CEO Forum – 01.17.19 HCARS

Paul Wagner

Paul Wagner is chairman and chief executive officer of Minnesota Wire. He has been with the St. Paul based custom development and manufacturing firm since 1985, when he joined the sales department. Before coming to Minnesota Wire, Mr. Wagner worked for Northstar Financial Corporation and the Metropolitan Sports Center. He became president of Minnesota Wire in 1992 and was named CEO in 2000. During that time, Mr. Wagner greatly expanded the company’s market exposure which now includes the medical, defense, industrial, and commercial sectors; and he has provided strategic direction to evolve the business into a high technology development house, primarily through federal research and development grants. The company has a greater than 80 percent capture rate on federal grant applications (compared with a 10 percent national average) and won the prestigious Tibbetts Award in 2007 for excellence in Small Business Innovation Research.

Mr. Wagner developed Minnesota Wire’s subsidiary Minnesota Med-Equip, the Minnesota Defense division, a joint venture with Primordial, Inc., and was a founding member of the state’s Manufacturers Alliance and Leaders Alliance. In 2004, he founded Defense Alliance, the region’s defense and homeland security industry network that is the first of its kind nationally. The organization serves to network businesses, organizations, federal agencies and state and national political delegations. Defense Alliance was awarded the Small Business Administration’s Veteran Business Champion of the Year Award in 2007. In 2010, Defense Alliance became one of only three Advanced Defense Technologies Clusters (ADTs) for the U.S. Small Business Administration as a trusted agent for the Department of Defense.