voiceover: A key component of the modern world economy, the chemical
industry delivers products and innovations to enhance everyday life.
It is also an industry in transformation where chemical executives and
workers are delivering growth and industry changing advancements while
responding to pressures from investors, regulators, and public opinion.
Discover how leading companies are approaching these challenges
here on the chemical show.
Join Victoria Meyer, president of Progressio Global and
host of the chemical show.
As she speaks with executives across the industry and learns how they are leading
their companies to grow, transform, and push industry boundaries on all frontiers.
Here's your host, Victoria Meyer.
Victoria: Hi, this is Victoria Meyer.
Welcome back to The Chemical Show where Chemicals means Business.
Today I am speaking with Frank Fisher, who is the founder and CEO of South Carolina
Chemical and Fisher Specialty Advising, and is also the COO of Duralayer LLC.
If you know Frank, you might have thought that he was ready for retirement after
having a really great career at both Dow and Milliken, but it's obvious
that he still has a lot of energy and passion for the chemical industry,
which we are going to hear about today.
So.
Frank, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Frank: Thank you for having me, Victoria.
Looking forward to the conversation.
Victoria: Absolutely.
Really great to have you here.
So you started your career as a chemist with a PhD at that.
And then moved into business and procurement roles and
really never looked back.
So maybe tell us a little bit about that shift in your career.
Even what sparked your interest in chemicals and then led to that shift.
Frank: It was a very non traditional route.
And so I'll back all the way up to the beginning.
The high school I went to, not a lot of people went to college.
I did not intend on going to college.
This was kind of a machine shop town.
My mother and father didn't go to college.
My father expected me to take over the small family business, and that was that.
Um, I was walking down the hallway, the guidance counselor came up and
grabbed me my junior year and asked me where I was going to college.
I said, I never really thought about it.
He goes, uh, your marks are so high, you can get a scholarship almost anywhere.
Why don't you consider that?
So I went in his office and we talked about it.
And then I said, well, I was the senior class president the next year, very
outgoing debate squad, that kind of thing.
So why don't I become a lawyer?
That sounds like fun.
So I took my scholarship, head off to Grand Valley State,
started taking elective classes.
You have to take a science elective.
So I happened to take chemistry.
Didn't do particularly well, which was kind of a challenge.
So the next thing you know, I'm taking organic chemistry.
Again, not doing particularly well.
Next thing you know, I'm a chemistry major.
And I'm seeing it kind of as a challenge more than a love for chemistry.
So, now I'm graduating from a small state school with a degree in chemistry.
Now what do you do?
Well, my undergraduate advisor said, Why don't you consider going to
graduate school and figuring it out?
Oh, and by the way, they'll pay you to go.
Next thing you know, I'm off to Duke University studying organic
chemistry while there, then I kind of had the, um, matrix scene, scenes
of the movie matrix, where all of a sudden everything made sense to Neo
and that all the dots all lined up and chemistry became fairly simple.
I very much understood it and got into chemistry kind of in a strange way.
Victoria: Yeah.
alright.
I'm' just going to interject because people have heard
me tell this story before.
I am a chemical engineering major and organic chemistry almost killed me.
So at no point in time did anything about organic chemistry line up.
The other pieces, sure, but organic, no way.
Of course, which is ironic working in the chemical industry then
for the entirety of my career.
But as I often like to tell people, like I'm an engineer, I like the blocks
and the processes and putting it all together, I don't necessarily need the
molecules, but you, it sounds like.
love and understood those molecules.
Frank: I understood the molecules when I got into quantum stereochemistry,
and it made sense at the molecular level why a Diels Alder reaction would
be performed and why it would work.
I'm going, oh, now it makes sense to me.
Okay, so.
Now we'll slide into the business world.
My degree at Duke was physical organic chemistry.
So kinetics and thermodynamics went to work for Dow chemical.
I was from Michigan, went back to the mothership of Dow Midland,
worked in the thermodynamics lab.
So in that position, you're between the beaker chemist who's invented
something and the chemical engineer, like yourself, who's designed the plant.
So we're going to do everything you need from process safety
to keep things from blowing up.
However, I still kind of had that leadership outgoing nature.
And so through very quick evolution Dow Chemical was doing a lot of contract
manufacturing only through acquisitions.
So they bought companies that were doing contract manufacturing.
Some of the chemistry was a little challenging.
So the next thing you know, I'm supporting contract manufacturing.
That led to technology transfer at contract manufacturing that eventually
led to negotiating contract manufacturing that led to being the global work
process leader at Dow for contract manufacturing, which eventually led to
category leader at Dow for all of their contract manufacturing procurement.
So what started as a bench chemist for a little while doing analytical work
eventually led to the giant global strategies around outside manufacturing.
And I was much more comfortable in that space than in the lab.
Victoria: Got it.
Makes sense.
So now today , you've got 35 years , of experience in the industry,
obviously doing a lot of things.
And of course, working for companies like Dow and Milliken you get to see.
Great countries.
You get to work around the world and get a wide variety of experience.
You've now opted to take this and apply it to South Carolina Chemical.
So tell us a little bit about that.
Frank: Okay, so South Carolina Chemical was born out of my consulting business.
So when I retired from Millikan, I lasted roughly one month.
And my wife said, uh, yeah, you're going to go back to work and do something
because You cannot walk up to me one more time and say, you're bored.
So I immediately started consulting, which was fairly easy because I'd been
consulting for years in these jobs.
From out of the consulting, there were some needs of, can you find chemicals?
Can you source chemicals?
sOme of my companies I worked with overseas, can you
help me sell my chemicals?
Can
Victoria: Yeah.
So leaning in really to a lot of your corporate experience
doing some of those same things.
Frank: Exactly.
So interestingly, I've never thrown away a business card my entire career.
I have thousands of business cards.
I've kept contacts with everybody and try to maintain really positive relationships.
So what South Carolina chemical is we find things.
So when people need oddball materials, I get a phone call.
There's a force majeure.
I get a phone call that's led to new product development.
Frank, can you get, so I do sourcing, uh, for companies that
have smaller sourcing organizations.
And from the consulting to the South Carolina Chemical, we very quickly
figured out how to import, how to manage.
So the companies will just say, can you just take care of it for me?
we started bringing that in.
As I started working with more companies, there's still a lot of
manufacturer in this world that we, I call them undiscovered.
They've only sold within their own country.
They'd never had a distributor but they're solid and I know them and I visited
them, they're perfectly comfortable saying, Hey, can you rep my stuff?
So we aren't two years old and we've been kind of astonished
at the growth that we've had.
Victoria: Yeah.
So sourcing and distribution and beyond, I guess is, is contract manufacturing
part of your value proposition today?
Frank: Absolutely.
I work with various companies.
I need to have this made, right?
I've got a long Rolodex of.
Where we can do things.
I also have contract manufacturers that will say, why can't I get business?
And so we'll work with them on what's their messaging and
they're not very discoverable.
So I do a lot of contract manufacturing, a lot of supply chain design.
So the supply chain design is how do you compete and win kind of on a global stage?
You really have to think in terms of, you know, total cost of goods at
the location, strategic advantages.
Um, and there's a lot of things that go into that full design.
So it all comes full circle.
We tend to say yes to everything.
I've got a strong team and took on a partner for my consulting business.
And so, yeah,
Victoria: That's very cool.
So, you know, one of the things we, we talked about, I guess, before
the podcast here is just some of the opportunities and challenges that the
chemical industry is facing today.
What do you see from where you sit?
Frank: Well, the opportunities are largely around sustainability recycle, renewable.
Now, the opportunities have a longer time horizon.
It's not going to happen overnight.
Mathematically, it can't happen overnight.
It's just the world's not ready.
The costs aren't ready, but that's where the opportunities are.
And there's always opportunities for, for better and more clever.
Right.
There's always a better reaction.
There's always a product that's got something, I wish
I would have thought of that.
And there's some neat things that come out every year from creative companies.
So the opportunities still kind of exist.
Okay.
The challenges I see it is world of business works best when you
have very stable business rules.
I can work in this sandbox.
I can manage this because I know what's going to happen.
Yeah.
If you get dramatic overnight changes
and some of the more dramatic ones that came in the tariff 301 overnight, 25
percent duties on imported chemicals.
Victoria: Yeah.
That's significant
Frank: Wow.
That, that was huge.
That was, that was an overnight.
That was a game changer and immediate rules.
Victoria: Yeah.
Frank: It can still happen.
I mean, just this recently, the administration doubled the tariffs on
electric vehicles coming in overnight.
So the challenges are trying to build a business where
the rules can change on you.
And there's some watch outs.
I think the U S market needs to learn from the old biodiesel days.
To support biodiesel and become energy independent to some extent, the U.
S.
government was subsidizing biodiesel to the tune of a dollar a gallon.
Victoria: Yeah.
Frank: A dollar a gallon subsidy, you could do a lot of biodiesel.
And there were a lot of biodiesel plants popping up across the U.
S.
Next administration came in.
Yeah, we don't want to give them that dollar.
Overnight, they went bankrupt and disappeared.
If you're building a business case on something that's not
fundamental to earth, fire, and water
Victoria: Hmm.
Frank: And a true customer, there's some risk.
So that's one of the challenges I see.
Victoria: Yeah.
Well,
and I know certainly a lot of, uh, companies when we think about,
Sustainability technologies and investments that support greenhouse
gas reduction, carbon capture, for instance, would be a great one.
You know, a lot of it.
And I talked to companies that are like, well, what does the IRA mean?
And what are the tax advantages that come in?
And I'm, I'm with you on the fact that to a certain degree, there has
to still be business fundamentals, because if your only business
fundamental is a tax incentive.
Well, then you need to be able to turn it on and turn it off pretty quickly.
And so it's hard to make a significant investment when the
tax advantage maybe even goes away before you can even start up, right?
Cause let's be honest.
Some of these big investments take three, four, five, 10 years to start up, they are
not insignificant, , and it's certainly a challenge, but it's also somehow
striking this balance across the globe because obviously there's a lot of, um,
uh, different behaviors and different rules that are taking place depending
on what region you're working in.
So, so maybe let's talk about that a little bit.
So you've talked about the importance of global competitiveness.
And, and really we're.
In many ways, we're in a global market.
I would argue that that global markets are shifting a bit and we can get
to that a little bit, but how does a company really know that it's
competitive in a global marketplace?
What's important about that?
Frank: The, that's a very good question.
, and we get asked that a lot, right?
You know, because companies only know what they know.
They only know what they've been exposed to, especially
small and mid sized companies.
They can sometimes use consultants for various things, but I
call it looking in the mirror.
And we'll be talking about this conference coming up in Savannah at
chemicals, America for a company to look in the mirror, you have to sit
there and say, what am I good at?
Right?
So, and why does my customer buy from me?
And it's some companies have a really hard time Taking that hard look.
So give an example and kind of walk you through it.
So you have a customer who's buying a product.
Are you the only one that can supply that product?
All right.
Do you have a patent, some competitive advantage, some IP, if your patent is
going to run out, if other people can do it and that's your bread and butter,
take a hard look and say, am I winning?
And can I win because I'm better on raw material sourcing?
I'm vertical when others aren't.
If you have no true competitive advantage on raw materials, do I have a
competitive advantage on manufacturing?
Do have a fully depreciated plant?
Are my operations better?
Do I have better labor costs?
Okay, so now you can say, okay, so if my raw materials are okay, my
customer's okay, my manufacturing is okay, how's my supply chain?
Okay.
Am I have a better service model?
Am I delivering better?
Am I cost of delivery better?
Do I have a good location?
When you, most companies aren't good at everything, but you better have a strong
competitive advantage in one thing.
And one of the things that used to be, well, I'll still do it.
And I've trained people to do it.
When I go to a trade show, you're busy.
You're meeting with somebody at a booth and I'll tell the people
in the booth, I'll say, I want you to have this conversation.
When I'm walking away, you say, if Frank buys this from anybody else in
the planet, he's making a mistake.
Victoria: Hmm.
Frank: Tell me what this is.
If you can't answer that question, you've got some problems.
And some of the answers I get is we're good at everything.
No.
No, nobody's going to everything or they would have the dominant
position in everything.
So
Victoria: Well,
and then the other one that's a very popular answer is people do
business with us because of the strength of our relationships.
Well, everybody has strong relationships.
You just don't have strong relationships with everyone.
And it's beyond that.
It's not just relationship.
There's something else going on that is driving that and you have to really
uncover it because it's, if it's just quality of relationship, does
that mean that when that salesperson leaves the, the business goes away?
, that's pretty scary and that
happens in some markets.
Frank: this is a, it is a relationship business.
People can really buy into relationships when the product that they're purchasing
for use is semi immaterial to the total cost of the good being sold.
We can example of agricultural chemicals.
The money is in the active ingredient.
You can have a relationship for their surfactants and the carriers.
It's a small percentage, right?
It's still dollars.
You still want to manage it.
When you look at the big picture, all your emphasis on one thing,
Relationships really make a difference.
Um, then, you know, We'll, we'll touch on a little bit more of that coming up.
So
Victoria: Yeah.
That sounds great.
One of the things we talked about being globally competitive and certainly we're
seeing really over the last several years, and I think everybody thought
it was going to temper and simmer down and it hasn't, but we've got some
significant supply chain challenges.
from a variety of places, right?
Russia Ukraine war has caused some, some challenges.
Uh, what's going on in the Middle East has caused some significant challenges
and even just this relationship between, I would say the U S and China, but China
and India, China, and other places, right?
So we've got both supply chain geopolitics and other things going on.
And we're.
I think we're really seeing a focus on regional businesses and maybe shifting,
you know, somebody said, at one point said, Oh, the supply chains are shifting
from East West to North South, right?
And, and maybe that's true.
Maybe that's not true.
But do you see that, do you see us shifting to more of a regional business
or strengthened regional businesses?
And why or why not?
Frank: I see the desire.
I hear the words I've seen it at the board level.
I've seen it added into strategies.
A few years ago I was at a conference, largely dictated
on contract manufacturing.
And everyone's excited.
We're going to reshore after COVID, the exposure of supply chains and the
dependence on foreign countries, what's all going to come back in next year, the
conference, it was much more tempered.
They expected it to come.
It didn't fully come.
The projects they had started were kind of getting canceled.
And I'll kind of come to the point.
If you look at a long term, well, we'll take a look at the stock market.
Over the course of forever, it always goes up, but it always comes, it's up and down.
So the chemical industry, globalization, there's a thermodynamic
point it's going to come back to.
So I'll use example of the 80s and 90s.
The, when brick was a strategy, Brazil, Russia, India, China.
Brazil never really landed because they had, you know, some business
tariffy things and Russia was Russia.
India had infrastructure, but China was wide open for business.
When the Western companies first went to China, the first ones
that went, huge cost advantages.
There were,
right?
So you started, rationalizing some plants, moving things to China.
Companies that didn't embrace that strategy.
were losing out in the market because they were just cost disadvantaged.
So like it or not, everybody started moving that way.
So this was the push.
You had purchasing departments that are being called year over year,
your goals, five to 10 percent cost reductions year over year.
When you had this pull back to the West, it made perfect sense.
For the, for a lot of reasons.
Yeah.
However, China was still open for business.
China is kind of in a recession.
China really wants to sell.
They really, really want to manufacture.
They're trying really hard as best they can to maintain whatever share they
can get for that purchasing manager.
Even though strategically he was told the board said, go do it.
When it comes to dollars and cents.
Can the business afford to near shore?
Some cases from supply chain that forcing the reevaluation was brilliant
and they should have been here all along for others You're kind of going your
math's gonna fail people have short memories Managers and executives have
short memories at the end of the day.
They're gonna look at that cost of doing business and say I
Need to have more cost downs.
Are they really going to stay here some will But
There's still, a pretty heavy gravitational pull back to low
cost countries that have some high enough quality product.
Victoria: Yeah.
It's a real dilemma.
I mean, I think it's a it's definitely a dilemma and of course this is
obviously one of the things that some of these tax programs are
supposed to help adjust for, right?
To encourage more investment and business in the U S because
I think There is always a risk.
I see the risk that when you're chasing the low cost, uh, region,
it, It may not be actually healthy on a long term basis, right?
So you're chasing today's pennies and sacrificing tomorrow's future.
And, and, we've seen that happen in a lot of industries.
We've seen it happen in the chemical industry.
I think what's going on in Europe is, um, sad, right?
I think it's sad.
I think a lot of this is policy driven that ends up actually having
a huge significant impact, not just on the chemical industry, but
actually on the people in Europe because they're losing employment,
they're losing economics, et cetera.
So there's a lot of things that go on and you know, it, it even ties into the
conversations that we sometimes have around sustainability and green products
and, Oh, everybody wants to, want some more sustainable, greener product.
Well, sure.
Until it costs a lot more money.
Because let's be honest for, for many products, for much of the world.
Cheap and cheerful is the way to go.
, and that's what they can afford and that's what they see.
And it may have a pretty green label on it that denotes sustainable
or plant based or whatever.
Well, that's great, but I may not be able to afford to do that.
Or I can only afford to do that on certain products, but not all products.
So I think this is something that the chemical industry and its customers.
If I think about all the consumer products, companies, big and small,
whether it be automotive or, dishwashing, um, I think this is something that
we're struggling with together.
Not sure where that resolution comes out.
Cause we're still driving down some paths, but it will, it will come to bear.
So, so let's just talk about, you know, you've shifted from a big
global companies into a startup.
So what has surprised you about that in terms of leading, leading
these big enterprises to now leading a small enterprise?
Frank: I think what surprised me the most was when you're your own boss
and your responsibility for you, your employees, your contractors.
I was expecting to have this huge amount of stress, right?
This was going to be much more stressful.
What I found was it was the most freeing thing I've ever done.
, I've always been on my responsibilities, maybe too much.
Um, but at the big companies, you'd wake up in the middle of
night having a pit in your stomach.
You owe the company this, you have a deadline, you need to have that.
You understand the big picture.
You've got a big negotiation.
So in the back of your mind, you always had work, a type of
work, but it was never your work.
Even as much as you bought in, it was always for somebody else.
When I started my own, it's, we basically have one general rule
for anybody who works with me.
We started every meeting.
Are we still having fun?
Victoria: Hmm.
Frank: If we're not having fun, we're going to just,
we're going to shut it down.
So we choose to do what we want to do to have fun.
It is very low stress.
It is very freeing.
We laugh a lot.
We will say yes to work with people that we want to work with.
And if we go, I don't think they're, they fit in our genre, we don't do it.
So I think that the biggest difference is just kind of going
yeah, it's, it's, it's freeing.
It's kind of fun.
Victoria: Yeah.
I will say, I will agree that point you made about choosing
who you want to work with.
It is liberating.
Yeah.
Right?
Like sometimes, I mean, you know, this and I throw this and sometimes you're
like, yep, their money isn't good here.
And you can say that.
Frank: Exactly.
Victoria: You have the liberty of saying that that's not somebody you want to spend
time with or your business values and personal values don't meet up very well.
etc.,
Final question here, leadership lessons.
So what characteristics.
Have driven your success or the success of leaders around you?
Frank: It's a little bit different.
It's kind of personal.
So everybody has.
Who they are.
Um, I've been accused of liking everybody.
I would literally, we were having a meeting and you know, a salesman came
in who, who might've come across a little terse and annoying and Oh, I
can't, you know, I can't stand that guy.
I said, I like him.
And they said, your, your opinion is no good here because you like everybody.
Um, I think the key thing that's been useful for me and I recommend
for everybody is empathy.
No matter who's working, who you're working with, who you're working for, take
the time to understand as best you can why they may be acting the way they're
acting, why they make the decisions they make and grant them graces and, you know,
allow them to just kind of say, okay, I don't have to agree, but I understand.
Negotiations critical to understanding the person sitting across from you
is not your villain or your opponent.
They're just trying to get the best deal they can for their company.
So the idea of understanding your people, and then the key thing that
worked for me, and I've been reasonably successful as a people manager, I
believe is the, the, the DNI catchphrase bring your whole self to work.
When people come to work, They bring stuff.
They've got personal challenges.
They've got kids problems with boyfriends or spouses, and you can't look them in the
eye and say, no, I don't bring that here.
If you work with them to kind of go.
I understand.
I'm listening.
I believe you.
I trust you.
I love you.
It makes a big difference.
It makes a huge difference in that trust factor.
When you show support for somebody, when they're down, they'll be
there the rest of the time.
So from the management style, um, I tend to be very personal, tend to
be involved the, from the diversity perspective, I have very diverse teams.
I.
I have always pride in myself, not just diversity of ethnicity
or race or gender; thought.
So when I had contract manufacturing that Dow chemical, so I had 15 direct
reports, seven of them were not chemistry or chemical engineers, but
they, what they brought and how they brought to the services, completely
different approach, incredibly valuable.
The team that I have now.
We are as eclectic a mix as you're ever going to see, but boy, they
all understand exactly who they are, why they're there, and how they fit
in the cog, and that makes it fun.
Victoria: That's awesome.
Frank: I'm a big get diversity wherever you can, and you're good.
Um, And I guess if I look for advice to anybody in their position, how to
get ahead and future leaders, whatever job you're given, you have to do
that job to the best of your ability.
It's okay to ask a lot of why's.
Okay.
Why did this come into my inbox and who's my, who's the product of my work product?
Who's my customer?
Who's taking it?
So you start your first step.
Why do I have it?
Where's it going?
Then keep asking questions.
Why did that person have that?
Eventually you will have a full vision of
every request for an order and every customer fulfillment
and the entire supply chain.
When you understand where you fit in the world, it makes a lot
better and you can impact things and you can look for other careers.
If you just put your head down and never ask why I'm doing what I'm doing, it's
not very satisfying and it's limiting.
So.
Look and ask and occasionally raise
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Join us again next time here on The Chemical Show with Victoria Meyer.
Frank: your hand and go from your perspective.
You think this is great down here in the trenches?
It's not going to make it
Victoria: Yeah,
Frank: and be loud and kill it early.
So
Victoria: It's great.
Well, great.
Thank you, Frank.
This has been a great conversation.
I've really enjoyed it.
Frank: thank you.
Thanks for having me on Victoria and look to speak to you again soon.
Victoria: Absolutely.
And thank you everyone for listening.
Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will
talk with you again soon.
voiceover: We've come to the end of today's podcast.
We hope you enjoyed your time with us and want to learn more.
Simply visit TheChemicalShow.
com for additional information and helpful resources.
Join us again next time here on The Chemical Show with Victoria Meyer.