Listen to Victoria and Kris Here:
Discover how hiring for character and training for skills can cultivate a thriving company culture with Kris Maynard, executive chairman of Essential Ingredients. Kris joins host Victoria Meyer on The Chemical Show this week to share insights on the importance of long-term sustainability, reflecting on his company’s journey from humble beginnings to becoming an employee-owned business. Kris discusses the transformative power of trusting relationships, transparent communication, and the strategic advantages of remaining privately owned.
Additionally, Victoria and Kris explore the concept of a 100-year company, drawing parallels with historical craftsmanship in cathedrals, and discuss how Essential Ingredients’ ESOP model has driven employee retention and engagement. Gain valuable advice for those entering the industry and understand how a purpose-driven approach can navigate modern challenges like supply chain issues and regulatory hurdles.
Join us this week as Victoria and Kris discuss the following topics:
- Essential Ingredients’ origin story: Humble beginnings in a server closet
- What makes Essential Ingredients different?
- Partnership Alignment in one-to-one relationships
- Essential Ingredients as a privately owned company – a rarity in the chemical industry
- Building a 100-year company
- Customer Experience at Essential Ingredients
- Kris Maynard’s leadership advice
Killer Quote: “A hundred-year company isn’t just about surviving; it’s about flourishing, creating a legacy, and paving the way for future generations. It’s about hiring for character, training for skills, and building a culture that values trust, transparency, and long-term sustainability.” – Kris Maynard
Other Links:
April Yeager, Senior Vice President of Operations for Essential Ingredients, Episode 41: Moving Up the Corporate Ladder For Professional And Personal Growth With April Yeager
Watch Victoria and Kris’ Discussion on Youtube Here:
Building a 100-Year Company: Kris Maynard of Essential Ingredients
Hi, this is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show, Where Chemicals Means Business. Today, I am speaking with Kris Maynard who is the executive chairman of Essential Ingredients, a company he founded in 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia with a vision of creating a different kind of chemical distributor, partner focused and people focused. Today, Essential Ingredients is employee-owned through an ESOP and Kris has fulfilled his mission of creating and shaping a work environment that provides a pathway for employees and stakeholders to utilize their giftedness and bring themselves bring their best selves to their callings. Kris now has his sights set on building an evergreen company to last a 100 years with the stated purpose of being a blessing to others. These are things that are a little different amongst the world of chemicals, and distribution and, heck, business in general. But I think that’s what’s gonna make this conversation so great.
So Kris and I are going to talk about that and many things including the importance of independent private ownership and the impact that it has on people in society. So, a lot to cover here, Kris, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Thank you, Victoria, for having me. It’s a pleasure.
So what is your origin story? What got you interested in chemicals and led to the founding of Essential Ingredients?
Before I get to the origin story, I co founded the business actually in 1996 with a good friend and partner of mine. That’ll be part of our story we talk about. But, it’s taken a lot of us to build what we have here today, so I don’t want to take too much credit for all that. I grew up in Southern Ohio, very modest, growing up in a farming community. It was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house with 3 boys and mom and dad. I was the first one of the boys to go to college. I was a middle child.
So my poor mother had to share a bathroom with 4 men. In fact, at one point our my mom was so frustrated with the cleanliness of the bathroom. Dad had to put a shower in the utility room outside. You didn’t wanna be the first one to take a shower in the wintertime because you had to break the ice off the floor. So, anyway, I ended up going to Miami of Ohio. My dad wanted me to be a doctor, having a struggle with finances pretty much all his life. He thought, well go pursue a medical career. So I was a pre-med guy.
I think when I talk to folks in our industry, it’s like 9 out of 10 were pre-med and ended up in the chemical industry for some reason. So coming out of college, I actually thought I was gonna be a missionary. I’d spent some time in Russia behind the iron curtain and on one of those trips, actually, I met this young lady, fell in love with her, and I wanted to marry her. When I went to ask her dad for her hand in marriage, he said, you need to find a job. So I went back to the career planning center at Miami and started digging through potential career opportunities. I found this company, Stepan Chemical Company, was advertising in the file cabinets.
Of course, we didn’t have computers readily at hand back then. I sent them a note, and they invited me up for a series of interviews. And I got that job after being turned down for so many other jobs that paid literally half as much and started my career in chemicals as a trainee inside of Stepan, which did a fantastic job of training folks. My hat’s off to them, for their investment in me and I spent about 6 years, selling chemicals here in the southeast for Stepan before kinda catching this idea with my founding partner who happened to work for one of our distributors at the time. He and I actually, the first time we met, we were out peddling chemicals in his car. I always call it windshield time. So, I’m the supplier. He’s the distributor.
We’re both about the same age, and we started this chemical distribution company that really did things a little differently based on some of the frustrations I had from the supplier side, and some of the frustrations he had from the from the distributor side and felt we could do something a little different.
Yeah. That’s really cool. You really were pretty young and early in your career journey when you guys decided to co found Essential, right?
Yeah. I think I was 27. He might have been 28. I remember coming home and telling my wife, that was my last day at work. Both of us had brand new baby girls at home, less than 1 year old each. We had a minuscule part of a plan, nothing you would really call a sharp business plan. Looking back on it, I wouldn’t advise anybody to do what we did. But, we started off in a little incubator in Augusta, Georgia. We couldn’t afford a real office in the incubator, so we rented the server closet in the corner. It was where all the wires came in for the phone service.
Oh my gosh.
We paid a $125 a month for that server closet. It was just big enough for a desk and a bookshelf for some samples. Really what we wanted was somebody answering the phone in a professional way that said, thank you for calling Essential Ingredients. And, he and I ran off with 2 used cars and a couple of SkyTel pagers.
That’s awesome, that’s a great story. So tell us a little about Essential Ingredient.
We’re a chemical distribution company, and, Essential Ingredients was the name that we founded in 1996, and that’s the name that’s been carried through and has largely turned into our personal care chemical distribution arm. We became an ESOP in 2011, which we’ll talk a little bit more about, I’m sure. Since then, we formed a holding company over top of Essential Ingredients we call Cathedral Holdings. It’s allowing us to diversify the verticals within chemical distribution so we can have a little bit more of a focused approach on different industries, whether it be personal care, industrial care, or floor care.
In fact, we’re looking at the oil and gas market right now as a new one.
Cool. So what makes Essential Ingredients different? You guys founded it with this idea that there was something different available. You were frustrated as a supplier. He was a little frustrated as a distributor. What makes Essential Ingredients different?
One of the common frustrations that he and I both had was the lack of trust between people in business. The typical way that that suppliers and distributors work together, it’s really designed against building trust. For example, it wasn’t uncommon for me as a step in sales rep to walk into one of my distributors and constantly being kind of beat over the head by the distributor about the most recent price they had gotten on a surfactant. Here I was in the field with their salespeople trying to help them promote our products, particularly our specialty products, really trying to forge these really deep and meaningful relationships. I found myself really enjoying that part of it, getting to know customers, their family, their stories, getting to know these sales reps really, really well. Doing business together in a combined success focus, versus my success over your success. We kinda took that and said one of our founding principles is gonna be that we won’t have competing product lines. We’re gonna have a surfactant supplier, and we’re not gonna have 2 or 3.
We’re gonna have a silicone supplier and then we’re going to start hitching our wagons to these to these folks and really give us a platform to develop trusting, transparent, meaningful relationships where we can exchange information very freely. With that trust as a backdrop, it allowed us to really put rocket fuel in the engine. If I came to a supplier with a competitive situation, they could believe it was because we were truly a partner in that situation and not necessarily a quasi partner who was looking to leverage them for better pricing, to buy my own pocket.
Did you find that your suppliers were really open to the idea of being the singular one to one relationship?
From what I gathered, it was based on my experience, it was really new at the time. So it was a bit revolutionary in terms of the way this interaction was going to take place. Once it got some steam, it became really magnetic, and very refreshing for folks to be able to do it. We publish a quarterly report for each of our suppliers that says, here’s where all your samples went. Here’s how our sales are doing. Here’s the projects we have in the pipeline. So it’s a very transparent relationship, and it gives them a lot more transparency to the marketplace and what’s going on. So that feedback loop is very tight, very transparent, and they really appreciate that.
Because suppliers, they may have a good line of sight on some of their direct accounts. But when it comes to the smaller mid tiers or co packagers and these sorts of things, they’re relying on their distributors to really feed them that information, which the smaller customers tend to move faster. They pick up on the trends a little bit quicker, and that information is really, really meaningful to them. So, we found it to be a tremendous success and I think a huge part of our story.
I think that’s great. I’ve always worked on the supplier side and I’ve had that confusion or wonderment sometimes these conversations were like, how do you decide if you’re selling my material conflict in some ways. It’s certainly the way the business runs and it’s run successfully for decades, obviously. However, I could see where there’s also a lot of tension that comes into the relationship when you’re not clear in terms of how the partnership is aligning, what products are getting sold where and what those decision factors are in a way that you get more transparent, it sounds like, when you’ve got these one to one relationships.
Yeah. The one to one thing has gotten a lot more complex since 1996, as you can imagine, with all the consolidation that’s happened in our marketplace. So, we really still kinda set that as a goal for what we do and the story we tell. But it’s gotten much more challenging with a lot of the consolidation that happens.
I’m sure. So let’s let’s jump into this whole aspect of being privately owned. In fact, Kris was introduced to me by Cameron Whaley, from SCT, another privately owned company, and family owned company and obviously now Essential Ingredients is an ESOP which is employee owned. Why does this matter? There’s there’s not that many truly privately owned companies in the chemical industry. Why do you think this is important?
We talked about consolidation a little bit already,but we’ve obviously seen it on the chemical distribution side too, and there’s not many of us privately held ones left. And I think who owns you matters whether it’s a publicly traded company or a private equity owned company, I would argue that those owners have one thing in mind, it’s financial outcome. In most cases, they’re willing to sacrifice a lot of things for a financial outcome. If you’re publicly traded, of course, you measure it on a quarterly basis, if not more often on a daily basis if you look at the markets. But the idea of standing in front of the cameras every quarter and reporting out your earnings, that’s a hard thing to do. They’re sharply dialed in on the financial results or what Milton Friedman would say, shareholder of a value over a pretty narrow period of time.
Being privately held gives us the luxury of saying, you know what? That’s not unimportant to us. We’re very, very driven by metrics and KPIs, and we define what our own success looks like there. But, we can take a much longer view of success on the financial side. It also gives us a luxury of saying, we’re gonna make some changes to the business here that may cost us a little bit in terms of finances or even time. But we’re willing to take a longer view of what success looks like. That could be a 5 or even 10 year period of time if we know that this is the right thing for us and right thing for the business and where we think things are headed. It also allows us to focus on the things that we think are much more important than that. You highlighted our purpose as we started to be a blessing to others and inspire them to be a blessing as well.
I totally disagree with Milton Friedman and the idea that businesses are strictly for creating shareholder value. I think businesses can do tremendous amount of good in their communities and for the people that they get to touch, whether it’s people that work inside the business or the customers, even the suppliers. The value of building personal meaningful relationships, it’s given me the most joy over the years, these deep meaningful relationships that I’ve been able to build with people. I think we’ve we’ve proven that you can have both. You can have very strong purpose that is focused on people and doing good in our communities.
I like that. I do think there’s this whole dynamic that takes place with publicly held companies or companies that are owned by private equity around always looking at short term financials. Whether it be a 3 month financial or daily, as you say, when you look at the stock market and the way it moves on a day by day basis, or even just an annual financial that can make businesses make suboptimal decisions, right? You’re optimizing the short term, but maybe sacrificing some of the long term. So from a private company perspective, you can give yourself a 5 or 10 year horizon, truly, for some of your business decisions. Always still wanting to make some money so you can make payroll and have profits in the business. But being able to take a longer term, more strategic view than what sometimes happens in the industry.
One of our core values is who before what. It’s the idea of valuing people over things or results. When you’re measuring things by financial results, it’s what before who. A lot of times that leads to layoffs and these are people’s lives and people’s families that are being impacted by these things. We just try to focus on the who before the what, and our results indicate that it can work.
Awesome. So, Essential Ingredients became employee owned, an ESOP, more than a decade ago. What prompted that?
So at that time in 2011, we brought in a third partner, a minority shareholder, and all of us were about the same age. So we’re still fairly young, in my mid to early forties at the time. But we started playing the tape forward a little bit about, what does this look like for us long term? We had been courted by some competitors and private equity folks. As this was going on, I had watched the wake of destruction in the path of some of those events with these really good companies that I admired, and the people that just kinda got lost after the dust settled. We knew that wasn’t the path that we wanted to take. I had been studying ESOPs. One of our suppliers had been an ESOP for number of years, and I had been studying employee ownership for a while.
So my partners and I were like, it’s not feasible for us to be a generational family business with, 3 selling shareholders involved. We all had kids and stuff. Nobody showed a tremendous interest in the business, but we just felt like that would be messy.
Yeah.
We didn’t wanna take these other paths. So we started studying ESOPs and thought, man, this could be a really good thing for us. I mean, we can all stay involved if we choose to. We can let our people who have helped us build this business start enjoying the fruits of it as an owner, quote, unquote.
It really gives us a path for retention. Our attrition rate is very low. It’s less than 4%. We tend not to lose folks and it allows us to cultivate this culture where everybody has a stake. Every day they come to work, they’re influencing the financial results of the business, the share price. So we get measured once a year as an ESOP. So we have evaluation team come in and give us our share price rather than daily, like a publicly traded company. We get ours once a year.
And do you use a third party, like, one of the big four accounting firms or something? Is that how that plays out?
Not typically a big four, but, yeah there’s companies that specialize in ESOP valuation. They’ll come in and take a hard look at the books. Of course, we have audited financials and all those sorts of things. They’re looking at things like, what are on your business plans for next year? What does your budget look look like? Any major events forecasting up or down. And they bake all that in using a formula to create value. But it allows our people to really have an influence in it. I think when customers interact with us, when suppliers interact with us, we’ve got a beautiful culture here.
Some of that culture comes from that ESOP ownership that folks are saying, this is my business too, this is my company too, and I’m gonna do a good job here. I’m gonna do a good job for you, mister customer, mister supplier, because number 1, it’s who we are. Number 2, it influences that outcome.
Do you find that it becomes more personal versus public stock ownership? Because obviously a lot of companies use public stock ownership as part of their employee value proposition or employee opportunities. So do you see that it shapes it differently?
I think it can. All ESOPs aren’t created equal, there’s some pretty horrific stories about ESOPs out there. But I think using the tool in the right way, you’re very intentional about educating your people on how we make money, how do we lose money, how does what you do every day impact? We’re an open book company. In 2015, we deployed a tool called A Great Game of Business, so every Monday, if you came and visited us at 11 o’clock, we have an all hands huddle. Everybody gathers around and for the remote folks, they dial in, and it gives us a time to share the metrics. How’s the business doing? We also use it as a time to thank one of our peers for something they did exemplary that week or to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries.
It’s a wonderful gathering time. So we’re very intentional about connecting our folks, as employee owners, and educating them on what it means to be an employee owner and how what they do every day impacts our results.
Yeah, cool So let’s talk a little about what’s going on in the industry. I think it’s been a whirlwind over the last several years. Obviously, we’ve all faced it, COVID and post COVID. This year, we’ve got a lot going on as well.
It seems there’s a lots of ups and downs and changes. What do you see as the challenges faced in the chemical industry today?
I mean, we felt all those things. COVID was actually good for our business. The supply chain crisis was not good for our business. Last year was really, really difficult, so I am thankful we’re beyond that now and actually starting to see buying patterns come back to what I would call sort of normal. Normal for us is really more pre-COVID, because you had the COVID spike and then you had the supply chain ditch.
There’s some obvious challenges, you’ve always got environmental issues and regulatory issues we’re dealing with. But I think it sort of comes back to an earlier point in our conversation. Being privately held versus ownership, whether it’s public or private equity, I see the impact of those things really drilling down into people’s connectedness at work. When Gallup tells us that 70% of the US workforce comes to work every day, and they hate their jobs. They don’t have a best friend at work. They don’t respect their manager, these sorts of things. I think particularly given some of the newer generation, whether it’s millennials or the Zoomers, those folks really want meaning in their work, and they want a place that has a purpose that stands for something more than just a job.
We spend most of our life hours with people we’re working with and doing a task. We try really, really hard to understand people’s giftedness and try to connect them with a job that they can have joy in and, really do that with a team that does that in a healthy environment.
So you talked about giftedness. I know that’s part of your mission and your vision and your objectives of the company. What does that mean to you? And what is it that you guys look for when you’re trying to help people connect with this?
So, it really starts early. We’re interviewing a candidate coming in and we may have a job opening and we’re trying to match somebody to that. We’re super intentional about the front door. I learned a long, long time ago we hire character, we train skills. Most folks really look at skills and say character’s optional, perhaps. That’s one of the things that makes our culture beautiful in a lot of ways just by being super intentional about the front door.
Then beyond that, once they get here, they may come to us thinking they’re really good at this or this is really what their passion is, but we’re really, really open to helping them explore other potential avenues for them. And, we’ve got a number of examples. So we’ve got a a gal that worked in our customer service department for years. And then, right before COVID happened she had sort of expressed along the way a desire to maybe tinker in the lab a little bit, so we started giving her that opportunity. COVID happened, and we were all panicking trying to figure out different ways to thicken alcohol for hand sanitizers. You couldn’t get some of the more traditional chemistries as readily as we thought we could before. And, she and the team came up with a lot of those solutions, and she’s now a full time lab tech for us, not a customer service person.
And we’ve got so many stories like that. I could rattle off probably another another dozen of folks that came to us thinking they were going to do this, and now they’re doing something completely different. Great cultural fit, great character, but wanting to take some time and explore, is it possible I could do that, because I never thought that was possible. So we give them a lot of freedom to do some exploring, and we’ve got some assessments we do to help them with that and trying to put them in a seat that really excites them.
When I think about that, it sounds like you’re giving your employees a lot of leeway in many ways to figure out where their fit is and how they want business to run. Certainly as owners, they have a stake in that. But how do you ensure that alignment then? Is it tough to manage within that environment? Or what do you see as the opportunity to keep people on mission even as they are maybe shifting from where their focus is because they have an idea about where else they would be would have a good fit.
Although we are all employee owners, we have different roles in the business. My role is different than, maybe the director of customer service or even one of our customer service reps. It doesn’t mean they don’t have a voice in these things. We’re very proactive in making sure people do have a voice in a lot of these things. But, at the same time, it is a business and we make decisions. Occasionally, we gotta to put somebody where there’s a job here that needs to be done today.
And, we need to do that job today and it was back burnered and we call that development opportunity. We’ll help you with that. So just because somebody is an employee owner doesn’t necessarily mean they come in and start calling the shots. That sounds harsh, but it’s really an easy conversation to have in the right cultural environment. I almost picture it as, you see these rowing competitions in the Olympics, and they’re fantastic as everybody’s doing their part in sync. And you’ve got somebody in the front of the boat, who’s making sure everybody’s on the right cadence. But if everybody’s got their oar in the water and they’re rowing the right direction, it’s a beautiful thing.
So Kris, we’ve talked a lot about the supplier relationship and how the business that you formed with Essential Ingredients is very supplier centric in a lot of ways. Changing some of that relationship and then as well as being employee owned, very people centered, and that has a significant impact on your employee experience. What about the customers? How do you think about your customers feel about the experience that they have when they’re working with you guys?
So even early in our business, I remember walking around and telling everybody, guys, the customer pays our salary. So not losing sight of the fact that without customers, we’re nothing. In our case as a distributor, without suppliers we’re nothing. We’ve always walked that tightrope of making sure that we are partnering well with suppliers, but also partnering well with customers. We’ve tried to be super intentional about elevating the customer experience here. In fact, we’ve got a director of customer experience. Her sole job, Julie Vibert, is elevating the customer experience. We do some fun things like have a customer advisory panel where we get feedback from some of our better customers that tell us what’s working, what’s not, what can we tweak?
We try hard to have dedicated customer service reps that are building relationships at a different level than the sales interaction. Customer relationship managers is what we call them actually, they’re talking to that buyer three to four or five times more often than the salesperson. I’ve always said we sell relationships, not chemicals. It’s this idea of building and forging these relationships with customers and it comes back full circle to building trust in that trusting environment. I’d say we’re really good at it. We’re not as good as I want us to be at this and I think we can always get a little better. It’s a journey. We really, really try hard to not satisfy our customers, but delight our customers. We can all think of situations we’ve been in before when we walk out of a situation where you bought something or you had a meal.
When you walk out and you’re like I can’t believe that just happened. Blow your mind service. Like I would have paid more for that. They’re not often but when they happen, it’s shocking because we sort of get lulled into this mediocrity when it comes to transactions. We want those experiences for our customers to be a delight, not just a satisfactory.
I really like that. I like the idea of having the customer advisory panel, I think that’s probably lacking, not that companies don’t go in and survey their customers and ask them questions, but being very deliberate about the form in which you bring that input in and leverage it and harness it. I think it’s so critical because It’s easy to misunderstand why your customers are doing what they do and the experience that they actually have. So fostering that relationship is really critical. The other thing that strikes me is, of course, you’re based in Atlanta, which I think is also where Chick-fil-A is based and Dan Cathy and the customer culture that they’ve built.
So even just the whole response of my pleasure. Have you guys taken any cues from that as you’ve developed what you do?
We have and I often compare when I’m telling our story an experience at Chick-fil-A versus one of the other fast food chains out there. I asked people, does it feel different? Why do you go to Chick-fil-A and pay a cashier, I’d say, significantly more for your lunch? Instead of going to Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, I think it helps them understand a little bit more clearly, more quickly, what we’re trying to do here. We’re fortunate to be in the same geography as Chick-fil-A, because our customer relationship manager, she takes crews down to Chick-fil-A and they allowed us to come down and we dip our folks in that tank a little bit and they share some of their wisdom with us about, how they do things, why they do things more importantly, and the outcomes of some of those things.
So it’s a great comparison and they’re a great model.
Awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about a 100 year company. What does that mean to you?
100 years is a thumb in the air kind of a number. But, I was really introduced to that through an organization called Tugboat Institute. It’s a group of owners of businesses that have this desire to build a business to last for generations, generationally owned, who aren’t in the camp of building to sell. It’s because of some of the things we’ve already talked about, the value of people, the value of businesses doing good in our communities. Businesses that have been around a long, long time, they’re well known and there’s legacy associated with that. I’m not interested in my personal legacy, but I am about those others as potential employee owners that t I will never get to meet 30 years from now when I’m gone, but still enjoying this place that we call cathedral. We call it cathedral intentionally because cathedrals take typically 100 of years to build.
The people that start them don’t get to see them finished. But people typically recognize cathedrals as something that’s there, standing the test of time. It was intended to be something beautiful from the outset. When I walk in an old cathedral, I often think about how many thousands and thousands of people have walked over this threshold. And I can see the concrete or the stone is actually beaten down and it’s got marks in it from just wear of the amount of shoes that have walked through there. And I think about the people that have been, blessed in those opportunities, and, that’s the vision and the meaning behind it. Really, the impact on people over a long period of time.
Yeah. That’s awesome. I’ve been in a lot of cathedrals. In fact, most recently I was in France this summer. And we went to, Chartres, which is in France, and they started building it in 1189. So almost a 1000 years ago. There is this choir wall. So it would basically be the wall that goes around the choir, around the whole altar. It’s immensely detailed. This beautiful sculptured wall that I don’t even know how long it took. It took hundreds of craftsmen probably 100 of years to do it, and it’s still there. In fact, my husband, he’s like, what happened to all the sculptors? Well a lot of things. Number 1, in the middle ages, building the church was your job. Right? As opposed to today, we’ve got all kinds of industry.
It’s amazing really, how some things can live for generations. It goes multiple generations and the impact that has, it’s really cool.
Yep. I often tell the story. There was a an architect in London after the London fires around 1780. And he was charged with rebuilding the cathedrals in London. Dressed in plain clothes this day, and this guy was a gentleman architect. He sees a guy working and asks him what he’s doing and the guy says, I’m laying bricks, and goes around the corner and there’s another one. And he says, I’m building a wall. And the third one, he walks around the corner and there he hears singing in the background, and he says, what are you gentlemen doing?
We’re building a cathedral. This vision of not doing this task of laying bricks, building a wall, but this vision of what we’re doing over a much longer, broader period of time, even outside their lifespan, brought meaning to their work that gave them joy.
So Kris, let’s talk about leadership advice since this is a question I’ve been asking a lot recently. What advice do you have for someone entering the industry that perhaps wants to follow in your footsteps, and achieve the success, and the vision that you’ve achieved. What’s your advice?
So when I think back on my college years, and I’m a Gen X, the Gen Xers were really about pursuing a paycheck. It was about being successful quickly. I think about all these folks that I knew in college and went on to these jobs, typically financial jobs and these sorts of things. I would ask first, why do you wanna do that? What is driving you? Is it a paycheck? Is it some sort of income associated with it? Or is it something you really feel like you’re good at? Something that’s gonna bring you joy? You’re not gonna come home and kick the dog. We all have bad days at work. Believe me, I do. But thinking about what it is that really, really excites you inside or outside the chemical industry.
Then for leadership advice, when I ask most leaders of businesses why you exist, it typically comes back to some of those financial metrics that we talked about before, shareholder value, these sorts of things. And I just encourage folks to elevate above that a little bit more and think about humanity in a different way and elevating above the task or the job or the company and think about the impact on people.
Love it. Well, Kris, thank you. This has been really cool, and I love your perspective on business, and how visionary you are and how people and human centered you are. It’s really great to see. So thanks for sharing that today.
You’re welcome. I’m glad to be here. Thank you, Victoria.
Absolutely. And thanks everyone for listening. Keep listening. Keep following. Keep sharing, and we will talk to you again soon.
About Kris Maynard:
Kris Maynard was born and raised in rural Ohio and graduated from Miami University in Ohio with a pre-med degree in Zoology in December 1989. His chemical career started in Chicago, Illinois in the spring of 1991 after spending several months in Russia doing missions work where he discovered the love of his life. Kris and Cindy were married in May of 1991 and relocated from Chicago to Atlanta, Georgia, where he got his first “real” job. In May of 1996, Kris co-founded Essential Ingredients.
Kris serves as the Executive Chairman at Essential Ingredients. His favorite thing about Essential Ingredients is helping to create and shape a work environment that provides a pathway for employees and stakeholders to utilize their giftedness and bring their best selves to their callings. He is also passionate about building personal relationships with customers and suppliers, understanding their businesses, and exploring creative ways to help them be more successful. Kris believes that demonstrating that work can be rewarding, fulfilling, and even fun is something that can give hope to all workers throughout the world and that people underestimate the power that great businesses can have as a force for good in the world. Kris and his partners converted the company to a 100% S Corp ESOP in 2011, and he now has his sights set on building an evergreen company to last 100 years with the stated purpose of “being a blessing to others”.
Kris and Cindy have three children: Rachael, Ryan, and Justin as well as two grandsons. Kris is an avid pilot, fisherman, hunter, reader and loves all things outdoors. In his free time, Kris enjoys exploring the mountains with friends and family near their farm in Dahlonega, Georgia.