A year after leaving one of the country’s best-known consumer goods companies, Michael Polk found himself starting over, this time at a private fitness accessories business most people had never heard of.
From Newell Brands to a New Beginning
Michael Polk Newell Brands spent his final years overseeing a portfolio that included household names like Rubbermaid and Sharpie, helping push the company’s enterprise value well past its starting point before he retired in 2019. His return to corporate life came in 2020, when he took the CEO role at Implus LLC, a Berkshire Partners portfolio company built around fitness and active lifestyle brands. He has since called the move a back to the future moment, one that reconnected him with the marketing and sales work he enjoyed long before his career shifted toward large-scale strategy and resource allocation.
Building Implus Through Disruption
The timing was far from ideal. Polk stepped into the Implus role just as the pandemic began disrupting supply chains and consumer habits across the industry, and he spent much of his first year reworking how the company operated while trying to steady its finances. Michael Polk has said the experience pushed him to engage far more directly with his team than he did while running Newell Brands, trading high-level resource decisions for hands-on work building brands day to day.
That closeness to the business, spanning sixteen brands and a global footprint, appears to be exactly what drew him back into the corporate world in the first place. For Michael Polk, this second act has been less about repeating past success and more about finding a different, more direct way to build something worthwhile, on a scale small enough to feel every decision as it happens, day in and day out, rather than months after the fact. Visit this page on LinkedIn, for related information.
More about Michael Polk https://www.implus.com/leadership/