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Hi, this is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where chemicals means business. Today, I am speaking with Kris Maynard, who is the Executive Chairman of Essential Ingredients, a company he founded in 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia, with a vision of creating a different kind of chemical distributor. Partner focused and people focused. Today, Essential Ingredients is employee owned through an ESOP.
Kris now has his sights set on building, an evergreen company to last a hundred years with the stated purpose of being a blessing to others. These are things that are, frankly, a little different amongst the world of chemicals and distribution and heck business in general. But I think that's what's going to make this conversation so great.
So Kris and I are going to talk about that and many things, including the importance of being, and the importance of independent private ownership and the people, the impact that it has on people in society. So lots of cover here. Kris, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Thank you, Victoria, for having me. It's a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you. So what is your origin story? What got you interested in chemicals and led to the founding of Essential Ingredients?
Before I get to the origin story, I co founded the business actually in 1996 with a, with a good friend and partner of mine. That'll be part of our story we talk about, but, it's taken a lot of us to build what we have here today. So I don't want to take too much credit for all that. But, I grew up in Southern Ohio. very modest, growing up in a farming community. it was a three bedroom, one bath house with three boys and mom and dad. And, I was the first one, yeah, of the boys to go to college.
I was a middle, middle child. So, my poor mother had to share a bathroom with, for, for me um, in fact, at one point in our, my mom was so frustrated with the cleanliness of the bathroom. Dad had to put a shower in the, what we call the utility room outside, which got very, very cold. It wasn't insulated in the wintertime. So you didn't want to be the 1st 1 to take a shower in the wintertime because you had to break the ice off the floor. So, I ended up going to Miami of Ohio.
My dad wanted me to be a doctor, having kind of struggled with finances, pretty much all his life. And he thought, well, Go pursue a medical career. So I was a premed guy. Like, I think when I talk to folks in our industry, it's like 9 out of 10 were premed and ended up in the chemical industry. Some reason. so coming out of college, I actually thought it was gonna be a missionary. I had spent some time in Russia behind the iron curtain and on 1 of those trips.
Actually, I met this young lady fell in love with her and she, I wanted to marry her. And when I went to ask her dad for her hand in marriage, she said, you need to find a job. And, so I went back to the career planning center at Miami and started digging through, potential career opportunities. And I found this company step in chemical company was advertising. It was in the file cabinets course. We didn't have computers readily at hand back then.
And, I sent them a note and they invited me up for a series of interviews and and I got that job after being turned down for so many other jobs that paid literally half as much and, started my, career in chemicals as a trainee inside of Stepan, which did a fantastic job of training folks and my hats off to them for their investment in me.
And spent about, six years, selling, chemicals here in the Southeast for, for Stepan before kind of catching this idea with my, my founding partner who happened to work for one of our distributors at the time. And, he and I actually, the first time we met, we were out peddling chemicals in his car. I always call it windshield time. Right? So, I'm the supplier. He's the distributor and we're starting and we're both about the same age. And we started sharing this passion.
We both had for starting our own business someday. And over a period of about 3 years, we hatched this idea for a chemical distribution company that really did things a little differently. Based on some of the frustrations I had from the supplier side, some of the frustrations he had from the, from the distributor side and thought we could do something a little different.
Yeah. That's really cool. And you really were pretty young and early in your career journey when you guys decided to co found Essential.
Yeah. Yeah. I think I was 27, he might have been 28. I remember, coming home and telling my wife, that was my last day at work. Both of us had brand new baby girls at home, less than 1 year old each. And, Had a minuscule part of a plan, nothing you would really call a sharp business plan. Looking back on it. I wouldn't advise anybody to do what we did, but, we started off in a little incubator in Augusta, Georgia. We couldn't afford a real office in the incubator literally.
So we rented the server closet in the corner. It was where all the wires came in for the phone service and, We paid 125 a month for that server closet. It was just big enough for a desk and a bookshelf for some samples. And really what we wanted was somebody answering the phone in a professional way that said, thank you for calling Essential Ingredients. And he and I ran off with two used cars and a couple of Skytel pagers and started beating the streets.
That's awesome. That's a great way. A great story. So tell us a little bit about Essential Ingredients.
Yeah, so, obviously we're a chemical distribution company and, Essential Ingredients was the name that we founded in 1996. And that's the name that's been carried through and has largely turned into our personal care, chemical distribution arm. since then, we became an ESOP in 2000 and 2011, which we'll talk a little bit more about. I'm sure.
Yeah.
and then since then, we formed a holding company over top of Essential Ingredients. We call cathedral holdings and it's allowing us to diversify the verticals within chemical distribution. So we can have a little bit more of a focused approach on different industries, whether it be personal care or industrial care floor care, In fact, we're looking at, the oil and gas market right now as a new one.
Cool. So what makes Essential Ingredients different? I know you said you, you, you guys founded this with this idea that there was something different available. You were frustrated as a supplier. He was a little frustrated distributor. What makes Essential Ingredients different?
One of the common frustrations that he and I both had was, the lack of trust between people, in, in business and, and the typical way that, that suppliers and distributors work together, it, it's really designed, against building trust.
For example, it wasn't uncommon for me as a step in sales rep to walk into one of my distributors and constantly being kind of beat over the head by the distributor about, the, the most recent price they had gotten on a surfactant from, it could have been Rome Polonka at the time, right? Names that we don't recognize anymore for some of the newer folks, but, or could have been WITCO or something like that.
Here I was, in the field with their salespeople trying to help them promote our products, particularly our specialty products. really trying to forge these really deep and meaningful relationships, which is I found myself really enjoying that part of it, getting to know customers, their sort of their family, their stories, getting to know these sales reps really, really well and, doing business together, like in, in a combined success focus, versus, my success over your success.
So, we kind of took that and said, 1 of our founding principles is going to be, we're not going to have competing product lines. we're going to have a surfactant supplier, for example, and we're not going to have 2 or 3, we're going to have a silicone supplier and then we're going to start hitching our wagons to these. To these folks and really, give us a platform to develop trusting, transparent, meaningful relationships where we can exchange information very freely.
we can, and with that trust as a backdrop, it allowed us to really just kind of put rocket fuel in the engine, because, if, if a supplier, if I came to a supplier with a competitive situation, they could, They could believe it was because we were truly a partner in that situation and not necessarily a quasi partner who was looking to leverage them for better pricing to line my own pocket.
You find that your suppliers were really open to that, to the idea of being kind of the single one to one relationship?
From what I gathered, it was based on my experience. It was really new at the time. So it was a bit revolutionary in terms of, the way this interaction was going to take place. And once it got some steam, it became really magnetic, and very refreshing, for folks to be able to do that. Because, for our suppliers these days, and we did it back then, but, we publish a quarterly report for each of them that says, here's where all your samples when here's how our sales are doing.
here's the projects we have in the pipeline. So it's a very, transparent relationship and it gives them, I think, a lot more transparency to the marketplace. What's going on? so that feedback loop is very tight, very transparent and they really, really appreciate that because suppliers, I think often find find themselves and they may have. good line of sight on some of their direct accounts.
But when it comes to the smaller mid tiers or co packagers and these sorts of things, they're relying on their distributors to really feed them, that information, which the smaller customers tend to move faster. They pick up on the trends a little bit quicker and that information is really, really meaningful to them. So, we found it to be a tremendous success and I think a huge part of our story.
Yeah. I think that's great. And, and I know I've always worked on the supplier side and I've had that, kind of confusion or wonderment. Sometimes these conversations were like, okay, well, how do you decide if you're selling my material or somebody else's? Like when, when do you sell, from supplier a versus supplier B and there's this. It's a bit of a conflict, I think, in some ways. it's certainly the way the business runs and it's run successfully for, decades, obviously.
However, I could see where there's also a lot of tension that comes into the relationship when you're not clear in terms of. How the partnership is aligning, what products are getting sold where, and, what really those decision factors are, in a way that you get more transparent, it sounds like, when you've got these one to one relationships.
Yeah, and that, the, the 1 to 1 thing has gotten a lot more complex since 1996, as you can imagine, with all the consolidation that's happened in our marketplace. So we've really still kind of set that as a goal, for the kind of the way the story we tell, but it's gotten much more challenging, with a lot of the consolidation that happens. So,
I'm sure. I'm sure. All right. So let's, let's jp into this whole aspect of being privately owned. So, in fact, Kris was, as you were introduced to me by Cameron Whaley, from SCT, another privately owned company, in family owned company, and obviously now, Essential Ingredients is now ESOP, which is employee owned, Why does this matter, right? There's, there's not that many private, truly privately owned companies in the chemical industry. Why do you think this is important?
yeah, there, we talked about consolidation a little bit already, but we've obviously seen it on the chemical distribution side too. And there's not many of us privately held. One's left. And I think the, who owns you matters because, whether it's a publicly traded company or a private equity owned company, typically, I would argue that those owners, have one thing in mind, it's financial outcome. And in most cases, they're willing to sacrifice a lot of things, for a financial outcome.
if you're publicly traded, of course, you're measured on a quarterly basis, if not more often, on a daily basis, if you look at the markets, but the idea of standing in front of, the cameras every quarter and reporting out your earnings., that's a, that's a hard thing to do. They're sharply dialed in on the financial results or what Milton Friedman would say,shareholder valueover a pretty narrow period of time.
So being privately held gives us the luxury of saying,what,that's not unimportant to us. I mean, we're very, very driven. By metrics and KPIs, and we define what our own success looks like there, but, we can take a much longer view of success, on the financial side and, It also gives us a luxury of saying we're going to make some changes to the business here that may cost us a little bit in terms of finances or even time.
but we're willing to take a longer view of 5 or even 10 year period of time. If we know that this is the right thing for us and the right thing for the business and where we think things are headed. It also allows us to, To focus on the things that we think are much more important than that. You highlighted our purpose as we started to be a blessing to others and inspire them to be a blessing as well.
So, I don't, I totally disagree with Milton Friedman and the idea that businesses are strictly for shareholder value, creating shareholder value. I think businesses can do tremendous amount of good in their communities. And for the people that they get to touch, whether the people that work inside the business, or the customers, even the suppliers, the value of building personal, meaningful relationships again, I that's been the, the.
It's given me the most joy over the years as these deep, meaningful relationships that I've been able to build with people and I think we've proven that you can have both. You can have a tremendously successful, from a financial metrics, measurement company. And at the same time have a very strong purpose that is focused on people and doing good in our communities.
Yeah. I like that. And I think the, I do think there's this whole dynamic that takes place with publicly held companies or companies are owned by private equity around always looking at short term, short term financials, right? So it's, it's whether it be a three month financial or daily, as you say, when you look at the stock market and the way it moves on a day by day basis, or even just an annual financial that can make, can make businesses make suboptimal decisions, right?
You're optimizing the short term, But maybe sacrificing some of the longterm. So from a private company perspective, you can give yourself, as you say, a five or 10 year horizon, truly for some of your business decisions. obviously, obviously always still wanting to make some money so you can make payroll and,have profits in the business, et cetera. But, but being able to take a longer term, more strategic view than sometimes happens, I think in the industry.
and one of our core values is who before what, right? So it's, it's the idea of valuing people over things or results. And, when you're measuring things by financial results, it's, it's, it's what before who,
Yeah.
and, a lot of times that learns to leads to layoffs. and these are people's lives and people's families that are being impacted by these things. And, so we, we just, we, we try to focus on the who before the what, and our results indicate that it, it can, it can work.
Awesome. So, Essential Ingredients became employee owned. So in ESOP, like more than a decade ago, what prompted that?
Yeah, I would say, so at that time in 2011, we brought in a 3rd partner a minority shareholder and all of us were about the same age. So we're still fairly young. I'm in my, mid to early forties at the time,but we started playing the tape forward a little bit about,what does this look like for us longterm? And we had been courted by some competitors and, private equity folks.
As this was going on, I had watched sort of the, the wake, I would say wake of destruction in the path of some of those events where these really, really good companies that I admired and the, and, and the people that were just kind of just kind of got lost, after things were after the dust settled. And so we didn't we knew that wasn't the path that we wanted to take. I had been studying ESOPS.
1 of our suppliers had been in ESOP for a number of years and I had been studying employee ownership for a while. So my partners and I were like, it's not possible feasible for us to read a kind of a generational family business with 3 selling shareholders involved. we all had kids and stuff. Nobody showed a tremendous interest in the business, but we just felt like that would be messy.
Yeah.
We didn't want to take these other paths. And so we started studying ESOPs and thought, man, this could be a really, really good thing for us. I mean, we can all stay involved if we choose to. We can let our people who have helped us build this business start enjoying the fruits of it as an owner, quote unquote.
Yeah.
And it really gives us a path for retention. Our attrition rate is very low. It's less than 4%. I mean, we don't, we tend not to lose folks and, It allows us to cultivate this culture where everybody has a stake. every day they come to work. They're influencing the, really the financial results of the business, the share price that we get measured once a year as any shop. So, we have evaluation team come in and give us our share price rather than daily, like a public traded company.
We get ours once a year.
And do you use like a third party, like a, One of the big four accounting firms or something. Is that how that plays out?
Yeah, I mean, not typically a big 4, but there's companies that specialize in ESOP valuation. They'll come in and, take a hard look at the books. Of course, we have audited financials and all those sorts of things. But, and then they're, they're, they're looking at things like what, what are on your business plans for next year? What does your budget look like? any major, major events forecasting up or down and they build, bake all that in using a formula to create value.
But it allows our people to really have a hand in what does that they're influencing it I think when customers interact with us, when suppliers interact with us, we've got a beautiful culture here. Some of that culture comes from that ownership that folks are saying, this is my business to this is my company too. And I'm going to do a good job here. I'm going to do a good job for you. Mr. Customer. Mr. Supplier. because number 1, it's who we are. Number 2, it influences that outcome.
Yeah. Do you find that it, it becomes more personal then versus public stock ownership? Cause obviously a lot of companies use stock options, public stock ownership as part of their employee value proposition or employee opportunities. So do you see that it, it shapes it differently
I think it can. All ESOPs aren't created equal, for example I am. So there's some, there's some pretty horrific stories about ESOPs out there. but I think using the tool in the right way, where you're very intentional about educating your people on how the, how the, how we make money, how do we lose money? how does what you do every day impact, how do we make money and lose money? we're an open book company.
so we in 2015, we, we deployed a tool called the great game of business that so every Monday, if you came and visited us at 11 o'clock, we have an all hands huddle. everybody gathers around and for the remote folks, they dial in and it gives us a time to share the sort of the metrics. How's the business doing? we also use it as a time to thank, 1 of our peers for some, something that did exemplary that week to celebrate birthdays anniversaries. And it's a wonderful gathering time.
So we were very intentional about connecting our folks as employee owners and educating them on what it means to be an employee owner and how what they do every day impacts results.
Yeah, cool. Awesome. So let's talk a little bit about what's going on in the industry. it's, I think it's been a whirlwind over the last several years. Obviously, we've all faced it COVID and post COVID. I don't know, this year we've got a lot going on as well. It seems, there's, there's a lots of ups and downs and changes. what do you see as the challenges facing the chemical industry today? Yeah.
things, right? I mean, it was actually good for our business. The supply chain crisis was not good for our business. last year was really, really difficult 23. so I am thankful. Well, we're We're beyond that now and actually starting to see, buying patterns come back to what I would call sort of normal and normal for us is really more pre COVID right? Because you had the COVID spike and then they had the supply chain ditch.
but I think, there's some obvious challenges around, how do we deploy AI? you've always got environmental issues and regulatory issues we're dealing with. but I think it sort of comes back to an earlier point in our conversation. I think, being privately held versus ownership, whether it's public or private equity, I, I see the impact of those things really drilling down into sort of the people's connectedness at work.
When Gallup tells us that 70 percent of the U. S. workforce, depending on the year. It's about 70 percent about every year. The U. S. workforce comes to work every day and they hate their jobs. they don't have a best friend at work. Right? They don't respect their. Manager, these sorts of things.
those things, I think particularly given some of the newer generation, whether it's millennials or the zoomers, those folks really want meaning in their work and they want a place that has a purpose that stands for something more than just a job.
we spend most of our working hours, working life hours, now with with people we're working with and doing a task and, we try really, really hard to understand people's giftedness and try to connect them with a job that they can have joy in and, really do that with a team that does that. In a healthy environment.
Yeah. Yeah. So, so you talked about giftedness, and I know that's part of your, your mission and your vision and your objectives of the company. What does that mean to you and what is it that you guys look for when you're trying to help people connect with this?
Yeah. So, it really starts early. And we're interviewing a candidate coming in we may have a job opening and we're trying to trying to match somebody to that. So we've got a we're super intentional about the front door. I learned a long, long time ago, we hire character, we train skills. most folks Really look at, at skills, and say characters optional perhaps.
so that's one of the things that makes our culture, I think continually, I'd say beautiful in a lot of ways, just by being super intentional about the front door. So, and then beyond that, once they get here we're pretty intentional about, they may come to us thinking they're really good at this. So this is really what their passion is but we're really, really open to helping them explore other potential avenues for them. And we've got a number of examples.
So we've got a, a gal that worked in our customer service department for years. And then, right before Covid happened, she had sort of expressed along the way a desire to kind of maybe tinker in the lab a little bit, and, so. We started giving her that opportunity and then COVID happened and we were all panicking, trying to figure out different ways to thicken alcohol for hand sanitizers. And we couldn't get some of the more traditional chemistries as readily as we thought we could before.
And she and the team came up with a lot of those solutions and she's now a full time lab tech for us, not a customer service person. And we've got so many stories like that. I could write a lot. Probably another another dozen of folks that came to us thinking they were going to do this. And now they're doing something completely different. great cultural fit, great character. but wanted to take some time and explore, man, is it possible? I could do that because I never.
I never thought that was possible. So, we give them a lot of freedom to, to do some exploring and we've got some assessments we do to help them with that and try to put them in a seat that really excites them.
Yeah. So, so when I think about that it sounds like you're giving your employees a lot of leeway in, in many ways to figure out where their fit is and how they want business to run and certainly as owners they have a stake in that. but how do you ensure that alignment then? Is it tough to manage within that environment or what do you see as the opportunity to keep people?
On mission, even as they are maybe shifting from where their focus is because they have an idea about where else they would be, would have a good fit.
Yeah. So, this is where often I'll talk about different roles, although we are all employee owners, we have different roles in the business. Right. So, my role is different than, maybe the director of customer service, or even one of our customer service reps doesn't mean they don't have a voice in these things. We're very proactive in making sure our people do have a voice in a lot of these things.
But at the same time, it is a business and we make decisions and, occasionally we've got to put somebody that there's a job here that needs to be done today. And we need to do that job today. And what's. let's back burner that and call it a development opportunity and we'll help you with that. so just because somebody is as an employee owner doesn't necessarily mean they come in and start sort of calling the shots.
That sounds harsh, but it's really an easy conversation to have in the right cultural environment where people feel like, I always picture it as you see these rowing competitions in the Olympics and they're fantastic, as everybody's doing their part in sync and on step and you've got somebody in the front of the boat who's making sure everybody's on the right cadence. but if everybody's got their oar in the water and they're rowing the right direction, it's a beautiful thing.
So Chris, we've talked a lot about. The supplier relationship and how the business that you formed with essential ingredients is very supplier centric in a lot of ways, right? Changing some of that, uh, relationship. And then as well as being, uh, employee owned, very people centered, and that has a significant impact on your employee experience. What about the customers? How do you think about your customers and the experience that they have when they're working with you guys?
Yeah. So even early in our business, I remember walking around and telling everybody, you know, Hey guys, the customer pays our salary, right? So not losing sight of the fact that, uh, you know, without customers, we're nothing in our case as a distributor without suppliers, we're nothing. So, um, we've always walked that, uh, that tight rope of, making sure that we are partnering well with suppliers, but also partnering well with customers.
We've tried to be super intentional about elevating the, what do we call the customer experience here? In fact, we've got a director of customer experience. Um, yep. So, uh, her sole job, Julie Vibert, you may want to have her on the show someday, but, her sole job is, is elevating the customer experience.
We do some fun things like, you know, have a customer advisory panel where we get feedback from some of our better customers that tell us, you know, what's working, what's not, what can we tweak? We try hard to have dedicated customer service reps that are building relationships again at a different level than the sales interaction.
In the customers, uh, customer relationship managers, what we call them actually, um, is, is probably talking to that buyer, uh, three to four or five times more often than the seller, um, the salesperson. So, you know, those relationships, uh, and I've always said we sell relationships, not chemicals. Uh, it's this idea of building and forging these relationships with customers and, and kind of comes back full circle to building trust in that trusting environment.
So, uh, we're still, I'd say we're really good at it. We're not as good as I want us to be at this. And I think we can always get a little better. Um, It's a journey. It is a journey. Um, Yeah. But, uh, we, we really, really try hard to not, well, we say not satisfy our customers, but delight our customers. Yeah. We can all think of situations we've been in before when we walk out of a, uh, you bought something or you had a meal.
When you walk out and you're like, I can't believe that just happened. It just kind of blow your mind, uh, service. Like I would have paid more for that. They're not often, uh, you know, but when you, when they happen, it's, it's shocking because we, we sort of get lulled into this mediocrity when it comes to transactions. And we want those experiences for our customers to be delight, not just a satisfactory. True. Yeah, I really like that.
I like the idea of having the customer advisory panel, I think. Um, I think that's probably lacking, not that companies don't go in and survey their customers and ask them questions, but being very deliberate about the form in which you bring that input in and leverage it and harness it, I think it's so critical because It's easy to misunderstand why your customers are doing what they do and the experience that they actually have. Uh, so, so fostering that relationship is really critical.
The other thing that strikes me, um, is of course you're based in Atlanta, which I think is also where Chick fil A is based. There's somewhere in the South. I think about Chick fil A and, um, And Dan Cathy and, and the, uh, customer culture that they've built. Right. So even just the whole response of, you know, my pleasure. Right. So I think, have you guys taken any cues from that as you've, uh, as you've developed what you do?
We have, you know, and I often compare when I'm telling our story, when somebody is coming in, like for an interview, for example, and, and, you know, if I get involved in those situations, I often compare, you know, In contrast, Chick fil A, an experience at Chick fil A versus, you know, one of the other fast food chains out there. I asked him, I mean, does it feel different? Why do you go to Chick fil A and pay a cashier? You know, I'd say significantly more for your lunch. As a premium, yeah.
Um, you know, instead of going to Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, I think it helps them understand a little bit more clearly, more quickly, what we're trying to do here.
And we're fortunate to be in the same geography as Chick fil A, because our customer relationship manager earlier, she takes crews down to Chick-fil-A and they allowed us to come down and kind of, we dip our folks in that tank a little bit and, and, and they're, they share some of their wisdom with us about, how they do things, why they do things more importantly, and, uh, the outcomes of some of those things. So, uh, it's a great, comparison, I think. Um, and they're a great model.
That's very cool.
so let's talk a little bit about a hundred year company. what does that mean to you?
100 years is a in the air kind of a number, but, I was really introduced to that through an organization called Tugboat Institute. It's a group of owners of businesses that have this desire to build a business to last for generations, generationally owned, aren't in the camp of sort of build to sell and really because some of the things we've already talked about, the value of people, the value of businesses doing good in our communities.
Yeah,
businesses have been around a long, long time. They're well known and they there's some, there's legacy associated with that. I'm not interested in my personal legacy, but I am interested in our business being able to propagate for generations of employee owners and coming back to our purpose of being a blessing to others.
I think about those others as potential employee owners that folks that I will never get to meet 30 years from now when I'm gone but still enjoying the this place that we call cathedral. We call it cathedral intentionally, because cathedrals take typically hundreds of years to build the people that start them don't get to see them finished. but people typically recognize cathedrals as something that's there standing the test of time. It was intended to be something beautiful from the outset.
When I walk in an old cathedral I often think about, man, how many thousands and thousands of people have walked over this threshold? And I can see the concrete or the stone is actually beaten down and it's got marks in it from just wear of the amount of shoes and have walked through there. And I think about the people that have been blessed in those opportunities. And so that's the vision in the meaning behind it. really, it's the impact on people over a long period of time.
Yeah, that's awesome. And, and I've been in a lot of cathedrals. In fact, most recently was in France this summer and we went to Chartres, which is in France and they started building it in 1189, so almost a thousand years ago. And there is the, there may be a better name for it, but they call it the choir wall. So it would basically be the wall that goes around the choir, around the whole altar, et cetera, immensely detailed. this beautiful sculptured wall that I don't know how long it took.
In fact, I mean, took hundreds of craftsmen probably and in skilled craftsmen and sculptors, hundreds of years to do it. And it's still there. it's still having the test of time. And in fact, my husband, he's like, what happened to all the sculptors? Well, a lot of things number, one of which was also in the middle ages. Building the church was your job, right? As opposed to today, we've got all kinds of industry. It's amazing really how some things can live for generations, right?
It goes multiple generations and the impact that that has, it's really cool.
often tell the story, there was a, an architect in London after the London fires, and I think it was around 1780, there was a big fire in London, and he was charged with rebuilding the cathedrals in London, and you probably heard the story, but he goes to one worker, and he says, what are you doing? And he gets a gruff answer, and he's dressed in plain clothes this day, and this guy was a gentleman architect. But the guy says, I'm laying bricks and goes around the corner and there's another one.
And he says, I'm building a wall. And the 3rd, when he walks around the corner there, you're singing in the background. And he's wondering, he walks in. He says, what are you gentlemen doing? He said, Hey, we're building a cathedral, so really this vision of not doing this task, laying bricks, building a wall, but this vision of what we're doing over a much longer, broader period of time, even outside their lifespan brought meaning to their work that gave them joy.
Yeah. Awesome. Really cool. So, so Kris, let's talk about leadership advice. And this is a question I've been asking a lot recently. what advice do you have for someone entering the industry that perhaps wants to follow in your footsteps and achieve the success in the vision that you've achieved? What's your advice?
when I think back on my college years, and I'm a Gen X. so the Gen Xers were really about pursuing a paycheck. it was about being successful quickly and these sorts of things. And I think about all these folks that I knew in college and went on to these jobs, typically financial jobs and these sorts of things. I would ask first, why do you want to do that? what is what is driving you? Is it a paycheck? Is it some sort of income associated with it?
Or is it something you really feel like you're good at something? That's going to bring you joy. You're not going to come home and kick the dog. We all have bad days at work. Believe me, I do. but, thinking about what it is that really, really excites you. Inside or outside the chemical industry.
Then for leadership advice, when I ask most leaders of businesses, why you exist, it typically comes back to some of those financial metrics that we talked about before, shareholder value, these sorts of things. I just encourage folks to elevate above that a little bit more and think about humanity in a different way and elevating above sort of the task or the job or the company. And think about the impact on people.
Love it. Cool. Well, Kris, thank you. This has been really cool. And I love your perspective on business and how visionary you are and how people and human centered you are. And it's really great to see. So thanks for sharing that
you're welcome. I'm glad to be here. Thank you. Victoria.
Absolutely. And thanks everyone for listening. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk to you again soon.