Barry-Wehmiller's Chairman and CEO, Bob Chapman, is co-author of the book Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring For Your People Like Family.

[5] It was within the midst of massive growth within the industry, in 1885, that Thomas Barry bought into a machine shop that provided production equipment and repair service to local breweries.

Under the Barry-Wehmiller partnership, the company developed and began offering its own pasteurizers and bottle washers and grew from a regional to worldwide supplier.

[6] As market challenges caused the business to struggle into the 1950s, the Wehmiller family sold controlling interest in the company in 1957 to William Chapman, formerly an auditor for Arthur Anderson who had been hired as treasurer in 1953.

[10] In 1984 Chapman – based on his admiration of Chuck Knight, CEO of Emerson Electric – began acquiring companies to expand Barry-Wehmiller's markets and technology.

Because of the company's financial situation, many of these acquisitions were in poor health, but after a number of businesses were acquired, their combined operations began to create profitable enterprises.

The first acquisition of significance for Barry-Wehmiller was Pneumatic Scale, a publicly traded hundred-year-old business based in Quincy, Massachusetts.

The book tells the story of Barry-Wehmiller’s business history that led to Chapman’s change in leadership as well as detailing many of the company’s internal cultural programs.