BY HIS OWN CHARACTERIZATION, Monte Ahuja is an impatient man. He believes every job can be completed sooner rather than later.
Yet when asked to take some time to sit for photos and questions in the wake of his surprising — not to mention triumphant — return as chairman and CEO at Transtar Industries this summer, he is unfailingly affable, patient and polite.
Ahuja is delighted to learn that the design director for the photo session is a graduate of the Cleveland State University business school that bears his name. He excuses himself from our conversation to walk out and chat with her and the photographer as they say goodbye. It is, for him, a natural impulse.
“I’m truly a relationship-building guy,” he says later. “In all of my dealings, I am very driven to develop relationships. That’s part of my life.”
Besides making him uncommonly gracious, Ahuja’s instinct helps explain the loyalty he engenders from employees, customers and suppliers of Transtar, the Cleveland-based global leader in transmission and driveline-related products he founded in 1975. Guests at his Las Vegas retirement party 35 years later included Transtar’s first customer, who had never left the fold.
After the completion of his non-compete agreement with Transtar, Ahuja started a new company in the same field, Transmax, and took on his former company when it faltered. But even with that involvement along with his private investment company, Mura Holdings, his pace had deliberately slowed. “I was enjoying my personal life, focusing on my beautiful grandchildren,” he says. Ahjua and his wife, Usha, have two daughters and four grandchildren.
Ahuja reacquired Transtar in June and has been racing ever since. At about the same moment he was returning to the company, he also was celebrating the completion of a $1.5 billion fundraising campaign he co-chaired for University Hospitals. He and his family donated $30 million to the campaign, and the UH Ahuja Medical Center is named in their honor.
Ahuja’s name also graces the College of Business at Cleveland State University, in honor of his $10 million donation and former service as the university’s chairman of the board. In addition, he has given $3.5 million to The Ohio State University, where he received his first U.S. degree — a master’s degree in mechanical engineering — in 1970. He went on to earn his MBA from CSU in 1975, the same year he founded Transtar. That was just seven years after the native of Punjab, India, arrived in Columbus, Ohio, without enough cabfare to pay for his ride to Ohio State.
Ahuja, who turns 71 this month, says he is far from finished with his business and philanthropical pursuits. We talked about his journey.
Q: How did it feel to come home?
MA: Coming back on June 7, walking through the front door, I was somewhat nostalgic. It was the first time I stepped into the building in more than eight years. It was a great feeling, a sense of accomplishment, a pleasure to come back home. Several of the [previous] employees were still here. Some people were in tears. Obviously they had gone through some rough times, but seeing me come back gave them some assurance. They were happy to see their company would survive and grow and once again would be a happy place to work.
Q: How had the company changed in your absence?
MA: It has been a pretty overwhelming experience for me to see how many things can go wrong in a short time. In the first two to three weeks here I spent most of my time talking to folks internally and just discovering and identifying what’s going on. It was mind-boggling for me to see how a company I left in wonderful shape could be so badly screwed up. It was all very shocking.
Q: Yet the turnaround seems to be going quite well.
MA: I was able to put together a team to lead this company quickly. In just four weeks we had filled the president’s position, vice president/sales and marketing, vice president/supply chain and chief financial officer. The fearsome task of rebuilding and restructuring the company began to look a lot better in the second month.
Q: You must be exhausted.
MA: I didn’t think at this stage of my life I would be working 12 hours a day. But there is a strange kind of energy I get out of this. I am not complaining that I’m tired or I can’t handle this. As stressful and as time-consuming and as tedious as the issues are, I’m having a thrill dealing with them.
To be honest with you, this is exciting to me. We expect that even this year — which will be only half a year for me — to make a reasonably profitable company out of this mess. And my expectation for next year is truly phenomenal growth.
Q: Do you find yourself reflecting on those early days when you arrived in the country with four bucks in your pocket?
MA: There are times when we have that conversation in the family, with the kids and sometimes with friends. It’s almost 50 years ago now. It seems amazing how we survived those days and how the country was so different and how the opportunities were so wonderful. I feel blessed. I feel very thankful to this country.
It is very difficult to imagine how the journey went from where it was. Never in my imagination did I envision success like this. Both my wife and I really feel humbled and blessed. God has been very kind to us. Those deep feelings are the root of why we want to be engaged in the community and philanthropy.
Q: Philanthropy gives you joy?
MA: I always say that there are three components of charity. First, one must be financially able to do it. Secondly, you must also have the desire to do it. And the last, but not the least, is that once you do it, how rewarded you feel about the outcome. To me, my real charitable pleasure comes from not only giving money but also being engaged with an organization and having an impact on its future.
Struggling to go through CSU and graduating in 1975, it was thrilling to come back in 1990 when Gov. Voinovich was kind enough to appoint me to the board of trustees. It was a memorable event for my life just being on the board one year, and to be drafted into the chairmanship! I served in that role for six years, the longest-serving chairman of the board at Cleveland State University. I felt a tremendous amount of satisfaction from what we achieved at Cleveland State.
Q: And UH?
MA: That is another area of deep concern that interests me, health care. I had no particular background in that area, but the one thing I have learned about myself is that, regardless of the situation I am in, I have a tendency to get deeply engaged in it, and see the light through the forest quicker than normal. I feel like I can come up with a plan to overcome any challenge. Those traits give me tremendous confidence, that even in some new situations I am able to deal with them effectively.
Q: Is that the mindset of an engineer?
MA: Part of it comes from that. Even in the business here, I’ve been able to take a lot of issues and concerns, a lot of creative ideas, and put them together in a very systematic plan and approach to deal with them. When I leave my office, every piece on my desk is perfectly square. I like to plan and take a straight, easy, simple approach to difficult problems. Not make it too complex, not make it so tedious that no one can understand.
Q: Have you always been that way?
MA: My father had the dream of me becoming an engineer and he saw in me some aptitude. I was great in making drawings in early childhood. I was great in organizing things. I was great at fixing things around the house. By the time I was in high school I always felt like I was going to be an engineer. There was no choice.
Q: Never at any point did you think, I’d like to be an artist or a poet or something else?
MA: From the time I developed somewhat of a mature sense of the future, there was only one mission, and it was not only that I was going to be an engineer, but also that I was going to be a mechanical engineer. Not even a choice, nothing else. I never even thought I was going to be even an engineer in a different field. It was just an instinct, I guess.
Q: Do your exacting standards make you a difficult boss?
MA: I may be difficult to people who don’t have confidence in themselves, in their ability or in their performance. But as long as people have talent and confidence, I am perfectly willing to work with them. I have had great experience in developing people from what they felt was not achievable, and made them achieve a phenomenal level of success.
Q: At your management meetings, how often are you the smartest person in the room?
MA: Let them answer that! It’s rarely that there is any issue where I feel dumfounded and don’t know what to say. I never have found myself at a loss of giving input on any issue, any problem. I never say I don’t know what to do. I just have never used those words. I always have an opinion.
Q: If you had just a few minutes with President Trump, what would you say to him about immigration?
MA: We need to open up more legal immigration and we need to restrict illegal immigration. No country in the world can say it is perfectly comfortable to have people keep breaking the law. We can’t have that. However, you can’t just take 10 million people and throw them out. The bottom line is, Mr. President, deal with the current problem in a very pragmatic manner, devise and develop a very strict rule going forward, a bipartisan rule, and make sure that no one is violating it.
Q: What’s next for you?
MA: I am still invigorated to be involved in more philanthropic work. I don’t believe this is the end. As I build more wealth, I have no plan to take it with me. The more I can share while I’m still alive, the happier I am.