Edward Russnow is an accomplished leader in the electrical power and mass transit industries, currently serving as President of MAC Products, Inc. and MAC-IMPulse, LLC. With a robust background in engineering management and entrepreneurship, he has successfully guided his companies to become key players in the market by focusing on high-quality manufacturing and innovative solutions. Edward’s leadership philosophy emphasizes team building and fostering a culture of excellence, which he believes is crucial for business success. His extensive experience spans over 50 years in the industry, highlighting his commitment to quality and customer satisfaction. Additionally, he has served as Vice Chairman for the Foundation Fighting Blindness, showcasing his dedication to social causes. Edward holds a Bachelor of Business Administration with a specialization in International Finance from The George Washington University.
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Chris Santomassimo: Welcome to The Think Factory podcast powered by OGC Solutions. And I’m your host today, Chris Santomassimo, on site in Kearney, New Jersey. I’m sitting here today with Ed Russnow, who’s the president of Mac Products. Well, welcome to the podcast.
Edward Russnow: Pleasure to be here. Happy for you coming in and seeing our facility and seeing what we do.
Chris Santomassimo: I was excited to learn about the company, you know, and as we talked about when we first got together, I really love to see these successful, multi-generational products companies like yours, you know, doing, and you’ll talk about it in more detail, but these really customized special products right in our backyard here in New Jersey and right here in the United States, most importantly.
So we love spending time with companies like yours to, you know, tell people who you are and over 60 years of business, maybe you’ve got, and I know you’ve got quite the network of folks, but it never hurts to just get a little fresh air and a little bit of light shining on the company. So tell us a little bit about the history of Mac and what you folks do for your customers.
Edward Russnow: Great, well, Chris, again, thanks for being here. As you noted, the company Mac Products has been in business under current ownership for 60 years. This is actually our 60th anniversary this year. My father-in-law started the business, bought it out of bankruptcy from a company that had been in business for about 20 years prior to that and had been manufacturing in, I believe it was Hoboken.
Then over time, as the business got more successful, he was able to branch out into other parts of the electrical infrastructure market. We got opportunities with mass transit here in the metropolitan area, New York City Transit being probably our first go at it in the electrified mass transit business. And then as we got more successful and had more opportunities within Con Edison and PSE&G here in New Jersey, our product line just kept growing.
One of the things about the company is that we don’t back away from challenges. A customer comes to us and says, “Hey, you manufactured this product for us now, would you be interested in looking at this other product where we feel it is still within your wheelhouse of capability?” […]
[…] We are a solutions-based manufacturer because we have many talented engineers, many talented craftsmen on our shop floor. We don’t have to solve the solution with engineers all the time. Our shop people are plenty capable of solving problems for our customers. So it’s really a combination of having very strong engineering capabilities and having very strong machining and manufacturing people in the shop.
Chris Santomassimo: Well, both of those categories of employees historically, or at least in the recent history, have been really hard to find. So how do you find them and how do you keep them? And how do you get them to work together effectively?
Edward Russnow: Yeah, that’s a great question because certainly being in the state of New Jersey, it’s not easy to be a manufacturer.
We’ve been very fortunate over the years that the majority of our staff are first or second generation immigrants. This is an amazing area of an immigrant population. We have seven first languages that are spoken at this company.
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