Celebrating Retirement!
Garth deBruyn, Managing Director, celebrates retirement after 29 years with ProMinent.
Garth deBruyn started his career with ProMinent Fluid Controls in March of 1990. At that time, he was the 8th official ProMinent Canada employee and in those days worked in sales helping develop and grow the company, (being small this role often also included shipping, engineering, production and accounting). Over his career Garth had a keen sense of how to grow the business and established many of the relationships with customers we currently have today. Garth also saw the need for customers to purchase complete packages rather than only pumps and designed the first ProSIP standards over 20 years ago in promoting them as the S1 units. Garth’s legacy of developing ProMinent’s first systems business originates from with having successfully completed many larger projects in the power generation market with systems for zebra mussel control and through providing complete solutions to a variety of markets including Canada’s heavy industry
Through the years Garth moved from the sales and engineering role to the Assistant General Manager, where although he still worked closely with customers, he also helped manage the Canadian operations working with Sandy Chu (at the time our Managing Director for North America). As the AGM in Canada he still enlivened corporate events dressing up as Santa to hand out gifts at the Kids Christmas parties, as Elvis to perform Karaoke at the company Christmas events and enjoying the company of the good friendships he had developed with colleagues at a variety of Trade Shows around the world.
Garth took on the role as North American General Manager after Sandy’s retirement and spent much of his time leading the US team and helping to onboard the current Managing Director Mike Weber. After 6 years of managing the 2 subsidiaries, Garth moved back to a full-time role of being in Canada which was appreciated by the team as well as his family whom Garth loves very much.
Garth’s focus on the Canadian market and leadership provided continual growth of the company which in turn meant ProMinent could add new talented people to the team every year and physically expand the Guelph location 3 times during his tenure. Garth always professed that the key to growing a successful company was based on taking care of the customer and his ikigai (reason for being) was to find more people to help.
We know that in his retirement Garth will continue to follow his ikigai, while finding time to build on his health and hobbies he will continue to help his family as a husband, father, grandfather and Opi.
Congratulations on your retirement – you will be missed!
