Got a Generac? This is the guy who made it happen.
Robert D. Kern, a mechanical engineer who in the mid-1950s started a company in a garage making portable backup power generators and then transformed the business into an industry leader known as Generac, selling it in 2006 for an estimated $1 billion, died on Nov. 8 in Waukesha, Wis. He was 96.
Robert D. Kern, a mechanical engineer who in the mid-1950s started a company in a garage making portable backup power generators and then transformed the business into an industry leader known as Generac, selling it in 2006 for an estimated $1 billion, died on Nov. 8 in Waukesha, Wis. He was 96.
"...“The company is way beyond anything we dreamed about,” Mr. Kern said in an interview with the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, his alma mater. “My vision was incredibly small compared to what it became, but tenacity is what it is all about.”
He and his wife and a few investors started the business after the rise of the airline industry had cost Mr. Kern his job making motors for railroad cars... Today, Generac... accounts for roughly 75 percent of standby home generator sales in the United States.
"...The Kern Family Foundation has donated upward of $100 million to the Mayo Clinic, where Mr. Kern was treated as a child, and helped establish Project Lead the Way, a science and math curriculum for kindergarten through high school. It has also donated to the Milwaukee School of Engineering; Marquette University’s College of Engineering; and the Medical College of Wisconsin, to which the foundation has given, or pledged to give, about $100 million.
"...In 1954, with his wife as the new company’s bookkeeper, he began making portable generators for recreational vehicles and for farmers and construction crews out of a garage in the village of Wales, Wis., about 28 miles west of Milwaukee. The business, originally called Electric Controls Inc., marketed the gear through Sears under the Craftsman brand. It became Generac in 1959, combining the word generation with AC.
"...In 1967, the Generac factory in Waukesha burned to the ground, but with help from the local community, production resumed six days later, and the plant was rebuilt in seven weeks, without layoffs.
“A company is not defined by its bricks and mortar,” Mr. Kern once said. “It is defined by its people.”
He and his wife and a few investors started the business after the rise of the airline industry had cost Mr. Kern his job making motors for railroad cars... Today, Generac... accounts for roughly 75 percent of standby home generator sales in the United States.
"...The Kern Family Foundation has donated upward of $100 million to the Mayo Clinic, where Mr. Kern was treated as a child, and helped establish Project Lead the Way, a science and math curriculum for kindergarten through high school. It has also donated to the Milwaukee School of Engineering; Marquette University’s College of Engineering; and the Medical College of Wisconsin, to which the foundation has given, or pledged to give, about $100 million.
"...In 1954, with his wife as the new company’s bookkeeper, he began making portable generators for recreational vehicles and for farmers and construction crews out of a garage in the village of Wales, Wis., about 28 miles west of Milwaukee. The business, originally called Electric Controls Inc., marketed the gear through Sears under the Craftsman brand. It became Generac in 1959, combining the word generation with AC.
"...In 1967, the Generac factory in Waukesha burned to the ground, but with help from the local community, production resumed six days later, and the plant was rebuilt in seven weeks, without layoffs.
“A company is not defined by its bricks and mortar,” Mr. Kern once said. “It is defined by its people.”
