With roughly 30 years under his belt at local manufacturer Stoughton Trailers, including more than a decade at its helm, President and CEO Bob Wahlin is looking to secure the future of the business his family founded for the next generation.
With plans to keep the business under family ownership, Wahlin is confident that Stoughton Trailers — which makes dry vans, refrigerated trailers, grain trailers and more — is well-positioned to weather immediate challenges like tariffs and a freight recession.
In fact, with a recently completed new headquarters, the company is anticipating better years ahead for the next crop of leaders and employees.
Did you always plan to join the family business?
I guess growing up I didn’t expect to necessarily go into the family business. I’ve got three boys (who are) college age now, and I don’t think they think too much about where they’re going to end up just yet, but they’re getting to that point.
A little over 15 years ago, I became president and CEO of Stoughton Trailers and STI Holdings. … It’s gotten pretty big over the last few years. We peaked a few years ago at $1.25 billion (in revenue), so we’ve grown quite a bit.
We’re a little off the beaten path — people sometimes don’t recognize Stoughton — but we’re definitely a growing company.
According to (In Business Madison), we’re Dane County’s largest manufacturer, which we’re pretty proud of.
I’ve been here full time for about 30 years. For my first job, I was a janitor at one of our manufacturing facilities in seventh grade. I was involved pretty early — summers throughout growing up — but I think I’ve worked every job in the company … at least every job out on the manufacturing floor. Those summer jobs were a great education as I was growing up.
As I was starting to interview in college with bigger companies, I got more and more drawn into the desire to work in an organization where you have ownership. It really motivated me to try to grow the business.
At Stoughton Trailers, we’re fully owned by family members, and the decisions we make are not decisions for trying to have a successful month or quarter or even year. The decisions we make are more to try to position ourselves generationally.
Tell us about your new headquarters.
As part of our new office building (at 1800 Greenbriar Drive in Stoughton), we’ve donated a significant amount of land for a large community park. We’re putting together that development — it’s going to be named Stoughton Trailers Community Park.
(The new headquarters) is really targeted for all generations, but with a particular focus on Gen Z and the other generations coming up that are maybe not entirely in the workforce yet. It focuses on physical, mental and business health.
On the physical health side, we’ve got full workout facilities, even a yoga room where we can bring instructors in and have yoga classes. We’ve got activities rooms that include a golf simulator and can simulate other sporting events, a cafe with a nice vibe and a pool table.
Especially as we attract people from further away — we have more and more people doing a commute from the Milwaukee area — having a workout facility and things like that was important to us.
For mental health, we designed the building … so everybody from every work station has access to natural light and views — windows all over overlooking what will be the community park.
Then there’s lots of outdoor working space, even an outdoor conference room area … so people can get out during the day, walk the trails, take calls and do meetings. (There are) lots of other collaborative workspaces where they can get out of their offices.
What other milestones have stood out in your career?
In the early 2000s, we lost a lot of our production to China, and particularly some of our intermodal equipment. … China came into that market a little over 20 years ago and wiped the entire North American manufacturing base out, and we took a big hit.
We were at a point where it was almost a near-death experience — not many people know that — but we really changed how we approached the business, our customer base, designs and manufacturing philosophies.
Then, a few years ago, we formed a coalition of U.S. manufacturers and did an antidumping and countervailing duty case (preventing foreign producers from selling a product in the U.S. at a price below normal value) with the Department of Commerce and U.S. International Trade Commission — kind of the old-school approach to tariffs.
We won that case and really brought that product back to U.S. manufacturing.
Being able to come out of that, reshore that manufacturing, bring those jobs back from China to people in Stoughton and Evansville and Broadhead … has been one of the things we are most proud of.
Now, we’ve got similar challenges. It’s classical U.S. manufacturing. It was China at one time, now it’s nearshoring into Mexico, and we’re competing with that. (We’re) approaching it a little differently in the nearshoring, where we are trying to win through significant investments in automation.
What’s the next horizon for you and the company?
We’re really positioned to continue that climb up in the transportation equipment industry. We’ve been steadily rising over the last few years. Right now, there’s a little bit of a freight recession, so our industry is paused a bit. It’s been tighter the last few years, but we’re positioned really well.
We’ve been gaining market share, growing our customer base and we’re ready to continue to move up that chain of companies, especially depending on what happens with tariffs.
We’re positioned better than our competition. A lot of our competition has relied on foreign resources and labor, where we’ve been primarily focused on U.S. manufacturing.
We’re also very vertically integrated, so where other companies are outsourcing certain elements of their work, we’re doing it all in-house.
Will Stoughton Trailers remain a family business?
We intend to still have family ownership, but how the business is managed has been shifting more to, I’ll say, outside professional management.
I think that’s natural in family businesses as they grow. So there’s some things changing in that respect, but we have no intention of selling it. We’re in it for the long haul, no pun intended.
This is what we do and what we’re committed to, and we plan to keep it that way.
