About Barry Litwin

Barry Litwin is a highly experienced CEO with a diverse list of accomplishments in industrial distribution and consumer retail firms in various industries. With an extensive background in the public and private sectors, he has also worked with many companies funded by private equity.

Throughout his professional career, Barry has achieved a solid reputation for his exemplary ability to drive revenue and margin growth. He has a stellar track record of increasing operating profits, enhancing operational excellence, and fostering innovation by developing high-performance, collaborative teams.

Barry’s excellent background as a CEO has made him a valued advisor to several business figures and organizations, including management boards, analysts, and investors. For the valued partners he has worked with over the years, Barry’s wide range of skills and capabilities are effective for spurring transformational growth.

Barry’s Leadership Approach

As CEO, Barry’s leadership style is transformational and adaptive. It is characterized by championing collaboration, associate engagement, operational excellence, a focus on customer problem-solving, and accountability and ownership. He is adept at using his Five by Five strategic planning framework to identify and leverage initiatives that maximize value, increase organizational prioritization, and drive innovation and operational efficiency. He has also exhibited exceptional skill in aligning key talent to improve an organization’s effectiveness.

Barry’s ability to improve financial performance is due in large part to his belief that improving a company’s end-to-end customer experience generates higher customer satisfaction, lowers customer churn, establishes a competitive differentiation, and creates long-term value. To this end, his signature is building great teams to drive growth and efficiency initiatives, including strengthening digital and omnichannel capabilities, focusing on end-to-end quality, improving sales force efficiency and scale, speeding product development, reducing COGS through global product sourcing, leveraging AI and automation to shorten the order to case journey, and optimizing and automating supply chain operations. These areas all improve the customers’ everyday buying experience.

Barry also has a proven ability to leverage pricing intelligence to strengthen the value proposition and expand gross margin, differentiate the assortment by innovating private brands, and improve vendor relationships and service-level compliance. His adeptness in financial engineering and cost management has frequently played a key role in driving operating leverage.

Barry Litwin’s Professional Background

In April 2015, Barry became CEO of Adorama, serving until January 2019. He revitalized the company’s business model as a leading retailer of professional cameras and consumer electronics. With support from associates and the board, he implemented the FOCUS strategy (For Our Customers and Us), transforming talent, financial, marketing, digital, inventory, merchandising, and supply chain processes. This initiative expanded high-margin offerings in pro audio, video, and broadcast equipment, strengthened the used camera category, and eliminated unprofitable consumer products. He led a digital and brand transformation process, established a new B2B channel for large enterprises, and expanded the rental and photo-finishing businesses. As associate engagement and company culture soared, so did Adorama’s revenue, profits, and market share within the highly competitive consumer electronics market.

From January 2019 to August 2024, Barry served as CEO of Global Industrial Company, a leading industrial supply distributor with annual sales of over $1.3 billion. A recognized expert in business transformation and growth, he implemented the “Accelerating the Customer Experience” (ACE) strategy, streamlining the selection, purchase, and delivery of large MRO items. This enhanced the company’s competitive edge, increased market share, and boosted market capitalization by $700 million, pleasing shareholders and investors. His M&A efforts culminated in the May 2024 acquisition of Indoff, broadening the customer base, opening new markets, and establishing a channel for private-label products. ACE notably improved customer satisfaction (CSAT) rates from 60% to 95% in 2024. Additionally, associate engagement rose from 50% to 75%, leading to the company earning the prestigious “Great Places to Work” certification in 2024.

Enhancing Cultural Engagement

Barry’s leadership style is crucial to building cultural engagement. Relying on equal parts collaboration, trust, and accountability, his distinctive approach effectively drives cultural transformation in the work environment, making his associates feel valued and motivated.

Barry’s approach is especially effective for building engagement that extends beyond strategy. His hands-on style of leadership has consistently proven to be a driving force in reshaping company culture. As CEO, he has a knack for identifying operational and cultural challenges and implementing changes that boost morale and enhance performance.

Development Strategy and Execution

Barry also consistently exhibits clear vision and decisive leadership, which complement his ability to align teams toward shared goals. These qualities have frequently contributed to effective strategy development and execution.

Throughout his professional career, Barry has showcased these qualities across multiple organizations, crafting and implementing strategic plans for optimum growth and operational efficiency.

At Adorama, he aimed to revitalize the business into a competitive billion-dollar entity. At Global Industrial, his goal was to transform and strengthen the industrial distribution platform and people systems to carve market share growth from a fragmented $100B MRO market. In both cases, Barry crafted a three-year strategy focused on prioritizing a differentiated customer experience, built the management operating process to measure initiative success and ensure execution, and delivered positive cultural transformation.

Leadership and Customer Experience

At the core of Barry’s success as a leader is his ability to engineer a differentiated customer experience, elevate the culture and associate engagement, and deliver strong financial performance. This unique ability to blend a customer-centric approach with a keen focus on business objectives is what ultimately makes Barry Litwin such an effective leader.