This article is part of our Beyond the Family Business series.
Hosted by Luke Hansen-MacDonald, a second-generation family business leader, “Beyond the Family Business” is one of the most thoughtful and engaging podcasts about family enterprise in Canada. Every two weeks on Canadian Family Offices, Luke goes beyond the headlines with other leaders in family businesses and family offices to explore lessons they have learned, their successes and their challenges.
In this episode of “Beyond the Family Business,” Luke sits down with Ben Hertzman, the second-generation leader of a 100-year-old-plus packaging company, which counts among its customers some of the best-known high-end retailers in Canada and the U.S. Hertzman is also the president of Gather Packaging, a Toronto-based manufacturer of high-quality paper shopping bags.
In his conversation with Luke, Ben shares:
- How the company his father started had its origins in his grandfather’s entrepreneurial journey.
- How one of his father’s first customers—the team behind the smash-hit board game Trivial Pursuit—provided a launchpad for further growth and global expansion.
- How he got involved in the family business, and his approach to bridging decision-making between the generations.
- How, as a global manufacturer based in Canada, his company has navigated tariffs and geopolitical disruption.
Previous episodes of “Beyond the Family Business” on Canadian Family Offices feature K.C. Daya, Jeffrey McCain , Ian Wilson, Derrick Hunter and Pierre Somers.
Disclaimer: This podcast is sponsored by BMO Private Wealth. The information provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or professional advice. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any organization or company. Always consult with a qualified financial advisor or professional before making any investment decisions.
Luke: Hi, I am Luke Hansen-MacDonald, and this is Beyond the Family Business, a podcast made in partnership with Canadian Family Offices, where we dive into the challenges and opportunities that come with running a family enterprise. This episode is brought to you by BMO Private Wealth. As a client myself, I’ve seen firsthand how they can help families like mine plan for the future.
Today’s guest is Ben Hertzman. He’s a Toronto native and second-generation leader of his family business, Progress Luv2Pak, and the newly formed Gather Packaging. They are experts in high-end retail packaging, supplying customers across Canada and the U.S. This episode is very topical because Ben gets into detail about his offshore supply chain and how he’s had to become an expert in dealing with tariffs. He also shares his new strategy of reshoring part of his supply chain, and how in a very short period of time his team has built out a local manufacturing facility in Toronto. And lastly, we get into the legacy story of his family business and how his father’s first big win was producing the Trivial Pursuit boxes in the 1980s.
Alright, this is Beyond the Family Business podcast. Let’s jump into it.
Luke: So, I always start off with the same three questions. Who are you? Where are you from? And what do you do?
Ben: My name is Hertzman, born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and I still live here, and I’m in the packaging business. My company supplies products like shopping bags and gift boxes to retailers and brands all over the world. And I’ve got a feeling that just about every single one of your listeners has used one of my products over the years and likely has one of them in their home today.
Luke: Awesome. Well, I’m very excited to learn more. So, starting off, you are from multiple generations of entrepreneurs. Could you tell us a little bit about that entrepreneurial history within your family?
Ben: For sure. So, I’ll tell two stories of entrepreneurs coming to Canada and starting businesses. I’ll start with my own family. So, my own family came to Canada in the 1920s, and my great-grandfather was in the clothing business. He had a menswear store in downtown Toronto right near Young and Dundas. And when my grandfather and his two brothers-in-law of three partners came into the business, they were among the first in the Canadian menswear industry to embrace discounting. So, they would go to Japan in the 1960s before anyone was doing it and buy clothes for a fraction of the cost of what you could get them for here in Toronto. And, you know, there were a lot more people with $3 to spend on a shirt than $10 to spend on a shirt. And the business really took off. They went, grew the business from one store to 30. My grandfather took the company public in the ’60s, and he sold it when he was, I think 47 years old. And then, he lived till he was 90 and spent the rest of his life investing in real estate, going to Florida, playing gin rummy and golf and living a good life.
Luke: That is an ideal life story, selling a business halfway through and then enjoying the second half. That’s amazing.
Ben: Oh, yeah. My great uncle Arnie, who was one of his partners, was into big boats. So, he bought a big boat and had a boat slip next to Evel Knievel, which is his claim to fame, among other things.
Luke: That’s insane. And sorry, I got to tell you, there’s a guy in Halifax who bought Evel Knievel’s Boat.
Ben: Oh, no kidding.
Luke: It is now in Halifax. I actually interviewed him on the show.
Ben: Oh, that’s so funny.
Luke: Yeah. Anyway, hilarious.
Ben: So, my dad didn’t have a family business to go into. He was still in high school when the clothing company was sold. So, my dad went to go work. He got his MBA, he worked at the Oshawa Group, which is a really large grocery chain at the time; later the Oshawa Group was acquired by Sobeys. And my dad worked his way up through the company but got to the point where he wanted to become a vice-president. His boss said to him, ‘David, you got to wait 10 more years before you’re going to become a VP.’ And he said, ‘I think I want to go do something on my own.’
So, he did some consulting work, got a little tired of telling people how they should run their business. He thought he could do it better himself, and he had this desire to go buy his own business. And sitting in his accountant’s office one day, he said to his accountant, ‘You know, I’d love to buy a small business and run it and see what I can do with it.’ His accountant said, ‘You should go talk to my Uncle Lou. He’s got an old box factory he wants to sell.’ That’s how we were introduced to the company that we now run today.
So, the business I now run was started back in 1917, even before that. An immigrant named Morris Lukovsky came to Canada, escaping World War I in Russia. And he came to Canada, couldn’t speak the language, he needed a job. He found work in a factory sewing hats, and sitting there sewing hats every day, he saw that every hat was placed into a hat box. And he said, Why should I work for someone? Why don’t I open up my own business? How about a hat box factory? So that’s what he did. The business took off, and they expanded their product line, and they served just about every icon of Canadian retail, from 1917 really through to the early 1980s, when my family bought the business.
And, you know, you think Hudson’s Bay, Eaton’s, Holt Renfrew, Harry Rosen, who’s still a client today after 70 years, Eaton’s, Thrifty’s, Simpson’s, and many more. We worked with all of them. And Mr. Lukovsky brought his sons into the business. That family ran it for about 60 years and, come to the year 1981, Mr. Lukovsky’s son Lou was looking to retire. And he was introduced to my dad, and as they say, the rest is history.
Luke: That is a cool story. I really love the fact that it’s a family business, you know, that then sold to another family business or, you know, a business family, and then took it on into the future. That’s super cool. The other aspect, I guess I would just quickly ask, do you know much about like what influence did your grandfather have on your dad, you know, as far as your grandfather was the original entrepreneur, but was never directly involved in the packaging business. Correct?
Ben: So, my grandfather and one of his business partners, a man named Harold Soupcoff, helped my dad buy the business when they were in the 1980s. And my grandfather was more of a silent partner. He was also a tough guy. Rough around the edges—as you know, a lot of entrepreneurs from that vintage were. But my dad’s partner, Harold Soupcoff, was a brilliant man. You know, he had this company, Wycliffe, which was a big property development business that became very successful. He started Pickle Barrel Restaurants. He started Mayfair Tennis Clubs. And, this man, Mr. Soupcoff, was a big believer and supporter of my dad. And anytime that there was an opportunity, we wanted to buy a piece of equipment, we wanted to go into a new business line, we’d take Mr. Soupcoff out for lunch, we’d sit down, he’d take out a pen and a napkin and draw out the deal. And he’d say ‘OK, this sounds good. How much are you going to put in? Here’s what I’m going to put in. Let’s go give it our best shot.’
Luke: Cool.
Ben: And Mr. Soupcoff eventually passed away, and we bought his family out, and we bought my grandfather out over the years, and it became my dad running the business. And now I’m in it.
Luke: Very cool. That’s interesting, the dynamic of how your grandfather’s business partner, you know, was a huge mentor to your dad. I wonder if it was almost because he was not a family member, it created a bit of arm’s length, less family baggage almost, or something like that?
Ben: I think it certainly helped. And he was a real bona fide businessman. Brilliant. Really successful. And he had a lot of folks, particularly in the property development business that he set up, and Wycliffe’s still around today and they built a ton of homes over the years.
Luke: Very Cool. That’s an awesome story. So, your dad bought this business, you know, he had never run a business that was his own. Can you speak at all about some of the challenges he faced when he took over a business that had, as you said, I think 60 years with another family, culturally, et cetera? That would be a huge hill to climb to then make it your own. What was that like for him?
Ben: Yeah. I mean, he’d never worked in a manufacturing environment before. He’d worked in the grocery business, and he’d done some consulting work, and he was an MBA. So, you suddenly wake up, and you’ve got a factory with dusty old equipment and people that had been working there for a long time. And Mr. Lukovsky’s daughter was still in the business. She was a sales rep, and there were a bunch of people that had been there for a while. But when Mr. Lukovsky sold the business to us, he said, ‘I’m going to stay on for you full-time, and you part-time, and I’ll show you what to do, but I recommend you hire this factory manager.’ There was a guy from England who came on and really knew how to run a manufacturing plant because we—my dad had the sales and marketing experience, he had the business management experience, he had instinct, he knew how to put deals together, but when it came to actually how do you run equipment and produce stuff—which I mean, Luke, you’re in the manufacturing business as well. You know that it’s a very challenging thing to do. Having someone with that kind of expertise really set him up for success. And that plant manager was with him for some time until we were able to bring on more people that could help us run the business. And we built our own expertise as well.
Luke: Very cool. And what was that, you told me this before so I’m kind of doing a leading question, but can you talk about the Trivial Pursuit opportunity that sort of revolutionized the business, it sounded like?
Ben: It was, sometimes you get lucky, and I’m a big believer that the harder you work, the luckier you get. So, when we bought the business, we had a little division that was producing a lot of boxes for board games—you think Scrabble, Monopoly, and a whole bunch of others. And the orders weren’t that big, but we’d been doing it for quite a while.
One day, our controller walks into my dad’s office and says, ‘We have this massive order for a client I’ve never heard of before, and they have no credit. What do you want to do?’ We took a look at the order and we said, ‘This seems pretty big. Let’s see if the customer will come in and tell us about it. And we’ll see what we want to do with it.’
So, the customer comes in a couple of days later, nine o’clock in the morning. It looked like this guy had been sleeping in his clothes. He sees a bottle of scotch up on the shelf, asks for a drink at 9 a.m. and begins to tell us his story. He’d been in England with his friends travelling, sitting in pubs, playing trivia, and came up with this idea for a board game. So, he goes back to Canada and the U.S., goes to all these trade shows and comes back with all these orders, and he needs someone to produce the board games for him. So, he comes to us and says, after having a drink, after looking like he’d been sleeping in his clothes, ‘I think this is going to be big. If you take a chance on me, I’m going to remember you.’ And we said yes. So that propelled the business. Our factory ran 24/7 for years. My dad paid off his house a year or two after he bought the business. And, you know, Trivial Pursuit was huge in the early 80s. And we produced most of the boxes for it.
Luke: That’s crazy. That is such a random success story. That’s awesome.
Ben: Sometimes you get lucky, and I mean, it didn’t last forever. And our company did many different things over the years in our factory. Like we did cereal boxes for General Mills, and we did envelopes for Canada Post, and the specialty that our factory really had was making gift boxes for retailers all over North America. That was what our factory was really tooled to produce. And, you know, if you went to Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle, Express, Ann Taylor, Chico’s in Canada, Reitman’s and Laura, many, many others, they were all our clients, many of them still are today. And we produced their holiday gift boxes in our factory. Board games didn’t last forever. It was great while it lasted, but it was certainly a story that’s really part of our history.
Luke: Yeah, absolutely. So, when I was like 13-14, going to Abercrombie & Fitch with bleached tips and my hair gelled up, I was getting one of your guy’s gift boxes in all likelihood.
Ben: And shopping bags—they’re a fabulous client. We still work with them today.
Luke: Yeah. Oh, that’s funny.
Ben: They’re very different now than when they were back in the ’90s and 2000s. The stores are not dark, and their demographic has changed just a little bit, but—
Luke: Hey, they were like the coolest thing ever when I was in middle school.
Ben: So Luke, I had frosted tips, too. It wasn’t a good look for me.
Luke: Yeah, exactly. Maybe let’s not go back there. So, you talked a lot about the manufacturing footprint, but then your dad actually got out of local manufacturing, did he not? And can you talk a bit about that transition?
Ben: Yeah. There’s a story and journey before that. So, we had this factory that he bought, and when we bought the business, everything that we sold was what we produced in house. But our clients who liked buying the things that we could make in Canada asked us for things that we couldn’t produce in Canada. They said, you know, take a luxury menswear retailer, they could buy all different sorts of things from us beyond just a gift box. They would buy a shopping bag, they’d buy a suit bag, they’d buy ribbon, they’d buy tissue. And some of those things are not made in North America. If you go buy a suit from, a menswear, ladies-wear retailer, the bag that you take it home in, is still made at a sewing machine to this day, one at a time. And there’s no one in North America, there is a sewing industry in North America, but not to produce something like that. So, my great uncle Arnie, the guy with the Evil Knievel boat, he was the one who would go to Asia and import. That was his role in the clothing business. And when, my dad bought the factory, Uncle Arnie said to us, ‘If you ever want to import, if you ever want to bring over some nicer products that you can’t produce here in North America, I’ll show you how to do it.’
So that was back in the mid-’80s. And, again, we were among the first in our industry to embrace importing. We went, it took a long time to get there in the ’80s, you know, two days to go. At the time we were in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea,and Hong Kong. China didn’t even open up until the late ’80s, early ’90s. And then we went there and the importing part of our business really grew pretty rapidly. And it got to the point where we were sourcing things from factories all over the world, distributing them to our retailers that have stores all over the world, and we had this factory as well, which was pretty good, but it was highly seasonal. When you’re producing a holiday gift box for a retailer, the busiest time of year is really from, call it Black Friday to Christmas, and you’re running nonstop to get ready for that. But the rest of the year, is a little quiet.
It made sense for us about 15 years ago to focus all of our efforts on importing and to exit manufacturing. And sometimes, when you’re an entrepreneur, when you own your own business, and at this point, it was just my dad in it, you have to adapt. You have to see, how much capital do you have tied up in a particular segment of your business? What assets do you have? We had a ton of people there. And, you know, there were huge ebbs and flows, and when there’s seasonality and cyclicality, you have to make choices. And we were able at that time to become a much leaner, much more profitable business. And for us, at that time, it was the right move.
Luke: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean to your point about the Trivial Pursuit opportunity, if all you did was focus on that, you would’ve not existed for another few decades after that. Right? So, you do have to constantly be evolving. And, you know, sometimes that means making tough decisions, but the businesses that are still around today that have been around for decades are the ones that made those tough decisions. They’re not the ones that just said, ‘All right, we’re doing it one way, and that’s the only way we’ll ever do it.’
Ben: You have to adapt. There’s a friend of mine who says pretty regularly, ‘If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevancy even more.’
Luke: Yeah. No kidding. That’s a good way to put it. So then, now let’s go to your story a little bit. What’s your earliest memory of the family business?
Ben: So, my parents split when I was three years old. And I have an older sister who, she’s much older than me, so when I was 7, she went away to university. So, when I was with my dad, it was just me and him, and he would take me along, just as part of his life. You know, he would pick me up from school, we’d go grocery shopping and cook dinner. I was the only one in my house in university that actually knew how to cook. But on weekends, the factory was still running. And he’d say, ‘OK, Ben, come along,’ and he’d go talk to people, and he’d give me to someone to, you know, go for a ride on a forklift, or they had these conveyor belts that would move the material through the factory, and they’d put me in a box and I’d go along the conveyor belts on a ride. That’s my earliest memory in the business.
And because as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve had the business and it, and it’s just been a part of my life. And I’d go to go to the holiday parties and then, growing up through the years, the business was, there was never any pressure to join, but there was always discussion about it. And I was really fortunate that, you know, some of the trips that my dad and I took together, where it was spring break or whatever it was, and he had to go visit some customers in California. So, he took me along, and I can remember falling asleep at the dinner table with customers, in California. And I also remember there was a couple of weeks, before the start of school, I was 14 or 15 years old, and my dad said, ‘OK, Ben, we’re going to Japan, and we’re going to go visit some suppliers.’ And I still remember flying over to Japan and being super jet-lagged and waking up at, you know, three o’clock in the morning going for a run around the Imperial Palace, and then going to visit,one of our Japanese suppliers and going to Hong Kong and having that experience and having bespoke shirts made and riding the Star Ferry and all, and all the things that you … I mean, I have friends that would go to a resort or on a cruise on their spring break, and I went to Japan. That was really, really cool.
Luke: Yeah. That is amazing. I mean, I think that’s—sorry to interrupt—but like, people sometimes have a negative connotation about kids getting brought into the family business too early. And I think that’s a perfect example of how unique and cool of an experience it can be. You know, your dad’s going to meet customers, but you’re getting to go along with him, first of all, which directly or indirectly you’re getting to learn from how he’s dealing with customers and all of that. But you’re getting to see this whole other, you know, unique side of life, which, you know, if you’d just gone to Disneyland or whatever, that would be nice, too. But that sounds like an awesome childhood. Those are some really cool memories.
Ben: We’ve got a really special relationship and still work together today. I mean, he’s 75 now, and he spends close to six months of the year in Florida and is probably on a fishing boat right now. But, you know, I’ve been really fortunate to have grown up with him and to spend so much one-on-one time with him and for him to have brought me along.
But the thing was that I went to Queen’s and studied business. There wasn’t a role for me at the company after I graduated, and that was made very clear. So, you know, I had a whole bunch of summer jobs and there were summer jobs where I would come and help out in some way in the business. Like, I worked in, we had a retail store for a little bit, and I worked in the retail store for a year, worked in the warehouse for a year. I remember there was a gap between—I had another summer job. I spent a summer selling chocolate for Cadbury. That was awesome. I was a summer camp counsellor for a couple of years, and whenever there was a gap between whatever job I had and the start of school, there was no bumming around. There was, ‘OK, Ben, you’ve got two weeks. You are coming to the office. We’ve got a marketing campaign we want to do. We’ve got a website we want to launch. I could use your help.’ And I was happy to do it.
But after university, there was no role for me at the company. And I also wanted to go stand on my own two feet. One of my dad’s close friends who’s been very, very successful, as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, said, you know, ‘Ben, the early part of your career is a great chance to learn. Go find a phenomenal company to work for, and see if you can learn how to sell, because no matter what you’re going to do in life, selling is going to help you.’ And I’m still a firm believer in that. So, I set my mind that I wanted to go work for Procter & Gamble, and it took me three tries to get in before they finally said yes. And I remember going back to the final-round interview, and it was the interview for a full-time job, which was in my fourth year. And the interviewer was the same as it was in my third year. He’s like, ‘Oh, Ben, I remember you, and I admire your tenacity coming back here again.’ But I got the job.
Luke: That’s awesome. And what area did you work in at P&G?
Ben: I was in sales.
Luke: For any particular products?
Ben: Yeah. So, they split you off either generally by customer first, and they also give you a number of categories to work on. So, I spent a couple years living in Vancouver, calling on London Drugs, and then I moved back to Toronto, got promoted. I worked on the Target business until Target went under. And then I spent a bunch of time on the Walmart Canada business. And the brands I covered, you know, you spend time working on a bunch of different brands, but I spent most of my time on haircare products. So, Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Herbal Essences. Baby care, Pampers, shaving Gillette, and covered off most of their other brands through the years I was there.
Luke: So, you got a lot of experience selling to retail as well, which is probably super valuable in your current role.
Ben: P&G was a phenomenal place to start a career. I can’t recommend it enough. The people there are so smart. And you get to work on things that are at a massive scale. Like when I was on the Walmart business, I had a pretty good year, and they said, ‘OK, Ben, we’re rewarding you and a few other top-performing sales reps to go down to the Walmart annual shareholders meeting in Bentonville.’ And this is, you know, something unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, because it’s meant for all the Walmart, Bentonville is in the middle of nowhere, northwest Arkansas is quite remote, but the whole city around it has been built up to support Walmart. And when Sam Walton was trying to get people to support his business, he said, ‘You know what, we’re going to have it be like a homecoming, and we’re going to have concerts and events.’ And I went down there and, you know, they have this arena where there was 15,000 people from all over the world and Katy Perry performed.
Luke: That’s insane.
Ben: And not to mention getting to be in an environment where you’re with folks that are calling on the Wal, like P&G at the time, I think was doing over $10 billion a year with Walmart. And you get to work with people that are working with Walmart in Argentina, and in China, and in South Africa, and certainly Canada and the U.S. And it was really, really cool to have that kind of exposure, so early on in my career and create those kinds of memories. And you learn a ton selling to Walmart. You learn a ton selling to Target. And getting to really cut your teeth with such iconic brands and such really smart people really was a wonderful place to start a career. And I can’t recommend it enough.
Luke: Yeah, it sounds like it. Absolutely. So, can you talk a little bit about, you know, you were at P&G, then how did you transition into the family business?
Ben: So, it was the year I got married, it was 2017. And at the time, you know, things were going great at P&G. [I] had a high rating, I was getting promoted. I could have stayed there and spent a career there if I wanted to. But my dad and I started to have the conversation of, What would it look like if I wanted to come back into the family business? And I asked him the question like, ‘Do you want to sell the business or not?’ He said, ‘No, I don’t want to sell it. Would you consider coming back in and helping me out?’ And I said, ‘Sure. What does a role look like?’ And he said, ‘You know what, Ben, your business card is going to say trainee for the first three months, and you’re going to do every job in the company, and you’re going to learn from the ground up.’ Even though I had spent summers there, even though I had done different roles if I’m going to be coming in, like, I wasn’t coming in a senior management position. It was coming in to learn how the business actually runs.
And there’s a story that my dad told me over and over and over again as I joined, that he remembers from his years working for the Oshawa Group, which has to do with a grocery chain called Dutch Boy. So, when he was working for the Oshawa Group, his boss came to him and said, ‘You know, we’ve just bought this grocery chain out in Kitchener called Dutch Boy. See if you can help integrate them into the big chain.’ So, he goes out to Kitchener, goes into the grocery store and sees mom and dad in a little backroom writing purchase orders out by hand. And the business was highly profitable, making, call it, a million dollars a year. Anyway, the business, Dutch Boy gets swallowed up into the mothership. And they try to implement all these processes, and it goes from making a million dollars a year to losing a million dollars a year. And, as soon as my dad came in, he kept saying, ‘Ben, remember Dutch boy. You’re not going to come in and try to change everything. You have to understand how we do things, why things are going well, why we do things a certain way. And then you can start to put your mark on it.’
Luke: That’s excellent advice. Like, having seen a lot of, like we’re in the private equity world, and having seen lots of transactions, going in and immediately trying to tell everybody how to do their job right, is such a disastrous way to approach things. So that’s, that’s incredible advice.
Ben: They’ll say, ‘Who are you? I’ve been at this company longer than you’ve been alive.’ I mean, they weren’t saying that out loud, but they were thinking it. And there were certainly some people that said, ‘You know, Ben, at times, Ben’s overstepping his reach, or he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ But I really tried to show that I would work as hard as anyone. I was on the road more than anyone. I visited every customer that I could, every supplier that I could. I’m in Asia four times a year. That’s where a lot of our supply lines are. I went to every trade show and, you know, progressively over the years worked my way up through the company. So technically a trainee for three months. My first day on the job, I was unloading shipping containers, which were really dusty and heavy, and, you know, the team needs help, I’m happy to do that still today. And then took over running a little division, which I did for over a year, then ran operations, then I was the COO. And then, I found out I was going to be president about five minutes before it got announced to the company.
Luke: What’s that story?
Ben: Yeah. So, this was, I think right before our Christmas party in 2020, my dad sends me his Christmas party speech. And it’s about five minutes before we’re, it was still peak COVID, so we’re doing it over Zoom. And the Christmas party speech says, the United States is getting a new president in 2021, and so are we. Announcing Ben as the president of our company. And I’m thinking to myself, ahhh, that’s great.
Luke: That’s intense.
Ben: No, but I was honoured, happy to do it. I’d been the COO for a year. It was only a matter of time, but …
Luke: Was there precursor discussions or was this a complete shock?
Ben: I didn’t know it was going to be president before that, but I mean, it’s been five years now, and so far, so good. But it was around the time that one of my dad’s closest friends had a big health scare. He was spending more and more time in Florida, and I think that he, we had just come through COVID, which was, COVID was challenging. When most of your customers are retailers, and the government mandates you to shut down, it’s a challenging time.
We got into the PPE business as a lot of others did, and that kept us going. And while the PPE business was a thing, but once we were through that, my dad, you know, knew that if I was here, running the business, I’d actually have to run the business. And he wanted to spend more time in Florida. He wanted to hand the reins over, and that was his way of doing it.
Luke: Wow. Ripped the Band-Aid off.
Ben: Trial by fire. But it’s been just about five years now that I’ve been running the business. And one of the other things that he said too is, afterwards he said, ‘You know, Ben, I had been thinking about it for a while, and congratulations.’ He said, ‘You know, I was a member of YPO and you should join as well.’ And that’s where, that’s where you and I met, Luke.
Luke: Yeah, a hundred percent. And that’s same story for me. My dad was in YPO before I was, and I always sort of observed how valuable it was to him. And he’s now in whatever it’s called when you get much older …
Ben: Gold.
Luke: Yeah. I think it’s even beyond that. I think he’s in CEO or something like that, but he still has his forum of basically the same people he’s been in a forum with for, you know, a few decades now. And I know it’s been super valuable to him. And that was basically why I joined as well.
So, that’s an incredible story and super cool to hear, you know, your journey outside the business and how practical it was to you joining the business. That’s a very dramatic reveal. Probably the most dramatic one I’ve heard. You know, sometimes it’s a huge shock to the business. Rarely is it a huge shock to the person that’s getting it.
Ben: I wouldn’t call it a shock. I’d call it more ‘Oh, that’s nice. That’s how we’re doing this.’ But I was honoured, and yeah, happy to do it.
Luke: For sure. And obviously there was a lot of, it wasn’t like you were coming from the outside. You’d been in the business for a while. So can you talk a bit about—you know, so then you take over the business. Not unlike your dad’s story, you know, you worked in a different world beforehand. You have had some time in the business, I suppose. But, you know, what was that transition like? You know, was it, was it a natural transition given the time you’d had to sort of graduate up through the different roles? Or was there a whole section of the business that maybe your dad was overseeing you didn’t have experience in yet? Or, or what was that like?
Ben: Yeah, so when I started running operations, everyone in the company reported to me except for accounting and finance. So, it was basically sales, operations, purchasing, IT, everything else like that. So, and the team had grown up, along with me. So, there was a prior generation of senior leaders at our company, which had all more or less retired. And a couple that stuck around, but the team, the leadership team that I have right now, has been with us for some time. And, you know, the only real change was, you know, now overseeing finance and accounting and running the relationship with the bank. And, you know, we’re very happy clients at BMO. They’re phenomenal partners of ours.
And it wasn’t as bad of a transition as I expected because more and more my dad was working his way out of his role. And, you know, he hasn’t seen a client in years. And he still likes to go to Asia because it’s father-son trips. And, and we have fun going over there for, we go over two, three times a year. But when it comes to a lot of the key decisions you have to make in the business, he’s really not involved in it anymore. He’ll help out with some strategic things. He’ll still come to a management meeting. But all real operational stuff—How do we price projects? How do we think about personnel, hiring, firing, you know, how do we budget? That’s all my team and I.
And there was enough of a transition that I’d been through, call it four full cycles of how the business runs. And had enough comfort. And over time, you know, I’m president, he’s still CEO and chairman, so he’s around for the things that I don’t know how to deal with. And when you have someone who’s got 50 years of experience in business and 40 years of experience of running the company, there really isn’t anything that we encounter that he hasn’t seen yet. Particularly when it comes to, you know, technical issues on quality or a challenge with a particular client, or making decisions on risk on if we want to bankroll a customer or not, how do we think through challenging personnel issues, how do we think through strategic direction, acquisitions, divestiture, stuff like that. He’s still a great sounding board for that.
But, you know, I feel very fortunate to be in the kind of business where I have that kind of relationship where we can talk through those sorts of things. And there isn’t a lot that we disagree on, and the things that we do, when it comes to business matters, he’s usually right. And I say that, with all sincerity, that he just has this instinct.
Luke: And the wisdom too, right?
Ben: And wisdom that you get from having been through just about everything over the years and understanding the signs of how things could go well or not. And knows how to handle them and usually provides some good guidance on what we should do.
Luke: That is the annoying but very useful thing about, you know, fathers, is that they, my dad’s the same thing. He’ll sometimes have a completely different opinion to me on how to deal with something. And, you know, nine times out of 10, I’ll take some time to reflect on it.
Ben: Oh, he’s usually right. And, you know, a lot of times he doesn’t explain himself clearly.
Luke: Yes. And that may also be part of this. Not a lot of sales going on.
Ben: So, he’s like, okay, no. Or, you know, he’s had the conversation in his mind like 75 per cent of the way there and then says, ‘Yeah, we’re doing this, this, and this.’ And I’ll look at him and I’ll think, OK, help me understand that a little bit more. He is like, ‘No, no, Ben, I’m right. And this, this is how we should do it.’ It’s like, you probably are but help me understand this a bit more. And I’m sure we’re on the right path here.
Luke: Yeah. That is a bang-on point that I’ve experienced so many times. Is just the stating it as if it’s a, you know, dogmatic truth versus helping me understand why it is. But, anyway, that’s very funny. Very similar experience.
On that point, one of the things I found personally that is always a push-pull or a fine balance is trying to figure out how much do you respect the legacy, call it, of the generation before me and making sure that I listen to their wisdom and I learn from their lessons, et cetera. But as you know, and as we’ve talked about already, business is always evolving. And so then, you know, finding that balance of when do you push the envelope and actually say no. You know what, the business worked that way, but I’m going to do it this way.
What have you found that works? Because that’s something I’m always challenging myself with, or I’m always struggling with to say, I don’t want to be just listening to the previous generation and blindly following their wisdom, but I also don’t want to be constantly deciding to go in a new direction when I have, you know, these great resources that have done it for decades.
Ben: Luke, that’s a great question, and I think I’m fortunate enough that my dad has let me make some of my own mistakes as I’ve gone through things. And one of the examples I can think of is where we had a couple of clients that were in high luxury cosmetics. They were selling really expensive stuff that’s not really where we play very well. Like our business is not geared towards, we’re not geared towards commodities, like selling things like paper by the pound. That’s not really what we do. And over the years, we’ve struggled to like make a box for a Rolex watch. That’s just not—we could do them, but we’ve had challenges as well. And we were seeing glimmers of opportunity in the luxury space. I said, ‘Hey, I think we have some opportunity here. We have a couple of good sales reps. I think we should double down on luxury. We should go to this trade show, and we should explore this category.’ And my dad looked at me, he is like, ‘I’ve screwed that up so many times, but if you want to make your own mistakes, we can give it a shot.’
And he was right. You know, we go down there and we spent all the money to go to this trade show, and we bring in all these new opportunities. And lo and behold, all the things that he said about all the issues you’d have working in the high luxury space where the volumes are low, the clients are demanding. You have to do multiple rounds of samples. There’s usually claims and damages if the product isn’t perfect, it just wasn’t a good fit for our business. But I can learn that lesson myself.
And you know, same thing with personnel. You know, we’ve, he’s given me a lot of latitude about the people that we hire. And I still do most of the interviews for the key people that come into our company. And there’ll be times where we bring someone on and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know about this, but if this is who you want to hire, Ben, I trust you on it.’ And again, he’s usually right. So, you know, he’s involved in the business less and less now. And, but there’s still, I’m finding I’m repeating a lot of his sayings. And when you spend enough time around someone, you absorb a lot of their wisdom, which is pretty fortunate.
Luke: Yeah, absolutely. No, I have the exact same thing where, especially being a parent now, I find myself saying stuff to my kids and I’m like, I’ve become my dad. What am I doing?
Ben: It’s not always a bad thing.
Luke: I know. But it is always terrifying when you realize how quickly time passes. So, I guess another question I would ask around your leadership is, what is a major challenge you faced? You know, you are now in your own story, your own timeline of this family business. What’s something that’s been, you know, a key defining moment for you as a leader and something that you’ve been challenged with?
Ben: Yeah, I think one of the big things that’s really impacted our business in so many ways over the eight years that I’ve been in it has been a lot of the changes in geopolitics and tariff policy going into the U.S., and we’ve been impacted by it since the year 2018. So, it’s not just this year in Canada. We’ve been having to deal, we have a lot of clients in the U.S., and for many years the best place to source a lot of our products that could not be made in North America was in China. That just the Chinese partners that we’ve dealt with. First of all, we have staff, we have Chinese staff living in China that have worked for us for close to 20 years, that inspect quality on everything that we produce. And we work with a lot of the biggest factories in the country in our categories. We become important to them. We instill a lot of our quality standards. We rigorously inspect everything so we can get really good quality stuff out of these Chinese factories. But all of a sudden, when policy changes and tariffs go to 25 per cent, all of our clients come to us and say, ‘What are we going to do about this? I don’t want to pay 25 per cent more.’ And this was back in 2018 when it wasn’t really a thing.
So, what does that mean? It means, you know, rebuilding your whole supply chain, going to a lot of other countries in the Far East and identifying all these new factories that were really immature with their manufacturing capabilities, making a lot of mistakes, losing a lot of money. A lot of times we had, we had orders where every like, you know, three out of every five products came out defective, and you have to credit the whole thing. And not to mention having to replace them and go back and say, you know, ‘Yeah, even though China’s more expensive, it’s more reliable. That’s what we have to do.’
And you know, I think we visited, oh gosh. Like, having to, one, communicate to customers that your goods are going to become more expensive now. And they’ll say, ‘I’m not going to pay that.’ And how do you absorb the cost? And then how do you move the supply lines around to different locations, where you ask the question, Can these factories produce as well as I’ve been used to? And it was very difficult to do. You know, I think, having to have so many false starts, having to actually get on a plane and go meet with these factory owners and instill the quality standards in them, was very challenging. But we worked our way through it.
You know, fast forward to the last year, which, you know, tariffs are now on the tip of everyone’s tongue because they’re impacting every country around the world. For the friends of mine that run businesses that are experiencing this for the first time, I feel kind of old hat at it. Not that that’s a good thing, but I just have had so much experience on, How do you navigate this? What are your other options? How do you have discussions on pricing with your customers? How do you have discussions on, you know, mitigating the risk in the supply chain? And leading into another question I’m sure you’re going to ask is, What do you do? What can you do about it? What’s in your control?
And that was a big part of the reason we decided to get back into manufacturing in Canada, was not only did we want to mitigate tariff risk, but we also wanted to, you know, de-risk supply chain. That, back in COVID for any of your listeners that imported anything during COVID, it was a total nightmare. Freight, historically, the cost on a 40-foot container to go from anywhere in Asia to North America, New York, Chicago, Toronto, wherever it is, was about 5,000 U.S. dollars. In COVID it got up as high as $25,000. Which is huge. And not only that, but containers kept getting stuck off the coast of Los Angeles and Long Beach and Vancouver and Prince Rupert. We had containers, you know, fall off a boat because a ship caught on fire, and they got stuck for nine months. It was just, it was very difficult to keep our customers in stock. So, we’ve been on a journey to try and figure out how do we bring the right kind of manufacturing back to North America so we can keep our customers happy.
Luke: Awesome. And yeah, no, we went through the same thing in our manufacturing business that I was running at the time COVID hit. And you’d literally lose containers. Like, oh yeah, well, it left this port and it’s somewhere here, but we have no idea where it is. And then it would suddenly pop up, you know, a month later or two months later.
Ben: After you’ve replaced the goods and suddenly you have double the inventory.
Luke: Yeah. I also know about that.
Ben: Yeah. No, I’ve got lots of thoughts on inventory, Luke, but I don’t know how interested your family business listeners are for tales of inventory.
Luke: Yeah. So, that’s an excellent description of sort of like how you can have a huge challenge actually become a strength. You know, it’s ironic that you were dealing with that and probably at the time didn’t appreciate how valuable that experience was in 2018, 2019, that nowadays you’re an expert in it. Because I can certainly speak for, you know, we dealt with a little bit of it, but this last year was like a complete shock through our supply chain to figure out. Okay, are these on, are they off? How do we deal with them? How do we communicate with customers? So, pretty incredibly lucky in some weird way now, looking back at it that you’ve got that experience.
Ben: There were a lot of sleepless nights. And I remember there was, I can remember this moment where President Trump had a meeting with President Xi, and I was like, okay, you know, I think maybe they’ll negotiate something. Maybe it’s just a threat. But then the news came at like, no, this is really happening. And I just thought, okay, I’m out of energy for the day. I’m going to go to sleep and we’re going to wake up in the morning and we’re going to figure this out. And I try not to get, a lot of the people that spend a lot of time around me think of me as pretty stoic. You know, I try not to get too excited when things are good. I try not to get too frustrated when things are challenging. Sometimes something really knocks the wind out of you. I do my best to regroup and pick myself up from my bootstraps and go and figure it out. And that’s what we did.
Luke: Yeah. I mean, it’s a marathon. It’s not a sprint. Right?
Ben: A hundred percent.
Luke: And like that wisdom or whatever you want to call it, of knowing I’m going to tackle, I’ll have tomorrow to deal with this. I don’t need to be up all night. It’s better I get a proper sleep.
Ben: I’m going to sleep now because I got a lot of stuff to deal with tomorrow.
Luke: Yeah. No, I mean, that by itself is excellent advice. So, you’re getting back into manufacturing, you know, I’ve run a manufacturing business. As you said, it’s a very complex aspect of a business. How have you gone about building that, you know, function and that team? I mean, starting from zero and rebuilding a whole, you know, manufacturing supply chain is not a simple thing to do.
Ben: It’s a very challenging thing to do. And, you know, we have, again, this is being fortunate where on this, on our legacy import and distribution business, I’m running that, soup to nuts. And my dad’s really not involved in that. On the manufacturing business, I wouldn’t call him in retirement, but he’s more involved on helping it get set up and helping us to understand what we need to do and what are the challenges we expect to face. So again, really fortunate to have that kind of wisdom on this new venture here. But, you know, we’re constantly adapting in how we go to market and what we do, and we felt it was the right time to get back into manufacturing.
Now getting into manufacturing, there’s a lot of things you have to do. You know, you got to find a place to set up the plant. You have to order the equipment, you have to know what equipment to buy, you have to set up the plant in the right way. You have to source the right kind of raw materials, but the most challenging thing is how do you hire the right people and build the right standard operating procedures to ensure you actually get what you want when you manufacture it. And the category that we chose to produce was paper shopping bags. So, think about, you know, if you were to go to Starbucks and get takeout, that kind of, that brown bag with a handle on it, that’s something that we would make in our factory. And the way that we wanted to go to market is identifying a couple of gaps where we felt, in Canada and the United States, we could have a real edge. And for us, in my category, there are not that many manufacturers that make what I make in Canada and the United States, and the ones that do really focus on very high volume, food service and food service takeaway, and a little bit of grocery, too. So, they’ll, if you think about McDonald’s or KFC or Starbucks putting through hundreds of millions, even billions, of bags where it’s paper by the ton and almost pretty close to a commodity. That’s where we knew we would not be competitive.
We just, as a startup, you don’t have that low-cost infrastructure built. We felt that our niche had always been working with higher-end retailers and providing them something a bit better. And at a lot of the factories that we worked with, we had instilled really strict standard operating procedures. We didn’t necessarily know the equipment to buy, but we knew what good looked like. And as we built out our plant, you know, we spoke to a lot of our factory partners to understand what are the best, what’s the best equipment we should use? You know, you go to Germany to an equipment trade show and you buy the machinery. And then when we had our plants come up and running, we picked a few people from our legacy business almost in a, and I call it startup mentality, where you’re working with a small team, you’re figuring things out even before you go live. And then once the plant was up and running, we relied on some skilled mechanics from our machinery suppliers to help us get trained. And a lot of the workforce has come from our old factory that we sold 15 years ago.
Luke: That’s crazy. That’s awesome.
Ben: So, our plant manager has worked indirectly for our company since 1982. And, you know, our plant manager’s wife was my sister’s nanny. So, the story goes that my sister had a nanny, and one day she comes to my parents and says, ‘I have, I found a sweetheart. Would you mind sponsoring him to come to Canada?’ And we said yes. So, he comes to Canada. ‘Can you give him a job?’ Sure. So, he starts off working on the printing press [and] eventually runs the plant. When we sold the manufacturing business, he went with the manufacturing business, but we have to have him back. And he came back and, we brought along some of the top mechanics from our old plant that we had.
We’ve, you know, we’re fortunate that, in the manufacturing business, there’s more skilled labour that’s becoming available. And, you know, we’re bit by bit like our factory’s running now. We’re running 24 hours a day, five days a week. We’re in production for a lot of major brands in Canada and the United States. We’re planning on adding more equipment and, you know, it’s still challenging, don’t get me wrong. Manufacturing is a very challenging, it’s much more challenging, and importing was challenging, but, you know, dealing with something where you are, you’re making something is coming off the line at thousands of pieces an hour, where there can be variances in quality, you have to monitor it very carefully. And we’re doing our best.
Luke: That is incredible to scale that up in such a short period of time and already be in full production, but it speaks to that value of multi-generational support. You know, your dad being able to help sort of support this, I don’t want to call it special project, but you know, this one-off project of setting up a factory, being able to draw on, you know, relationships from when you used to have a manufacturing footprint. You know, that’s just super interesting. And I think my viewers will really be interested because onshoring is such a big topic nowadays, and you guys have now done it. So, bravo to that.
Ben: Thank you. You know, the plant that we’ve set up, it rivals the best quality production that you’d find in Asia or in Europe. There isn’t any, what we hear from our customers who are, again, some of the largest retailers in the United States, is the products that we’re making are not available at the quality they want in the United States, Canada or Mexico. We’re the only plant that does it. So, it’s making conversations go a little bit easier. The samples, when you put them on the table and stack them up against what else you can get in the United States and Canada, you notice the difference immediately. And, you know, we’re making improvements every single day. You know, you don’t know what you don’t know when you start up. And I’m fortunate that I can only surround myself with, I try to surround myself with smart, capable, talented people, give them a lot of latitude for what they want to do, provide advice where they can. And I have to know what my strengths are and my best strengths are engaging with customers and building a team around me.
Luke: Awesome. Time for one last question.
Ben: Sure.
Luke: You’ve now gone through a very successful succession. You know, going from not even working in the family business to now running the family business, which many people would hope they could do and could hope that they could pull that off with the next generation, or they could be in the next generation thinking that, you know, I hope I could step up. What advice do you have, and maybe think about it, you know, for your next generation of, what would you do different, or, you know, what do you think are some of the most important things to focus on?
Ben: That’s a great question, Luke. And there are a few things that I think helped set us up for the best success possible. The first was, you know, gentle exposure, but no pressure to the business as you’re growing up. Here’s who we are, here’s what we do. This is where dad’s going, this is why he’s travelling so much, like that’s learning a little bit about that as you go, so you’re familiar with it. I think certainly helps.
Not having a role in the business straight out of school, going to work for another large company where you know, everyone has to, you know, carve their own path, stand on their own two feet, learn what it’s like to work for a difficult boss, learn what it’s like to, you know, earn promotions based on your own merit and not because your name is on the building. I think that is extremely important, and it can be in a similar industry, it can be in a different industry, but some of the most successful folks that I know that have joined family businesses have spent time outside of the business getting a great education and going to work for a great company. Because invariably you bring back things you might not even realize that you bring back.
And like, you know, it’s not like you’re going to bring back a customer list or industry contacts, but ways of working. How do you build culture? How do you work with a great team? How do you become a great leader and things that your family couldn’t teach you? Those are really valuable, and I can’t recommend that enough.
And then when the time is right to come back into the business, I believe it’s very important to start at a lower level and earn and work your way up. Because if you get parachuted into a very senior role, I believe that the team might listen to you, but I don’t know if they’re going to respect you. And it’s really important, just like I shared the Dutch Boy story, to learn how the business runs, learn what made it successful, and begin to put your own mark on it one bit at a time. And if you do those things well, you know, we’ve been around for 108 years, I hope to be around for 108 more.
Luke: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Ben. This was a super interesting interview, and I loved hearing more about your story.
Ben: Luke, thank you so much for having me.
Luke: Awesome.
Thank you so much for watching. This is Beyond the Family Business podcast. Please like and subscribe. Take care.