Harcros Chemicals President & CEO, Mark Hamilton, joins Knowde CEO, Ali Amin-Javaheri, to share his insights into shifting customer expectations and talk through the importance of having an organized digital product catalog for both internal teams and customers.
Read the transcript.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
Hello and welcome everyone. I’m your host, Ali, CEO & co-founder of Knowde, the leading Digital Customer Experience Platform for ingredients, polymers, and chemicals. It’s no secret that our industry is starting to transform right before our eyes. Emerging market trends and software innovation is changing the game. In this short executive series, we’ll get perspective on this topic through the lens of the industry’s top leaders. Our goal is to share these perspectives with you in order to help you navigate the changing landscape. We have a very exciting guest today, so let’s just dive right in.
I’m thrilled to welcome Mark Hamilton as our guest. Mark is the President and CEO of Harcros Chemicals, a distribution chemical manufacturing company based in the U.S. So whether we’re talking water treatment to mining, to oil and gas production, Harcros provides technical assistance in choosing the most effective products for your applications. Mark is an amazing person. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Mark Hamilton:
It’s my pleasure, Ali. It’s a pleasure to talk with you today about all things digital.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
Great. Before we jump into the conversation, is there any more background that you want to give on yourself or Harcros?
Mark Hamilton:
I’ve been around the industry a long time. I’ve been with Harcros since the early part of 2016, but I’ve known Harcros as a supplier before that for 21 years. Harcros is a medium-sized chemical distribution and manufacturing company, but what makes it a little bit unique is that it is both a distributor of a full line of chemical solutions as well as a manufacturer. Most of the companies in our space are one or the other, but we’re both, and we try to leverage that.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
You’ve been at Harcros for seven years now?
Mark Hamilton:
Yes, seven years. Before that, I knew Harcros as a supplier for about 20 to 25 years.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
So you’ve been in this industry for a while.
Let’s jump right into the questions. We’re seeing a lot of suppliers and distributors increase investments in their digital customer experiences. Generally speaking, they’re building capabilities related to digitizing their product catalogs, increasing customer reach, engaging more customers, or lowering their customer acquisition costs. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for digital within Harcros?
Mark Hamilton:
Probably on all the fronts you mentioned because we did have information available on a digital format, but to be honest, it was kind of all over the place. So if you talk about the area that you’re helping us with right now on the Digital Product Catalog, it’s so important to have that accessible to our employees as well as to our customers so that our people can help our customers or can look for solutions and be more aware of what we have to offer. We’re also embarking right now in the middle of an ERP project — we’re about a little bit more than halfway done on that — and a better and more robust CRM platform. So how we get all that information in a good format and easily accessible is our biggest challenge right now, but I do think we’re making progress. It’s going to be vitally important for us.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
That’s a lot to bite off simultaneously, so good on you.
Mark Hamilton:
To be honest, we kind of had to. Harcros has been around for over a hundred years under different name iterations; it’s now been close to 30 years that I’ve known Harcros. Harcros prides itself on its people and the relationships that they have, and being able to look for solutions for their customers, but being very accessible on a people format. So how do you leverage those types of relationships, but also become more modern in having the tools necessary to be more effective? Especially in the world we live in today, because I don’t want to give up the reputation we have for being a very people-oriented customer service organization. But we need better tools to be more effective and the customer base is changing, right? So some of our more savvy customers are used to going online and whether it’s going to be for personal or business, seeking information, getting it rather quickly, and making decisions, right? So we want to be a part of that.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
You hit on probably the most common trend that we hear across the industry, which is that customers’ expectations are shifting. They want much more responsiveness, they want access to information really quickly, and they want to be able to have quick, short interactions with their sales reps.
Are there other trends that you’re seeing at Harcros related to digital strategy?
Mark Hamilton:
The thing that we’re hearing a lot about right now, both you and I, is artificial intelligence, and where that’s going to take us. I’m trying to keep an eye on that and have our folks keep an eye on that, because there may be a lot of opportunities — as scary as that is in some ways — to utilize that to make our responses even faster and more effective. I’m sure you are also looking at ways to make your platform more responsive using that. A lot of talk is going on about that right now. I’ll give you an example. I was having a conversation with one of our key leaders earlier today, and I said: “Wouldn’t it be cool if either somebody internal like a product manager or one of our customers would be able to go into the platform we’re using with you, the product catalog, and look at an anionic surfactant with a cloud point of X.” And have some sort of artificial intelligence be able to get you there faster, rather than sifting through a catalog online or not. I don’t know that that’s where my head goes these days as opportunities arise to follow the next thing.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
I don’t know how closely you follow the market, but that whole space is very hot outside of the chemical industry. I think a lot of suppliers are talking about that capability, like how do we answer a customer’s question quickly, especially all these basic questions where the answers sit in the documentation and they don’t necessarily need a sales rep to be able to answer those questions. They just need access to the info as quickly as possible, right? It’s coming, I can tell you. We’re playing around with a lot of stuff now, so be on the lookout soon. But it’s definitely coming.
Ok, last question. There are a lot of headwinds right now. A lot of CEOs are talking about it; they’re seeing demand slow down. What advice would you give your peers in the industry that are trying to balance short-term challenges with long-term investments, especially in tech?
Mark Hamilton:
As long as your business is relatively sound, even though it may be slowing down, I think one of the things that I would advise companies, as much as it may be difficult for a public company to do this, but we can do it as an employee-owned, private company, is to think a little bit longer term. To build that infrastructure and not take your eye off the ball just to have a short term savings. Because I do think it’s really important, especially even in some of the downturn times that we may be experiencing. And to be honest with you, at least in my space, we’ve seen some slowdown, but we haven’t seen a tremendous slowdown like everybody was fearing. It may still be coming, but we’re not seeing it. We’re below where we were last year, but last year was kind of an anomaly high — a record year. If you look at a longer term graph, there was a spike in ’22, and it’s come down in ’23. But if you look at the longer term trend, it’s still going up. My advice would be to not give up on things that are going to make you more effective and efficient in the longer term — within reason, you can’t break the bank.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
I can’t agree with you more. We are in these conversations all the time with suppliers where, when the times are really good, they don’t want to invest. When times aren’t good, they also don’t really want to invest for the long term. So, I’m very glad to hear you say what you did. But it is changing. I think that as more CEOs are watching their competitors and some of the things that they’re building and talking to customers about, I think it’s putting a lot of pressure on folks to invest regardless of the short term environment. But I’m glad you guys aren’t feeling the impact like some others are.
Mark Hamilton:
Yeah, I’ll knock on some wood here, but so far we’re looking pretty strong. But the challenge is still going to remain with us. We have somewhere around 5,500 SKUs of products that we’d like to get in front of our customers and get in front of our own people. Our people have to be aware of those products, and know what we have to offer. It’s going to take some digital help to get us there. And then not only have those available to choose from, but have ways digitally that people can place an order or track an order, just like we do in our personal lives. I mean a week doesn’t go by that I don’t hit Amazon for something. I don’t think we’ll quite get there because we’re in a chemical space with a lot more regulation and things like that, but it’s got to get more efficient and better and faster.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
No doubt. Five years ago I think there were still a lot of questions around maybe the industry is just different from all the other markets. But I think now it’s just a matter of when, and things are certainly accelerating.
Well, that’s it; we’re at the end. Thank you so much for joining us. Mark, any final comments as we wrap up?
Mark Hamilton:
Like I said, I can’t stop thinking about the AI opportunities. The markets are all buzzing with it. Sometimes they can get a little ahead of themselves, but there’s so much. One last example, this leader I was talking to said they tried out a business intelligence function that helped him build a PowerPoint deck on sales performance in a matter of minutes — talk about a time saver.
Ali Amin-Javaheri:
Things are going to look a lot different in five years. I think our audience will certainly appreciate hearing your thoughts. Thanks again, Mark.
