Tennessee on Supply Chain Management

S3E9: Driving Change & Doing Good with Clayton Homes SVP Matt Stites

• Season 3 • Episode 9

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For the June 2025 episode, co-hosts Ted Stank and Tom Goldsby spoke with Matt Stites, president of Clayton Supply and SVP of supply chain for Clayton Home Building Group, about dealing with disruptions, addressing the national housing shortage, and building growth-minded teams that pursue excellence in operations and customer service. 

Stites, a member of the GSCI Advisory Board, leads the supply chain for the largest builder of manufactured and modular homes in North America. He is responsible for a 1,500-person team producing internally manufactured building products, leads a sourcing organization managing a multibillion-dollar spend, and guides a materials team serving 60 manufacturing facilities. 

Listen in for insights on integrating your supply chain organization, driving talent-rich teams to continue innovating, and the importance of resilience, agility, and plasticity during uncertain times. 

Plus, Ted and Tom dig into the latest news about tariffs and inflation, trade agreements between competing nations, and more. You don’t want to miss it! 

The episode was recorded virtually on June 12, 2025. 

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Intro & Outro:

Welcome to the Tennessee on Supply Chain Management podcast. Listen in as co-hosts Ted Stank and Tom Goldsby set sail into the world of end-to-end supply chain management, diving deep into today's most relevant business topics. They'll share insights in pressing industry issues and tackle the challenges keeping supply chain professionals up at night. If you're enjoying the ride, download and subscribe to Tennessee on Supply Chain Management on your favorite podcast platform now.

Ted Stank:

Hey everybody, welcome to Tennessee on Supply Chain Management, episode 9 of Season 3. I am Ted Stank, here with my great friend Tom Goldsby and our guest today, matt Stites, president of Clayton Supply and SVP of supply chain at Clayton Homes. Tom, how you doing.

Tom Goldsby:

I'm doing well, ted. You're catching me in an early morning. I'm recording in Phoenix Arizona today, so I'm three hours behind you, but hey, raring to go here.

Ted Stank:

So I mean, as you said earlier, being three hours behind gave you a really good viewing window for your Pacers to win last night hey, you know, I'm still just over the moon.

Tom Goldsby:

Pacers took a 2-1 lead over the Oklahoma City Thunder last night. Yes, sirs, I was sporting my t-shirt. I had all my family equipped with those yes, sirs, t-shirt. I think that really made the difference. Also, it was my dad's 85th birthday. Happy birthday, bob. So I think that certainly had something to do with the Pacers. I'm sure it did.

Ted Stank:

Hey, matt, welcome, great to have you with us. Hey guys, great to be here. So, tom, you are out at Supply Chain Leaders Conference out in Phoenix, right? That's right. What kinds of things are y'all talking about in terms of the absolutely calm and very certain environment that we are all living in in the supply chain world today?

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah, no, it's been a real snooze fest out here.

Tom Goldsby:

You know nothing of interest to talk about, but I will tell you, it seems as though supply chain professionals are trying to move beyond tariffs and tariff wars and squabbles, but we just can't quite get past it.

Tom Goldsby:

You know, and they kind of said some things that backed up what we are seeing in some of the hard data with regard to front end loading. You know a lot of goosing of orders and there was one conversation I was having that said you know, we're really not great at forecasting anyway. You know, someone was forthcoming with me but they said you know, we're given these little windows at the fits and stops to the tariffs and rather than kind of looking three to six months out, you know they're trying to anticipate even more than six months. And so here we are in the middle of June and we're trying to think not just the holiday season but even into 2026 right now with what they might need to get ahead of it, ahead of it while there's this little window of opportunity. So they said our forecasts are typically pretty bad. They're even worse when we're looking out, trying to think about what 2026 looks like.

Ted Stank:

Sure. So to me that suggests that, if I look in my crystal ball, we're going to have overages of some things and, out of stocks of many things.

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah, it doesn't exactly speak of agility, right? I mean, if you're trying to anticipate what the world's going to look like in 2026, it means you're putting some pretty big bets on what you're buying. And it might be one of those situations where, hey, we don't have what you want, what you're asking for as a customer, but over here we've got plenty of this. Yeah, so there could be some mismatches in what we have on hand and what the market's asking for.

Ted Stank:

And yet you know, inflation numbers came out this week. Inflation only ticked up 0.1% from last month, so inflation seems kind of calm. That comes with a note of caution that perhaps the tariff-based inflation really hasn't hit us yet. The Fed does not seem to be in any rush to lower lending rates, much to the chagrin of the Trump administration. We had some news yesterday that there is a positive agreement on a quote-unquote framework for a US-China trade agreement trade agreement. I know Canada just announced that they expect progress on US-Canada trade negotiations potentially as soon as the upcoming G7 meeting.

Ted Stank:

Things don't look very good with the EU. The EU is digging their feet in. There's been some progress with Japan, although that seems to have stalled. India was making progress, but with the conflict with Pakistan, that all seems to be put on a back burner as well. There's some worries right now that Israel is going to bomb some nuclear sites in Iran, and what does that mean for Red Sea and uncertainty there. What a mess. And so I think supply chain managers do what they always do, which is keep on trucking right.

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah, no, that's generally the sentiment I'm getting here supply chain leaders in action. And you know, I will tell you. I was with this group back in January, you know, before the inauguration, as we were planning for this event, and there was ebullience. I mean, there was excitement, there was enthusiasm, there was the thinking that 2025 was going to be a big year, with enthusiasm. There was the thinking that 2025 was going to be a big year. And then, right at inauguration day and immediately, the executive orders around tariffs started flying and I think I use the analogy that sounds like air being squeezed from the balloon and that kind of is still the feeling. I think there's a lot of pent up enthusiasm out there, but folks aren't willing to make those big bets given all the uncertainty that you just ran through.

Tom Goldsby:

I asked the question in the executive group yesterday about long-range planning. I made the assertion it's something of a lost art form to look out three years or longer and there was the retort that came back. It's like Professor Goldsby, we can't see out three days from now. How are we supposed to anticipate what three-year-plus horizon looks like? But that's really what you need if you're going to want to make a big bet on a greenfield operation, something from scratch. You need that kind of runway at a minimum to make those big bets. And there are folks that want to make bets. They came into the year wanting to make those investments, investments, and they just have been hamstrung.

Ted Stank:

Well, I mean, regardless of what you think about it, we're going through some some really foundational change in the way we look at US role in the global economy. Another interesting fact that I just read was in the month of April, we brought in something like I want to say 37. The month of April, we brought in something like I want to say 37,. It might have been more than that. Billion dollars in duties from tariffs. That represented 6% of government revenues in the month of April, which is a huge jump from any time previously. Does that replace taxes and what happens in terms of the way we kind of view the whole total cost model from a tax standpoint and the price of tariffs? Really interesting. I mean, the Trump administration has promised from the start that there was going to be a period of extreme turbulence while we reset the table. So I don't know some really interesting conversations here that I'm 65 years old I don't know that there's been this conversation, this kind of turbulence, in my lifetime perhaps.

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah, there was some suggestion and I'll even say you know, we had some former military folks, retired generals and admirals. They used the word war quite a bit beyond the context of trade war, as you kind of look at geopolitics and then bring that into the supply chain world. So there's some really eye-opening discussion around that. But we just kept coming back around the fact that our supply chains and our businesses are many fangled things, interwoven supply chains, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems as though Trump initiated the conversation with China because rare earth minerals, turns out we need those to make auto parts, weapons systems, aerospace.

Ted Stank:

Maybe houses, Perhaps perhaps.

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah, we'll find that out here in a moment. The bigger thing about that is steel and aluminum.

Ted Stank:

That becomes a big issue, clearly in Matt's industry. Love to get your comments on that later, matt. There's also a discussion about what cutting in half the duties on steel from Mexico? So that could, I'm sure, impact your business, tom, you said war. What's the context of war? Are they talking Taiwan or?

Tom Goldsby:

It was in the context of Taiwan. And again, something we try to do here at SCLA is keep our conversations close to the vest. You know what's said here in Phoenix is meant to stay here in Phoenix, but now it's really interesting. What I'll offer is just to get these different perspectives and to really underscore the need for scenario planning and sometimes to brainstorm. It almost feels like you need a Hollywood script writer to help you with those brainstorming efforts, because you know we're seeing some stuff we didn't really anticipate, didn't imagine to scale.

Ted Stank:

Yeah, I mean it was interesting. Also, you talk about geopolitics and the Trump administration. I think the anticipation was that the Trump administration was going to be a bit soft on Taiwan, and yet the secretary of defense, Hegseth, early last week at a conference in Asia-Pacific, came up very staunchly in support of Taiwan. Crazy world. I just read a word that I had not heard before in reference to resilience and agility, called plasticity. I have no idea what that means and what consulting firm made it up.

Tom Goldsby:

Can I step in here? Yeah, that came from an editorial that Walter Zinn and I wrote in the Journal of Logistics in 2019.

Ted Stank:

Is that right?

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah yeah, we actually coined the term and I have to give, so you're the guys that we can blame. I have to give credit where credit is due. Walter Zinn came up with that and the notion is it's agility, but at the supply chain configuration level, not so much the operational area, and so creating options and trying to rapidly implement them on a structural basis.

Ted Stank:

So you talk about network design type issues, right?

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah, yep, that's the idea, but most of those take place over months or years, and the idea of maybe moving into those on a much shorter timeframe.

Ted Stank:

So who knew that my own colleagues were coming up with space age terms like plasticity?

Tom Goldsby:

Well, you know, so often I'm going to say it. You know, consultants take academic ideas and they run with it and they monetize it and do a lot better than we academics ever did. But you know, that's, that's nothing new.

Ted Stank:

So plasticity, matt. You live in a world where you build homes that have amazing amounts of subcomponents that are involved in putting those homes together. I am feeling pretty certain that plasticity is something to you about. Was resilience in your supply chain. Reminder to our listeners Matt is president of Clayton Supply and SVP of supply chain at Clayton Homes, a partner here, a neighbor in Knoxville in the Knoxville Tennessee area, but one of the largest manufacturers of manufactured homes in the world. So, matt, plasticity, resilience what kinds of things are you all dealing with?

Matt Stites:

I grew up on a farm and a farmer would do three things in a day for sure. They would watch the weather forecast in the morning, they would watch the weather forecast at night and then they would pray before they go to bed. And this world today kind of reminds me of my growing up, because it's a little bit of the same.

Matt Stites:

I love that, if you don't mind, I'm going to use that. Yes, so I think you know there's a lot going on and I got to follow up with Tom to get a little bit better understanding of this word and how I could use it around here. But the whole idea of really what is happening and how to adjust to it really what is happening and how to adjust to it I can remember back earlier in my career and there was a fantastic presentation that another company was providing of how resilient their supply chain was because they have this great plan and they went through all these steps and they were going to have a little bit of business with all of these different suppliers. And then two years later the same individual was back presenting to a pretty similar group that all worked until the typhoon hit and took out our primary supplier and then our small suppliers weren't able to pick up the additional capacity and therefore we were sunk. No pun intended.

Matt Stites:

Really the times today are how do you adjust to it? Who are your partners, who you're working with and really kind of having those plan ABC and working through those. I think as much as we want to focus on technology and there's a lot of information and you can get overwhelmed by it. It's a matter of the relationships that you have and the partners that you have, and you really find out who you're working with to kind of help your business be successful. And then the team that you have within the company. How is the team wired? You know, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable has been a thing that we've worked on here for quite a bit of time, and the more reps we get on that, the more we kind of get used to doing that. And then the organization that's behind you how flexible are they of? Hey, we got this challenge. What could we do and help them pivot on different materials? But it's an interesting time, as you said.

Ted Stank:

Hey, before we get too deeply into that, can you help us understand? What does your inbound product flow look like? How many different product categories do you all have to buy? What does your global network look like?

Matt Stites:

Yeah, so we're somewhat fortunate. A large majority say two-thirds comes domestically here, and then the rest will come from different areas of the world. You'll see a heavy concentration in Asia, but it will also get some stuff from the West as well. Categ categories, I mean if you think of everything in a home, down to a nail or a staple to the lights and all that in your house. I mean it's a pretty complex model and a lot of pieces to keep track of, and the team has done a nice job of doing that. We're working on some technology that'll help us do better on that going forward as well. The bill of materials for a home is more complex than what you might think at first thought.

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah, I can only imagine it occurs to me that again two thirds domestic supply, a third from abroad, and then your market. On the outbound side you build the homes in the United States and a significant presence right here in Tennessee.

Matt Stites:

Yeah, we've got 41 manufactured sites building homes off-site today and then we've got nine site builders building on-site today throughout the country. So all of our sales would be in the US today, but it's from Oregon down to California, through to Florida and up to Pennsylvania and over to Minnesota. So we cover pretty much where people are at and where homes are being built. We've got a big focus there.

Ted Stank:

I was going to say you talked about your teams. Can you talk about some of the initiatives you've put in place, I'm guessing, since COVID, to try to deal with? You know what does your structure look like? Do you have resilience teams?

Matt Stites:

if you will, yeah, we do, and if an item becomes hot then we form a specific team to work on that specific item. But you know, just as a normal course of business, we've got our sourcing organization dialed into our suppliers. A lot of focus really has come from understanding what all the options are. And I'll go back to COVID.

Matt Stites:

As you said, there were scenarios where domestically there wasn't a whole lot of supply of building materials and it forced us to look more globally and, interestingly enough, import some materials from different regions of the world. That really helped us continue to be able to build and use our supply chain network and our knowledge. Those also set up for some interesting conversations after COVID with the domestic manufacturers of saying, hey, tell me how you did that and I don't really like it. And it's like you know, hey, that's interesting, I didn't really like it either, but you know, you kind of got us to that point. So I think it's really the resiliency of the supply chain and knowing where you could go get products or where you could change sourcing has helped us one, be flexible, but two, also helped us in our conversations that we've got a team that's capable of doing that and that's brought some honesty to some more recent conversations with suppliers.

Ted Stank:

Have you built that cost of disruption into your total cost of ownership models in procurement?

Matt Stites:

Yeah, that's an interesting thing. We have really worked. We're attainable housing, to be very candid here, the on-site and off-site homes we build. We built over 62,000 homes last year and attainability is a key part of that. As we look at what is the disruption and the impact that it's having, clearly we take account for that, but when we also start to take account to, hey, what is a substitute material that we could use or how could we change our building process, we've actually taken some of the things that started out as challenges in the build process during COVID and found that they were more effective in our production process and have kept them as a benefit post-COVID as an outcome of that.

Tom Goldsby:

Interesting. Hey, matt, I was curious. 62,000 homes, I mean that is amazing and I got to believe that should be making a dent in what we refer to as the housing shortage that's going on throughout this country. And then you know not only are there enough kind of you know brick and mortar Greenfield houses going up supposedly, but also you know the higher interest rates. I'm just kind of curious about how you approach the market as an alternative maybe to what a lot of people might think of as housing, and then how you make that dream accessible for folks.

Matt Stites:

To back up a little bit. The organization here is a very integrated organization. So within part of the organization we'll make our own windows, doors, trusses, cabinets all of those materials that are going into the home. We have our own DCs supplying materials into the home building sites. We build homes off-site and we build homes on-site, and then we're working on versions of building a combination of an off-site home and an on-site home. One of those today is a cross mod and it's really how do we drive the cost down of homes?

Matt Stites:

When Jim Clayton started the company back in the 50s, he started it as a manufactured home company and it was about attainable homes.

Matt Stites:

And as we've gone on through the years, we've acquired site builders and today we look at ourselves as a residential home builder and we continue to talk about how do we leverage the knowledge and the capabilities within the organization.

Matt Stites:

So if we're building our own windows or we're building our own cabinets or we're building our own things, those are passed through the organization at a cost point that allows us to be more attainable. The way we build homes is to be more attainable, and the materials and the relationships that we have with our suppliers. It's pretty interesting this year the attainable housing seems to be more interesting from a supplier perspective, because volume is more important than it has been in past years, when you could sell whatever you produced at any price you wanted, and we see others kind of moving into that space. That space has been one that we've been true to in times where market would have accepted any price, as well as times where price is a little bit more challenged. But the whole objective is here is for school teachers, librarians, police officers, the entire population. We want to really be able to offer them a home that they can afford, and we've built a model that gives us quite a bit of advantage in doing that.

Tom Goldsby:

You're coming across as really more vertically integrated than I imagined is really more vertically integrated than I imagined.

Tom Goldsby:

Trekking on I-40 or 75, we see the double wide load coming through. It's like, okay, how am I going to get around this? And so I knew that you had that delivery aspect on the prefab piece. But the amount of onsite that you're doing and then also the building of so much of the componentry that's going into those homes is something I wasn't frankly aware of. Yeah, that's going into those homes is something I wasn't frankly aware of.

Matt Stites:

Yeah, that would be a good case study. The organization here Jim and Kevin and the leadership team has really leveraged. That led to, in 2003, the interest of Warren Buffett to buy the company. I don't know if you guys know it or not, but the University of Tennessee played a key role in that. You guys know it or not, but University of Tennessee played a key role in that. University of Tennessee had a group that would go to Omaha meet with Warren and the year that the controller within our division was in University of Tennessee and made that trip, his group offered the book that Kevin Clayton wrote to Warren Buffett, which then later turned around to be Warren acquiring the organization. Following it turned out well for the students and really well for the professor. The professor got an A share and the students got a B share Tom.

Ted Stank:

It was a group of finance club students and the advisor that's a great story.

Tom Goldsby:

I was not aware of that.

Ted Stank:

Wow, a lot of small one-story houses on the water have sold for like $2 million and got completely razed and giant 7,000 square foot homes built on that lot which made it unaffordable for a lot of people. One street off the water. Lots were not going for that much but they were still going for a lot. Somebody bought one of the older homes that was kind of in disrepair and knocked it down and lo and behold, a couple of weeks later and so there's this empty lot. A couple of weeks later two trucks show up with components of a Clayton home and within a week that home was up. I mean, they were still working on the interior. But the point I wanted to bring out is that in a lot of areas skilled tradespeople are really tough to come by. So if you're building your own home and you're not building a 7,000 square foot, $5 million home, it's really tough to find tradespeople. And these people were able to build a really nice looking home, move into it in a short period of time.

Matt Stites:

Yeah, that's a great point, Ted. The market has been kind of constrained on trades and there's some things that are going on today that may be constraining those trades a little bit more with some policy. But the idea of being able to build a home or portions of a home off-site have a whole lot more efficiency to them and this organization has been great at knowing how to do that. To talk about it a little bit more, we have a product that's a hybrid version today. It's called a cross mod, and the cross mod is the core part of the home, is built within a facility, delivered to the job site, much as you said, and the garage and the porch is constructed in a much smaller time than what it would take to normally construct a home. And that's really part of being efficient and that of leading to attainability. That's a great new product.

Matt Stites:

We've got one here in Knoxville 300 home community. That's being done that way at a price point of, I think, three, three and a quarter, which is pretty attractive. As you know, the market and I would also say another thing in those homes is attainability, isn't just the price that it costs you to get into the home, but it's the cost of living in that home and the organization, two years ago, right at this time, made a commitment to build homes to a higher standard. We built 50,000 homes to the highest energy standard last year, thousand homes to the highest energy standard last year. Those 50,000 homeowners will save over $39 million a year in their energy bills for the homes that they bought last year, being another way to bring attainability to the homeowner.

Ted Stank:

I mean, I love that so many different supply chain concepts being applied in this context, you know, building the things that you can build efficiently in advance and then postponing the final assembly, if you will, and these are things that we think about in automotive and electronics but not in home building and really, really a fascinating concept.

Matt Stites:

Yeah, the cool part of that is the innovation involved in getting from how do we do it to actually doing it. And we did it in a six-month period of time of understanding the energy code, engaging our team members and engaging our suppliers, and saying here's the challenge. And everybody rowing together and hop, we made it happen. And six months later, all 40 home building facilities at that point were building homes to that standard.

Ted Stank:

Let's talk about that innovation comment that you made. How do you drive that innovation into your teams?

Matt Stites:

Yeah, I think we're an organization that really has a growth mindset. So the idea is how do we overcome it? One of our values is driving change, and doing good is another value. So it's a little bit in our DNA of looking to disrupt and bring value. The interesting part of it is, if you go back to how sourcing may have been done or some may do it is, you know, an RFP or what's the lowest cost or, my favorite, the reverse auction. You kind of get what you pay for, but when you engage your partners to help you figure out solutions, you can really do a lot of different things, and I think that's really key to the core of this organization. We're wired internally that way and got some amazing partners on the outside that interact with us that same way.

Tom Goldsby:

Yeah, no, it really would make for a great case study and how you bring that innovation forward is key. But I did want to go back. We've touched on talent, certainly here at the Supply Chain Leaders in Action, year in, year out, perennially always a top topic of discussion. And you know you mentioned kind of the techs earlier. You know the capabilities you need to actually build. What about in the supply chain organization? What kind of talent needs do you all have and how have you been meeting them?

Matt Stites:

Yeah, that's a great question and I would say, as much as we might identify ourself as a home builder or building products company, it really comes down to as a team we see ourself as a team members and how engaged they are in the annual cycle of giving us feedback and then us acting on it. As it relates to the supply chain, in addition to the things that the company is doing to keep team members engaged, we're actively engaged in several different functions and organizations. I'd like to genuinely say really proud of the relationship that we have with the University of Tennessee and what we're doing there together. You guys have got these academies that you've developed. We've got some folks that we've put through those academies. We're having a conversation with your team as well, dan and Jada, on the Kerman Academy that's going to launch this fall and, as we were talking over the last year about what was going to be in this academy and seeing what you guys have really centered that on is the value. That's one that kind of is core to the way I look at the supply chain and how you build out from. That is a key thing.

Matt Stites:

We've done a lot and we've grown it with internships and we've done a lot more recently with manager and training programs. We've got a success rate with a 66% conversion of our interns to team members and we've got some really fantastic team members that have come into the organization. We currently have 15 interns here this summer. We met with them a couple of weeks ago as we brought them into the organization and we talked about who we are. We also talked about them and what we wanted them to do in their role and we wanted them to give us feedback and to help us get better at what we're doing. And some of the conversations we've had in the last two weeks of hey, mr Seitz, could I tell you about this? You know it's been fantastic. It's really kind of that organization of continuous learning and people that come in even if they're an intern. You know how do you add to the organization and being curious, and if we don't know the answer, let's find people that know it and go explore.

Ted Stank:

How do you instill in them not only them, but your experienced team members as well this comfort level of living with the uncertainty we were talking about earlier? With using AI, for example. You know the innovations, those kinds of things.

Matt Stites:

Yeah, no, it's pretty interesting from the folks that are coming into the organization. They're chomping at the bit to get after this AI thing and then those that have been in the organization are kind of like, oh man, what's going to happen with that? So it's an interesting dynamic. By having a diverse culture here in the organization, I think the power of that technology is just leaning into it, being curious, how could we adopt it? How are we talking about it?

Matt Stites:

We've got a material manager conference here next week and we'll have 60 folks in and there's a session that you guys are helping us with, talking about all the changes that are going on within supply chain. And we're talking about technology. And we've got a partner in Shaw Industries is in and they're talking about how they're using AI and technology and you know the the conference is themed, uh, looking up and looking out. We want our folks to to kind of see what's coming at them. You know we've got busy jobs that we do every day, kind of making sure that we've got the house in order, and we're going to use this time to help them look forward. Another cool thing that we're doing, guys, is this supply chain camp, and I heard about it last year and I'm like this is incredible, talking about talent and how to get talent early. Your program is fantastic. We're excited to be sponsors of it and engaged in the success of that coming up here in July.

Ted Stank:

So what Matt is talking about for our listeners is what we call the Supply Chain Management Summer Camp. It's run by our director of career placement, called Burns, where we bring in a number of high school students and run them through a week long, essentially boot camp on supply chain management. Clayton is one of our great sponsors of that. We have sponsors, we have folks from those organizations come in and talk to the students about what careers are like in supply chain. Talk to the students about what careers are like in supply chain, and we think it's a really good way to reach to particularly underrepresented groups in our university base as well as in the supply chain community. So, yeah, it's great.

Ted Stank:

Thank you so much for supporting that, Matt. It's a really cool innovation.

Matt Stites:

We had a meeting last Friday with our whole team here and we were talking about things coming up and we had our interns in that meeting and they're like, hey, we want to be part of that. So we've got our interns that will be speaking to these high school students of what it's like to come in and go to the university and the opportunities it provides and why supply chain. And then we've got early in career folks that have gone through that and talking about what their journey has been, have gone through that and talking about what their journey has been. And then we've got a partner from Ernst Young and myself that'll be talking more holistically about what the career is like and the opportunities that it provides. So great opportunity. Thanks for setting that up for us.

Tom Goldsby:

Well, you know, matt, I'll just turn it right back to you as a member of the advisory board. You all pressed us to kind of help solve a problem that we were all experiencing about bringing those underrepresented groups into your supply chain organizations, also into our universities, and it was really great. Thomas Deakins, who was our former managing director of the GSCI, got behind it and partners like Clayton Holmes stepped up to support it, and we're just so excited about it and we're solving a key problem out there. But it occurs to me that we're talking about bringing new talent into supply chain. Something we could have touched on at the outset was your journey, matt. I'm just curious what a graduate of the University of Toledo and you had an extensive career at Dana Corporation, and I'm just curious about how it brings you to your current role as president, svp. So can you go back a little bit to your upbringing? We heard the farm reference earlier. So did you grow up in a rural area?

Matt Stites:

Yeah, I did. I grew up in Northwest Ohio area. Yeah, I did. I grew up in Northwest Ohio 161 years this year the family's been on the farm, so that's a pretty cool thing. Wanted to work at Dana Corporation. It was a premier company. I like cars and that's what they did. So at age seven, that was where I wanted to go and had the fortune of spending 12 and a half years there. Ended up at corporate in their supply chain organization. Centralized the supply chain into a global supply chain structure. Had an opportunity from there to go to Wisconsin, be part of an employee-owned company and the leadership team there of how do we reinvent that business and some pretty cool things we did there with partners. We reinvent that business and some pretty cool things we did there with partners. One of those was a milestone, I guess maybe in my journey was we ended up winning the 2012 award for most innovative ideas. We were a global finalist for the industry and our recognition was based off of a supply chain initiative to work with a third party and how do we work collaboratively and strategically together, and so it was really showing that supply chain has the ability to really change a business and a business model.

Matt Stites:

And then I got a phone call from a recruiter that said, hey, you ready for a different industry. A phone call from a recruiter that said, hey, you ready for a different industry? And would you want to move? And that was well. If it was to Minnesota from Wisconsin, no, I wouldn't want to move.

Matt Stites:

It was the opportunities in Knoxville, which I had done some work with University of Tennessee when I was in Wisconsin. We had traveled here as a family before and liked the area and I said, okay, so what's the industry? And they said it's a home builder. And I said, okay, I don't know about that. And it was what are your first thoughts? And I'm like my first thoughts is I read that it's a pretty turbulent market. It's good when it's good and it's horrible when it's horrible. And there's probably little in between from what I read. And the recruiter said, hey, what if I told you this company didn't lose money through the housing crisis? And I said, okay, I think we should continue the conversation. So that's what brought me here and it's been a fantastic journey along the way, learning a lot of different things, but being in a place today where the value of the supply chain really can contribute to the success of the organization Amen.

Ted Stank:

Well, we're really, really delighted to have you as a friend and neighbor and a partner. Tom had mentioned our executive advisory board. You're a great contributing member of that. We attribute a lot of the progress that we've made in our program to the advice we get from that group. So thank you for that. Listen again. Thank you so much for being here with us To our listeners. You can reach us at gsci at utkedu. Matt did a great plug for our certification academies. We have them in general supply chain management foundations. We have them in supply chain finance, supply chain planning and a new one kicking off this fall in procurement. So if anyone's interested and wants more information, please reach out to gsci at utkedu. Matt, great to be with you. I know you've got a busy day coming up. We'll let you go with that.

Matt Stites:

All right, thanks guys, I enjoyed it.

Intro & Outro:

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People on this episode

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Ted Stank

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Tom Goldsby

Co-host