In April 2000, Anne Eiting Klamar arrived for a board meeting at Midmark, her family’s medical equipment business, expecting to work with her fellow board members to choose the company’s next president.
During the meeting, the other board members asked her to leave the room. When she returned, she was shocked to learn the board had decided she was the best candidate.
For Klamar, the opportunity was not exactly a dream come true. “I was not terribly thrilled,” she recalls. But it didn’t occur to her to refuse. “I’m the oldest child. The company has been in the family for generations.”
And so began Klamar’s journey as an accidental CEO. A strong collaboration with the board, her family and her team, she says, has been instrumental in her success.
Klamar, now 49, was not a stranger to the company. She had been a member of Midmark’s board since 1993 and had served part-time as its medical director since 1998.
But she was living in Urbana, Ohio—about an hour away from Midmark’s Versailles, Ohio, headquarters—with her husband, Rob, and their young sons. She and Rob had met in medical school and were practicing medicine together—her part-time, him full-time. They even shared a desk.
Giving that up for a major role with the family firm was not part of her career plan. But Klamar, who had earned a bachelor’s degree in economics before entering medical school, wanted to see Midmark’s long history continue.
The company was founded as a manufacturer of cement mixers in 1915 (under the name The Cummings Machine Co.) by a group that included Klamar’s great-grandfather. It shifted toward the medical equipment market, then into dental and veterinary equipment, after her father became the third-generation president in 1969.
Today, thanks to a series of acquisitions, Midmark has more than 1,000 employees worldwide. (Klamar declines to disclose company revenues.) It also has a partnership with a company in India. “We’re focused on efficiency in the health care market,” Klamar says.
Klamar became president during a period of instability in the company’s leadership. The brother whom their father had hoped would one day take over the business had left the company. An outside president who was appointed after her father’s retirement in 1995 turned out not to mesh well with Midmark’s needs.
Klamar’s father returned as president in 1999. But the company had problems to confront, and the board told Klamar’s father that he might need to sell.
Naming Klamar president was the alternative.
“We knew she was very, very bright and probably, [when] put to the test, she would do OK,” says Dave Phillips, who was a board member when Klamar was selected and became board chairman in 2009.
In addition to the board’s support, Klamar had the support of her two siblings who work for the company. Neither of them was interested in the president’s job.
“It was just perfect timing,” says Klamar’s brother Mitch Eiting, 44, who joined Midmark in 1986 and today is the company’s corporate services manager. “She was a practicing physician, and we needed her knowledge. And with her economics background, she knew the theory behind the business concepts.”
“It was a surprise to me because I didn’t know that she was in contention for the job,” says Klamar’s sister, Polly Grow, 46, who works in cabinetry customer service for the company. “It was not one in the sense that she’s very smart, probably the most driven of all of us.”
Steep learning curve
Klamar’s early years as president were not easy. The company’s leadership changes and financial instability had taken a toll. “Plus,” Klamar adds, “I had no business experience.”
The new job also required a big adjustment for her family. Two months after Klamar became Midmark’s president, the family moved to Versailles and her husband reduced his medical practice.
“Going from being the breadwinner to being a part-time physician and taking care of groceries and the house and the kids, that was a real transition for him,” Klamar says. “He did a great job at a really difficult time.”
Rob Klamar describes that period as “an overwhelming time,” as he and Anne both made huge adjustments in their personal and professional lives. He says his wife’s networking ability helped her learn the business and learn to enjoy her work. For example, he says, she did not like business travel initially, since she was alone much of the time. But as she made contacts in the industry, business travel “turned into a group of friends she could visit,” Rob Klamar says. “Her comfort level has really grown, her confidence level has really grown, her skills have really grown.”
On a professional level, Klamar had a lot to learn about running a company.
“She was not a businessperson,” says Jack Moore, a fourth-generation member and former director of Benjamin Moore & Co. (acquired by Berkshire Hathaway in 2000). “She did not know how to develop strategy or how to run an organization,” says Moore, who met Klamar when she attended his family business governance seminar.
This became apparent in 2002, when the business was operating more smoothly and the board asked Klamar for a strategic plan. She hired a consultant to help her and worked for six months on a 29-page document. When she presented it to the board, the members told her, “‘This is a bunch of platitudes—it has nothing to do with the future of Midmark,’” she recalls.
“I was devastated,” Klamar says. “I couldn’t even wear the suit I wore to that board meeting again.” But she was determined to learn how to write a good strategic plan. She told the board she wanted to go back to school.
Klamar chose an executive education program at Harvard, an intense experience that included several weeks of classes each year for three years. She did not revisit her original document, but ultimately, she delivered a strategic plan for each division of the company.
Klamar credits the board, which named her CEO as well as president in 2003, with helping her through those difficult first years.
“Every time I thought I was drowning, they’d pull me out of the water and shake me off, then throw me back in,” she says.
Phillips helped Klamar with finance issues, such as reviewing the executive team’s compensation and retirement plans. He says he and other board members knew they needed to help her grow into her new role. “There was a concentrated effort on the part of a couple of us to mentor her and help prepare her,” says Phillips, who had a 32-year career at Arthur Andersen and held senior leadership positions there before retiring in 1994 to head Downtown Cincinnati Inc., an organization that focuses on economic revitalization of the city. Phillips retired from CEO responsibilities at Downtown Cincinnati in 1999 to co-found Cincinnati Works—a non-profit organization that works to eliminate poverty in the Cincinnati area—with his wife, Liane, and to establish a financial consulting practice. He serves on numerous corporate boards.
Linda Doyle, a former professor at the Harvard program, says Klamar started out listening more than talking in class discussions.
“But you would never catch her not being totally prepared,” says Doyle, who is now retired and sits on Midmark’s board. “Anne is smart, dedicated, motivated like few people I have ever seen, and she is a sponge when it comes to learning.” She also “takes input and critiquing better than just about any human being I’ve ever met,” Doyle says.
Klamar’s story is a good example of a board’s partnership with a CEO, Moore says, citing in particular Phillips’ role as a mentor. “With a different board, she might very well have failed,” Moore speculates.
After a decade in the job, “I’m enjoying it, even in these trying economic times,” Klamar says.
New directions
The family controls the company, though there are other shareholders as well. About once a month, Klamar, Grow and Eiting get together to look over the company’s financials. “Anne is very open communicating with Mitch and me and doesn’t want anything to be a surprise,” Grow says. (Their father retired in 2009 as chairman of the board.)
“We are the stewards of the company,” Klamar says. “We take a lot of pride in it.”
With the support of her family and the board, Klamar has moved the company in new directions. When Klamar took over, the company had a large share of the market for exam tables.
“My dad had done a great job,” Klamar says. “People were pretty content with how the company was run.”
But she could see that this market alone would not propel the company into the future. “Anybody can make exam tables anywhere in the world,” Klamar says. “An exam table is good, but it doesn’t help physicians get home on time or see more patients.” She wanted to change the company’s focus to making medicine more efficient, for example by selling products that transmit the data they gather directly to electronic medical records. She is also looking at developing value-added services for medical practitioners.
“She gave Midmark an absolute shot of adrenaline when we needed it most,” says Bill Cron, associate dean of the business school at Texas Christian University and a member of Midmark’s board. “She is very high-energy, very positive, optimistic but pragmatic. There are no flowery speeches, just substance.”
Klamar also worked to transform the company’s board functions to match the company’s grander ambitions. “The board went from a good-old-boy board to a professional board under Anne’s leadership,” Phillips says. “We’ve got a governance committee, a strategic planning committee, everything that you ought to have.”
Klamar’s visions of transformation don’t end with Midmark or its customers. Through an acquaintance, she learned about a dental school in Tanzania that lacked modern equipment. She decided that Midmark and some other companies would donate training and supplies.
Doyle says Klamar was uncertain at first about whether it was OK to spend Midmark’s resources on a project of this type. “I said, ‘Anne, you’re the CEO, you set the direction of the company,’” Doyle recalls. She told Klamar that the project was consistent with Midmark’s values, and employees would be “thrilled to have leaders who care like that.”
The fact that Klamar didn’t work her way up through the ranks makes her a somewhat unusual CEO. And observers say this may be part of the reason she comes across as both humble and collaborative.
“She doesn’t have that arrogance about her that some CEOs display,” says Sharyl Gardner, chief administrative officer at Midmark.
In some ways, Klamar is continuing a family style of leadership that her father practiced. When Mike Walker, who today is vice president and general manager of Midmark’s veterinary division, started at the company 23 years ago, Klamar’s father stopped by as he spoke to a worker on the assembly line. He waited while Walker finished his conversation, then welcomed him to the company. “I never forgot that, ever,” Walker says. “It was a fantastic impression.”
When Klamar came on board, Walker says, “There was that perception of the same type of culture and fit that her dad had perpetrated throughout the business.”
Klamar’s style of leadership is more consultative than her father’s, though, observers say, partly because of her personality and partly because the company has grown more complex than when her father was running it.
The company’s slogan, “Because We Care,” ends every e-mail message employees send and is on employees’ business cards. It predates Klamar’s leadership, but she has given it new meaning.
“She is embodied in that tagline,” Phillips says. “It is a character of the organization. She really lives that.”
In addition to pursuing her own learning, Klamar encourages employees who want more education. Walker decided to get his MBA while working for Klamar. “She couldn’t have been more effusive in her support,” he says. Her support—both financial and in terms of encouragement—made “all the difference in the world” to him while he was balancing school, family and work.
Klamar has been recognized for her professional success outside the company. She received a lifetime achievement award from the Health Industry Distribution Association, which is generally given to long-tenured industry professionals, Doyle says. “Anne is young to receive such recognition.”
Klamar helped start a group called Professional Women in Healthcare to promote networking and mentoring among women in the field. “She saw that women were underrepresented in senior positions in this industry, and so she helped develop this membership organization whose vision is to see the health care industry equally led by women,” Doyle says.
Klamar is firmly focused on the future—both the company’s and her own. She wants the company to move into the digital diagnostics area and beyond technologically. “Efficiency isn’t just about making a better medical table,” she says. “It’s about changing the information flow and work flow.”
She is also working on a succession plan—one that would allow one of the six children in her kids’ generation to run the company someday but would also allow them not to. She wants her team to have several members who could take her place.
“My sister and brother and I have not raised any of the children with the expectation that they will even have a job at this company, much less run it,” she says. Still, “if one steps forward, great.”
Klamar says she hopes to have a successor in place in five to ten years so she can focus on other interests, such as global philanthropy, board service for private companies, teaching and mentoring women in business. But she is prepared to stay on longer if necessary. “I’ll always do the right thing for the company and the family,” she says.
Margaret Steen is a freelance writer based in Los Altos, Calif.