Don Nolan and the value of things you barely notice

For twelve years, Don Nolan helped oversee Apogee Enterprises from its board. On October 31, 2025, he became responsible for running it. The independent chair became executive chair and chief executive, succeeding Ty Silberhorn. It was a short journey on an organizational chart and a considerable change in the working day. Oversight had become an operating assignment.

Apogee makes architectural products and coated materials: glass, windows, curtainwall and storefront systems, among other things. Its work is often encountered through something else. You look through a window at the view. You admire the picture behind the protective glazing. The materials succeed partly by letting another object take the attention. There are quieter ways to spend a business career than selling the object everyone notices first.

Nolan’s path has passed through steel, industrial chemicals, coatings, labeling materials and cutting tools. The company names change; materials keep turning up. Read as a whole, his career offers a useful question: what can an executive carry from one technically demanding business into another, and what must be learned again?

The engineer who started in sales

Kennametal’s introduction of Nolan in 2014 named Royal Oak, Michigan, as his hometown. His education joined three disciplines that would recur in his working life. He earned a bachelor’s degree in materials and metallurgical engineering at the University of Michigan, a master’s in mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an MBA back at Michigan.

Those qualifications offer different ways of looking at the same product. Materials engineering concerns what it is made of. Mechanical engineering concerns how it behaves in a system. Business asks whether someone will buy it, at what price, and with what return. A technically satisfying answer can still leave the commercial question wide open.

His career began at Latrobe Steel, then part of Timken. Early assignments included sales at General Electric and sales and marketing work across Ashland Chemical and Loctite. The sequence matters. Before his public-company chief executive roles, there were jobs connecting industrial products with customers. Selling gives a practical audience to technical knowledge: somebody has to decide that the proposed improvement is worth paying for.

He subsequently spent twelve years at Valspar, from 1996 to 2008, advancing through executive roles in coatings. By the time he left, he was senior vice president of Global Packaging and Automotive Coatings. The business put him close to another sort of background performer: a surface treatment whose usefulness depends on the demands of the product beneath it.

Avery Dennison’s very large roll of material

In March 2008, Avery Dennison appointed Nolan group vice president of Roll Materials, based in Mentor, Ohio. The assignment covered long-term strategy and growth for its global roll-materials operations. The company’s pressure-sensitive segment, which included that business, had recorded approximately $3.5 billion in sales in 2007. A label may be small. The industry supplying it has rather different dimensions.

The brief was explicit about both growth and margins. Nolan was entering a competitive business where manufacturing performance and customer demand had to be considered together. By 2012, according to Kennametal’s later proxy biography, he was president of Avery Dennison’s Materials Group. When Kennametal recruited him in 2014, it described that group as a $4.5 billion operation.

Apogee had already noticed him. In June 2013, it elected Nolan to its board and assigned him to the audit committee. The announcement emphasized experience growing businesses internationally, developing products and markets, and improving profitability through manufacturing efficiencies, pricing and material costs. That combination would become a recurring description of what boards wanted from him.

Fifteen months at Kennametal

Nolan became Kennametal’s president and CEO on November 17, 2014. The company made tooling and wear-resistant solutions for demanding industrial applications. At his appointment, it described a business serving customers in 60 countries, with approximately 14,000 employees and nearly $3 billion in sales. For someone trained in materials and metallurgy, the technical connection was clear.

The appointment came with expectations about growth, customer engagement, innovation and the cost structure. Yet this chapter was short. Nolan left on February 3, 2016; Ronald De Feo became chief executive the next day. Roughly fifteen months separated the arrival announcement from the end of the assignment.

The operating context was difficult. Kennametal’s February 2016 results described pressure in key markets, a sale of non-core businesses and substantial charges. Quarterly sales were $524 million, compared with $676 million a year earlier. The company attributed the decline to weaker underlying demand, currency effects and divestitures. It is a period that deserves to remain in the account of his career, alongside the appointments and praise.

There was recognition during those months, too. In October 2015, Michigan’s materials science and engineering department named Nolan its Alumni Merit Award recipient. Its account also noted his service on the university’s Engineering Advisory Council. Academic recognition and a demanding corporate assignment occupied the same stretch of the calendar. Careers are capable of containing both.

Glue, molds and the business of combinations

After Kennametal, Nolan appeared in another part of the materials economy: privately owned specialty businesses. In 2018, Arsenal Capital Partners identified him as interim CEO and board chair of Meridian Adhesives Group. Meridian was building a portfolio of adhesive technologies through acquisitions, including Epoxy Technology and Adhesives Technology Corporation.

Later that year, Meridian added W.F. Taylor, a flooring-adhesives business. Taylor’s chief executive, Dan Pelton, became Meridian’s CEO, with Nolan identified as board chair. The sequence is a concrete example of the work behind the broad phrase “portfolio building”: bringing businesses together, adding applications and arranging leadership for the combined organization.

Nolan also chaired Polytek’s board. Its specialty polymers served mold-making and casting applications, including sculpture, special effects, tooling and prototyping. The connection to his previous work lies in the commercial use of material properties. The settings could hardly be more varied. A factory tool and a film effect can both depend on the behavior of a polymer.

These roles extended his record beyond the large public company. A board chair working through acquisitions faces decisions about which capabilities belong together, which customers they might reach, and who should run the resulting business. Those are useful experiences to consider when looking at the acquisitions that would later arrive at Apogee.

The chair gets a closer view

Nolan became Apogee’s independent chair in January 2020. In August 2023, he joined Silberhorn and colleagues at Nasdaq’s opening bell to celebrate forty years of Apogee’s listing. It was a public moment for a director whose work usually took place away from the exchange’s cameras.

Two years later, his responsibilities changed. When Apogee appointed him CEO, its board also said it would evaluate internal and external succession candidates. The announcement paired his familiarity with the business with an ongoing succession process. It did not present the appointment as the conclusion of every leadership question.

By January 2026, Nolan was describing the difference between board knowledge and executive experience. His first two months as CEO, he said, had given him a deeper perspective. Customers’ comments about product quality and reliability featured in those observations. He offered a compact statement of his approach:

“companies that delight their customers win in the market.”

Don Nolan, January 2026 earnings call

It is a broad principle with specific consequences in industrial businesses. Reliability has to survive manufacturing and delivery. Customer confidence has to be earned again on the next order. The principle connects his early sales assignments with his later responsibility for operations, without requiring every company along the way to have been the same.

Daylight, reflection and the next set of decisions

In July 2026, Apogee completed its acquisition of Kalwall, a manufacturer of translucent daylighting solutions. Groglass joined in September, bringing anti-reflective coating capabilities. The two additions extended the company’s materials portfolio in different directions: how light enters a building, and how reflections are controlled on a viewing surface.

Kalwall also brought a long-established identity. At closing, Apogee described a business with a 71-year brand history and proprietary polymer and coating application processes. The transaction was valued at up to $115 million. Its brands included Kalwall, Structures Unlimited and Kal-lite. For Nolan, the acquisition added both another technical capability and relationships with architects - a commercial audience whose specifications help determine which materials reach a building.

The October results supplied a dated checkpoint. Apogee reported $391.1 million in fiscal 2027 second-quarter sales, up 9.2% from a year earlier. Kalwall contributed $16.4 million. Pricing and product mix also helped, while lower volume offset part of the gain. The company raised its full-year adjusted earnings guidance. These were company results, shaped by many employees and decisions made over time.

In his October earnings-call discussion, Nolan described Kalwall integration across finance, human resources, sales and marketing. He said the approach aimed to preserve the strengths of the acquired business while bringing it into Apogee. He also described Groglass as expanding technical capabilities and the company’s European presence. These were plans and management assessments at that moment, with the practical results of integration still to unfold.

For Nolan, the work now includes integrating those businesses while running the operations already there. His long association with Apogee gives this chapter continuity; the chief executive’s responsibilities give it a different test. The public chronology has brought him from selling materials to overseeing companies, then back into daily leadership. The next judgment will depend on what those businesses deliver.