Turning Culture into a Competitive Advantage in ManufacturingTurning Culture into a Competitive Advantage in Manufacturing

Turning Culture into a Competitive Advantage in Manufacturing Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: Delighted to be here. And you? 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, I’m stoked to be chatting again. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’ll be a good show today. I think. 

Jeff White: I think so. This is a relatively unique topic. It’s definitely a unique topic when you consider the specifics of how this organization is going to market and do things. 

Carman Pirie: I love what our guest and their company are doing. And I think that just listeners can learn something from it and perhaps take some inspiration from it because the context within which it operates is something that I will resonate with an awful lot of manufacturers, they may look, listen to this and say we could take something like this on as well.

Jeff White: And do something either peripheral or directly related to it. I think it’s really cool, but enough of the mystery; we should get into it. 

Carman Pirie: I should tell you that you just reminded me we got this great as an agency. So we ran an agency in addition to a podcast, and we got a contact us form filled out. Just within the last 24 hours, from somebody who said that their company regularly turns mysteries into solutions. Jeff just reminded me of that, one of the absolute most outlandish contact us forms we’ve ever received. And if the person’s listening, I hope that they contact us and mention this podcast.

Jeff White: That would make it even more interesting. 

Carman Pirie: It’s just, absolutely. Yeah. So we’re gonna lift the mystery and turn it into a solution, as it turns out. 

Jeff White: Absolutely. So joining us today is Ian Antioch. Ian is the Marketing Coordinator at NorthGate. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Ian. 

Ian Antioch: Thanks, everyone, for having me on. I really appreciate it. I’m excited to have a good conversation here. 

Jeff White: Hope you’ve got some mysteries for us, Ian. 

Ian Antioch: Hopefully, I got some mysteries, some answers. All the above… 

Jeff White: Some solutions. 

Carman Pirie: You’re beginning to, you’re really beginning to second-guess your decision to be on this podcast, aren’t you?

Ian Antioch: I could be, yeah. I could be.

Carman Pirie: Ian, why don’t we start by learning a little bit more about NorthGate? Would you please maybe tell us a bit more about the organization and what you all are up to there? 

Ian Antioch: Yeah, for sure. NorthGate is a packaging supply chain solutions company based in Flint, Michigan. We were founded in 1984, so we have just over 40 years of business here. Right now, we have four operating divisions: Jack Pack, which is our corrugated die-cutting division, packaging solutions, and supply chain services. And finally, Be Ready Enrichment services, which you hinted at earlier. We roughly have about a hundred to 200 employees. We include key clients that we have right now, our major automotive manufacturers.

NorthGate recently received a GM Overdrive Award in 2024. And what makes us different is our Be Ready Enrichment services, our unique approach to corrugated manufacturing and our capabilities. 

Jeff White: Very cool. Before we get into the Be Ready thing, which is what we really want to chat about today, tell us about yourself and how you landed there.

Ian Antioch: Yeah. I graduated from Michigan State University in 2023 with a media and information degree, and like most of US Metro Detroiters, I landed a position either with a Big Three in the automotive industry or something to do with the automotive industry. It’s hard to avoid it when you live around Detroit.

So that’s how I ended up at NorthGate. What, a little bit of brief history on my experience and things like that. But yeah, as I said, it’s hard to avoid the automotive industry around here. 

Jeff White: It’s probably one of the, if you are interested in marketing and you’re in the Chicago area, there’s certainly a lot of manufacturers. But if you’re in Detroit, it’s known for automotive manufacturing, and honestly, probably careers outside of that are uncommon. 

Ian Antioch: Yeah, honestly, you’re either working directly with one, you’re either working with a supplier or even if it’s like something tech-focused, it could be to do with software, or to do with vehicles.

Like everything I have to do with. Cars and manufacturing cars around here, which has been, it’s honestly pretty cool as someone who’s grown up around it. You’ve found an interest in cars and automotive in the automotive industry, which has been a really cool experience as well to work hand in hand with something that you’re interested in.

That’s been good as well. 

Carman Pirie: We are teetering on the knife-edge of this just splitting into our enthusiasm about cars and having nothing to do with marketing or frankly, even podcast. 

Ian Antioch: I’m happy to do that, too.

Carman Pirie: I can see where Jeff is going with this. I’m trying to, I’m trying to cut this off at the pass. I know where it’s going. 

Jeff White: Yeah. As the guy who has an uncanny ability for horsepower numbers and other things like that, it’s…

Carman Pirie: What people don’t know is he also has an uncanny ability to be upside down on a car loan and sell to the goddamn thing anyway, and then buy another one. 

Jeff White: Hey, yeah. I’m not in my twenties like Ian anymore. I figured that out. It’s not a good idea. Don’t do it. 

Carman Pirie: All right. Ian, I wanna learn more about this Be Ready program and dive into that because I think there’s a lot to learn there. So would you be so kind as to introduce our listeners to what the Be Ready Enrichment Program is? What are you all trying to do there? 

Ian Antioch: Yeah, Be Ready Enrichment Services was always a thing in NorthGate. It just wasn’t really formalized until later, I would say probably about five or six years ago, when it really became formalized into an actual program. Our founder, Jack Goggins, was always giving back to the community, giving back to his employees through certain avenues. As I said, it just wasn’t formalized before. And then it was finally, I think around 2020, it was formalized into the Be Ready Enrichment services. And it’s an onsite employee enrichment program where we invest over $125,000 annually into things like dream coaching, financial planning, mentorship, and professional development for our employees.

So it’s something that kind of. If you ask anyone at our company, Be Ready is the tangible demonstration of our mission to bless people, which is NorthGate’s mission. So it’s a really good example of how we bring that mission to life every day, blessing our people, our employees and everyone around us.

Carman Pirie: The way that you introduced that, Ian, it stands out to me that I bet there are so many manufacturers out there. That has maybe been around for 40, 60, 80 years. It’s a very common story, particularly in a certain swath of the US and often family manufacturers that are incredibly dedicated to the community that they reside within. And they would say something similar, we’ve always done this, but they haven’t had either the courage or the vision, I’m not sure which, it is to actually formalize it into a program. It seems to me that naming it, formalizing it, you probably don’t even have to spend more on it than was done before. It’s just more about giving it a bit of a voice in some ways, isn’t it? 

Ian Antioch: Yeah, for sure. I would say we definitely have to give credit to our owner, Andy and his wife, Sarah, for coming up with the original idea of getting the formalization started. And then he passed the idea off to our then CEO, but now fractional, CEO George Wilkinson, where he formalized the whole Be Ready Enrichment Services, created each division of Ignite Shift and Launch. Each of those has different courses and specifications that you do during those, and they tailor to different needs and things like that. So that’s one of. The main reasons, as you said, are how we formalized it. A lot of people do these kinds of things like that. They just have trouble turning it into that concrete program. And outlining what the employees need. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. So, turning a business asset. Something that works for employees, that is certainly an asset that’s there, but then turning into a communication asset as well. I just love this. Jeff, you were gonna say something, I think I interrupted you. 

Jeff White: Not at all. Of those different areas, of Be Ready, what do you think has been one of the most transformational for NorthGate? 

Ian Antioch: I would say the employee development. We currently have an individual with us who started as a packer at one of our very entry-level positions. She’s gone through different areas of Be Ready. To where she is now, actually one of the plant managers at our North Star facility of Jack Pack. So she plays a huge role, and she was educated and put through our Be Ready Enrichment Services program and totally flourished from all that.

Carman Pirie: That’s a really interesting lens on this challenge of the skills gap and workforce development. Every single manufacturer on the planet is challenged with how to recruit and retain the best and get the horsepower that we need to make this operation run. And I just love the way the folks have said, yeah, you know what, it’s not about always trying to recruit this mythical unicorn. It’s about working with the talent that we know and appreciate locally and growing them to not just be a better employee, but also be a more productive citizen. I, as I think about it, did you get inspiration from anywhere? Was there another company out there doing something like this? And if not, how have you thought about messaging it? How do you, how have you thought about getting it out there? 

Ian Antioch: Yeah. I don’t think there was any inspiration behind it. It was just the core values and the spirit that our owner and original founder embodied. So our current owner, his father, founded the company originally. So they just carried on those values in that spirit and that culture and the family-owned business vibe. Where we’ve been able to, create this organization and this service for our employees and our community, which is extremely beneficial.

To everyone around here, as I like to say, our mission could literally be anything. It could have to do with boxes. It could have to do with anything our owner and our leadership team could have chosen. Something towards profitability or things like that. But they chose to bless people and to bless our customers, to bless our employees and everyone around us in our community. So that’s what, in my short experience here in two years, about how people-centred and culture-oriented. Everyone here is, and as I said, it’s been a family business, and it still is, and everyone treats each other like family. 

Jeff White: Was this part of your understanding of what Northgate was about when you joined? Like what, were you aware of this in the community more broadly or did you learn of it as you got there? And if not, have you been? Focused on leveraging this as an idea for advancing the communication about NorthGate more broadly? 

Ian Antioch: Yeah, for sure. It wasn’t something that I directly knew about. I knew about North Gate’s involvement in the community, but not necessarily the division of Be Ready itself. That’s something that I learned. As I got more involved, and that’s because of a few reasons. There was not necessarily a direct marketing person prior to me. There was a little bit of a gap between the previous one and me. So things had slowed down for what type of marketing content NorthGate was pushing out.

So there was a small gap between, so we had to fill those. And that’s how I learned about it, and how we leverage it now is. We leverage our mission in the things that we’re doing as a chance to, kind of market ourselves and market that program to other partners, so we can get other people involved in it as well.

Carman Pirie: That raises an interesting question. How do you think about the balance in your communications, in your marketing efforts? I’m assuming there’s a lot of the marketing that is obviously a little bit more obviously related to the output that the business does and what you produce for your customer. So, have you, as marketing, thought about the balance between promoting Be Ready and culture and things of that sort versus promotion of capabilities, et cetera? 

Ian Antioch: Yeah, it’s definitely hard to balance because there are so many great things going on at Be Ready and things that we’re doing in that Avenue O of Northgate that I wanna share. I also can’t let that get in the way of everything that we share because we are still a manufacturing company, like you said. And I do want to share the great machines and things like that, our capabilities, and push more kind of sales-oriented content as well. So it’s hard to balance both of them. But that’s something I’ve been finding in the infancy of my career, which is balancing both of those and also using them to complement each other. As I mentioned in the individual story earlier, she was someone who went through Be Ready. Now is also a huge part of our manufacturing process in our North Star facility. So it kind of ties in the manufacturing work there, but also the really cool story from Be Ready in the development there. 

Jeff White: How are you leveraging those stories? Like, how are you getting it out? Are you using video? What are the channels that you’re considering when you’re promoting this program, and the people who are helping to build NorthGate as a result of their involvement in it? 

Ian Antioch: Yeah. So I can start internally. Ever since I started here, we have created a kind of an internal newsletter. One of the things we wanted to fill was internal communication. So we wanted to share stories within NorthGate and spread that family values and kind of family business vibe that we wanted to create. So that’s one of the initiatives that we started when I arrived here. Second, externally we do lots of videos. We do lots of photos. We’re leveraging LinkedIn and Facebook for both of those as well. So I’m doing another one of the large projects that I worked on here, which was a Be Ready video. This was a short to mid-format, a three to five-minute video showcasing our services and our partners. It involves some participants in the service or in Be Ready and things like that. So we want to highlight our partners, highlight people who are using it, and highlight people who are running it as well. So that was a major project as well that we did, like I said, kinda just video, photo, text, graphics, pull quotes from employees who have been through the program. That’s one thing we like to do. We like to showcase our partnerships, whether someone is on site, we photograph the events there. Maybe get some experience from the employees or individuals who are participating in those. And then also get the perspective of our partners as well, and highlight what the impact on them is.

Like, for example, when we bring in the Secretary of State on-site and we hold an event there. That’s a really huge thing for them, too. They get a lot of people checked off their list who need to complete vital tasks that they may not be able to because they’re at work during the hours that this is open and they can’t get an appointment or they’re not able, they don’t have transportation and they’re not able to get to the Secretary of State to maybe renew their license or something like that. So those are all. The ways we’re utilizing to market it. 

Carman Pirie: I don’t know. It feels, to me, like it was just a real-life nature to what we’re dealing with here.

And so much of what we deal with in marketing can be a little bit of. It’s all in your head. It’s above the shoulders, acidic mustard to try to bring The Wolf of Wall Street into it without saying the full quote. But, it’s, whereas like this is talking about, okay, what are the what is it?

What are the realities that people are dealing with outside of the workplace? And we actually, rather than try to divorce the workplace from those realities, we’re trying to bring them in. Like we’re being open about the fact that these are, this is real, and this is something that people are navigating.

We’re not trying to wallpaper over it. There’s a certain realness to it that I can’t help but think that it humanizes NorthGate to a level with their employees that may not otherwise be achievable. 

Ian Antioch: Yeah, that’s one thing that I noted, at a lot of super large companies, you make these relationships, just simply don’t feel possible within your company. And that’s one of the things I really value at Northgate, the intimacy that you can get with your coworkers and all the people around here in the company and your leadership team and all of those, the great people that you work with. That’s one of the most important things that I value here for sure. 

Carman Pirie: I wonder one, one of the things that causes me to question things as marketers a little bit is just that I think sometimes as marketers we’re asked to communicate things that are difficult to communicate, or we find challenging to try to get across.

What part of the Be Ready program do you think what part of the benefit of it do you think is the toughest thing to communicate externally? 

Ian Antioch: That’s a good question. The toughest thing to communicate externally is maybe the impact. There’s a lot to understand about the scenarios our community faces to understand the impact of some of the things we’re doing here.

Like I said, bringing those facilities on-site. It could be life-changing to some people because they’re able to do something important like that. Another example of a facility event that we had was a health fair where people were able to find out kind of vital information on health, where they were able to get, like blood pressure screenings, A1C and things like that. And there were actually a good number of people who were either referred to go to the doctors almost immediately because they had an issue that they were not able to find out about. And they were, because we were able to bring this service on-site. So when you think about communicating this, it is quite literally life-changing situations that are happening at certain services that we are able to provide.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I’m reminded of earlier in this show when we were getting you to introduce the program, and you talked about the dollars spent on the program. Basically, you highlighted the input because it’s the thing that business people more readily understand. We could all, oh, okay, you’re spending X amount to do Y.

But I hear exactly what you’re saying. I’m my mind’s spinning because I’m like the dollar amount that you mentioned. In comparison to the impact that you just articulated, and that’s gotta be so hard to try to get across in their attention-starved world,

Ian Antioch: Yeah, definitely. It’s been something that we have to nail down there, too, that literal life-changing impact that some of these services are able to have on people. But as I said, it is directly a reflection of our mission and our leadership and our ownership and them putting that trust in us to execute the mission of blessing people. Which is what we’re here for.

Carman Pirie: What a gift of a challenge. I think a lot of people would really love to have that type of challenge to try to communicate. It’s better than that. Please talk about these three features and benefits that nobody gives a rat’s ass about. 

Ian Antioch: Yeah, definitely. I feel like that’s one of the unique things about Northgate as well, is that mission gives us character where some companies may have like generic missions, which also then proposes a challenging task for the marketer to, how do I market this generic mission that has no character behind it, like that, or not necessarily any meaning. So the fact that our mission means so much to us and is the way we live and work every day makes it significantly easier to translate that into marketing. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, man. Significantly harder to live into as an organization and significantly easier to talk about as a result. 

Jeff White: Oh, but man, how many mission statements are just vapid empty promises? And in this case, we’re talking about, it’s almost like. You wish organizations would spend more time developing programs that truly benefit their people, their customers, whoever, and then base how they talk about their purpose, mission and values on that, rather than developing an empty purpose and vision and mission statement that you know is something that you have to live into that you’ll never be able to actually live up to.

Ian Antioch: Yeah, exactly. And that’s something that we’re definitely proud of, and we’re proud of the challenge that it presents as well. As you said, it’s a huge challenge to fulfill it. But also, something easy that we can translate since we are so dedicated to it.

Carman Pirie: I love it too because, Ian, what you need to know is that one of my defining characteristics as a human being is that I’m entirely cynical about almost everything. I think when you look at, frankly, when I read the mission statement, if I were to read your mission statement. And not know about the Be Ready Program. I would be the absolute first one on the planet to be rolling my eyes and calling BS on it and saying how vague it is, and on and on. And then I look at the proof point that’s brought forward by Be Ready, and it knocks that right on its head. I just think a lot of people should spend a lot less time trying to wordsmith their mission statement and a lot more time trying to live into it as you all have.

Ian Antioch: Yeah, definitely. And like I said, that’s a hundred percent something that we take great pride in. Being able to lean into it as much as we have, and the support from our leadership team and our ownership. Being able to dedicate and being, being able to have the opportunity to be those people and culture-centric is a really awesome opportunity.

Carman Pirie: Absolutely. I wanna wrap this show up by getting your advice because anytime that we have somebody on the show who is of a somewhat younger vintage than I, I don’t wanna age myself, but somebody that’s maybe been a little bit more recently has seen the inside of a university than I have, or what have you.

I always like to ask. What advice do you want to give people who are just starting their careers? Because frankly, I think your advice is a little bit more useful than mine. So what advice would you give to somebody who’s sitting in your chair? But three years ago or three years from now.

Ian Antioch: Manufacturing companies have incredible stories to tell. They’ve just not always had someone who’s willing to tell them. So if you’re willing to learn the industry, earn the trust of the leadership team. Build things intentionally. There’s a lot of room for you to be creative in this space. That’s not always thought of that way.

Jeff White: You’re wise beyond your years, Ian. Not to sound like a granddad ’cause I’m not. But yeah, that…

Carman Pirie: soon probably. 

Jeff White: Oh geez. Don’t. No, seriously, there’s a wisdom in that that is not common, and I really appreciate it. 

Carman Pirie: Absolutely. 

Ian Antioch: Yeah. Yeah. No problem. I’m really glad to be in an industry like this, where I had to do a significant amount of research on the product and in the industry before I was able to even begin marketing it, because of how complex it is and the uniqueness of it. So that was definitely one of the roadblocks that I had. But as I said, there are awesome stories that you can tell and super interesting things and aspects to the business and manufacturing as a whole. You just have to find your way. 

Carman Pirie: Exceptional. Again, wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much. 

Ian Antioch: Awesome. Thank you, guys. 

Jeff White: Yeah, thank you.