Speed, Grit, And Pharma Packaging

Transcript

Meet Kunal Gupta And Nutramed

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Welcome back, everyone, to the Packaging Etc. podcast. I'm Matt's co-host, Kristen Channer. I'm very excited about today's episode, as the person we will be interviewing today is not only a president and former CEO, but he was EY's entrepreneur of the year in New Jersey in 2024. He's an industry leader and innovator in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as a loving husband and father to two great little kiddos. He's someone who I have personally looked up to for many years, someone who continues to push not only his industry, but his company forward. I am thrilled to introduce Kanal Gupta, president of Nutribed Packaging. Welcome to the podcast, Canal.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Thank you so much, Kristen, for that kind and overwhelming introduction. Luckily, this is a podcast because otherwise you'd see me blushing. But thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Of course. So obviously I gave you a little bit of an intro, but the way Matt and I always like to start off these podcasts is to let you kind of introduce yourself to the audience, tell us a little bit about yourself, Nutramed, and your story, and then we can jump into some of the topics that we talked about.

From Tech Startup To Family Business

Growth, Regulation, And New Headquarters

SPEAKER_02 1:45

Sure. That would be great. So I started in Nutramed back in 1999, which is when my father actually founded the business. My father was a packaging executive, worked in the contract packaging space for 25 years, and decided it was time to start his own in summer of 99, which was when I was entering my senior year of high school. So my start in the business was actually painting walls, doing construction work, wrapping palettes, really getting started at the ground floor. I worked with him for that year to help launch the business and then, of course, went on to get my undergraduate. But I was always attracted to the business. I spent any time I had on the weekends or summers working, learning, helping dad as much as I could. But after I finished my undergrad, it wasn't quite time for me to get involved in family business. Instead, I had a passion for technology. So I actually started a venture back tech software startup back in 2004. I did that for a couple of years, raised some money, and ran that until about 2008 when during the financial crisis, I couldn't raise any more capital. And that was the first time I decided to join the family business on a full-time basis. I had tried out in tech, and that's where my original passion was. I said, okay, well, let me see if I can take that same entrepreneurial spirit and apply it to a different industry. It was a good time to join with my father. The business was just starting to get some legs to it. And so that's how I actually got involved in the business. I came in because I had blown all my money on my startup. I was broke and needed a place to live, it was probably the truer version of the story. So I came back home. I started helping dad. We started growing the business together, butt heads a little bit, but ultimately saw some real success in the business. And once we started to see some success, it was time for me to go back and get my MBA. So my father took gave very, very astutely said, I want you to have every opportunity in the world. This business is here for you if and when you want to join it full time. But why don't you go back, get your MBA, and really figure out this is what you want to do. Go into finance, go into consulting, go into anything in the world that you want to do. But I want you to go get an education. He also wanted me to meet a nice girl, get married, start that lovely family you talked about. And um, being a good son, I listened to him. I went back, got my MBA, and while during that period, uh met my now wife, got married to her as I concluded my MBA program, and did take another job. I was actually, and we'll talk about private equity a little a little later, but I got into private equity due diligence consulting and that side of the business, spent some time there, learned a lot, but also learned that that's not what I wanted to do. And it was really that experience that solidified that my passion and my interest was in supporting the family business. So I came back to the family business after I got married, and my father again encouraged me, so I'm giving you another opportunity here. Really be certain this is what you want to do, and this is where you want to spend your life and build your career. Go interview a few more places. Maybe this wasn't the right job for you. And so again, I listened and I did that. But that process really manifested to me that I wanted to be in the family business with my father. So I rejoined him in 2020 at the end of 2020, full-time. Um, and that really started my long-term journey in Nutramed. And that really, you know, you asked me about my background and who I am, but I talk mostly about Nutramed because that's really what's defined who I am today. So starting in 2020, joined Nutramed, business started growing more and more and more, had a major inflection point in 2020, uh, 2016. Our industry changed, a lot of new regulations. Uh, we had serialization, we had Gadofa, we had lots of things happening. But we made a commitment that this is the business we wanted to be in and wanted to grow. So again, had another opportunity to leave the industry, do something different, but decided nope, this is what we want to do. Moved our business to a new headquarters, built that out my own, you know, two hands in many respects. Believe it or not, I literally slept here. I helped dig the trenches for the plumbing. I was involved in every aspect of construction and again learned a lot of stuff outside of just the pharmaceutical part of the business. Enjoyed that, continued to grow the business, got into COVID. COVID was sort of the next major inflection for us. Realized that the entire family's life was in this business, right? For at that point, 21 years, my father had been running the business, and that was what defined him. That, you know, has what all we knew. And COVID made us think about what does the future of the business of the family look like and made a decision at the end of COVID that it was time to bring in some professional investors to help us continue to grow and scale the business, and to also help us take some chips off the table, to be very honest. So did that process brought in professional investors, brought in private equity. Um, who in 2022, January 2022, we closed that transaction. My father stepped away from the CEO role into a board member role. I stepped into the CEO role to start the next chapter of growth. And, you know, over the past four years, we've really continued to accelerate that growth. We did our first major acquisition where we went out and bought a competitor, have now integrated that business into the core business in New Jersey, and are really now embarking on yet another new chapter of growth in the business and a whole new dynamic. So I know you asked me to describe me, and I think I describe more about the business than myself, but this is who I am. I've I've spent the last 20 some odd years involved in this business, and it's shaped who I am. You know, I talked about meeting my spouse and uh I'll diverge a second, but you know, I would not have met my spouse or been able to date and marry my spouse if it wasn't for this business. She was in New Haven doing uh her internship year as a physician at Yale, and the reason it worked out was because I was working for my father in Nutramed. And that gave me the flexibility to travel back and forth New Haven, Connecticut from New Jersey whenever I needed or wanted. In fact, my father would tell me, you need to go and visit Dina to make sure that you're spending time with her if this is, you know, a woman you want to be with. And she tells me that there's no way this would have ever worked out if you weren't able to make that trip and sacrifice that time to spend with me because I didn't have the time to come and visit you. So, you know, again, the the business has really shaped who I am and where I am today.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

That's a great background. I I appreciate you sharing all that. Uh, I would ask for two additional details just for our listeners. One, you mentioned New Jersey, but where specifically new NutriMed is located. And two, obviously you mentioned form circles, but you know, what is there like a niche? Like what's your, you know, what's your wheelhouse just just so that people listen and can understand kind of your core business?

SPEAKER_02 9:02

Yeah, probably something I should have led with. So the listeners who have already turned out, tuned out, wouldn't have. NutriMed is located north in northern New Jersey and Whipany, New Jersey. We have five facilities here all within a two-mile radius. We acquired a business in St. Louis as well, but we've now absorbed that business into our New Jersey footprint. So Nutramet is focused on contract packaging for oral solid dose products. That means we do blisters, bottles, cartoning, kit packaging and assembly type work. We do secondary packaging of all dosage forms. So we when we get involved in liquids, powders, ointments, injectables, they're already in a primary container. So you may have an injectable that's already in the vial, but we are then labeling that vial and assembling it into a kit, into a carton, into a finished saleable form. So primary packaging, all oral solids, secondary, tertiary packaging, anything and everything under the sun, focused on the pharmaceutical industry. So majority of our business is prescription drugs. That's both generic and branded products. But we also do work in the OTC space. We also do work in the dietary supplement space.

SPEAKER_03 10:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

There was a bunch of things that he said. Matt's background is pharma as well. And I actually, when I thought about this interview, I was like, these two could really like geek out on the serialization and the pharma stuff. And they may like go way over my head on some of these topics. But I figure that there is probably a lot of complimentary conversations, like that you two have lived in a lot of the same worlds as each other have. Matt's worked for are they considered a contract packager? Your previous role where you and I first met. Okay. Um, so I'm sure there's a lot of you probably have a lot of the same pains that you've gone through together, especially during COVID and all that good stuff.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

So I've contract is its own beast, right? Sorry, Matt. Yeah, no, contract is like a unique little space, and um it's tough to be a contractor. It really is.

COVID Inflection And Private Equity

SPEAKER_00 11:10

So so I've worked uh years ago, I worked for Pfizer. So I worked for Big Pharma, even though it was in the consumer healthcare division, it was a consumer products-based run like a pharmaceutical company. This was this was pre-divestiture to Johnson ⁇ Johnson, so talking 04 to 06. And so I got to see the the world from from Big Pharma perspective, but I've spent the majority of the latter half of my career in contract packaging, contract manufacturing, and what I would call small to medium pharma, right? And so I realized that, you know, as we alluded to before we started recording here today, I like to stay busy. And contract packaging, contract manufacturing, you're you're running around with your hair on fire every day, and it's a different fire every day. And I actually I don't know what to say, thrive, but I I appreciate that because it it holds my interest. If I'm doing the same thing over and over and over, it becomes mundane and becomes boring, and I just I I lose interest. And so I kind of feed off the idea that I'm driving into work in the morning and I know I've got five things I'm planning on working on today. And on my commute home, I'll laugh and go, I didn't spend a minute on any of those five things because these other five fires just popped up that I wasn't anticipating. And as frustrating as that can be, I do enjoy that dynamic in my daily work life.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Are you sure you don't work in Neutromed? Sounds just like my day. Um but like you, I thrive on that, right? I know going into the day, today's a new day, right? I I when I say that in the morning, it's not just a saying, it's today is a new day. It will be unlike any other day I've had, right? It's it's you don't know what you're walking into. And some days are tougher than others, and some days are phenomenal, and some days are rough. But I know the next day is a new day. But that keeps me going, that keeps me excited, that keeps me engaged. I'm always ready to tackle the next challenge. And so is our team here, frankly.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

I completely understand that. So, in preparation for this episode, as as I have done with all my previous guests, I shared a questionnaire. And one of the phrases that you shared in in one of your first responses, and and I actually have it quoted here, is that you have a business designed for speed. And I was going to ask you to elaborate on that a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

Yeah. So early on in building this business, we realized that one of the reasons we were winning and folks were coming to us is because they needed things faster. They already had a contract packaging partner, but there was some product launch or something happening, and they just needed it sooner because time was money for them. And so when we really started going after this business, we knew that we were winning it because our ability to deliver faster than anybody else. So that was the speed, right? Quality was table stakes, service and treating the customer right is an expectation, but still a differentiator. But speed was really why we were winning. So as we've continued to grow and develop and build the business, we've built around that platform where everything we do, everything we invest in has to support that mission, right? Of how can we do this quickly for our customers? So I'll give you an example of our equipment. Our equipment platform is such that we can change over that equipment from product A to product B with real quickness. Where an average or you know, the standard for a changeover might be four hours or eight hours, our team can do it in one to two hours. And that's through training of the team, our processes and procedures. It's also through the equipment we buy. We look for equipment that we know can be cleaned and changed over very quickly. So it's speed by design, not speed by accident.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Okay. So when you're purchasing equipment, you're looking for toolless changeover, uh, you're looking for, you know, quick change parts with you know hand tightened knobs and and I'm assuming uh if you don't have them, you're probably looking at, you know, shadow board 5s carts for for machine tooling. And yeah, so Kristen, you mentioned us geeking out. Yeah, that's that's yeah, that's right up my alley.

What Nutramed Actually Does

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Over my head. Yeah, so exactly. It's it's toolless changeovers, it's how many contact parts are there? It's what's the cost of dedicated contact parts? Sometimes it's easier than waiting for parts to be washed down to just have another set of parts that I can swap in while things aren't being cleaned and washed. So there's a number of different things that go into it, but it's very, very deliberate. It's packaging components, right? What is easy to swap in? What is a common component? Where can we influence our customers' decision when they're looking for a bottle or a cap or a corrugate? How do we utilize components that are somewhat standard or utilize components that are readily available, right? Speed is not just a changeover, speed is sourcing components, whereas somebody might take four weeks because they picked bottle A, we might take four hours because we picked bottle B that's always in stock. So one of our oldest vendors, going back to the idea around speed, uh, they've been a partner of ours since 1999. They sell us bottles and caps. They are a stocking distributor of packaging components. They deliver to us every morning. If we call them by about 5 p.m. with an order for standard components, they deliver it to us the next day by 8 a.m. That is speed, right? And that is incredibly helpful to us. We pay a premium for that, but in turn we get that speed which our customers value and are willing to pay for.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

You had mentioned before that that helps you guys win business. And do you feel like your turn times are far greater than the competition, or are you just constantly trying to figure out how to take a minute out of the process? Where do you stand when it comes to that?

SPEAKER_02 17:26

I believe today we are orders of magnitude faster than our competitors because of the way we've designed the business and the equipment we've bought, right? When you especially when you look at more of a macro level. But when you get finite into a changeover, for example, yes, I do believe there are other competitors out there that do a changeover just as fast as we do, right? So we're not super unique or the only game in town. There's no IP in what we do. But a business that's built for speed and built the way we are can continue to grow and execute around that. What I think is very difficult with some of our competitors who have not been designed and built that way, and they're used to being able to service their customers over six months or four months or and have changeovers of eight hours. It's very difficult to go backwards. It's very difficult to now take that and retool the business to be set up for two-week turnarounds or to do uh changeovers in two hours. Is it possible? Yes. But you're really changing the entire culture of the business. It's not just the equipment, it's not just the processes, but you're changing the whole way the business operates. That rapid scheduling, that rapid turnaround, Matt was talking about earlier, that really creates a lot of chaos in the business, right? Your hair is on fire all the time. It's my calls to Kristen saying, I need this tomorrow. I know that you know it's Friday. I still need it on Saturday. And having partners who understand that and will deliver and go to Batfree would make that happen. But that doesn't get built overnight. That's not something you can just suddenly create.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Yeah. And I think to echo that point, you know, I've been in enough scenarios where in the 11th hour on a Friday night, I need something. We're going into Saturday, we're going into weekend work, and oh crap, uh we need this. You know, we have to pivot. I appreciate the business partners that will answer the call at 6 o'clock on a Friday evening. Even if even if they can't deliver what I need them to deliver, just the fact that they're answering the call and making an attempt, I appreciate it's the ones that go into voicemail, and then I get a response back Monday morning where I'm like, you know what, you're kind of you're going to the B team now. Like you're not, you're you're not my ride or die supplier kind of thing. So, you know, sometimes you know, effort does count even if you don't get me across the finish line.

unknown 19:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

I do recognize it.

Life In Contract Packaging

SPEAKER_02 19:49

It's like you said it's picking up the phone and saying, Let me see what I can do. I'm not promising anything, but let me talk to my team. And that's where I kind of go back to the culture. We can talk about this if you want in more detail, but I've got this story from gosh, this has to be 2012, 2013 time period. I was in Connecticut actually with my wife having dinner on a Saturday, and I got a call from a number I didn't recognize from a major generic pharma customer on a Saturday night saying, Hey, look, we've got this product launch on Monday. This is a long weekend. I think it was um Memorial Day weekend. It was in the spring. And I need you to help me package this product and change the PI, etc. I said, You're out of your mind, man. Like, first of all, we've never done business together. I don't even know who you are. I don't know how you got my number. And it's a long weekend. You don't have the new PI. You don't have the product. How is this going to happen? But I said, you know what? I appreciate the challenge. Let me try. Let me talk with my team. And this goes to the culture. I called my head of operations and I said, Hey, I just got this call. We've never done work with this customer. It's an opportunity. I'm okay if we can't do it. But what do you think? Do you think we can wrangle together a team? And without even thinking, without any hesitation, he's like, Yeah, look, we need about 10 guys for this. I'll get us 10 guys. It's a great opportunity for the business. It's important for the customer. It's an opportunity for us to win a new customer. Let's do it. And it wasn't me. It wasn't me pushing that mentality of speed and service. It was my team member who I gave every opportunity to say no to. So no, I'll make this happen. And sure enough, I called the customer back and said, you know what? My team believes, you know, we can make this happen. Here's what we need to facilitate. They're like, great, we knew you could do it. The truck's actually already at your dock waiting for you to unload. Because we had that reputation, right? He's like, I expected you'd say that. So we took a risk. The truck's there. Let us know when you got there. So I packed up my dinner and my wife and I went down. We drove two hours. We unloaded that truck ourselves. And uh the next day we were up and running, packing. We got the work done. We shipped it on Memorial Day. We found a truck driver willing to pick it up. And wouldn't you know it? The FTA changed their guidance uh Tuesday morning. So they shipped all the product back to us. We did it all over again on Tuesday and we shipped it back out on Wednesday. It was one of those moments in our company's history that I always remember and I always remind our team about. And that customer to this day remembers that. Leadership has changed a number of times, but they always remember Dutrum Red for how we turned things around so fast for them and uh went to bat and really helped them out of a jam.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

I love that story. That's a great story. I I had a similar experience, and I can't obviously I can't take credit for it, but I was part of a team uh working for a packaging supplier, and this was during Hurricane Sandy, and Sandy just devastated this area, and we had we had team members who lost their homes. And the area where the manufacturing plant was was without power for I want to say around a week and a half, and within three days we had found I always go to movies. Uh I've actually gone back through every episode I've done and counter up all the movie references that I've made, and it's a lot bigger than I would like to admit. But um I go right back to Back to the Future and we brought in a 1.21 gigawatt uh generator. It was basically a 53-foot trailer that we brought up. I think they found it in Florida, and we were able to run the plant on this generator limited, but we were able to run some of our lines and therefore keep some of our customers who still had power in business because if we went down, they went down. Uh but it also gave us an opportunity to allow our employees to come to work every day and continue to earn a paycheck through very, very trying times. And I remember months later, our our number one customer sent a truckload of product up to our plant as a thank you. And and their leadership team came up and they were handing it out to our leadership team, our employees, they gave us a plaque. I mean, it was really it was really a nice moment to recognize the the effort that the the the overall leadership team went through, you know, to keep these companies in business. And so, yeah, you you you you take that extra step, you go that extra mile for your for your customers, and it no longer becomes just a business relationship.

Built For Speed: Culture And Equipment

SPEAKER_02 24:17

That's that's absolutely right. While we have some stories around Sandy, for us that was around COVID, right? And what happened during COVID, and we were an essential uh business and we're open, but at that time in 2020, we had called 400, 450 employees. And as COVID um really started taking hold, we were down to 40. And those 40 were really our leadership team. And it was the senior members of the team that were still coming to work who some of them had never even touched a packaging machine. But we made a decision that we felt was the best thing that we could do for our community, our country to run priority products, right? We had products that were being used in the in the treatment of COVID, and we said, okay, we're gonna run it, we're gonna figure it out, and we're gonna make it happen. And it wasn't easy, right? It wasn't easy, but we we made it happen, not because we expected some reward. In fact, we didn't take people offered us tons of money, oh, run my product, run my vitamin product, run my this, but we said, no, we're gonna do what we think is right to help the general population here. And at the end of it, we emerged a much stronger company, a much stronger partner to our customers. And as you were mentioning, some folks sent us these, you know, lovely gift baskets and treats and thank yous and showed up here and awards and everything else. And it was really appreciated by the team, by myself, by everybody. Unnecessary, but it it helped us understand that the relationship is not just about, you know, we're their packager, we're their vendor. They they appreciated us, they appreciated what we did. The relationship was much deeper than that. They they recognized everyone here on a much more personal level. And again, those are the kind of things that keep you excited in the morning, right? When you're doing good for people. And look, I tell our team all the time, we are in the business of saving lives, right? Our small contribution through packaging, whatever it may be, we are in the business of saving lives. What we do matters. And if we focus on that and on helping people, then the types of decisions you have to make during Sandy and during COVID and other difficult times are much easier. You take care of people first. If you take care of people, everything else seems to work itself out. I know I went a completely different direction than we started in, uh, but that's important, right? That's again part of who NutriMed is, who I am, what I've learned along the way. You know, part of the recipe for success is take care of people, take care of people first.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

At Wexler, we're also a small business too. So and I say small meaning, you know, we're not a Pfizer. And I often tell the salespeople, this is such a silly statement, but like everybody puts their pants on the same way. Right. So like when we're cold calling or reaching out to new businesses, they're just people. And you know, sales 101 is like people buy from people that they like and people that do good to them. Last week, one of our technicians retired. We had a little luncheon for him. Um, it was nice, and we went around the room and we all talked about New Year's resolutions. And the uh continuing comment that kept coming out was like to be kind, to be a good person. And I think that if you are a good person and you do what's right, both personally and professionally, then people remember those things, like you just said about getting the generator and putting product out. And that wasn't just to support the customers, to your point, Matt. That's to support the people that didn't have a place to go and they just needed to go somewhere so that they didn't have to stay in their hotel room or to make a product on a Memorial Day weekend. Like people remember things like that. And at the end of the day, we're all just people trying to support our families and to support our people that work for us or work with us. And I think at the end of the day, if everybody was just a little bit kinder to each other, this world would be way easier to navigate, you know, especially in those moments where we're running around with our chicken, you know, chicken with a head cut off, as I often like to say, because as you two are building the products, I'm supporting, you know, the business that you're running. And we, it's a trickle-down effect. When things go crazy, it always slides down to your to your vendors too. So it's interesting to hear about COVID, because that was one of the things that was on the, you know, had Matt mention the the write-up that you did. And I was curious to how you you know some of the navigating of that. So I'm glad you were able to jump in on that a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

Yeah, I mean, when you talk about COVID and kind of piggybacking what you were saying, Kristen, chain is only as strong as his weakest link. Every partner in the chain is critical, right, to success, to successful execution. And I think during COVID, we saw that even more where gloves, right? We are a packaging company, a pharmaceutical packaging company. Everyone wears gloves in a packaging suite because you can't contaminate a product. But it was getting hard to find gloves, right? So we had supplies, we had packaging material, we had people. But if you don't have gloves, you can't start the line. And the thing you really didn't value a week ago suddenly is life or death, or and literally life or death, right? If I don't package this product because I don't have gloves, it doesn't get to the patient's hands. If the patient doesn't get this product, there's a chance they may die, right? So I think from um appreciating our partners and understanding about the strength of the overall chain, the strength of every link. Um COVID really, really highlighted that and reminded me how important each and every one of our partners is. Doesn't matter what they do for us, they are all critical to our success.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

100%.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

I love the word partner too. And I love that you use that word. Matt and I have talked about this so many times. Like you remember the good and the bad, but when both sides together feel like they're doing this together, it just makes every bad situation easier because you know that you're you're both trying to come to an outcome that's beneficial for both parties when you're in a partnership, when you're just a quote unquote vendor, you know, and a quote unquote customer, it's just a way different vibe when you're talking to somebody. So I love the partner word that that makes me happy, makes me warm and fuzzy, as I like to say.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

I'm right there with you. Uh, you know, there are there are sales reps that I deal with, and there are sales partners and solution providers. And some sometimes you talk to a salesperson. I may have mentioned this in previous episode, but sometimes, you know, I hang up the phone and I feel like I need to take a shower because they were trying to sell me a used car, and I just I feel dirty. And and then there are other people that you talk to and you you feel like you know they they I may not buy anything from you. Kristen's a perfect example. I've never bought anything from Kristen. Uh, and here we are so many years later, good friends. You you appreciate that partnership. And I know that if I had a scenario come up, you know, she could have handled, although that's a that's that's back to my another conversation. My episode with Patty, yeah. Um how they uh how they wiped that slate clean. But you know, I I put them through the ringer on a on an equipment uh uh purchase option, if you will, and uh they didn't win the bid. And she could have handled that a certain way and didn't, and here we are years later. And I know that despite it not going her way all those years ago, if I was in a pinch, I could pick up the phone and call her, and I know that she would be absolutely receptive to that. Whereas other people would be like, Yeah, you know, you burn me once already, I'm done with you.

Partners Who Answer On Fridays

SPEAKER_02 31:39

Yeah, the partnership that relationship matters, right? Um being able to to your point, being able to have that open line of communication. I I tell folks all the time that come and ask for our partnership, today may not be the right day, but let's stay in touch because I don't know when that moment will come, but there will come a time when I need you and I will call you and you will pick up the phone and you will help me. And that is how our relationship will really blossom on the business side. But until then, let's have a relationship on the personal side. Let's stay in touch, let's help each other, let's share contacts, whatever we can do. We just don't know where life and roads take us. So, yeah, the partnership is uh very, very, very important, no question.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

So, just to take a brief pivot here and going back to the questionnaire one more time. You had mentioned about directions the industry in general is taking, but I'd like to get your perspective specifically on this. Talking about onshoring pharma manufacturing and tariff implications and whatnot. What are you what are you seeing from from where you sit? Uh, you know, how is that all going? Where where do you feel like things are headed in the next couple of years?

Memorial Day Launch Story

SPEAKER_02 32:49

So I think that answer has a couple different dimensions to it. There is a need for us to be a little bit more self-sufficient in the U.S. I'm that is my opinion, that we are extremely reliant on offshore businesses. And that is not a knock on anybody or any country or any or any company, but I believe we as a nation need to be a little bit more independent. So I do believe in this move towards onshoring critical medicines or at least having a plan B onshore. I I believe that momentum will continue and we will continue to build some of that capability in-house. When I say in-house, I mean within the contiguous uh United States. How quickly that happens is a big question mark. In pharmaceuticals, we are highly, highly regulated. And it is a very slow and careful process because again, we're in the business of saving lives. We can't cut corners, we have to do things in a very deliberate, measured, and careful way to protect our patients and our citizens. But I do believe it'll happen. I do believe it's necessary. I don't believe that we will stop working with overseas manufacturers and overseas companies. There will always be a place for them. They have phenomenal technology, phenomenal cost efficiencies. Uh, they're vertically integrated in many places, and trying to decouple that and disassemble it is it's just not going to happen. I don't think that's practical. So I believe in the onshoring trend, but I don't believe that it's going to be replacing all of our international partners. I think it's in addition to our international partners. We work with both. We're a domestic company, we have domestic partners and customers, we also have international partners and customers. I still believe that's how we'll continue to grow. I don't see the United States manufacturing at scale and cost-effectively some of our maintenance medications that we rely on in the US, like McForman or a Torbostatin and so many others. But the volume and price point for those drugs is so low and so much effort and investment has gone into reducing the cost of those products. I just don't know that we can be competitive at that scale. But setting up the capability to be able to turn it on and produce it here, if we got ourselves into trouble for whatever the reason may be, the next COVID, I think is very important. And then then it's not a cost issue, then it's a life-sustaining issue.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

Yeah. I I think COVID, and it's not common knowledge yet, but the one of the most recent episodes I've recorded was what uh hasn't been released yet, uh, was talking about the the COVID pivot and what the packaging industry can do to prepare for the next fill-in-the-blank. You know, got God willing, it's you know, not in any of our lifetimes, but uh another pandemic or you know, major natural disaster and and and how we can how we can prepare for that. So yeah, I I I hear you in in you know the the onshoring process becoming much more self-sustaining to a certain extent, and knowing that the option is there to turn that faucet on if necessary. Not necessarily that you would, because maybe the dollars and cents of it don't make sense under normal business circumstances, but you know, if something like that happens, that's you know, normal business circumstances are out the window. So um no, it's a great point. Kristen uh at at Wexler, what what are you guys seeing? I mean, I know you have business partners overseas. How has that been imp impacting you guys?

SPEAKER_01 36:35

We are there's always been conversations about bringing some part of the manufacturing process to the states because it's such a big part of the pie. I think that COVID revved that engine and then the tariffs put it into overdrive. But to your point, Canal, it takes time. You're talking about processes that have been honed for a very long time with technology and personnel that's not always easy to duplicate. I talk about this with my friends all the time that aren't in manufacturing. I'm like, you guys have no idea what it means or the back end to make something. You know, consumers go to the store and you know, I once heard somebody's like, Oh, I get my I get my meat from the store. I'm like, Yeah, your meat doesn't come from the store, it comes from farms, you know, but that's the consumer thought behind things. So at Wexler, I've been having a lot of conversations about bringing some level of manufacturing here. And to your point about what products can that be, are those products that are easily manufactured because of the volumes are higher, or are they more sensitive products where you're making them in a more case-by-case scenario? So the cost is not as big of a deal, right? Because customers are paying more for those goods because they're used to it, because it's a lower MLQ, or it's just a more specific product to support a different product line or something like that. So the one thing that you had mentioned before is that every day is different. And for me, that's I think the reason why I've stayed in manufacturing for so long is that every day is different. We work in so many different industries. So to see the effects of COVID on every industry, whether that were food or pharma or general manufacturing, was really interesting because you saw how everyone would pivot some more essential than others. In your case, creating a packaging line to produce goods because you couldn't do that. I mean, you saw like distilleries make like hand sanitizer. They didn't know how to do that, but they knew how to fill. They're like, well, we know how to fill. So if you give me bulk product, I can fill it. And I think that's like the American ingenuity. Like I that's part of COVID. I think while COVID was terrible for a lot of us, it really gave us all the opportunity to see how we really could work hard and make slight changes and support what it needed. You think about like during a wartime when people would make ammunition and they weren't ammunition producers, it was sort of the same thing, but in a very different capacity. But that's actually like a really good segue into a question that I wanted to ask you, Canal, which is a pivot a little bit, Matt, if you're okay with that.

SPEAKER_00 39:16

Go ahead.

Purpose, Patients, And COVID Duty

SPEAKER_01 39:17

So you started in the business with your dad, which I remember your dad, I cold-called your dad many, many years ago in the old plant. So I actually well, I didn't, well, I don't know him well. I do have a very fond memories of him. For somebody who wasn't in manufacturing, or maybe like, I'm not a packaging engineer, right? I didn't go to school for packaging. Everything I know about packaging is what I've learned on the job. What would you say to somebody who maybe isn't in manufacturing or in pharma specifically, if you want to go that deep, and is maybe thinking about coming into it, not necessarily someone who has had the technical background that, like say Matt did, right? Matt went to school for packaging, um, and then he used that knowledge to gain more knowledge on the job, but somebody who maybe doesn't have that, you know, background, but is curious about manufacturing as a whole, because you kind of were that person. I mean, you had your dad's background from learning on the job, but you didn't really have any formal manufacturing background.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

No, I had no manufacturing background other than my first job as a intern for him at his former employer as a quality control inspector, where I learned on the job. But to your question specifically, it's really about doing touching, feeling. Get out there on the packaging floor, understand how the sausage is made. Right. And that's that's It's everything. It's understanding how the warehouse team moves materials in the warehouse. Get your forklift license, drive a forklift, understand what goes into that and how many touches it takes to bring a pallet down from the rack and bring it to the production area. Work in the production area, work on the packaging line, learn how to run a machine, learn how to set it up, learn how to troubleshoot, work with the quality control inspectors, work with the supervisors, work with the project managers. And that's really what my dad did very deliberately. He made me do every single job that we had. And the expectation isn't for you to become the best at every job. The expectation is to understand the job, is to understand what people are going through. And then from there, you start to learn. You learn to have a conversation with them, you learn to take their input, you bring a fresh perspective so you can also challenge them and they'll give you answers. And sometimes that'll answer your question. And sometimes it gives them something to think about that, oh, I never thought of it that way. For me, as now the CEO of the business, talking to the folks on the production floor teaches me so much. The best ideas come from the production floor. It comes from the guys who are doing it. That's where I've learned the most. I learned something sitting in the office and talking to people, but the most of my learning, the most of my best ideas come from walking the packaging floor and staring at things and touching them, comes from literally taping boxes and saying, why are we doing it this way? Let's do it a different way.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

Gamble walks.

SPEAKER_02 42:08

Gamble walks.

SPEAKER_00 42:09

100%. Yep. It's funny because I've alluded to this in in multiple episodes. One of the things that I preach to my employees, interns, engineers, my colleagues, my students at Rutgers, I teach them about voice of the customer. And I explain to them that, you know, for the students, you know, they're future packaging engineers. And I say, understand that when I say customer, I'm not talking about just the patient at the very end of the process. The person that's going to open up that bag of Doritos, the person that's going to inject that insulin. I'm talking about your internal customers. I'm talking about your machine operators. I'm talking about the mechanics. Those are your customers too. And if you design a poor package, you're not listening to the voice of that customer. How do you understand the voice of that customer unless you spend some time getting your hands dirty, getting out on the floor and mixing it up and seeing from their perspective? And my eye-opening experience was when I finally worked in a production environment because I graduated with a packaging degree and I spent the first six or seven years of my career in an office environment. And except for an occasional business trip to a production facility, I never saw the custom my internal customer side. And it wasn't until I got there when I went, wow, okay, now I'm really starting to put things together and I understand the implications of my work product and how I can do my job better to make their lives easier.

Onshoring, Tariffs, And Resilience

SPEAKER_02 43:52

I think about that where I always understood a little bit about board stock. Oh, it's a thickness and it's, you know, thicker feels better. But when the mechanics who set up the cartoning lines think about board stock, they're thinking about how's this carton going to break open? How's it going to run on my cartoning line? And I don't think you appreciate something like what SPS means and why the thickness matters until you watch a setup mechanic or a mechanic setting up that cartoner and seeing the difference between a thin board stock, something that's too thin, something that's too thick, and something that's just right, or why the fold pattern matters, right? Oh, you know, how should the carton be folded flat? I don't know, however they want. Where should the lot EXP box go on this thing? It it doesn't mean anything until you can see why it means something. So I I really always encourage our team and our customers, some of our best customers, to come on site and have many of their team members who are involved in packaging come on site to understand how our collective decisions impact the product. Right. So it's it's talking about this is why I wanted your bulk tablets labeled with this particular code number. And so, for example, we tell our customers, however, you want us to identify your product in our inventory system, that code number must appear on the outside of the packaging that we see when it first comes into our warehouse. So if you're gonna call it A, B, C, D, I need to see A B C D on the label, not iron tablets. It can say iron tablets, but it better say ABCD. Because if not, I'm gonna call it iron tablets and you're gonna be looking in my inventory for A B C D, right? Because that's how I'm gonna identify it. It's something very simple. But when they come and they sit in the warehouse and they see, well, yeah, how would this guy know it's A B C D if it's not labeled ABCD? Now I get it. Then they're like, ah, aha. It's such a small thing. But when you actually see it in action and experience it, you just make better decisions, small decisions that collectively add up. So we love having customers on site ahead of packaging, during packaging. We love them experiencing what we're experiencing and problem solving together.

SPEAKER_01 46:01

You gotta get your hands dirty. I mean, look, I sell equipment, so I love the floor. But you go sometimes and you're talking to like an engineer and he doesn't know the difference between a flathead and a Phillips head. And I'm like, come on. You know, I mean, my dad's electrician, so for me, it's like an obvious thing. But come on, like that's to me like a you can't sell equipment if you don't know the difference between a flathead and a Phillips head screwdriver. That's like a like you don't know the difference between your left foot and your right foot kind of thing. So I love the four to me. That's the that's the coolest part of our job. I often tell people the show how is it made? Which is so cool. That's our job. Like pick a product, and I bet you between the three of us, there's very few products that we haven't seen made. Yep, but that's all just life and being on the floor, like you said, and experiencing what's going on. And you have to want to do that. And I think it's pretty awesome as a business owner to know that you've gone through all those stages. I'm sure your staff also looks at you differently, knowing that you've you've driven the forklift. I mean, there's not many CEOs of companies that have driven a forklift.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

Let's not get mistaken. Um I'm not a good forklift driver. Um, uh, true story, I did get certified on a forklift and got my license. I physically lost my license the very same day. I went around bragging about my new license. Uh, I think it might have been sabotage, they didn't like that, but whatever it was, I physically lost my license and for good reason. I'm I'm not a good forklift driver.

SPEAKER_00 47:38

Well, I wonder if your employees would see you in a different light. I'm gonna pivot here for a second. If they would see you in a different light if they knew, and maybe they do know, but I definitely want some explanation on this. If they knew that you were a DJ before DJing was cool.

Learn By Doing: Floor First Leadership

SPEAKER_02 47:53

Yes. So some of our team members here do know. Um, we are very fortunate that we have a huge population that has been with us for 10, 15, 20 years. And so in the earlier days of the company, when we'd have holiday events, um, I would bring my old DJ gear and provide the sound system and and and do that. In fact, my old gear from the late 90s, early 2000s is still somewhere within these four walls. It's like stored here, and every now and then we use it as a PA system. Um the team here has seen me grow up. I think that's very interesting. They have watched me transform from this high school kid who was DJing and driving this beat-up car uh with loud music and huge speakers into the leader of this company. And to your question in point, I think they respect um the many different things I've done in my lifetime and who have shaped who I am today, right? So let's talk about being a DJ. Um and being a DJ, I really learned how to get people's attention, how to get them excited, how to put them in good spirits, in that case through music, but it was about relating to your audience and understanding their needs. And some days my audience, my customers were senior citizens, and I DJ'd senior citizen proms. Some days it was at a baby shower, so maybe the babies weren't my customers, but you know, their parents, some days it was a wedding. So it really taught me how to read your audience, how to perform for your audience, how to get their attention, how to get them excited. Because I have to do that every day as a leader in this business. I have to get the team excited, I have to get them motivated. And there are different crowds within the organization. And as we said, every day is different. Some days are really good days, and it's a very easy task. Some days are not so good days, and it's hard to get people excited and put on a happy face when you feel like the world is falling apart, you know, behind you. So, yes, I was a DJ in my earlier days. I remember those days very fondly. Our listeners can't see my face, but you can how much I'm smiling. I had so much fun doing that. Let me tell you, it was so, so much fun to go out and play music and make people dance. And I still have that gear, some of that gear, which is not in the company, set up in my parents' basement, which they hate me for. Uh, they're counting the days, months, however long it takes, until I get a house and can move it and have it out of their basement in my own house. But yeah, it's still there. And now my son, my son has learned that I used to be a DJ. And by the way, being a DJ today is way cooler than it was in the early 2000s. In the early 2000s, my parents were like, You're out of your mind, you're never gonna make any money. And today we've got, you know, DJs are like mega celebrities. So my son for Christmas, my seven-year-old, asked me, I forgot the name of the toy, but there's like some DJ set that he wanted to buy for kids. My wife cringed a little bit. She's like, I don't think I would have ever gated you in your DJing days. Um, but I I thought that was kind of cool that my son has interest in that. So I tried to cultivate that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:04

Kristen, I don't know if you knew this, but I was also a DJ. We never we never talked about that. Yes. No. My my DJing story is much different. So I went to Rutgers School of Engineering, and the rule on campus, back then, at least and going back to the 90s, uh, freshmen do not have cars on campus. Now I lived on campus, but I found a loophole, and I'm all about loopholes. So if you have a job that requires you to transport equipment, materials, etc., etc., you could get a special dispensation from Rutgers Parking Authority, which is I don't even want to go into they're they're they're they're serious business, we'll put it that way, right? They're they're legit. And I realized, hey, if I claim that I'm a DJ and I get a letter somehow from somebody stating that I'm a DJ and I need to carry my DJing equipment around, which my DJing equipment was my my home theater system from my high school days. So not at all impressive. There was no mixing table, it was two speakers, some speaker wire, a receiver, and a five-disc CD changer. But I used that as my excuse to have a car on campus freshman year. Well, the problem is I actually had to book gigs as a DJ. So I got hired by a few of the smaller fraternities and sororities to do like basically just run an extension cord set up in the middle of a field and play dance music for three hours. I didn't even have a microphone, so I was just yelling out to the crowd, hey, any recomm any requests, or yeah, how about this banger? You know, and and it just I was if there was a category in Guinness Book of World Records for the worst DJ ever, I would be in serious competition.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

I have serious questions. What were your names?

SPEAKER_02 52:48

Go ahead, Matt, before I embarrass myself, you can embarrass yourself.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

I was not formal enough enough to even have a name, so I'm just gonna say I was DJ Matt. I didn't I there was no there was no name, there was no pomp and circumstance. It was just I show up with a couple pieces of gear and a serious CD collection, and I would just play music.

SPEAKER_02 53:07

Amazing. Uh I was the guru, and I specify the the because some would call me DJ Guru, and at that time that was like offensive to me. I said, No, I am the guru, not DJ Guru. I don't know how, where, why I came up with that name, but I was I was the guru.

SPEAKER_01 53:25

Yes. Uh I might I might have to write that in emails to you now when I send you an email.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

She's gonna make you regret telling her that.

SPEAKER_02 53:35

I I I'm sure I will. Yeah. They are very fond memories in my head. Some memories I'd like to repress as well. Um, some pictures I wish that didn't exist, but it was a phenomenally fun time of my life. Just I I I still to this day I love music, right? Music helps me when I'm angry, helps me when I'm sad, helps me, you know, I'm just blah. I'm a big, big music guy.

SPEAKER_01 54:02

Love it. It made me smile. So thank you. I can think of I could see both of you with like the headphone on, and like even though you didn't have the table, Matt, I could just I have a vision of it now with the two of you like that. The other thing, I know we're we're getting up against time here, but the one thing that Matt and I saw that we both were like very interested in, because I would like to consider myself a little bit of a foodie as well, is your comment about um wanting to do all the Michelin star restaurants, right, Matt? That was one of the things we had talked about.

SPEAKER_00 54:34

Yeah, that was kind of a part of that. So that that's the part that's the part A. I have a part B. But yeah, so wanted to ask, because I guess we're all to a to a different extent foodies, three-star Michelin restaurants. Have you have you made it to any yet?

SPEAKER_02 54:48

Made it to quite a few. Um we my wife and I both really enjoy the experience, right? The food, the experience. It's just like a guilty pleasure that we have to be pampered a little bit, to try these really creative dishes and to um have that experience. And where we really, really enjoyed is doing it outside of the US. So when we travel, if there's an opportunity to go to a Michelin restaurant and to sit down and have a meal somewhere, we'll really sometimes build a trip around that, right? Hey, we we know we want to go to Spain, but can we fit in XYZ restaurant and and have a trip around it and make sure that's part of the itinerary? So, yes, we we both really enjoyed doing that. I've been to some phenomenal restaurants. I've been to some three-stars that I thought were terrible, right? And sometimes it's the food, sometimes it's the service. The food was great, but the service was terrible, right? One or the other can make or break it. But yes, that's definitely a guilty pleasure. And it's not just three-star, right? Uh two-star, one star. It's it's about the experience, it's about having that unique experience and and doing that together. That's something we both really enjoy doing together.

SPEAKER_03 56:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:08

Billy just got a couple of the first Michelin one-stars. It was the ones that they've they've never had a Michelin star restaurant. So this year they finally announced, I think it was three. Um, and I've been to two of them already. So the third one now is on my list. But like you said, it's just an it's more of the experience too, not just the food, but uh, you know, like you said, being pampered a little bit and experiencing a different type of food too, which I think goes with the eating outside the states as well. The opportunity to eat a different type of cuisine and culturally understand more about that country based on the cuisine is also super cool.

Voice Of Customer Inside The Plant

SPEAKER_02 56:45

It's the presentation, too, right? I love how the chef and the executive team will present the same old, you know, potato that you've always had. It suddenly is like, wow, I cannot wait to eat this potato. That to me is part of it. We went to Disfruitar and we were very lucky to go to Disruptar in Barcelona. And one of the best experiences of my life. The food was great, the presentation was great, the service was great. My seven-year-old at that time, five, I think, was lucky to lucky enough to join us. And he had a blast too, and they catered to him. I mean, he's a five-year-old kid, and he didn't enjoy the same meal that we did. But that really, for me, put them over the top that they've got this five-year-old kid here, and even though he wasn't enjoying a full dinner, they made him part of the meal and they took care of him and made sure that he also left remembering that restaurant, right? He still talks about that restaurant.

SPEAKER_00 57:39

Yeah, that's that's an experience he'll always remember.

SPEAKER_02 57:42

I hope. Expensive experience for him.

SPEAKER_00 57:45

Yeah. Yep. So then I'm gonna put you on the spot here because one of the questions I love to ask people, and and I usually ask it while I'm while we're eating a steak dinner, but I don't want to limit it to just steak. So if you had to pick one dish, one restaurant that stands out above the rest. I know I'm sure it's a tough question asking a foodie, but if you had to pick one.

SPEAKER_02 58:07

Maybe this is a cop-out, and I don't know if you'll accept it or not. But my favorite dish is probably my mom's food. She has this um chunabatura, we call it, right? It's chickpeas with fried bread. And that's one of my favorites. It's not a restaurant. I think hers her quality is better than any restaurant. I love that. Is that acceptable? Can I get by with that? Listen, that's Dennis.

SPEAKER_00 58:35

If I could go back and uh I my mother passed years ago, but if I could go back and have uh homemade pizza from my mother or her spaghetti meatballs, uh I'd be right there with you.

SPEAKER_02 58:46

Fantastic. So yeah, absolutely. That's definitely that's definitely my favorite. There's no restaurant that compares to to mom's channel.

SPEAKER_00 58:53

Yeah. Channer, any comments or opinions?

SPEAKER_01 58:57

My parents, I mean, my dad's a decent cook, but my mom was not a good cook. So as a sorry, mom, as a kid, I don't think I had as much. You know, we kind of ate regular food, just normal American food. So I think when I as I got older and started traveling, I've been so lucky with Wexler to get to see so many places around this country and others. I think not having, you know, like I think I had my first like piece of sushi when I was like 22. But you know, like I didn't even know sushi was a category when I was a kid. So I've been super lucky to get to experience a lot of great restaurants because of Wexler and getting to travel. I don't know what my favorite is though. We've talked about this before, Matt. There used to be this restaurant in Philly that just closed recently. Um, Nick Elmy, who was on Top Chef, I don't know if any of you watched that, had a restaurant and he just closed it and it was a 10-course meal. And my husband took me there when I paid off my student loans. And there was this one very simple, it was like a cracker with some type of pate on it. I don't even know what it was, but it was like a one-bite, a moosebouche, I guess as they call it. And I remember that was like over 10 years ago. And I remember that one bite. It was so good. It was just, it was like savory and sweet. There was every single, it was like a bomb, you know. And I think that those are like such cool moments. It doesn't have to be like a steak, you're right. You can have a great steak a lot of places, but that one single bite of that, what I would consider cracker, I'm sure it wasn't. There's probably something fancier than that. Um, it was really outstanding. So food is awesome. It just gives you a chance to experience something that you didn't know you could.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:40

Yep. Sometimes it's the unexpected things that that jump out at you. For me, one of my favorite food memories was uh the first time, well, the only time I've ever been to Rome. I was I was headed to Lucca, Italy for a a trade show. And so my wife, I came home and I told my wife, I said, Yeah, I'm headed to Lucca for six days in Italy. And she goes, Yeah, you're not going without me. So we uh we we piled onto it and we did uh three days in Rome and then we we went to Lucca and then we did a date each in Florence and Pisa. But we got to we took the red eye to Rome, got to our hotel, took a nap, went out, and we did the Spanish Steps, Piazza del Popolo, Trevi Fountain, had a phenomenal dinner in in Piazza del Popolo. Each of us drank our own bottle of wine. She's a white drinker, I'm a red drinker, so it works out perfectly. And we're absolutely stuffed. And we got to Trevi Fountain, and of course, there's gelato everywhere. So I had to have a gelato there. And literally waddling back to the hotel, what was new to me was in a lot of European countries, and especially in Italy, they have it's like the kiosk kamikaze at the mall. These people just kind of jump out in front of you and they try to pull you into their restaurant. So this young lady jumped out in front of us, and uh, for some reason, I don't remember exactly why, we just followed her in. And I mean, we're both stuffed, so we're not interested in any food. It was a fast food pasta joint. And I want to say for about eight euro at the time, now this is going back to this is like 14 years ago. Uh, for eight euro, you would get like a paper dish that you would get a hot dog in at a ballpark. And they had three different fresh pastas and three different fresh sauces. And you would pick your pasta, you would pick your sauce, and they would flash boil it, throw it on a frying pan on a hot plate, and then pour it in this dish, and you would get a little mini bottle of wine with it for like eight euro. And I thought it was the coolest thing. Well, the the sauce I had picked I'd never heard of before, and it was uh it was it ended up being uh Bucettini Alomatriciana, which is now my absolute new favorite. It's uh it's a like a chunky uh tomato sauce with um uh guanchala, which is uh kind of like a uh bacon, but just absolutely amazing. And now I now I cook it at home, and it was just this random little uh nondescript restaurant. In I I wouldn't even tell you where it is. I know it's near Trevby Fountain, but it was absolutely amazing. I couldn't I couldn't stop eating it. It's a random thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:09

Maybe maybe crave that now. I think I feel like I gotta look it up for days.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

I I I make I make it pretty well, so maybe we'll uh maybe we'll do a dinner at the house.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:17

Absolutely.

Simple Fixes That Change Everything

SPEAKER_00 1:03:19

So all right, we are getting close to the end of it. We have been talking for quite a while, so uh wanted to give you an opportunity if you have any parting thoughts or comments, anything that you want to share with our listeners um before we kind of call it for this episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:36

No, you know, the packaging industry is a very people might hate me for saying this, but it's not a very sexy industry, right? I want to go into packaging, like it's so glamorous. But I love this business, right? I truly, for all the things we've said, it's different every day. There's new challenges, problem solvers for our customers, we're partners to our customers and to our quote unquote vendors. Um it's exciting. There's so much happening, there's so many different dynamics. It's not for everyone, right? Not everyone likes running around with their hair on fire every day. Somehow, Matt, you I and Kristen love to do that. I don't know why. But it it's um people call me weird, but I I love this industry. I love what I do every day. I wake up excited and happy to go to work. I love helping patients. I love hearing the stories of how the little piece of packaging that we help put together created some benefit for somebody. To me, it's exciting. It's it's not a sexy industry, but it's a really cool, important, solid, exciting industry.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:40

Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Something about this industry makes people very passionate that you know, when I talk to people that don't work in packaging, they don't understand how you could have a passion for the industry in which you work. So I guess you you can't uh you can't explain it. It's that I don't know, just it doesn't make sense to some people.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:00

We call it the community, right, Matt?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:02

Yep, yep, the packaging community.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:04

The community, which is cliche, but I think that's why we all love it so much, because we're helping people with good people.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:13

And I imagine any of our listeners who have made it this far feel the same way as we do about this. Yep. So thank you. And um and thank you for being part of our community.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:22

So early on in the the podcast, one of my earliest episodes, a friend had recommended I add a like a trivia bit to the episodes. And and I I did not find something packaging related, but I found something really, really interesting that I wanted to share with both of you and with our listeners. And it it it kind of makes a point. I actually thought it might be an interesting uh LinkedIn post, so you might see it out of LinkedIn one of these days for me, but it talks about reading the fine print and making sure that you're not just kind of rubber stamping things. So you're both familiar with the band Van Halen. Well, back in the 1980s when Van Halen was one of the premier bands traveling around the globe, they had a contract writer where they requested a bowl of MMs backstage. And then hidden in the contract verbiage was there should be absolutely no brown MMs. But they were separate statements, I guess. And so the idea was whenever they would get to the venue, they would go in and David Lee Roth would check for the MMs. And if he saw brown MMs, he knew the promoter or the venue or whomever obviously did not read through the contract completely. And so, therefore, what else did they miss? And they would actually cancel shows based on that, just because there weren't brown M's brown MMs in there. And I thought that was really a very, very simple tool, but really powerful in what that could represent. So I thought that was interesting and wanted to share that with you guys.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:52

Really cool piece of information for sure. I read a lot of contracts for that very reason. So, you know, I catch those brown MMs.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:01

Yeah, good, good. All right. Listen, thank you both so much for uh for your time today. Kristen, awesome job. Thank you for hosting the episode today.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:11

And for getting a part of it, wish you exciting.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:15

Yeah, wish you the best of luck, and uh I guess we'll talk to everybody soon. Uh before we do end, I just want to ask for those of you that are listening out there, please hit the like and subscribe button. Appreciate any support you can provide. Would always love to hear from you guys if you have ideas for future episodes or if you would like to participate as a future guest, feel free to reach out. www.precisioneng solutions.com on the contact us form. Love to hear from you. Thank you so much. Bye bye.