Factories in Reynosa, Tamaulipas do not usually turn out chief executives of American workplace design companies. Yet that is precisely where this particular story begins, on the production floor of Zenith Electronics Systems in the mid 1990s, where a young materials manager and financial analyst first learned to read a supply chain the way other people read a map.
Dave Albert is now the Chief Executive Officer of One Workplace, the Santa Clara, California-based company that shapes how organizations experience their physical environments across furniture, technology, construction, services, and hospitality. He took the role in August 2025, and the appointment, on paper, looks like the natural conclusion of a career that has spent thirty years circling the same central question: how does a business that is losing money find its way back to health, and then keep growing once it gets there?
A Career Built in Commodities and Crisis
Before boardrooms, there were spreadsheets and shipping manifests. From 1994 to 1996, Dave worked as Senior Commodity Manager, Materials Manager, and Financial Analyst at Zenith Electronics Systems in Reynosa. From there, he moved to General Electric, where between 1996 and 1999 he directed a $200 million electronics commodity spend for the Industrial Systems business, supporting eighteen manufacturing facilities scattered across the globe and leading a staff of thirteen.
It was, in retrospect, an apprenticeship in scale. He was learning what it meant to move materials, money, and people across borders long before he was asked to move entire divisions.
The Stanley and Black & Decker Years
In 1999, Dave was recruited to Black & Decker HHI as a director charged with building the division’s first professional global sourcing team, headquartered in Lake Forest, California. He was elevated to Vice President in 2002 with expanded responsibility for manufacturing strategy, leading three plant closure and transfer projects and implementing a disciplined Material Cost Take Out, or MCTO, process.
By 2005, he had moved into his first commercial assignment, Vice President of Brand Marketing and Business Development, where he led the launch of SmartKey, a technology that drove a significant increase in market share, and helped evaluate potential acquisitions for the division.
In 2008, he was appointed to lead the company’s entry into residential access solutions through the Baldwin brand, and within a year had taken on the additional task of turning around Baldwin’s declining profits. That work included a strategic shift from mechanical to electronic locks and the development of the Home Connect electronic lock platform.
When Stanley acquired Black & Decker, Dave was promoted, from 2010 to 2012, to Vice President International for the combined Mechanical Access Solutions business, tasked with merging the two companies’ international operations and building the division’s first integrated strategic plan. He went on to lead the Hardware and Home Improvement Division’s international business from 2012 to 2014, a period that required separating operations from Stanley and folding them into Spectrum Brands, a project that involved seven concurrent SAP integrations, six distribution center transitions, and two new office start-ups, completed with minimal business interruption.
Turning Around Canada, Then Asia Pacific
From 2014 to March 2016, Dave served as Vice President and General Manager of Canada, based in the Greater Toronto Area, where he was asked to turn around the country’s hardware and home improvement division and integrate it with the rest of Spectrum’s Canadian operations. He consolidated four sales offices, implemented SAP across all operating divisions, and rationalized the portfolio by divesting unprofitable businesses. Under his leadership, the region’s EBITDA grew twenty-one percent on fourteen percent sales growth within the first two years.
He then relocated to Melbourne, Australia, taking on the role of Vice President and General Manager of Asia Pacific from April 2016 to September 2018, with a mandate to build a regional platform capable of tapping into the fastest-growing markets in the world. Over that two-and-a-half-year period, he grew the region’s EBITDA by thirty percent on ten percent net sales growth and reduced inventory by twenty-two percent, while also championing a new strategic alliance between Spectrum Brands and JD.com to enter the Chinese e-commerce market. In September 2018, his responsibilities expanded to include Canada as well, a dual mandate he held until February 2019.
A $1.1 Billion Turnaround
In February 2019, Dave was appointed President of Spectrum Brands’ Home and Personal Care Appliances division, a $1.1 billion business that had just emerged from a failed sale process and was facing steep revenue and profit decline. Over the next three years and eleven months, he rebuilt the culture, upgraded talent, and aligned execution around four pillars: insight-led innovation, brand equity, go-to-market strategy, and operational excellence. Within the first two years, the division’s EBITDA rose thirty percent on fifteen percent sales growth. In February 2022, he championed the acquisition of the $400 million Tristar Appliances business, a move designed to expand the division’s brand portfolio and accelerate its entry into the direct-to- consumer channel.
Across his career, Dave’s mergers and acquisitions record also includes Stanley Black & Decker’s acquisition of TLM, a $150 million lock manufacturer based in Taiwan and the Philippines, and the divestiture auction of the Pfister business.
The Wheel Group and Now One Workplace
In October 2023, Dave became President and Chief Executive Officer of The Wheel Group, an Ontario, California-based manufacturer and distributor of automotive wheels, tires, and vehicle accessories established in 1969. The company’s distribution network spans twenty centers across North America, reaching more than forty countries, with a portfolio of nine wheel brands, four wheel accessory brands, two vehicle accessory brands, and one specialty off-road tire brand. He led TWG for one year and eleven months before moving, in August 2025, to One Workplace.
In his current role, he has described his mandate simply: to elevate the client experience across everything One Workplace touches, from furniture and technology to construction, services, and hospitality. It is a wide canvas, but it is one his career has been quietly preparing him to paint on since a factory floor in Reynosa first taught him to see a business, in full, as a system that can always be made to run better.
Dave holds expertise across business transformation, product and brand management, strategic planning, international sales and marketing, manufacturing strategy and restructuring, portfolio rationalization, distribution and supply chain, plant start-ups, Lean Six Sigma, and turnarounds, a résumé of disciplines that reads, in the end, like a single continuous argument: that struggling businesses are not lost causes, only unfinished ones.
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