We were lucky to catch up with Richard Kersey recently and have shared our conversation below.
Richard, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?
It’s not just this industry, and the biggest challenge that corporate america faces today is the decision between organic growth and mergers and acquisitions. America has a consolidation problem that frankly speaking never should have been allowed to occur, and that antitrust regulation used to be in place to prevent, for good reason. Businesses exist for three primary reasons. First and obviously to make money, which should be the least important of the three. The other two are to provide a necessary product or service for the community, and to create jobs so that folks can care for themselves and their families. Organic growth addresses all three of these pillars and encourages innovation. Mergers and acquisitions ignore the last two and literally stifle innovation, focusing entirely on profits and capturing market share. The result of these mergers is usually removing jobs and adding to unemployment among other things. So the challenge is focus really. Executives could be “selling” organic growth and innovation to investors for example, rather than an unproductive cycle of buying & firing to “grow”. Also firing people to gain more customers is not moral behavior last I checked. Besides the fact that it offers no real or actual growth, and customers are lost in the process because they weren’t buying from your business in the first place and they still don’t want to. Congratulations, you’ve done nothing to improve any part of your business, you’ve put employees out of work, and compared to the combined revenue of both businesses, you’ve retained maybe 80% of it. But hey, investors see a 30% increase in revenue, right. And fair competition? who needs it. We can buy more and sell cheaper than anyone else now, so let’s destroy them and force more customers to come buy from us. Who cares how crappy our stuff is or how crabby our employees are. Let them quit. we’ll hire less people to do more and pay them even less. God it’s good to be a gangsta, err executive.
Now this attitude and focus might be that of only a few, but the general public consensus and perception is that this is exactly what’s happening, and planned obsolescence has not helped. Nor has outsourcing call center and other jobs to India, Egypt, and China. Add to that we now have AI to contend with. People are less content and have less money, making them less interested and less productive. Markets and economies end up suffering because of all the consolidation, and ultimately prices are raised in order to offset a downturn in sales volume, which creates a negative spiral towards hyperinflation. And yeah, all because corporate america is infatuated with consolidation. Executives stare endlessly at one pillar, ignoring the other two. It’s a real challenge.
How does it effect the paper industry is a tricky question though because the industry has dwindled over the past twenty years, and there has been lots of maneuvering and flat out plant closures. Ironically, we are now importing more, so there’s that obvious elephant in the room. We cut down and ship out our trees, then buy back paper. Yeah, hey somehow it’s cheaper. God forbid we keep plants open and generations of families working and towns employed. Lookup paper mill closures online, and consider that with ecommerce, we now have more paper shipping packaging being produced than ever before, and yet fewer mills and fewer jobs. The focus is on profits is why. No one is asking how can we keep these folks working, or how can we innovate.
There’s also a tremendously high bar to entry in the industry, where there didn’t used to be. The buy in, if you really want to get involved in distribution is over a million per manufacturer. I’ve seen this limit increase over the years, and some manufacturers are exclusive to a single distributor, with no exceptions. Have they lost business to competitors products and imports? You bet they do. I know because I have no choice but to sell them an alternative. You see, I can’t buy even from the larger distributor because they see me as competition. So the manufacturer loses market share because the distributor won’t sell, so the customer can’t buy what they’re manufacturing. That’s Corporate America in a nutshell. It’s like, Congratulations boys! You’ve managed to prevent your own customers from buying the products you make. Well played. And who cares. One of them just spun off another IPO and generated 37 billion I think it was. I mean why even bother with customers. Of course there’s an old saying in this industry also, which is, “Print is dead. Long Live Print” So what can I say?
For the past 5 years I’ve been building a business model that I think is necessary for the future of the industry, that will allow folks to buy in and create jobs in many communities, provides necessary products, and will have a good ROI for investors for a long time. It’s a solid 3 pillar approach for an industry that has and will be around for a very long time. And the best part is, it’s a global opportunity. But we’ll see. The government keeps devaluing our currency so little guys like myself find it more and more difficult to keep competing. Grow or die, right.
Richard, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m not going to toot my own horn. I grew up in a lower-middle class family in Texas, and learned the value of independent and collective hard work and fair trade for fair pay. I’ve spent a great deal of time in the trades, and have done everything from shoveling shit out of 52 foot double decker cow trailers to construction work, warehouse work, retail management, sales, owning service businesses, managing government contracts and For the past 5 years I’ve been building a business model that I think is necessary for the future of the industry, that will allow folks to buy in and create jobs in many communities, provides necessary products, and will have a good ROI for investors for a long time. It’s a solid 3 pillar approach for an industry that has and will be around for a very long time. I sell paper. I never planned it, or even thought about it. Life just sort of taught me to try and take care of folks as best you can doing whatever you find yourself doing, and I wound up here for now. I’m not super passionate about the business itself because it’s paper. I mean sell me a pen, right? Well hang on because first you’re gonna need something to write ON, and I have this wonderful multipurpose 92 bright smooth white blah blah, yeah yeah just gimme the sheet already. You see what I mean. Lot’s of folks have seen “the office” TV series. and it really is kind of like that. I have a few other projects as well, but this is a solid opportunity to put some good folks behind a drivers seat in a sturdy business model that will run for them for a long time and they can build on. So I guess I’ll be proud of that when we roll out the opportunity to franchise with us.
For now you can visit www.woodyspaper.com and see a simple site with some commercial printing paper products on it, which most commercial printers need and use regularly, and we have wholesale discounts for businesses on everything from multipurpose to bath tissue, paper towels, facial tissue, and even things like sand paper and rolls of kraft paper, engineering rolls, corrugated boxes, paper board, security prescription paper, receipt paper, carbonless form NCR paper. We gots the barbq shrimp, coconut shrimp, shrimp scampi, sauteed shrimp, shrimp tar tar, cocktail shrimp (but that’s just smoked and chilled shrimp), lemon pepper shrimp…
It’s paper, so there’s literally only so much you can say about it, but I hear that there’s no limit to origami, so… (insert awkward laugh and smile here)
What makes us different is what we’re building, and that is a plug and play model fit for 1-3 people, offering immediate revenue on day one of operations from multiple industries and with tremendous growth opportunity across industries including government. And that is different for this industry and I believe it’s necessary.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
I sold off my investments in the market, and put that together with a home equity loan I took out from a bank. The stressful bit was that this was at the end of 2020 when everything was shut down. I had nothing saved and no income if it didn’t work, so I would’ve lost literally everything. BUT what I did have was contacts in the industry and hundreds of customers that were in need of all these products. So it was a HUGE bet. It was also a carefully calculated bet. And so far, despite my best efforts, it’s working out.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Oh the customers for sure. People will always always always build or destroy your business reputation. and it will always depend entirely on how they perceive how fairly you treat them. It’s not how fairly you treat them. It’s how they perceive what you being fair is. So, for example, in wholesale the price is often negotiated because you’re dealing with differences in volume, and do you could do your little calculation there and just say well here’s the price for this or that, right. Which most people do. And there’s the occasional back and forth of is that the best you can do or I pay less over there or whatever. Traditional American haggling, right. It’s fun and it’s a pain in the ass at the same time. I think the trick is, if you can let them know in a way that they can really see, that you’re being sincere in your attempt at giving them a good deal but not THAT good not because you don’t want to, but because you just can’t for whatever reason. It could be volume, cost, availability. It’s definitely not you being an asshole and going here’s your price, now piss off, you know. I think people respect that and they want to do business with folks like that. But it’s also making an attempt to go above and beyond without being asked. A great indicator of this is if your customer ever says to you, “oh no that’s ok. I don’t need you to do all that.” If you ever hear a customer saying that to an employee, protect them at all costs like gold.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.woodyspaper.com
- Instagram: woodyspaper
- Facebook: woodyspaper
- Linkedin: woodyspaper
- Twitter: woodyspaper
