Hey there, everybody.

Welcome back to lead to the team.

You may not know the name Technoplex, but you've probably touched it six times today.

Your coffee pod, your egg carton, your skin care routine, all a part of this organization.

And at the helm, Eldon Schaefer, CEO of Technoplex Consumer Products, a 1.3 billion dollar global market science powerhouse that's quietly shaping how the world consumes, protects and sustains.

And in just four years, Eldon has doubled the company, led bold global acquisition acquisitions, and championed consumer first sustainability.

He's lived on four different continents, built businesses across the globe, and believes that leadership is about accountability, adaptability, and getting your team to own the outcome.

Eldon, welcome to lead the team, my friend.

Great.

Ben, thanks.

Appreciate being here, y' all.

I had to go through that intro a couple times.

Thanks for being here.

Elvin is so patient, but y' all really, they're up to so many big things and I particularly love working with leaders in these industries that are shaping the world.

But not enough people know about what's it like leading a company that's behind the scenes, but, but pretty much everywhere.

Terms of, you know, it's, it's really an exciting opportunity and, and a real pleasure to be able to collaborate with the team that we have here.

And you know, it's.

Business is super critical in that we protect products, strengthen brands and innovate sustainably to help our customers win in the market.

And Ben, you touched on a number of the different areas that, that we play in.

Anywhere from your eggs that you ate this morning to the yogurt that you may have eaten this morning, we make the cups and the lids.

If you unscrewed your peanut butter, if you unscrewed your peanut butter jar and remove the seal there, we make that.

And you talked about skin care.

If you're pumping skin lotion out in the morning, we make components to go into that.

If you, you are spraying cologne or perfume, we make components that go into all of those dispensing.

So it's, it's really a exciting time here at Technoplex.

Yeah.

So cool.

And again, people don't realize like you're pumping your lotion out to moisturize, which in the wintertime, hello, you gotta, you gotta have.

And you don't really think about who's leading the charge to bring that to you in the actual container.

Right.

And how that works.

What's something that will surprise you think most people about your specific niche?

I think the one thing is, is that, you know, a lot of Our customers are really some of the big companies around the world.

You know, whether it's a l' Oreal, an Estee Lauder, a Unilever, a Denone, a nestle, a Keurig Dr.

Pepper, all the way to a Tyson's chicken, a Walmart, the retailers.

So we touch everywhere from packaging companies like Aptar Group or Berry Global or Amcor to the CPG companies I mentioned or the food producers.

And the interesting part in all of those is that they've made a lot of commitments around sustainability to their investors and to their stakeholders, and they're not sure how they're going to get there.

And that's where the fun comes in, because we really come in and try to help unlock the value that our customers are looking for to find the sustainable solution.

And we really look at trying to develop something that's sustainable and which means we want it to be sustainable, but also maybe be easier to use for the consumer or sustainable and be easier to use on the.

The customer's production line or be sustainable and lower cost.

So we really come in and try to understand what the needs of the market are and then develop a solution around that.

Yeah, love that.

Yeah, you're making that happen.

And a lot of people don't realize, like, they look at like a skin care routine or.

Or like what.

Or the actual makeup or the.

And they start thinking of the company is being vertically integrated, like, oh, this must have come from the same company.

And no, it's.

It comes from their partners.

Right.

You guys got to work together.

Everything's very tailored and customized.

And I suspect you guys are like, I mean, really incredible leaders of innovation, but also adaptation and tailoring your product to fit.

Absolutely.

Clients you have.

Yeah, absolutely.

And innovation is certainly at the heart of what we do.

We have over 200 chemists and chemical engineers in our organization that are really trying to decipher the needs of our customers in order to bring the right solution.

I'll give you one example.

We had a major CPG company that was looking to move out of a copy pod that was made of a not environmentally friendly material.

And we moved it into a environmentally friendly material so that it was subsequently recyclable.

And it also had to make sure that it worked across all of the equipment, that the different iterations of the equipment.

It had to work across all of the hoppy brewers that exist out there today.

There's a lot of different one iterations.

And every time the consumer put it in, they wanted the certain pop sound to happen.

They wanted the aroma while the coffee was brewing.

And this was happening literally 10 billion times a year.

So we are literally touching millions of consumers every day with all the critical packaging and delivery needs and really looking to identify how do we create value for our customers so that they win in the marketplace.

And, and it's a simple equation, Ben, because if we think that we can help our customers win, then for sure Technoplex is going to win.

I love that.

But challenging, right?

I mean, can you imagine y' all how you said that?

10 billion coffee pods a year and you're trying to change like that?

Impacting that is like starting a sustainability revolution.

Just one industry.

And that's a lot of, that's a lot of pressure, but it's high impact.

Now, thinking about your leadership, what's been a defining moment for you along the way?

So I, I think the, I think when I look at, you know, my leadership, I kind of define my role as being a global P L leader that likes to get a group of high achievers together and help them overachieve by helping customers win in the market.

And, and I look at this as kind of a vicious cycle.

You know, if we help our employees win by helping our customers win, then our customers are going to grow, we're going to grow, our people are going to grow, and then this, this thing is going to be repeating and repeating and repeating.

And I, I really give that a lot of the reason for why we've been able to double our business in, in a period of four years.

And if I look at arts, you know, some of our defining moments through that process, one of them certainly was when, when I first started at Technoplex, literally the day I started, we lost one of our top five customers and they were looking to go to a more sustainable solution that we didn't have.

It was one of our egg carton customers that.

And we only had two different materials at that time.

We had a polystyrene, which is the polystyrene foam, and we had a pet material and we didn't offer fiber and they really wanted a fiber solution.

So we got our team together and we said, okay, what are we going to learn from this?

And we put a strategy together.

And sometimes that word, strategy, people get overwhelmed by it and think, McKinsey's coming in and there's going to be a six month process and then there's going to be this wonderful portfolio that lives on a hard drive somewhere.

But really you can do an agile strategy in a number of days, which is more or less what we did and we had a number of people, we probably had about 30 to 40 different people involved in it.

And then we identified in the end who's going to do what by when, you know, and what are we going to do on Monday once we finish the strategy and start the implementation.

That process really helped build buy in with the team.

A lot of collaboration certainly and probably also brought great insights because we're dealing with the people that were closest to the business.

So in the end we came up with, I will say, a good strategy.

You don't need a great strategy, you just need a good strategy well implemented.

And we just started the following Monday and started to hold weekly meetings and go, what do we have to do in order to enter the fiber market?

And Ben, the amazing part about this is literally 150 days later we had made an acquisition.

We also had innovated a new fiber solution that outperformed the rest of the fiber market by protecting the egg better than any other fiber egg carton in the market and had already then moved forward to start to shape what the future of the fiber egg carton market is.

Which by the way, just again, to give you some numbers, we produce in the billions of egg cartons per year.

And now today we offer a fiber egg carton, we offer a polystyrene egg carton and we offer a pet egg carton.

And we walked in recently to talk to one of our egg carton customers and they said, hey, Eldon and Technoplex, we love talking to you guys because you come in and say, what are you trying to achieve?

What are you, what's your branding vision?

What's your goal with organic or pasture raised or whatever, brown eggs, mass market eggs.

And we try to really come up with a solution that is tuned to them.

Rather than come in and go, do you want to buy a fiber egg carton or do you want to buy a PT egg carton or do you want to buy a polystyrene egg carton?

So we really, again, you know, it goes back to what we started talking to at the beginning, Ben.

We really try to understand what our customers are looking for.

Leverage those 200 material science solution providers with our chemists and chemical engineers to bring the right solution for the brand, for the customer, for the market, for what they're trying to accomplish.

Reminds me of the classic Stephen Covey adage, seek to understand, then be understood.

You guys are, you guys are experts in this business and you've probably seen about everything you can imagine.

It'd be so easy to come in and be like, look, do use this egg carton because this is what you should be doing.

This is the best.

But you really flip it on its head.

Even though you're the experts, you're still starting with a listening approach before you start driving home solutions.

Yeah, absolutely.

And communication, you know, it's kind of interesting.

I.

The communication side of things is so important.

And there's a quote that we've been carrying amongst us within the technoplex here recently talking about if you could get all people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you can dominate any industry and any market against any competition at any time.

And that's from Patrick Lencioni.

And I love that quote because it goes back to that whole strategy comment that we were talking about earlier.

We got all the team together to identify where we going, what are we trying to accomplish, how are we going to do it, who's going to do what by when.

And everyone then understood the mission.

And so even though we were starting way behind compared to the rest of our competitors who were already, you know, long in the tooth and producing a fiber egg carton, we not only ran and caught up to them, we passed them with developing a fiber egg carton that protects the egg better.

I mean, one of the nature's most fragile products is the egg.

And if we can take that from farm to table and make sure that there's no egg breakage, because, okay, you're going to hear more about eggs.

And you are the most passionate person I've ever heard talk about egg cartons.

And I'm excited now.

It's funny because I get the egg carton and I'm, you know, I look at them in the fiber container and I'm like, clearly that's probably better for the environment.

Right?

Because it breaks down much better.

Correct.

It is the most environmental.

It's kind of interesting.

There's a lot of, you know, depending on where you measure from, what is the.

The better, you know, economic or environmental solution.

But the interesting thing about eggs is, and you know, not to harp on this too long, but I mean, if one egg breaks in a carton, you don't lose that one carton.

You lose the 12 total eggs that are in there because the consumer is not going to buy.

That's going to work to the.

It's going to work back in the freezer.

Absolutely.

Back of the refrigerated section, I should say.

And.

And if that egg leaked onto one or two other cartons, again, consumers are going to look at that and Go.

I'm not interested.

Yes.

With the egg goo that's on top of this.

I don't know where it came from.

I don't know what it's impacting and.

Or when you go to the, go to it.

If you're grabbing the top of the egg carton to pull it out and it comes unhinged really easily, even if all the eggs are in there, you're like, wait a minute, I'm going to have to like put the lid back on.

I don't feel like it's secure.

And that also.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we, and the amazing thing is, you know, people joke about, you know, hey, you know, do you really need an engineering background to do some of this stuff?

And, and we have some amazing people at our organization.

I was on with a few of the engineers earlier today, again working on new solutions that, that are for simple everyday tasks that, that, that kind of in the end you, you forget about and you know, when you're producing literally in the billions of everything that, that, that we're doing, whether it's, you know, billions of liners, when you're taking your catch, peeling your, the liner off the ketchup, or billions of dip tubes as you're pumping your skin lotion in the morning, or billions of the egg cartons, or billions of the coffee pods, or billions of dairy containers and billions of.

We also then make the trays that your chicken or your beef for your, your turkey come in.

So we, we, we are really leveraging all the insights that we have across the material science in order to bring the right solutions to our customers.

So that first day you got, or the first week you got there and you lost one of your top five customers and you have how many thousands of employees?

Yeah, we have 9,000 employees in 13 different countries.

Yeah.

You mentioned Patrick's quote about getting everybody rolling in the same direction.

Yeah.

You're the new guy and they're like, what's this guy gonna do?

And you got, you have an issue with.

Yeah, we have a gap identified in the, in the market.

You might even, I'm just, I don't want to say co op the story, but I bet in the back of your mind as a leader, like we lost the top five.

How many of these other ones might be in, in jeopardy?

What did you do to get everybody rowing in the same direction when you're, you're the new guy at the home?

You know, I think first of all it's, it's about leading with intention and, and being authentic.

You Know, I never in, in that particular circumstance.

It's never about you lost the business or you know, it's we.

Because I'm part of this team now.

I'm wearing the Technoplex jersey as well.

And then we are going to work together to find a solution.

And it's super important to.

I say there's kind of two simple things in leadership business.

It's about strategy and developing that strategy again, down to the technically who's going to do what by when, but also managing people and providing people that guidance and that leadership.

And it's that balancing that, you know, leadership is kind of balancing that confidence that no, you're going to find a solution with the humility of that you don't necessarily have all the answers yourself, that you need to lean on your team who typically is closer to the problems to help them and engage them to bring the solution forward.

Because you get ownership, you get buy in, you get effective execution.

You know, all of that comes together and really is, it's kind of a winning outcome.

It really, really is a winning outcome.

Well, congratulations on that.

What was the key to doubling the business in four years?

Like, what was the thing that worked the most?

Again, I think it just comes back to strategy.

When we set forth with this mission to grow, we put a plan together and we involved literally hundreds of people to help us create that plan and then built that plan to continue to grow and adapt.

And maybe one other element just to highlight, you know, you know, you can put a plan together.

And what's the old quote?

You know, plans are worthless and planning is everything.

But I mean, we dealt as this business with a lot of challenges.

In fact, we've been joking lately that you know, we chaos for breakfast because there's just so much chaos and craziness going on in the world.

You know, obviously we had Covid, we had supply chain shortages, we had logistic challenges, we had rapid inflation destocking.

Today it's tariffs.

And this team is super, super resilient.

And we not only survived, we thrived and really outperformed the market.

I mean, you don't double the business unless you're continuing to outperform the market.

And, and there's sort of like, I call it like five key things that, that we focused on in order to, as we execute our strategy, one, focus on what we can control.

You know, don't, don't get too far outside this.

You're over your skis and go, oh my gosh, what's, you know, new tariff is going to come Tomorrow or what supply chain shortage is going to come tomorrow?

Go.

Okay, what's in front of us?

How do we handle it?

How do we make sure it's successfully handled?

And then we also stayed committed to our strategy.

And, and I have a kind of a saying about this saying, hey, we got to stay committed to our strategy.

You know, using a map example, if we want to go from New York to California, I don't care if you go up through North Dakota or you go down through Texas, it doesn't matter.

But don't call me from London and say, don't worry, Eldon, I'm on my way to California.

We have to stay focused on what we're trying to accomplish and stay true to our strategy.

The next one is really having a bias towards action and results.

So make sure you understand, like, hey, let's move.

We may not know every, every outcome that is possible, but let's move and move forward, take a decision.

We can always adjust and adapt, but let's take a decision and move on.

And really also staying close to our customers and our suppliers, so understanding what our customers needs and wants are in the timeframe and also working closely with our suppliers because they're super critical to help us be successful.

And last element is really to focus on facts and data.

Not on emotion, not on hyperbole, not on maybes, but really focus on data.

Oh, so good.

All right.

A lot of things, though, packed her this quote about we eat chaos for breakfast.

I think that's powerful because that's the mindset instead of.

Because a lot of times people believe, especially in finance, right?

A challenge is bad.

When things break down, that's bad.

But in the engineering world and in the design world, that's when they get excited, right?

You're like, hey, we have this problem and they.

And they get cranking on it.

But if you can instill this across the organization, IT, finance, on design, I suspect it's a lot easier to get people to rally around these challenges.

Is there one challenge that you mentioned?

You're like, hey, we really, we really savored the chaos and benefited from our approach to.

On that one.

I don't know, I guess that seriously, I think all our team does has done a really great job.

And whether it's, you know, managing through supply chain shortages or some of the logistics challenges, I mean, we had a situation where we had a couple of our suppliers come to us and go, we're not going to be able to supply you.

And, you know, many other people would have said, oh, well, what, you know, now we're, let's.

Let's put some of our customers on allocation.

We'll have to figure this.

But our, Our business pivoted and went the other way.

Said, wait, how can we, how can we make this happen?

And so we started.

Our technical people started to experiment in reducing the amount of that material that we used in and supplementing it with another material.

Our procurement team started to work with a couple of other suppliers that, that were not on the map.

And our salespeople started working with our customers and said, hey, we have a couple of other substitute products just in case that, that, you know, so should we start to explore how we manage a potential risk if there's some business continuity planning going on?

And again, the whole organization worked in concert, understanding what the challenge was, and then tried to find unique solutions rather than accepting a particular outcome.

And I think that it's, you know, it's the old adage too, of, you know, your outcome is 5% what happens to you and 95% how you react to it.

And that's really the spirit within this organization.

Yeah, I love that.

The spirit of the organization.

And a good note for leaders.

Right.

When you.

It's a chance to innovate.

And yes, finding a new supplier and developing them, that's innovation.

Right.

Because you're innovating in your business versus just going to the same ones over and over again.

Sometimes you've gotta look beyond what you've been doing and it can really accelerate the business and seize the day.

I just love that.

And.

But I have another little, little rabbit hole I want to go down.

Sure.

In addition to this, I mean, four different continents you have lived on.

And I think, okay, hey, hey.

I've worked on four different continents.

I've lived on three or two different continents.

So.

Okay, you've worked in four, Loved.

Lived on.

Lived in two.

Yep.

Still, based on the travel schedule you were sharing with me before we got on, I suspect you spent a lot of time on these continents.

What have.

How has this shaped your leadership?

Getting these perspectives, being on these different continents, working with such a variety of people.

So how has it shaped your leadership?

And what can the rest of the world learn from that?

So I think there's two things that I would say that this has shaped my leadership.

One is the importance of building diverse teams, and the other is the importance of being comfortable, being outside your comfort zone.

But just to talk first about the diverse teams.

Wow.

I mean, if bringing a multicultural, gender, diverse, functional, diverse experience, diverse age, diverse Group of people together.

Does it take longer to take decisions?

It does.

It absolutely does.

And I would strongly advocate that they're better decisions.

And having the diversity of the cultures that we have in Technoplex, the regional diversity, the cultural diversity, the functional diversity.

The nice thing about, even if it's a little bit longer decision, I'd rather have it challenged internally and fail within our team, then have a group of homogenous individuals, you know, salute the flag and say, perfect, let's go forward.

And then suddenly we're going off a cliff with a new product introduction.

And it's, it's, that's, that's a very, very powerful thing that, getting the exposure that I've had at a, at a relatively young age.

I was in my 30s when, when I was moving around and living all outside the, the US for the first time.

That certainly is there in your mind.

We're like, you know what?

Because we had that diversity of perspective, it saved us.

You know, I, there's, there's been a number of different success stories that, that we've had that in my career.

And I say we because, gosh, if there's one thing as a leader you learn is, you know, once you start leading people, it's all about the we and not about the me.

And you know, we've, we've, we've been on the brink of some pretty spectacular failures.

You know, we, we once lost a, one of the biggest opportunities that the team that I was leading, we were working on and, and, and I remember I was living in the UK at the time and, and we, we got the news that we lost it and people from the US were calling me and, and it was like, I don't know, six or seven o' clock at night in, in, in, in the uk.

And my wife goes with, answer the phone.

And they go, well, can I speak to Eldon?

I want to talk to him about the, the.

And my wife's like, he's in bed.

I took it really hard, Ben.

I took it really hard.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, that was.

We worked so hard as a team.

And then the one interesting thing about it though is woke up the next day, got the team on the phone and said, okay, what are we going to learn from this?

I mean, I will take the responsibility that we did not win this particular piece of business, but what are we going to learn from this?

And, and what are we going to do in order to put ourselves in the best position for the future?

And we were just talking and one of the engineers said to me, eldon, we have the best solution.

We should just.

The only thing is, they just didn't want to pay for it.

And then one of the other guys said, ah, we should just give it to them for free.

And I'm like, okay, we can't give it to them for free, but what if we.

And so what we did was we brainstormed and went back in and talked to the customer and said, we will consult with you for free on the development of this product until you launch it into production.

Because they gave a business award to get it into production.

And to make a long story short, they thought we were crazy.

Actually, my boss thought I was crazy at the time, too.

But.

But we did that.

We went in, we consulted for free for a period of time.

And then in the end, right before they decided to launch production tooling, they came to us and said, you know what?

You do have the best solution.

We would like to award you the lead position in this product launch.

And it completely turned the business around.

So, you know, the moral of that story is failures.

Failure is not fatal.

And make sure you own it.

I mean, I owned it.

I said, it was us.

We got.

And we got to do something different.

And then.

And listen to your team.

I didn't come up with an idea about, hey, we have the best solution.

And, hey, why don't we do know, why don't we give it away for free?

Okay, I knew we couldn't give it away for free, but.

But we came up with a way to get there through a.

To find a path, even after, quote, unquote, failing.

O.

So good.

And y' all, for you, those of you who can't watch Eldon tell that story, just tell you.

He's giddy about it.

You're like, oh, it started out a little shaky.

When you're like, eldon's in bed, we lost this thing.

That's right.

That's right.

But it's nice that you guys were able to find the opportunity in that to really innovate on your process and what you could offer as a cons, as a consulting entity and.

Absolutely.

What a comeback story.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, Ben, just to circle back to the other, you know, part B of the question where you were asking, like, what I learned about living internationally, and that was, you know, being comfortable being outside your comfort zone.

So, you know, we as a family, lived outside the US for nine years.

And I mean, first of all, doing every little thing that you do is on your.

In your personal life, like, Going and buying a mobile phone, you know, and trying to speak German and trying to understand all the intricacies about that, you know, taking your child to school with a foreign language, you know, going to a doctor, let alone all the business things, you know, negotiating with.

I remember I was sitting across from a CEO of another company negotiating a business deal, feeling like I'm talking like I'm five years old.

Collaborating with the engineers and launching new products and understanding what their cultural needs are within that country.

I mean a truly amazing experience and certainly life changing for me and my family.

And I would also say, Ben, it was really an accelerator of personal growth.

I mean, every time I've set out into a new geography, a new market, a new business, you know, you learn a lot, you learn a ton.

And it is, you got to get comfortable living outside your comfort zone and push boundaries and ask questions and learn and adapt and grow.

And I'd also advocate that you don't need to move to another company to do this.

In my 36 years, I've only worked for two companies.

I realize I'm a unicorn and that most people will have worked for many different companies.

And I don't believe you need to leave an organization to get more experience and to step outside your comfort zones.

And not all my moves were upwards.

Some of them were lateral.

There was one or two that were actually a slight step down and, and I learned a ton in each and every role and it's, it's super amazing to, to do that within the, the confines of, you know, only two companies across a 36 year career.

That's a powerful reminder.

It's easy to get into comfort and to stay there.

And it's a different thing to continually push yourself and sort of find your new status quo as living in the discomfort of being challenged.

Whether it's living in different country, a different role and that discomfort, if it becomes your norm, you're going to grow faster because you're going to be outside of that.

And I think it's, and for those of leaders that have been in their role for a while and they kind of feel steady state, you gotta, sometimes you gotta go experience that comfort zone to remind yourself, oh, that's what learning feels like.

That discomfort and that learning edge, it, it doesn't always feel good, but you, you can get, it's like working out, Working out does not feel good if you're doing it right.

Absolutely.

You know, in this dynamic world, things are constantly changing and if you're not learning and growing, you're not Staying the same, you're going backwards.

And you know, I've been fortunate.

I've had a number of different mentors and quite frankly, not all of them were executives.

One of my best was an engineer in a factory that really helped me understand our equipment.

I've had many factory managers who I walk the floor with many times of the day.

And while the insights that you gain and the passion that you see is incredible, and hearing all the stories from our team members and the pride that comes across from these people is 100% inspirational, you know, what they did to get an order out the door for a customer or running a van and driving it so that the customer got the order so that they could build and pack their products, what they did to get a new product launch on time.

I mean, I remember seeing one guy literally work overnight.

He came in six o' clock in the morning and was still working overnight to make sure that that new production piece of equipment started up so that we could get it samples out the door to our customers.

So it's just incredible.

You know, I worked all three shifts in an as an operator in one of our factories so you could see how it really ran.

And the third ship supervisor put me on like what he called the worst machine in our factory.

And you learn a lot, you learn a ton from these experiences.

So again, Ben, you don't have to step outside of your own company to gain this perspective and to gain these insights.

And whether you're attending conferences with your sales team.

I was last week.

I was just at a customer supplier event that, you know, shed light on what the customer strategy was, where they wanted to go, how could we be transformational with them?

There are so many opportunities to learn, Ben, if all you got to do is open your eyes and all you got to do is walk out the door and engage and it is so easy to sit behind your computer, do email, you know, get, you know, read the financial reports and to try to take decisions.

But the real fact of the matter is the opportunities for learning, the opportunities for developing, the opportunities for communicating or being out there with your team, with your customers, in the marketplace, your co suppliers, your suppliers, and understanding the, the environment which you're operating in.

Well, let's land the plane there, Ellen, because that's a great call to action.

Be proactive, get out and learn.

Love that.

Being on the floor with your people, being out with your suppliers and that's where you can really see a lot of possibilities and great value.

Thanks for coming on, lead the team.

My pleasure.

Thanks, Ben.