Tom Pientok’s retirement had barely made it through a page of the calendar. He left Timberline Manufacturing on May 2, 2025. On June 1, he became president and chief executive of Folience. Some careers finish with a farewell. His acquired another set of responsibilities.
The return carried a particular complication: the people working in Folience’s businesses also owned the company. Pientok had spent decades around that arrangement, first at Apache and then at Timberline. He understood the machinery, the financial decisions, and the questions that come when a workplace is also an investment in your own future.
A month between jobs
Folience was familiar territory. Pientok had joined its board in 2017 and become chair in 2019. He began serving as part-time interim CEO in February 2025, following Chris Snyder’s departure. When the permanent appointment came, Tracy McCormick took over as board chair. The director who had helped oversee the business would now run it.
His explanation was personal. He spoke of “a deep affection and connection” to Folience. The language makes the return easier to understand: an existing relationship had become an obligation he was willing to accept. The announcement did not read like a long-planned next move. It read like a decision made when circumstances changed.
There is a useful distinction between knowing a company through board meetings and being responsible for its next working day. Pientok’s career had already taken him across that distance. He had sat on Timberline’s board before becoming its chief executive. At Folience, he was making that crossing again, with a much longer history behind him.
The education below ground
That history begins in Whitehall, Wisconsin, where his father and uncle owned an underground sewer and water utility business. As a youngster, Pientok helped out. His introduction to work involved the physical business of getting things done beneath a town, well before his responsibilities included boards and manufacturing strategy.
The setting gives his later career a useful scale. A utility business has work to finish and people depending on the result. Manufacturing carries a similar demand, even when the product is a component most customers will never see. Pientok’s route moved from that family enterprise into the industrial businesses of eastern Iowa.
He graduated from Coe College in 1985 with a degree in business and economics. A University of Iowa MBA followed in 1991, concentrating on finance and operations management. Those subjects would appear repeatedly in his working life: how a business uses money, and how the work inside it actually happens.
The combination is less glamorous than many corporate origin stories. It is also more relevant to a factory. A company can sell more and still struggle to organize production. It can produce efficiently and still make an expensive strategic mistake. Pientok’s subsequent jobs put both sides of his education to use.
When the name had to catch up
At Apache, his responsibilities extended beyond industrial hose and belting. By 2012, the company’s product range included cut and molded goods and other accessories. The business was approaching its fiftieth anniversary, and its established name described a narrower operation than the one it had become.
Pientok explained the change to Apache Inc. alongside a more consequential adjustment. The company’s broad selling channels had put it in competition with customers. Focusing on distributors, dealers, and original equipment manufacturers was intended to resolve that conflict. A shorter name accompanied a clearer answer to who the company served.
“We depend on Iowa.”
Tom Pientok, on Timberline’s customer base in 2021
Growth also brought acquisitions. Pientok helped guide Apache through roughly half a dozen before its 2017 sale to Motion Industries. Some employee owners initially worried that buying other businesses would take attention or resources away from Cedar Rapids. He later recalled that their concerns eased when they saw ESOP share valuations rise.
It is an unusually revealing detail. People with an ownership stake can still be skeptical of the strategy being pursued on their behalf. A distant acquisition might look attractive in a presentation and troubling from the workplace where someone has spent years. Pientok’s account gave the skepticism a practical explanation rather than dismissing it.
The eventual financial result mattered because it connected the unfamiliar businesses to something employees could recognize as their own. That episode helps explain why his career keeps returning to ownership. The same operating decision can be experienced as expansion by a manager and uncertainty by an employee. Leadership has to account for both.
More room for the work
Pientok joined Timberline’s board in 2013 and became president and CEO in 2018. The Marion manufacturer made wire harness assemblies, control panels, and electronic components. Its products went into other companies’ equipment. Much of its work happened inside things bearing somebody else’s name.
In 2019, Timberline opened a 90,000-square-foot facility, twice the size of its predecessor. The old building had grown through additions and become crowded. The new one offered a chance to improve workflow and material handling. The appeal of the building, as Pientok described it, lay in how it worked as well as how it looked.
Timberline’s revenues more than doubled during his tenure. That is a company result, involving the people and systems inside the business, and a substantial part of the record he brought to Folience. Physical expansion supplied one visible marker. Decisions about technology supplied another.
In 2022, Timberline received a $500,000 Manufacturing 4.0 grant. The planned projects included automated wire coiling, a consolidated label printing center, and guided carts to move parts between work centers. These were specific changes to familiar tasks, the kind of improvements whose value depends on what happens throughout a working day.
Pientok explained the intention in terms of employee skills. Mechanical activities could go to technology while people concentrated on work requiring more judgment and expertise. It was an argument about what automation should enable inside an employee-owned manufacturer. The purpose had to be stated alongside the equipment purchase.
Hiring required reconsideration, too. After working with workforce specialist Ron Cox, Pientok said Timberline had begun considering labor pools it previously would not have explored. His public testimonial credited the presentation with changing the team’s thinking. The admission is modest and useful: experience does not eliminate the need to revise an assumption.
The business with newspaper roots
Folience brought a different collection of businesses into view. Its roots reach back to a family company formed in 1884 and The Gazette, founded in 1883. Employee ownership began in 1986; the business became fully employee-owned in 2012. The holding-company identity followed in 2017.
By the time Pientok took the permanent CEO role, that inheritance sat alongside manufacturing. Today, Folience’s website identifies Life Line Emergency Vehicles in Sumner, Iowa, and Cimarron Trailers, whose locations include Chickasha, Oklahoma, and Manhattan, Kansas. The portfolio reaches beyond the place where the company’s story began.
Shared services connect those businesses through functions including finance, human resources, information technology, and learning and development. Folience describes the arrangement as support that preserves each company’s culture. For a leader, that makes coordination a recurring task: provide resources across the group while understanding the particular operation using them.
Then came a decision involving the business’s oldest identity. In November 2025, Folience and Adams MultiMedia announced the sale of The Gazette and eleven community newspaper titles. Pientok addressed the difficulties facing local journalism and the growing challenge of sustaining the newspaper independently. The sale became effective December 1.
The transaction moved those publications from employee-owned Folience to a family-owned media company. That distinction belongs in the story. A career associated with employee ownership now included selling a newspaper group out of that structure. The decision changed what Folience owned and where those newspaper employees would work.
History supplied the significance of the sale; it could not remove the pressures behind it. For Pientok, the first year of permanent leadership therefore included more than settling into a familiar organization. It involved a visible change to a company rooted in the community’s daily account of itself.
Owners still need an explanation
His responsibilities also extend outside Folience. In May 2025, Benchmark added Pientok and former Crystal Group president Scott Kongable as independent directors. The roof and pavement consultancy was bringing outside perspectives into its board. Pientok’s manufacturing experience would be applied to another kind of business.
He serves on the Iowa Center for Employee Ownership Advisory Council and the Junior Achievement of Eastern Iowa Board of Trustees. In fall 2024, he returned to Coe as a participant in its inaugural Fireside Chat series. The graduate was back in a setting where students could ask about the working life that followed college.
There are conversations available beyond the boardroom, too. His 2019 interview with Nate Kaeding covered his upbringing and introduction to manufacturing. A 2024 Leadership Unplugged episode discussed leadership. In September 2025, Folience’s ESOPOD featured him as its new president and CEO. The sequence follows an executive through different stages of responsibility.
Across those stages, employee ownership has remained a practical concern. Acquisitions had to make sense to people in Cedar Rapids. Factory investments had to improve the work. A holding company had to decide which businesses belonged in its future. None of those questions was answered simply by calling the employees owners.
Pientok’s brief retirement is the amusing calendar detail. The longer story concerns the connection that brought him back: years of knowing a business, and a willingness to take responsibility for what happened next. He returned with experience in making things, changing operations, and explaining why growth should matter to the people doing the work.