Karla Trotman: Wired to Reshape Manufacturing
From cutting wires for quarters to leading a multi-million-dollar electronics company, Karla Trotman says legacy, grit, and humility power her approach to business, family, and the future of American manufacturing.
Before she became CEO of Electro Soft Inc., Karla Trotman earned 25 cents an hour marking wire with a ruler in her parents’ basement. The company—founded by her parents in 1986—served as both a family business and a training ground.
As she grew, so did her skills: From wire stripping to operating a wave soldering machine, Trotman learned electronics from the inside out. Today, she leads the company in delivering high-stakes manufacturing solutions for clients in aviation, rail transit, and beyond.
In college, Trotman leveraged her skills and business sense. “There was one phone in each dorm room for two people to share,” she recalls. “On top of that, the cord was too short.” Because Trotman grew up around electronics, she started a small business splitting the phones’ jacks and making the cords longer so both roommates could have phones at their bedside.
Trotman holds an MBA from Drexel University and a B.S. in Business Logistics from Penn State University.
IL: How has your perception of small business changed?
Even though I grew up in a small business, I initially felt I needed to work for a big, glamorous company. But as I had my children, I realized how important legacy is, and how important small businesses are to the economy.
I love being able to create the environment that I walk into every day. I want other people to enjoy coming to work. That was a game changer in the way I thought about small business.
IL: What challenges are top of mind?
Supply chains work as long as everything is perfect and there’s predictability. We’re currently dealing with unpredictability when trying to identify costs associated with tariffs. When there are drastic changes or unpredictability, companies stop everything. This impacts orders and cash flow. That’s a huge concern; things are a bit rough for businesses.
IL: How do you navigate family and business?
First, it’s not as tumultuous as people on TV make it out to be. When you’ve grown up in a business, you respect it as an entity because many other people—employees, suppliers, and customers—are stakeholders. With that in mind, we make decisions about the business and not personal decisions.
Sometimes there are hiccups because people get emotionally involved in an issue, but ultimately you have one decision-maker. I value family being involved in the business. For a significant part of my life, I’ve had an office next to my father. One of my brothers still works with me; that’s meaningful.
IL: What characteristics are key for effective leadership?
Humbleness is one. You have to be able to accept correction. You need people who are willing to tell you things you don’t want to hear.
A sense of humor is second. You have to realize what things you can and can’t control or you go nuts trying to force things to happen in the way that you want them to. Sometimes I have to laugh at myself and say, ‘What am I doing?’ I can’t control the tariffs. I can’t control when a customer sends an order.’ We can only focus on the things we do have control over.
IL: What role does your board of advisors play?
They’ve guided me in invaluable ways, especially helping me see things in ways I never would have seen on my own.
One example: A large customer had gone through a merger and had new supplier agreements. It was an intimidating document coming from a large, publicly traded organization. I thought that as a small business, I didn’t have many choices and I would lose the business if I didn’t sign the document.
But a long time ago, I decided never to take business that would cause me to hate myself. I thought I was going to have to walk away from this customer.
I pulled in my board and received great advice from every member. One, an M&A attorney, spent time going through the document with me to make it something Electro Soft could live with. Thankfully, the customer was willing to negotiate.
Advisory board meetings can get hot and heavy, and the hard truths are always said, but I have tremendous respect for these folks as they have helped me tremendously.
IL: What do you look for when evaluating job candidates?
When I took over, my management team did an exercise: If you were to recolonize the company on Mars, who would you take and why? We identified the characteristics we valued. The common themes were presence, team, and pride. We made those our core values, and that’s how we identify candidates.
We can train anyone to do electronics. But we can’t train people to show up every day on time, to be good teammates, to be kind and courteous, and to take pride in their work. We don’t just want it done. We want employees to realize that what we’re building is going into an important piece of equipment that may be headed to the bottom of the ocean or that will send traffic signals to move families through intersections. We need employees to care.
No matter how much skill they have, if they don’t have those characteristics, they will wreak havoc on our culture and make the company a miserable place.
IL: If you could host a dinner party with three famous leaders, alive or not, who would you invite?
One is Harvey McKay, who had an envelope company and became a New York Times bestseller. His business advice was instrumental as I was learning about business.
Second is Emma Grede, co-founder and CEO of Good American, founding partner of SKIMS, and co-founder of Safely and Off Season, who knew how to capitalize on the trend of celebrities aligning with brands. As Wayne Gretzky would say, ‘she would skate to where the puck is going.’ I’m so taken by her.
Third is Barack Obama. He’s brilliant, well-read, affable, and engaging.
Manufacturing Needs People: Building the Path Forward
I’ve known that the United States has a strong need for stateside manufacturing, because Electro Soft has had to turn work away because we couldn’t find employees. That’s because we have not done a good job of marketing manufacturing.
To help change this, I knew I had to be a part of a strong network, as there’s strength and resources in numbers. I’m part of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Manufacturing Alliance. We come together as non-competitive manufacturers to look at our issues. We’re all suffering from the cost of training and finding the right trainers. We created career pathways and a training program.
Then, we went a level higher and worked with the Drexel Solutions Institute at Drexel University to identify our core problem. Is it marketing? How do we find people? With their research and expertise, we were able to identify that we should be targeting women, people of color, and immigrants. It often hasn’t occurred to them that manufacturing is an opportunity.
This work helped us think about how we wanted to go after potential candidates. It was easier than sitting and waiting for the problem to solve itself.