Two senior leaders walked into Steve Richman’s office one evening with an awkward message. Milwaukee Tool was growing, but the way its leaders were running it would not keep working. Talented people were leaving. New arrivals liked the pace and the products, yet wanted something more than a seat near the action. They wanted room to make decisions.
Richman later described an executive team deeply involved in the details of the business. That involvement had helped get the company moving. As it expanded, the same habit threatened to become a constraint. A president can approve only so many things before his calendar starts governing everybody else’s ambitions.
The episode is a useful entrance to Steven Philip Richman’s career. His business makes equipment that transfers power to the person holding it. Inside the company, he had to work through a comparable problem: giving people authority while keeping them responsible for the result. There is a certain occupational neatness to that.
In May 2024, after more than 17 years leading Milwaukee Tool, Richman became chief executive of its parent, Techtronic Industries. He inherited a wider collection of brands, markets and operating decisions. The lesson from that office conversation travelled with him: growth eventually asks the person in charge to change his own job.
“Empowerment was not a free-for-all.”
Steve Richman, discussing Milwaukee’s culture
A political science degree, then the tool aisle
Richman’s route into manufacturing began at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science with a focus on business. His LinkedIn profile lists his UCLA years as 1978 to 1982. He began his career at Black & Decker in 1982, entering an industry he would spend decades learning from several sides.
From 1998 to 2004, he served as president of SKIL and Bosch Power Tools. He then led ladder manufacturer Werner as chief executive from 2005 to 2007. These were businesses in which an executive had to understand how a product reached a buyer as well as what happened when someone actually used it. His experience covered industrial, electrical, plumbing and retail distribution.
Milwaukee appointed him president in January 2007. The brand already had a long history and an established place among professional users. Its lithium-ion tool introduction had come in 2005, before he arrived. Richman’s task was to develop the business around that technical foundation, working with engineers, manufacturing teams, sellers and distributors who could turn a promising technology into useful equipment.
That distinction matters to the story. Richman joined an existing enterprise with existing inventions. His contribution would be measured across years of decisions: which users deserved attention, which products deserved investment, and which people should have the authority to take an idea further. An inherited reputation provided a beginning. It still left plenty of work.
The customer has a job to finish
Listen to Richman discuss Milwaukee and he repeatedly returns to particular trades. Mechanical contractors, electricians and plumbers have different working days. A broad promise about a better power tool leaves a great deal unspecified. Watching someone install pipe or work around an awkward space produces a more demanding brief.
By 2013, he was describing the company through an outside-in view of its distribution partners and end users. Wholesalers mattered because their relationships with contractors helped connect the equipment to the work. The commercial channel formed part of the product’s practical journey, rather than an afterthought once engineering was finished.
The technical story was also bigger than the battery alone. In an earlier interview, Richman described progress across batteries, electronics and motors together. The improvements showed up in tools that could be smaller, more ergonomic and longer lasting. A battery specification becomes interesting to a contractor when it changes what can be carried, reached or completed.
His 2013 comments about social media were similarly practical. Milwaukee was investing in platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, he said, and could use them to respond quickly to questions and problems. For a manufacturer accustomed to selling through distribution, those conversations supplied another route back from the person doing the work.
At Milwaukee’s 2019 New Product Symposium, the range on display included a cordless pipe threader, a cut-off saw and additions to the PACKOUT storage system. The setting was a former department-store warehouse. There is something pleasingly appropriate about presenting equipment for working people in a building that had already put in a shift of its own.
More room for the people doing the building
The expanding product range needed more people and more space. In 2016, Milwaukee began a $33 million, 200,000-square-foot expansion in Brookfield, Wisconsin, paired with plans to add nearly 600 employees over five years. Many of the planned positions were in engineering and marketing. Growth had acquired an address and a construction budget.
A further headquarters project announced in 2018 involved $32 million and a 114,500-square-foot building for advanced manufacturing and research and development, with 350 new jobs expected. Richman publicly credited employees for the company’s expansion. The physical investment also showed how much organizational work sat behind the next product launch.
He made a revealing distinction in 2019 about entering additional trades. Milwaukee added resources for new user groups while maintaining the teams serving existing ones. Sales, development and jobsite teams already supporting a trade retained their attention there. Expansion was supposed to add capacity instead of continually borrowing it from yesterday’s customers.
The approach gives his growth story a particular shape. A new market meant a continuing obligation to learn its work, develop suitable equipment and support users after the sale. Every additional trade brought another set of relationships to maintain. The catalog could grow quickly; the organization had to be built to remember why each part of it existed.
The engineering office moves closer to the engineers
By 2022, recruitment was helping determine the company’s geography. Milwaukee was investing $14 million in a 70,000-square-foot engineering and product-development office in Chicago’s Old Main Post Office. Richman discussed electrical and mechanical engineers alongside software and firmware developers. The modern tool business was competing for several kinds of technical talent at once.
His explanation was straightforward: Chicago offered people already working in the region and people graduating into it. Milwaukee could bring the opportunity closer to them. A company selling cordless equipment was becoming less attached to a single location for the people inventing it.
The wider implications appeared in the products. Electronics and connectivity created possibilities beyond the motor turning a blade or bit. Development required people who could understand the physical work and people who could write the instructions running inside the equipment. Getting those disciplines to work together became part of the manufacturing executive’s job.
Richman also described long-standing relationships with suppliers of chips, batteries and electronics. Those conversations mattered when supply chains became difficult. His account placed patient commercial work behind the public excitement of new products: regular contact, technical planning and confidence that a growing customer would keep needing components. A launch has an audience. Supplier meetings mostly have the next meeting.
Richman kept talking to the trades in public, too. In June 2023, he appeared with Angie Simon on SMACNA’s Let’s Talk Shop to discuss his career and Milwaukee’s industry relationships. Later that year, he returned to the Appetite for Construction podcast with John Mesenbrink and Tim Ward. Those appearances put an operating executive in conversation with the communities buying and specifying the company’s equipment. They also supply a less formal view of a career usually recorded in appointments, buildings and financial tables.
Start with the working day
- Watch the taskJobsite teams, designers and engineers meet professional users.
- Connect the disciplinesBattery, motor, electronics and software development work together.
- Build the capacityDedicated people support additional trades.
An editorial diagram of the approach Richman described in interviews.
A bigger desk, the same question
The move to TTI’s top job became effective on May 21, 2024, following Joseph Galli Jr.’s retirement. Richman had already become senior group president in January. On August 6, he joined TTI’s board as an executive director. His responsibilities now extended across the parent company, including professional and consumer businesses with different customers and economic pressures.
There was outside recognition along the way: the Milwaukee Business Journal named him its 2021 Executive of the Year. He also joined Traeger’s board in October 2022, bringing experience in manufacturing, product development and distribution to another consumer-products business. Traeger shareholders re-elected him in June 2026 for a term running to the 2029 annual meeting.
TTI’s 2025 results put the scale of his current assignment into numbers. Group revenue reached $15.260 billion, up 4.4% as reported. Milwaukee grew 7.9% in local currency and Ryobi grew 5.4%. Those figures describe a portfolio, with more than one brand contributing to the total and different rates of progress beneath it.
The first half of 2026 brought revenue of $8.292 billion, a reported increase of 5.9%, and profit attributable to owners of $738 million, up 17.5%. The same results described weaker noncore businesses and the effects of exiting HART in 2025. Running the group includes deciding where to reduce commitments as well as where to expand.
His 2025 chief executive’s message, published in March 2026, emphasized sharing resources and practices across the organization. The aspiration is recognizable from his Milwaukee years: people who understand their users, take responsibility for decisions and can work together across boundaries. At group scale, that ambition has to survive many more handoffs.
The office conversation remains the revealing detail. Richman’s colleagues had been able to tell him that an approach associated with success needed changing. He has since argued for discussing setbacks promptly and asking for help when work goes wrong. A business making tools depends on people willing to point out where something does not fit. Its chief executive has had reason to learn the value of that habit himself.