Brennan Industries: John Joyce

IndustrialSage

John Joyce of Brennan Industries returns to share how remote work and logistics pileups have led to both issues as well as improvements.

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Danny:

– Well hello and welcome to today’s Executive Series on IndustrialSage. I am joined by John Joyce who is the global marketing director at Brennan Industries. John, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

John:

– Glad to be here, Danny. Thanks for having me.

Danny:

– Well John, I’m excited to have you again for the second time because we spoke—gosh, I can’t remember when now. It’s been a minute. It was a while ago. It was before this crazy thing called Covid happened, so I imagine things have changed. We talked a lot about marketing last time, some tactics and different things that you guys were doing, and that was pretty cool. Today, before we get into today’s topic and discussion, for those who aren’t familiar with Brennan, if you could just give me a high-level on who you guys are and what you do.

John:

– Sure. Brennan Industries is a manufacturer of hydraulic components, specifically hydraulic fittings and adapters but also some accessory components. And we are a multi-national company, so we manufacture those things in the US, in Canada, in the UK, and in Asia and have a worldwide distribution network as well.

Danny:

– Okay, that’s great. Since we last spoke, and again, it’s been a minute, how have things changed over there for you guys?

John:

– Yeah, so I think the same way things have changed for a lot of businesses is an increasing reliance on remote, technologies that enable remote, remote management and leadership, and also other technologies that enable remote sales and a shift away from a traditional sales model which is still super popular in the world of manufacturing. It’s kind of like an old-school industrial world, shifting away from that model towards a more social selling and marketing-heavy. Marketing’s doing more lifting, I think, than it used to do in the past because of the inability of people to meet as easily and freely as they used to in the past.

Danny:

– Yeah, so it’s definitely made things quite a bit of a challenge. Obviously there’s been a lot of changes. You mentioned trying to reach customer, obviously, is kind of a big one. How has it really altered your future? Some of these things are, maybe you can say a blip on the radar, temporary. But what do you think those things are that will remain permanent?

John:

– Well I think actually a lot of the changes that have happened aren’t going to roll back. I don’t think things are going to roll back to the way they were before on most of the levels. We talked about increasing reliance on marketing. That was one of the changes and moving away from the face-to-face sales. That’s going to continue. I also think the importance of data and the immediate access to data through systems, kind of like ecommerce but streamlining that whole concept of direct-connect, direct-sharing of data has just gotten more and more important because it’s eliminating the human element which, we’ve been on a trajectory for that for forever, from really switching from face-to-face business to the telephone to the fax to the email to ecommerce. But Covid just pushed it all the way to the edge of almost touchless as much as possible. And I don’t think that’s going to go back, I think because we were going that way already. And not only in commerce, but then you also have that in leadership and management. Building and training and managing your team has also been shoved entirely over into the virtual space.

So we’ve spent a lot of time developing training materials, building infrastructure for remote leadership and remote team management. And all of those things have improved the company, so I don’t see them just vanishing. I think all those changes are permanent. But it’s been—another topic is logistics. Logistics has been a nightmare since Covid, and hopefully some of that will change because it’s actually been so—the pricing and the availability of things and the ability to move things around has been horrible, and there’s been a lot of scrambling in that area. But again, having a multi-national footprint, having the ability to manufacture your parts in multiple geographies and move them around gives you a lot of opportunities for moving them around differently. That’s even helped through the logistical challenges. So I think all those challenges are going to stick, or those improvements.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. Well, certainly. Obviously, there’s a lot of, with the cons come the pros. I’m curious; beforehand, was Brennan fairly virtual? What did the makeup look like?

John:

– No, not very virtual. The marketing department’s actually one of the most—sales and marketing are one of the most virtual. A lot of the sales guys are already scattered all over the place, and they report virtually. Then the marketing team, just due to the nature of marketing and the people who do it, you tend to get a lot of people who have worked as freelancers or are used to that kind of, having equipment and set up at home remote work. It actually works well for remote because everything’s digital, all the assets. Our team became more remote during this time, but Brennan as a whole I think hasn’t been very remote at all. That has been kind of a cultural challenge for Brennan, let’s just say. We’ve embraced it, but it’s also not been super easy.

Danny:

– Well yeah, and that seems to be a similar and familiar story with a lot of manufacturers. It is a cultural challenge. It’s a mind shift. Paradigm shift, really, but then you also have a whole other element. Obviously if you were a manufacturer and you are manufacturing things, there’s obviously elements that are, you can’t do virtually. But there’s hybrids, and there’s ways of being able to make that happen. I know that’s been difficult. What about trade shows and things like that? Was that something that Brennan took—did you guys do those before a lot? What does that look like?

John:

– In 2019 I think we did 19 or 20 shows. Some of them huge, and some of them quite small. In the last couple of years, we’ve done next to zero. I think just this year, we’ve done a couple. But even then there’s been a lot of resistance in wanting to do the shows which has been interesting. The people holding the shows really want to get the shows geared back up, but there’s a bit of a resistance of, eh, we’re not so sure we want to do that or anybody’s going to come. Or if the performance of the show is half of what it normally is, is it going to be worth it? But we have experimented and done three or four. I think there’s four on the schedule for this year. But I think it’s still questionable whether those shows are worth it yet again because of, everybody’s in the same boat. The nice thing is, everybody’s going through this, if that’s nice. It’s not like we’re the only ones going through these challenges. Your competitors are going through them. Your customers are going through it. So we’re all in this together, and I think we’ve all stepped back and said, okay, how necessary is some of this stuff? And it gives you the opportunity to rethink things like, maybe you’ve been doing them every year for years, or every two years for forever and you’re like, eh, do we really need to keep doing that? Or is this really providing value? I think that’s a plus side to the challenges again.

Danny:

– Sure, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. If I heard you correctly, I know you said you have some on the schedule. But have you already attended some so far? How have those been? I’m just curious. I’ve been hearing different things.

John:

– Yeah, the general reaction has been underwhelming. People come back; I’ve heard extremely underwhelming things like, that was horrible to eh, wasn’t the greatest. We have one that’s still coming up this year, the last one for this year, and I’m hoping that that proves to be a little better because the first ones were earlier in the year. As things have progressed this year I think it’s confusing because there’s, is it getting better? Is it not getting better? Is it getting better? So I’m hoping it is getting better and that this show coming up in a few weeks will be good. So far they’ve been pretty underwhelming.

Danny:

– Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ll see what happens with that. From what we’ve heard, very similar experiences is that just the attendance that you thought was going to be a lot higher than it actually was. And I’m sure that there’s several different reasons for that. Certainly if they’re international shows versus more domestic. There’s a lot at play certainly going forward in the fall as right now as the whole variant stuff in the US anyways is kind of going nuts. I’m really curious about some of these big ones that are going to be rolling up here in the next four to six weeks, what’s going to happen, if they will keep going, if they won’t. Certainly the attendance has got to be hampered, but who knows? It’s anyone’s guess. I kind of hope, personally, that we’re going to get back, better, and that we can take that variable off the table. Then we’ll see what’s left. You may have companies that say, we’re out of this game, or what. I’m very curious to see what’s going to happen there. I think it’s anyone’s guess.

John:

– Yeah, speaking frankly, I’ve always had a skeptical view towards most of the events, especially the bigger ones that cost a million dollars, basically, to participate at the scale that we need to participate. It’s like, are these really worth it? Are they really producing? Or is there some better way to do it? And I do think not having them hasn’t—I don’t feel like it’s been a major blow, like oh, wow, we missed 20 shows times two years. That’s 40 shows, and wow, you could really feel that. Honestly, it hasn’t been that. It has been pretty fine. So it just seems like right now last month was one of our best months we’ve ever had. I think it might have been the best month we’ve ever had. It’s kind of like business is cranking, and so just as a marketing guy, just really am questioning the ROI on these things. I think the break in the tradition of going to them is actually good because like I said before, it can really give you an opportunity to rethink. Do we need to pick this back up? We quit doing it; let’s just leave it where it was. Like a bad habit, we’ll just walk away from it.

Danny:

– Yeah, it’s interesting. Like I said, we’ll see what happens. On that, as we’re prognosticating a little bit, the future, the future of your industry, what does that look like for you?

John:

– Future of our industry, so we’re facing some challenges, that’s for sure, with the progress of technology and electrification of equipment. Hydraulics is not new technology, let’s just say that. There is a push towards anything new and shiny, so you see the threat of electrification. You start seeing that more and more, but what’s been interesting at least so far to see play out is the combination of electrification with hydraulics because of the inability of electrification to truly replace hydraulics in every application just due to, each method has its own limitations. So you’re starting to see digital pumps and things like that instead of actuators replacing hydraulic components, you just see more like a digitization of hydraulic components to give them some element of the control of electronics and things like that. That’s I think a direction that the industry is going, which I think is interesting. Seems scarier than I think it’s going to be because of the way the innovation has been changing and still people are embracing hydraulics just because of the ability of it to cheaply and easily transfer power in a way that other modes of transferring power just can’t do.

Then for us as a company, I think the aerospace market is always an interesting market. You see tons of publicity recently with various billionaires blasting themselves off into space, but that market is more and more a growing market. Aerospace is a huge market, so of course it’s a growing market. But you see even space travel and everything related to that becoming more accessible to businesses. That was just the thing of governments, and now you have private businesses figuring out ways to do things like that. Some of those businesses are our customers, so that’s exciting to see. We say, more power to that whole industry and everything they’re trying to do because hydraulics is playing a role in it, and so we’re excited about that.

Danny:

– Yeah, that’s definitely super cool, especially about aerospace and you’re seeing all the privatization of that whole space exploration. That’s obviously super exciting. One thing I’d ask then, if I gave you a magic wand and I said hey, if there’s any challenge you see that you could solve right now, what would it be? Besides Covid.

John:

– For me personally, it would be technical integration, seamless integration. One of the things we’re really trying to push for—and what I mean is integration of business systems for the purpose of real-time data and real-time commerce, just fully integrated through the whole chain of distribution. I think there’s massive potential for that to solve a lot of bottlenecks and a lot of problems. And it’s not a new thing. It’s been going on, but it just needs to really come into its fullness which it has not. It’s so spotty and done in half-measurements, let’s say. I think that is something that I would like to see happen, especially at Brennan. And I’ve actually been pushing on this pretty hard. But in all industry, just to streamline all of the business that happens between industrial manufacturers and their distributors to speed up that process. You still have distributors today ordering by fax which is, it’s just an example of the state of how business is in industrial distribution sites. It needs to catch up with the rest of the world, and I think that that would make a massive difference if industrial business was happening at the speed of a business like a huge retail operation would, like a Walmart or something like that.

And we’re getting there, and we’re trying, on our side Brennan is pushing to adopt and develop. We’ve developed our own technologies in that regard to bridge the gap between our distribution network which is huge—we have over 6000 distributors, maybe 7000 by now—and bridge that gap technologically between them and us to make that relationship seamless and almost to remove us out of the middle of the relationship because in my opinion, that is the ultimate customer experience would be that it’s all about the customer. You’re literally inside their head. Their data is inside your head so that they don’t even really need you, more or less, except you’re hoping, in my personal opinion, the end result would be, we’re basically invisible. Everything is just happening smoothly and seamlessly and automatically, and they never have to think about us. I think we need to get to that point. That would be my magic wand, let’s make that happen.

Danny:

– That’s a great magic wand answer right there. The customer experience, and it’s interesting. You mentioned retail. A lot of this is driven from our consumer behavior, our expectations. You and I go onto Amazon or whatever. You can go buy something online and get it, sometimes in an hour or faster. Your food, your products, your groceries, whatever, that’s all where that’s going. That’s sort of being pushed into, on the B2B side. Well, wait a minute; why couldn’t we do that? It was interesting. There was one of the companies that we talked—this was probably two, three years ago. They had pushed into ecomm, and you could go buy stainless steel tanks from them for $20,000 online. It’s interesting. B2B purchases obviously are very different in nature. But you mentioned from an ordering standpoint, like okay, fine. It’s still very technical, and you’ve got to go through all kinds of stuff. Certainly if you’ve got a distribution network, there’s going to be some similarities. Alright, let’s hit a button. It’s coming; it’s coming. It’s going to take some time. It’s also interesting too, you were mentioning fax. Real estate, I remember several years ago. It wasn’t that long ago, I guess. I was still blown away at fax. Like, really? You guys have to… Okay, alright, but you know what? It’s not the only industry that is…

John:

– Yeah, it definitely gives everything an old-school flair, the fax machine coming in the corner.

Danny:

– Things are changing. They’re coming. My last question before we wrap up is, what are you doing to stay at the top of your game, to continue to learn and sharpen your toolset? What are you doing?

John:

– That’s a great question, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about that. What I’m doing is, I’m trying to share knowledge with other people in the marketing world and in the remote working world, both socially like social media, putting content out on social media, and also sharing best practices amongst peers. Let’s say sharing practices amongst peers to learn from each other and also public speaking. I’ve been trying to do more and more speaking and get out there more and talk about these things just like I’m doing right now, but also virtually in front of other groups or in-person as that is possible and just really help people to grow from the 30 years of experience that I have but also in that process you learn a lot yourself, both from trying to help other people grow and the input of others around you who are doing the same thing or have their questions or their experiences. Really just trying to give back, I guess, in some way actively is a huge way that I’ve found to try to advance myself but also the whole industry and other people. Honestly I’m really trying to focus quite a decent amount of effort onto doing that kind of thing, and also it’s very enjoyable. I love doing it.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. That’s a great answer. I love that. Giving back, but then you also— I do some of the similar stuff, and there’s a tremendous amount that you learn from other people. I love that. It’s fantastic. It’s sort of like this—I don’t know what I’m trying to say. You put in, you get out.

John:

– Yeah, I think Covid has locked us up in little boxes to some degree and you have to get back out of that. Even when you’re free, so to say, after being penned up for a long time, there’s actually a stretching. You have to stretch and get your muscles going back into, no, I need to be out there. I think just pushing yourself, or at least for me, pushing myself to be out there, to engage with people, even if it’s digitally, but everybody is so much better and more ready for that, engaging with people, engaging in the discussion, bringing ideas, sharing them, getting input. That is a very awesome growth process for everybody, really.

Danny:

– Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s funny; you reminded me of a story that a buddy of mine told me just a couple of weeks ago. He was a road warrior, always traveling, going somewhere, conferences, networking, all over the place. He told me, well I went to my first conference or whatever two weeks ago. He was like, I came back, and I was like, aw man, this is—yeah, I’m okay with doing this two times a year now. I don’t want to do this all the time.

John:

– He’s out of shape.

Danny:

– Yeah, exactly. He’s winded. It makes a lot of sense. I get it. Cool, well John, I really appreciate the time that you’ve spent with us here on the Executive Series, just learning a little bit more about you and about Brennan and just sharing ideas and thoughts on where we think this crazy world is going relative to industry. I’ve loved it. For those who would like to learn more about you guys, it’s brennaninc.com; is that correct?

John:

– That’s right, brennaninc.com, and you could also search me on LinkedIn. Feel free to follow or connect on LinkedIn.

Danny:

– Perfect, yeah. So that’s where you’re posting most of your social content?

John:

– Mm-hmm.

Danny:

– Alright, cool. Well we can follow you there. Follow John. So again, thank you so much for your time, and we’ll do this again. This won’t be the last time.

John:

– Okay. Yeah, I’d love it. I always love talking to you, Danny. So thanks.

Danny:

– Any time, any time. Alright, and that wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series with John Joyce. He is the global marketing director at Brennan Industries. If you want to learn more about them, you can go to brennaninc.com, or you can check out John. He puts out a lot of content on LinkedIn. You can go follow him, check out his stuff, share a comment, all that good stuff.

Hey, speaking of content and consuming it, if you are not on our email list, you need to go and get on the list now. I highly recommend. Why? Because we’ve got great content like this and others that are coming out on a weekly basis so you can continue to sharpen your tools and learn from other leaders and executives about what they’re doing in their industries and how you can be a better leader in yours. So that’s all I got for you today. Thanks for watching or listening. I’m Danny Gonzales, and I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage for the Executive Series.

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