Issue link: http://www.insightdigital.biz/i/1334077
24 | I NSIGH T • F e b r u a r y 2 0 2 1 w w w . i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m 24 | I NSIGH T • F e b r u a r y 2 0 2 1 w w w . i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m in Mexico and Shivaram went to Mexico to work on the acquisition. He and his wife, who he had recently married, would go on to live and work in Mexico for the next four years. e ensuing years brought opportunities at other companies and roles in Brazil, Houston, Michigan and Mississippi, but through it all Shivaram held onto another dream: moving back to Wisconsin. "All throughout that, I always kept my 414 number, always knew I'd somehow end up back in Wisconsin," Shivaram says. Aer he and his wife started a family, the wish became more urgent and it was around that time that a former colleague messaged him about a leadership opportunity at Samuel Pressure Group in Marinette. Shivaram took the president role and commuted from Houston for a year before he and his family moved to De Pere in 2017 — he calls his wife, who grew up in Nepal and works for McKinsey & Co., a real trooper for her willingness to embrace the change. A couple of years later, he faced the prospect of needing to move to California for his job. He and his wife wanted to remain in Wisconsin, and fate once again intervened when the CEO position at Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc opened up. Shivaram stepped into the role in June 2019, becoming the first non-family CEO of the 112-year-old family-owned company. A dream job secured, a home and community his family loved, everything had fallen into place — until March 2020. T he story of Sachin Shivaram, a would-be lawyer with an Ivy League education who abandoned his earlier aspirations to pursue a career in the steel industry, should cast aside any doubts about the power of the written word to move and inspire. Shivaram, who grew up in the Milwaukee suburb of Glendale and completed his higher education at Harvard, Yale and the University of Cambridge, was in law school and on track to become a lawyer when he read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," a book that changed the trajectory of his life. e dystopian novel tells the story of two lovers, railroad executive Dagny Taggart and steel tycoon Hank Reardon. While the book has a reputation as a darling among conservative and libertarian thinkers, Shivaram says it was the story that drew him in. Abruptly, he decided he didn't want to be a lawyer and wrote to a steel company saying he had become interested in working for the industry "aer reading this book." "Now, it sounds absurd," Shivaram says, but someone from the company read the letter and decided to take a chance on him. He spent a summer working for the company and decided it was indeed what he wanted to do. "I loved it. It was everything I thought it would be working for a steel company — the operations, the people, just the magnitude of everything," he says. Shivaram finished his third year of law school and went on to pass the bar exam. In the meantime, the company he'd been working for bought a company P H O T O G R A P H S C O U R T E S Y W I S C O N S I N A L U M I N U M F O U N D R Y "We could teach people about the values and we could say we were living the values, but until you have that bond, it's not that real. I think that's what happened during that coronavirus time, we built bonds." – Sachin Shivaram, CEO, Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry