CEO of the Year 2023: Kerry Siggins 

Some lead by example, others by words. Kerry Siggins, CEO of Durango-based StoneAge Inc., is one of those rare leaders seemingly adept at both: equipped with the perspective of someone who knows what it’s like to hit rock bottom, and with a gift for convincing those around her to reach for their dreams. 

Siggins, a Colorado School of Mines grad, took the helm at StoneAge 14 years ago at age 30. In that time, she’s helped guide the company to consistent sales growth and developments such as the 2020 acquisition of Nevada-based Breadware, an industrial IoT product-development company; and last year’s acquisition of Terydon, an Ohio-based waterjet company that will expand StoneAge’s development and adoption of fully automated robotic solutions. Siggins was StoneAge’s 33rd employee when she was hired as director of operations; the company now employs more than 200.  

Siggins also is the author of  “The Ownership Mindset: A Handbook for Transforming Your Life and Leadership,” which she wrote during the pandemic. Launched in October, the book covers her own transformative journey, from the darkness of substance abuse to recovery, to CEO of a worldwide leader in the manufacturing and design of high-pressure water-blasting tools used in industrial cleaning. 

An ownership mindset is not just a catchphrase for Siggins. It’s what she’s sought to instill at StoneAge, too. Though it offered profit-sharing when she came aboard, the company became 100 percent employee-owned in January this year, capping an eight-year process of buying back shares from existing shareholders that started when the company formed an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) in 2015. For Siggins, the ESOP is a critical piece of StoneAge’s “own-it” culture. 

READ: Building a Strong ESOP Employee Culture — Five Lessons Learned for Success

“We want people to think and act like owners, where they take responsibility for their work ethic, for their efforts, their attitudes, their teamwork, how they show up every day,” Siggins says. “We want this to be a place where people feel like they can be their very best selves, where they can live their dreams while working. You have to create a culture that says, ‘Hey, we’re all in this together, and we’re going to win together. If we have to tighten our belts, we’re going to do that together, but as the company is successful, we’re going to share in that success with you.’” 

Contrary to its name, StoneAge has been synonymous with innovation since its beginning in 1979. Founders Jerry Zink and John Wolgamott met at Colorado School of Mines in the late 1970s and developed a water-blasting tool that would bore through rock. 

“The rock-drilling equipment we developed in the laboratory at CSM caught the attention of the energy companies that were investing heavily in underground uranium mining in New Mexico and Colorado,” Zink says. “John saw the opportunity to launch into private manufacturing.” 

That opportunity proved fleeting. The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant meltdown in 1979 caused the appeal of nuclear power to dim and the demand for uranium to plummet. 

Zink and Wolgamott pivoted, though, and soon found there was a robust demand for their high-pressure water-blasting equipment in industrial cleaning applications. Today StoneAge holds hundreds of patents and sells its products throughout the world, with more than 100 dealers in about 30 countries. 

Siggins seemed a natural fit for the growing Southwest Colorado company when she applied for a job in late 2006. She grew up in Montrose and after college had been working in Austin, Texas, when she returned to Colorado’s Western Slope. She was hired at StoneAge in 2007 as director of operations at the age of 28. Less than three years later, the company’s board of directors named her CEO. 

Though young for the job, it didn’t hurt that founders Zink and Wolgamott also had backgrounds with the School of Mines, the state’s premier engineering and applied-science university. It also impressed Zink that she’d thrived as a student-athlete, a four-year letter winner and three-year captain on the Mines softball team. 

“Her path through Colorado School of Mines as a woman on an athletic scholarship demonstrated grit,” Zink says. “She listened well and convinced me she was prepared to learn our inventive, small-company, disruptive culture.” 

Siggins considers her mother, Sue Petranek, one of the inspirations that gave her confidence she could succeed in a male-dominated field. A single parent, Petanek raised Siggins and her brother in Montrose, working two or three jobs. When Siggins was 12, her mother returned to college to earn her teaching degree, driving 60 miles from Montrose to Gunnison to attend school while still holding down two jobs. 

Another source of inspiration for Siggins was her grandfather, who relocated from the Midwest to Montrose and bought an army surplus store, which he converted to a sporting goods outlet. At 12, Siggins convinced her grandfather to let her work in the store, and she often tended to celebrities who stopped in to shop for cold-weather gear on their way to tony Telluride. Siggins recalls those encounters as her first inkling of an exciting world out there awaiting discovery. 

StoneAge is on the move, too, from a business-development standpoint, increasingly tech-driven in its product offerings. 

“We will always be manufacturing, but we’re building our own software platform,” Siggins says, citing robotics and software that will enable customers to make better decisions about how they’re cleaning equipment and how they’re training their employees. “That will lead to developing efficiency ratings for the overall hydro-blasting system, which will help our customers with their sustainability goals.” 

Siggins is immersed in many causes, most of them stemming from her desire to share experiences and ideas as a thought leader. She’s a frequent speaker at schools, including her alma mater, and other venues; along with appearances for her book, she maintains a blog and podcast on her website, kerrysiggins.com; she sits on Gov. Jared Polis’ Commission for Employee Ownership; she’s vice president of the Waterjet Technology Association, the industry’s safety organization; and she’s partnered with two former School of Mines softball players to spearhead a fundraising campaign to upgrade the team’s facilities and playing field. 

Siggins also hopes to encourage girls in their formative years to consider STEM careers. StoneAge serves as a welcoming example. 

“Half of the executive team here is female, and we have women in all kinds of positions throughout the company,” she says. “We have women in mechanic positions, we have women in assembly positions, in engineering positions. I think because we’re a women-led company with so many women in leadership positions, it makes it a safe place for women to apply for those types of jobs.” 

As for why women tend to be under-represented in STEM fields, she says, “I think it’s a complex answer. I know many, many women who I think would have made fantastic engineers, but they didn’t believe in themselves in those really formative years of junior high and high school where you would need to start making those decisions to get on that track, because they had self-doubt about their math skills. Then, I think part of it is that it’s tough to make it in a male-dominated industry, right? I recognize that it’s not easy to be in a male-dominated school or a male-dominant industry if you don’t feel like you belong.” But, she says, “The reasons are different for every single person out there.” 

CEOs tend to wear many hats, but Siggins has a clear vision of what her most important role at StoneAge is: “My number one job is to hire the right people on the team and create a culture that attracts the people who are going to help us drive our vision forward, and then inspire them to do their very best work and to be their very best self,” she says. “When people feel inspired, when people are engaged, when people are on fire about what they do, you drive results. So my number one job is to ensure we have a culture that attracts and retains the kind of people who want to be here helping us change the world.” 

Mike Taylor is the editor of ColoradoBiz.