Successfully navigating a newly-formed company’s first years comes with challenges and opportunities in business systems, workforce development, and sustainable manufacturing. Listen and learn as Victoria Meyer speaks with John Foley, CEO of Verdant Specialty Solutions about solidifying the business in its first two years, then building a platform for growth.
John discusses leading the acquisition and integration of multiple businesses in the chemical sector. With a focus on building a strong team, implementing sustainable practices, and leveraging technology, John has brought Verdant to new heights of success. Having recently acquired a specialty oxide plant and a range of businesses, John shares his insights on workforce development, strategic acquisitions, and the importance of balancing commercial strategy with team-building efforts.
Learn more about the following topics this week:
- Verdant 1.0 – buying and integrating the 3 businesses, standing up a back office, implementing an ERP system, and safety and compliance
- Introduction of Verdant 2.0 – growth strategy
- Identifying what’s really creating value for your customers
- How Verdant is navigating an uncertain economy
- Sustainable Manufacturing
- Maximizing the Potential of a state of the art specialty chemical plant
- Finding Business success in teamwork
Victoria and John chat about the importance of sustainable manufacturing and the potential to strengthen a smaller chemical company’s technology capabilities through external acquisitions. Join them as they uncover the secrets to building a successful chemical company on The Chemical Show.
***Don’t miss an episode: Subscribe to The Chemical Show on your favorite podcast player.
***Like what you hear? Leave a rating and review.
***Want more insights? Sign up for our email list at www.thechemicalshow.com.
Listen to Victoria’s Interview with John Foley Here:
Watch Victoria and John’s Discussion on YouTube:
Team Building for Success: How Verdant is Approaching Sustainable Growth
Hi. This is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to the Chemical Show. Today, I am speaking with John Foley, who is CEO of Verdant Specialty Solutions. John’s going to explain who he is, and I’m not gonna get into that piece because John is actually a repeat guest here on The Chemical Show. He was here on Episode 8, right at the very beginning when he was starting up a new company and I was starting up a new podcast. He was back on Episode 49 and talking about the 1st year challenges and how they were building out the back end and more. Both of those episodes are linked so go take a listen and you’re gonna get the full story. You’ll get version 1, version 2, and version 3. So, John, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Good morning, Victoria. Great to be back.
Good to have you here. So let’s just start for those that may not know you. Give us a brief introduction to you, and also to Verdant Specialty Solutions.
I grew up in the Midwest on a farm. I joined the chemical industry via Monsanto Agricultural Products decades ago, and there I really found I’ve made a great career choice because it’s a great industry. After Monsanto, I did 26 years with Solvay its predecessor companies, before jumping into the private equity space, to to to really meet my passion to run, build and run, middle market, specialty chemical company, businesses. So that brought me, after my first experience, really looking at what to do next and that manifested itself in Verdant, and the investment thesis behind Verdant.
So, tell us a little bit about Verdant and and what it is and where you’re going.
What we were looking to do was to create a company where I think there’s a lot of opportunity and runway in the middle part of the chemical industry. We have great entrepreneurial spirit founded in in private companies, that grow quick. They’re nimble, really customer focused. Most of the the industry is dominated by the global industry dot giants. So what I want to do, what we want to do, with the private equity partners is create a brand and a culture, that operates to large company’s standards, but with that small company entrepreneurial spirit. In the 1st couple years, it hasn’t been easy, but I’m really pleased with the progress. We’re fun, and and we’re creating value.
Awesome. And you guys are primarily in the surfactants space?
Surfactants and surfactant-based solutions. We were formed in the first part of 2021 via 3 acquisitions, so we acquired the Odyssey business from Solvay. We are a corporate carve out of their amphoteric surfactants business with manufacturing in the North America and Europe and we quickly followed with a couple more entrepreneurial businesses, DeForest Enterprises and Baze Chemical. So over that first 5 or 6 months, we acquired 3 businesses and put them together with a variety of the amphoterics, and we also have an energy services business, via, Baze with a lot of water treatment chemistry, corrosion inhibitors, and also one asset I’m really excited about is our specialty oxide plant in Palestine, Texas. So, that formed it.
Principally, the market’s home personal care as with most surfactant companies is our key market, and a huge focus. Energy Services is second. We have an industrial business, and we call it Drill because like in many companies, it’s everything else that doesn’t fit in our major markets. So I really think about that. That is more emergent markets. We hope to grow more market based businesses out of that group. Then we also do some level of toll manufacturing, not really strategic, but it helps you some of the capacity that we would otherwise not put to use. So in a nutshell, that’s where we’re at today.
Cool. So give us an update on Verdant 2 years in. As we’ve talked previously, year 1 was starting up the company. Year 2 was fixing the company. How would you describe where you are at this point?
It’s been almost 2 years since we finished that 3rd acquisition and you capture it correctly. Inside the company, I talk about Verdant 1.0. I think we are just wrapping up 1.0 now. There are a number of levers that we had to implement to get through that: Buying and integrating the 3 businesses, starting up a back office, and implementing an ERP system is not for the faint of heart.
With our large company standard, small company spirit, safety and compliance is at the core of our industry and our values. We self audited all of our sites. We did due diligence when we bought them, and then we audited. For a company of our size, it was a massive program – recruiting the people and uncovering every issue, safety compliance, regulations that we could, and making sure we’re operating to the Verdant standard. So that was hugely internally focused, but as I’d consistently shared with the team and our private equity owners, creating real value for our stakeholders because that comes first. We also refocused the commercial activities and a lot of this was, making sure we’re focusing our assets and our people where we can create value. And, it isn’t enough. I’m not a volume driven guy or professional. We don’t have many of those here. Volume in and of itself doesn’t solve any problem for me. So we need to make sure everything we do creates value for a customer who just wants to pay for it.
How do you identify that, John? I think that’s an easy thing to say, but that’s harder to do. How do you identify what’s really creating value for your customers?
Well, in Verdant 1.0, some of it is a reflection the competitive intelligence. But the rubber hits the road on if you have competitive assets in a fairly competitive cost structure. Will somebody pay you the price you need to make a minimum accepted return? So we tested that. I’ve done this a number of times in in my career and, I’ve always assumed at some point when we refocus the portfolio, make sure we have the the right price points to be sustainable that I would end up with an empty plant because people would say, “No, something’s wrong with you. You don’t have the right cost structure. You don’t have the right product. We’re paying for it. So all your volume’s gone.” But it’s never the case. So that reflection and then building the team to get the data together, the right prices and to implement was one of the key early successes.
So now the next phase Verdant in 2.0. It’s gonna be a little bit of a different game. My opinion when you buy businesses, is that it’s usually because something needs to be improved. I mean, sometimes it’s a great business that just doesn’t fit. But often, there’s something that was missing with the previous owners to realize its potential. So we did those 4 things, bought the back office, self-audited, safety and compliance and we refocused. The best part, because it has to be a virtuous circle, is we’re over-delivering versus the investment case we bought them on, and really having a great year in 2023.
I attribute that to the work that the team’s done, but I think we’re in the right segments, and with the right customers and good support from our suppliers and stakeholders. So we’ve got a long ways to go. But, the team is justifiably proud of of what we’ve accomplished and looking forward to the next phase.
Yeah. So that’s a great segue, John. I think what we’re seeing across the industry is, chemical markets are flat, or you could say declining. We’re also experiencing in many markets a prolonged period of destocking because inventories had gotten out of whack, and over the past year or 2, a flattening supply demand curve. We’ve got economic pressures from what’s going on in Europe, with the European situation around gas lines and the Russian-Ukraine war. We’ve got pressures from China and what started out as their approach to COVID and what’s turned into an economy that’s not growing, and resolving the way it was supposed to. What are you hearing from your customers and seeing in your business, as it relates to that?
I’m humble in this area. So I’ll share what I’m seeing and feeling as opposed to what I know because I’m humble about what I know. Firstly, we’re disappointed with our volume performance this year as well. We planned to grow volume approaching a double digit number, and we’re just slightly positive. So in our markets, we’re not getting where we want to.
Every business is facing different pieces. We’re always trying to learn more and and listen to your show and your comments on Q3 or Q2 results. I keenly listen to all that to see what we can learn. There’s a couple things I take around. First, I believe there’s some level of destocking. People are nervous about the future. So you wanna reduce working capital. You wanna reduce inventory. In some cases, there’s probably been some demand destruction which helps too. Your customers are probably the worst place to go to understand what’s happening with demand. Sometimes customers can be very polite about, the fact that they’re not buying from you and their demand’s way off.
When I see some of these quarter to quarter declines, it cannot all be demand destruction or even inventory, that is my opinion. So I think as an industry, we’ll sort it out. Formats will start to vary, markets will settle down and what I am confident on is that we can compete. We can get our fair share of the volume in any market. Over time, we’ll see what happens with market and where it goes.
I think one of the things that people are anticipating, and again mixed comments depending on who you talk to and who you listen to, but some people are saying they’re seeing some brightness in the rest of 2023. Others are saying, we’re not gonna see it till 2024. Then the plastics guys, which is a whole different market, they’re not expecting anything great until 2025. Of course, they’re also the victims of their own investment profiles. So that’s part of it as well.
Just for Verdant, and where my blinders are is in the markets we participate in. feel blessed that we’re part of the home-personal care world. I think all indications to me is people still bath and take care of themselves every day. Right? So they’re consuming soaps and detergents and using personal care products. It’s just key there, that we align with the right part of the value chain, the winning brands. As consumers maybe buy different products and maybe trade down.
Also in the US energy business, in our energy services business is well positioned in production chemistry, and the energy prices are holding up well. We’ve got a great team there. We wanna bring in some new products. The third leg though is, there are companies that are growing very nicely. That’s about Verdant 2.0 and we’re really starting to get started in a big way to pivot from what’s still been a pretty heavy internal focus. Looking at our portfolio, how we position, building the company. We’re strongly pivoting to externally lean into a couple of big themes that we see in the industry to get growth.
So you’ve referenced Verdant 1.0, which we’ve kind of moved up behind us, or it’s coming to a transition point. What is Verdant 2.0? What’s what’s on the horizon? What are you guys setting your sights on?
That is the language I use inside the company, 1.0. Okay we get it. We succeeded. It’s done. We need to do 2.0. Originally, when I used the 1.0, 2.0, we roughly doubled the value of the company operating results in the first period. I wanna double it again, but it isn’t even about the absolute numbers. There’s a lot of growth that we can capture. So what do we have now? We have a good back office. We have a a strong leadership team. We’re building out their teams. It’s really getting equipped to grow. We’ve got the basic tools inside. We’ve got well placed surfactant specialty batch plants in North America and Europe that have capacity and they’re in good shape to run.
So the two things then that I’m personally pivoting on is looking at what’s moving market share. What happening? Clearly the green, sustainability, ESG improvements, carbon footprint, and that whole thing. There is just a lot of interest in products that solve those problems for companies. We see customers now looking for the solutions, and I’ve got opinions on where they’re gonna come from and how you win, of course.
But what is happening is, socially, the government and consumers. Everybody would prefer to have a product that’s more sustainable by whatever criteria someone’s using, but the transition is slower than many people would like to see, so that interest is there. We see at some of our larger customers in particular, personal objectives being written. In many cases, those objectives are being written to find solutions to improve the sustainability profile of these companies.
Does that look like green chemistry, green and renewable products, John, or is it more broadly defined in terms of life cycle analysis, energy reduction, and carbon reduction. There’s so many factors that we can be measuring sustainability on. How are you looking at this and how are your customers looking at this?
Well, what I would say is yes to all the above. I don’t think there is a unified way of looking at it, and all the companies are positioned at a different place. So I think what we’ll try and understand is, in our target markets, what do people need to balance the equation which moves market share? The equation that moves market share is delivering incrementally sustainable benefit. We have some things in our toolbox and know what we want to acquire, but you’ve got to deliver that incrementally sustainable feature or claim, while not sacrificing functional performance or increasing cost and use. You gotta do all three. Until you can do all three, you’re not gonna move market share. There are companies sometimes with older products and technology, that are finding the ways to do that within our portfolio. What we bought, the amphoteric surfactant line, is reasonably well positioned as far as on a relative basis, more sustainable, renewable, gentle and also can serve as a surfactant in many formulations enabling some other change. So we want to leverage that and then other things, like there’s a great story around our Palestine asset to help the industry, up and down the value chain.
So I know we’ve talked about that Palestine asset in the past, you and I personally. What are the plans? How does Palestine fit into Verdant 2.0?
Yeah. We’re forming our plans. What we acquired up there is a specialty scale batch oxide plant which was newly constructed over the last 5 to 7 years. So it was permitted built and started up. Which, I was very happy to acquire because it’s probably the key strategic driver for us on the Baze acquisition. Although we got a great energy services business as well.
What we found up there was more of a startup plant, it was relatively new. It was in a geographic area that is 3 hours north of Houston. So you can’t access the same skilled workforce to staff and build that plant. So what we did in the first 2 years was really ethylene oxide – a serious chemistry, and we treated it with great respect. That was one of the plans we targeted for the full safety and compliance review and upgrades. We spent a lot of capital up there to make sure, the core processes are where we want them to be.
The other key part is workforce and workforce development, investing in the team of skilled operators to build that capability and then the professionals to really start up the plant. We’ve made progress on that and reshaping the portfolio. What’s next is, we’re about to get more aggressive in putting in the resources. This week, we named a new plant manager at that site. It was one of my most trusted plant managers, experienced in specialty batch, chemical manufacturing, a great team leader, and builder. That is a foundational position which enables us to be a great member of the community and develop the workforce and the footprint.
The other piece that we’re doing is, we’re gonna put in more business development resources because there’s 30 odd plants outside the US Gulf Coast, and a number of them and their customers need to find the right mechanism and partner to move more production to the US Gulf Coast. So I can anticipate that we try and acquire, if there’s parties that don’t want their plants in the upper Midwest or West Coast or somewhere else. Maybe it’s time that they restructure, that they choose to structure these great companies with great product lines, and we help them get that production in the US Gulf Coast with the ESG benefit of reducing EO molecular terrorism and all the costs associated with that. Really improving the long term supply reliability of those great product lines. So we’ll do that. Then we’ll just straight on compete in more niche specialty areas where they’re high value, they’re important components, but maybe they’re not currently connected to a manufacturing footprint that is in and of itself sustainable. I’m not denigrating any of these companies or the plants, but it’s natural. There’s been a big migration of West Coast. So we’re gonna help and we’re gonna help ourselves, as we do that. The most frustrating thing has been ramping up that capacity.
So Palestine is, as you say, a couple hours from Houston. So, US Gulf Coast-ish and when you’re citing a location for a new facility: It’s access to feedstocks. It’s access to customers. It’s access to logistics. I know you guys bought into the Palestine plant, so this was not an investment that you made, but why that location? What’s unique about that location or what was the opportunity in that location and how are you guys leveraging that?
Yeah. You’re right, we bought so it existed. But I think the attraction is that it has it’s a great community, good values, good workforce to build in and operate. We believe in that and that’s important: be a good neighbor and be supported. They value us there, and we wanna earn that over time.
Logistically for specialty batch manufacturing, the freight rate to get up to, Palestine from the major EO production points, might be under 5¢ a pound. Some of the freight rates to get to outline plants we understand is up to 30¢ a pound. So it’s not on a pipe, but it’s specially batch manufacturing and certainly we have a good competitive advantage with ease of access in logistics.
The third thing is, it’s in a remote location. We’ve just bought some land across the road that is a cattle pasture. So there’s a good buffer, but those things are never permanent. A community and a location that’s not terrible logistically, and we can build a workforce up there and win. Now if I could do it, I’d have it a few miles from an EO plant without any city around and all those things. But we can certainly work with that asset on a scale of the 30 odd batch plants in in North America. I’m very happy we have this one with where it’s located.
Given that chemistry is under such tremendous pressure, really over the last decade especially, having a facility that’s outside of a major metropolitan area is critical. It’s just important from a overall safety ESG perspective, and being good neighbors.
Yeah. Our private partners are very supportive, and they would ask me over the last couple of years, “John, we’re not slowing you down at Palestine, are we? What what can we do? Do you need capital? When are we gonna see these things?” But, the first thing is, making sure we have safety and compliance, the operating culture, and if we do those things right then we can start to really accelerate. So that’s what we’re working on next.
That’s awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about talent. I know Verdant has had a bit of turnover at the leadership level. You’ve also just referenced your new plant manager, which is a critical role. I also know you’ve had some senior commercial leadership and I feel like sometimes this is typical for PE backed firms, where the timelines are short to deliver performance. But what’s your take on this, John? You’ve obviously been working to put together the right team. When you think about leadership and and the leadership turnover, how’s that affecting your team and how are you approaching that?
Really the key to the success factor for us is teamwork. In my career, I’ve rarely been part of anything that meets my definition of a real team that supports each other, that has the feel for the whole business, and where we’re committed to each other and the business to make it happen. So it’s critical and it has been when picking our talent here. The first thing I would have done early on, maybe a couple of lessons that I took is we were formed via corporate carve out, and there was nobody outside of the plants and a few key commercial people and some technical. So the back office and a lot of the functions, we had quantity to address and then competencies. So the whole thing, and we buy a business and then you gotta start running it. So a lot of pressure, it’s really not easy to form overnight via three acquisitions, put it together and improve it. Even where we hired enormously talented, hardworking people, and because some of the people who came in and contributed, I’m deeply impressed with what they did and what they accomplished. Even today there’s nobody who came in, who didn’t leave it all on the field. But then it comes down to, is it a good fit for this environment, for this strategy. And can they help build and develop team? The other part of joining at least our particular version of private equity and startup is you have to be able to both: do and build at the same time. Those are often two different skills.
They are in both from a preference too, not just skills, but people don’t want to do it. You’ve reached a level where you’re pulling levers at a big company and you’ve got all these processes, all this data, and great teams, great people. Then you come in here, and it’s more, especially initially – it’s hand-to-hand combat, not with each other, but just trying to get that. So if you come into that, a couple things that can happen: One, you just do. All you do is you get work done every day, and you don’t spend enough time on team. You’re gonna fail. We’ll fail because you gotta build process and team or you’re doomed because you can’t get leverage.
Then the other side, if you take too big of a step back and say, I’m gonna build all the team and wait for all the good data, good processes, and then we’ll be able to to fix our commercial strategy. Well, that’s not gonna work either. So what I found is it’s important for everybody we’ve hired – I would say I’ve been deeply impressed how smart they are, how hard they worked. Balancing, that’s been a trick.
Why are we on Verdant 2.0 today? Because, going through that process of stepping up the company, I had to be utility infielder. Sometimes I was sales at Verdant. Sometimes I was working with product management. Sometimes I was working on liquidity and cash flow or ERP. Now we’ve reached a maturity where the business has developed. We are not perfect. We have many, many things to do: including me, they don’t even have a perfect CEO. I tell them all the time. But we’re on a path where we’ve got a lot of good people and some momentum. To be open, that’s what I see. Some of the people who came in and aren’t here, I consider them part of my work family, and it doesn’t mean they won’t come back.
That’s a good reflection, John. As the company develops it needs different skills. It needs different personalities and temperaments from a work perspective. So there is this development cycle that requires not just different processes, but different people at different times. I helped a startup, that was moving from development. They were setting up the company, building the assets and into commercialization and recognized that as a huge inflection point.
So these dramatic inflection points at different companies, and I’ve worked with several companies along the way here that are moving in from one phase to the next. As you move from one phase to the next, you sometimes need different resources. The skills that you needed at the beginning are different than the skills that you needed the next phase. The culture of the business has to evolve. That’s really too bad because culture is tough. It’s slow moving, but you have to make that move as you move into different phases and different steps of the company.
One of the key challenges then, because fully aligned with what you just shared and really critical, is trying to do it in a small company. In some of the larger companies, if we needed a plant manager, we had programs to develop these people over 10 or 15 years. You need a plant manager. You call up your friends in HR. They’ll send three highly qualified people. You pick one and you go. That’s why I like telling our story is because I need people to know the story in the industry. I need them to know how we work because the most part really my preferred way is recruiting people we know or private connections. We’ve used a lot of recruiters, but it’s really difficult to build a company and a culture that way.
People need to understand what we’re doing. It’s not for everybody and where they fit. That’s the most powerful recruiting tool for human capital, for partners, people to join our work family, and also for business owners. Who have a business and then what do they do with it too? Telling our story really enables them to sample what we do. We’re not perfect, but we bought these businesses, private equity. A lot of people were worried when private equity buys it. We have more employees than when we started. So it’s not slash and burn. We’re builders. We’re here to put together this small company spirit, large company standards, and there’s a lot we can do. So I appreciate that.
We’ve talked about this a couple times. Your private equity back is private equity owned. What’s the view from the owners? So PE comes in with a hope, a dream, a plan and objective. With Verdant 2 years in, what’s the view from the owners?
I don’t wanna speak for them, but I’ve gotten to know them pretty well, so let me give you a self evaluation. They’re very supportive people and teams. So I’ve really enjoyed that. They’re happy. Now part of that is self evaluation. Because they really count on their portfolio, CEOs to build a team and deliver results so they’re there to support. It was really a difficult carve out and start up. For a number of reasons, but we work through those issues. The team really engaged and then we have a monthly board call. It’s about an hour. An hour by schedule, but early in our 24 month history, they might have been 3 or 4 hours. They were much more difficult. Now as things start to collect, they’ve become shorter and more fun. So that’s satisfying to see. We actually have a meeting later today with them. They’re excited for what we can do. I feel very well supported to do the next part, because we’re gonna need people who continue to believe in it. We did Verdant 1.0, we created value, but now we’re creating that next step.
That’s a version 2.0. I know at times in the past, we’ve talked about the potential to bring in another business at the appropriate time. I know that you can’t share any secrets or confidential things, but when you think about, Verdant 2.0 from both your perspective and from your owner’s perspective, is there still a timeline to sale? Is there a timeline to additional growth? Is there anything you can share around that?
Yeah. Generally I don’t think about when the company will be sold, and we’re not trying to drive anything. As we succeed and we get noticed, there’s people who want to, see how to create value together. There can be discussions and the future’s hard to predict. But as far as what what I’m working on every day, is looking at what do we have in the portfolio? How do we leverage it? And, how do we build team? We’re still recruiting skilled professionals to come in to help us accelerate growth, in particular. I do think external acquisitions of technology, product lines, businesses, are very much on the table. What I’d look for primarily, are our pieces that strengthen our technology basket. Particularly, acquisitions or alliances that enable us to balance that equation I talked about: increased sustainability without compromise of functionality, cost and use. Then also for that geographic play at Palestine. I have no idea what we’ll find. Those are the 2 most attractive targets for me that if it happens. It’s tough to find the right deals and do the right deals and then make them work. So we’re looking. I believe we’ll have a strong support if we find the right opportunities.
I had the opportunity to talk with, Kevin Yttre from Grace Matthews, a month or two ago about M&A and a variety of other topics. One of the pieces that stood out is, you don’t know where the market’s going. It’s always more surprising than you think it’s gonna be. Then two, it’s that whole aspect of being ready and having your ducks in a row, so to speak, to be able to tell your story, identify the opportunities, and that value in the appropriately.
For me, a couple parts of that is one, we had to create team capacity, the organizational capacity to do more, because frankly, we’ve always had support to do more, but inside the company we didn’t have the capacity. So we had to say no more. We cannot do anymore until we get this. That’s coming to an end. Then the second thing, knowing what you want that adds value to what you have, because it’s not about just buying something. How does it fit? Then understanding your ability to create something unique with it. The first thing I always look is, how would we improve that business? If we can’t do it, then it’s not gonna work. The other side, I’ve seen some businesses where clearly if they were put together, would create a lot of value. Those are fun because I don’t even care who buys who, just put them together. So you just capture that value and have it go. That really gets my creative and business juices going.
That’s right. I think about these deals a bit like a Venn diagram. You’re looking for the overlap, but you’re also looking for the white space to be filled. When there’s enough white space that you can move into, there’s value.
Exactly. So it’s been a lot of fun. We still have a lot of work to do.
Well, great, John. We’ve talked a little bit about what’s next, but what exactly is next? What should we be looking for with you in Verdant over the next 6 to 12 months?
We’re shaping it up now, but you’ll see us strengthen our organization. We will bring in some more people that we all know because the chemical industry is a small family for sure. We’re gonna bring in more talent to help us accelerate, and enable the internal growth opportunities that we see so clearly. We’re gonna build more solution-based capacity in our technical teams, to take the technologies we acquire through acquisition, alliance, or just organic growth to create those solutions. I expect we will emerge as a company that will be one of the winners in this sustainability transition. I see levers that can enable us to start winning by solving people’s problems for those products, short term, and get us positioned for some of the breakthrough chemistries that might develop, in the future. So, Verdant has a long runway as long as we stick to what we’re doing, that small company culture, those large company standards, and we move fast. To get moving and a lot of opportunity. So I’m really excited. It’s a great time to be in the chemical industry.
Absolutely. John, thanks for joining us today. This has been fun.
Thank you, ma’am.
I know that you’re gonna be in attendance at The Chemical Summit coming up in October. So for people that have questions about what you’re up to and and how you’re tackling stuff with Verdant. They’ll be able to meet you in real life up close and personal and have some conversations.
Yeah. Thank you for organizing that. I know it’s your inaugural summit, but, that fully aligned with what I’ve read and how you’re positioning it. I think that there is a need for us to get together. There’s still work from home, but the conferences are coming back, it’s a great industry. We have great people. Even as an introvert I like going to those events and really consider it credit. So, absolutely see you there.
It’s gonna be awesome. Well, thanks, John. Thanks for joining us today on The Chemical Show. And, thank you everyone else for joining and reading. Keep reading. Keep following. Keep sharing, and we’ll talk again soon.
Thank you, Victoria. Bye bye.