Episode Description
Are you curious about the impact of employee ownership and the power of transparency in driving a company’s culture and success? Want to learn more about how these factors influence leadership and organizational dynamics?
In this episode of Empowered Owners, Ben Haviland, vice president at Paramount Plastics, discusses the transformative effects of employee ownership, the importance of transparency in leadership, and the inspiring initiatives that are shaping the future of the organization.
- The importance of engaging in the decision-making process and being transparent with your colleagues. Taking the initiative to express your opinions and ideas matters more than you think. By embracing this transparency, you’ll become an even more integral part of the company’s success.
- Getting involved with local initiatives, contributing to charity events, or participating in volunteer activities can make a real impact outside of work. By getting involved, you will feel a greater sense of fulfillment and connection, both within the company and in your community.
- The benefits of employee ownership can positively impact your life. Learn how employee ownership at Paramount Plastics has influenced workplace culture, creating a sense of ownership and responsibility among all employees.
Jump into the conversation:
[01:57] Making an impact at work[04:41] Career changes and life-changing events
[10:09] Ben’s experience with Employee Ownership
[14:19] The positive culture change at Paramount Plastics
[20:57] Transparency in leadership
How to Listen or Watch
Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Watch below or @Empowered_Ventures on YouTube.
Read the full transcript below the media links.
Episode Transcript
Ben Haviland: Some people think of employee ownership, and they’re thinking maybe all 53 employees are voting on every decision made. Manufacturing especially doesn’t work that way. It moves way too fast for that. So there has to be key individuals like Curtis and myself in positions that make those decisions, as well as the rest of our leadership team. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the fiduciary responsibility and just responsibility overall to the employee owners to let them know what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and why we feel like that’s the best decision to make.
Chris Fredericks: Welcome to Empowered Owners, the podcast that takes you inside Empowered Ventures. I’m your host, Chris Fredericks. In each episode, I’ll have a discussion with one of our employees to discover and highlight their distinct personalities, perspectives, and skills while also keeping you in the loop with exclusive news, updates on company performance, and a glimpse into the future plans of Empowered Ventures. This is an opportunity for me to learn more about our amazing employee owners and an opportunity for you to hear regularly from me and others from within Empowered Ventures. On this episode of Empowered Owners, I’m talking with Ben Haviland, Vice President at Paramount Plastics, a thermoforming business EV acquired in 2021. Prior to joining Paramount, Ben served as a Financial Executive at two large steel manufacturing companies. A native of Elkhart County, Indiana, Ben chose to return home in order to be close to extended family and to serve the community that had served him as a kid. I’m excited to talk with Ben today about many topics, including employee ownership, Paramount’s progress these last two years, and what motivates and drives him, which he says is ultimately about the legacy he wants to leave. For Ben, life has become all about making a difference in people’s lives. With that, let’s get to my conversation with Ben. Ben, welcome to Empowered Owners.
Ben Haviland: Thanks. I appreciate you having me.
Chris Fredericks: There’s a lot of places we could start. I think, first off, it’s been a lot of fun working with you at Paramount Plastics, and one of the topics I think that could be interesting is having an impact at work. And a lot of people work is a place they feel like they can make a difference in the world. And I think that might be something that matters a lot to you. So I’m curious, how do you think about that word, impact at work?
Ben Haviland: Yeah, actually, that’s one of the things that really attracted me to Paramount when I came here almost two years ago. Now is just the impact that we can have as not only individuals, but as a whole. On financial well being, as well as the employee owners themselves. I’ve always believed that work should be somewhere that you enjoy going. Usually you spend more time with your work family than what you do your own family, and that’s something I experienced quite a bit in my past, working in steel and spending a lot of time with my teams there. So I’ve always tried to buck the trend a little bit, especially in the accounting world, and really valued that work home life balance and making an impact on people’s lives.
Chris Fredericks: Where do you think that comes from? Do you think about anything growing up about that, connecting work with impact?
Ben Haviland: Yeah, probably so. When I was growing up, I was part of the latchkey kid generation. I can remember probably all the way back to maybe six years old, being home after school by myself until my older brother got home maybe an hour later. There was several times where I’d be the only one there and would need to make my own meals, take care of myself, basically, at least for an hour. I did benefit that my grandparents were right next door to us, so I always had somebody there if I needed them. But I think that probably played a role in me wanting to really help people out and really value that work home life balance so that maybe kids don’t have to be home by themselves, at least with our employee owners.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah. Where’d you grow up?
Ben Haviland: I grew up in Goshen, Indiana. Part time there and then part time in New Paris, just south of there. Most of our family was from New Paris, and so I spent quite a bit of time at my grandparents house, great grandparents house. I was fortunate enough to have my great grandparents in my life up until about 20 years old. That’s something that most people don’t get to experience, I don’t think. And so my grandfather is still here in Elkhart county. In fact, I was the only person really in my entire family that moved out of Elkhart county when I moved away for college. Everybody else is still here. And so when I came home two years ago, it was really just a family reunion. So that’s been great.
Chris Fredericks: Did you assume that you would always come back, or was that more not an assumption that you would come back?
Ben Haviland: Actually, funny you asked that. I actually had been talking to my mom probably less than a month before I moved home and made the comment to her, I will never live in Elkhart county again. My career path, I thought, was always to stay in steel. I was climbing the corporate ladder there pretty quickly. Spent about ten years in the steel industry on the financial side, worked my way up to a division CFO and was probably in line within the next few years to take over my own division and be a CEO there. Thought that’s the path that I had forward and that kind of changed right before I came to Paramount. My dad was in what I would consider a pretty bad head on car accident on his way to work. And it was such a humbling feeling to know that I was 9 hours away and there was nothing I could do. Thankfully, everything turned out really well for him and he was able to go home from the hospital that day with some cuts and bumps and bruises and probably a concussion or two, if I had to guess. But it really switched my mindset to reprioritize and start thinking about more. So what’s important in this life and what would have happened if that would have gone a little bit different and if dad wasn’t with us anymore, God forbid. So that was what I thought my career path was, but that was abruptly changed.
Chris Fredericks: So then, not that we need to dig a ton into kind of your career decisions, but I’m curious, did you just at that point make a decision you wanted to be back home if at all possible?
Ben Haviland: I was working probably 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and that was the expectation at my previous role, so it didn’t hit me right away. It’s one of those evolution things that the more I thought about it, I obviously wanted to come home and be here for my family through that time. And that was the heartfelt side of it. But I would say over the next month, maybe two months, it just really refocused the way I was looking at my job at the time and some of the things that I saw going on and started to bring up things like how do we shift this to more work, home life balance, and more family oriented. And the response I started to get was we pay our employees well enough that this is the expectation and they know that going into it and that’s not going to change. It was more of an evolving process for me. The final straw was one of my direct reports got cussed out in the middle of the office by my division CEO. And when I brought that to his attention, that probably the optics of that to the rest of the team. The response I got from him was he shouldn’t have messed up what he messed up. And that was the deciding factor for me, that this is not heading in a direction that I probably want to be heading any longer. Funny enough, I looked nationwide. We weren’t held down to anything. And at the time, I still didn’t think I want to be home. And so put out feelers and started talking to recruiters and applied for a total of four jobs in Elkhart county and was offered three of those. Didn’t have a whole lot of success elsewhere in the country, so took that as maybe this is God’s way of telling me it’s time to go home. And so came home to interview for some of those jobs and spent about three weeks here, stayed at my parents house and got to spend time with family again for the first time in about twelve years at a really deep level. And the more I did that, the more Ashley and I talked about. We both felt like it’s time for us to go home and really refocus and put family as a priority.
Chris Fredericks: Wow, that’s really awesome. And through that, you ended up coming to Paramount. And I imagine coming to Paramount, the potential of having a big impact on a smaller organization might have been a factor.
Ben Haviland: It was. And to be quite honest with you, I don’t think I knew what I was getting into. I’ve always worked for big corporations. The last corporation I was at was a Fortune 150 company. It was a shock. You wear quite a few hats when you work for a smaller company, but that gives you so much more potential to be able to help people out and to be able to learn more about the business. One thing I never wanted in my career was to be siloed into finance. I love accounting, love finance, but I love business overall a lot more, and especially manufacturing. Being able to see processes and figure out efficiencies always got me going.
Chris Fredericks: That’s awesome. Yeah. So that’s an ability to have an impact. And then I think you have a lot of experience with managing complex kind of company type, division and company projects, ERP implementations and other things. You’ve gotten a chance to do some of that work at Paramount, too.
Ben Haviland: I have. That’s been great. So we just implemented a new ERP system this month, and this is the fourth one I’ve done in my career and by far the best one. And I credit that not only to our team here, but just to the small nature of Paramount. The close family nature of it has allowed us really to have much better communication throughout the process as well as, I think, the ESoP part of it, the employee ownership piece, has really had our team buy in a lot easier than what you would at a traditional holding company.
Chris Fredericks: That’s interesting. And I think employee ownership is not something you had experience with prior to coming to Paramount.
Ben Haviland: That’s correct. I had never experienced employee ownership before Honest, I was a little skeptical, as I think most people probably are. They hear this pie in the sky and think it’s too good to be true. Who’s this Chris Fredericks guy and what’s empowered ventures, and why would they want to help me with my financial well being? And I’ve always felt like, how can I sell something that I don’t believe in? And so the longer I’m here, the more I dig into the ESOP, the more I realize it is everything it’s cracked up to be. And I think the transparency piece of that goes so far with our team. I just spoke to an employee owner last week, that same story as me, and said I was completely skeptical of this. He was lucky enough to be able to come to the Employee Ownership Summit with us and told me on the way home, he said, while I was skeptical, I’m totally bought in. Now I see what you guys are talking about. Now I’m focused a little bit more on how do we get more people to get that realization that he had while he was there.
Chris Fredericks: That’s neat for those that haven’t heard, because maybe when this comes out, not everyone will know about it. So you mentioned an Employee Ownership Summit. Could you share what that was and what transpired there?
Ben Haviland: Sure. So this is my second opportunity to attend our Employee Ownership Summit, which is we have an employee ownership committees at each of our holding companies, or OPCOS. And then we also have the empowered ventures team that all come together once a year, discussed several things to do with employee ownership, everything from healthcare this year to really down to the nitty gritty of what each company’s plan is to further promote employee ownership culture within each of our companies.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, the employee ownership champions, and your sign behind you plays into that. I guess we should have brought that play like a champion sign to the committee meeting.
Ben Haviland: I had to have something Notre Dame in the background.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, I thought the energy at that summit was pretty incredible, and it seemed like people came away feeling really excited and good about what they were going to be working on this year as a committee.
Ben Haviland: Yeah, absolutely. And it really gave us an opportunity, even myself, to take a good, clean, hard look at not just employee ownership, but the way that we view each other within our company. One of the things that we discussed at Paramount was the mentality that’s brought in by some of our employee owners from previous jobs of office versus plant. We’re one of the only manufacturing companies in the empowered ventures umbrella, definitely the only one in the RV setting. So I think that’s something that we’re going to focus on over the next year is how do we bridge that gap and how do we meet people where they’re at and get them to buy into it the same way that we are of, we’re all on the same team, we’re all working towards the same goal and have the same outcome, hopefully.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, that’s super interesting. And I’m guessing what you might be alluding to is maybe some industries maybe don’t treat people as well as others, and there might be a reputation in the RV industry at times that maybe people aren’t at the highest priority level for all the organizations.
Ben Haviland: So for those that don’t know, the RV industry as a whole tends to hire when things are great and they pay really well. They don’t tend to offer great employee benefits. But during a downturn in the market like we’re currently experiencing, which is about every eight to ten years, mass layoffs and Elkhart County as a whole being the RV capital of the world, we experience higher than normal unemployment rates during times like this. So one of the things really worked for us at Paramount to increase that employee retention is just the job security of employee ownership people can expect when they go home and come back the next day. Our gates aren’t going to be closed and our doors aren’t going to be locked. They’re still going to have a job tomorrow and still have the ability to put food on the table for their family.
Chris Fredericks: That’s amazing. I would think that’s an impactful approach to employees. Are you finding that it’s working well in terms of just the culture at Paramount?
Ben Haviland: Yeah. I’ve been absolutely amazed at how quickly our culture has turned from the two years ago when I got here. We had a mindset of coming off a previously 40-year-old family owned company. We had a culture of just, I’m here for a job, I’m going to put in my time, do what I have to do, what’s required of me, and go home. And we’re starting to see a little bit more of that employee ownership mindset of everybody taking ownership of each individual piece that they are contributing to the whole.
Chris Fredericks: That’s amazing. What else is exciting for you going on at Paramount these days, or what are you thinking about for the future of the company?
Ben Haviland: The biggest exciting thing for me is the growth opportunity that we have here. We just hired a couple of months ago our first salesperson. So previously all of our sales have been organic, have just been word of mouth, previous customers or somebody that just googles plastic thermoforming and looks at our website and calls us up and says, hey, I want you to quote these parts. So this is the first opportunity that we’ve really had as a group to really seek out customers. And that really gets me excited.
Chris Fredericks: That’s exciting. Another thing that I’ve been excited about, that you and Curtis, president at Paramount, have both spearheaded, I think is like creating more of a community service element at Paramount. And I know you guys even made the local news, like, last October and tell us what you guys have done to get involved in the community more.
Ben Haviland: Yeah, so I have several connections in the community. As soon as I moved back, one of the things I did was reach out to a mentor of mine, Kevin Deary, that was former CEO of the Boys and Girls Club locally, asked him, how can I help the community that helped raise me? And I know Curtis, he had a similar upbringing that I did. Neither one of us were born with a silver spoon in our mouth, and both of us worked really hard to get where we’re at. We brought that focus as well to Paramount. So last October, we did a community service day that we paid each of our employees to either go to Salvation army here locally in Elkhart, or the Goshen Boys and Girls Club, where I was at, and just volunteer and get our name out in the community, let people know we’re not here just to make profits and churn and burn the way some of the other RV companies are. But we really want to make an impact, not just with our employee owners, but throughout our community and make everybody’s life a better place.
Chris Fredericks: That’s awesome. And you guys also did a food drive.
Ben Haviland: Yeah, it was enormously successful, partly because we won our competition between our sister companies. So we raised about 60,000 pounds of food this year, which just floored me. I truly thought going into the food drive this year with a downturn in our market, that our employee owners would not be able to participate at the same level that we did last year. Last year we hit about 30,000 pounds of food and we even had a meeting, pulled all our team together and said, hey, we completely understand if you can’t participate this year, but if you can give something, and the way that they stepped up part of it, I think, is our competitive nature in this area and especially at Paramount, but just the hearts that our folks have for the local community. I do think we were helped by going to the Salvation army into the boys and girls Club. Curtis, our president, told me about a situation that when they first got to the Salvation Army, they were looking for an unlocked door to get in, and he walked around the one side, there was a guy sleeping on a pallet. We don’t tend to think about that in our community. We’re pretty rural. Elkhart’s a fairly large city for this area, but nothing close to anywhere where you think there’d be a homeless problem. And so to see that for some of our employee owners, I think really struck a nerve for them. And when we were giving part of our food drive contribution to the Salvation Army where they had served, and we gave part of it to the boys and girls club, I think that really hit home for them. It was an impact that they could physically see and people that they dealt with on an individual basis.
Chris Fredericks: Wow. I imagine that was so meaningful and impactful.
Ben Haviland: It absolutely was. We see companies sometimes that they’ll put a slogan on the side of their truck that say people matter or something like that, or so many volunteer hours served by our employees. But I think our challenge is to take it past that. And how do we make that make a meaningful impact on the individual? How does it mean something? So they’re there not just to get a paycheck and that they’re there to really make a difference in somebody’s life and hopefully continue that on outside of work. Hopefully a few people will go and volunteer for if it’s not at the place that we selected somewhere else and make a difference whenever way they can.
Chris Fredericks: I love that so much. Another way that is kind of related. I know you have a passion for community service and public service. I hear you might be running for office.
Ben Haviland: I am. I wasn’t sure if I was going to this year or if I was going to wait till 2026, but the more I talked to my wife and my family about it, I’ve attended a couple of county council meetings recently and was really shocked at the lack of transparency that go on with the finances in our county. So decided to run for county council, and I think I got a pretty good shot. I got a good background. Being the only candidate running that’s in manufacturing. In such a manufacturing community, I think, helps. I think it’ll help me to understand what our people are going through and be able to give them the transparency of where their tax dollars are going. So I think everybody wants to see that and maybe doesn’t realize that that’s something that should be public. And there’s a public meeting every month that anybody can attend. But what I found out, surprisingly, was that meeting is on Thursday afternoons and there’s a Wednesday morning meeting where everything’s actually decided that isn’t open to the public. One of the things that I think I’ve made a pledge to is to be more transparent and put out if I am elected. Kind of a minutes notes of every meeting that we have on Facebook, on my Facebook page for county council and just try and increase transparency. I think I have a pretty good key on what our folks are going through in this county and what we need to do to get back to everybody prospering.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, that’s great. That word transparency is one I’ve heard you mention a lot in this conversation and before, and I’m curious why that word or what transparency, why you think it’s so important for organizations in general.
Ben Haviland: Especially with an employee ownership. How can you be an owner if you don’t know where the money is going or if you don’t know why the decisions are being made that are being made? Some people think of employee ownership and they’re thinking maybe all 53 employees are voting on every decision made. Manufacturing especially doesn’t work that way. It moves way too fast for that. So there has to be key individuals like Curtis and myself in positions that make those decisions, as well as the rest of our leadership team. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the fiduciary responsibility and just responsibility overall to the employee owners to let them know what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and why we feel like that’s the best decision to make.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, I love the way you put that, that you as leaders have a responsibility to the employee owners. That’s a dynamic that doesn’t necessarily naturally exist in all organizations.
Ben Haviland: Yeah, I don’t think it exists in many organizations. It tends to be top down in most organizations especially. The bigger the organization gets, the more it’s going to be that way. I was thankful to work for the companies that I did within the steel industry, that at least at the division level, we were pretty autonomous. But even there, there could have been a lot better transparency as to the decisions that were made at the top.
Chris Fredericks: Something I’ve been thinking about. I’m going to spring an idea on you, but it’s probably something I imagine you have thought about. What does it mean to be a good citizen in a democracy, in an employee owned, in any organization where nobody’s a king and can make all the decisions? And it’s all meant to be a collaborative approach. But you can’t just do everything on a vote either. Right. So this question of what does it mean to be a good citizen, like an informed, responsible, capable, and a citizen that’s benefiting from this organization. So I don’t know. That’s just an idea that’s percolating for me. And I’m curious, what comes to mind for you when I say that two.
Ben Haviland: Things come to mind right away is, first, doing the right thing every time, all the time. That’s one thing that when I got here, Curtis really drilled into me that when we lay our head down at night and close our eyes, do you really want anything weighing on your mind that things you could have done differently? If you do the right thing, you never have to look over your shoulder. And that kind of ties into the transparency piece as well. There can never really be any, even a semblance of indiscretion or anything negative. If you’re transparent with people and honest with them, the other piece of that really flows in. It’s a personality trait and a mindset of who’s your customer. You mentioned a little while ago what I said about it’s our responsibility to the employee owners. That’s who we work for. Essentially every employee owner, what is there, 170 of us throughout empowered ventures, that’s who we work for. And from you all the way down to somebody that runs a CNC machine for us, we’re all responsible to each other as employee owners. And I think community is the same way. If you’re a community leader, whether you hold an office or just a responsible member of that community, your responsibility is really to everybody in the community as a whole.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, I love that. The word that comes to mind for me then is a good citizen is a citizen is someone who is engaging the process ultimately. And it can be hard to feel like you have power or influence or whatever in a big organization, a big country, a big county, a big state, whatever. But actually choosing to engage, and that’s one thing I love about employee ownership, is it’s small enough, we can actually help people get comfortable engaging, ultimately.
Ben Haviland: Yeah. I’ve seen some people out here on the floor that I never would have thought would have been as engaged as they are. And to see them flourish and really open up and speak their mind, speak their opinion, that’s such a great thing. And you just see it in their pace that they’ve never had that opportunity before in their career. They look at it like I’m just a factory worker, right? What opinion do I have and why does it matter? And at a lot of companies, that’s probably the case, but that’s what sets us apart and makes us different. That’s going to help us get better employee owners and be better as a company more profitable in the long run.
Chris Fredericks: Huge kudos to you. Huge kudos to Curtis for fostering that potential for that environment to be taking shape at Paramount. It’s so exciting.
Ben Haviland: It is exciting, but we couldn’t have done it without our team being willing to do it.
Chris Fredericks: Ben, this has been fantastic. My last question for you. Any advice for your fellow employee owners throughout Empowered Ventures?
Ben Haviland: Just what Curtis told me. Be honest with everybody, be transparent, but also take a good hard look at what does work/home/life balance mean. That’s one of the things that Curtis has really instilled here at Paramount, is there’s nothing that a millionaire can’t wait another day on an RV for relationships are what matters and family is what matters. Make sure you keep that priority in place and work will still be here tomorrow.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, but it’s funny how you say when you say that. I think a business that operates that way can still provide the same level of incredible customer service.
Ben Haviland: Customer service and quality is our two keys here. On time delivery every time and the highest quality part. But that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your family to get there.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, Ben, this has been fun. Thank you.
Ben Haviland: I appreciate you having me.
Chris Fredericks: I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Ben Haviland. Thank you Ben for joining me for that discussion. Huge thank you as well to Emily Bopp and the team at Share Your Genius for producing this episode. Remember, we want to hear from you. Please give us feedback, suggest guests and topics for future episodes, and tell us how we can keep improving the show. To reach us, email [email protected]. Thanks for tuning in.
