Jonathan Painter and the business of what comes next

A conveyor is an unlikely place to look for a theory of leadership. It moves things from here to there, asks for maintenance, and rarely receives applause. In December 2018, Jonathan Painter explained why Kadant wanted to buy a company that made them. Syntron Material Handling had a history of steady earnings, equipment that mattered to its customers, and an aftermarket business. The attraction lay partly in what happened after the first sale.

There is a useful clue to Painter in that last detail. An industrial machine arrives once. Its working life creates a much longer relationship. Parts wear out. Customers need replacements. The supplier has another opportunity to be useful. During his years as Kadant’s chief executive, Painter helped extend that logic across wood processing, recycling and material handling. The machinery changed; the commercial reasoning kept a familiar shape.

Now the calendar has a different sort of replacement on it. Painter, Kadant’s chairman as of October 2026, is scheduled to leave its board on January 2, 2027. He stopped being CEO in 2019. His career offers a story about buying businesses, certainly, but also about passing responsibility between people who have spent decades learning one another’s judgment.

A lawyer among the machines

Painter’s preparation for industrial leadership included political science at Kenyon College and a law degree from Boston College. His early corporate work took him through legal and financial responsibilities at Thermo Electron, the former parent of Kadant. From 1994 to 1997, he served as treasurer of both organizations. By 1997, he was an executive vice president at Kadant.

The sequence matters because his experience crossed the boundary between evaluating a business and running one. He led Kadant’s composites building products operation from 2001 until its sale in 2005. A transaction has a price, a contract and a completion date. An operating company has tomorrow morning. Painter’s résumé contains both kinds of obligation.

The composites sale also supplies a small corrective to the picture of the acquisitive executive. Businesses can leave the portfolio as well as enter it. When the transaction closed, Painter thanked the advisers who had helped identify and negotiate with potential buyers. His account emphasized the process of finding a suitable purchaser. Buying was one instrument available to him; selling was another.

In the same year, he negotiated Kadant’s purchase of The Johnson Corporation, later Kadant Johnson. Before becoming CEO, he already had experience with the company’s acquisitions, operating divisions and finances. His promotion therefore followed a long apprenticeship inside an existing institution. There was no garage in this particular industrial origin story. There were rather more balance sheets.

The second sale is part of the first

Kadant appointed Painter president and chief operating officer in September 2009. He became CEO on January 3, 2010, succeeding William Rainville. The arrangement kept Rainville involved as executive chairman during the transition. Painter entered the chief executive’s job with an experienced predecessor still available, a practical detail that would recur when his own turn to hand over arrived.

His acquisition choices show how Kadant expanded from its pulp and paper roots. In November 2013, it agreed to buy Carmanah Design and Manufacturing for approximately US$52 million, subject to adjustment. Carmanah made stranders for oriented strand board, the engineered wood panels used in home construction, as well as debarking and wood chipping equipment. Kadant completed the purchase that month.

The equipment widened Kadant’s reach into forest products. It also brought an installed base of machines and associated demand for parts and consumables. That combination became a recurring theme: seek a position in a process the customer needs to keep running, then remain involved through the equipment’s working life. A spare part has few opportunities for theatricality. Its absence can make quite an entrance.

In April 2016, Kadant bought PAAL, the German-headquartered maker of channel balers and related machinery for recyclable and waste materials. The announced price was approximately €51 million, or US$58 million. Painter singled out its aftermarket business and product innovation. Recycling gave Kadant another industrial setting in which machinery, wear and repeat customer contact belonged together.

The following January, Kadant appointed Bulk Handling Systems to distribute its balers to material recycling facilities in the United States and Canada. It also announced its first American channel-baler order, for a waste recovery facility in Monterey, California. Here was the less glamorous work after a deal: distribution, access to customers, an actual order. The acquisition supplied an opening; somebody still had to walk through it.

Growing without buying a fantasy

Another step came in July 2017, when Kadant completed the acquisition of NII FPG’s forest products business for approximately $173 million, net of cash acquired and subject to adjustment. Its equipment served sawmills and veneer mills. More than half its business came from parts and consumables, a characteristic Painter had highlighted when the deal was announced in May.

That proportion helps explain the purchase better than a photograph of a machine could. Kadant was adding customers and products, but it was also adding an established pattern of repeat demand. The attraction was attached to equipment already at work. The future did not have to begin with persuading every customer to build an entirely new plant.

The financial discipline behind these transactions was unusually plain in Kadant’s March 2019 investor presentation. Its acquisition model used conservative assumptions and allowed for little or no synergies. Targets were to be profitable and well managed, with stable growth and substantial aftermarket sales. There is an appealing lack of romance in this. The arithmetic was expected to stand up before the promised improvements arrived.

“He is frankly a better operating guy than I am.”

Jonathan Painter on Jeffrey Powell, February 2019 earnings call

Syntron carried that approach into additional process industries. Kadant announced the transaction in December 2018 and completed it on January 2, 2019, for approximately $179 million, subject to customary adjustments. Syntron’s conveying and vibratory equipment served mining, aggregates, food processing, packaging and pulp and paper. The portfolio was becoming less dependent on a single industrial family.

These were company decisions made by teams. Painter was explicit about that distinction when discussing his successor: he credited Jeffrey Powell with leading major acquisitions including Carmanah, PAAL, the NII forest products business and Syntron. The CEO’s role in the story includes recognizing the work of the executive beside him. Sole authorship would make a tidier legend and a less accurate account.

The numbers, with the machinery left in

Kadant finished 2018 with revenue of $633.8 million, up from $515 million the previous year. Acquisitions contributed $64.6 million to the increase, and favorable currency translation contributed $2.6 million. Excluding both, revenue grew 10 percent. The distinction deserves to survive the celebratory headline: buying revenue and growing existing operations are different activities, and both contributed.

Earlier that year, first-quarter parts and consumables bookings reached $103 million. Painter described this business as a longstanding strategic focus. Such details are the working parts of his record. They connect the acquisition announcements to the less conspicuous business of keeping equipment productive. An order for replacement components may lack a ribbon-cutting ceremony, but it still belongs in the growth story.

The figures also resist the idea that an industrial strategy can be understood through deal prices alone. A purchase creates exposure to a market. Existing businesses must still execute, customers must still place orders, and acquired operations must still contribute. Painter’s public explanations repeatedly returned to those ordinary commercial tests. The language of parts and bookings kept the story close to the factory floor.

Knowing when to move one chair over

In February 2019, Kadant announced that Powell would become CEO that July. Painter moved to executive chairman, then became non-executive chairman in July 2020. The handover preserved his involvement in strategy, acquisitions and governance while transferring the operating job. It echoed the arrangement under which he had succeeded Rainville almost a decade earlier.

On the earnings call discussing the transition, Painter offered an unusually unguarded endorsement of Powell’s greater operating ability. The comparison was specific. He and Powell shared views on acquisitions, he explained, while Powell brought operating strengths of his own. A successor could preserve a method without being a replica.

His professional relationships have unusually long sightlines. In 2019, Painter said he had known and worked with Powell for more than 30 years, going back to Thermo Electron. In September 2026, Powell again recalled their connection in the 1980s. Across changing titles, the shared history remained part of how they described the next appointment.

Painter’s board work extends beyond Kadant. At Graham Corporation, he reassumed the chairmanship effective June 15, 2026, after a period as lead independent director during its own CEO transition. Graham supplies engineered technologies for defense, space, energy and process industries. Another technical business, another succession: his recent responsibilities bring the human mechanics of continuity into view.

Kadant’s next transition is already scheduled. Michael Colwell is due to become CEO on January 2, 2027; Powell will become executive chairman, and Painter will leave the board. In the announcement, Painter welcomed retirement from that board and endorsed the leadership continuing behind him. The next chapter has names and dates attached. For an executive whose career involved so much attention to what follows the first installation, it is a fitting final piece of work.