Meet the President
John R. “Jack” Smith, President of Sanford Rose Associates – Milwaukee, has served a broad base of small, medium, and Fortune 500 sized U. S. and international companies in the industrial, manufacturing, supply chain, environmental remediation services, and human resources outsourcing sectors. Jack has recruited chief executive and chief operating officers, and group and business unit presidents and managing directors for public and private companies. He has also recruited senior corporate officers across key functional disciplines in accounting, finance, information technology, business development, sales and marketing,manufacturing, engineering, R&D, Six Sigma and lean, human resources, and supply chain.
Prior to his career in executive search, Jack enjoyed serving as president and CEO of his own award winning human resources outsourcing firm (Barton Employment Outsourcing, LLC), president of an industry leading environmental remediation services company (GNB Environmental Services, Inc,) and general manager of a best-in-class industrial welding equipment manufacturing company (a division of ITW Miller Electric). During his career Jack has also enjoyed serving for over 17 years as senior vice president of human resources and administration for three top performing Fortune 500 industrial and supply chain companies (GNB Technologies, Inc., Integris Metals, Inc. and EnPro Industries, Inc.).
In these roles, Jack helped to develop strategically aligned performance based cultures involving over 25,000 employees throughout the United States and in over 35 other countries. He has helped CEO’s, functional executives and managers throughout all levels of these organizations to significantly improve how they strategically determined their human capital needs and how they identified, hired and developed their leaders. Jack has a proven track record of finding, getting and keeping top leadership talent in the key roles in the organizations he has served. During his career he has demonstrated success executing organizational change, productivity improvement, and high impact profit improvement strategies utilizing lean, Six Sigma, kaizen and other continual improvement methodologies. He holds a Six Sigma black belt certification.
Jack holds a BA and MBA from California State University, Fullerton, California. He has also completed post graduate studies at the University of Melbourne Business School, Melbourne, Australia and Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin while working toward a Ph.D. in organization change readiness and strategic human resources.
Jack serves as co-chairman of the WWS Foundation in support of Royal Family Kids Camps for abused and abandoned children, on the boards of Students in Free Enterprise and Etude School for the Arts and Academics, and was a past board member of the Metals Service Center Institute and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. He is a member of the Society of Human Resources Management and was a past member of Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, National Association of Professional Employer Organizations, and Battery Council International.
Jack thoroughly enjoys his family, fly fishing, the Green Bay Packers, CSU Fullerton Titan baseball, golf and reading. He and his wife Kristine live in Kohler, WI. Back to Top