Background
Vik was born in India and grew up in Karnal, a small town about 3½ hours north of New Delhi.
72, Kunjpura Rd, Sector 27, Sector 9, Karnal, Haryana 132001, India
St. Theresa's Convent School, where Vik studied.
National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra, Kurukshetra, Haryana, India
The National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra, from which Vik graduated in 1987.
124 La Trobe St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia
RMIT University, where Vik studied.
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Swinburne University of Technology, where Vik studied.
Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
From 1993 to 1996, Vik attended Deakin University, where he received a Master of Business Administration degree.
Vik was born in India and grew up in Karnal, a small town about 3½ hours north of New Delhi.
Vik's parents sent him to St. Theresa's Convent School, a strict Catholic school where Bansal said they took a no-nonsense approach to teaching with a high expectation of performance around academia and sport. He excelled in both, learning team dynamics from the many sports he played and showing a natural ability for maths and physics.
Not wishing to follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer, Bansal decided to apply his talent for maths and physics to a degree in engineering. He attended the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra and, in 1987, he graduated with honors from the university with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Working for three years as a projects engineer for the Indian home appliances company Voltas Limited, he managed building automation and HVAC projects within commercial and industrial applications and got his first exposure to managing diverse and decentralized teams at multiple locations.
In 1991, Bansal moved to Australia after being admitted to RMIT University in Melbourne for a master's degree in computer science, but first was required to earn a post-graduate diploma. Attending the program at Swinburne University of Technology, Bansal sought work to support his studies, but found that difficulties learning to assimilate to Australian culture in combination with recession made finding a job extremely difficult. Although there was no language barrier, the difference in communication patterns proved to be a learning curve that Bansal has described as "character-building."
Bansal applied for roughly 100 jobs before landing a position selling advertising space for small suburban newspapers for $85 a week plus commission. However, he kept every single rejection letter he received, and in the years since went on to even acquire some of the companies that had denied him employment previously. Besides, he has been known to inspire motivation by reading those letters to his new employees.
Although Bansal was successful in earning a post-graduate diploma in computer science from Swinburne University of Technology, he decided against continuing on to pursuing a master's degree. Instead, he began looking for engineering jobs and was hired by the French manufacturing company Alstom to work within process automation for their subsidiary Endress+Hauser. However, the role Bansal took on also involved sales and he soon found that he had an aptitude for business. In 1993 he enrolled at Deakin University to pursue a Master of Business Administration while continuing to work for Alstrom, graduating in 1996.
The single-dimensional view of business that is required from an engineering perspective never appealed much to Bansal when compared with the intellectually challenging and engaging view needed to manage, and so when Alstom acquired a new product portfolio that had success in Japan but had not been launched in Australia yet, he jumped at the opportunity to become the national product manager for the category. Many people had declined to be involved with the project out of fear of the unknown, and Bansal's boss even told him "I'm not so sure this will go. You want it, you can have it, but do you understand if you fail you have a job?". However, Bansal accepted the challenge head-on and was made responsible for marketing and strategy of the product range servicing multiple segments across Australia and New Zealand.
Without any status quo to follow, Bansal launched the product as he believed to be best and quickly began to see success. Thanks to his business prowess, in just three and a half years he had turned the category into the most profitable product for Alstom, and as a result, he was promoted to group marketing manager, making him responsible for strategic marketing and product position of the entire Australian market.
After eight years with Alstrom, Bansal left the company to become divisional general manager and executive director for Delta PLC, a struggling company that was a part of the Eaton Corporation's electrical group. Responsible for the $50 million automation and electrical distribution business, Bansal also became an executive board member for their UK subsidiary Delta Group, and within two years was promoted to MD Delta Electrical Group for the Australia/New Zealand region. However, just four short months after his promotion, Delta Electrical Group was globally acquired by the United States operations of the Eaton Corporation. Many advised Bansal to avoid the stress of a messy acquisition and leave, but he stayed on and was able to successfully integrate the acquisition across Oceania and was made country head for Eaton Electrical's $135 million business in Oceania where he managed a portfolio of six business units ranging from power distribution, projects, electronic components and engineering services.
Within another two short years, his division became the head of Eaton Electrical for the Asia and Pacific region, and Bansal was made vice president and general manager. As the strategic and operational leader of the business, he successfully integrated Eaton's acquisition of Delta & Powerware across Australia and Southeast Asia while also managing a portfolio of multiple subsidiary companies throughout Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and India, spanning 22 sales offices and manufacturing sites which employed over 1000 people.
After Eaton, Bansal became the divisional general manager for Steel & Tube, the largest steel distribution and metal processing service in Australia and a division of the company OneSteel. In the position, he was in charge of all strategic and operational leadership for the division, which was the largest steel distributor in Australia with a turnover of over $528 million and a portfolio of 11 regional business unit P&Ls spanning the country. As a member of the multi-billion dollar OneSteel Distribution executive lead team, Bansal reported directly to the CEO during his three years at the company, until an exciting opportunity in the United States became too good to pass up.
Trading the capital city of Australia for the greater Omaha area in Nebraska, Bansal and his family moved to the United States so he could become the group president of the Asia Pacific region for Valmont Industries, a large American manufacturing company. In addition to overseeing 35 manufacturing sites, 25 sales offices, and over 3000 employees across 14 countries in the region, Valmont was having trouble with one global product in particular, and Bansal applied his expertise at generating favorable outcomes to it. In January 2013, he was made group president/divisional CEO of Valmont's global infrastructure segment, becoming responsible for Engineered Infrastructure Products, the largest global vertical segment of the company. During his time in the position, he managed the $1.3 billion division across 21 countries, overseeing over 6000 employees and driving growth in revenue, operating margins, EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) and ROIC (Return on Investment Capital).
In 2014, Bansal was made chief operating officer and president of Valmont Industries and was poised to eventually become chief executive officer, but realized that in doing so he would officially be calling the United States his home. He and his family missed Australia, and so they made the decision to return to the country. He received three job offers that he seriously considered, and while the recycling, waste management and industrial services company Transpacific Industries Group was the worst-performing of the group, he also felt that it had the most potential, and accepted the position of chief executive officer and managing director for the company. In doing his due diligence and researching, he found that while management had a lot of turnover within the past couple of years, the core of the company itself and the people within it were good. One of the first things he did as CEO was organize a name change to Cleanaway, the name of the company's largest brand. This was just one of the many ways Bansal worked to streamline operations for the company, but perhaps his most notable achievement was the development of the Footprint 2025 plan, a strategy to invest in technology and facilities to drive resource recovery across Australia. As of 2020, Footprint 2025 is now entering phase two, where it will focus on moving across the waste value chain to strengthen Australia's circular economy growth in materials like glass and plastic.