Servant Leadership in Manufacturing: Ed Determan’s Approach at Pallet Service Corporation | Manufacturing Series

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Ed Determan, Plant Manager at Palat Service Corporation, PSC. They have been a trusted wood product supplier for over 50 years, offering new recycled and remanufactured pallets along with custom crating and recycling services across multiple locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Now Ed has been managing plant operations at PSC since 2011, overseeing safety initiatives and implementing efficiency projects that have boosted performance. Before joining PSC, he led shipping operations at Sealy and managed a lumber yard at Menards gaining valuable experience in logistics and team building. Under Ed’s guidance, PSC reduced lost time injuries, facilitated a cutting-edge inventory ERP system, and upgraded production equipment without extra labor.

He also supervised a major plant remodel at Sealy, finishing ahead of schedule and demonstrating his leadership skills. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBAC Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the plant manager at PSC, Palette Service Corporations, Ed Determan. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. I appreciate you having me, thank you. Absolutely. So Ed, how did the opportunity to join PSC first come about?

Ed Determan: I was working at Sealy Tempurpedic. I was the shipping and receiving lead at that point and the plant superintendent, his name was John Roberts. He wasn’t at the time, but shortly after he became my mentor and we’re still very close friends, but he got an opportunity to run Palette Service Maple Grove facility and within a month of him leaving Sealy and taking that role, he poached me and brought me over as a supervisor.

Anthony Codispoti : Gotcha. And so how many facilities does PSC have? We currently have four. Okay. And are you doing the same thing at each location or the service is the products a little bit different?

Ed Determan: It is a little bit different at each location. Each location has something unique to itself. We have two in Minnesota and two in Wisconsin. The facility that I run and operate, all we do is cut the components for pallets. So we don’t actually build any pallets.

Anthony Codispoti : And so you get the lumber in, you’re cutting it into the right dimensions and then you’re shipping it where?

Ed Determan: We’re shipping it all over the, mainly the Midwest. We go a little bit outside the Midwest, but a majority of it is the Midwest. We were originally back in 2011 when we opened this facility. It was originally supposed to just be like a distribution center for the other two facilities that were actually building pallets. And we quickly realized that we had more capacity than what we really needed to service those two facilities. So we started dabbling and selling to other pallet manufacturers in the area. And that really took off and turned into a huge business for us.

Anthony Codispoti : So as somebody who’s an outsider, I’ve never been inside a facility, it seems to me like, well, why wouldn’t everybody just cut their own lumber and put it together? Clearly, it’s more complicated than that.

Ed Determan: It is. It’s not difficult to find and buy the equipment. There’s a lot of different brands and manufacturers out there that sell pallet component cutting equipment. But the real trick is getting good and efficient at it because there’s so little margin in the lumber itself that if you’re not efficient at it, your labor costs are going to just swallow it all up.

And so a lot of smaller pallet manufacturers, they just can’t get efficient enough or keep it running long enough for it to pay for itself. And it’s actually cheaper for them to go find the components somewhere else.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s really interesting to me because obviously, there’s extra freight involved, right? I mean, by the time the cut lumber gets to whoever’s going to assemble it, there’s been the freight of the raw lumber getting shipped to you. And then you guys have to cut it and you’ve got your own margins to make there. And then there’s the additional freight of now having to ship it out again. But the efficiencies, what I think I’m bringing to the table and labor and I’m guessing also lack of material waste makes this cheaper for folks to just buy from you and do the assembly part themselves only. Yep.

Ed Determan: And then the third part to that pyramid is we have a sales team that are so good at cultivating relationships that they’ve been able to get into some bigger lumber mills that most pallet manufacturers can’t get into because they’re not big enough.

They’re not well known enough. So we’ve gotten into these mills and we built these relationships. And so we’re able to bring in volumes of lumber that most others aren’t at potential cheaper prices.

Anthony Codispoti : Are you guys impacted or likely to be impacted by any tariff talks that are going on? Yeah, you get this question a lot.

Ed Determan: Yeah, yes and no. We’re really just kind of riding the way to see what’s going to happen. It could benefit us because a lot of my competition for pallet componentry is out of Canada. And so that portion of it could potentially help us.

But a lot of the raw material that we use comes from Canada. So I don’t know if it’s going to be a gain or a loss or a wash or what.

Anthony Codispoti : Just some uncertainty right now is the best way to put it. Yeah. Okay, so when you got poached from Sealy to come over to PSE, remind me again the position that you came in at.

Ed Determan: I came in at the first shift gun nail supervisor was my title.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay. And now you’ve worked your way up to plant manager. So you’ve overseeing the entire shop operation. Yep. How many sort of steps along the way inside of PSE were there before you got to where you are today?

Ed Determan: So I was that first shift supervisor for about eight months. And pretty much the same time that I got hired was the same time that they opened the little Canada facility.

And they just started bringing machinery in and we’re kind of trying to make it take off. And they had a hiccup with the leader that they had put in place. And they needed to refill that spot.

And so they offered me an opportunity to come over as the production manager. And at that time it was just eight employees. The building itself and the property was still owned by drywall supply. And we were leasing from them. And then shortly after I got here that that relationship flipped to where they were leasing from us. We had bought the property they were leasing from us.

And then they eventually moved out a couple months later. And then once they moved out that gave us a lot more space to be able to upgrade the production floor and start to grow that a little bit more. And within the first two years of being here we went from those eight employees up to close to 3032. So it was a real rapid growth.

Anthony Codispoti : And it sounds like that rapid growth came about with the realization that you didn’t just have to supply these components to PSC sort of internally at the different locations. You had extra capacity and there were a lot of other folks out there that could benefit from what you had. Correct. And so you put a salesperson on, hey, let’s start calling people and start finding the folks that maybe like our competitors that you know.

Ed Determan: That was kind of the unique part was we had been dabbling in it long enough that we really didn’t need to go out and pound doors. There were people asking for it and we were just trying to catch up with the curb to fulfill it.

And it wasn’t up until a couple of years ago that we actually got to the point where we said, okay, we actually need to go out and aggressively find business. Wow.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah. You’d spent that much time just trying to catch up with the demand that already existed. Correct. That’s fascinating. And so now in the last couple of years, as you’re going out to look for new business, what does that process look like for you guys?

Ed Determan: I can’t really speak to it a whole lot. I deal with sales from a capacity standpoint and telling them what we can achieve and kind of where we are in that plan as far as filling or not filling it. But from their end, I know that we’ve definitely added to our sales team the last couple of years and I know that we have a couple of salesmen that didn’t necessarily grandfather into accounts.

They were basically hired to go out and cold call and start knocking on doors and expanding a little bit because like I said, we’re mainly in the Midwest, but we’re starting to dabble in and outreach to the rest of the United States.

Anthony Codispoti : Actually, maybe we’ll take a step back real quick and I presume that everybody listening understands what a pallet is, but maybe that’s not a safe assumption to make. Can you just give a basic definition of what a pallet is, what it’s used for?

Ed Determan: Yeah, so there’s really just a handful of different types of what we call a standard pallet. The most common is a GMA and that is basically a 40 inch by 48 inch pallet that has three runners and then a bottom deck.

And that’s, there’s multiple different grades of a GMA, but that is typically what I would say 60% of manufacturers are using to ship their products on. Within that class of pallet, you get into the the recycle. So some are buying new and you’re building to new and then some are okay with reusing older pallets and so that’s where you get into fixing damaged boards and then grading it based on how bad that pallet really is and there’s different price points to each.

Anthony Codispoti : So basically it’s a platform that people can use to move their products around. Correct. It’s a sort of a shipping platform so that it’s easy for people to get a tow motor forklift underneath and move this heavy collection of items, put it onto a truck or onto some shelving, etc. And so you mentioned that you’ve got new and you’ve got sort of these rebuilt. In what circumstances would somebody say, oh, I have to have new, I don’t want rebuilt? Because it’s not like, correct me if I’m wrong, these aren’t going to, they’re not setting out at trade shows, right? There’s not like a cosmetic appeal to these. This is like form and this is like function. Correct.

Ed Determan: But there definitely is a line or a market that says we do need it to be new and we need it to be clean. So a lot of food grade type of industries or medical type of industries, they are very particular about the type of pallet that they get. You can’t have bark or wane from the board. It can’t have mold. A lot of them, I mean, they don’t even want to see any sawdust from the cutting of the material.

And we’ve had customers in the past that have been so detailed about that that they would lay out a white sheet on the floor in the dock as they’re unloading our stack of pallets and they’ll take the first couple and just drop them on that white sheet to see how much dust actually falls off. Wow.

Anthony Codispoti : I had no idea. I think of pallets and the environments I’ve seen them. They’re rugged, they’re dirty, they’re getting the job done, but nobody’s taken a white glove to them. So it’s interesting to hear that, yeah, of course, there’s a market for that kind of thing, food, medical, right? Yep.

Ed Determan: And then the other end of the spectrum, we do business with some sawd farmers that you could have mushrooms growing on the side of the pallet. They don’t care as long as they’re paying the absolute cheapest price. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s good to be able to service those different ends. And so as you’re manufacturing the boards for these different use cases, are there different parts of your manufacturing facility where, okay, hey, this is where we do the medical grade or is that you can process them all on the same machinery?

Ed Determan: No, you can process them all on the same machinery.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay. Yeah. So tell me if I’ve got this right. You’ve led efforts to reduce lost time injuries to just a single one over the course of three years among 120 employees. Is that correct?

Ed Determan: The short answer is yes. I was tasked about six or seven years ago to develop the company’s safety committee and safety culture. And so through doing that, at my facility, we went full three years without any type of recordable injury.

I can’t speak for the other two facilities, I’m not sure. But I do know that it made a vast improvement over what we were doing. And it was in an effort of trying to make sure that we were incentivizing the employees to do the right thing.

Anthony Codispoti : Can you get into more specifics of what that looked like?

Ed Determan: There are safety programs out there that basically say, if you’re safe for the whole year and you don’t get injured, then we’re going to give you some type of a bonus for that, which incentivizes the complete wrong behavior. What an employee is going to do is get hurt and then try to hide it so that they can still get their bonus. And so the effort with the culture that we wanted to build was trying to incentivize, but do it in a way that the employees are going to think forward about how to prevent injuries or what could potentially become an injury and take care of it

Anthony Codispoti : before it sort of align everybody’s goals so that you’re keeping the injuries down, but you’re not incentivizing people to hide it.

Ed Determan: Well, from an operational standpoint, we still look at the three major metrics of recordables and I’m sorry, of first reports, recordables, and then indemnities. But then from the employee’s standpoint, we’re incentivizing off of what we call a radar in a near-miss.

So a near-miss is defined as something that happened. Luckily, nobody got hurt, but the incident happened and then we want you to report it. We want you to explain everything that happened. We want to do a little bit of an investigation to see what kind of led up to it, and then we want to document it so that hopefully we can look back and make sure that we’re taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

A lot of times the example that I will use for this is if you have two production cells next to each other and somebody needs to use an extension cord for one of their tools, but the closest outlet basically runs through the other cell and then someone trips on the cord. So it happened, it could have been serious, luckily it wasn’t, but then what do we need to take for action items to make sure that we don’t have that problem again? And then the other portion of it we call radar. So we want you to recognize, assess, oh I’m blanking, I’m sorry.

Anthony Codispoti : Anyway, it’s so ingrained you do it every day without even thinking or pulling the acronym from your head, but you know what the steps are.

Ed Determan: But more than anything, it’s it’s looking forward to catch things before they happen. And my example of this is if there’s a stack of lumber out in the yard that’s five units high and you see that it’s really meaning heavily, before you race in trying to fix it, we want you to stop, assess what you’re doing, think about it. Maybe the right answer is to have three different forklifts go and assist, you know, to make sure that the one doesn’t get stuck while you’re trying to get, you know, just put a little more thought into just racing in and doing something about it. And then take care of it and then record the results after.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah. And this has been incredibly successful. I mean, you’ve taken incidents down to almost zero, which in an environment like yours, I don’t have standard industry metrics, but that sounds really impressive. Now, let’s talk about the inventory ERP system that you helped to implement. That sounds like a major undertaking. What were some unexpected challenges you faced in that?

Ed Determan: Well, first of all, there really isn’t an inventory system out there for what we do, right? And so we found the closest thing that we could at the time. This was getting close to nine years ago, I think, nine or 10 years ago. But it’s designed for a pallet manufacturer. So the major function around it is the bill of materials. So it’s set up to say, for this pallet, I need this many boards. And it helps track inventory based on the process of those pallets. But our problem was we do more than just pallets. In fact, 60% of what we did at the time was just cutting boards. So we needed to go from dimensional board to cut stock board, not cut stock to pallet. So luckily, we got in the infancy of this ERP system.

It’s called Palmate. And they had a very open forum with us. And they took a lot of feedback from us. And we helped kind of develop what their software is today, which does a lot more around boards and lumber and volume in general.

But it gave us most of the things that we were really looking for. Because before we had an ERP, we were doing everything paper and pencil. So it gave us the ability to do true physical inventories. It gave us the ability to verify what we were loading. And then it gave us the ability to track capacity.

Anthony Codispoti : And so a lot of times when I hear people talk about upgrading their software, it’s going from one piece of software to another piece of software. In your case, it was you were going from paper and pencil to software, which there’s different challenges in both systems. But in your environment, now you’re having to teach people how to use software for this purpose for the first time, right? Yeah.

Ed Determan: And there was even a period of time where then you got to have the right type of hardware to run the software and not having anything established for that. We really didn’t know what the hardware was that we needed. So we spent probably six months just trying different tablets and different computers and different scanners.

And until we kind of came up with what we thought was going to work and then again, through attrition over a year, two year period of time, we learned that the dust was too harsh on the printers or the scanners or, and yeah, just was a huge evolution of trying to get all of that function together.

Anthony Codispoti : Tell me about the $220,000 trim saw that you upgraded and installed without needing any more labor.

Ed Determan: So the original trim saw that we had was kind of a mess up from the start. So when the owners ordered it, it was supposed to be able to cut a 20 foot board. And when it showed up, the longest board we were able to cut was 18 foot. The total length of the saw was 20 foot. And at that time, we just didn’t have the financials to be able to say, well, take it back and fix it.

And like, we needed to get started today. So we put it in place and the best way to cut a 40 inch board is a 10 foot board based on what you can put through the saw. We were hoping to be able to use a 20 foot board and get five 40 inch boards. But now the best we could do was a 10 foot board and getting three 40 inch boards. So a couple of months after I got involved over here at the facility, I just kept seeing this eight foot of saw that we were never using.

It was just blank. And so we were also cutting the stringers or the side panels for pallets. And in order to do that, we would have to stop cutting the decking, do a full change over of all the machinery, and then start cutting the stringers.

But the stringers came out of an eight foot material. And so I found some old conveyors that we weren’t using anymore. And we kind of pieced together our own little contraption behind the trim saw. And we started cutting the eight foot boards on that empty side of the trim saw. And we were able to do both products at the same time. And we did that for two years. And it turned into such a staple of what we do. We said, okay, we need to order a new saw. And it needs to have the ability to do what we’re doing now. But we also want to make sure it’s got all the other features for the employees so they don’t have to be bending and twisting and lifting. And because that’s what that person on the other side of the saw was doing, they didn’t have a deck feeding them. And so that’s kind of where where that purchase came in.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s really clever. The interim step that you guys kind of came up with to make better use out of the equipment that you had. Ed, how would you kind of describe your management style? You’re managing a plant, you’ve got a lot of workers there. I’m going to guess sounds like a tough environment where you’re doing physical things, you’re moving stuff around all day. How do you kind of keep your arms around everything, keep everybody moving in the same direction?

Ed Determan: Well, first and foremost, I’m a huge subscriber to servant leadership. I very much so believe in being hands on and being the type of leader that would never ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. So I don’t have to do it as much as I used to. But there are occasions where if someone calls in or something like that where there might be an open piece of equipment that I can go run for a couple of hours, not necessarily because I have to, but because AI enjoy it, I like getting up from the desk and doing some physical labor once in a while. But be it, it really helps tie the back of the house and the front of the house together. They really like to see me come out and do some of that once in a while.

Anthony Codispoti : When you think about what it takes to attract and retain a good workforce, what are some of your approaches? What have you found works to find good folks? And once you’ve found them, hold on to them.

Ed Determan: Yeah, that’s definitely developed and changed over the course of time here. When we were really starting up, I used a lot of temp services and it was basically all about bodies, like if they have a pulse send them in. and that has definitely since changed. We about seven years ago as a company we got into traction. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.

Gina Wickman. Yep, correct. And the idea of the right person, right seat and hiring around core values and really making sure that they’re the right people has made a huge difference because three or four years ago our retention rate was greater than 40 percent. And last year that dropped to 25 percent and it’s still dropping.

And I attribute that 100 percent to taking the time, vetting the person, making sure that they align with our culture and our core values before we bring them in the door.

Anthony Codispoti : How do you do that? It’s a particular question that you like to ask that kind of pierces through the veil?

Ed Determan: I don’t do a lot of the interviewing anymore. I’m trained to all of my managers and supervisors to be able to do a portion of that. But I do sit in on most of them towards the end of the interview. If this is really somebody that you’re entertaining bringing on and my focus is 100 percent on our five core values, I ask them very broad questions just to see what their grasp of the core values are. And so for example, our first core value is balanced. We want a healthy balance of faith family and work.

And even that there’s been a learning process to say everybody’s going to have a different definition of what balanced is for them. For me, I have a family. I have children. And so balance for me is being able to get to my kids’ football game. But there’s other people that don’t have kids and maybe balance for them is being able to sit all Saturday long and read a book. And so it’s just understanding that there is going to be a different definition of balance for everybody.

But making sure it falls within the scope of Yeah, I’m really looking to make as much money as I can so that I can buy a Mustang. Well, maybe that’s not going to be the best fit for us.

Anthony Codispoti : Because it doesn’t seem to align with your values. Correct.

Ed Determan: You’re only interested in being here for the money. You’re not interested in being here for a career.

Anthony Codispoti : As you think about PSC, your location as well as the other ones, things that you apart from the other companies out there doing similar things.

Ed Determan: Like the company in general? Yeah, correct. So the first thing is definitely the emphasis around relationship building. So customers, vendors, employees, that’s on our vision traction organizer. And it’s what we all focus on is building those relationships and delivering on promises that we’ve made and just upholding as much of that value as we can. So the purchasing side has been built around those relationships and has done some marvelous things for our ability to buy. And the pallet industry in general is it’s very interesting from a standpoint of I’ve never been in an industry that’s so open. These pallet manufacturers, they go to conventions together and they invite each other into their facilities and show each other what they’re doing. And there’s been a number of times that maybe we bought a piece of equipment that we don’t already have and we’re having trouble with it. And the owner will say, well, I know so and so runs one of those. Let me call them and see if we can go in and get some tips and tricks. And it usually happens. They openly do that kind of stuff.

Anthony Codispoti : So it’s yeah, it’s it sounds more like a brotherhood than a sort of a competitive pit, you know. Yeah, very much so. That’s amazing. I’m kind of going back to something you said a moment ago and I’m curious where your inspiration for being a big believer in servant leadership came from? I think it’s something that has always been ingrained in me.

Ed Determan: That’s kind of the type of person that my father was. Very hands on. I’m not afraid to jump in and do anything. My mentor, somewhat the same way, but he taught me more the outward focused side of it so that you’re more cognizant of when you’re doing it and why. Right. So if we have like an all hands meeting where we’re going to bring in food for everybody, making sure that it’s something that you can stand up there and serve them, you know, kind of putting a real definition to it. I like that.

Anthony Codispoti : You’ve mentioned, Geno Wickman, his book and his framework, Attraction EOS has been super helpful for you guys. Are there any other books, podcasts, any other frameworks that maybe have been really helpful to you that our audience might benefit from?

Ed Determan: I’ve been through pretty much the entire Attraction series. The newest one, the People book is really good from building a culture and understanding that right person, right seat. I just recently finished It’s Your Ship. I’m blanking on the What’s it about?

Anthony Codispoti : What sort of the core concept?

Ed Determan: Captain Michael Abzoff. Abzoff. And it’s basically his story of being in the Navy, being given his own ship to command, and then just the different techniques that he used to try to win over the crew. He did a lot of one-on-one interviews to get to know people. And then he also did some kind of inspiring team building type of stuff that for being on a ship out at sea was pretty outside the box thinking. So yeah, it was a really good read.

Anthony Codispoti : Ed Shifting Gears now, I’d like to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome, whether it’s something personal or professional. What was that? How did you get through it? And what did you learn?

Ed Determan: So again, I’m going to go back to the traction journey. When I first started in the plant manager role, my belief was that I needed a team that thought like me and acted like me and that was how I was going to succeed. And after a couple years I realized, and through starting traction, I really realized that there’s probably some benefit to diversity. So maybe the next time I fill a leadership spot, instead of looking for somebody that is going to be hands-on, that is going to be the first one to jump in and get dirty and help, maybe what I really need is somebody that thinks differently than I do. And going into those interviews, I felt like the more uncomfortable I was with somebody, potentially this was going to be the best fit.

Interesting. So I did eventually hire a manager that was very different than myself, was very different than most of us at Pallet. And he had some quirks, right? And it was difficult for him to understand the culture that was built. It was difficult for me to help him overcome some of his his just to communicate with people because his communication style was completely different. But the attributes that he did bring, one of our bigger goals was to achieve 95% inventory accuracy. And we were light years away from it. But that was because I’m not a numbers type of person.

I can’t sit down and just look at item audit trails and crunch numbers for hours figuring out where everything went awry. And that was his thing. That’s what he was good at.

So we did get to that peak and we’ve been there for a while. But the struggle was keeping the team together more or less. I had a number of meetings with my managers where they just didn’t get long because this guy was so different than them. And that led to a lot of frustration and just a point where I didn’t want to hold meetings anymore. I didn’t want the team together anymore. And it did, unfortunately, get to a point where I had to make a difficult decision and say, this isn’t healthy for anybody. Even though I’m getting really good benefits from you, it’s just not a good fit.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah. And I think that story there says a lot about the importance of culture, which sounds like it’s super important to you guys as well. Hats off to you for trying something different outside your comfort zone, going where it was a little bit unusual for you. And there were some gains from it. Life’s complicated. Not everything’s all good or all bad. And so there were some gains for that process. And ultimately, a change had to be made because there’s nothing that tops culture. Culture is what I think great businesses are built on. And so have you been able to find somebody now that fits that role and helps with the culture? Or did you just benefit from having the new systems in place already that you haven’t been

Ed Determan: able to shape? Exactly. The system that he built, the departmental team that he built was fantastic. And so the person that I replaced him with is really just sitting back and watching it run. So yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : Talk to me, Ed, about daily practices. Do you have any habits, rituals, things that you like to do every day that kind of keep you centered and on track? I really don’t.

Ed Determan: A typical day for me, I’ll get in around seven, pull up my reporting, take a look at what happened last night, just kind of make sure everything’s on track. And then I’ll get out and about and try to greet everybody that I can.

And then just see where the day goes from there. What’s something you do for fun, Ed? My number one hobby and passion is restoring anti-trackers. I also, I’m very involved in my kid’s life. So I have a son that’s 16. I’ve been his football coach for the last five years. So we have a youth associated football organization in our town.

So it’s not through the school. So yeah, I’ve coached him and his buddies for five years. And yeah, he just loves football. And then my whole family is very big into scouting. So I’ve run the local Cub Scout group for 10 years. Three of my four kids are in the scout troop.

My oldest is getting very close to Eagle. Wow. Yeah.

That’s awesome. And then they have some really cool leadership courses for adults that go outside of the scouting world and really kind of overlap with the business world. And a lot of the benefits that you get from that training are much cheaper than anything you would find in the business world. So I went through some of their adult leadership training and then now I’ve gone back and I’m actually helping with the courses as part of the staff.

Anthony Codispoti : Oh, wow. And is this training available to anybody or do you have to be kind of involved in the Boy Scouts Network?

Ed Determan: You do have to register with the BSA, but you don’t necessarily have to have a kid in Scouts to do it. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti : How would somebody find out more about this? It sounds really intriguing.

Ed Determan: Find your local scout organization. But the course is a world-recognized course called Wood Badge.

Anthony Codispoti : Sorry, it’s called what badge? Wood Badge. Wood Badge. Okay. Yep. And what do they take you through? What’s the lesson?

Ed Determan: A lot of it is team building. So, Baden Paul, when he developed the scouting program in the 1900s, it was based around the patrol method that the military used. So it really, the fundamental of it is to teach you what that patrol method is supposed to look like, but doing it by using the edge method to where you’re experiencing it as if you were a scout. So there’s team building activities that take place. There’s classroom presentations that are given around dealing with different things like diversity, problem-solving, just some really good leadership stuff. They take you through forming, storming, norming, and performing. And they connect that by using some of the different team building movies.

So like October Sky or Remember the Titans, where you can really clearly see the four steps. And it helps give you an understanding of how that whole process works and that it’s not just done when you get to the performing portion, but as your team continues to grow, you’re going to go through the phases again and again and again.

Anthony Codispoti : So that sounds great. It sounds like you’re a busy guy too outside of work. Four kids, football coach, scout master, refinishing antique tractors. What is that about? Are you trying to use these in the field? Are you showing them? Tell me more. Yep.

Ed Determan: There’s shows throughout the state and throughout the country that typically in the very beginning of fall is when most of them happen. And you can bring your tractor out and show it. Most of the shows have a theme based on what brand they’re going to show for the year. The brand that I’m partial to is Minneapolis-Maline. They were based out of Minneapolis from the early 1900s through late 1960s. And it kind of ties back to the manufacturing thing, because at one point they were one of the largest manufacturers in Minnesota.

Anthony Codispoti : Is that why you’re partial to them? They’re sort of the local guys?

Ed Determan: I’m actually partial to them because that was the first tractor that I worked on was in Maline. It’s what my dad and my grandfather had bought it together two years before I was born.

And so we went through the process of restoring it in 2015. That created a really great bond. My grandfather had already passed by that point, but he was so excited to see that thing run again. It didn’t look that nice when they had purchased it.

So he was very proud of it. That really got us into, hey, let’s go find some more of these to do. And then let’s start traveling to some of these shows. And it got to the point where we’re doing four or five shows a year. And then there’s a lot of like-minded people at those shows that you get more and more opportunity to do things. So some of my tractors have been featured in magazines.

I’ve purchased a couple of project tractors just because you get to talking to people and they might have something that they don’t want anymore and you get it for a really good price. So yeah, it’s just a blast. Plus, my older son took a huge interest in it when we first started. And so Grandpa bought him a tractor. And it has kept him away from tablets and video games and kept him active in something that doesn’t involve any of that, which I thought was fantastic.

Anthony Codispoti : You’ve cracked the code. What every parent’s trying to figure out, how do I get my kid away from the screen? It’s good for you. Write a book about that. I’m curious, Ed, if you would have much insight on this, kind of what the future growth plans are for Palat Service Corporation. Is this new locations? Is it just more customers servicing out of the same spots, new services? How do you guys think about this? Yeah.

Ed Determan: So we did open a new location about 18 months ago, a little bit further east in Wisconsin. And it was a big facility. So you could take the three facilities and the land that they sit on and you can fit them all in this one. Wow. Yeah. So it’s big. We have five separate buildings on that property. All of them are bigger than the one that I operate out of. One of them we put in sowing equipment to basically do the same thing that I do here. In another, we put in a couple of the automated pallet building pieces of machinery. And that whole initiative is to really start driving a little bit further east than what we have been, plus cut out some of the freight that we’ve been paying to get our product shipped. Another big point of emphasis is our non-processed material.

So when we bring in material from the mills, if we have excess volume, we’ll sell it to crate manufacturers, pallet manufacturers, that without processing anything. And so trying to grow some of that. But yeah, we’re definitely in a growth mode.

Anthony Codispoti : And I’m going to guess this new facility, since just open 18 months ago, is still kind of ramping up to where their production can be. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. Lots of room for exciting growth there. That’ll be fun to follow. And if I were to talk to you a year from now, what’s something you would hope to be celebrating?

Ed Determan: I would be creeping up on my 15-year anniversary with pallet. So I’d be looking forward to that. Yeah, beyond that, I guess I don’t really know.

Anthony Codispoti : Obviously, you enjoy working there. I mean, you’ve been there a long time and you have glowing things to say about the environment. What specifically about it do you think appeals to you so much?

Ed Determan: It’s mostly the culture and the family. The winners, the owners of pallet service are amazing people. They’re super involved. They go above and beyond all the time. And it’s almost a relief to know that that’s the type of people that you’re working for. And then beyond that, it’s the culture that we’ve built.

And I say we because it took our entire life, we evolved into a wonderful culture. And then the industry is, like I said before, it’s very unique. You get the opportunity to talk to a lot of very interesting people and see a lot of really cool things. The industry itself, I think, is probably going to migrate a lot heavier towards automation. And as that evolves, it’s going to be fun to see what it all looks like.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s actually a question I kind of like to wrap up the show with. And so I’ll ask some follow up questions on that. But before I do, I want to do a couple of things. First of all, I want to invite all our listeners to hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app so you can continue to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Ed Determan of Palette Service Corporation. And I also want to let people know the best way either to continue to follow your story or to get in touch with you directly. What would that be?

Ed Determan: It would probably be LinkedIn.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay. We’ll include the link there. But for those folks who are listening, Ed’s last name Determan is spelled D-E-T-E-R-M-A-N. So it kind of looks like deter man. That’s how you can find him. Just search for Ed Determan on LinkedIn with Palette Service Corporation. So Ed, I kind of want to go into a little bit of what you were just saying there, kind of what the future of the industry looks like. You’re talking about more automation. Are we talking like full-on robots? Are we talking AI? Like what’s the landscape look like?

Ed Determan: Yes, it’s probably a combination of both. I think the palette industry in general has been very lacking with automation compared to where a lot of other manufacturers have gone. Labor, I think, continues to be a problem for everybody in the industry. It’s not getting any cheaper.

It’s depending on the pool that you’re drawing from. The quality of person isn’t necessarily getting any better. And it just continues to be a problem. And really, I think automation is ultimately going to end up being the fix for it. There is a minor amount of automation that exists today.

A lot of the machinery that we use to cut the wood, the process of the board being taken through the saw is automated, but you still have to have an operator there to push a button or know what to do if there’s a jam or something along those lines. We’ve seen some newer mechanical automation with being able to dismantle a palette, which was probably the most dangerous operation there is when it comes to palettes, is taking an old palette and dismantling it. The old practice was basically you had a bench platform that had a bandsaw blade that ran between two tires and you would take the palette and push it through the bandsaw blade to cut the nails. And everything was open and it’s very on-guarded, very dangerous process. Within the last, I’d say probably five to seven years, they’ve developed some mechanical arms that will grab ahold of the palette with a vacuum and it’ll run it through that same saw to get it all cut apart and then it’ll drop all the components and nobody needs to be near it while it happens.

Anthony Codispoti : And a saw is still more efficient than just trying to pull the nails out or to pry it apart?

Ed Determan: Absolutely.

Anthony Codispoti : And so where are you guys in sort of this automation conversation thought process?

Ed Determan: We’re definitely more on the board, the cut stock side than we are the palette side where we want to try to take out some of the more laborious manual laborers. Like when we get done with a unit of boards, somebody has to put strapping around it and prepare it to be able to go on to a truck and ship. And there is some equipment out there now that will automate that and we’ll do that in repetition.

So we’re dabbling a little bit in that. It’s a very physical job. These guys out on the production floor work hard and they definitely earn every cent that they take home. And it does leave us open to injury and things like that in the future. So there’s just a ton of upsides for trying to get some of it automated and take the first knot of it. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s going to be exciting to follow and it very much follows in line with all the safety things we were talking about. You guys are committed to at the beginning of the interview. Ed Dieterman, I want to be the Determan. Sorry about that. Ed Determan, I want to make sure I get that correct. But Ed, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. It was a pleasure being here. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today. you