- February 15, 2025
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A 23-year resident of Siesta Key, Rod Hershberger has built a rich life of family, friends and more in the past seven decades. He’s also, in one big way, lucky to be alive. Ask Hershberger about his four grandkids, which happen to be two sets of twins, 4-year-old boys and 14-year-old girls, and he will smile widely and tell a lot of stories.
Same with the other important things in his life: his wife of 46 years, Elaine. His grown adult children, Benji and Jordan. Or ask him about surfing in Costa Rica, or the Ohio State Buckeyes. Ask him about the dozens upon dozens of people he has taken lobster fishing in the Florida Keys. He will happily engage in a conversation on any of those topics and more.
The one topic Rod Hershberger doesn’t like to talk about? Rod Hershberger.
Asked to meet for an in-person interview for a profile story about his life and accomplishments, he agreed — sort of. “We can try,” he texted. “Not real good talking about me, but maybe we can tell some stories.”
The story of Hershberger is one of remarkable success in life and business. That can be traced, in a simple way, to what Hershberger, 68, calls his three pillars of decisions: faith, family and work.
Less straightforward, Hershberger’s story can be traced to a series of fortunate happenings. That list includes surviving a harrowing van accident when he was 18, breaking both legs; a second, even-more harrowing experience when he was 60 and was lost in the ocean off the Florida Keys, hanging on to a buoy for 24 hours until a boating captain randomly found him; and co-founding a manufacturing business that began with a product design on the back of napkin and grew into a $1.5 billion, multi-state, 3,500-employee enterprise.
A third part of Hershberger’s life story, and success, can be traced back to what more than half-dozen people in his life, friends and colleagues, say is one of his defining characteristics: his sincere, genuine pay-it-forward belief system where his north star is helping people. Put more simply, Hershberger is a nice guy.
One of many stories to illustrate that point: When Hershberger was CEO of PGT Innovations, the Venice-based manufacturer he and his friend Paul Hostetler founded in 1980, an employee came to him with a dire situation. The worker, says Debbie LaPinska, head of human resources at PGT, needed to get home, to Haiti, to attend a relative’s funeral. But the employee didn’t have the money for the trip.
“Rod just covered the whole trip out of his pocket,” LaPinska says. “He didn’t expect anything in return. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He didn’t brag about it.”
Going deeper to trace what makes Hershberger Hershberger — and why a swath of people in the Sarasota-Manatee business community call him, lovingly, the “Rodfather” — requires a stop in Ohio and then rural western Canada. (Christine Robinson, executive director of the Argus Foundation, a pro-business group in Sarasota, is one of several who call Hershberger when they hear chatter about some happening, deal or legislation that impacts the region. Hence, the Rodfather. “I always call Rod,” Robinson says, “to ask ‘what do you know about this?’”)
Hershberger was born in Ohio, the son of missionaries. His parents moved from the Buckeye State to a town between Calgary and Edmonton when he was a young boy. They were going to go to Africa, but his mom had some health issues. They eventually settled in South Bend, Indiana. Hershberger was a standout football player in high school, playing in the shadow of Notre Dame.
Hershberger was good enough at football that legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes recruited him in the early 1970s to play for the Buckeyes — a made-it-in-life moment for someone born in Ohio. Hershberger recalls Hayes, when they met, razzed him a bit.
“When I met Coach Hayes, he said, ‘You are good, but you are not going to be our running back next year,’” Hershberger recalls over breakfast at Village Cafe in Siesta Key Village in late November. Hayes, Hershberger says, then quickly said, “Turn around, I’d like you to meet next year’s running back.”
Behind Hershberger stood Archie Griffin, the only two-time Heisman Trophy winner who is also considered one of the greatest college football running backs of all time.
Beyond that, Hershberger says the van accident he was in ended his college football dreams. Instead of going to college, Hershberger went to work. He obtained his blasting license when he was 18 and began working at factories in Ohio. “That’s a real cool job to have,” he says. “It was a really dirty job, too.”
In Ohio, Hershberger met and befriended Paul Hostetler. In 1980, the pair moved to Florida and looked to start a manufacturing business. They drew a vinyl porch enclosure product on a napkin, which led to a company dubbed Vinyl Tech. The company started with the two of them and one other employee.
Growth came slow, but steady. Then, Hershberger says, Hurricane Andrew in 1992 changed everything. The company, by then PGT, went from a $24 million business to a $42 million business, with work flowing constantly. Hershberger says a key to the company’s success wasn’t just showing up for the seemingly endless amount of window work but sticking to a high customer service model that fosters repeat business. That and a lot of 12-hour days. “Looking back now it sounds fun,” he says, “but it was not fun while you were going through it.”
The next big tipping point for PGT came on June 28, 2006: the company launched an IPO, raising $123 million when it debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The company remained publicly traded for the next 18 years, as it grew from $333 million in annual sales to $1.5 billion. Pennsylvania-based Miter Brands, another window company, acquired PGT in March 2024, in a $3.1 billion deal.
Hershberger was CEO of PGT from 2005 to 2017, when he retired from day-to-day leadership. He was then named non-employee chairman of the PGT board — and over the summer he was named to the Miter board.
Another defining characteristic of Hershberger that comes up regularly when talking to people about him? An ability to mesh intelligence with integrity. It’s why people often come to him for guidance and advice.
Lakewood Ranch-based Willis A. Smith Construction Chairman David Sessions has served on two boards with Hersberger and says he has always looked up to him. “He is the quiet strength in the room,” Sessions says in a text. “He doesn’t talk for the sake of talking. But when he has something to say everybody listens. His points are well-organized, well thought out and to the point.”
Christine Robinson has seen that side of Hershberger, too. She worked alongside Hersberger on several prominent civic and business issues and reported to him when he chaired the Argus board.
“He’s like the wise old owl,” Robinson says. “Whenever we had a discussion on what to do, we always looked to him for guidance and perspective. He could be quiet. But he could command the room.”
Hershberger, says Robinson, is also the kind of leader and mentor who could find and cultivate other great leaders. One year, at her annual review at Argus, Hershberger wrote, “needs to take a vacation” in Robinson’s action plan. At first, Robinson was taken aback, calling it a “jaw-dropping” moment, that maybe the organization didn’t need her.
But Hershberger explained taking a day to go to a daughter’s volleyball game or a son’s concert isn’t a vacation. “He said the organization and I would both do better if I took a vacation,” she says. He was right, she adds.
LaPinska is one of multiple PGT employees to consider Hershberger a mentor. “He invested quite a bit in my career,” she says. “I don’t know if I’d be where I am today without him seeing things in me that I didn’t see in myself.”
LaPinska, in working with Hershberger for some 30 years, also learned that, while he’s a caring, servant-leader kind of person, he also has a long memory — for practical joke revenge.
After one series of hijinks at the office, Hershberger told LaPinska he would get her back. “You won’t know when, you won’t know where,” the then-PGT CEO told her.
It took a few years, but Hershberger got his revenge: LaPinska came back from vacation to her office and everything in it was gone. The only thing left was a sign that directed visitors to…the women’s bathroom down the hall. Inside was her desk, and a sign that said: “Welcome to Debbie’s office.”
More revenge: Around Christmas one year LaPinska saw a huge poster of two young girls hanging in the main PGT lobby. As she walked in from the parking lot, she thought it was for the company’s adopt-a-family program for the holidays. “As I got closer I said, ‘Oh my gosh,’ that’s a picture of me and my sister as young girls,” she says, chuckling at the memory. “Rod had called my parents in Arizona and gotten this picture and blew it up into a poster.”
Hershberger was the opposite of joking the night eight years ago he was lost without his boat in the Atlantic, outside Marathon in the Keys. The incident started with what in retrospect he called a was stupid decision to go out looking for good lobster fishing spots for the next day with friends during some bad weather. It was noon. He was alone, and the boat got dislodged from its anchor, drifting away. Hershberger was wearing boardshorts, with a mask, snorkel and fins. He had no shirt on.
“I looked up and I knew there was no way I was going to catch that boat,” Hershberger says. “My first thought was, ‘I’m just gonna die out here.’”
Hershberger spent the next 23.5 hours out on the water, much of it hanging on to a buoy. His boat, a 24-foot Yellowfin, was gone — eventually it was found 50 miles off the coast of Cuba. A boat dubbed the Mystic I passed by Hershberger and the captain spotted him hanging on the buoy.
Hershberger was saved.
He spent a night at Fisherman’s Community Hospital in Marathon recovering. His wife had actually been in the same hospital the night before due to complications from surgery.
Out in the ocean alone Hershberger says, in addition to his fight-or-flight survival instincts, his thoughts went to his wife, kids and then two grandkids. “You’re not thinking about stuff at work or stuff that you did or didn’t do,” he says. “You’re just really thinking about your family.”