Listen to Victoria and Austin’s Conversation Here:
Explore the intersection of digital innovation and chemical distribution with host Victoria Meyer and Austin Nichols, CEO of ChemPoint, on The Chemical Show. Austin shares his insights on the critical role of digital solutions in scaling business operations. Victoria and Austin discuss the difference between ChemPoint’s supplier-centric model and Univar’s broader approach, detailing how ChemPoint leverages digital marketing and inside sales to enhance efficiency and supply chain management.
Discover how ChemPoint’s unique value proposition targets strategic supplier relationships and digital optimization. Austin discusses the ongoing digital progression in the plastics industry, the impact of AI on distribution, and how remote work during the pandemic brought about transformative changes in company culture. Gain valuable perspectives on leadership, customer focus, and the significance of creating a culture of accountability in business success.
Gain insights on the following topics this week:
- The evolution of ChemPoint: from Univar’s digital platform to standalone chemical distributor
- Striking a balance in being “wholly owned” yet a stand-alone distributor
- Right-sizing digital resources
- Digitization and the future of chemical industry distribution
- How is the chemical industry utilizing AI in business?
- The evolution of work models: Facing challenges and strategies in remote work
- What is critical in leadership today?
Killer Quote: “At ChemPoint, we’re not just focused on distributing chemicals; we’re pioneering a digital transformation in the industry. By combining frugality with cutting-edge digital solutions, we’re able to redefine efficiency and reshape how suppliers and customers interact. It’s about creating a seamless, innovative experience that keeps us ahead of the curve.” – Austin Nichols
Watch the Interview on Youtube Here:
Harnessing a Digitally-Optimized Business Model with Austin Nichols of ChemPoint
Hi. This is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show where chemicals means business. Today, I am speaking with Austin Nichols, who is the CEO of ChemPoint, a chemical distribution company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Univar Solutions. Austin has a wide variety of leadership experience both in and out of the chemical industry, and we’re going to be talking about that, digitization, distribution, and more. Austin, welcome to the chemical show.
Thank you so much for having me, Victoria.
I’m really glad to have you here. So let’s start with your origin story. How did you get interested in chemicals and distribution?
So when I graduated from college, I’m an engineer, and I was pursuing this dream of trying to make the US Olympic team for rowing. Not a glamorous sport, and I never made it. So we’ll just we could cap that right there. It’s like, you know, the the dream was there. It didn’t happen. But while I was on that journey, I moved to Seattle. I ran out of money, and a recruiter contacted me and said, you’re an engineer who can talk. Have you ever thought about chemical sales? And my immediate reaction was, no.
I have not thought about chemical sales, but tell me more. And so we had a conversation, and it seemed to check a lot of boxes for where I was in my life and the experience that I had with organic chemistry. My background’s biomedical engineering. One thing led to another, and I am an entry level sales rep at ChemPoint.
Wow. And you’ve stuck with it since then?
Yeah. It was one of those things where, I got into the industry, I saw the value of what I brought to the table from an engineering perspective, and it gave me great flexibility early on as a fast paced dynamic young company. Our average age at that time for our employees was, like, 26 years old, and I fit right in with that demographic. I was going to camps and working remotely at times and able to perform and succeed. I really started to build a real love for the chemical distribution world, which I don’t know if anybody says until they’re in it.
And then opportunities just started to open for me from there. As I continue to grow within ChemPoint.
Very cool. So tell us a little bit about ChemPoint, just who and what the company is.
I like to tell people that ChemPoint is one of the biggest open secrets within Univar. So we’re a wholly owned subsidiary. We are 25 years old. A lot of people don’t realize that we’re a 25 year old company. As a standalone chemical distributor within the North American distribution space, we’re in the top ten by sales for specialty distribution. So we’re actually fairly significant. We have this reputation of being, Univar Solutions digital business. But interestingly enough, we have our own supply chain, our own warehouse network.
We have our own salesforce. We have our own hunter technical sellers that are out there working with customers. So we really are a fully functional standalone distribution company within the broader Univar organization. It’s actually quite fascinating if you think about it.
That is interesting. So that gives me several questions to talk about with you. So first of all, you referenced digital, and that’s where ChemPoint started. Right? Didn’t it start as a digital platform for Univar?
Yeah. So the original hypothesis was in 1999 when we started, Amazon was taking off. These guys are hitting it. There has to be a play for chemicals here. So the hypothesis was, let’s go let a couple guys start this up as a start up. We’ll incubate it. We’ll go hands off. Univar went hands off for about 10 years, and we built a pretty strong business that we thought would be ecommerce in those days.
And as everybody in the chemicals industry can relate, we’re still not there. We made that that 25 years ago and quickly pivoted into more of a digital marketing inside selling organization, where we used the digitization of processes to create a very efficient business, and we hook ourselves to suppliers in the sense that we are suppliers’ entryway into a market very efficiently.
I think your point about assuming that because digital was taking over the consumer world, there was a hypothesis that many companies had, that digital made sense in chemicals. When I worked for Shell around the same time, I helped start up a couple of different e-business platforms, including the customer lounge, which still exists, and kind of had the same hypothesis. What was really interesting is what we found is that individuals at companies really did enjoy the digital aspect of it, the transparency, placing orders, seeing where their invoices are, etcetera, but still within the context of the broader relationship. Very few digital only customers, a lot of digital business with existing customers.
Yeah. It’s fascinating. The thing that we saw in those early days that and we still see an element of it today is the value proposition around digital. How do you make a buyer or an R&D chemist’s life easier in their day to day action? It’s hard to say that buying online is gonna replace a direct connection and SAP for procurement to a major multinational corporation. That’s the long term view. But if you have a customer who’s buying 10 products and they need 10 conflict mineral statements, and they can go to your website or a portal that you set up for them and get those in a way that it’s easy, seamless, and takes takes burden off of them in their day to day, that’s a real distinct value proposition for a distributor.
Yeah. Makes sense. So how do you really fit within the broader Univar? Right? You mentioned that ChemPoint is 25 years in business as a wholly owned subsidiary of Univar or a predecessor. Was it Univar at its origin?
Yes, at its origin. It’s always been a part.
Got it. So 25 years of the wholly owned subsidiary and yet also would be considered a top 10 distributor on a stand alone basis. That kind of stuff doesn’t normally work very well for most companies. Right? Let’s be honest. So how does this work for you guys? What makes it work?
So I think one of the things that ends up happening is our customers, in some cases, end up different. Our value proposition to suppliers is different. So I’ll give you a great example. The Univar team has exclusive relationships in the specialties business where they’ll partner with a supplier, or they’ll have suppliers where they have categories like citric acid and solvents and all these other things. Our general philosophy is we’re not a business that distributes on a category basis. We only partner with suppliers.
So if you look at our portfolio, sometimes in a market, it might look incomplete because our distribution products are only places where we have a strategic relationship. Where Univar, you wanna own a customer, and you wanna echo a supplier sentiment. For us, we wanna supply a customer, but really echoing that supplier sentiment in a lot of ways efficiently in more hard to reach places. A great example is we generally don’t do bulk. Okay. Univar is great at bulk. Yeah. Univar makes money on products that they buy well.
Our products are typically ones where I don’t have to go pit a supplier in a category against one another. There’s different ways to skin the cat in distribution, but our focus has always been, let’s pick a supplier product combination and go to market. And that allows us to concentrate on it to give that supplier data rich feedback, and it allows us to really seamlessly market on their behalf. So if you’re googling a product from one of our suppliers, we’ll choose a down methacel. We are routinely in the 1, 2, or 3 position in SEO. We optimize our business digitally so that we come up 1st in search or 2nd in search right there with the supplier. We’re the first in line for that contact from the chemist.
That purchaser is looking for the product. And then we have a 2 hour maximum follow-up time when someone makes an inquiry.
Wow.
So our parent company, sister company, however you wanna view it, that’s just not their model. And their model is great. I’ve been in it. It’s fantastic. I love working in the Univar side of the house, but that’s a different model than what we do.
Yeah. That’s really interesting. I’m thinking about that aspect. And so in some ways, I’d say it’s it sounds like you’re a bit more supplier centric perhaps than typical distribution being or certainly Univar being, but also figuring out how to still harness that digital aspect to be customer responsive.
Right.
So sidebar off the wall question, when I think about this, so one of the challenges that a lot of chemical companies have is the commitment of resources to build an effective digital platform that allows customers to find them, find their products. You talk about being a SEO search engine optimized and stuff. That’s not easy to do. And so a lot of companies struggle with this idea of how much resource and effort do you give into digital when it’s not necessarily fully additive to the business. Because you’ve already referenced that a big part of your business is just core distributions.
You’re not making money because you’re a digital company. You’re making money because you’re a distributor. And people would argue, well, why spend the money on that when customers are gonna find us anyway and it’s all in the relationship? How do you guys think about that? How do you think about just managing the amount of resources you apply to your digital platform versus elsewhere?
That is a great question, and it’s one we get from suppliers whenever we talk about the strategy. I could tell you the exact number of sales dollars and customers that came in 2023 and this year 2024 from our digital work. It’s roughly 4 to 5% of our enterprise and new sales come from our digital work. And the way that we manage that and understand it, that’s where those come from, we actually split our salesforce into, for lack of a better analogy, hunters and farmers. So we have sales reps and we have market developers, and our market developers actually sit with our digital group. They own no accounts, and all they do is campaign work around our SEO/SEM. Any times the product managers in our product group want to launch a campaign, let’s say we’re doing one for DAO into their personal care.
So we’ve got personal care market developers. They can spin up opportunities and flip them over to them. They’ll run those down and see what makes sense. But while that’s going on, our digital marketing manager is spinning up an SEO optimized microsites or web pages for products. We’re paying for SEM, and when those people click on our website or click the links, they get a cookie and all the digital stuff that happens in the background where we can track them. That automatically feeds into our CRM, and that market developer gets a pop up.
Says, we had someone you got essentially, they get put on a 2 hour timer to follow-up with that. That lead gets spun up. They call them, email them, and then we follow that through. So that thing where people talk about, it’s really hard to quantify. It is if you don’t put in the effort, and we’re really strong at following it from being.
Yeah. Which also tells me that your hiring profile is probably different than the typical chemical company and distributor. You referenced the fact that you got hired because you’re an engineer who could speak. How does that play out when you think about who ChemPoint is hiring and bringing into the organization?
So I think over time, what we have learned is that there’s a lot of talent across the US that is wanting to upgrade their skill set on the digital side. So if you look at our market developer workforce, they’re scattered through the regions of major chemical manufacturers. A lot of them are ex-DAO or ex-BSF. So we’ve got those types of people on our staff, and we can train them up in this process. I won’t say that we gamify the process of lead qualification through, but we have very clear metrics and deliverables. We don’t do commission with these guys. It’s hey, we’ve got these inquiries.
We’re trying to beat an effort energy target. Let’s follow it through, I like to say, if we hire someone who’s a 2 finger typer, there’s a lot of us in the industry who are like that. Our system even works for those types of folks coming in. Our farmer staff, they’re mainly located in Bellevue, Washington, which is where our our home base is. Typically, a slightly younger demographic, more entry level salesforce, and then they can graduate up into those roles with a lot of technical training with our suppliers and our internal engineering resources.
That’s cool. Because, as you say, the intersection of the two, chemically proficient and technically, CRM and digitally proficient, aren’t necessarily the same. Although maybe as the demographic gets younger, it is. I know we talked early on about the podcast before we started recording. I’m often getting from the folks that are helping to publish the podcast and stuff, like I don’t understand half of what you guys are talking about.
Right. Okay, so work on the things that you can work on, which is the sound quality and getting rid of the stupid stuff, and we’ll figure out the rest of it.
So we started talking a little bit about how you guys are using digitization. But, when we think about distribution and digitization, where are we currently, and where do you see us going? Either ChemPoint or the industry.
I was just at the ACC, and there are your established chemical distributors. Braintag, Univar, LSINCD. I’m there for ChemPoint. You’ve got, Agilis Node. So you’ve got this broad spectrum of participants in the space who bring a disparate value proposition. What I think is we’re still in that fragmentation mode where traditional distributions is growing and it’s consolidating.
Digitization’s playing a key part in that. You look at the Univar team and the Univar Solutions business and how they digitize their business in a way that’s different than ours, but really strong class leading in that traditional distribution space. And then you look at where we are, where we’re not quite that, but we’re not quite where the guys who are just software as a service are. I think that there’s a hunger for somewhere a lot of people who meet us realize that we’re in the middle of that space, like setting up a marketplace that managed all documents and just was providing leads to suppliers. That’s very doable. We’ve explored this a number of times. Is it something we might do in the future? Maybe.
But the revenue models are hard for a distributor or software as a service company to actually be profitable doing that. And we see that with the growing fragmentation and people coming up and people docking out. Because we have an actual core distribution business, I think we’re the best position to say, what does the digitization path look like when you have a healthy distribution business behind that innovation? So as we spin up different initiatives with suppliers, we have this whole marketing as a service function that that we offer where, hey, you’re not ready to do distribution with us or anybody. Too early in the life cycle of the product. You want market feedback.
Well, what we can do is we can build you a digital marketing plan, get you a microsite positioning on our website, and then we’ll apply some market development resources against that. And we’ll do this for a period of time for a fixed cost. If the product takes off, great. If it doesn’t, we can both exit gracefully and try to find another project. So there is a need in that direction, but I don’t know that anyone has of all the names that are out there right now in the major players, I don’t know that we have that sorted out completely, which is why you’re seeing some of our not in kind competitors pivot.
Got it. It’s complex. As you point out, 25 years into the journey of digital and chemicals, and it’s still a journey.
It was before my time, but you think about, like, plasticsadditives.com. Everyone thought that was gonna be the thing for plastics. Well, I was in the plastics industry at Nexeo for about a year and a half, and I can tell you being in that industry, they’ll be ready in another 20 or 30 years based on that they’re a little behind chemicals. It’s very interesting. They’re different than chemicals.
Yeah, I could see that. So how do you share technology and processes? It sounds like you guys have figured out a pretty sophisticated online marketing to see around approach. Do you share this insight and information with Univar? Are you guys operating autonomously? Is there some behind the scenes alignment that takes place?
We have relationships that are exclusive to each of us, so we do have to be sensitive. Like, we do firewall our businesses. There are engagements with specific suppliers like DAO where we share product lines into different segments. We have done marketing as a service for our Univar colleagues in the past. We use Univar Warehouses as a 3PL, like an arms length 3PL. They provide a service level that’s very good.
So we use them for, I think, 15 of our warehouses. But then we have another 15. They’re like XPO, Koon and Nagle, and others. So I think in the digital world, we are very separate. But where we have best practices and where we have suppliers that have us authorized in similar tangential spaces on similar tangential products It all depends on the supplier.
Got it. Great. So let’s talk about AI, I don’t know if people wanna talk about AI anymore, but we’re here and it’s not going anywhere. We’re struggling to figure it out. How are you and ChemPoint thinking about AI in your business?
It’s really interesting. So in my role before this, my wife and I own a small business with 15 people, a good business. And I found great utility in AI because we were not staffed. I mean, we’re just a small business. So I could use it to write HTML code for me or put a widget in HTML code I can put on our website. Coming back into Univar after that experience, AI is fascinating because the first thing about it is are the AI platforms and the tools secure? There’s still a lot of IT security issues around AI as everyone’s realizing. That is the number one concern for anybody in a big corporation. So would we do customer facing AI stuff, like chat bots and things like that? I think that will come.
I honestly believe it’s going to come. I think the biggest value for AI right now in the distribution world is actually in some of the back office work, like receiving disparate types of POs and using machine learning AI.
How do you use it for document management? Can you use machine learning to harvest data from data packs from suppliers or customers that they need? If a customer makes a request, can you automate the response using AI? I think in the short term, business efficiencies are there. I think interacting with AI will come, it’s going so fast that it’s going to be here. Don’t quote me, but I think in 12 to 24 months, someone’s gonna be in the space using a chatbot to help solve problems with R&D chemists. I think that’s coming. Now will it be accurate? We got a long ways to go.
Yeah. I personally like asking questions about my own business and seeing what it has to say.
I’m sure the comparison is still, like, yeah, not quite as many followers as Joe Rogan podcast.
Yeah. No doubt about that. Although I’ve listened to Joe Rogan and only one episode because, by the way, it’s like 2 hours. I think I listened to it on a road trip with my husband, fell asleep partway, woke up, and I’m like, oh my gosh, it’s still going. And what are they talking about? It was like just some random randomness.
That’s too funny.
Yeah. So, anyway, you see it coming into the back end, but you recognize, obviously, everybody’s still trying to figure out the rules of engagement.
Yeah. And I think we’re in our industry where we’ll see it is on the manufacturing side. I mean, you look at what they can do from a synthesis modeling perspective now, especially in the biotech side. They can take years off the the R&D pipeline. Coming from biomed now I’m far enough away that I am not a biomedical engineer, but I have friends still in the field, and they’re telling me about the things that they’re doing and how they’re harnessing AI to speed up research into COVID therapeutics and things like that. And you’re just like, wow. This makes a big difference, but it’s not in my world yet. I’m gonna be the recipient of that speed.
But distribution’s not using it that way yet.
Yeah. Makes sense. So I think yeah, stay tuned it’s still to come. If it took us 25 years to get to this point, AI will speed it up, but maybe it’s 5 to 10 before we see a big impact.
So let’s talk about your employees. I mean, we talked a little bit about your supplier value proposition. We’ve talked a little bit about your customer value proposition, and let’s just think about that employee value proposition. We’re here 4 years post COVID, I’m not actually sure when we start that time clock. My perception has been that distribution has been a little bit distributed from an employee perspective. Right? People out in the field a lot.
And then, along came COVID and this real shift to hybrid work and working at home. What does that look like today for you and for ChemPoint?
So we actually cut across the grain, historically, the opposite of what people would expect from distribution because we’re predominantly inside sales. We office everybody in our regions. So Bellevue was our global headquarters, but we have an office in the Netherlands in Maastricht. So we have a European business. And then we also have a small office in Mexico. So pre-COVID, everyone’s in the office 5 days a week. And it’s interesting in my time being in distribution before going to Univar, where Univar is a distributed workforce. All the sellers are in the field.
My experience was everybody in the same office. COVID happens. I come back to ChemPoint, and I’ll be here on a Monday, and there are 5 people in the office. I’m like, what happened? My first day back there were 6 of us. So for us, we went hybrid, and it allowed us to change how we attract talent. So we’re in we’re in Bellevue, Washington.
You can’t see it, but I’ve got Amazon and Microsoft buildings all around me. Not exactly a hotbed of chemical engineers and chemists. We are out here. No doubt. But what COVID allowed us to do was to attract talent in the areas that our suppliers are in, which has been a net add for us. I think it’s a real, real coup that COVID happened and kind of pushed us to pivot in how we recruit. So we’ve got supply chain individuals all over the country. We’ve got finance individuals all over the country.
Our customer service is largely in the northwest, but not in Bellevue proper. It’s actually increased our employee retention and support functions, which as you know, as a business owner and someone who’s participated in many businesses, customer facing attrition’s hard on any business.
Yeah.
And so reducing that has our NPS scores where we want them to be. We’ve actually got better NPS scores now than when we were all in the office. So I think it’s a good thing. Now COVID was a bad thing. No doubt about it. But this outcome for us, I think it strongly shifted our base, tipped our iceberg. It’s been good for us.
How do you build culture and an alignment in a workplace that’s now highly distributed versus what it was before?
We just had a manager’s training. We have 15 managers and we’re talking about this as a group.
And I’m about 3 months back into the business. When I was at Univar, to build the culture, I was running their food ingredients business for North America. I did a ride along with every sales rep at least once. And I went out with a bridge driver to learn about what it was like in the daily life of a driver delivering. As a leader, you have to spend time, but you have to figure out a way to bring people together. Now that usually means getting people together. And if they’re fragmented, you have to aggregate. So what we try to do, at least with our industry teams, we tend to aggregate at the major trade events, and we’ll do a team event at the major trade events.
For our finance group, we’ll bring them all in. So we budget for these things to ensure that we can build that alignment. But it is hard. We don’t take the approach, I think it was Michael Dell, said anyone who stays remote is no longer promotable.
Like, that is not the approach. But there is some element of, you know, Peter Huntsman said at ACC, deals are done in the hallway. You do need to see each other. Teams meetings can be hard to build that rapport. You have to fight more for those interactions as a leadership team. And you have to try to create that inception that this needs to happen.
So I think we’re still figuring that piece out as a business, how to do it really well, but I’m genuinely impressed with our culture, and how we’re communicating. We’ve got some technology tools. I’m doing a every 2 to 3 week blog post and trying to connect with folks that way. I think that stuff matters.
Yeah. Do you have Slack channels that are active or team channels that are active?
Yeah. We do. We have team channels that are active, and then we use a software called Confluence where people can post blog posts or chat lines. So they get company updates there. But it’s a lot like Slack with a couple of other things around employee resources. Like, where do you go for this?
Nice. Alright. So let’s talk about leadership. You have been in and out of Univar and ChemPoint. You’ve formed your own businesses and led businesses, and have been in other companies.
What do you see as being really key to successful leadership, maybe not just in chemicals and distribution, but thinking about the world that you’re operating in today, what’s critical to leadership?
I think every leader, we all strive to figure this out. And I think one of the things for me that’s been helpful is I grew up in a small business. My dad was an electrician, and he made me customer facing at, like, 8 years old. I was working with him at houses when people were there. As an 8 year old, you can’t be complaining about crawling in a crawl space. You go under there and you smile because you’re there with the customer’s help.
Yeah.
So I think always having an eye for the customer is a big part of it. I find that I am almost direct to a fault, which is one of those things that I’m always working on, in a moment of vulnerability with you and the audience. I always have to check that because I’m highly competitive. I pursued elite sports. I love winning, like most leaders do. But you have to have that directness while also coming from a place of, I can walk a mile in your shoes.
I’m not afraid to sweep the floors. In my wife’s business, when our shop helper quit, I ran the Zamboni in the back in the work area cleaning the grease off the floors. And that was 3 years ago. It’s not like I was 22. I’m very established in my career and I think there’s an element of show me, don’t tell me, be willing to do the work, and then realistically, being able to create a culture where the accountability actually matters.
One of the things I learned going from Univar or ChemPoint and then going into a small business that we own, was when every dollar is your dollar, you think about things a little bit differently in how you spend it. Like, when a half $1,000,000 of inventory is a half $1,000,000 that’s not in your bank account, it changes your perspective on how you coach and lead because you think you knew what that was like, but when you finally do it yourself, it’s very different. So I’m always trying to connect people to that.
Your decision impacts this this way. Let me tell you about my experience. I’m not saying what you’re doing is wrong, but if you were gonna bet a paycheck, you’re not actually having to bet a paycheck. But, like, once you make this decision and people take a step back. I don’t know how to make the decision this way, and here’s why.
So I think creating that accountability responsibility is mission critical, especially at where I’m at. Because I can’t do everything. There aren’t enough hours in the day. And so that’s the thing that I’m consistently trying to make sure that I’m prioritizing is, alright, get functional leaders in place who will run through walls for me, and then I would run through walls for them. So that’s kind of the way I approach it.
That’s a good challenge.
It’s a good challenge. Working so far.
Awesome. The other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about this is, I have to find what which part of game theory it is, but there’s some game theory examples that maybe apply to this. So your example around when it’s your money and your business, you’re looking for where that half of $1,000,000 is. Or in my case, it’s around parking. I personally hate to pay for parking. Hate it.
I’m with you.
I’m a person that searches for the free parking spot or the meter. I’m plugging the money in the meter rather than paying $30 into a parking lot. And I’m in the Houston Chemical Association, a great association here in Houston, they have monthly luncheons, and it’s at a venue, and there’s usually valet parking. And I’m like, I parked on the street. What do you mean? It’s my business, if I’m paying $3 versus $30, I know it.
And they’re like, I just never even thought about it. So this whole aspect of, within an organization, within a group, it’s always better to be the defector, so to speak. If I’m the only one that pays for valet parking, it’s best for me. But when everybody does valet parking, that $30 expense, multiply it by 3,000 people or whatever is, all of a sudden you’re at $1,000,000. And you don’t really think about it inside the big context of the organization. It’s easy to lose sight.
To a certain degree, you say, is it material? No, it’s not material. But you make different decisions along the way, depending on how you view your place in ecosystem. When you’re a small business owner, it’s 1 to 1. You know exactly the effect that you’re having.
Yes.
When you’re inside a big corporation, it’s harder to see how you move the needle. So finding ways to help people understand how they move the needle becomes really critical.
Yet all of us in our roles, and I’m sure you as well, we read business books. And a consistent theme in the greatest leaders, the Buffetts of the world, is you’re not thinking about the frugality of how you run your business. The waste adds up, especially if your business scales. It’s one of those things where you’re like, to your point, if one person does valet every time they travel, but they travel once a month or once a week. That adds up really quick in your T&E line.
Yeah, especially when you multiply it by a 100 or a 1000 or whatever your number is. It jumps fast. So, anyway, it’s interesting, but these are the challenges and opportunities we all have in the industry. So what’s next for you and for ChemPoint? What should we be looking for?
So one of the things that I’m really working to do is evangelize the brand. We’re not a secret within Univar, but there are suppliers who still don’t even know who we are. So one of the things that I’m really working on, especially for our size, giving suppliers an eye into what this organization is, what the future of digital looks like, the things that we’re doing and what’s working. When you look at the scale of our business, we bring in 20 to $30,000,000 a year in digital sales, that’s a real number. That’s real sales.
That’s material.
And the suppliers that are part of us are benefiting from that, and we’re hitting the goals for them. And there are suppliers that don’t know that’s an option. I always I joke around, for as big as BASF is, we have a very small relationship with BASF. We enjoy our relationship with BASF, but they have a distribution partners who they’re strategically aligned with in a lot of places. But that’s one where you would think just because of our scale and size, that’s on me. That’s on BASF. That’s on ChemPoint.
We need to do a better job evangelizing who we are to that organization. So over the next 12 months, or really the next 3 to 6, you’ll see a bit of an uptick in our activity, with me coming back into the business and working on some new digital solutions to bring. You’ll start to see some things crop up. We’ll start advertising a few things that we’re working on in the vein of some of the digitization we’ve talked about. So we’re really excited.
I’m looking to forward to seeing where you guys head into the future.
We appreciate it.
Well, Austin, thank you so much for joining me today. I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you and learning more about you and ChemPoint.
Thank you for the time, and I look forward to continuing to watch your podcast. I love it.
Thank you. I appreciate that. And thanks everyone for joining us today. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.
About Austin Nichols:
Education
Georgia Tech, B.S. Biomedical Engineering
Career
2010 – 2016, ChemPoint
• Sales, Product Management, Supplier Development
2017 – 2021, Univar Solutions
• Food Business Leader; Commercial Leader of the Year 2020
2021 – 2022, Nexeo Plastics
• VP Product Management and Engineering
2022 – 2024 Small Car Performance
• Ownership stake in small business with global reach in automotive
aftermarket