[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and my guest today is Chris McIntire, the new Head of Water, I'm calling him Head of Water, we'll discover whether he really is the head of water, at Oldcastle in the United States.
[00:00:22] Piers Clark: Oldcastle being one of the biggest companies you've probably never heard of in the water sector.
[00:00:28] Piers Clark: Chris, it's wonderful to be with you today.
[00:00:30] Chris McIntire: Good to be here, Piers.
[00:00:32] Piers Clark: We always start with a little bit of a potted history so can you give me in 90 seconds or so, the journey you've taken to get to the position you're in today?
[00:00:41] Chris McIntire: I'm a guy who was lucky enough to find himself in the water space, probably close to 40 years ago. I've had a career that has been full of cycles of being bought and sold over, and over again.
[00:00:53] Chris McIntire: I started early days as an engineer working on electrochemistry. Ultimately got sold to a business now called Thermo Fisher. I left that business and was really fortunate enough to build a great instrument group called Nova Analytics. Nova Analytics got bought by Xylem and became the analytical instrument portion of Xylem. I got to be a founding officer at Xylem, reporting to the CEO, and really helped get that company started. Also gave me some really good insights in what it's like to build up a company, sell it into a much larger, strategic, publicly traded company, and then what it looks like making that all work.
[00:01:28] Chris McIntire: And for the last six years or so, built a company called Axius Water, all about wastewater treatment. Private equity, KKR backed us. My good Canadian friends at XPV Water Partners were part of that backing team.
[00:01:39] Chris McIntire: Caught the eye of Oldcastle, who's owned by CRH, a very large publicly traded company, $40 billion in revenue. And, three months ago, we became part of CRH's US entity, Oldcastle Infrastructure, and here we are.
[00:01:52] Chris McIntire: I'm not a guy who's big on titles anymore, it's been too long. I think it's gonna be President Wastewater. Really haven't figured it out yet.
[00:02:00] Piers Clark: That very statement you made there of, " I really don't care about the title", it tells us more about you than probably anything else you'll say in this podcast. But let's see.
[00:02:09] Piers Clark: Now, what we're talking about today is what it's like to be in the water sector when you're bought and sold, and bought and sold, and to different people. What makes that journey exciting, what makes it a challenge, and trying to tap into your experience as a seasoned entrepreneur and business leader who's been in the supply chain and has been bought and sold multiple times in multiple different businesses. Very, very different perspective on the water industry to our usual utility executives. They're on the other side of the fence.
[00:02:36] Piers Clark: But before we get to that core topic, let's talk a bit about Oldcastle. Probably one of the biggest businesses in the water sector that you won't have heard of, because outside the United States, Oldcastle's presence is really quite muted.
[00:02:50] Chris McIntire: Yeah, that's fair to say. Oldcastle is an infrastructure company, roads, concrete, things that we probably take for granted, that's where Oldcastle's focus has been. So I'm talking Oldcastle, 'cause that's the business I'm in here in North America, but that extends beyond.
[00:03:05] Chris McIntire: CRH is a global company with operations around the world, and again, all about infrastructure. Along the way, they've managed to put together a $2 billion revenue water company. So we've got wastewater treatment, they bought Hydro International in the UK a few years ago. They've got water transmission, they're doing the collection of water. We've got equipment that's collecting that water, that's preparing that water, that's de-gritting that water, getting it into the wastewater treatment facility. Now we're treating it, removing nutrients from it. So it's from drop to discharge.
[00:03:40] Piers Clark: And you're not the utility operator, you are a supplier to utility operators?
[00:03:45] Chris McIntire: That's right. We provide solutions.
[00:03:47] Chris McIntire: I mean, look, at the end of the day, the purchase order has sort of products and line items. The reality is the value we bring is in the application knowledge, it's in solving these problems, it's in the technical know-how to do what our customers need, again, in order to collect, treat, and discharge water in a way that supports the environment.
[00:04:06] Piers Clark: Brilliant.
[00:04:07] Piers Clark: And as you said in your introduction, you've gone through multiple cycles of being bought and sold.
[00:04:11] Piers Clark: So let's start with a broad question. What are the things that entrepreneurs who are growing businesses in the water sector, what is it they need to be aware of? What do they need to be thinking about?
[00:04:22] Chris McIntire: First, a little context in the water space, because I do think it's important.
The water space and particularly wastewater treatment, it's highly fragmented. Lots and lots and lots of small companies. There's no one piece of technology that treats water or wastewater. Lots of really, really smart people solving problems piece by piece, and that's why we see all these companies. You add to that, the customers are super conservative.
[00:04:46] Chris McIntire: When a 20,000 person town makes a decision to either install or upgrade a wastewater treatment plant, it needs to work essentially forever. Because if it doesn't work, a high school doesn't get built, because they'll have to put more money into it. So highly, highly conservative customers.
[00:05:01] Chris McIntire: The reputation based on successful installations drives the marketplace. We say in order to be a real player in this space, you need to have been there for 10 years and done 100 installs.
[00:05:12] Chris McIntire: For me, that's a great place to operate. It means small companies can compete shoulder to shoulder with much larger entities, because expertise in the application you're selling rules the day. It's your reputation, it's your installs, it's your references that really drive the day.
[00:05:29] Chris McIntire: That's critical for folks that have businesses that are looking at a transaction. How do you preserve that? How do you teach the big companies that big doesn't always rule the day? Reputation and expertise can trump size. That's a big mouthful for a large multinational company to swallow.
[00:05:48] Piers Clark: That is a staggeringly beautiful insight because it absolutely means that the value of the small business you create, the small specialist team that you create, if they can bring something that gives the big behemoth that was interested in your business a distinctive edge, then hopefully they will preserve the edge, they will look after it.
[00:06:08] Piers Clark: They will make it a core part of what differentiates them moving forward.
[00:06:12] Chris McIntire: They want to preserve the edge. They didn't buy us 'cause they didn't want us to succeed, right? They got enthusiastic about the story we tell 'cause it is what we've done.
[00:06:21] Chris McIntire: I think the other piece of that and the most important element of my business are the people. It is these teams of folks that have solved these problems location by location, outside with the snow and the rain and the heat, they've solved it over and over again.
[00:06:37] Chris McIntire: Look, the equipment's important. The IP's important. The customer lists are important. What's far more important is the knowledge that this team has, how to solve our customers' problems. And so building an organization, I talk about the org chart upside down.
[00:06:51] Chris McIntire: Traditional org chart, the grand poobah's at the top, and then people below, and then the people that actually do work and add value are at the bottom. I say that's nonsense. It's completely upside down.
[00:07:01] Piers Clark: Flip it the other way.
[00:07:02] Chris McIntire: I think my job, my team's job, and us people that sit at desks, our job is to support our people out on the ground solving problems.
[00:07:10] Chris McIntire: Point them in the right direction. Give them some indicators on how well they're doing. And that's what my team thinks about every day. How do we support our people, our commercial people, our sales people, our application people, our field people, our production line people?
[00:07:24] Chris McIntire: How do we support them in how they support our customers?
[00:07:27] Piers Clark: All right, let's go in a slightly different direction, 'cause you mentioned at the beginning that we've got a client base in utilities which are naturally conservative, for very good reason. Because you don't play fast and loose with people's public health, with their water supply. So they are naturally conservative. They want to see solutions that are well-tested.
[00:07:43] Piers Clark: So what does that mean for innovation if you're in a company in the supply chain? How do you make your innovations work and be something that's valuable to your client base?
[00:07:53] Chris McIntire: I think you have to accept the customer's characteristics as they are. I do see a lot of frustrated innovation leads with those big, lofty titles at the water companies all over the place, the equipment suppliers, they get frustrated that the market won't move quicker.
[00:08:09] Chris McIntire: I would say that the innovation that we need to focus on is the solutions are out there. We have a lot of great solutions in the water space, us and our competitors. The innovation is getting that existing technology to the customers and to the sites. Now, you can innovate, you can surely improve your technology, you can become more efficient, you can do more with less. Like, that's accepted.
[00:08:31] Chris McIntire: But all sizzle in innovation isn't gonna win the day with our customers. A steak with no sizzle's boring, and if it's all sizzle and no steak, you're disappointed. You gotta have some balance, right? Little sizzle, little steak, and I think our customers, pretty focused on the steak. Doesn't mean they don't like a little sizzle, but you really gotta keep your eye on the steak, right?
[00:08:50] Chris McIntire: Listen to your customer, meet them where they need to be met, make sure you're giving them a solution they're comfortable with and they trust. It's more complicated than that, right? 'cause folks in the space know that the supply chain and the market space has consulting engineers and reps, and there's a whole lot of folks influencing these decisions before a purchase gets made.
[00:09:09] Chris McIntire: It's interesting, and if you know what you're doing, you can do really well, and if you don't know what you're doing, well, your competitors can do really well, right?
[00:09:15] Piers Clark: Brilliant. So let's come back to the topic of being bought and sold.
[00:09:20] Piers Clark: You've just been bought by another entity, whether it's a private equity investor and your shareholders have changed. What's the advice you'd give someone as to how you make this a success?
[00:09:30] Chris McIntire: I think the success starts early days. My being bought and sold has a particular theme to it, and it's been private equity backed. What does that mean? Well, that means a bunch of folks put some money up. They say, "Look we're gonna give you a bunch of money and we're gonna go buy a company or a collection of companies," and the payoff for them is, " We're gonna let you do that for four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years, and our goal will be to sell it then and make back a lot more money than we put in." It's really that simple. They put up the money, they bring in somebody like me and my team, and our job is to deliver.
[00:10:01] Chris McIntire: When I took this job six years ago, obviously the financials, the metrics drive the whole machine. We don't get the money if we don't promise the return, so okay, we got that.
[00:10:10] Chris McIntire: And look, having done it a few times, I asked the questions right up front. What does this look like? What's the timing? What's the expectation? to make sure we were aligned, and again, a very positive experience with my KKR and XPV team on that front.
[00:10:21] Chris McIntire: But in addition, I also made clear from the beginning, that we are fundamentally taking founder-based businesses that started from nothing and got to scale. They got to the 10 years, 100 installations. They got recognized. Those are the businesses that make up Axius.
[00:10:37] Chris McIntire: We're gonna acquire them . We're gonna bring them into the group, and then we're going to make sure that they know how to be successful in a larger organization. It's part of the process.
[00:10:48] Chris McIntire: What worked to get them from zero to 10 or 20 years isn't what's gonna work from 20 to forever. But, the smart people are there. They just need a little bit of guidance. They need some structure. We work on org chart. We work on systems. We put some rhythm and cadence in place that, again, we've just done it over and over and over again so that we know what works, and just help these folks pivot.
[00:11:12] Chris McIntire: They're getting bigger, so they have to organize a bit differently. At the end of the day, these businesses are delivering in terms of financial metrics, revenue and profit, to the point where they're just gonna be successful.
[00:11:24] Chris McIntire: I want all the people that come to work in all our locations every day to be able to keep coming to work in those locations every day should they wanna keep coming. I want them to be able to do it for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.
[00:11:35] Piers Clark: Maybe professionalizing the businesses is wrong. It's corporatizing the businesses, making them so that they are more suitable to a bigger corporate. Because how Xylem and Oldcastle operates isn't the same as a mom-and-pop business.
[00:11:47] Chris McIntire: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
[00:11:49] Chris McIntire: And my part of the deal coming in to taking the job, was that I needed the room to be able to do it the hard way. I'm not just gonna build a business with an EBITDA and a multiple that's gonna make everybody happy.
[00:12:02] Chris McIntire: I look back on Xylem, the plants are still there, the people are still coming to work. I didn't know it was successful until 10 years after I left. I mean, money changed hands and all, so there's success. But for me personally, did I do something that I'm proud of?
[00:12:18] Piers Clark: You don't see your legacy until you've got some distance.
[00:12:21] Piers Clark: Last question: what advice would you give the organizations that are buying businesses? What's the guidance you might give them?
[00:12:29] Chris McIntire: In a nutshell, don't screw these businesses up. You bought them because you liked them, you liked what they were doing. In the case of Axius, we've got a double-digit revenue growth rate. We're profitable. There's a lot of real strong points about the business but again, we're ... compared to CRH, compared to Oldcastle, we're small.
[00:12:46] Chris McIntire: We operate a little bit differently. And so as you think about the ways that your larger organization can help, also think about the ways that the business is being successful right now, and just be cautious about that.
[00:12:59] Chris McIntire: That's my role right now is pointing out where to be cautious. All with the focus on keeping this business creating value for the long term. With private equity, you're there for five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years.
[00:13:12] Chris McIntire: Very clear. It's a term. When you get bought by a company like CRH, it's a forever home. So the perspective and the thinking has to change a little bit.
[00:13:20] Piers Clark: I love it, and I hope that in 10 years time you'll look back and see the legacy of where you are now.
[00:13:25] Piers Clark: We're running out of time I'm afraid. And so the question I'd like to give you is look back at what you've achieved, and maybe put it into the context of the advice you might want to give your younger self.
[00:13:35] Piers Clark: Try and paint the picture for your younger self as to what the future might hold for him.
[00:13:40] Chris McIntire: I was in my 20s when I sort of started on this journey, and I was a starry-eyed young guy, wanted to be aggressive in my career.
[00:13:47] Chris McIntire: When I look back on it now and I look back at what I'm most proud of, it's not the dollars, it's not the number of transactions. What I look back at and what I'm proud of is the people and how we've helped them grow and succeed and take a lot of pleasure from their jobs. This upside down org thing, it's really real.
[00:14:08] Chris McIntire: And so when I go to WEFTEC, we usually bring 75 or 80 people. It's a big show for us. When I go, we have a dinner on the Monday night and we all get together. What I always do is I sit back and I just watch all these teams of people that used to be separate businesses, and I watch them all together, happy, smiling, excited. I look at those folks and I see the pride they have in what we're doing for our customers, I see the team and the camaraderie.
[00:14:35] Chris McIntire: That's what I'd like to see more and more people think about. The people aspect of what we do is gonna give you the satisfaction in the later years.
[00:14:44] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today, Chris McIntyre, the Head of Water, we think, Head of Water, Wastewater, at Oldcastle.
[00:14:54] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and my guest today is Chris McIntire, the new Head of Water, I'm calling him Head of Water, we'll discover whether he really is the head of water, at Oldcastle in the United States.
[00:00:22] Piers Clark: Oldcastle being one of the biggest companies you've probably never heard of in the water sector.
[00:00:28] Piers Clark: Chris, it's wonderful to be with you today.
[00:00:30] Chris McIntire: Good to be here, Piers.
[00:00:32] Piers Clark: We always start with a little bit of a potted history so can you give me in 90 seconds or so, the journey you've taken to get to the position you're in today?
[00:00:41] Chris McIntire: I'm a guy who was lucky enough to find himself in the water space, probably close to 40 years ago. I've had a career that has been full of cycles of being bought and sold over, and over again.
[00:00:53] Chris McIntire: I started early days as an engineer working on electrochemistry. Ultimately got sold to a business now called Thermo Fisher. I left that business and was really fortunate enough to build a great instrument group called Nova Analytics. Nova Analytics got bought by Xylem and became the analytical instrument portion of Xylem. I got to be a founding officer at Xylem, reporting to the CEO, and really helped get that company started. Also gave me some really good insights in what it's like to build up a company, sell it into a much larger, strategic, publicly traded company, and then what it looks like making that all work.
[00:01:28] Chris McIntire: And for the last six years or so, built a company called Axius Water, all about wastewater treatment. Private equity, KKR backed us. My good Canadian friends at XPV Water Partners were part of that backing team.
[00:01:39] Chris McIntire: Caught the eye of Oldcastle, who's owned by CRH, a very large publicly traded company, $40 billion in revenue. And, three months ago, we became part of CRH's US entity, Oldcastle Infrastructure, and here we are.
[00:01:52] Chris McIntire: I'm not a guy who's big on titles anymore, it's been too long. I think it's gonna be President Wastewater. Really haven't figured it out yet.
[00:02:00] Piers Clark: That very statement you made there of, " I really don't care about the title", it tells us more about you than probably anything else you'll say in this podcast. But let's see.
[00:02:09] Piers Clark: Now, what we're talking about today is what it's like to be in the water sector when you're bought and sold, and bought and sold, and to different people. What makes that journey exciting, what makes it a challenge, and trying to tap into your experience as a seasoned entrepreneur and business leader who's been in the supply chain and has been bought and sold multiple times in multiple different businesses. Very, very different perspective on the water industry to our usual utility executives. They're on the other side of the fence.
[00:02:36] Piers Clark: But before we get to that core topic, let's talk a bit about Oldcastle. Probably one of the biggest businesses in the water sector that you won't have heard of, because outside the United States, Oldcastle's presence is really quite muted.
[00:02:50] Chris McIntire: Yeah, that's fair to say. Oldcastle is an infrastructure company, roads, concrete, things that we probably take for granted, that's where Oldcastle's focus has been. So I'm talking Oldcastle, 'cause that's the business I'm in here in North America, but that extends beyond.
[00:03:05] Chris McIntire: CRH is a global company with operations around the world, and again, all about infrastructure. Along the way, they've managed to put together a $2 billion revenue water company. So we've got wastewater treatment, they bought Hydro International in the UK a few years ago. They've got water transmission, they're doing the collection of water. We've got equipment that's collecting that water, that's preparing that water, that's de-gritting that water, getting it into the wastewater treatment facility. Now we're treating it, removing nutrients from it. So it's from drop to discharge.
[00:03:40] Piers Clark: And you're not the utility operator, you are a supplier to utility operators?
[00:03:45] Chris McIntire: That's right. We provide solutions.
[00:03:47] Chris McIntire: I mean, look, at the end of the day, the purchase order has sort of products and line items. The reality is the value we bring is in the application knowledge, it's in solving these problems, it's in the technical know-how to do what our customers need, again, in order to collect, treat, and discharge water in a way that supports the environment.
[00:04:06] Piers Clark: Brilliant.
[00:04:07] Piers Clark: And as you said in your introduction, you've gone through multiple cycles of being bought and sold.
[00:04:11] Piers Clark: So let's start with a broad question. What are the things that entrepreneurs who are growing businesses in the water sector, what is it they need to be aware of? What do they need to be thinking about?
[00:04:22] Chris McIntire: First, a little context in the water space, because I do think it's important.
The water space and particularly wastewater treatment, it's highly fragmented. Lots and lots and lots of small companies. There's no one piece of technology that treats water or wastewater. Lots of really, really smart people solving problems piece by piece, and that's why we see all these companies. You add to that, the customers are super conservative.
[00:04:46] Chris McIntire: When a 20,000 person town makes a decision to either install or upgrade a wastewater treatment plant, it needs to work essentially forever. Because if it doesn't work, a high school doesn't get built, because they'll have to put more money into it. So highly, highly conservative customers.
[00:05:01] Chris McIntire: The reputation based on successful installations drives the marketplace. We say in order to be a real player in this space, you need to have been there for 10 years and done 100 installs.
[00:05:12] Chris McIntire: For me, that's a great place to operate. It means small companies can compete shoulder to shoulder with much larger entities, because expertise in the application you're selling rules the day. It's your reputation, it's your installs, it's your references that really drive the day.
[00:05:29] Chris McIntire: That's critical for folks that have businesses that are looking at a transaction. How do you preserve that? How do you teach the big companies that big doesn't always rule the day? Reputation and expertise can trump size. That's a big mouthful for a large multinational company to swallow.
[00:05:48] Piers Clark: That is a staggeringly beautiful insight because it absolutely means that the value of the small business you create, the small specialist team that you create, if they can bring something that gives the big behemoth that was interested in your business a distinctive edge, then hopefully they will preserve the edge, they will look after it.
[00:06:08] Piers Clark: They will make it a core part of what differentiates them moving forward.
[00:06:12] Chris McIntire: They want to preserve the edge. They didn't buy us 'cause they didn't want us to succeed, right? They got enthusiastic about the story we tell 'cause it is what we've done.
[00:06:21] Chris McIntire: I think the other piece of that and the most important element of my business are the people. It is these teams of folks that have solved these problems location by location, outside with the snow and the rain and the heat, they've solved it over and over again.
[00:06:37] Chris McIntire: Look, the equipment's important. The IP's important. The customer lists are important. What's far more important is the knowledge that this team has, how to solve our customers' problems. And so building an organization, I talk about the org chart upside down.
[00:06:51] Chris McIntire: Traditional org chart, the grand poobah's at the top, and then people below, and then the people that actually do work and add value are at the bottom. I say that's nonsense. It's completely upside down.
[00:07:01] Piers Clark: Flip it the other way.
[00:07:02] Chris McIntire: I think my job, my team's job, and us people that sit at desks, our job is to support our people out on the ground solving problems.
[00:07:10] Chris McIntire: Point them in the right direction. Give them some indicators on how well they're doing. And that's what my team thinks about every day. How do we support our people, our commercial people, our sales people, our application people, our field people, our production line people?
[00:07:24] Chris McIntire: How do we support them in how they support our customers?
[00:07:27] Piers Clark: All right, let's go in a slightly different direction, 'cause you mentioned at the beginning that we've got a client base in utilities which are naturally conservative, for very good reason. Because you don't play fast and loose with people's public health, with their water supply. So they are naturally conservative. They want to see solutions that are well-tested.
[00:07:43] Piers Clark: So what does that mean for innovation if you're in a company in the supply chain? How do you make your innovations work and be something that's valuable to your client base?
[00:07:53] Chris McIntire: I think you have to accept the customer's characteristics as they are. I do see a lot of frustrated innovation leads with those big, lofty titles at the water companies all over the place, the equipment suppliers, they get frustrated that the market won't move quicker.
[00:08:09] Chris McIntire: I would say that the innovation that we need to focus on is the solutions are out there. We have a lot of great solutions in the water space, us and our competitors. The innovation is getting that existing technology to the customers and to the sites. Now, you can innovate, you can surely improve your technology, you can become more efficient, you can do more with less. Like, that's accepted.
[00:08:31] Chris McIntire: But all sizzle in innovation isn't gonna win the day with our customers. A steak with no sizzle's boring, and if it's all sizzle and no steak, you're disappointed. You gotta have some balance, right? Little sizzle, little steak, and I think our customers, pretty focused on the steak. Doesn't mean they don't like a little sizzle, but you really gotta keep your eye on the steak, right?
[00:08:50] Chris McIntire: Listen to your customer, meet them where they need to be met, make sure you're giving them a solution they're comfortable with and they trust. It's more complicated than that, right? 'cause folks in the space know that the supply chain and the market space has consulting engineers and reps, and there's a whole lot of folks influencing these decisions before a purchase gets made.
[00:09:09] Chris McIntire: It's interesting, and if you know what you're doing, you can do really well, and if you don't know what you're doing, well, your competitors can do really well, right?
[00:09:15] Piers Clark: Brilliant. So let's come back to the topic of being bought and sold.
[00:09:20] Piers Clark: You've just been bought by another entity, whether it's a private equity investor and your shareholders have changed. What's the advice you'd give someone as to how you make this a success?
[00:09:30] Chris McIntire: I think the success starts early days. My being bought and sold has a particular theme to it, and it's been private equity backed. What does that mean? Well, that means a bunch of folks put some money up. They say, "Look we're gonna give you a bunch of money and we're gonna go buy a company or a collection of companies," and the payoff for them is, " We're gonna let you do that for four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years, and our goal will be to sell it then and make back a lot more money than we put in." It's really that simple. They put up the money, they bring in somebody like me and my team, and our job is to deliver.
[00:10:01] Chris McIntire: When I took this job six years ago, obviously the financials, the metrics drive the whole machine. We don't get the money if we don't promise the return, so okay, we got that.
[00:10:10] Chris McIntire: And look, having done it a few times, I asked the questions right up front. What does this look like? What's the timing? What's the expectation? to make sure we were aligned, and again, a very positive experience with my KKR and XPV team on that front.
[00:10:21] Chris McIntire: But in addition, I also made clear from the beginning, that we are fundamentally taking founder-based businesses that started from nothing and got to scale. They got to the 10 years, 100 installations. They got recognized. Those are the businesses that make up Axius.
[00:10:37] Chris McIntire: We're gonna acquire them . We're gonna bring them into the group, and then we're going to make sure that they know how to be successful in a larger organization. It's part of the process.
[00:10:48] Chris McIntire: What worked to get them from zero to 10 or 20 years isn't what's gonna work from 20 to forever. But, the smart people are there. They just need a little bit of guidance. They need some structure. We work on org chart. We work on systems. We put some rhythm and cadence in place that, again, we've just done it over and over and over again so that we know what works, and just help these folks pivot.
[00:11:12] Chris McIntire: They're getting bigger, so they have to organize a bit differently. At the end of the day, these businesses are delivering in terms of financial metrics, revenue and profit, to the point where they're just gonna be successful.
[00:11:24] Chris McIntire: I want all the people that come to work in all our locations every day to be able to keep coming to work in those locations every day should they wanna keep coming. I want them to be able to do it for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.
[00:11:35] Piers Clark: Maybe professionalizing the businesses is wrong. It's corporatizing the businesses, making them so that they are more suitable to a bigger corporate. Because how Xylem and Oldcastle operates isn't the same as a mom-and-pop business.
[00:11:47] Chris McIntire: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
[00:11:49] Chris McIntire: And my part of the deal coming in to taking the job, was that I needed the room to be able to do it the hard way. I'm not just gonna build a business with an EBITDA and a multiple that's gonna make everybody happy.
[00:12:02] Chris McIntire: I look back on Xylem, the plants are still there, the people are still coming to work. I didn't know it was successful until 10 years after I left. I mean, money changed hands and all, so there's success. But for me personally, did I do something that I'm proud of?
[00:12:18] Piers Clark: You don't see your legacy until you've got some distance.
[00:12:21] Piers Clark: Last question: what advice would you give the organizations that are buying businesses? What's the guidance you might give them?
[00:12:29] Chris McIntire: In a nutshell, don't screw these businesses up. You bought them because you liked them, you liked what they were doing. In the case of Axius, we've got a double-digit revenue growth rate. We're profitable. There's a lot of real strong points about the business but again, we're ... compared to CRH, compared to Oldcastle, we're small.
[00:12:46] Chris McIntire: We operate a little bit differently. And so as you think about the ways that your larger organization can help, also think about the ways that the business is being successful right now, and just be cautious about that.
[00:12:59] Chris McIntire: That's my role right now is pointing out where to be cautious. All with the focus on keeping this business creating value for the long term. With private equity, you're there for five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years.
[00:13:12] Chris McIntire: Very clear. It's a term. When you get bought by a company like CRH, it's a forever home. So the perspective and the thinking has to change a little bit.
[00:13:20] Piers Clark: I love it, and I hope that in 10 years time you'll look back and see the legacy of where you are now.
[00:13:25] Piers Clark: We're running out of time I'm afraid. And so the question I'd like to give you is look back at what you've achieved, and maybe put it into the context of the advice you might want to give your younger self.
[00:13:35] Piers Clark: Try and paint the picture for your younger self as to what the future might hold for him.
[00:13:40] Chris McIntire: I was in my 20s when I sort of started on this journey, and I was a starry-eyed young guy, wanted to be aggressive in my career.
[00:13:47] Chris McIntire: When I look back on it now and I look back at what I'm most proud of, it's not the dollars, it's not the number of transactions. What I look back at and what I'm proud of is the people and how we've helped them grow and succeed and take a lot of pleasure from their jobs. This upside down org thing, it's really real.
[00:14:08] Chris McIntire: And so when I go to WEFTEC, we usually bring 75 or 80 people. It's a big show for us. When I go, we have a dinner on the Monday night and we all get together. What I always do is I sit back and I just watch all these teams of people that used to be separate businesses, and I watch them all together, happy, smiling, excited. I look at those folks and I see the pride they have in what we're doing for our customers, I see the team and the camaraderie.
[00:14:35] Chris McIntire: That's what I'd like to see more and more people think about. The people aspect of what we do is gonna give you the satisfaction in the later years.
[00:14:44] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today, Chris McIntyre, the Head of Water, we think, Head of Water, Wastewater, at Oldcastle.
[00:14:54] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.
