A factory worker can help a company become more valuable without ever owning a piece of it. Vicente Reynal had seen that arrangement from the management side. As his career advanced, equity could reward him for a business getting better. The people making its products were helping produce the same improvement. He began asking why the opportunity to build wealth stopped somewhere above the factory floor.
In May 2017, at Gardner Denver’s return to the stock market, that question acquired a price tag: more than $100 million in deferred stock units for employees worldwide. Reynal, the company’s chief executive, and its chairman, KKR’s Pete Stavros, announced the award. A stock-exchange bell usually rings for a select audience. This one had rather more people to congratulate.
The gesture became a recurring part of Reynal’s career. After Gardner Denver combined with Ingersoll Rand’s industrial business in 2020, the new company announced another $150 million equity grant, reaching nearly 16,000 employees. The machinery still made compressed air, moved fluids and handled demanding industrial tasks. The question of who shared in the machinery’s success had changed.
A long way from Humacao
Reynal grew up in Humacao, Puerto Rico. His father taught; his mother worked as a seamstress. Both had emigrated from Spain. His account of childhood emphasizes work, family and a modest household. There is little in that description to suggest a childhood spent rehearsing earnings calls.
He left for Georgia Tech to study mechanical engineering. The transition was difficult. Coming from public schools, with English and entrance-test results that counted against him, he recalled being assessed as likely to leave within a year. He graduated in 1995. Two master’s degrees at MIT followed in 1998, one in mechanical engineering and another in technology and policy. The early prediction had a short shelf life.
What interests him about that education seems to be where it could take him inside a business. After MIT, he chose factory supervision at AlliedSignal rather than the banking or consulting opportunities available to him. Learning an operation from its working level was a deliberate career choice. It would leave him with an unusually practical starting point for a future chief executive: the shift had to work before the strategy could.
“Coming from a small, rural Puerto Rican town”
Vicente Reynal, reflecting on his path to the chairmanship, 2021
The education after the degrees
His early operational career took him through AlliedSignal’s engine repair and overhaul business, then global operations and supply chain at Thermo Fisher Scientific. In 2004 he joined Danaher. Over eleven years there, he held operations roles and ran businesses, eventually becoming a group president.
Read as a list, these are familiar executive credentials. Read as a sequence, they show repeated exposure to the details that make a manufacturing business succeed: materials arriving, work moving through a plant, products leaving and customers coming back. Such details are less photogenic than a deal announcement. They also have a habit of determining whether a deal pays off.
Gardner Denver brought him in during 2015 to lead its industrials segment. In January 2016, he became chief executive of the company. It was then owned by KKR, which had taken it private in 2013. Reynal arrived at an old industrial business with a particular difficulty: winning back the commitment of its own workforce.
He began with an engagement survey and visits to teams around the world. In his later account, morale was low and employee turnover stood at 19%. The diagnosis mattered. A company could have recognizable brands and useful products while people inside it doubted management. Ownership offered a way to make a promise about the future tangible.
A bell with 6,000 listeners
The 2017 public offering gave that promise a public occasion. About 6,000 employees received equity. Stavros had been developing broad employee ownership within KKR’s industrial investments; Reynal brought the perspective of an operator who wanted employees to connect their work with the company’s financial progress. The partnership joined an investor’s incentive design to a manager’s daily problem.
Giving away that much equity was not an administrative trifle. A later National Center for Employee Ownership account describes board concerns about dilution, employees selling shares and the complications of making grants across borders. Those are consequential objections. Issuing shares changes the division of future value, and a global workforce brings a collection of local rules to the table.
The award went ahead. Reynal later identified the 2017 employee grant as the best moment of his career. That is a revealing selection for someone whose résumé also contains a public offering and a large industrial combination. The corporate milestone mattered to him partly because of the people it allowed into the result.
Gardner Denver employee grant
Ingersoll Rand employee grant
Announced award values. These are separate grants, not a stock-return chart.The shares came with homework
In early 2020, Gardner Denver combined with the industrial segment of Ingersoll-Rand plc and took the Ingersoll Rand name. The remaining climate business became Trane Technologies. Following the corporate family tree requires some concentration; the familiar name conceals a significant change in the business behind it.
For Reynal, the combination created a more immediate challenge: building a shared culture across two organizations. The September equity announcement was unusually concrete. Eligible employees received an award worth 20% of their annual base cash compensation at the grant date. Senior managers already covered by the annual long-term incentive plan were excluded, as were employees in Vietnam and the Philippines because of local legal restrictions.
Reynal called it an investment in employees. Its design also expressed a management expectation. As he later put it, “equity comes with responsibility.” The company trained employees to understand how purchasing and inventory affect cash. Engineers received instruction in value analysis and value engineering, examining how to make products more efficiently. Ownership was accompanied by lessons in how a business earns the money it can reinvest.
There is an appealing lack of ceremony in the inventory example. Cash tied up in unnecessary stock cannot be used elsewhere. An employee who understands that connection can see why ordering the right amount at the right time matters beyond a supervisor’s checklist. Financial education gives the share award a working vocabulary. The certificate can go on a wall; the lesson has to survive an ordinary Tuesday.
- A stakeEmployees participate in equity value.
- An explanationTraining connects daily decisions to cash.
- A habitBetter purchasing and product design become repeatable.
Keeping the promise through acquisitions
In November 2021, Reynal became chairman, succeeding Stavros as the KKR representatives left the board. William Donnelly became lead director. Reynal used the occasion to emphasize their shared commitment to broad employee ownership. The change in the boardroom carried a statement of continuity for the workforce.
His advocacy now extends beyond Ingersoll Rand. He serves on the board of Ownership Works, the nonprofit helping companies adopt shared ownership. He also joined American Airlines’ board in 2022 and chairs its finance committee. These appointments place an executive trained in industrial operations in conversations about capital, governance and how organizations work at a different scale.
Acquisitions make the ownership idea especially relevant. In an April 2026 account, he described the company’s purchase of more than 75 businesses in recent years, many family-owned. He argued that shared ownership could help reassure sellers about the future of their people. An acquisition agreement can transfer a company in one transaction. Earning the confidence of the people coming with it takes longer.
This is also where the thesis faces a continuing test. Each acquired business brings its own habits and expectations. The work of explaining ownership must keep pace with buying companies. A growing collection of brands does not automatically become a coherent organization, even when everyone has received an impressive presentation.
The next shift still has to deliver
By July 2026, the company was reporting second-quarter revenue of $2.049 billion, up 9% from a year earlier, and net income of $257 million. It generated $296 million in operating cash flow. Those figures give the ownership discussion a current operating context, rather than leaving it frozen at the moment of a grant.
The same quarter showed the pressures that remain. Its Industrial Technologies and Services segment reported a lower adjusted EBITDA margin, with inflation and pricing difficulties, particularly in China, among the factors. Reynal’s approach still has to contend with customers, costs and competition. Share ownership does not exempt a compressor business from arithmetic.
In his public posts, he continues to describe time with teams and customers, including a recent trip through five European countries. The factory visits make sense alongside the degrees and the board appointments. His chosen starting point was close to the work, and his account of leadership keeps returning there.
The enduring question in Reynal’s career is a fairly plain one: when the business gets better, who gets to participate? At Gardner Denver and Ingersoll Rand, he helped put part of the answer into employees’ hands. What happens afterward depends on the work they do together. The bell is a pleasant sound. Eventually, everyone has to get back to the machines.