The Interview That Never Happened — Part VI: Value Before Volume
Growth is what shows up. Value is what makes it inevitable.
Joe’s next question sounds like a scoreboard question: “What are some of the best strategies you’ve discovered for growing the value of a company—and how did you grow one of your companies from $90M to $300M in four years?” It’s easy to answer that with numbers. It’s harder—and more accurate—to say the numbers were never the point. For us, sales were not value. They were a side effect of value. If you focus on the right things long enough, growth stops being something you chase and becomes something that happens.
The Industry Forced the Game
We were in rigid plastic packaging—bottles and caps. On the surface, not particularly glamorous, but the economics underneath it created a very specific game. You’re converting resin into containers, which puts you between large multinational resin suppliers and customers who were themselves becoming multinational. The old “mom and pop” packaging companies couldn’t operate at that level. The industry was consolidating whether you liked it or not.
You had three choices: grow, sell, or die.
Growth, however, wasn’t just about getting bigger. It required doing something most operators in that space didn’t fully understand.
The Business Became a Chessboard
The real advantage we built was not just in manufacturing. That was table stakes. What mattered was how we integrated what we acquired and how we positioned the entire system.
Shipping plastic is expensive in a very specific way. Once a bottle reaches a certain size and travels a certain distance, you’re essentially shipping air—and the cost of that air can exceed the value of the container itself. That means proximity to where the product is filled becomes critical. As we grew through acquisition, we grew in locations. That allowed us to move machines, shift production, and constantly reposition ourselves closer to demand.
The entire company became a chessboard.
We were always rearranging it to be in the strongest position possible.
Purchasing was the second major lever. Someone—either us or the company we acquired—was always doing it better. Better pricing, better terms, better scale. When you improve purchasing in a business like this, it doesn’t trickle down to the bottom line. It drops straight to it. There were smaller operational improvements as well, but these were the big moves: where you produce and how you buy.
Integration, People, and the Discipline to Choose
A lot of companies acquire. Very few actually integrate. Our ability to absorb a business within six months—so completely that you couldn’t tell it hadn’t always been part of us—was what made us different. But integration didn’t mean forcing everything into our way of doing things.
If we were better, we pushed our processes into their operations. If they were better, we changed.
That requires humility and discipline. Not everything different is better, and knowing the difference is a skill. This also became one of our strongest filters. If a company relied heavily on temporary labor to compensate for poor processes or inconsistent production, that wasn’t just an operational issue—it was a cultural one. Different standards. Different expectations. Different reality.
We passed, no matter what the price was.
At the same time, value was always grounded in fundamentals. Growth without profitability is just motion. Value only happens when you are making money. Make money, sell a great product, and keep reducing cost while maintaining quality. We had a cost savings team dedicated to finding ways to spend money intelligently to lower cost. If the return justified the investment, we made it. We were always investing in becoming better.
Revenue is what shows up. Value is what makes it inevitable.
None of this works without the right people, and this is where things get uncomfortable. As expectations rose, some long-time employees realized they couldn’t meet them. A few shifted into smaller roles, but most moved on. That’s reality. When the business grows, not everyone grows with it.
At the same time, the general labor force became happier. Friction decreased. Success became clearer. People could see progress and be rewarded for it. The system worked better, and that improved everything.
Our hiring philosophy became sharper:
Most people hire for the present.
We hired for the future and forced the present to catch up.
We didn’t look for people who could just do the job as it existed. We looked for people the business could grow into.
The Fuel and the Alignment
Going from $90M to $300M in four years doesn’t happen without fuel. For us, that fuel was private equity. There was no other way to move that fast at that scale. Capital made the strategy executable, but capital alone doesn’t create value—it amplifies it.
Which brings it back to the real driver behind everything: alignment. We all knew what the challenges were. We all knew what the opportunities were. We all knew what success would look like—and what it would be worth.
That alignment made speed possible.
🌱 Seed Thought: Growth at that level isn’t about doing more. It’s about knowing exactly what matters—and aligning everything around it.
