Ben has had a notable career at Madison Industries, primarily focusing on growth and strategic acquisitions. Ben unpacks his roles, specifically discussing his customer focused approach to innovating tamper evident products. He explains the importance of providing tamper evidence in real-time through digital capabilities, addressing theft and contamination issues in the medical and transportation sectors, and leveraging customer feedback for product development.
Ben shares anecdotes from his career, emphasizing the significance of speed and rapid iteration, resource allocation, the value of trust in customer communication, and the role the Covid pandemic played in encouraging leadership growth and transformation.
- (00:26) Welcome Ben Rogers
- (01:34) Ben's Role at TydenBrooks
- (02:43) Innovative Solutions in Tamper Evidence
- (05:33) Challenges in the Supply Chain
- (07:19) Career Path and Lessons Learned
- (11:11) Developing Digital Products
- (14:07) Customer Collaboration and Feedback
- (16:39 Reflections on Innovation and Speed
- (20:26) Final Thoughts
About Our Guest
Ben Rogers has spent his entire career at Madison Industries, recently taking on the role of president at TydenBrooks. Previously Ben served as general manager of direct to consumer at Conair Industries. Ben earned his Bachelor of Science in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University graduating cum laude with concentrations in finance and entrepreneurship. And he was also captain of the Cornell football team.
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Full Show Transcript
Patrick: Hello, fellow innovators. This is Patrick Emmons.
Shelli: And this is Shelli Nelson.
Patrick: Welcome to the Innovation and the Digital Enterprise Podcast, where we interview successful visionaries and leaders and give you insight in how they drive and support innovation within their organizations.
Shelli: Welcome to today's episode. We're excited to have Ben Rogers with us, a dynamic leader who spent his entire career at Madison Industries steadily advancing through progressive roles over the past seven and a half years. Most recently, Ben has taken on the role of president at Tyden Brooks, the leading global manufacturer of safety and security seals with critical applications across a wide range of industries. Before this, Ben served as General Manager of Direct to Consumer at Con-Air Industries and as Vice President at Madison Industries where he played a pivotal role in acquisitions and strategic growth.
Ben earned his Bachelor of Science degree in applied economics and management from Cornell University, graduating cum laude with concentrations in finance and entrepreneurship. He was also captain of the Cornell Football Team. In today's conversation, we'll explore Ben's insights on leadership, innovation, and the future of digital products. Let's dive in.
Patrick: Welcome to the show, Ben.
Ben: Thank you. It's great to be here. I realized today that I've drawn inspiration from many of the prior guests on this show, so it's really cool to be here and I appreciate you having me.
Patrick: Awesome. Well, I'd love to hear some of the inspiration, but before we get into that, why don't you share with our listeners a bit more about your role at Tyden Brooks?
Ben: Tyden Brooks is a 151-year-old company, began when E.J. Brooks, who happened to be neighbors with Thomas Edison and Thomas Edison asked him to provide a seal for the very first electric meter that he was working on. A hundred fifty-one years later, as Shelli mentioned, we provide a wide range of products to critical applications in the tamper evident space. In my role as president, I'm responsible for the day-to-day operations as well as our strategy. We have an innovation strategy, and I'm responsible for allocating resources to that plan, that strategy, and ensuring that we are developing and providing the next round of tamper evident products that solve the types of problems we're seeing in the world today.
Patrick: Very cool. Why don't you give us an idea of the types of problems, type of customers? What's the problems that you're solving right now and what do you think are going to be some of the problems that as you're developing your innovation muscle and growing, where do you see the real opportunity is?
Ben: Our products are used anywhere where tamper evident is required. A few applications that come to mind are in the medical space. We provide a security seal with a dot on it that gets used for surgical equipment that's put in autoclave and sterilized. When the dot turns from blue to black, they spend at the desired temperature for the desired period of time, and that's really important because surgical equipment can lead to infections in surgery. Those infections typically do not have favorable outcomes for the patient. In fact, there's an alarming number of infections that happen at the surgical site that lead to deaths in the United States and in the world. We're doing our part to decrease the number of cases from contaminated surgical equipment.
We also provide many products to the transportation space, so goods and transit, any chain of custody solution that requires serial numbers, contamination, physical security. We provide the products that allow shippers and carriers and really any stakeholder in the space to ensure that goods are not tampered with, like I mentioned, stolen or protected going from point A to point B.
Patrick: You used the word there before, autoclave. Of course, I know what it means, but for our listeners, what is an autoclave?
Ben: For simplicity, let's just think of an autoclave as a big oven. I think actually steam might be involved as well, but you cook the surgical equipment for the required period of time in order to get rid of any germs or contamination that may be present to ensure sterility. In terms of the types of products that we're developing and the problems that we will be solving in the future, like I mentioned, everything is centered around tamper evidence and what we're working on right now is providing that tamper evidence in real time.
So, how do we layer digital capabilities onto our existing, what we call mechanical products to provide tamper evident, whether it be potential contamination, potential theft, anything that may be happening that shouldn't be happening that we would be looking for with our mechanical products or I should say protecting against with our mechanical products? How do we provide that data in real time? One area that is particularly relevant is in the transportation space.
By layering our digital solutions onto our mechanical products, you no longer have to wait for goods to get from point A to point B. You can actually be alerted to possible tamper in real time. That allows you to take any action on that possible tampering, whether that's trying to recover the goods that are stolen, stop people from stealing goods, investigate whether contamination has taken place, or simply get goods back on the road to ensure continuity of supply. Our goal is to be able to not only stop people from tampering but also provide the data in real time that allows actions to be driven from that data.
Patrick: Overall, you're talking about the theft that's going on. What's the size and scale of that?
Ben: Theft in the US supply chain is in the tens of billions. While that's an alarming number, I think it's sometimes hard to wrap our head around that, we are working with one customer right now who's theft on their consumer electronics portion of their business is well over $50 million. To me, that's a staggering. That's on an annual basis and tells you the amount of product that is being stolen in our supply chain.
Patrick: And is that mostly through rail solutions that this is occurring or is it trucks?
Ben: Rail and trucks as well. Unfortunately, people have gotten so smart that it could be an inside job where we've even seen people marking the truck, so that thieves who are on the side of the road know that between certain hours of the night, if a truck goes by and it's got an orange X on it, that's a high value shipment and that's one you should go after. It's really unbelievable how smart these people have gotten.
Patrick: So I'm going to start looking for orange X's on the trucks down the road.
Shelli: Don't put an X on your car, Patrick.
Ben: Right. I think the point there is it's such a widespread complex problem to solve and we really are just a small part of the overall solution, but the times really have changed. Because the value of the goods that are being shipped has increased, so too do we need to increase the solution and the sophistication of our solution so that we can provide data when needed given that we are the first line of defense for anyone trying to get into any truck container rail car, and that's really where our innovation comes in.
Shelli: Awesome. I was just going to maybe switch gears. So, Ben, we know that you've had a great career path so far at Madison. Just curious how your previous roles have set you up for this position at Tyden Brooks.
Ben: I think that's a really interesting question because while we're constantly trying to learn, we aren't always as aware of how we're drawing on past experiences, and I think ultimately my past experiences have definitely shaped my role today and how I go about my role today. In terms of how I draw on those experiences, I think really it comes down to focus, mission, and allocation of resources to that mission and I would actually combine the focus and the mission to focus on the mission and allocate resources appropriately. Thinking back to one of my first operations jobs, we were selling isopropyl alcohol wipes or providing isopropyl alcohol wipes to clean room environments.
I happened to join that business two months before COVID. Global pandemic happens and we are getting calls from customers, specifically hospitals, wanting to order 10 times their previous year volume, not just 10 times their previous order, but 10 times their annual volume from the year before. The issue with that is that we were put on allocation from our suppliers because isopropyl alcohol became a scarce resource during the pandemic. So, I sat the team down and we reevaluated our mission and said, "How does our mission right now need to change?" How it changed was we had to really focus on hospitals and providing this sterile product to the hospitals that were providing care to sick people during the pandemic, and we rallied around that.
We put our very best resources on that problem and we focused on our mission. We allocated resources appropriately, and because of that, I think we gained a lot of trust in each other. We gained a lot of trust from our customers because we were open and honest with our customers about what was going on and we stayed very true to our mission. I think how that applies here at Tyden Brooks is interesting because Madison acquired Tyden Brooks in 2022. When I joined Tyden Brooks, we had been very focused on the mechanical products that we were providing. We were not focused on innovating with digital capabilities to our mechanical products and we were getting calls from customers asking us to provide products for theft issues, for example, like I mentioned earlier.
We had to be really honest with our customers about the fact that we didn't have the solution that they were looking for, but we had the capability to develop the solutions that they were asking for. So, we understood what our mission was. We had a very real theft issue. Again, I'm going to keep coming back to this theft issue because it's one that we rallied around and fit right into our mission. We rallied around and focused on doing our part to fix the theft issue and allocated resources appropriately. We put our very best people and found the very best people we could to come up with a solution so that we could tell our customers we're working as fast as we possibly can on the solution that you're looking for and solving the types of problems that you're running into on a daily basis.
Patrick: It's a lot of honesty. If you listened to any of our previous podcasts, it's a theme that we hear quite often is there's the collaboration between clients, vendors, customers, partners. It takes everybody. You just mentioned two years ago, you had that little crisis of like, "Hey, there's a problem people are looking to us to solve. This is what we do." What was the key investment? What was that move? What did you have to do to start getting on the right path? Because you can say, "Hey, we don't have the right answer yet." So then what do you do? What's your move after that?
Ben: We first had to identify the types of resources we needed to develop these digital products, and then we had to be very honest with ourselves about whether we had those capabilities in our organization or whether we needed to go outside of our organization to get them. We ultimately decided on a bit of a hybrid approach. We did have one person in our organization that had the technical skills to develop these digital products. We also partnered with leading technology providers and we brought on three new members of this team in order to develop the types of products we were looking for. We then removed every other responsibility that this team had. So, that they were solely focused on developing these digital products.
I think one of the things that was very unique about and continues to be very unique about this opportunity is that we were receiving voice of customer from current customers of ours. We weren't having to go out into the market and try to gather feedback from people in the space who we were not selling to already. Customers of ours were coming to us asking for these types of solutions. So, as we put together what we now call a tiger team, we had that voice of the customer because there were open lines of communication already because they were coming to us with product ideas.
We are not going to them. That has flipped. Now that we have actual solutions, we're gathering feedback on the solutions that we've developed, but originally, it was that inbound interest that was a light bulb moment for us to say, "We need to put key resources on this. We need to invest heavily. We need to go as fast as we possibly can to solve these problems because the largest shippers of goods and the largest providers of transportation really in the world are coming to us with product ideas and asking us to develop these products for them."
Patrick: So here's the thing, as I hear you tell that story, the thought I have is you did have something because we hear all the time first to market, technical advantage, you got to have the right people, but that's not this story, is it, right?
Ben: It's not.
Patrick: You didn't have the people and you didn't have the product, but I would argue and I don't know your industry very well and I don't know your customer base, but I would argue you had something that was really more important than all of those things, and that's trust from your customers. They looked to you and said, "Hey, can you help me with this? This is the problem." I think that's where I think a lot of entrepreneurs and innovation people get a little lost. They think the product is the answer, but the product is the result of if you don't have your customers as part of your R&D design team, I think you're just wasting time.
Ben: No doubt. I think it's hard to overstate the importance of that. To be able to pick up the phone when you're thinking through a feature and talk to the largest shipper of products in the United States, huge advantage.
Patrick: Yeah. Were they part of the tiger team or did the tiger team have direct lines with people to do a little bit of an iterative approach of what about this, what about this?
Ben: There were no customers who actually had the tiger team designation, but they were about as close as you could get, I would say. The other advantage that we had drawing on our closeness to the customer is while they weren't specifically on the tiger team, I would say they were part of the tiger test team, which allowed us to go test our product in the field on real applications with that customer.
I'll be honest, we failed miserably the first time, but we were very fortunate to be able to test with, like I mentioned, real customers in the field that were giving us real-time feedback because we were so close to the product that outside perspective and how our product fits into their specific application really cannot be overstated. Had we gone in it was a strike one and you're out scenario, we would've been in a bad spot, but because we were so close to our customer the entire time, because we are allowed to test early in the process, that allowed us to gather data much more quickly than if we were just doing all of the testing internally. I think it allowed us to move a lot faster.
Patrick: How long did it take to get to the failure, months?
Ben: It took us a few months to get to what we thought was a minimally viable product. I will admit it took us hours to find out it was not in fact viable, but the positive that came from moving very quickly and gathering that data with a customer through field testing was that it showed the customer not only were we on the right track, we were very close. Once we had the solution that we were promising them, it was going to be an extremely innovative solution, which was exciting and a nice bit of inspiration to pull from what was otherwise a failed test.
Patrick: See, I hate the word failure. I hate it when people say, "Oh, you got to fail fast." I'm like, "I could run into a brick wall. I'll fail real fast. I won't learn much." So I don't like the word failure. It just seems too sexy, which seems weird, but I just don't like it. So, I always focus on the learn fast of like, "Hey, even if you roll something out there, you are 100% off base."
Okay, good. My delta here is going to be awesome. I'm going to go from 0% correct to 50% correct at the end of this conversation. We're going to get clear fast. That clarity I think is the critical thing, but not so much the fail fast or learn fast or anything like that. In that first phase, is there anything you would've done differently from getting that even proof of concept, minimal viable product, whatever you want to call it? What's one of the things you might've done differently if you were to do it again?
Ben: I have a hard time providing definitive answers to questions like that because it's impossible to say how the outcome would've changed had we changed anything about the process, but ultimately I wish that we had moved faster. I think I'm always going to have a bias for moving as fast as possible. There's such a fine line between moving as fast as you can and cutting corners, and the faster you move, the smaller that margin becomes.
So, it's very uncomfortable to move fast. It's very uncomfortable to be asked to move faster than you have previously for individuals, teams, organizations. So, that focus on speed, being comfortable going that fast is something that I wish we had adopted earlier in this development process, in our innovation journey, but it's something we're going to carry with us for sure as we continue to provide innovative solutions.
Patrick: So really a lot of times we look at things and say, "Oh, it was discomforting," and that means it wasn't good. But you mentioned before I started three businesses and the idea that any of it is surgical is the worst lie told. It's all active will last mile. You played football, you're on the two yard line, it's not going to be pretty right. Somebody's got to pick it up and somebody's got to ram it in. That's just the way it is. So, especially when you do innovation, the road's bumpy and that's why a lot of people don't choose it. We can analyze the discomfort level, but discomfort's required, right?
Ben: No doubt.
Patrick: You're going to take some shots to the dome. There's no way through this without the violence of action coming back at you, right? So quick question. You did have this interaction with the customer that was not 100%. Did they end up buying?
Ben: They are. It's a bit different product bundle than the one we tested with them early on, but they are using the solution.
Patrick: You probably got a massive amount of learning off of what to do next-
Ben: Oh, absolutely.
Patrick: ... where the strategy is, right, and that's the point of innovation. I love when you talk to some of these people who have had massive success in their life and they've got this great narrative of like, "Oh, we saw this opportunity. We did X and we did Y and then we got Z." You are a liar. You did A, B, and C. It got you to D, and realize D's bad. E, F, G is going to give it a shot. Then by the time you get to Q, R, and S, you finally figured out where the right thing is. So, these stories that people tell after the victory of we saw this and we knew that, and it's like, "Yeah, after you got your head kicked in pretty solidly."
Ben: Selective memories, only remembering the good parts, right? Not the uncomfortable.
Shelli: Yeah.
Patrick: It's just the marketing salesmanship of like, "Oh, we've got it all figured out." Nobody does. So, awesome story and congratulations. I think that's really great stuff, and it sounds like it's leading to future success when it comes to your digital road map and how you're going to engage with some of your other customers, but the fact that you had all of this, you learned a ton and the customer is still there, I can only imagine your relationship with that customer is only enhanced because of the shared journey of trying to solve this problem together.
Ben: No doubt, that experience with that customer highlighted the importance of innovation. The team did a great job developing our innovation muscle. We're only going to get stronger, which in turn will only allow us to gain more trust from more customers, which is something I'm really excited about.
Patrick: Awesome. Sounds like you're a great team. Really excited to hear more about your success as you guys continue grow. Love to hear any updates that you have, any breakthroughs as that tiger team is growing, I'm sure it is. But really appreciate you taking the time to join us today and share your background, your history, and some of the challenges that you guys are overcoming.
Shelli: Yeah. Thank you, Ben.
Ben: Thank you both for having me.
Patrick: We also want to thank our listeners. We appreciate everyone joining us.
Shelli: If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, you can subscribe by visiting our website at dragonspears.com/podcast or find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick: This episode was sponsored by DragonSpears and produced by Dante32.
