Jim Minadeo is the President and Owner of Zero Surge Inc., leading the company with over 37 years of experience in sales, engineering, and leadership. He focuses on providing high-quality surge protection solutions that are built to last, ensuring reliable performance for homes, businesses, and critical industries. His hands-on approach and commitment to excellence have helped Zero Surge stand out as a trusted name in power protection.
Outside of work, Jim is a passionate pianist who has been playing for over 45 years. He turned his love for music into a fun side gig with his band, Timeless Groove, performing in central New Jersey.
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Paul Salvatoriello: Hello, welcome to the Think Factory podcast powered by OGC Solutions. My name is Paul Salvatoriello, Counselor with OGC Solutions, and I’m your host of today’s episode.
On today’s show, we will be delving back into the world of electricity and protecting your electric products and appliances, particularly manufacturing in New Jersey, with Zero Surge Incorporated, an industry leader in the manufacturing of premium quality American-made surge protectors, and award winner from Huntington County for helping PAC Huntington succeed, which was a technology group slash computing competition.
And I am very excited to bring to the podcast today, Jim Minadeo, the President and Owner of Zero Surge Incorporated. So, welcome to the podcast.
Jim Minadeo: Thank you, Paul. Thank you for having me. It’s fun to be here. We’ve had a great conversation already. We’ll hope to continue it here with everybody listening to us.
Paul Salvatoriello: Totally. Yeah, Jim and I have had such a phenomenal conversation.I wish the audience could have heard all this stuff that we covered. I think we solved all the problems of the world.
It’s great to have you here, Jim, live in studio. Now, the firm, my firm, learned a little bit about Zero Surge and its story as a few of our colleagues from the New Jersey Manufacturing Extension Program, the NJMEP. So, after meeting you there, we just had to invite you to the Think Factory to learn more firsthand. So, Jim, let’s start at the beginning of Zero Surge’s rich history.
Jim Minadeo: So, we were founded in 1989 by Rudy Harford. He’s a former engineer from RCA, back when RCA Television was big. He worked at the famous Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton and had like 30 patents in color television—and I would say it’s partly the reason we have color television, because of Rudy.
When he was consulting for Samsung and they were having issues with printers failing in their computer network, he figured out that the reason was because of surge damage and the way traditional surge protectors worked. Eventually he came up with a better way of doing surge protection, and started manufacturing them in his barn, and then moved into us where we are today—which is we’re sitting in a converted chicken coop that Rudy built himself with his partner.
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