consisting of:
- Base salary
- Performance-based incentive compensation
- Long-term upside for exceptional performance
We are looking for someone who wants their financial success tied directly to the growth and performance of the business.
Location
This position is on-site in Anaheim, California.
The Site Leader needs to be physically present with the team, close to the manufacturing operation, and actively engaged with customers.
This is not a remote position.