Bert Baker

Bert Baker
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BERT BAKER

359 Brocdorf Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio 45215 | 513-290-8180 | bert.baker@yahoo.com | linkedin.com/in/bakerbert
SUMMARY
A dynamic technical leader with extensive experience building and leading cost-effective, state-of-the-art, and high-growth teams to produce high-quality and on-time results in multiple situations, across multiple industries and cities, including multinational collaboration. Grew one team from 18 to over 200 employees. Grew two teams in two different cities from 0 to 25 employees. Grew another team from 15 to 45 employees. Created over $60 million in recurring annual revenue. Skilled at identifying needs, recruiting and training essential talent, leveraging personal relationships, creating rewarding work environments, organizing to capitalize on key individuals, motivating employees, providing excellence in customer service, and establishing effective communications within team and with customers. A customer-focused problem solver.
EXPERTISE
Technical
• Software Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering
• Embedded Systems
• Manufacturing Engineering

Leadership
• Team Building
• Project Management
• Six Sigma
• Management of Technology

Business
• Strategic Planning
• Marketing & Sales Management
• Contract Negotiation
• Management Accounting

EXPERIENCE
QUEST GLOBAL ENGINEERING 2013 – 2015
Directed delivery teams in nine geographically disbursed cities. P&L responsibility for five engineering centers, and over 200 engineers. Responsible to drive growth of US Embedded Systems business. Clients included: GE Aviation, Siemens, Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney, GE Transportation, Halliburton, Honeywell, Ford, Baker Hughes, GE Power & Water, and GE Global Research. Industries included: jet engines, locomotives, oil drills, wind turbines, automobiles, aircraft lighting, power generators. Technologies included: finite-element structural analysis, fluids and air flow analysis, heat transfer analysis, software engineering, controls, test support, instrumentation, piping and wiring, design/drafting, and manufacturing engineering.
General Manager (2013 – 2015)
• Team Building: Organically grew first organization 27% per annum. Organically grew second organization 33% per annum.
• Identifying Needs: Collaborated with sales, the customer, other offices, and recruiting to land new Manufacturing Engineering business in a new Midwestern city. Leveraged personal relationships and corporate recruiting to hire office manager. Obtained and furnished office space. Mentored leadership. Recruited an offshore coordinator. One year later, office has over 40 employees both locally and offshore, and is continuing excellent service and rapid growth.
• Strategic Planning: A Western office had stalled growth, and was barely profitable; but company could not close the office because the customer was considered of core strategic importance. Hired and trained new site manager. Developed new strategic plans for office. Office has grown three-fold, and is now continuing a rapid growth trajectory.
• Multinational Communications: Assigned a team with poor multinational communications. The customer was threatening to pull the contract. Collaborated with the team and the client to add expertise, to determine core metrics, to install quality processes, to institute new project management practices, and to focus the team on optimizing the new metrics. Customer satisfied with team’s progress continued to fund work.
• Management Accounting: In collaboration with finance team, replaced monthly corporate financial reports with dynamic reporting based on weekly operations, yielding more effective weekly reports on key metrics.
• Work Environment: Put in place a series of new employee engagement activities including all-hands meetings and social events. Average employee engagement increased 18% overall.
• Leveraging Relationships: Company’s embedded systems business was substantially only in India with Indian clients. Worked with US clients in Embedded Systems to understand their needs. Then leveraged existing relationships to hire and train core talent. Company now has two new US Embedded Systems teams supporting two new US clients with projected first-year revenue of $2.5 million.
BELCAN ENGINEERING 2002 – 2013
Led delivery teams in five geographically disbursed cities with P&L responsibility for two engineering centers and over 200 engineers. Clients included: GE Transportation, Rolls-Royce, The Central Intelligence Agency, GE Aviation, Parker-Hannifin, Proctor & Gamble, Honeywell, Smiths Aerospace, Aurora Flight Sciences, Amway, GE Global Research, Kodak, Lockheed-Martin, GE Power & Water, BAE, GE Wind, and Crane Aerospace. Industries included: jet engines, locomotives, wind turbines, UAVs, medical devices, manufacturing equipment, aircraft electronics, industrial printers, power generators, and consumer electronics.
Vice President (2008 – 2013)
Assigned to coalesce regional growth in Embedded Systems into a nationally growing organization:
• Team Building: National organization grew from 600 to 1,000 employees in 5 yrs..
• Contract Negotiation: Successfully acted as lead negotiator on multi-million dollar blanket agreements with Fortune-500 companies, 5 in Aerospace and 1 in Industrial-Machinery, some focused on General Engineering others on Embedded Systems. Also facilitated acquisition and collaborative agreements.
• Cost Effective Solutions: One of the new offices quickly became the most profitable office in its business unit.
• Marketing & Sales Management: Hired a sales manager. Created and implemented sales plans. Coordinated activities among national Embedded Systems managers. Revenues in national organization grew by over $40 million.
• Recruiting and Training: Hired and trained site managers in two cities. Established regional managers in three other cities. Hired first Embedded Systems technical leads in another city.
• State-of-the-Art Solutions: Designs for the US Air Force’s Joint Strike Fighter aircraft showed it would produce too much heat to meet cloaking requirements. The current vendor was using a 1-dimensional heat analysis package. Proposed they use a specific multidimensional analysis tool and provided a representative analysis using this tool. The Air Force accepted the idea and used it to resolve their heating issues.
• Project Management: Opened new offices and expanded existing facilities, selecting property and coordinating with facility management and corporate IT.
Program Manager / Group Leader / Section Manager (2002 – 2013)
Starting with 18 employees and perceived growth opportunities with a single Embedded-Systems customer:
• Team Building: Organically grew organization by over 30% per year over an 8 year period, including double digit annual growth during the 2009-10 recession.
• Cost Effective Solutions: Created the most profitable and fastest growing organization in the Cincinnati headquarters.
• High Quality: Company recognized that across the company poor communications are the greatest cause of poor quality scores by customer. Implemented communications training courses in the embedded systems organization, and invited others to teach classes in communications. Customer-provided quality scores to embedded systems organization became among the highest of all organizations in the company.
• Organizing to Leverage Talent: Promotion and raise system in Cincinnati office was not clear to new graduates, and did not emphasize leveraging senior talent or growth. Worked with management team to create new promotion and raise structure within embedded systems organization.
• Recruiting and Training: Based on ongoing discussions with client to understand their needs, recruited and trained lead technical personnel, program managers, resource managers, and new engineers.
• Software Engineering: Implemented state-of-the-art Software Engineering tools and practices.
• Management Accounting: Developed operational and financial reporting systems for internal and client use.
EAG, Inc. 1998 – 2002
President & CEO
Privately owned engineering services company with 6 employees, specializing in software solutions for customized manufacturing. Created business plans. Developed marketing materials. Raised seed investment.
OTHER EXPERIENCE
General Motors (Advanced Manufacturing Engineering Staff at GM Technical Center)
General Electric (Manufacturing Engineer at Corporate Automated Assembly Applications Center, Control Systems Lab at Corporate Research and Development, Design Engineer at Major Appliance Business Group)
Cincinnati Milacron (Treasurer’s Office Staff at Fortune 500 Machine Tool Manufacturer)
United States Air Force (Manufacturing Technology Directorate at Air Force Research Laboratories)
EDUCATION
RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Electrical Engineering 1984 – 1991
HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL: Master of Business Administration (MBA) 1982 – 1984
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN: Master of Science (MS), Mechanical Engineering 1980 – 1982
RICE UNIVERSITY: Bachelor of Science (BS), Electrical Engineering 1975 – 1979

PUBLICATIONS
OVER 1,000 CITATIONS AS LISTED ON GOOGLE SCHOLAR (http://tinyurl.com/bakerpubs)
Scholarly publications in Autonomous Systems, Multi-Agent Systems, Visual Programming Languages, Factory Control & Scheduling, Event-Parameterized Dynamic Systems, and Controls.

REFERENCES
References available at www.linkedin.com/in/bakerbert