In his first two months as head of Pennsylvania-based service body manufacturer Reading Truck
John A. Secoges
“We’ve got to continue to innovate, understand what local customer needs are ... But fundamentally the biggest opportunity for us is to build our national presence.” Greg Freeman, President and CEO, Reading Truck Group
Group, Greg Freeman has visited every company site on a mission to learn, listen, and absorb information.
“I’ve gone out to a lot of customers and everything I’ve heard has either reinforced or added to what I thought coming into the job,” Freeman said in a telephone interview with Service Truck Magazine. “So it’s been great.”
Freeman’s appointment as president and CEO of Reading took effect April 2. He reports to John Poindexter, president of Houston, Texas-based J.B. Poindexter & Co. Inc., Reading’s parent company.
“It’s a very thorough process that one goes through with John Poindexter,” Freeman said. “So you come in with a fairly thorough knowledge of the business as it is.”
While Freeman came to Reading with no direct experience in the service body industry, his 25-year career in other specialty industries — such as at Graham Packaging Company — readied him for Reading, he said.
Solving speciality problems
“Every one of those steps in my career has prepared me for Reading in the sense that Reading is a specialty product,” Freeman said.
He described specialty manufacturing as a business that modifies commodities “to create products that solve specific customer problems.”
That’s what Graham Packaging does in the business of rigid plastic bottles for such laundry detergent and motor oil. And it’s what Reading does in manufacturing truck bodies.
What his career didn’t prepare him for at Reading are such things as the industry-specific language and its acronyms.
“So I’ve been coming up the learning curve very quickly to be able to speak the language, speak intelligently with our customers, with the staff. That’s really the biggest area,” Freeman said.
For example, since it’s his first time in a metals industry, he is needing to learn how the raw materials procurement chain works. He also has to learn the acronyms of Readings specific product lines — such as RVSL, SL, and CSV.
Talking tarrifs
Speaking of metals, Freeman arrived at Reading just as U.S. President Donald Trump announced he was imposing stiff tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel. Initially, Trump exempted Canada, Mexico and the European Union from those tariffs. But in June, he removed that exemption, citing a lack of progress on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“I’ll try to stay unpolitical about this because it is what it is, and certainly our president feels it’s important,” Freeman said. “For me, as an industry producer, it’s more of a hassle than anything else. What I mean by that is if it’s creating an increase in the price of the commodities, which it is, I will pass that through to the customers because it’s a cost increase.”
The tariffs won’t mean any additional profit for Reading, he noted. And the hassle is ensuring that any cost increase is fair to the customer and timely.
“It’s not something I welcomed but it’s there and we will continue to address it,” Freeman said.
As a leading producer of aluminum service bodies, Reading hasn’t yet analyzed how those tariffs will affect its customers. But despite the aluminum tariff being 10 percent compared with 25 percent for steel, the aluminum charge has so far had the greater impact, he said.
That’s because there are far more sources of domestic steel available than of the specialized grades of aluminum that Reading uses in its bodies.
“Canada is really the major source for a lot of the grades of aluminum that are used in these types of industries. So it can be a big impact,” Freeman said.
Smaller, tighter focus
In moving to Reading, Freeman has gone from a much larger company with facilities around the world to one that, until recently, had a primarily regional presence in the eastern U.S. At Graham, Freeman was president of the company’s household, personal care, and automotive division — a multi-million dollar business unit with 22 operating facilities. He earlier had leadership roles with Celanese, a multi-billion dollar global company, and with W.R. Grace and the Grace Construction Products Group.
During his career track, he has “intentionally” moved to smaller and smaller companies. In his previous jobs, his “wide variety of functional experiences” ranged from product management and operations management to new business development — all of which proved to be great training grounds.
“What I loved about going to the smaller businesses and the privately held businesses is a much greater reliance on the immediate business team to create success,” Freeman said.
In recent years, however, Reading has been growing. In 2012, it became part of J.B. Poindexter, which now has about 6,000 employees and 80 subsidiaries in the U.S., Canada, and beyond, John Pointdexter said during a presentation at the 2018 Work Truck Show in Indianapolis this March.
In 2017, Reading itself acquired “substantially all of the assets” of service body manufacturer and Reading distributor Caseco Manufacturing Inc., and the “service body distribution and upfitting business” of Palfinger Group’s four PalFleet facilities in the U.S. Midwest.
Even though Reading is part of a larger company, Freeman said his boss expects him to run Reading as a self-contained unit and be accountable for its success.
“You can make decisions faster in a small environment and you have just a much tighter focus on the accountability of the team and what you need to do to win. That’s what I love,” Freeman said.
So how is Reading doing at integrating its new parts?
“I have over five years in what I call business development, which is really M&A (mergers and acquisitions) work, so I’ve seen the really good, I’ve seen the really bad. And I’ll say Reading’s right in the middle,” Freeman said.
The company has done some things really well, such as integrating new product lines and offering new solutions to Reading customers, he said.
As for the future of the Caseco brand, it is being folded into the Reading brand, he said.
“Reading is the key brand for us,” Freeman said. “Where it’s appropriate on certain products we may retain Caseco product trademarks but overall we want customers to experience Reading.”
National aspirations
Looking ahead, a key strategy for Reading, and for John Poindexter, is to become a “truly national brand” while maintain the Reading approach of focusing on solving customers’ problems.
“So we need to be local to the customers and that’s where getting the manufacturing in the Midwest is a key step to that,” Freeman said. “And we will look for continued opportunities to expand further to the west as they present themselves. We want to be local from an understanding of the local market, understanding of the local customer needs, but also meeting the lead time requirements, the delivery requirements, and making sure we’re doing it at a low freight cost.”
Pressed for specifics, Freeman declined to share any details of what expansion plans are on the horizon for Reading. However, he did offer that “this business will be significantly bigger, better in the coming years than what it is today.”
The challenge for Reading in gaining a greater share of that bigger pie will be “how do we be help the rest of the country come to know Reading like the Northeast has for all these years,” Freeman said.
To succeed at that, Reading will also have to take into account the differing needs of the different regions.
“We can’t assume we’ll be great there just taking exactly what we’ve got today and taking it there,” he said. “We’ve got to continue to innovate, understand what the local customer needs are, make sure we’re doing it in a way that’s helpful to them and still meeting all their other needs. But fundamentally the biggest opportunity for us is to build our national presence.”
Readying for the future
Technology and automation are also expected to create fundamental changes across the economy. Freeman said those changes should result in more demand for the types of service vehicles Reading provides. “But they’re all going to be slightly different needs than maybe what’s out there today,” he said.
In its own operations, Reading is always looking for ways to work faster and more efficiently, even in adopting robotics. However, he noted that robotics presents challenges when doing customization work, although robots capable of mass customization are being developed. Then again, that sort of automation isn’t on the immediate horizon for Reading because it’s not something customers are demanding.
“That’s not our first and best opportunity to make sure that we’re maximizing efficiency and cost for our customers,” Freeman said.
Another looming challenge is the imminent retirement en masse of the baby boomers, particularly in skilled trades. In Reading’s case that means welders. Reading works with educational institutions to create pipelines of talent, but the company does the training itself on its shop floors, Freeman said.
“We’re doing I think what any great company would do. We’re creating our own in-house training programs.”
— Keith Norbury