Career Insight, Sustainability and Advice on Performance Plastics with Drew Schwartz

Expert Guest: Drew Schwartz, President and Co-Owner of Colorado Plastic Products

Drew Schwartz, along with his wife, is the owner of Colorado Plastic Products in Louisville, CO. He is also a member of the Executive Committee on the IAPD Board of Directors and the IAPD Environmental Committee.

In this episode, Drew shares his journey on how he made his way into a career in the performance plastics industry, the insights he has gained along the way and the importance of being involved with IAPD.

Drew also shares his thoughts on the sustainability of performance plastics and the vital role they play in our world today.

Drew's Book Recommendations:

• Plastic a toxic love story, by Susan Freinkel
• Material Value: More More Sustainable, Less Wasteful Manufacturing of Everything from Cell Phones to Cleaning Products, by Julia L F Goldstein
• Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century,  by Stephen Fenichell
• Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World, by Mark Miodownik

Read Drew's Review of Material Value in Performance Plastics magazine

Transcript

Welcome to the Performance Plastics Podcast hosted by IAPD. The only podcast dedicated to providing you information and insights into the world of engineering-grade plastics and how they benefit society by improving the quality of everyday life. Now here's your host, Kailee Canty.

Kailee: On this month's episode of the Performance Plastics Podcast, we have the owner of Colorado Plastics Products who also happens to be a member of the IAPD Executive Committee. I’m so excited for you to listen to my conversation with Mr. Drew Schwartz. 

Kailee: Hi Drew. Good morning, how are you? 

Drew: Good, staying warm. It was about three degrees today when I came to work in Colorado but yeah so, we don't always dress like we're getting ready for a Yellowstone episode here.

Kailee: Yes, it is also very cold in Kansas City. It was about five degrees this morning here so I'm glad to hear that you're staying warm! But Drew, we can just dive on into it. Would you mind doing a brief introduction of yourself and you know talking a little bit about your background? 

Drew: Sure, I'm the owner of Colorado Plastics, along with my wife. We bought it in 2005 from a gentleman who was in his late 70s. Whenever you buy a business, you always wonder what you don't know about the business. This gentleman's wife had two very serious health conditions, so he had to go take care of her. But previous to that I had two other careers. My first career was in the laboratory business, which had a little bit to do with my family. I had physicians in the family. Also had to do with a mentor of mine who was in the diagnostics business so after getting the credentials to work in a human hospital laboratory and going to work at the Veterinary School University of Pennsylvania this gentleman and I started a Clinton path laboratory for veterinarians. We did that for about eight or nine years. Actually, had a sales rep, my first sales rep I ever hired wound up in the plastics business. A gentleman named Peter Shulgin who still I believe is still a member of IAPD; he's a manufacturer's rep. He still lives in the county where I grew up in Chester County, Pennsylvania. After that, we sold it to some people from New York City and I went back to business school. So, in 1992 I went back and became a full-time student at Georgetown University, was one of the oldest people in my class 

which I definitely recommend. I would say the longer you work or the more experience you have and the more different experiences you have, the more you're going to get out of business school if that's what you decide to do. It's not for everybody. And the more they're going to get out of 

you being there with them so that was a totally positive experience. Very close with those people I actually, at the beginning of the pandemic started having bi-weekly, every two weeks I do a Zoom call with whoever my class wants to show up and just talk about what's going on in their life so, day before yesterday I had about 10 of them on there. They tend to be overseas people, I don't know why, I think probably because those are the people that I was most interested in seeking out and keeping in touch with over the years. But yeah, we had gentlemen on there from Yemen. A guy from Calcutta in India. Guy who works for Parliament in the U.K. So, yeah I like to keep in touch. And I think even if you don't go to business school; the two biggest things I got out of it were the networking you know as I described the zoom calls and wanting to maintain those relationships, but more than anything I think in any master's program they teach you how to learn they teach you how to learn new things. I think as an undergraduate they tend to focus on the facts and the body of knowledge and what you're supposed to you know but I think in graduate school, it's much more up to you to decide what you're going to learn, subject matter-wise. But what that leads to is a method or a process for for lifelong learning. So, after business school, well, during business school, I spent the summer in between years in a place called Bratislava in what used to be Czechoslovakia but became two separate countries in 1990. I did some interesting consulting projects there. I had started going there in 1990 went back in the summer ’93 expected I would probably go there after graduation. But the situation had changed so much between 1990 to be a bootstrap entrepreneur, which is what I would have had to be pay my own way with my own earnings to 1993 when it had become much more of a formalized expense account you know big time consulting arena. I never wanted to be a management consultant, I always wanted to  operate businesses so I convinced my girlfriend, now wife of 25 years, in 1994 to move with me from DC to Boulder, CO. Where we still live, and I fully expected to get a job in the life sciences. I had some, you know, okay interviews with some life science companies you might have heard of like Amgen. But I couldn't get a job doing that, so I met these guys- Oh! Let me back up and say one of the reasons I went to business school or one of the purposes of going to business school besides the networking and the learning how to learn, better, was to learn about buying a business, or to think better about that more procedurally. Yeah, one of the most influential books in my life that I ever read it's called Barbarians at the Gate and it was written about 1988. It's when leverage buyouts were kind of a new thing, and private equity was still a very new thing. It's a story about how these guys at a private equity firm that you might have heard of called Colbert Kravis and Roberts went and advised the guy that was running Nabisco to take the company private. It was a public company that people were making takeover attempts at, and the CEO knew that he was going to be, you know, shown the door if there was a takeover. So, they convinced him that they could issue enough debt in different markets to buy all the public stock back anyway. I didn't want to buy a public company, I just wanted to buy one from somebody that was operating one. So, I wound up taking a job with these guys that were about 10 years older than me, that had a fancy building materials business called Wall Technology, kind of generic name. Kind of sounds like a shaver company, but it's not that company. I became a controller and I showed them how a transaction would work and how they could retire and how I could you know continue to operate the business in place and I did such a good job showing them the nuts and bolts of how you sell your business that when the strategic buyer which was a fortune 500 company called Owen’s Corning came along, they were ready to go. It worked out fine for me because Owen’s Corning offered about two and a half times as much as I could ever scrape together, borrow and so forth and they were very generous to me and cut me in on a significant chunk of the difference between what I could have paid and what Owen’s Corning did pay so I worked for them for two years you know normal course events I worked for them as an executive for a couple years and they asked me, what was the next job I wanted to know?  And I said well, I don't really you know want to move and they said well that's too bad. If you're a good boy, we'll pay you some severance so, yeah. I went traveling came back for an acquisition profile for a business to buy. Now, it was my time to buy a business and I went business hunting, and it took me about…oh gee- was eight or nine months after I came back, I probably wrote about 600 letters, I probably heard back from about five or ten percent of the people I wrote the letters to, you know, explicitly told them I wasn't a broker I wasn't going to flip their company and a lot of them were guys that had no idea how to sell business a lot of were my customers now. But my banker called me one day and said, “Hey Drew, Colorado Plastics is for sale” and I said, “Oh great, um I don't know anything about it.” He said, “Well, here's Rich Rappaport's phone number.” Rich is an active member of this association. He still operates business with his sons, I believe called Business Answers and he and I worked out a deal for me to buy Colorado Plastics and 15 years later here we are!

Kailee: Wow! That is such an extensive background and so much experience, traveling and different career paths. It amazes me that you originally started in life sciences and went back to get your MBA and now you're the owner of the Colorado Plastics. But, you know, aside from of course having that unfortunate turnout from all the businesses that you wrote to and finally hearing back from one that was for sale what you know what made you want to go into plastics? 

Drew: Well, I was going to say one thing my wife teases me about is that I seem to be industry agnostic. There's a guy in IAPD named Alan Harari who likes to tell me at the cocktail party is “Drew, I'm still looking for that person that decided they were going to work in plastics when they we're trying to figure out you know what they want to be when they grow up!” and I said, “Well, other than the people whose fathers and grandfathers had plastic careers you may be right.” I think for me it was the actual situation, like I said you don't always know why business is for sale. I could understand why this one was for sale. It was a certain size. I appreciated, well I wrote this acquisition profile and it included things like “Is it going to be solely retail? Solely B2B? A mixture? I wanted a mixture. So, we're about three quarters B2B about one quarter retail. I didn't want a big customer concentration you know some people joke about selling to Walmart. No, I didn't want to have one customer that was going to have so much leverage over the business that it would be a problem if they were sold, or they decided you know they're going to bring some of the stuff we do in-house. It needed to be a certain size, you know, I don't have an unlimited checkbook and I didn't want to go spend a bunch of time raising money and I didn't want to have a bunch of partners so that's- Oh! And I also wanted it to be within a certain distance of where I live. So, that was the six hours there's about, yeah, I think I wrote to all the manufacturing companies in Boulder County, and hereabouts which was about 600. Yeah, Boulder County is about 400,000 people and front range of Colorado is about 4 million people. 

Kailee: The resilience!

 Drew: Yeah, I'm a firm believer it's more important to know what you're after than it is to be super excited and then flame out, so I knew it was going to take a while and it did. 

Kailee: I have a question about- you know, a lot of our GenerationNext listeners who are early professionals or mid-career level professionals. When you first heard about Colorado Plastics, what was your initial thought like, “Oh, single-use plastics. I don't want to be a part of that or did you kind of have an understanding? When you're, you know, introducing yourself to people and telling them what you do, how do you kind of navigate that question about like “Oh you work in plastics isn't that isn't that bad? Isn't that not sustainable? How do you switch that to explain Performance Plastics?

Drew: Well, one of the things that gives me instant street cred for people that know my wife is a professional environmentalist. My wife has worked for the Environmental Defense Fund when I met her, she was working for an offshoot of Nature Conservancy called Conservation International which is a rainforest conservation organization. She's worked for regional environmental groups here in Colorado, and now she works for the Nature Conservancy so, she's always worked for environmental groups that realize that business is the only force on the planet that can drive the kind of change that we need to change the amount of carbon dioxide that's being released into the air. I think for me, yeah of course, I was concerned about her opinion more than anybody else's because she's my life partner and she's also my partner in the business. I guess in a way if I felt if I could convince her, I'd convince anybody. And she's sort of my conscience that yeah, okay, if you want to have a plastics business and you can continue to do the right stuff and treat people the right way. And oh yeah, we make stuff for, you know, generating plants and, you know, all sorts of cleanup activities and alternative energy, green energy, whatever you want to call it; sustainability. That would be fine. But, yeah, it's important to balance that we as an association and we as an industry run between being painted with the brush of single-use plastics and, you know, using plastic at all. There’s a book that- I tell people I like to read books- okay the book I tell people that are, you know, just starting out on their journey as to how harmful is plastic how should I think about plastic; this book was written by a woman named Susan Frankel. Susan wrote this book called Plastic: A Toxic Love Story and the idea of the book came from her wanting to figure out if it was possible to stop using plastic at all, so she wasn't just concerned with packaging materials or, you know, single-use stuff. She wanted to see if she could go through her day without using plastic. Of course, it lasted till she turned on the light switch to brush her teeth in the morning. But she goes through in very interesting fashion what it's like and she lives in San Francisco, and talks about what it's like to deal with the fact that plastics is great stuff that we're not going to be able to get rid of, and what's the most responsible informed way to think about it. Yeah, I recommend that book very much. I just wrote a book review of a book about sustainability- I forget how this one was recommended but- 

Kailee: Yeah, that's actually in the magazine of the issue live right now.

Drew: Yeah, and this one speaks to people that are more technically oriented. Julia Goldstein is a material scientist, PhD, who has worked in a plastics business, has worked in metal, and she lays out a lot of the landscape of what it means to be sustainable, and how we might think about that not just as plastics people but as, you know, responsible citizens trying to move forward. 

Kailee: Yeah, I actually just read that article in the digital publication for Performance Plastics. It's so interesting. Well, thank you for answering that question. I realize that it is kind of, you know, when you first get into it, it can be sticky to explain but you do have a leg up with having a wife who is an environmentalist. 

Drew: I do, just real quick, two other things I do little factoid things is one of my favorite things to say about plastic is “Hey it's too valuable to throw away.” We don’t throw away plastic here we upcycle it so we have remnant sales and, you know, give it away in ways it doesn't cannibalize our sales. The other thing is there were two times in history when plastic was actually very beneficial to the environment. The one time- this is a book called Plastics: The Making of a Synthetic Century and these are some really cool stories they're almost like magazine articles about different families of plastic how they came about. One of the first ones was called- oh phenolic actually celluloid before phenolic and it was developed without an application until they realized that it could replace billiard balls. So, about 140 years ago they stopped, using you know alpha tusks to put on pool tables to play pool and started making those out of plastic. The other time I tell people that, you know, plastic became very useful was talking about throwing stuff away after the second World War when we started driving more and the economy was booming, and everybody was buying a new car, a byproduct from crude oil is polyethylene so there were all these new feedstocks for all these new plastics so when you know read this book or some other books you'll see that a lot of these engineering plastics Performance Plastics that we sell through IAPD were developed in the 50’s because of all the chemistry that came about because they had all this refining fractions to do something with.

Kailee: I can't wait to put all these book recommendations in our description for the podcast episode. I think it's so valuable to have that information. What book are you reading right now, if you don't mind to share?

Drew: Today, the book I'm reading is a book called Stuff Matters. So, one of the things I like to do is- and I can't pronounce this gentleman's last name- but when I talked to Dr. Goldstein about Material Value, she recommended this book. This one actually compares a lot of different materials including plastic to things like metal, sand, a variety of different materials this gentleman, Mark- I think its name is pronounced Miodownik, is a material scientist too, and the other thing, you know, back to this question of how as a young person trying to be responsible having to contend with their peer group that's, in many ways, more oriented toward sustainability than my generation might have been, is to think about; okay plastic's got these drawbacks, plastic's got these benefits, what are the drawbacks of wood? What are the drawbacks and benefits of metal? What are the drawbacks and benefits of concrete? Glass? Glass uses a lot more energy to produce than plastic. Sand is not an infinite resource in the world. One thing I didn't know until I read this book was the sand in the desert is not suitable for concrete, so there are people that are, you know, stealing sand in river basins in Asian and African countries to sell to people that want to make concrete so it's not just “conflict diamonds” it's “conflict sand” too.

Kailee: And conflict wood, conflict metal- so interesting.  Well, you know, kind of going back to being a young you know professional in this industry, is there a piece of advice that you wish you could have given yourself when you just started out in the plastics business that would have helped you maybe? I know that mistakes are great and we have to fail to learn and everything, but is there a piece of advice that you would have liked to give yourself just starting out?

Drew: Yeah, everybody says make mistakes as fast as you can, that's fine. But this one actually goes back to the laboratory business but I have two new employees this week that- I've used this with multiple times- there's something I think about as the 400 questions. 400 is just a made-up number but I think it's plus or minus, you know, 50, let's say when the phone rings and you answer it. Which is really important. So, that's my number one piece of advice is: answer the phone. Don't be afraid of the phone. When you answer the phone and somebody has a question that you don't know the answer to at the beginning, it's very daunting to think about- oh should I know the answer to that question? And the way I think about that is, it's important to know whether you should know the answer to that question because if you don't know the answer to 

that question, which is one of the 400 let's call them. You're potentially losing credibility with the customer if you don't know the answer. Well, sorry if it's a question that you have no reason to know the answer to, and you're confident of that, you can make points with the customer by 

explaining to them what an unusual question that is how happy you are that they asked you that question and how long, in a reasonable, you know, believable time frame it's going to take you to get the answer the question. So, my advice is: figure out what the 400 questions are for your part 

of our industry, and get some expert to explain to you, okay? You know, should I have a notebook? Should I read these books? Should I just follow you around? Should I watch YouTube videos? I love YouTube videos. One of my favorite things to do with people that are new, migrating to new job responsibilities or just trying to fix something or figure out what somebody's, you know, asking us to a quote in our shop is YouTube. But, yeah, think about what the questions are that you really shouldn't know the answers to and think about how you're going to respond to people that ask you a question that you have every reason to believe is something that you have every right to take your time and do some research to get back to them about.

Kailee: That is fantastic advice: answer the phone and be ready for questions. 

Drew: Yeah, don't be afraid of questions. It's the way to not be afraid but when you're new you're afraid of questions. You're afraid to say, “I don't know” and it's okay to say- it's always okay to say “I don't know” but it's a lot more convincing to say “I don't know” if you know that it's something that you don't necessarily have a reason to know.

Kailee: Absolutely. What great advice for somebody that's just starting out, and it's okay to not know all the answers and that's how you how you learn too. And doing your own research and figuring out what works for that specific, you know, you'll know what they are, and you know the other thing about that idea is it gets you past that first three months when you don't know what you don't know.

Drew: Yeah, it's a way of getting into that second three months and third three months and on to a year, where I think most people after about 12 months, they firmly know what they don't know so I guess that's another way of describing the 400 questions is yeah, figuring out what you know, what you don't know, and you don't know what you don't know.

Kailee: Yeah, and in the beginning, you don't know what you don't know mostly don't know 

what you don't know yeah. So, being so experienced and being a member of the executive committee, how did you even get involved with IAPD in the first place?

Drew: Well, I think it's important that if you're going to be a professional, you know have a professional attitude and be a career person in a specific industry, to be a member of the trade association. I think it signifies something to do that. I also think it's important to figure out 

the shortcuts to figure out what other people already know that may not be obvious to you.  

And I guess we're back to why would anybody get an MBA? Well, you would get an MBA to have a solid network and you'd get an MBA to figure out, you know, what the subject matter experts are in a given field so, you know, through IAPD I have a great network, nice list 

of people say “Yeah, these people aren't just my competitors or my suppliers or my customers, they're my friends” but that's true. Initially I got involved because of this question of “How do I justify selling plastics?” I live in a place that's you know very socially progressive, you know, sort of like San Francisco, Berkeley, you know, some other college towns around the country that try to beat the cutting edge of social change. Particularly, in Colorado, environmentalism, you know, I don't know if you guys know but Colorado is the only place in the world that's ever been awarded in Olympic games and then the populists decided we weren't going to do it and the primary reason was environmental impact in 1976, the International Olympic Committee awarded Denver the Winter Olympics, and the governor said “I'm not sure that people really want to do this” and we had a referendum and the Olympics went to Innsbruck, Austria. So, I came into the IAPD Environmental Committee because I wanted to see and make sure that 

we were on the right track when it comes to all the different aspects of sustainability, including recycling and, you know, efficient energy use in our facilities and I went on from there to different parts of the organization. I began attending the convention. I became interested in- or- I learned about the other pieces of the organization, like the Membership Committee, like the 

Marketing Committee and more lately I've become very interested in something called the Small 

Distributor Roundtable, more than half of our distributor members or around half of our distributor members are less than 50 million dollars in sales. So, if you're less than 50 million 

dollars in sales you're eligible for a particular group called the Small Distributor Roundtable. Made some really good friends there. It's ironic because if you know the history of IAPD, you know, that it was originally started as a small distributor reaction to some consolidation some larger holding companies buying up independent distributors and creating chains. That continues 

both those things continue the small distributors continue to be a, you know, very significant number of our members and of course, you know, competition leads to people capitalizing businesses as chains so, yeah. And the other thing I'm very interested in, back to the single use 

plastic question, IAPD has our own people in Washington, DC that look out for our best interests and one of those is making sure that when it comes to bills in congress that we don't get written into them as people that are going to be regulated the same way that single-use plastic people are because we're not the guys that create plastic pollution. Which, you know, I consider to be single-use plastics, so I've become more active on the Government Relations Committee. 

Kailee: Yeah, that's such a fantastic point too, and going back to the book you recommended 

about how, you know, somebody tried to go throughout her whole day without using plastics and 

like you said she couldn't even make it without brushing her teeth or turning on the light switch. It really is a part of our everyday life and it is so valuable like you said, and is pretty much your motto. Well, thank you so much for sitting down and answering these questions so thoughtfully, is there you know any last-minute hail Mary’s that you would like to kind of send out to any of our early career professionals? Any advice?

Drew: I would just say if you're hesitant about whether or not you should get involved with IAPD, give me a call send me an email but, some more than that; just show up at one of these functions and I can pretty much guarantee that you'll meet enough people, kindred spirits, that'll make your life less lonely when you're feeling about, “Oh, should I be in this plastics thing?” but also you know like a lot of other things in life you get out what you put in, and just showing up is the most important thing. So, even if you don't find your niche committee, you're welcome to sit in committee meetings. You don't have to join a committee, you can sit in, you know, it's like picking a church. If you want to pick, if you want to go to different committee meetings and see, you know, who's running the committee, who's in the committee, what's being discussed, you're welcome to do that stuff too. Yeah, just show up and see what you think and if you have any 

Questions. I'm always happy to talk to anybody. The other thing I was going to say was besides the 400 questions, my way of doing business is to try and help people even if I don't do what they're calling about, so I always have a very thick folder full of referrals on my desk. Just to make sure I remember what's in it, I flipped through it once a month just to think about- oh yeah here's where I send someone or here so I can have somebody call if they need a cover for their window: Well oh yeah here's where I can have somebody call if they need plastic barrels or here's where I can have somebody call if they want to buy a bajillion credit cards and people really appreciate that.

Kailee: That's fantastic that you do that just to really help level up everybody in IAPD. 

Drew: I also refer them to members that do stuff that we don't do. Yeah, if you're not sure if you're in my referral folder, IAPD members give me a call!

Kailee: If you're not sure then you probably are!

Drew: It could be! There's plenty IAPD members to do the same thing. I actually got the idea from some people at Port Plastics in Denver. Once upon a time yeah. Well, I hope we'll be seeing you at the annual convention.

Kailee: Yes, in September in Tampa.

Drew: We'll be there. Anita's coming, she loves Florida.

Kailee: Fantastic, I'll be there for sure! 

Drew: Thank you for doing this, and welcome to IAPD! I hope you have lots of fun.

Kailee: Thank you so much, Drew! Thank you for popping on here you're a valuable resource to us!

Drew: Welcome! Thank you have a great rest of your day.

Kailee: You too! See you later, bye. 

This podcast was brought to you by the International Association of Plastics Distribution. For more information on IAPD, please visit our website at www.iapd.org