A Strategy For Getting The Right People

Want to turn around a company with sluggish performance? Try the SWAN method: getting the right people in place by focusing on Smart, Work Ethic, Ambitious and Nice.

That’s what David Barrow has done as CEO of GSC Technologies, a manufacturer based in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, which makes plastic goods, including storage totes, chairs, tables, shelving and garbage cans.

The strategy has paid off: Since Barrow came on board in 2021, GSC’s top line has improved by double digits through customer diversification, new product development and expanding the core portfolio.

In an interview, Barrow shares how exactly he pulled off GSC’s turnaround and the insights he’s gained.

Tell us about your efforts.

Everything for me starts with people. To tackle the challenges before me at GSC I first had to build the right team. The framework that I use to select the best teammates is something called SWAN, a tool I picked up from a great organization I previously did business with. It stands for Smart, Work Ethic, Ambitious and Nice.

Using the SWAN framework allowed me to choose a fabulous leadership team, a one-down team comprised of great SWANs from my past working relationships, the current GSC team that met the criteria and some new faces that I recruited.

The next priority was to create a shared vision and values to judge our progress and the way the results were achieved. I started by having the team look to the past. I asked them to keep the very best parts of the founders’ values and behaviors, and I also asked them what values and behaviors needed to be added or changed.

This exercise gave us a strong list of values that we could build our new working teams upon and gave us a shared common language around how to achieve results effectively.

I worked with the new teams to lay out four clear strategies—people strategy, grow revenue strategy, improve margin strategy and business excellence strategy—to drive our efforts toward our vision in a focused way. To fuel the investments required behind each strategy, we launched a total enterprise focus on reducing working capital to be able to reinvest these funds behind key initiatives.

For the people strategy, we declared we wanted to achieve a Great Place to Work designation. To support this goal we introduced a company-wide performance bonus program that was incremental to base pay and tied 80 percent to company performance and 20 percent to individual objective achievement.

For the grow revenue strategy, we self-invested in the creation of a pipeline of new products to be able to improve the category conversion and margins of our existing retail customers, and open relationships with new retailers.

The creation of products like the Organize-it! Intelligent Tags was rooted in consumer insights. The product addresses pain points like “I can’t find my stuff” or “I hate writing on labels on bins that fade or fall off.” We partnered with great outside firms to create a simple app that uses encoded NFC tags or QR codes to allow homeowners to transform any storage tote from being a dumb tote to a smart tote.

Since my arrival, my team of SWANs have been driving the four strategies forward with the fuel generated from cost savings and working capital optimization. This has enabled the top line and the bottom line to grow double digits over the past three years, while containing costs and improving employee engagement.

Now that I have Speyside Equity as our new financial partner, we can accelerate and grow our ambitions much larger and faster.

GSC has significantly improved its gross margin and EBITDA since your arrival. What has been your strategy to accomplish this?

We explored green solutions to replace materials that qualified for our quality control needs for resin specifications but were problematic for the environment and ended up in landfills. Using academic partners, outside converters, government agencies and technical experts, we succeeded in re-purposing some of these alternative resin materials from being environmental liabilities to being useful circular economy materials.

The cost of repurposing these materials through additional technical handling was more than offset by improved base material costs which helped to improve the GSC bottom line while, at the same time, helping the environment. 

The second initiative to improve margins was focused on upgrading our mold fleet with the latest technology to optimize performance. Our product portfolio was first ranked from largest volume and highest margins to smallest volume and lowest margins. We then partnered with outside engineering firms to redesign our molds for the top products to maximize their speed and design.

We ran multiple simulations in a virtual environment to prove that the engineered changes would yield a favorable result, and that the quality of the product would be same or better versus specifications. We then invested over $2 million in new mold tools with the optimized technology across the top selling products in our fleet.

The results have been very promising and have allowed GSC to improve its capacity and margins as a result. Both the reformulation and mold optimization have had strong impacts on the gross margin and EBITDA improvements. 

Your company has been certified as a Best Place to Work. Tell us how you and your team accomplished that.

We started with a focus on safety. When I arrived, the plant had a poor safety record and morale was generally low. The first step was to establish an open environment for everyone to report safety incidents and we spent a lot of time and effort to convince our folks that no one would be in trouble for reporting an issue.

The next step was to meet monthly with a cross-functional team and review the metrics together and implement actions to address the most common safety issues first. After two years we were rewarded by CNESSA with rebates and upgrades in our safety classification as the team reduced real incidents by more than 50 percent per year. 

Another action we took to create a Great Place to Work was the implantation of a performance bonus system that allowed everyone to be personally connected to the results. I also implemented a monthly employee communication meeting.

In each meeting I shared the corporate sales, gross margin and EBITDA performance, shared updates on major projects, talked through two to three key focus areas to improve, and also celebrated long service awards and called out significant individual actions that yielded exceptional results or were in line with GSC’s values.

This was followed by an open mic session where anyone could ask the senior leadership team anything.  It served to foster trust and communicated expectations and progress to the whole team.

We encourage participation in the communities where we work, like entering a team for the obstacle course at the Royal Military College annually. We participate in charity everts in Champlain, New York, and at St. Jean sur Richelieu here in Canada to allow our employees to give back to their communities.

In my view, all of these actions and thinking help contribute to our Best Place to Work accreditation.

What advice do you have for aspiring young professionals?

Learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Accept any and every challenge, even—or especially if—it seems scary. Academic training and working with a mentor are still important tools to supplement your development, but nothing will move the needle faster for your personal growth than accepting a new challenge and tackling it yourself.

Finally, an experience without analysis is not an experience at all. I have learned some great things from some fabulous bosses and colleagues, and some great things from some terrible bosses and colleagues. There is always something there to learn I always like to remember the saying “great sailors are not made in calm seas.”