SIOUX CITY -- Longtime Thompson Solutions Group CEO Skip Perley is planning to retire at the end of the year.
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Beaulieu
Renee Beaulieu, the company's president, chief financial officer and treasurer, will serve as Thompson's next CEO, beginning Jan. 1, 2025, the Thompson board of directors announced this week.
Beaulieu has been with with Thompson since 1993; she worked her way up from controller to CFO by 1996.
Perley, who joined Thompson in 1976 as an electrician, has been the company's CEO since 1998. Under his leadership the company has grown considerably from its roots as a small electrical contractor: Today, Thompson workers specialize in everything from electrical construction to HVAC and mechanical to plumbing and industrial piping to security to IT to automation and robotics and architectural sheetmetal.
Thompson's automation and robotics specialties have grown rapidly. Perley told The Journal previously that demand for robotic systems is "just exploding." He has stressed in the past that the jobs taken by robots are generally "dull, dirty or dingy," and thus unattractive to human workers.
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The final few years of his career at Thompson were consequential ones in the history of the company. At the beginning of 2023, a merger between the former Thompson Electric and Interstate Mechanical Corporation went into effect, creating a far larger Thompson organization that employed around 650 people as of last year. It was not a hostile or parsimonious merger: Every person at both companies kept their job, Perley said last year, including the former heads of Interstate Mechanical, James Olson and Wes Hunold, who now sit on the Thompson board.
“Strategically, we felt that this kind of a merger was really good for us,” he said in 2023, after the merger was announced.
And under a deal that closed at the end of last June, Thompson became a partly employee-owned firm, with about 25 percent of the ownership of the company in the ESOP (or employee stock ownership plan). ESOPs function essentially as an employee retirement benefit, with an employee's accumulated shares in the company being cashed out at retirement.
Thompson's ESOP, Perley said last year, was a matter of “just figuring out how to assure the long-term success of our company – we’re approaching 100 years old now, and we want to make sure that we’re set up to go another 100 years.”
Last fall, Perley was bestowed the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce's prestigious W. Edwards Deming Business Leadership and Entrepreneurial Excellence Award.