Purpose - A Journey from Breakdown to Breakthrough

Chapter 2:
Background: Developing years

My family moved to a suburb of Houston in 1951 when I was 3yrs and my brother 4 months old. My dad had taken a sales job with a corrugated paper box company in Houston. We had one car which dad needed for local and regional traveling so for years we pretty much hung out in our neighborhood. This wasn’t too bad in the 50s. They weren’t quite Ozzy and Harriet but the kids in the neighborhood were a lot like the Our Gang Comedy.

We spent most of our days dressing up in coon skin caps and shooting at each other with smoke rifles playing cowboys and Indians. The family adventures were the annual vacation to the Texas Hill Country. We stayed in a cabin along the Guadalupe River, rode horseback every day and then swam all afternoon. Saturday night was the big thrill when we would attend the rodeo and later the dance at Criders.

As my brother and I got older we got bolder and took off on our own during part of the day. Somehow, we avoided any serious accidents if you don’t consider stitches as serious. It seems that most vacations, one of us would be at the doctor’s office or hospital getting stitched up. Of course, that meant no more swimming for the rest of the vacation.

Looking back, I can see that my brother and I went a little crazy when we finally were let loose on the adventure of our vacation. This pattern has been obvious on occasion as I traveled through adulthood. I like to label it adventuresome. Others might call this kind of behavior OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder).

Adventuresome

My adventures seem to have been run in phases starting with Boy Scouts. In the Navy I was stationed at a base in the Philippines located on the coast of the South China Sea. My free time was consumed with Karate, surfing, and scuba diving.

When I got married, I bought a dirt bike and tried out motocross. None of my injuries were too serious but there were too many of them, so my wife put her foot down when we had a baby.

Then I got us into camping and later canoeing which included camping. We took 12 to 15 weekend trips a year. This led me into kayaking which I got more into when my wife and son got tired of camping and canoeing.

I developed some skills at kayaking in Texas Rivers like the Guadalupe, which had some nice rapids but nothing too challenging. Then one of my buddies invited me to go on a wilderness canoe trip for a week on the Pecos River. On this trip we experienced 6 days without seeing another human but those in our group. We survived even after running out of purified water and alcoholic beverages.

Later a bunch of us went to North Carolina for kayak training camp that took us on many different rivers including the Chattooga in norther Georgia, that part of the movie “Deliverance” was filmed on. Our family took some vacations in Colorado where I got to kayak on the Delores and Arkansas rivers.

Arkansas River, Colorado summer 1989

Later adventure phases have included long distance cycling, offshore sailboat racing, and later motorcycle touring. These phases sometimes overlapped and lasted from 5 to 10 years. Over the years, I was pretty good at compartmentalizing play from work. However, my biggest adventure was working with my dad to build a successful manufacturing company.

The Family Business

Our business was started by my dad in 1965. In ’65, I was seventeen. Hey, aren’t those lyrics from the song by Jackson Browne “Running on Empty”? Well, my dad wasn’t running on empty, but he was stepping out with a lick and a prayer like most entrepreneurs.

He had been a salesman in the corrugated box industry for several years until some customers and investors approached him about starting a new company that he would manage. This company, Engineered Container Corp Co., was set up with my dad as President and was successful enough in gaining major customers. Eventually, a major competitor made an offer to the board that they couldn’t refuse.

My dad made some money out of the deal and spent some time thinking about how he wanted to move forward. He felt that he had a few options including going to work for someone else in sales, buying a franchise or starting his own small business. I remember his looking at a few franchises that he could afford like car washes and gas stations. He was concerned about getting into a bad deal.

His biggest asset was his knowledge of the packaging industry and the customer base in the Gulf coast region of the US. He had spent almost 20 years calling on the chemical and food industries in Texas and Louisiana.

I grew up traveling with him in the summers and listening to him talk about business. When I was ten years old, I was the youngest kid that Exxon had allowed out on the production floor. My dad was selling them corrugated boxes for their oil can packaging lines. I would get to spend time looking at the automated lines and the packaging and warehousing operations of oil companies, food producers like Pioneer Flout Mills, and breweries like Pearl in San Antonio.

I had the chance to visit with the managers and see how their operations functioned to efficiently package, inventory, and ship their products. This gave me insight into how production worked in large operations. I got to see multiple products being packaged, stored, and then shipped in trucks and railcars, all while growing up in the 6o’s.

One thing that helped my dad get going in his own business was that one of his previous suppliers who managed a corrugator wanted to put him on a retainer to develop some specialty business. A corrugator converts rolls of paper into sheets of corrugated. His company had supplied Engineered Container Corp with these sheets of corrugated to be converted into boxes.

Dad, negotiated commission deals with a number of other manufacturers of packaging materials including, wood pallets, spiral wound paper cores (tubes), and plastic sheeting and bags. All these products were regularly used by the chemical and food producers in the Gulf Coast Region that he had been calling on for years.

I Get Involved

When I graduated from Highschool, I joined the Navy in order to avoid being drafted and not having a choice of service. It would have been great for my career if I had been able to work in logistics or warehousing rather than being a radio communications technician. However, I was involved in managing communication records and writing reports which did sharpen my administrative skills.

Leaving for the Philippines 1967

I was released from Active Duty in February of 1969 and came back home to reconnect with my high-school girlfriend and to look for employment while I attended the University of Houston. My dad felt there could be a win/win if I would help him with administrative tasks which would free him up to focus on sales. I had the GI Bill which paid me more than the tuition at U of H, so I had some money to contribute to living expenses. My parents let me move back in with them and my brother. Part of the arrangement was that I would drive my brother to U of H as we were both starting out as Freshmen in the Business School.

He and I registered for the Fall Semester and had many classes together. Most days we were back home in the afternoon. This left me time to be working for my dad. His business was set up on a brokerage basis so that he processed the orders from his customers and issued the orders to the vendors.

When the orders were shipped, the vendors invoiced our company and we in turn invoiced the customers. This was more work than performed by most factory representative firms, but dad felt that this would assure that we were on top of the orders and that we controlled our finances, as we deducted our commissions from the payments to the vendors.

I was able to manage this process on my schedule after school and into the evenings as needed. I was taking entry level accounting courses at the university which helped me understand the bookkeeping requirements.

In the spring of 1970, several factors changed my life; my sweetheart and I got married, my brother got a job and bought his own car, and I needed to work full-time so my wife and I could live independently.

My dad and I worked it out that I could work with him during the day and attend night school at the U of H. I would still perform the administrative functions but also start making sales calls locally.

The Spark

The spark that got us on a track to manufacturing our own products was grounded in the branding that we developed as the “Innovative Solutions Company”. Basically, if a customer or prospect had a unique packaging problem, we would work to develop a solution using the resources we had or could find.

What developed was the concept that if we could not find a vendor that was capable or desired to provide the product or service solution that our customers needed that maybe we could set up to provide it on our own.

The first opportunity that we felt we could handle was a demand for a built-up corrugated padding to be used for rail-car dunnage (cushioning between loads). This solution combined corrugated sheets from the corrugator and adhesive from one of our vendors plus labor from me and contract labor.

The second big opportunity was to develop a pallet made of corrugated paper sheets and built up...