Manufacturing for Good: Christina Keller of Cascade Engineering

Eva: Welcome to the Beyond Capital Podcast. In our purpose driven world, leadership is increasingly crucial. Now more than ever, shareholders are demanding the integration of social values and causes in everything, from shoes to soap to investments. We're bringing you the stories of leaders that are marrying profit with purpose. I'm Eva Yazhari, CEO of Beyond Capital. Ed: And I'm Ed Stevens, CEO of Preciate. Eva: And this is the Beyond Capital Podcast. Ed: Today's guest is Christina Keller, president and CEO of Cascade Engineering. Christina's company, Cascade, is a family-owned manufacturing and plastics business based in Michigan, with 14 locations around the U.S. And Hungary. Cascade works in a variety of industries, including transportation, recycling services, office seating and large scale plastic molding. She started her career in consulting and healthcare technology before joining Cascade, a company founded by her father in the 1970s. Eva: Let's dive in. Welcome, Christina. Christina: Thank you so much. Eva: Thank you so much for joining us today. I'd love to kick it off by painting a picture of Cascade Engineering's core business. Can you describe a little bit about what the company does? Christina: Right. So we are a triple bottom line organization. We focus on people, planets and profits and all of our decisions as we move forward. As mentioned, we're a diversified, large tonnage injection molder in a variety of different industries, including transportation, auto and truck, furniture, logistics in other areas, in the core fabric that weaves us together is our large scale injection molding, but also the care for people, planet, and profit in all of our decisions. Eva: That's super impressive, and I imagine that drives you personally as the CEO of a company. Can you tell us what gets you up, excited to lead Cascade Engineering every single day? Christina: Absolutely. And for me, a large piece of that is our people. I really am passionate about the employees that we have in our organization. We've done a lot of work at reinvesting in the training and development of our individuals, and we've also opened the door a little wider than maybe other organizations have been willing to do. We've hired now over 1,000 people from prison, and also from welfare backgrounds, and we support them with services around, social workers on site, and the ability to have access to public transportation. We're now unrolling a housing program, to help with down payment assistance for our employees, and we're working to have them have career ladders throughout the organization that they could start as an entry level operator and progress up into even the management ranks of the organization. And so for me, hands down, it's the people in organizations that make me excited. But also a lot of things around the planet and the things that we're doing. People often think that plastics is not a environmentally friendly area, and I talk a lot about materiality. And using the right materials for the right purposes. In plastics, it's never intended to be a single use product. It's around for hundreds of years and used for applications, uh, that need to be around and be durable. So durable products, which are what we create, across the board, is actually a great material. And for example, with our parts, we've made over 30 million rolls to the cart, trash and recycle containers as well as organic. Um, and I could end with the life - we typically take those back, re-grind them and put them into our next cart, and so we're able to have a full, cradle-to-cradle life cycle with our products and the plastic is a durable product that allows it to be something that can persist in its application. And our parts have a 10 year warranty. So for me that you mentioned your bottom line, people, planet, profits. People are very excited that the planet is right up there as well. Ed: Has your company always been focused on people, planet, and profit, or is that something relatively new for you? Christina: It was part of the inception. So, uh, we've been around for over 40 years and our founder had a passion for this. The triple bottom line terminology probably came around in the 80s and 90s for us, so we've been publishing a triple bottom line report tracking and measuring ourselves on the progress, relative to our goals and objectives. But really, it was part of the initial founding and the purposes of the organization. Our founder, Fred Keller, my father, was, a Methodist and one of the quotes he had was "do all the good you can to all the people you can for as long as ever you can." And so a core principle of that foundation or tenant was doing good to others, and that evolved into doing good for the environment, in doing good for people in our organization, and in our communities and beyond. Ed: I think it's so fascinating when companies focus so much on their people. I had the good fortune of meeting Bob Chapman. He would talk about how so much social good could be done just by sending your people home at night, you know, feeling good about their work, feeling good about themselves, being energized, being there for their families when they get home. That really pumps me up, that kind of a kind of approach for a business like yours. Christina: Absolutely. And people spend a lot of time in their work environment. So one of our goals is to be an employer of choice, a place where you choose to go and you're not saying on Wednesday, you know, it's just getting over the hump, or Happy Friday, or other things. It's that you're really passionate, engaged on what you're doing. And then if they say, obviously you never work a day in your life if you enjoy what you do. Eva: So having people, profit, and planet at the center of your company ultimately led you to go through the B Corp certification, and you've pointed out to me that you are one of the only B corporations in manufacturing. Can you talk more about why you decided to go through the process, and also what effect it had on the company? Christina: We're a group full of engineers, and we love metrics, we love data. And so we really wanted to know how to measure some of these things that are relatively squishy. You know, when you talk about your social impact, your environmental impact, it's difficult to come to agreement of what's the value of a person or a tree or something along those lines. And so, always looking at best practices of how others are looking at the metrics relative to the environment and people. So, Fred actually came along with a nice group of people from B Lab, and talked to them about what they're trying to accomplish, and I think for us it was twofold. Already we were focused on being a purpose driven organization, but for us it was 1. having those metrics available so that we can improve what we're doing and get better over time. And so we have seen our B score grow as we've continued to learn and adapt with it, understand how we can improve in different areas. One of the major areas it opened us up to was looking at our supply base, and how we can ask similar things of our supply base that we're doing internally. So that was a big growth area for us. The second piece was really to be part of a community. We were a bit out in front of the purpose led organization movement, and so having a partnership with others in the States that are passionate about making a positive impact through business, and looking at how we can practice capitalism differently, having that, uh, group was an interesting point for us as well. So we have been engaged in various different activities related to real leaders and B corporations and others to be able to expand our network and partnership and support others that are working. Ed: And when did you go through the B Corp process? Christina: I believe it was probably over 10 years ago. We've been a part of it for quite a while. Ed: Yeah, that's really impressive. My company's actually going through the process as well. And, um, we're a much smaller business. So it's not as big of a problem, but definitely, um, you know, along the different aspects of the environmental impact and social impacts and so on, it is very metrics driven and gives you a way to track your progress from year to year. Eva: You've mentioned that you've incorporated more recycled plastics into your products, and, um, that the kind of environmental impact is very key to you. Tell us who has initiated these changes within the company. Christina: Well, I think innovation for us comes from any area. And so we have actually a group called Noble Polymers, which does compounding. And they initially had been looking at different ways that we could bring, um, additional contaminated end of life products into our processes, maybe even using compatiblizers to make them more relevant for HCTE, and how we can increase our alternative materials, so we have our engineers involved in that, we have our chemists involved in that. We've also been working with an outside group. UBQ, who came to us through a connection with, I believe the Closed Loop fund and some other groups. Um, UBQ is actually taking trash and making it into plastic so that we can ultimately have a carbon negative, um, product available for sale, which is pretty exciting. So it's really looking at our entire carbon footprint, looking at use of recycled content and an overall impact that we're having on both the climate footprint as well as our dear waste landfill initiative and all of our facilities we're driving towards and in many cases, at your waste into a landfill from our manufacturing facility. Eva: And when you established those partnerships, was it your Board? Was it you, was it the president and CEO, who was really helping to drive that decision? Christina: Ultimately, there is buy-in from all levels with stakeholders, the board of directors, the management and the Executive Council, to be able to foster and grow those ideas. But as I mentioned, innovations can really come from anywhere. We had one that came up from Jeff Toten, one of our engineers. We have another that came to us through a partnership on the outside, one of our more on the people's side. But the pink cart was the brainchild of Julianne Perkins, who's one of our business unit leaders for, uh, for the trash containers and the recycling containers. And she was impacted by breast cancer because her mother and grandmother both passed away of breast cancer. So to celebrate their birthdays and celebrate the fact that she had passed hers and did not get breast cancer, she made a pink cart for breast cancer awareness. And a dollar for every cart goes to cancer research. It also has information on the top about remember, get your mammogram. It's a pink cart with the ribbon on the side. So you might even see those being rolled to the curb across the nation and potentially gonna win the coolest innovation in Michigan Award this year. We're pretty excited about the pink cart, but that was an idea that somebody had within our organization, and we fostered it because an innovation can come from anywhere. And as long as you have an environment that fosters the growth of those ideas, we were excited that now we've had $500,000 raised towards breast cancer awareness from somebody's idea from within the organization. Eva: Yeah, that's a perfect example of how one of your employees has kind of been involved in product design and have a stake in the purpose. I imagine that your employees are proud and impressed by this. Also the zero waste and the carbon negative products that you produce. So I think for me, one of Cascade Engineering's mantras that I love is that the company takes an approach worth standing for. I can't imagine that has been an easy pathway. Can you talk about some of the tensions that you've navigated when instituting a triple bottom line approach? Christina: Sure, and obviously there's been false starts and difficulties along the way. And I think even with some of our success stories, there's areas where you know you lose your way for a little bit and then find it again. One of the ones that was, I think that, was most powerful is the work that we've done on the prisoner reentry work. When you look at the stats, our state has 9,000 people coming back from prison, back into society, every year and a lot of times those people don't even have a state issued IDs. And so if you think about the difficulty and the false starts of trying to find a job. You can't get a home, because you can't get a loan because you don't have a home address. You can't get a driver's license and don't have an ID, because you don't have a home. It's just the compounding impact. Count 25 shows that if you have a job and a home, you're 90% less likely to go back to jail. But yet you have very high recidivism rates, where people are going back into the system. We're spending billions of dollars every year from the state to be able to incarcerate people, and we're really not focused on how those people are gonna come back and transition into society and be successful. And so, one of the programs that we have is to support prison reentry, and one of the individuals, Jahan McKinley, who started in - he's one of our early people in the program, starting production floor with all the way through the program of our PFC. Becoming a plant manager, is now down in Texas working on our lean implementation, and actually gave a wonderful talk on TedX called Transitional Leaders, and it was all about his journey of coming back and the false starts and the difficulties. But the persistence that he shows, and the ability that he had to wade through those barriers and overcome those barriers to be successful in the work environment. And now he has a wife and two young kids. Um, and they're doing wonderfully. And it's so great to hear the stories of individuals that have moved, kind of navigated through all the difficulties, um, within society and within our organization. And obviously there's some that have come through and maybe not made it to the level that Jahan has, but, um, I think it is a testament to the resilience and the persistence that individuals can have. Ed: Christina, I'm wondering, I'm 100% convinced, I see the big impact that that type of a program can have. Since you do measure everything, I'm just curious, you know, maybe just if you could shed some light on, is that type of a hiring process and sort of total cost of employee comparable to a standard hiring process? Or is it more expensive, or is it less expensive. Christina: Well, if you look at it from an aggregate perspective, in the manufacturing industry, manufacturing ranked dead last in terms of what high schoolers want to go into. 52% of the Gallup Poll says that they want little or no interest in manufacturing. They rank it seven out of seven in their career choices. And so, we're also seeing, if you do get millennials to come in to your employment, They typically, the average tenure is about two years. Um, if you get all the way through that process. And so the cost of turnover is actually quite a bit, especially if you have a young person that you're investing a lot of resources, training, talent, etcetera, to get up to speed. You're gonna be filling that hole again. It's difficult in the manufacturing industry. I believe they're saying that there's about 2.5 million jobs that will likely go unfilled in manufacturing in the next number of years. This is the combination of no interest from incoming talent, as well as a lack of STEM programming and STEM talent developments in our pipelines. So really, it's twofold. One is you're giving someone an opportunity. We have 20 million people in the U.. that have former felonies, and you have 40 million people living in poverty. So there are 60 million people that are potentially underemployed and looking for opportunities in our current pipeline. And everyone's very focused on the millennial talent and how we can attract them. Not that that's not a worthwhile effort. We want to continue that effort, but one of things we've said is, you know, we want to focus differently. We want to focus on people that want to be here. We want to support them, and we want to give them opportunities for growth. And we do find that the average tenure for our former felons and other groups is over seven years. Ed: So do you support a stronger emphasis on trade schools versus sort of university and colleges, then, just in general, to sort of, you know, get people going in that direction? Or is that just sort of not in your current thought process? Christina: Well, I think it is definitely. We support a lot of robotics programs for schools. I think, you know, trade schools are very important, technical training is very important and teaching trades to those that might be on their second career as well. You know, maybe they studied and have a bachelors or in some area, but then are wanting to go into more technical trade. Like manufacturing really has a brand issue. More people should aspire to the technical trade, maintenance, care... Because realistically, there's some very interesting things going on in manufacturing with product design. The way things are going with industry 4.0, machine learning, visions systems. We have some pretty high level skillsets, to be able to work the machinery, to be able to keep ourselves moving forward in this revolution. And so I like to say, you know, everyone wants to go out and sell AdWords, but realistically, here in West Michigan there's a really great opportunity to make beautiful office furniture, to make components for various different automobiles. There's a lot of different opportunities to make tangible products. And so getting students interested in the technical fields, getting them supported in how they can see a career path in that beyond just thinking of that as a dead-end job. I think that that's an important case, as well as taking people who might be on the second career looking at other opportunities. And how can we have great training resources that can partner with manufacturing, to ensure that we're raising the bar and we're not gonna lose out to - China, they're investing in electric vehicles and other things that we keep our cutting edge on the innovation side. Eva: Christina, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about you as a purpose driven leader. First, just describe to us what does a day look like for you at your company when you're looking at more than the financial bottom line, and focusing on people, profit and planet. Christina: Great. Well, um, every day looks a little bit different. So it's got a lot of different pieces, but I really try to stay focused on our three core areas, which is customer driven innovation, employer first choice and operational excellence. My day could be balanced anywhere between spending time with a customer, ensuring that we're listening to what their concerns are, working with our engineering team on what is the next generation innovation that we can bring in either a product innovation or an innovation of process, and looking at how we can potentially look at additional patents and other things that you can get involved in. From an employer choice perspective, I always try to attend on Mondays their orientation so that we can say hello to our new adds and say hello and welcome them to the organization. Also work at having lunches for employees to be a little bit of a lottery system. And if somebody has a birthday that month, um, we get them together and do a lunch and get to know each other. So, uh, tell a little bit about their background. That's where a lot of our formerly incarcerated people talk about the impact that having a job has had on them and their career. That's one of the most personally enriching conversations that we get to have. And it's fun because you have people from the production floor, or HR, or finance, leadership staff in from throughout the organization. The only kind of bond is that we all have a birthday that month, and it allows us to celebrate each other. We also do our Star Award at our town hall where we have a peer Star Award winner, and then people come up with gratitude for what that person means to them. And those are really powerful moments. But we actually have the University of Michigan Deposit school of business come and study some of our practices. They really appreciated the Star Awards, including an orientation such as our diversity theater and other things to help people coming in set the tone for what's acceptable within our organization and so, we can trace their activities. And the last one's really operational excellence. So ensuring that, you know, our practices are working well, our S&P process. Our materials are looking at how everything's flowing with our purchasing and our supply dates, and, uh, really troubleshooting is a big role that you end up in as a leader, but also celebrating some of the opportunities of when we've made some successes, especially relative to our metric, um, as we continue our journey towards operational excellence. Eva: Yeah, thank you. And it's clear to me that you're passionate about what you're doing. Um, so do you feel that focusing on more than just the financial bottom line fuels a greater satisfaction for you as a leader? Christina: Absolutely. I think that, um, you know, as I continue in my career here. You allowed it to be judged at some level on your financial results in what you brought to the organization. But I think your true value lies in the lives that we've impacted, and how you lead your community, uh, to the next generation. And so I'm excited about the legacy we've built, that Cascade of being a participant. And one of the things that Fred did was convene a bunch of CEOs in a group called Talent 2025 where we're focused on how we're going to get great talent for our community in the future. And in other areas where we've come together as the community to say, How can we make a positive impact? And I think those types of things for example, our prisoner reentry program. We were in the first ones to hire people that were formerly incarcerated, out of now over 320 companies in the region that are hiring people out of prison. So not only the impact that you could make personally on your organization, but the impact you could have as a partner or a peer to other organizations in their approach. Eva: Yeah, I think setting an example, especially, um, being a B-Corp, and with the movement of companies that are purpose driven, is extremely powerful and has tremendous potential for social impact. So wrapping up today, we'd love to know what's next for Cascade Engineering. Um, particularly on the social impact side, but also on the business side. Love to hear more details. Christina: Well I'm pretty excited about some of our future areas. One area that we're dipping our toe in, is smart logistics. And so we have a small group that does RFID encapsulation, or automizing our name tags. We also have a business that does bins and pallets for the logistics industry. And so what we're starting to do is as people are moving away from single use plastics and cardboard for shipment, how can we be part of that change and also bringing information or data right into your ERP system, through logistics and otherwise. So really having smart logistics be something that we can help out with as people are, you know, bringing product to market, bring product other places, being able to have a plastic injection mold for reusable, knock down bin, pallets, otherwise that they don't have to be utilizing all of the waste that we have today with bubble wrap and weaving pallets and other types of waste. A lot of ways to reduce waste in the cycle right now, packaging. And so how can we help cut down on that waste by providing returnable usable solutions and, by the way, getting more data information relative to the RFID, and even embedding sensors. So if you're sending a product ice cream or something, you want to know if it's broken to keep cold cycles, you can send that with some of these new smart pallet technologies. Eva: Excellent. Christina, thank you so much for your time and for describing to us how your company is focused on the triple bottom line. It's extremely inspiring for us and hopefully for other companies out there. Christina: Well, thank you so much. And thank you for what you're doing as well, I think if everybody shares their story, that could be inspiring to each other to continue on the journey. The worthwhile journey of being a purpose-led organization. Ed: Thanks, Christina. Christina: Have a great day. Eva: Once again, it's clear that a business leader with good intentions can create an impressive social, environmental and ethical impact. There's always a way to put meaning behind the mission of a company, and we can all make a difference. Ed: You've taken the first step by listening to the Beyond Capital Podcast. Thanks for joining us. Don't forget to rate, review, and if you haven't yet, subscribe on your favorite Podcast platform. For more information, go to beyondcapitalpodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter at @EAStevens. Eva: and follow me on Instagram at @ConsciousInvestor. Until next time. Ed: Bye everyone.