From the Operator’s Side of the Table
Most advisors learn what a manufacturing business is worth by reading about one. Mel Gabriel spent twenty-five years running them.
He has been the operator who built the asset a strategic buyer paid for, and the founder who sold. That is a different vantage point from the one most sell-side bankers bring to a founder’s kitchen table, and it changes the conversation early, when a founder is still deciding whether a process is worth running at all.
His career has moved between three seats that rarely sit in one person: the plant, the boardroom, and the transaction. He has managed multi-site manufacturing across seven countries, delivered capital programs measured in the billions, and sat inside institutional processes where the buyer and the seller each had a bulge-bracket bank on the other side of the table.
He sits across from founders as a peer because he has been one.
The Practice
Mel’s coverage spans industrials, advanced manufacturing, automation, automotive, aerospace and defence, infrastructure, construction services, cleantech and climatech, medtech, energy and utilities, environmental services, and mining and metals.
His depth is in the companies that make, build and move things: the founder-led manufacturers, fabricators, automation integrators and infrastructure services businesses approaching a generational transition. These are businesses where the value sits in throughput, contracts, installed base and people, not in a revenue multiple, and where a buyer’s diligence goes straight to the plant floor.
He brings the operator’s lens to positioning, the buyer’s underwriting perspective to valuation, and a direct network of relationships to origination.
Where the Expertise Sits
Four areas account for most of the work.
Founder-led manufacturing and fabrication
Businesses built by an owner-operator over decades, where the founder is still the commercial relationship and the operating system both. The central question in a sale is what survives the founder’s departure, and it is answered on the shop floor rather than in the model.
As Chief Operating Officer, Chief Information Officer and General Manager of Einbau Ltd. from 2022 to 2025, Mel scaled a founder-led architectural millwork installation company from under $3 million toward a $25 million revenue trajectory, building a coast-to-coast operation of more than 550 people delivering over a thousand projects a year. The company was acquired by ISPA Woodworking of Bolton, Ontario, a custom millwork manufacturer buying its installation channel in a vertical integration transaction.
Automation, robotics and industrial technology
Where a traditional manufacturer has built genuine automation capability, the buyer universe widens and the multiple moves. Distinguishing durable technical advantage from a well-run machine shop is the whole exercise.
Mel serves as Chief Business Officer and Chief Commercial Officer of Rhino Automation, consolidating Rhino Cutting Systems and Rhino Industrial Laser Solutions and directing global commercial strategy for robotic laser-processing platforms across North America and Latin America.
Infrastructure and capital-intensive services
At Synagro Technologies, Mel was Managing Director, Capital Projects and Senior Plant Manager, leading more than $1 billion in capital projects across ten or more sites.
He was inside the business through its sale. EQT Infrastructure sold Synagro to Goldman Sachs’ West Street Infrastructure Partners III, closing on 22 December 2020, with Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC acting as financial advisor to EQT and Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC as financial advisor to the buyer. Knowing how an institutional infrastructure process actually runs, from the inside of the asset rather than the outside of the data room, is not something that can be learned secondhand.
Succession-driven founder transitions
The largest category in Canadian lower middle market industrials, and the one least well served. These are owners in their sixties and seventies with no obvious internal successor, a business that has never been marketed, and a set of assumptions about what it is worth that have never been tested.
Founder and Operator
Mel co-founded Ergomorphology Medical Devices, an impact-protection technology company, where he served as Chief Technology Officer and held a one-third equity stake. The company was acquired by RHEON LABS, an Imperial College London spin-out specialising in strain-rate-sensitive polymers for impact, vibration and tension control, in an intellectual-property consolidation transaction.
He is Chief Executive Officer and interim Chief Financial Officer of ReductionTech Inc., a cleantech company developing atmospheric-oxidation and emissions-mitigation technology, and a registered competitor in the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition.
Earlier, as General Manager at voestalpine Rotec, he managed fifteen manufacturing plants across seven countries. He has held senior leadership roles at Magna International and Bombardier Aerospace, and has consulted to organisations across aerospace, infrastructure and transportation.
A founder who has run the plant asks a buyer different questions than one who has only read the reports, and gets different answers.
Research and Teaching
Mel holds a Ph.D. in Management Sciences from the University of Waterloo, completed in 2016 under the supervision of Professor Jatin Nathwani, founding Executive Director of the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy. His doctoral research examined the links between innovation, sustainability strategy and firm financial performance. He also holds an MASc from Waterloo, awarded in 2012.
He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Applied Operations Research and Management of Technology at the University of Waterloo, a Research Fellow and member of the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy, and teaches at the Schulich School of Business at York University. His published work includes research with Professor Nathwani in The Electricity Journal on meeting peak electricity demand through wind and solar.
He is a licensed Professional Engineer and holds lead-auditor certifications in ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001, along with certifications in quality and organisational excellence management.
A Confidential Conversation
Founders considering a sale, a recapitalisation or a generational transition can speak with Mel directly. Windsor Drake takes a limited number of engagements and every conversation is confidential and without obligation.
Contact the firm to arrange a conversation, or read how the firm runs a sale process.
