so welcome to week two of taking care of business where i get the great
opportunity to chat with small and medium businesses
to discuss how they're getting creative with their businesses
during this Covid 19 pandemic my name is mike katz i'm executive vice president
for t-mobile for business and today i have the great pleasure of
being joined by david schmidt president of tph global service
solutions tph global solutions is a 55 year old
family business and david and his brother are second
generation owners they specialize in packaging and
displays for consumer product companies and they work with some of the biggest
retailers in the world walmart costco sam's club and many more and
their mission is to make it easy for companies to get their products to
market in a really complicated retail world
so let's jump right into it david thank you so much for joining us
i can't i can't wait to hear your guys tour you've got a really great one
and i thought i'd start with you know i mentioned all these incredible retailers
that you guys work with obviously during this pandemic retail
has been one of the categories or one of the
industries that has been the most impacted
so how is this impact inside retail with Covid
affected your business
well mike thank you for having us on your platform
um i'll tell you that when uh in january when the glimmers of
covid started hitting and we started seeing what was happening in in china
we didn't expect anything like the shutdowns that they were experiencing we
never dreamed that that would happen in the united states
and so from uh being a thoughtful business owner trying to look out into
the future saying hey we know what's going to
happen we're planning out never saw this coming so when it hit it
hit very fast and the lockdown started happening or
the work from homes and the shutdowns of the various businesses
started happening very fast um and um it was
pretty all-consuming so what we saw in our business was a complete and total
uh dislocation if you will of what our normal course of business was
was everything that we work on this time of year
is for a fall holiday season for those big box stores and all of that
activity just shut down the our customers were dispersed the
retailers the buyers themselves were either furloughed or dispersed or
working from home any kind of normalized activity was completely out the window
and it was very disruptive and very unsettling and very unclear as to where
where this was going because nobody really had any clarity as far as
you know is this is this a month event is this a
three-month event is this 2021 are we looking at so that's that's sort
of the landscape of what we were looking at at the time
so i mean i've got a ton of questions for you about that but you know one of
one of the things i wanted to get to quickly just so everybody could hear
this amazing part of the story is with all of those impacts and retail
with all those delays because of obviously the big holiday retail
shopping season you guys you guys were really forced to
change your your entire business model and i'd love for you to
just talk about what what those changes entailed what you shifted your business
uh from to because it's really incredible
thank you uh we i had the benefit of being in the business
during 9/11 and i've been in the and through the
great uh recession of 2008 through 2012 and i really uh took those lessons to
heart and what we did well and what we did
really poorly um uh and center to how we look at
uh our our businesses one of the things we try to do
is we try to hold everybody together and keep the families together because
that's the strength of this business as a family-run family-owned business
and so you you look out and you say well gee what are our options we can
furlough everybody not on our menu card um
we're what can we do that is in our in our sphere
well all of retail was shut down um and so it just happened that um
uh we had just uh my brother and i had just come back from
an out of town wedding and that sunday there was the flare-up of
all the news media about ppe shortages
and it was everywhere and the types of things that they were talking about were
face shields face mask gowns the the the real
the real core products um and uh and then monday morning i woke up and
i heard a report from sanjay gupta that seven doctors in an atlanta
hospital had contracted covid 19 and it was like a light bulb went off in
my head it was i've never had this experience before
and i put two and two together and said hey this is something i think we can
we can do and we can do pretty quickly so i went from the kitchen
to my wife's office i took out a piece of paper i sketched out a
face shield and all the components build a build of materials
scanned it and sent it to my team i got into the office my designer had a design
done for me now we're all working from home at this
point so nobody's in the office i come to the office because it's my sanctuary
and and by the time i got in i had all the
manufactured components designed and laid out and specified
we pushed them out to our local manufacturing partners
by wednesday we had it costed ready to go and we started it we put up we put an
order in for 400 000 units as a guest not knowing who we were going
to sell it to and how we were going to sell it and
then i just started making phone calls to people that i know in the medical
community uh and it very quickly became very
apparent that the need was very real the demand was exponential
and that no matter what we made we were going to be able to
do something with and so that's how that that
pivot took place taking a step back i had to think about
well if what what do we want to do if we're going to do this we're we try
to be a strategic driven business we try to have a reason
for doing things and our goals were pretty simple and my
brother and i were very intent on keeping our families uh
both our immediate families our our people who work for us we have young
parents we have mature parents we have
grandparents it's these folks have relied on us for more
than 40 years in some cases and so number one goal was how do we how
do we keep everybody afloat number two goal was
how do we help people on the front lines uh frontline healthcare workers first
responders and what has now turned into essential
workers and businesses which is sort of a that's a whole other
conversation and the third goal was gee maybe this
could become a going concern and something we could
actually build and grow and make it a part of our of our
tph family of brands and so that was that's sort of how we start
got got on this this path
uh it's it's just an incredible story and
there's so many things that are heroic about it you know both the
the support given to what what now are the first responders
of the country the people that are dealing with this pandemic every single
day and then you know something i wanted to
you know hit on with you a bit more is the support that you gave to the people
that work for you that count on you that you know you're working coming to
you your company every single day is there is their livelihood
and i'd love for you just to talk about you know how um
you know you you said that was the number one priority in keeping
uh you know keeping those those people employed not not furloughing
not following them like one how did you come to that decision
and secondly how did you and they go through the shift of doing i'm sure
what many of them have done for a long time and done it really well in
what your business did before Covid into being effective
in a totally different venture um the the
we tell our employees that we're a family
uh we're a family business but for us it's not
that we're family owned that we're family focused
we're we compete in a world where companies can offer
tremendous benefits and perks and all this other stuff
and what we offer is um a a commitment to work-life balance
and a commitment to families so we tell our employees
you never have to have to ask permission to be present
in your child's life or your family's life
so we have a young man who works for us he doesn't have any kids but he lives
with his mother and he doesn't have to ask us permission
to be present in his elderly mothers if she needs to go to
the doctor or something like that we have young parents
so for us it's the commitment to the family is is his
started from the very beginning with my father and how he started the business
and the culture that he helped create and it's just something that my brother
and i have perpetuated and we feel a significant connection to these folks
they are they are part of our lives have been part of our lives
in some cases um uh for anywhere from 18 to 44 years so it's
it's something that you just you just don't throw that away
and say oh we're going to do something different it doesn't work for us that
way that's just not how we're wired how has how has this transition been
been for them um you know i'm sure everybody's
incredibly grateful that they you know still have an opportunity to
work with work for you um but how's the transition been for them and going from
producing you know retail merchandising um you
know collateral and merchandising pieces to producing face
masks like how how's that how's that evolution been for
each one of them so there wasn't much of a
change in process the people that we're working with on the face shield side
are people we've worked with um uh frequently over the course of the last
20 years so it wasn't like we found new vendors or had to come up with
a new way of doing things or these are manufacturing processes that we didn't
understand or have expertise in so that was part of our
core expertise what was different was that we were actually building a product
um and not a product that we were selling as a
product and not as a a fixture or something that we just
dropped the fixture off and we go away we
we had to think differently about how the consumer was going to use it what
the use was what the legal implications were we had
to go through and determine if we were fda compliant
we had to we did a whole undertaking on the fda
and learned everything there was about face shields and ultimately we went
further into ppe and medical devices and became uh
fda registered as a importer of ppe for for china and other other
manufacturing countries so that we could bring these goods in and continue
with this same mission different different market
the mission is to make it easy to get these products to market when everybody
else seems to be struggling and the but the market is the need is
extraordinary um you know as an example we have we we
do work now with the va hospitals of america
and the first va that we engaged in long beach the medical director
we sent him when we sent our first shipment of face shields sent me a thank
you note and said you're saving lives and that
was like an aha moment and that was oxygen to everybody's lungs
here because it gave us a real sense of purpose and
it gave everybody a a stake in what we were doing
and it's been really empowering uh for everybody but the process the what we do
the how is very it draws very much on our our
core expertise and competence that's really interesting you know as is
kind of shifting from talking about your employees to talking
a little bit more about your customers uh you know i know you said that there's
some overlap um where you know some retailers have demand for for face
shields and other ppe products um but how did you how did you go about
finding uh a new group of customers that you
didn't really serve before with your own business and
you mentioned this great story at the va which there's
you know very few organizations that have a better mission than the va does
but have you been able to see um beyond that
with that story that you just mentioned the va the impact
that you guys have been able to have with other customers
so we started um our the very first call i made was to a
a friend of mine who is president of northwestern hospital here in lake
forest illinois uh and i i just texted him and uh said
hey if if if i make these would this help you and
his response was to connect me with the supply chain people of
of this very large hospital system in chicago
and from there it sort of dovetailed and then i just started reaching out and
networking and really it was the networking that drove
it and i was predominantly making those calls um before i engaged
my team because i wasn't sure what we were doing or how we were doing it
and the healthcare community just jumped on very quickly and then when we added
the uh the the disposable masks um we started getting a lot of interest
and so the face shields was one component then it was disposable
it's now going to hand sanitizer and surgical gowns
uh and it's just taking on a life of its own and we even
we haven't even had interest from a veterinary practice
we had a multi-location veterinary operation which i kind of got a kick out
of
so how do you think um you know hopefully
we're not in this world that we find ourselves in today forever
um as we as we get out of you know the uh
the peak of covid and the world starts returning to some
sense of normalcy how do you think what you've gone through over the last
several months will change your business how will change your business going
forward
um i definitely think we're a little edgier in terms of
our our urgency in in movement we we have always been very methodical
and process driven um and uh and very uh
step by step by step but what this has done is this has said you know you can
you can run through that brick wall and you can get to the other side it
you might get a few dents along the way um
and so one one aspect is um we could i we could see the demand for
the product across multiple channels we could see it
from healthcare to business to municipal uh it just every place you turn there's
a demand for this type of product and so from
that standpoint we're just working the demand we're
following the demand we're we're identifying we've we've decided
how and who we want to sell and what that process looks like we
very quickly put up a web page website off of our main site and it made it
e-commerce enabled so that we could transact on smaller quantities as well
as larger quantities and we're trying to right now we're
still finding our way we don't know where this
goes we don't know what happens after covid our goal is to position
ourselves and to continue to build the relationships
the mind share and whatever market share we can get involved in
with the same level of service and expertise and attention to detail
and maybe carve out a niche in this marketplace and grow with it
and have it to be a contributor to our overall business
and it's so um unrelated to the retail side the course
business that it could really be a smoother of the
the business cycle curves which is something which is really attractive to
us um and uh and that's something that
we've we've started to talk about um right now
we're just it we're just holding on to the main of
the horse and we're just hoping we don't get thrown
well you guys are doing an incredible job and um
you know i i can't thank you enough for what you're doing for communities across
the country being able to provide some of the equipment that you're
providing what you're doing for your employees in the in the community of
chicago is a big deal and you know unfortunately
there's a lot of companies who haven't prioritized
their business the way that you have and you know as a result um you know people
people are looking for jobs so i just commend you so much in
in doing what you're doing one one thing i know you know this because
you've been running a really successful business for many many years and decades
um i i get the opportunity to talk to a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs and
one common denominator that i see in the most successful companies
is how they prioritize the people that work for them and their customers
those two groups are at the center of everything that they do
and it's been so great to hear how you guys have done that in your business
how it's allowed you to successfully shift your business model it's how it's
allowed you guys to remain successful during it what i know is a
really really challenging time uh so thank you so much for sharing that
story oh it's our pleasure thank you for having us on
yeah so i'm so grateful david to you and um you know for sharing your story
making some time to be able to talk about how you've made all these shifts
during what i know has been an incredibly challenging time during covid 19
and i know there's so many businesses
listening that are inspired by these kind of stories because
if there's one thing that covid has taught us um
that we're all going through this together and you know i know a lot of
businesses can empathize with exactly what you're going through and are
inspired in hearing how you guys have shifted so
please please everybody that's that's that's listing
find ways to support small businesses um they need us now more than
ever they're the pillars of our community
um they're they're vital in the backbone of our economy so please find a way to
support your local small business and we'll make sure t-mobile we continue
to do the same so david thank you again so much it was great chatting with you
and good luck to you guys going forward thanks mike
yeah thank you