When Stan Prutz left the Midwest for the South after college, he was searching for a warmer climate and originally intended to settle in Houston.
“Baton Rouge was to be a temporary assignment for a few months with my first job with a Fortune 500 company,” he recalls. “Within a few months I got an offer of more responsibility and after a year or two decided I didn’t need to move anywhere—I could make a good life here in Baton Rouge.”
Today, the husband and father of four leads QDS Systems as president and CEO. The engineering firm and control systems integrator specializes in automating production processes for food, water, petrochemical and paper products, among others.
“Our value-add is taking leading manufacturing software and hardware, assembling and configuring them to provide a turnkey manufacturing automation solution, most recently through collaborative robots—or cobots.”
Read the full Executive Spotlight Q&A with Prutz. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find:
What was your very first job, how old were you and what was your biggest takeaway from the experience?
“My first paid job was at age 10 delivering an evening paper door-to-door. I learned the importance of consistency of service and the basics of financial management, including accounts payable and receivable. It was also a good lesson in saving toward a long term goal, a car—which I eventually got to when I was 15.”
