🔒Former Proton OnSite CEO Friedland looks to lead Columbia Manufacturing to new heights

Back in 1996, Rob Friedland was a 30-something CEO of a newly founded startup Proton OnSite, ready to build the hydrogen-generation manufacturer into a force.

Nearly 25 years later, and after Proton sold for about $70 million, Friedland is in his second act as CEO of Columbia Manufacturing Inc., with the intention of bringing the aerospace engine-parts maker to the next level in terms of revenue and profitability.

“Just maintaining the status quo is not something that’s typically exciting to me, I want to really take the company from point A to point B,” Friedland said. “There is a lot of opportunity here to create Columbia 2.0.”

And the way Friedland sees it, his experience up to this point positions him to do just that.

From the time he was studying engineering at Syracuse University, Friedland knew he wanted to work in manufacturing. While still a student there in the mid-1980s, he took a co-op position at Carrier Corp., the distributor and maker of HVAC and other systems that had been recently acquired by now Farmington-based United Technologies Corp.

After finishing college in 1987 with full-time and part-time experience as a manufacturing engineer, Friedland opted for a job at Hamilton Standard, another UTC subsidiary at the time that made advanced aerospace and industrial parts for aircraft systems, and the industrial/energy and space/defense industries. The job brought the West Hartford native back to Connecticut.

“I like technology, so the fact that we were [working on] either Navy programs, or space programs, I found to be pretty interesting,” Friedland said.

Friedland worked his way up at Hamilton, eventually becoming Navy program operations manager, working on oxygen-generation equipment for submarines. It was there where he and three colleagues came up with the concept for what would become Proton OnSite.

The quartet figured electrolysis technology, which delivers hydrogen by using electricity to split water molecules, could be commercialized and set out on their own to raise venture capital funds and start a business.

“We were young enough, our families were young enough that the risk/reward ratio seemed to make sense,” said Friedland, who was about 30 at the time. “So, we were able to … start Proton really in a commercialization effort to take a technology that they were using for military and space, and really bring it into the commercial sectors.”

After several rounds of fundraising, and bringing on Goldman Sachs alum Chip Schroeder as CEO, the group founded Proton in 1996. The company’s technology allows for limitless production of hydrogen, and it sold its hydrogen-generation equipment to gas vendors, and companies in industries like utilities and heat treating.

By the time Proton was sold to Norway’s NEL ASA for $70 million in 2017, the company, then owned by Lumber Liquidators founder Tom Sullivan, had about 80 employees, and was doing about $20 million in annual revenue.

Friedland was CEO at the time and had an ownership stake. He said he thought it was the best deal available and a good time for him to shift gears professionally.

“I had been doing that for a long time, since ‘96, so it was over 20 years,” said Friedland, who declined to say how much money he reaped from the sale.

Through friends and colleagues, Friedland heard of an opportunity at Columbia Manufacturing, an eastern Connecticut family owned company that makes and supplies precision metal components for turbine engines.

Friedland started as chief operating officer then became CEO a year ago. The company currently does about $20 million in annual sales.

A year into his tenure leading Columbia Manufacturing, Friedland said he’s focusing on efficiencies that increase the number of projects the company can handle for customers like General Electric (which makes up about 70 percent of Columbia’s business) and Pratt & Whitney. For example, Friedland thinks the company, which employs about 100 people, is operating at about 50 percent capacity, with just a skeleton crew working the second of two shifts.

“This place could easily do $30 million of business without breaking down walls or adding a significant amount of investment,” Friedland said.

While 2020 will likely be a transitional year, Friedland said Columbia will see a real uptick in 2021, especially as GE and others begin to notice the company’s ability to handle an increasing number of contracts and work.

Check out a video clip of Rob Friedland's interview here.