From non-profits to industrial label
manufacturer
How Sarah Hilton built a career across industries, one conversation at a time
By Colin Gregory-Moores, EA Contributing Writer
After more than 20 years of working in non-profit organizations and the
financial service sector in marketing, communication, and product man-
agement roles, Sarah Hilton is currently product manager at Empower
Label of Plymouth, Minn., a producer of safety labels, and at its parent
company, the label materials manufacturer Wausau Coated Products,
Inc., of Wausau, Wis. She enthusiastically says, “I am very excited to help
Empower Label grow and succeed.”
Conversations beyond Maine
Born in 1982, Sarah was raised with her younger sister in the small town
of Winthrop in central Maine, amidst lakes, forests, and mountains.
Despite the idyllic landscape with its summer camps for the scion of
affluent parents, she felt that opportunity was restricted in lots of ways.
Across her childhood, there was much unemployment, factories were
closing, family farms that had long sustained themselves were struggling,
and classmates had one or both parents unemployed. She graduated with
65 people who, as she says, were essentially the people she had grown up
with. “We all looked at each other when we were five and decided who
each other were, and it was very hard to break out of that box.” As a teen-
ager she was anxious to leave as soon as she could.
Her decision to look beyond Maine was partly shaped by her father, a
state biologist and coyote expert, who did a job that he loved and found
meaningful. During Sarah’s early teens, he also often traveled for the Uni-
versity of Maine to work on the reintroduction of oryx in Jordan and ibex
in Pakistan. This proved to be quite motivating for Sarah, as were the fre-
quent visits to her aunt and uncle, her father’s brother, living in Montreal.
Both were academics and global travelers. “By the time I was 18, I was
comfortable traveling, landing in a new city, meeting people, and know-
ing that it didn’t have to be scary,” she laughs.
In 2000, she was admitted to Macalester College, a top-ranked liberal
arts school in St. Paul, Minn. Its aim is to have students from all over,
and Sarah jokes, “It was an advantage to be from Maine, because there
weren’t that many applicants.” Studying sociology and English, com-
pleting an urban studies semester in Chicago with its many public and
non-profit projects, and working in a non-profit organization through
her university’s work-study program all started to flow together as she
pursued job options upon graduation. Through AmeriCorps she got a full-
time position at College Possible in September 2004.
Non-profit organizations and marketing
Since the non-profit community in the Twin Cities is, as she says, not that
big, once she was working in one, she would get into conversations with
people from another. “There were job application processes, but when
I think about it now, it just feels like I flowed from one organization to
the next.” Her career in marketing and communications kicked off when
College Possible asked her in 2006 whether she would
consider being the organization’s new communica-
tions person.
Marketing, as Sarah observes, was changing a lot
in the wake of digitalization. The first customer rela-
tionship management systems were in use, and social
media was emerging. From a marketing standpoint,
people were trying to figure out what to do with big
data, how to organize their shared folders, which
newsletter platforms to use, etc.
Fixing problems
and rebuilding systems
Around 2009, Sarah accidentally got into financial
services. It was the time of the Great Recession (2007-
2009). Non-profits wanted all their full-time people to
be in essential services roles, and marketing was seen
as an extra. After a short period of unemployment,
Allied Solutions LLC, a financial services company,
answered her application and invited her for an
Feature | EA Reader Profile
Dave Rosen, president of Empower Label, and Sarah Hilton,
product manager, at the 2025 convention of the Electrical
Apparatus Service Association last summer in Nashville.
– Sarah Hilton photo
Please turn to page 20
18 ELECTRICAL APPARATUS | JANUARY 2026