Get to Know Jeff Post, VP/General Manager of Enduratex (Part Two)

Today we are continuing with part two of our four part series: Get to Know Jeff Post, VP/General Manager of Enduratex.

1.  Tell me about what Enduratex was like when you first came in. What kind of growth have you seen in the company since you joined?

Jeff: Enduratex was facing a challenging situation when I joined the company. Their former Vice President and General Manager had left the company and took with him a number of sales and operations people. That ripped apart the core of the company and it was in survival mode. When I came on board, there was a lot more film being produced and sold by the company, much less in coated fabrics, and yet there was a big difference between the profitability of those two. I quickly made the decision that we were going to focus on coated fabrics, where you can make more profit and more revenue dollars. Over the course of time, we’ve more than doubled our business from that day and it’s been solely in coated fabrics that we’ve done that.

2.   What challenges do you see for the vinyl industry during the next five years?

Jeff: I think most of our challenges will come from environmental regulations. They’re making it much more difficult for us to make products that can meet the standards of need or application with the chemistry that we have. They are pushing us to come up with new chemistries, which are costing much more, and which aren’t even close to being developed to the point where they can say they will work with an application well. It’s becoming much more difficult for us to maintain a face that is respected and will be able to withstand what I consider to be the three most important pillars of coated fabrics: durability, cleanabililty and flammability.

Those are the three areas where coated fabrics shine. When you start taking away the chemistry that helps you reach those three pillars, you end up with two pillars and two pillars, or legs, don’t hold up the stool very well.

3.   Fewer young employees are entering the vinyl industry which has become a concern for industry professionals. What are you doing to address this growing concern?

Jeff: I’m always looking for people who are younger and are looking for challenges and aren’t always looking for the next best thing. It’s harder because as we move through generation to generation, it becomes more evident that technology is moving faster and faster and so the younger generations want to be on the cusp of what’s happening. They want to be in the technology areas. But what we’ve seen is that a lot of young people who end up in the technology areas actually get burned out very quickly or their company gets sold out and they have to sell these stock options. Next thing you know, the companies don’t have anything left to their name. And so you see a lot of that happens with the high tech companies that are being born.

As a corporation, our parent company, really tapped into that marketplace because a lot of those kids end up working for our company, maybe not at our company here in the U.S., but for our company in Taiwan. A good example is that we just finished putting in a calendar line, which is a blue collar job. We have all new employees to run that calendar. It takes about 20 people to run a calendar, over two shifts. Almost all of them are new, young employees and most coming out of tech backgrounds. They’re working blue collar positions now.