Surviving the Chemical Down Cycle: Strategies for Sustainability and Innovation

Today, I have the opportunity to speak with my friend, Kendall Justiniano, who is the founder and managing director of GrowthArc Advisors. So GrowthArc and Kendall help chemical clients and material clients find untapped growth opportunities through expertise in sales and marketing, value and growth, and strategic transformation. Kendall comes to this with a career of over thirty years at leading companies, including Dow and most recently, WR Grace. So we’re gonna be talking about sustainability and innovation, some of the challenges, opportunities, and the new directions that we’re going. So, Kendall, welcome to The Chemical Show.

Victoria, thanks so much. It’s great to be here with you today.

I’m so glad to have you here. Let’s talk about your origin story because you know I love to start there.

What actually got you interested in chemicals, and how did you get to where you are today?

For me, I don’t think there was any other place that I was gonna end up but chemicals. That might sound strange, but I’ve got chemical engineers and chemists in my family. Chemistry was a love of mine since high school. It was always gonna be a chemical play for me in my life. But I spent 25 years on the commercial side of the chemical business. And I think the one thing that’s unique about my career is, I’m a generalist. So I’ve done sales and marketing, product management, I’ve seen a lot of different industry sectors and segments, and I’ve operated in a bunch of different scenarios, specialty, commodity, high growth, and even turnaround in divestments.

The one thing that I honed over that time and I think that I’ve come to be known for is, first off, when I get into an industry, a particular problem, it’s really fundamentals analysis. Going back to the fundamentals of what’s going on in that particular context and an ability to take that and read the tea leaves and do something with it. For instance, when I was at PolyOne Avient, I was one of the early champions of us getting into composites. That business is now 25%, almost a third of Avient’s revenue. That’s the kind of thing I’ve been known for. They haven’t always been successful. Sometimes they’ve been like, no, we gotta shut it down guys.

But that’s the thing I’ve done. I think part of that was because of this generalist thing. Right? I’ve seen a lot of different places that I’m not tied. I didn’t develop my intuition around a single context, but it’s also because I didn’t start in commercial. My first seven years in the industry, I was in operations. I was doing capital deployment, and I did one assignment as a finance analyst. So I have a close tie to the technology.

Again, chemistry is in my blood. I’m not gonna ever get rid of a close tie to the technology and a real understanding of what it takes operationally and from a financing standpoint. And you put it all together, and sort of our superpower where we come from is the fundamentals of business growth. How do you do business growth? And that’s one of the reasons I decided to form Growth Arc Advisors.

When I was looking for my next opportunity, I looked at the crystal ball, and you know you were there. I said, look, growth is gonna be tough to come by in the future. That’s my bet, and leaders are gonna need help. So we decided to go off on our own and specifically specialize in helping chemical leaders with growth.

I love that. And I think, Kendall, you and I have some parallel experiences in our career starting in manufacturing and projects and moving through a wide variety of different commercial roles and manufacturing roles and project roles, and it gives you that great lens for how business is really done. A lot of times it’s easy if you stick in one space, you kinda have blinders. You only know what you know.

The good news/bad news thing of being a generalist is you know a little bit about everything, which, is a great opportunity and it can also be a pain in the butt.

Yeah. I mean, that’s the potential downside. The thing that I learned is as long as you stick to the fundamentals, you’re always gonna figure it out. You’re always gonna figure out how it works in this particular context.

So, you know, we’re sitting here in the first part of 2025. Our focus here today is really around sustainability and innovation. The views and discussions on sustainability have dramatically changed. If we go back to the beginning of the decade, it was rah rah. We’re shooting for the moon. There were big promises, big goals, net zero by 2025 or 2030 or 2040 depending on where you sat.

Along the way, we figured out it’s really stinking hard. Now we’re not sure how we make it profitable. It’s easy to say, I want a sustainable product. Oh, your sustainable product is gonna cost 10 times more? Well, maybe not. So a big shift, and yet, there is still a sustainability imperative. So I think there’s no doubt about the fact that people wanna continue to improve the world, leave it a better place, be mindful of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions and all the other things.

You’re talking to a lot of industry executives. What do they see? What do you see happening and why?

Well, I echo your sentiment, and these are some really wild times. I’m not sure I’ve seen times like this in my career. And it’s been a pretty long career. If you look around, it sure looks like a lot of people are pulling back from sustainability. You see majors like BP. They just announced a whole reemphasizing and sort of pulling away from their renewable energy initiatives. Companies like BlackRock in the financial sector. They were one of the guys who originally started kicked off this whole ESG sustainability investing trend, and they’re struggling.

There’s a lot of talk about, maybe sustainability and financial returns don’t actually go hand in hand, and that was the original premise of why financiers started investing.

Right.

We were just talking a little bit ago in the green room. I’m in Europe now, and what you hear here and a lot of industry leaders have already spoken up is that, look, you can get decarbonization, but you’re probably gonna get deindustrialization at the same time. Are you sure you really want that? Because now you’re talking about impacting the standard of living of people in order to get to these lofty goals. Even if you look at trends with our customers, like, I’ve followed the auto industry for a long time. Let’s set Tesla and some of the political stuff aside. The rest of the auto industry is still trying to figure out how to make money from EVs.

And this is after spending billions of dollars of investment. So it can certainly look pretty scary in terms of, what’s really happening with sustainability? I think before you get into the dynamics around sustainability, you have to look at the economic context in materials today. Where do we sit? Where do we stand? What is the outlook just as you’re talking about chemicals? And from our perspective, you start to hear this as I talk to executives. We’re a third of the way into one of the longest down cycles you’ve ever seen in the chemical industry. It may be precedent setting even in my career. We’ve been around the chemical industry long enough Victoria. We thought of it as a cyclical industry.

Every five years, you get a little overbuilt, a little aggressive, and then you’d have to cut back, wait it out. Right? And then the industry would come back. The reality is, we haven’t really seen a down cycle in twenty years, and a lot of that was fueled from Asian growth. China’s growing double digits. They need materials. There’s crazy amounts of construction. You see these things like, skyscrapers built, and you’ve got a 25 year backlog of empty buildings waiting to be filled.

And miraculously, five years later, they were filled.

And so from our perspective, a lot of what’s happened is that China’s growth story is over. Their real estate sector has imploded. We now know they’ve overbuilt their material sector. And we’ve got a significant amount of excess capacity and core chemicals. A lot of that was happening pre-COVID. I think the industry got caught a little bit flat footed.

First, there was COVID. That was what was happening, and so everybody pointed to COVID. Then there was all of the logistical issues that came along with COVID and sorting that out. And I think it’s become pretty clear at this point that the Asian growth story is over. They have had flat growth in China for several years now, and you see now what global commodity prices are looking like. I came from polyolefins. It’s pretty ugly

It’s grim, right now.

I think as a context, the industry’s dusting off what you and I probably knew as the down cycle playbook. What do we do in a down cycle? We got used to knowing how this worked. Every five years or so, we’re gonna run a down cycle. You start to see rationalizations happening. You see things going up for sale. That’s after companies are reporting losses. Then you see focus on cash, limited capital, probably some headcount reductions to get your cost structure in place, and you waited it out, and it eventually came back.

One of the things I’ve seen is that if you look at our current leaders, you talk about it being a 20 year upcycle, and it’s been approximately that. It’s been a really long upcycle, and now we’re gonna enter this really long downcycle. But we have a lot of business leaders that have never actually managed or led through a down cycle. I mean, heck, maybe they weren’t even in their work career yet. They were in college or maybe they were in their early days.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t actually understand what was going on in the business when I was working in manufacturing as a young engineer. I tried, but I didn’t. There was a few things I called BS on related to sales guys when they would tell me some stories. But, you didn’t really understand it because you weren’t dealing with it. You were just executing and not making the decisions. So we’ve got a whole set of decision makers that haven’t necessarily had to make decisions in these environments.

I think it’s interesting that you talk about pulling out the playbook. I was at SOCMA recently, in February. Of course, SOCMA is focused on mostly specialty custom manufacturing, toll manufacturing.

They’re actually feeling pretty solid because they know that part of the playbook is, when the big companies have to downsize, have to tighten their belt, have to focus in, the opportunity comes up for that part of the market. And so I think there’s just some interesting nuances that take place.

It certainly is completely contextual. If you know the fundamentals, you can figure out where you are at and how those fundamentals play out for you. I have a funny story, I was talking to a CEO the other day, and he is of the same age that I am, and he remembers the playbook.

I wasn’t a leader at that time either. But his entire operating staff, almost all of his people have not been through one. And if you remember, the mantra of the day was “first into the cycle is first out of the cycle.” The guys who saw it first, who reacted first, didn’t end up hemorrhaging as much cash as some of the other companies did, and they were the ones who were setting themselves up to be the ones to come out healthiest in the back of the cycle. So if you know that, you say, okay, first in is smart.

If you’ve never experienced that before, you say, first, oh my god. We’re not.

What are they doing?

Yeah, what’s happening to us? And what’s gonna happen on the other side of it? And I think that’s part of what we’re dealing with, part of why we got caught a little flat footed.

The other piece and the other mantra that comes to mind with this is “cash is king.” And that was something that really came out early on was cash is king. And I didn’t fully understand it, but we executed the playbook because I was helping to run the playbook. But I certainly see that now. It’s an interesting dynamic as an entrepreneur. Like, cash is king because I’m running my own books, and I’m not relying on somebody else to cover my take, so to speak. You gotta do it yourself.

So I think this whole aspect is interesting. So when you talk about sustainability, though, do you see that companies are still interested? There was this jubilance. Now we’re in an economic downturn.

There’s a pullback.

You’re sitting in Europe. They’re I almost would say the initiator of a lot of what we’re targeting in terms of the net zero and net zero by 2025 or 2030, pick your poison. Are companies still interested in sustainability? What are they saying?

I think the short answer is yes. Thinking back five years, those were heady times in a sense. Everybody was getting pretty excited about the potential here. Sustainability became the key innovation investment, if you will. Everything had a sustainability angle. What you’re seeing right now is, a weighing of the trade offs. So in Europe, we’re starting to sort out what does this really mean, and does Europe continue on its path, or does it have to modify that in some way? That discussion, I think, in a lot of ways is just beginning. But what you see other places is that first effect of rationalization.

Rationalization is not, oh, we’re stopping. Rationalization is, not everything is as affordable as it was a couple of years ago. We’ve gotta pick our investments carefully. It’s a pruning, if you will. Plants get healthier when you prune them back. Essentially, I have an optimism for the industry, but what you’re gonna see right now is that type of pruning.

Yeah. And it seems like Europe is getting heavily pruned. You use that term rationalization, and there’s rational as in let’s be logical and rational. And then, of course, we often use rationalization to say, we’re shutting down a whole bunch of assets. Is the mood gloom and doom where you sit?

I mean, some of the key leaders, so Jim Ratcliffe is one I look to. Ilham Kadri at ScienceCO just was on the European man she’s now leading the European Manufacturers Association. They’ve gotta be sounding the alarm bells, because once you get to a point of rationalization, you’re done. There’s not much you can do after something has been shut down.

It feels like it’s too late in some ways.

Yeah, and so they’re setting off those alarm bells. I think that’s gonna be good, and that starts a healthy dialogue. The other aspect is when we talk about sustainability, we don’t think of it as a single uniform type of thing. Sustainability has a lot of different types of plays associated with it. There’s lots of different directions for sustainability, and the fundamentals are different for each one. So each one has its own dynamics, and each one’s gonna react a little bit differently to what’s happening right now.

So for me, for the question, are companies still interested? I would say yes, but in a qualified manner. Does it make business sense? And the devil right now for sustainability is in those details. For some, it’ll be yes, and for some, it’ll be no.

Yeah, if I go back to the heady days of sustainability in the early 2020s, it was around new products, new innovations, new what have you. And we talked about this a little bit before we got started here, I view the chemical industry has been inherently circular kind of forever. Why? Because it’s efficient. Maybe because it’s cheap. Well, instead of sending this stream to waste or to the flare or to whatever, can I make another product out of it? In fact, even chemicals themselves are often made from kind of the byproduct bottom streams coming out of oil refineries. Right? So there’s a lot of inherent circularity and sustainability that take place in that.

But it gets into Kendall, I think just these different risk profiles. And I think companies right now are facing a lot of risk, both from a business perspective, from meeting their targets, and from thinking about should they even have innovation platforms. I know you do a ton of work in innovation and risk and helping companies understand that. How do you approach that? How should companies be looking at risk and derisking their business and their portfolios and innovations today?

From a basic standpoint, the first is getting clear on what the context is. That’s why we talked a little bit about sort of where we’re at within the chemical industry. Because if you say, no, look we still got growth in China. You’re gonna think about this whole space differently. So getting that context is the first piece of it.

The second, and this is what we advocate is, you’ve gotta reassess your portfolios. You’ve gotta go through the portfolio given a new context and take a look at the fundamentals. What are the fundamentals that are driving each of your investments’ initiatives, and do they still hold up in the new context? We don’t advocate for rules of thumb. It’s not, this worked last year, so it’s gonna work this year. This is not the time to use those types of rules of thumbs. You wanna go back to, what are the fundamentals of each of these investments?

We think of sustainability in a couple of buckets, and they have distinct risk profiles. You mentioned earlier that you think, the chemical industry has kinda always been about sustainability, hasn’t it? Haven’t we always tried to use less material to get costs down? Isn’t getting material out of the reaction stream and out of the final product part of getting the cost down? And that’s really our first bucket. So things that are tied to efficiency, to productivity, to energy efficiency throughout the value chain, I think of as bread and butter sustainability. When I was a young operations engineer at Dow in the division we were working at, the division manager wanted folks to focus on capital investments that also had environmental benefits. At that time, environmental was the watchword of the day. And so they established a program for this. So you could get money from a special pool if you focused on environmental impact, impact at the waste treatment plant, impact at the incinerator. We had all those on-site.

And it became one of the most popular programs. It was called the waste reduction always pays program. And what they found was you got a ton of payback When you paid attention to how much wastewater you’re sending to the waste treatment plant. You counted for that. You paid attention to how much waste you were sending into the cost of that. And as those capital programs started going, number one, they paid for themselves very quickly. But number two, the load on the waste treatment plant went down.

The load on the incinerate went down. All of a sudden, you see waste reduction and efficiency and productivity. You saw the connection to the financial benefit. That’s the first bucket for us. To us, that’s bread and butter. It’s not going away. It may have been overlooked because of these larger sustainability initiatives. But I think of things like lightweighting. Now we’re electrifying, and we’re actually heavyweighting cars, but we used to be about lightweighting cars.

Waste reduction, getting energy efficiency down the value chain. These are all, we think, the lowest risk bucket. Our second bucket, let’s call it medium risk, is what I would put initiatives around the circular economy in. Now you could say that’s part of the efficiency bucket, but the unique characteristic of circular economy is you’re trying to build a value chain that brings materials back into the chemical stream. Yes, if you’re doing that within a plant, that’s part of the first bucket. But if you’re doing something like plastics recycling or chemical recycling of plastics, this type of thing, you need to build a new value chain. That’s part of the emphasis of a lot of these circular economy innitiatives. We think of that as a medium risk bucket and the way we think about that is you want your circles in the circular economy to be as small as possible.

And this is just a cost look, right? The idea being if you have to do a bunch of conversion steps from collection and you’re taking the material all the way back into the value chain and then you’re bringing it forward, chances are you’ve got a lot of steps. You’ve got a big ecosystem you’re trying to build up. You’re not gonna have a big cost spread to be able to get that value for each of your ecosystem partners.

Whereas if you design ecosystems that are smaller, that have a limited number of partners, and that have a more efficient recycle, you got a better chance of of surviving. If you want some examples of this. For me, at the one end, the big circle is something like chemical recycling through pyrolysis. You’re essentially collecting plastic. You’re aggregating it back in. You’re turning it back into oil, and then bringing it all the way back into the oil value chain at the refiner.

There’s a lot of steps.

There’s a lot of steps there, and you’re talking about producing commodities. Some of that’s gonna end up in monomer. Some of that’s gonna end up in fuel. One of the plays I like from a smaller circle standpoint is Eastman’s Renew. So they have a chemical recycling, it’s based on polyester technology. So here’s an example where you can collect from the largest single recycle plastic stream that exists. PET.

You’ve got very clean chemistry, and you’re getting very high yields back to monomer. And then in the case of Eastman, you’re putting it back into their high value copolyester business. So you’ve got a very small circle, and you’ve got a very big spread to be able to fit that circle into. I think their biggest challenge right now still is capital intensity. Then you get to the smallest kinds of circles you can think of. I’ve got a company that I think is just a gem startup company called Ubq. And their hypothesis is, I don’t need collection infrastructure.

I’m gonna start at the landfill, and they have technology that will take cellulosic and plastic waste directly from a landfill and convert it directly into a usable plastic. About the smallest circle you can think of.

I think that one’s got really, really high potential. You can see, in one case, you’re struggling. And in another case, you say, these things could still move forward even in the environment that we have today.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Those are the buckets.

That’s useful. You talk about the landfill to whatever, but what popped into my mind is that, Kendall, when I was a kid and probably when you were a kid, we didn’t drink a lot of soda.

Maybe it was the sugar, it was not as available, it was expensive, but we got eight packs, I remember, in glass bottles. And you return the glass bottle, and the glass bottle got washed and refilled. And somehow along the way, we’ve gotten away from that. Frankly, some of it’s lightweighting. It’s the beauty of plastics. It’s the way the markets have changed and stuff. But, we’ve made those circles a lot bigger than they used to be.

I mean, I remember as a boy scout doing paper drives. That was when paper had value on the market, and so I had a reason to go out and ask people for their newspapers, because I could sell it and make money. So those are the buckets. In terms of the reassessment, I talked a little bit about, we think of reassessing against four criteria.

Part of this is about getting really brutally honest about your initiatives. Take each one against four criteria. One is, what does your initiative look like in a cost-constrained environment? If you’re selling biopolymer competing with polyethylene, that may have all been well and good when polyethylene was selling for 80¢ a pound. How is it now if polyethylene’s selling for 60¢ a pound? Does your value proposition still hold water? And the other piece is in a capital-constrained environment, if you’ve got somebody who’s going to have to make an investment in order to grow the product you’re trying to sell, how are you holding up if, let’s say, that those capital investments are gonna be very difficult to get.

I mean, those two are super easy.

I’m gonna interject here with a bit of a philosophical discussion that I did not tee you up on, so here we go. Because part of the challenge here, and I think it’s a dilemma that we’re facing in a global world with legacy companies, is we are operating with different measures. So for instance, let’s just take polymers, polyethylene, pick almost any somewhat basic chemical. China is overbuilt, and they’re not gonna stop building, and they’re gonna keep building, and we are awash with polyethylene, polypropylene, other stuff.

I contend, those companies are not publicly held companies or maybe they are, they’re quasi, whatever. They are operating with a different strategic plan, a different set of metrics. They are clearly operating on a country strategy that is the China First strategy around independence. And then we’ve got companies in The US and Europe and particularly, let’s just tackle Europe where we’re shutting down, shutting down, shutting down because it’s not economical and they can’t compete. It can’t meet the stringent environmental requirements. So what strikes me, and this is a bit of my philosophical question is, what percentage of their business should companies be setting that they’re saying, you know what, this is just our long term investment. We know there is no return for the next ten, twenty, thirty years, but this is what it takes for us to be in business in fifty years.

Because if I keep shutting down and rationalizing and not making investments because it’s efficient to do so, and I save money today and my stock market investors are happy, I’m actually out of business in thirty years.

This could be an interesting conversation just in and of itself. So this is why getting clear on what we think the China dynamic is really matters. Trying to see forward the fundamentals of, can they continue this? In the last twenty years, it’s been, no. That’ll never work. Central planning doesn’t work. You’re a Texan, you come from a free market kind of background.

I come from the same type of background. And you got to the point with that Asian growth cycle where you said, maybe there’s something to this. Maybe we should be doing what they’re doing.

I mean, let’s learn from history. If you look at the history, the long growth cycles and the long commitments have worked. Maybe not in short terms, but on the long term, they do work.

So as you look forward then, you say, are these fundamentals set up to to operate like this going forward?

And I think there’s two things that really suggest that the China thing is over. It’s structurally over. And in a way, it’s a vindication of the central planning, the naysayers, if you will. Number one, they’ve imploded their real estate sector. And I don’t know how much people see that or feel that here because it’s it’s localized. But you now have local governments that are highly in debt. Most of the Chinese who could not get their money out of China, many did. Right? Vancouver’s overbuilt.

There’s lots of places that are overbuilt. But most of the individuals who could not, guess what? Real estate was a great investment. And it’s a way that, families would get together, and they would buy apartments. On the bet, it’s a speculative bet, this is all gonna work out. It’s worked out in the past. It’ll work out in the future.

And so what you have there is a significant amount of capital destruction. The other piece that I think people aren’t quite aware of and this is really fundamental. So this says, can you restart that engine? Does it continue to work? So they imploded the real estate sector. They’ve overbuilt their fundamental material sector. The other factor that you have is China is in the early stages of a population collapse.

Their population has been flat for three years. That’s unheard of. And if you look at estimates right now using official figures, it’s something like, they’re gonna be back to 700k people, not the 1.4 billion people we thought they had. A lot of the population figures are a little bit overblown, and as that’s starting to come to light now, it makes that population collapse faster and deeper and worse. As that starts to happen, you now don’t have people to consume in the same sense. And you don’t have workers to operate factories in the same sense. So you got here by being the low cost manufacturer, and now your supply of manufacturing labor is drying up. Coupled with the fact that you’ve got to restart that with capital.

And the one thing I know about free markets, and some of the capital was coming from the free market. Eventually, foreign director investment came in. You fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So I think fundamentally, you’ve got some structural issues that say this is not coming back. Now how do we deal with the fallout? Because they’re already overbuilt. So if you go back to the way you used to think about chemicals. When there was a cycle, we would get pretty pissed at the guys who were the last ones to build a cracker and didn’t see the cycle coming.

These were bad actors.

Or the guys who decided to trash price because they’re gonna get into a price war during the cycle. These were the bad actors, and these are stigmatized folks. And the market essentially works those out. The good players within the market understand you’ve gotta build capability. You can’t overbuild. You’ve gotta be smart about the cycle. If you think about a global market, what we have is a bad actor, a bad actor who is operating on their own policies.

If you’re doing that with your own money and your own people and your own assets, that’s fine. If you’re gonna blow up your own real estate sector, have at it. But what you now see China trying to do, and they’re doubling down on the consumption policy, which is, we’re going to sell our excess capacity on the open market. And we don’t want to slow down. We want to continue. So you’ve got somebody who’s now socializing their bad acting into other markets. Well, if you remember, we originally let them into the WTO on the basis of their liberalizing and moving toward free markets.

So now they’re taking actions that show that they’re not. So you could say, let’s do what they do, but we know where that’s gonna go. I think this is a time when you start to say, these are the basis on which you were allowed into the global market. This is a place for policy. This is a place for government action to say, if what you’re going to do, given that place in the global market, is overbuild and then socialize your policies to the rest of the world, do we really want that to continue, and would we stand for that?

Great topic.

Right? And I think that’s some of what you see in the political backlash today.

Oh, yeah. We won’t get into politics because that’s its own morale. What I am gonna say while we’re on this topic is, John Richardson from ICIS has been on the show a number of times, and we’ve talked about some of the China dynamics.

I love him. He’s great.

I will link, some of those episodes here in the show notes so that people have that context if they wanna go do some research. Maybe my one final question that I’ve got for you is, as you sit here in the start of 2025, we recognize that there are some dramatic global shifts taking place just economically, socially, etcetera. And companies are really assessing and figuring out what their next steps are.

What’s your top two or three pieces of advice that you would give to executives who wanna manage and grow?

I think the first step is reassessment. We’re in a period of pulling back and rationalization, so you’ve got to do a reassessment, and you got to do it on fundamentals. Step number two is the sort of easy options for growth. The easy levers for growth aren’t going to be there moving forward. I’ll give you an example. I worked for two companies during this heady time of growth, if you will. And they grew by acquisition, both of them.

There was a big acquisition screen. They grew by acquisition, and it was this thing that when an acquisition was over and you got through all the synergies and you were looking at counting on your organic growth to continue the growth path, you weren’t always there.

As long as you’re managing the core business really well, you could always go get financing and do another acquisition. So in the past, I would say, managing your core business and then being able to trade on your core business was a fundamental. If we’re going into a cycle, everybody’s gonna be struggling to manage their core business, and they’re gonna be looking for growth wherever they can. And I think we’ve gotten soft on capabilities around around organic growth. We’ve been doing that for so long in this era that we’ve gotten soft on our capabilities. And so the second thing that I would say is you’ve got to invest in your core capabilities to do organic growth.

Got it.

That means being able to do market driven innovation, and having the commercial capability for new business. I think we’ve gotten very used to managing existing accounts commercially, marketing to existing accounts commercially, and we’ve lost some of the muscle that we had to go out and get new business, to launch new products. I’m gonna say something that’s gonna be heresy probably. I’ll get in trouble for saying it, but I don’t think the epicenter of B2B commercial excellence is in industrials anymore. When you and I grew up, if you wanted to do B2B industrial commercial work

You went to work for GE, you went to work for Dow Chemical, because those were the places that knew how to do this the best. I think the epicenter of commercial excellence today in B2B is in tech. In a sense, we’ve fallen behind. Tech is not afraid of digital, and tech has kept up with the selling science. The selling science has advanced. I used to be a huge value selling guy.

Value selling is table stakes. Solution selling is table stakes.

And if you’re not up on the latest science there, you’ll end up falling behind. And if you’re not using the latest tools, you’ll end up falling behind. And so that’s the second piece of it. Growth is gonna be hard to come by. You’ve gotta start investing in real organizational capability for organic growth.

I love it.

And that’s what Growth Arc is all about.

That’s a great close. So, Kendall, this has been really fun. If people want to connect with you, how can they find you?

Two ways. Number one, I’m all over LinkedIn. So if you’re a LinkedIn user, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, and I’ve got a company page on LinkedIn as well, GrowthArc Advisors. If you’re not, and I know there’s a lot of people who are not, I would say go to my website. I’m at www.growth-arc.com. I run an executive roundtable. I run a a newsletter. I would say subscribe to the newsletter, and you will hear and get some of these perspectives and be able to stay in touch and join into the dialogue as well.

Love it. So Kendall, thanks so much for this, and thank you everyone for joining us today on The Chemical Show. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.