Special thanks to Ben Bisconer, CEO of Complete Welders, Scott Myran, President of Mississippi Welders Supply Company (MWSCO), Joe Francis, President and CEO of Central McGowan, and Allen Jezouit, VP Product Management, Meritus Gas Products for their contributions. The content for this blog was published in the October US Print edition of GasWorld. Almost three […]
Business Trends and their Impact on Strategy, Growth, and Talent
Special thanks to Freddie Briggs, VP of Strategy & Value Creation for PDC Machines LLC, Rick Kowey, COO of Universal Compressed Air (UCA), Kevin Lynch, SVP of Industrial Gases at Anova, and Sobia Chaudhry, VP of HR at PDC Machines for their contributions. This year has started out a bit differently than previous years because […]
The Business of Hydrogen
Special thanks to David Edwards (Director and Advocate for Hydrogen Energy, Air Liquide US), David Burns (Vice-President of Clean Energy Development, Linde), and Lars Martiny (Head of Hydrogen Future, The Chemours company). When considering which segments of the industrial gas industry have taken off over the past 5-10 years, hydrogen invariably dominates the conversation. Arguably […]
The Business of Helium
Special thanks to Phil Kornbluth, President of Kornbluth Helium Consulting (KHC) for his contribution From time to time, helium has received increased visibility in the B2B press due to product shortages. However, over the last 3-5 years the press has become more mainstream due to the same supply-demand challenges, as well as the effects on […]
Maintaining Customer Relations (and Remote Working)
Thanks to Jeff White (President of EMD Electronics, a business of Merck KGaA) for his contributions All companies have been faced with the challenge of maintaining robust and consistent customer relations in the midst the pandemic. In Salesforce’s annual (2020) ‘State of Service’ survey, it stated “the pandemic exposed avariety of customer related shortcomings. Eighty-eight […]
Business Resilience
Thanks to Jim de Vries (Founder/President, EIG) for his contributions A few years ago (2017), Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, published a book with Adam Grant called ‘OPTION B’ on the topic of building personal ‘resilience’ after the tragic loss of her husband. The book offered compelling insights for dealing with personal hardships in our […]
Customer and process – Balancing the organization
Thanks to Chris Ebeling (Vice-President of Sales & Marketing, Executive Vice-President of Sales & Marketing, ) and Jeff Bezos (CEO, Amazon) for their contributions When running a business division or even an entire company, there is constant friction between being customer focused and being process focused. It’s a constructive friction that often swings like a […]
Centralizing your functional resources
The decision of centralization vs decentralization of functional resources has been a regular evaluation by small and large businesses for decades. No company is fully centralized or decentralized, instead there are varying degrees of both. The amount of centralization that’s right for a company depends on its size, culture and strategy. If a company is […]
Moving to ERP Systems
Thanks to David Schaer (President, CU) for his contribution. The use of the term ‘ERP’ (Enterprise Resource Planning) can get some senior executives and business owners a little nervous. Some recall the implementation failures during ERP’s early days, or the lower than expected returns on the investment (ROI) for some of their peers. Whatever the […]
The importance of a digital strategy
Thanks to Eric Wise (CEO, Wise Telemetry) for his contribution. The concept or maybe the value of a digital strategy started becoming more evident over the last 10+ years as some digital capabilities (social media, mobile, e-commerce, IIOT) have scaled and gone mainstream.But developing a ‘sustainable’ digital strategy is hard work, harder than it has […]