Mark Witkowski and the business beneath your feet

A water main has a peculiar public relations problem. When it works, people walk over it. When it fails, it makes the news. Mark Witkowski has spent much of his career in the business that supplies the things beneath that pavement: pipes, valves, fittings and the equipment that helps water systems keep doing their jobs. His route to the chief executive’s office ran through accounting, credit and finance. The subject matter has remained refreshingly solid.

Witkowski became chief executive of Core & Main on March 31, 2025, after joining the business in 2007. Between those dates came a succession of financial responsibilities, a separation from HD Supply and a stock market debut. The promotion put someone who had helped build the company’s internal systems in charge of its overall direction. There is a pleasing correspondence here: the distributor’s products usually work out of sight, and so does much of the work that prepares a company to stand on its own.

A long apprenticeship in things that have to work

He studied business administration at Washington University in St. Louis, concentrating on accounting and finance. His early professional work was in the audit practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers. As a senior manager, he worked with public and private businesses, including manufacturers and distributors. These are companies whose accounts have physical consequences: inventory, equipment, purchases and deliveries. The numbers are attached to something that someone eventually has to move.

His next move brought him inside the business he would eventually lead. The 2007 starting date matters because the Core & Main name came later. Witkowski’s tenure crosses changes in ownership and corporate form; he did not arrive after the structure was finished. His career developed while that structure was being assembled.

From 2008 to 2012, he served as credit director. He later became vice president of finance and, in February 2016, chief financial officer of the operating business. Credit is a revealing stop on that route. It puts a finance executive close to the point where a customer relationship meets a payment obligation. A distributor can have excellent products and still need careful judgment about the terms on which it sells them. His progression made that practical side of finance part of his preparation.

The company needed its own plumbing

When the business separated from HD Supply in 2017, finance had an unusually concrete assignment. Witkowski helped establish tax, internal audit, external reporting, treasury and risk management functions. His remit also included information technology. These are the departments that rarely feature in a celebratory photograph, although a newly independent company has excellent reasons to be grateful for them.

Consider the list as a set of everyday questions. Who keeps track of cash? Who checks the controls? Who prepares the numbers for people outside the company? Who manages exposures that a branch cannot manage alone? Independence brings freedom, followed closely by paperwork. The work of turning a division into a standalone business includes making those answers dependable.

By 2021, another audience was arriving. Core & Main completed its initial public offering in July. Witkowski helped lead the company through the offering and the development of its capital structure. Including the later exercise of the underwriters’ overallotment option, the company sold about 40.1 million Class A shares at $20 apiece. Net proceeds were approximately $755.4 million after underwriting discounts and transaction costs.

The proceeds went through the holding structure and were used to redeem notes, repay debt and support general corporate purposes. That detail gives the IPO a more useful meaning than the usual photograph of a bell. Public ownership changed the balance sheet as well as the shareholder list. For a CFO, the transaction continued long after the ceremonial applause.

The reason he stayed

Career milestones explain the promotions. They do less to explain why he kept coming back. In a 2025 interview, Witkowski described being drawn to the company’s family-oriented culture and its service ethic. He also described an attachment to the waterworks industry itself. An accountant had found a business whose purpose he wanted to spend time with.

That account offers a modest but useful glimpse of the person. He talks about the people and the work, rather than presenting his career as a sequence of personal conquests. The company grew from local businesses, and he describes autonomy as something to preserve. His stated preference is for people close to customers to bring forward ideas and make decisions.

It is an appealing principle with a difficult operating question attached. As a company gets bigger, how much authority stays near the customer? Buying a local business gives the buyer its relationships and knowledge. Those are easy things to describe in an acquisition announcement and harder things to keep if every decision must begin a pilgrimage to headquarters.

“Our local leaders are empowered with autonomy and flexibility to act quickly.”

Mark Witkowski · fiscal 2024 shareholder letter

In his shareholder letter, Witkowski paired that local authority with national resources: supply access, project management and the ability to help customers plan complex jobs. The balance is central to his leadership assignment. Branches need room to respond, while customers also need the purchasing reach and coordination that make a national distributor useful. The challenge is to make both sides earn their keep.

A promotion built around continuity

The March 2025 handover was part of a planned succession. Steve LeClair moved from CEO to executive chair; Witkowski became CEO and a director; Robyn Bradbury became CFO. Bradbury had joined in 2009 and had worked across finance and strategy. The change brought two long-serving colleagues into new responsibilities at the same time.

That arrangement helps explain the character of the appointment. Core & Main was choosing experience accumulated inside its own business. Witkowski knew the financial structure because he had helped develop it. Bradbury’s team had established investor relations and worked on the IPO. The handover preserved that institutional knowledge while changing who was accountable for the final decisions.

The transition continued in April 2026, when LeClair retired from the executive chair and board chair roles. James Castellano became board chair, and former American Water CEO M. Susan Hardwick joined the board. Witkowski remained CEO. Governance was moving into its next configuration while the operating business continued its more familiar tasks: serving customers, managing costs and finding places to expand.

The first year brought arithmetic, too

A new title does not exempt an executive from an uneven market. In September 2025, Core & Main reported higher second-quarter sales but reduced its full-year expectations. Witkowski pointed to softer residential demand and higher operating expenses. The company had introduced targeted productivity and margin actions. Growth and restraint appeared in the same account of the business.

This is where his finance background becomes particularly relevant. A company can believe in long-term demand for infrastructure and still have to adjust spending today. Municipal work, residential development and non-residential construction do not advance in lockstep. The CEO’s job includes resisting the temptation to turn a promising industry thesis into an excuse for overlooking current costs.

Expansion also continued. On September 30, 2025, Core & Main completed its acquisition of Canada Waterworks. The acquired distributor served contractors and municipalities from locations in Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton. The purchase extended a Canadian platform, putting the company’s preference for local businesses into another market. The operating question travelled with it: how to add support while retaining the knowledge already on the ground.

For fiscal 2025, the company reported a sixteenth consecutive year of sales growth. Witkowski highlighted treatment plant solutions, fusible high-density polyethylene and geosynthetics as categories with double-digit average daily net sales growth. The emphasis was on adding capabilities that let the distributor participate in more demanding projects. These are company results across a long-running business, including years before his appointment as CEO.

What comes next still starts locally

By September 2026, the business was reporting second-quarter net sales of $2.145 billion, up 2.5% from a year earlier. Net income was $150 million. Municipal demand remained a source of strength, while fire protection and large projects, including treatment plants and data centers, contributed growth. The company also reported seven new branch openings during fiscal 2026, including openings during and after the quarter.

Those figures put scale around the assignment without making it abstract. A branch opening adds another place where the national organization must become useful to a local customer. A larger project requires more coordination. More than 370 locations and roughly 5,600 associates, as described in that release, give Witkowski a considerable network to lead. Size supplies resources; it also supplies plenty of opportunities for a small mistake to travel.

His fiscal 2025 shareholder letter set out the priorities ahead: profitable growth, stronger margins, expansion in selected product categories, new branches, acquisitions and technology investment. It also returned to time spent with teams, customers and suppliers. Read together, those priorities describe a CEO trying to connect the financial machinery he knows with the people who make the business work each day.

There is no need to dress that ambition in grander language. Witkowski’s career has followed a sequence of practical responsibilities, each supporting the next. Audit, credit, finance, independence, public ownership, leadership. Beneath the titles sits the same basic promise to customers: access to the products and help a project needs. If he and his colleagues deliver, most people using the finished infrastructure will have no reason to learn his name. In this line of work, that is a perfectly respectable result.