Nearly three decades into his journey with Conectiv, it’s clear that Rob Wipper truly loves what he does.

“I’ve been here a long time, close to 30 years,” the President and CEO tells The CEO Magazine. “I’ve had the luxury of really spending the majority of my career with one company, so for me as a leader in this role today, and this new opportunity that’s been presented, I really want to set the trajectory for the next 30 years, so others can have the same experience growing with the same company.

“To me, that’s a huge motivating factor.”

The new direction that Wipper is referring to is Conectiv’s recent establishment as a standalone private company as of 1 April, 2025, after being divested from its corporate parent Vantiva (formerly Technicolor), and being acquired by private equity firm Variant Equity.

“We’re really excited. We’ve moved from being a division within a larger company to being our own,” he reveals.

“I think what’s been impressive, not just with the team but also just with the whole organization, is everyone really is genuinely excited about what the future holds.”

Fostering agility

Conectiv operates as a middle-market industrial business with two main pillars: manufacturing physical media (a legacy from its Technicolor days, including optical discs and most recently vinyl) and a growing third-party logistics service.

“We have about US$500 million in sales and growing, and I would describe us as an industrial company by nature,” Wipper explains.

“On the manufacturing side, we’ve got a long tenured history. Our division specifically goes back to the 1980s, back to when VHS tapes were the predominant medium to deliver Hollywood movies into the marketplace.

“From that lineage, the VHS tapes migrated into optical discs, specifically DVDs, to Blu-rays and 4K high-definition discs, along with audio and games formats.”

Now, with the resurgence of interest in records, Conectiv has also added vinyl manufacturing to its repertoire of offerings.

“Along the way we’ve really established what we would consider to be a highly competitive third party logistic offering,” Wipper says.

“We’ve become experts at going into retail with high complexity stock keeping unit counts and most recently going direct to consumer with the big ecommerce trend that’s occurred over the past five-to-seven years.

“So with that, we leverage our ability to manufacture a product, to assemble, to fulfill. We do the full reverse logistics, we do transportation, and then we also do some business process outsourcing where we do transaction-based entries for some of our clients as well as procurement services.”

Having started his career as an industrial engineer at Sony Music Entertainment, Wipper joined the Technicolor family in 1998 as the Director of Operations. From there, he worked his way up, joining the Vantiva Supply Chain Solutions arm as Senior Vice President of Global Operations in 2020, before being appointed President and CEO in August 2023.

Over so many years at the helm of large groups within the company, and after such an illustrious career, it’s unsurprising that Wipper has fine-tuned his approach to leadership. His key takeaways? Transparency and collaboration.

“For me, it’s really about being authentic, not trying to be something that I’m not, day in, day out as I lead the organization,” he says.

“Be approachable. I think an open-door concept is important. I don’t want to be thought of as a leader that somebody on our shop floors can’t speak to.

“So I think by being authentic, open, relatable, we create that culture that allows us to really operate it as one team.”

Multigenerational workforce

Wipper cites an increasingly diverse generational pool of employees as one particular challenge, but one he has been pleased to find a solution to.

“We’re dealing with at least four generations in the workforce today,” he says. “We’ve still got the Baby Boomers, we still have Gen X, we still have Millennials and Gen Z. You have to be able to relate to each of those different generations in a similar way to sort of create that environment, that culture that allows an organization to move forward together.

“I take a lot of pride in being able to relate to all different levels of the organization. Between myself and our executive team, we’re very open with our communication.”

By hosting monthly, bi-directional town hall meetings, where the second half is an open forum for employees to ask any question, Conectiv encourages a cohesive culture of collaborative discussion.

“We take live questions and nothing’s off the table,” Wipper says. “We deal with everything that’s out there, whether it’s positive or negative, easy or hard. We put ourselves in that position where we can really have that open communication.”

Conectiv’s approach to technology is both practical and value-driven, focusing on maximizing the utility of existing systems before making investments in new areas like automation and AI.

“When I think about technologies, if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s constantly changing, it’s evolving,” Wipper explains. “So before we can talk about where we may want to go with a new technology, it’s important to be good at the application of whatever you have today.

“It can’t always be about chasing what’s new. Whatever your foundation is today, you need to put a lot of focus on delivering maximum value.”

Rather than chasing the newest trends, Wipper says Conectiv looks at first ensuring it’s consistently enhancing the baseline.

“We don’t need to redefine who we are based on an investment,” he says. “What we need to do is enhance and open new doors and opportunities with the capital that we employ. We need to make sensible forward movements, look for use cases that give incremental improvements, build on those over time.

“The way I like to think about what we’re doing right now with technology is the old expression, ‘walk before you can run’. So when we look back we realize we’ve made a big change, but we didn’t do it all at once.”

At Conectiv, CSR and sustainability are seen not as separate programs, but as integral parts of the company’s culture and daily operations, spanning safety, ethics, recycling and data governance.

“CSR and sustainability are built into the fabric of our organization,” Wipper says. “It’s not just an initiative that we’re pulling together to report out on an annual basis. It’s something we’re actually living with every day and making the right decisions.

“So we take a lot of pride in being at the forefront of whatever the sustainable solutions may be in our addressable market.”

Boasting ongoing relationships with customers, as well as suppliers over multiple decades, Conectiv always emphasizes longevity and ethical dealings when developing partnerships.

“We’ve built those because of the integrity that we bring through our relationships, our negotiations and our day-to-day interactions,” Wipper enthuses. “That’s important from an ethics standpoint – we run an employee committee, it operates independent of management.

“If there’s a concern, that ethics committee gets the anonymous request and they do the full investigation and make recommendations through a subset of our committee. So there is no chance that something could be squashed or hidden.

“We take a lot of pride in just having high integrity in everything we do.”