Q&A with President and CEO of Standex International Corp. David Dunbar

Standex CEO David Dunbar at the New York Stock Exchange in December 2024 to ring the closing bell. “Once you get beyond the number of people you can fit in a conference room, you know you need standard operating procedures, but you also need a sense of community or tribe that people belong to the same team.”

David Dunbar oversees an industrial manufacturing company that boasts an international reach from its headquarters in Salem, NH, and is primed for growth.

Standex International Corp. has five business segments: electronics, engineering technologies, scientific, engraving and specialty solutions. The company has operations in the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, Singapore, Mexico, Turkey, India and China.

Switches made by its electronics division are used in high-end coffee makers and automotive windshield washers. It also works with aerospace companies and makes parts that go on the fuel tanks of rockets.

Sales increased more than 23% to $222 million in the company’s 2025 fiscal year, Standex reported July 31, noting strong momentum from new products and fast growth markets.

“Our acquisitions continue to perform well, and we are investing towards their future growth,” Dunbar said in a press release.

Dunbar recently visited NH Business Review to appear as a guest on its “Down to Business” podcast. This article was adapted from that interview and edited for space and clarity.

Q. What does Standex do, and what is your history at the company?

A. Standex is a relatively old company. It was founded in 1955, and we’ve been on the New York Stock Exchange since 1969. A statistic we’re very proud of is in 1969, there were about 3,000 companies on the New York Stock Exchange, and of those less than 250 of them are still listed. We’re one of them. But the company has gone through a lot of transformations to still be around.

Originally, the business was founded by two men who spotted opportunities with family-owned businesses where the founder was reaching an exit point for whatever reason, and the kids were fighting, or there was a tax problem or there wasn’t a clear exit. They bought the businesses, and then they let them do what they did, and then they bought more businesses. At any time, they maybe had 30, 40, 50 different businesses.

From the time they were founded until the ‘90s, it was a really successful company. If you wanted to diversify your investment and wanted to invest in a small business in America, you could buy one share of Standex stock and effectively own 50 small companies.

There are very few companies like that now, but back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, industrial conglomerates were really common.

The only remaining one that people really know in America is Berkshire Hathaway, which is still a holding company with a lot of separate businesses that just do their own thing their own way.

When I joined, my predecessor had spent 12 years focusing the company. He went from 30 businesses down to the 16 that were there when I started. We have six now, and we’re much more focused. Our largest business is our electronics business.

Q. You have touch points all over the globe. How do you manage that with trying to grow locally but also trying to serve global industries?

A. The kind of people who work at Standex now are a little different than those who worked for Standex 20 years ago. Some people just love to be autonomous, and they love that holding company environment where they can do whatever they want. Well, now we want to check in a little more often. I want to know how you’re reinvesting that R&D, so show me the products that are in development.

Our CFO has calls with the finance teams every Monday, and then every month I get all the presidents on the phone and we talk, share best practices and give updates on the businesses. We have quarterly meetings and annual meetings.

We have a regular cadence all built around a lot of contact points, and that does many things. One of the things it does is reinforce culture, and that’s the underpinnings of everything to make it possible to run a global business or a business of any size.

Once you get beyond the number of people you can fit in a conference room, you know you need standard operating procedures, but you also need a sense of community or tribe that people belong to the same team. We focus a lot on culture.

Q. Give us an example of something maybe you needed to change for culture, or maybe six different companies doing a certain thing a different way?

A. I think one thing that had to change is this conception that everybody is best if they’re just independent, without any connections to the rest of the business if they just deliver results. They love that autonomy. But some of them weren’t as good as they thought they were. And we could just compare within the company. If you compare the results of a site in, say, Michigan to a site in Germany, they can start to learn from each other.

That takes a certain humility and openness and trust in the system that we’re not doing this to be punitive and show that you’re not so good. But, hey, here’s somebody you can learn from if you want to do the best you can.