GA 229 | How to Run a Sustainable Organization with Dale and Dan Crownover

From a love and respect for one another. We're trying to do the same thing with the environment. You know, Dan has made a reference. This generation is the green generation. We hope we encourage other people to do the same thing or something similar.

Today I'm excited to introduce an amazing company and leader. The company is Texas Naplant and the leader I'm referring to is Dale Crownover. Now, a few months ago we were fortunate enough to shoot an entire Gemba Academy Live episode at Texas Nameplate where we learned all about their journey with sustainability. Specifically, we learned how they recycle, rejuvenate and reclaim many of the things they use to make their product. Now, we've since released this entire video based episode. So if you're a Gemba Academy subscriber, be sure to check it out in the Gemba Academy Live at the Gemba section of our website. Now, with this said today, I want to share the audio portions of two different conversations from the episode. Now in the first clip you'll hear my opening discussion with Dale where he introduces what he calls the triple bottom line, which is people, planet and profit. And then in the second clip we go to the very end of the episode where I actually decided to take a bold risk as I asked some pretty tough questions in order to really understand why they're so passionate about this topic. Now in that last clip you'll hear from Dale and his son Dan. Now, show notes for this episode which will include a link to sign up for a free trial to Gemba Academy. So if you're not a subscriber and you want to check out this full Gemba Academy Live episode, you definitely can, free of charge. Just sign up for a three day trial and you can do that on our normal gembacademy.com website. Just kind of scroll to the bottom, you'll see a button. Or you could go to the show notes for this episode which will be podcast.com and this is episod episode 229. All right, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

All right, well, welcome to Lancaster, Texas and at Texas Nameplate.

Dale.

How are you, sir?

Thank you so much for having us come in.

Great.

We've been talking about this for several years and we've been out to visit you a couple times and super excited for today to finally get to introduce, you know, the Gibba Academy community to Texas Nameplate. Now, I think many folks who are involved with AME or anything like that probably already heard of Texas Nameplate because you're pretty Famous keynote speaker and all that kind of stuff. Podcast, rock star and all the rest of it, right?

All you guys make me look good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Dale, I want to do just in this first video, I want you to just tell us a little bit about your company, maybe its history. And then kind of towards the end of this one, let's talk about just what the folks can expect for the rest of this episode. Who we're going to, what we going to see, who we going to talk to.

Well, my father started Texas nameplate 1946. So we've been around a long time. I'm second generation. This is the only job I've ever had. I'm real happy. Both my two sons, millennials, are working with us now, so you get to meet them. And we make metal nameplates. Nameplates you see on hot water heaters, air conditioners, lawnmowers, any type of a name plate. It's been a good business. Not a lot of people know much about the nameplate industry, but we use a lot of acids and we use a lot of materials that some people would consider to be not good chemicals, solvents, or hazardous materials. But through the years, you know, we've used, you know, to make a nameplate. We've got very involved in a lot of different processes. And, you know, for many years it was about quality. And obviously, like so many organizations, AME and Shingo, everybody got focused on quality, which we did. We. I call myself a Baldrige nerd. I really went down to performance excellence with Baldrige and that really helped our organization. You won the award a couple times. Won the award a couple times. Very proud of that. But like anything I think Lean has taught me or ame, we can always do a little bit better. And back in our industry and having all these high risk materials, we got concerned about the future and, and what could we do with all this. So, you know, I'm real happy now, Ron. What I really want to do, I want to share the story about a sustainable organization. I consider Texas Nameplate to be a sustainable business. And what that really means, that we are very focused on triple bottom line. I'll be honest, I didn't really know what triple bottom line was till not long ago.

So what is it?

Well, it's when you identify people planet and profit.

People planet and profit, the three Ps.

And you know, I would say a lot of organizations do that. They probably don't do it as systematic as what I'd like to try to portray in this interview we're going to do today, that there is a real conscious effort how we identify the planet, how we identify the people, and obviously, we all need to make profit. But I think what we're going to show you, I hope to the audience, is that when you deal with environmental concerns and you deal with people concerns, when you do all that, obviously you're going to make a profit. And it's all about sustainability. And I really do think particularly so with the millennials. I love the millennials. I have two of them. I raised two of them. You could consider these the Green Generation. They claim right now that 75% of the millennials will make a purchase from an organization that is sustained, which I think is huge. So today, that's what I really want to share with everybody, that our doors are open and we're serious about this, and we really hope that we can encourage other entrepreneurs to do the same thing.

Tell us a little bit about your dad. Tell us about why he started this company. And now I'm sure he's watching down on you right now. He's got to be very proud of what you've done here. Dale, what do you think he would say if he could be here today?

Well, I love my dad. Like so many people, I had the opportunity to work with my dad for 50 plus years. Ironic. He just. He's been gone 10 years. I was lucky to be his son. That generation, he was born in the 20s, so they were back in the Depression. So his idea of running a business, he told me there were only three things I had to do. Ron. He said, I need to be good to my people, be good to my customers, and don't be greedy. And I've always remembered that you can read all these books about how to run a business, but I've always remembered those traits about my dad. My dad was a people person. He wanted to do the right thing. And what I think you're going to see, I hope you see in this interview that what we're doing on this sustainability, we weren't asked to do any of this. We did this on our own. And it goes back to what my dad always kind of said.

You work at it hard and you'll have people that'll follow you. And you be good to these people.

What do you mean? You work at it hard and you'll.

Have people who follow you.

You be a good leader. You be a good leader. Don't just be a demander. You go do this now. Be a good leader to these people. If they get to do a good job, compliment these people in the shop. If you make more money, give these people a little piece of the pie.

Just do the right thing. He was a good businessman. He wasn't interested in being big. He wanted to be better. And I think that's why we probably went down the path with the Malcolm Baldrige. We didn't want to be big. We wanted to be very good at what we do. My dad, as he got older, I could tell now that I'm 65 years old now, too. But now I look back when my dad was my age and I could really tell that he really wanted to help others. And as you get older in life, you really start thinking about a legacy. And we're all going to go one day. And I don't think anybody discounts the idea what people going to say about me. And I'm not doing all this just for that, but I am really interested in what Texas Nameplate could be for somebody else and how we could help them. And I think that's where my dad would be proud of our reputation. Not that what our sales are and not, you know, what our, you know, our expectations as far as profitability, but are we making an impact? And again, I hope in this interview today that we can invite big companies, little companies, anybody, to really, really make a real conscious effort to identify the environment and their people.

Okay, give us a quick overview of what we're gonna see today and who we gonna talk to.

Well, I hope what you see is an organization that is having fun. I think, I hope you'll see that it's clean, it's organized. Of course. We have a brand new facility that we're very, very proud of.

Got an eye scrubber machine that I've been using.

Eye scrubber is in fact, we just got inquiry from Australia. Somebody wanted to buy our eye scrubber. You'll see a little. You'll meet the people, you interview. You get to interview her youngest son, Dan, of course. I'm proud of both the boys. Dan has kind of taken more of an administrative role. He's a millennial. I'm real proud of where he's going. And you gotta understand Ron, when he's a graduate of Tech, Texas Tech, got his master's, but guns up, guns up. Yeah. And as I look back when he came to visit us and he'd bring his friends and I listened to their dialogue and their conversations and I could really, I got impressed with how these people think the millennials are a driving force. And people my age the entrepreneurs my age, the baby boomers, whoever, they need to really get mindful about this generation because they want to fix the mess that we probably helped create. So you'll get to talk to Dan, and I think he'll confirm he has really given me personally and this company a lot of support that what we're doing on this sustainability. You'll see we have a separate building that we have our chemicals stored in. But what you'll really see in there are three major projects where we recycle our water. We recycle 450,000 gallons of water a year. You'll see our rejuvenation. We're one of the very few nameplate companies that rejuvenate our acid 70%. You'll see our solvent reclamation room where we reclaim about 95% of our solvent. The Ice Gerber you talked about has zero discharge on VOCs. We got an exhaust fan that we put on it, probably cost $3,000. We don't even turn it on. There's really no VOCs. So you'll see some of that. We're paperless. I'm very happy with the paperless situation. I encourage a lot of organizations if you. If you want to say you're green, which I think is very, very important from a brand. The easiest, best way to say you're green is to go paperless. Now, the challenge is going to be your culture. You just got to have the right people. But if you get more and more millennials, they'll do it. I was happy. Dan, the youngest son you'll meet. We did a statistic just a couple of weeks ago. 40% of our people at Texas Nameplate are millennials. And. And what is interesting about that from this green concept is that now that we are attracting these people, and this is why I think people my age as leaders need to really focus now. We are attracting them. But what an organization needs to really do is look for, how are you going to retain these people? They're not going to stay around if you're throwing everything in the dumpster.

They just don't think like that.

So those are just some of the things that you see and very proud of. And you'll meet Ron and Ronnie. They're a little younger than I am, of course, everybody is. But they're. They were the ones that did all this. They put the pipes together. Ron, it was a lot of his ideas to do the rejuvenation. They took a lot of pride in this. I never told them, you know, go do this, do this. I think they knew where I was going with all this. When we built this new facility, we took advantage of that. We could do a lot of this stuff, that we could recycle our water, we could rejuvenate, we could do all this. And these guys made it happen. And you'll see a lot of pride from these guys.

All right, so back here with Dan. Hi Ron and Dale again. So, gentlemen, we've had a great day and again want to thank you for allowing us to come in and invade your property with our video team. And you know, the makeup wasn't that awkward, was it?

Just took a while for me.

Yeah. So what I wanted to do in this final chat, gentlemen, is just one thing I've been trying to figure out. I've been here a couple times now and talked to you, Dale, several times. And one thing I'm just really trying to, trying to put my finger on and I haven't done it yet and I've been waiting for this shot here to ask you guys is you talk a lot about what it is and some of the reasons, some of the reasons why, but something tells me that there's something deeper within, you know, the soul of this company, of why you guys are so passionate about sustainment. And to me, I just, I'm not buying, I'm just going to call you, I'm not buying all the stuff about Rags and this and that. I think there's something deeper going on and maybe you haven't even articulated it to yourselves, maybe you have. But I'm just curious if you could maybe share a little bit kind of from inside of where this is coming from. Because it's not normal behavior, unfortunately for companies to behave the way you guys are behaving.

You know, I think you are right that maybe we haven't articulated quite our thoughts on it all. But where I think the foundation of it is is that in our hearts and we believe in all of our team's heart is that outside of just the green aspects, we just want to do the right thing. We want to treat our customers right, we want to treat each other right, we want to treat our families right, we want to come into this place, treat our co workers right. That's in our heart and ultimately we just want to do the right thing. And so when this green projects and this green initiative kind of came up, whatever the first project was, it was a no brainer because it was the right thing to do. And so I think that's what it all ties back to is just to just Absolutely. It's so simple. We're just wanting to do the right thing, that that's what's in our heart, that's what, how this company was founded, that's in all the team's heart out there. When we're making a nameplate, let's make it right, let's come in here with a good attitude, let's enjoy this and ultimately let's just treat others with respect. And I think this, this green initiative has just developed off of that same thought process where we just want to treat our planet right and our neighbors right and just do the right thing. It's simple. It's a bit of a no brainer. My dad tells the story a lot about when you brush your teeth, do you turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth or do you just let it run for two minutes And a lot of people, especially males, will leave it running while you brush your teeth. But if you explain to them, hey, you can save X amount of gallons of water by just turning off the water while you brush your teeth, this is the impact you can have. And when you say that, it's a no brainer for them because it's the right thing to do. And so I think all of our seven, eight projects have been so easy to develop and implement is just because all of our team believes it's the right thing to do.

Yeah, you know, to piggyback, you know, back I guess originally, you know, when you ask about my father, his granddad, he was a pretty simple minded person.

So.

And I've tried to teach both Ryan and Dan that same thing. You know, a lot of our foundations are just biblical principles. Just do the right thing. Integrity, honesty, have fun doing it. So I was kind of taught that as a young child, tried to do the same thing for the boys. And then as Dan was saying again, what we're also really wanting to do is encourage other people. I'm not saying we want to be their daddy, but we want to share. We hope they would come and emulate us. We're a small organization, we don't really have the financial resources to a point. So we were driven by other means. So we really did want to share. But Baldrige really did help me learn how to do things a little bit more systemic that we learned from Baldrige and systemic way of doing it. But then I take the old principles of all of the people that my dad or older people that like Dan was saying that just wanted to do the right thing, that generation, it was a You know, they would look, man, and I shake a hand and it was a deal. And you know, we're not so silly to think we're going to get back to that same type of process. But from a love and respect for one another, we're trying to do the same thing with the environment. You know, Dan has made reference this generation, this, the green generation. We hope we encourage other people to do the same thing or something similar.

So I was in kind of my prep work. I always like to scan the websites and whatnot and couldn't help but notice there was on one page, I think it was, maybe it was talking about there was like mission and. And then one of them I saw was vision. And you guys, you called out Psalm 121:2, I believe it was. So I'm not to ask personal questions or anything like that, but just curious, you know.

Well, I'm glad you asked that. You know, I'm real proud. You know, we're, we're faith based organization too. And I've told Dan, both boys that always put the Lord in there. He's. He's helped us be who we are. But yeah, that's Psalm 121. That's one of my favorite one and it really talks about. And I've shared this from the boys when they were young. It was shared with me with an employee that used to work with us, an African American lady. When I got hurt as a young teenager, she told me read Psalm 121. I read it and I read it a lot now. And it's where you see help from the Lord and that it doesn't matter what the situation is, you can get help. And as I look back, he. He has helped me, he's helped Texas nameplate and that's, that's who we are. So it seek help and you know, so that's where it came from, you guys.

And you know, on that too, you.

Know, and.

Dad shared that verse with myself and my brother at an early age. That's definitely one of my favorite verses going back to this Greendell. In that verse it says my help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. We believe. And like dad said, we're a faith based organization. We believe that. And our team believes that he is the maker of heaven and earth like we spoke about earlier, all these resources. He's the maker of all these resources. The water, the acid, the metal, the solvent. We're only glorifying him by being able to reuse what he created for us. So that's when I say it's a no brainer. He gave it to us. Grateful for that. Let's glorify him by just reusing it.

As much as we can.

Well, you guys are doing some amazing work and I feel really fortunate to have spent a day with y' all and I know our relationship ain't gonna end here, so keep up the good work. You know, we've been talking, you know, at lunch and all the rest of it that maybe Gimba Academy needs to get some sustainability courses.

And I think I have a couple.

Trainers right here who can help, maybe lead the way because I think the world needs it and I'm willing to do my part. Yell help and we'll figure out how.

To do it together.

Down owners for sure. Thank you guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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