Damon Baker (00:14)
Rich, when you joined Holland in 2017, it was coming off nearly a decade of strong growth, but the momentum had slowed. The strategy was there, the people were talented, and the ideas were endless. Maybe too endless. And the problem wasn't a lack of vision, it was alignment. Can you take us back to that moment? What did you walk into and what did it feel like?

Rich Trojan (00:36)
Well, it's kind like you described, right? There were so many good ideas. At times it was tough to get everybody to join forces, right? To work on those a critical few. know, departments were more motivated by their own bonuses and what theirs were than say the overall company's strength. So that was something we had to address.

Damon Baker (00:58)
What was the energy like in the organization, if you can think back in that time? Were the people hungry for change? Were they tired of change initiatives that have come and gone in the past? Or was the team just misaligned and rudderless, directionless, or maybe a combination of several factors?

Rich Trojan (01:14)
Yeah, I think it was a combination of those couple things, right? I think that people were hungry, right? you, you know, it's like one of those when you get success, you want to keep it going. But I think everyone had their own idea of what it took to be successful. And it was more based on each individual department or say initiative. So you would have people fighting over the exact same resources and there wasn't a way to have us all aligned. Cause like I said, bonuses were more tied, you know, to individual departments instead of overall company flaw.

Damon Baker (01:47)
Yeah, it makes me think of strategy. when you got there early on, what did you notice about the strategy in particular that wasn't translating into execution? You already talked about the misalignment of incentives as one root cause, I guess, and why they couldn't execute.

Rich Trojan (02:03)
Well, you know, I think you've seen this, you know, when you're, when you're building teams for different initiatives, a lot of times as you're trying to build those teams, the top individuals in an organization, everyone wants them on their team. All of a sudden then, right, you have this one team member that's like a part of like seven different teams. And whoever's the leader of that, they're telling them that, this is the most important team. This is the most important team. And you're really good employees. They want to help every team that they're on.

Damon Baker (02:16)
Yeah.

Rich Trojan (02:32)
But there's just not enough time in the day, there's not enough energy to be able to do that effectively. And that was, I think, a little bit of what we were going through.

Damon Baker (02:40)
Yeah, when I think of effective strategy, I think it's about making choices, not only choosing what to do, but more importantly, choosing what not to do. And it sounds like Holland at the time felt like they could take on multiple initiatives and on top of that, put the same rock stars on those initiatives to try to execute those. And as we've seen this movie before, people get diluted.

Rich Trojan (03:01)
Yeah, and I think it's also hard when a customer comes to you and says, hey, can you do this for us? People really don't want to say no to a customer, right? Because it's like, it's a customer and they're paying us. Well, but just because a customer's paying you for something, if you figure out all the additional costs that you may have to do to give the customer what they look for, you might not make any money doing it. So it's like the customer's happy.

Damon Baker (03:10)
Hard to say now.

Rich Trojan (03:28)
but you diluted time and energy from maybe some more important initiatives just to keep the customer happy, where at the end of the day, if you would have said no and explained why, you probably would have kept the customers still happy. People would have worked less and been more focused on the things that really gave more bang for the buck.

Damon Baker (03:45)
What I think is unique about this story, and we're going to get into this, is you came into the organization as the CHRO. And I had to think back in my career, like, could I remember a situation where a CHRO was the catalyst for a lean transformation within a company? And honestly, I couldn't think of any other example other than yours, which I think is a good reason.

Rich Trojan (03:47)
you

Damon Baker (04:09)
to have this discussion because of the situation is so unique. So as an HR leader coming in from the outside, all your Danaher experience and all your background, what role did you think you played in changing what you were seeing when you first got to the company?

Rich Trojan (04:28)
Yeah, you know, I didn't go to school for HR, right? Like I was an operations person, you know, first job at Caterpillar, I was in HR, kind of got pulled into HR, and I spent time in operations, right? And when I was interviewing for with other company after my time at Caterpillar, I was interviewing more for an operations role. But during the interview, they're like, no, we want you for HR manager. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, I was in HR, I got out of HR.

Damon Baker (04:39)
reluctantly.

Rich Trojan (04:57)
But it was the first time that I had an HR leader say to me, like, I don't want an HR person. What I'm looking for is a business person who's going to work in HR. And that has stuck with me to this day where it's like, think if I provide the most value to business leaders, it's because I'm trying to think like a business leader. Yes, I have responsibility for HR and all that. But it's always like, I always want to be pulled into what are the most important questions that the company's trying to answer.

What's the worst thing that's going on? I want to go jump into that. want to help out, regardless of whether it's HR or not. coming in, that was one of the things where it's like, hey, yes, we need you to help out with the HR strategy. But my boss at that time was so open that he was just looking for someone that he could bounce ideas off of and really have that good sounding board. And I could see the different things that he was going through. And you and I worked obviously together at VideoJet and we saw the power of when you had that one piece of paper, That showing that policy deployment, one piece of paper can do so much. And as he jokes to me to this day, it's like, well, why did you wait so long to bring it up? Where he knows that, he said no, probably for about a year and a half before I finally was able to convince like, hey, let's try this. And so that was the big change where, and again, it wasn't just me being the catalyst, he had to be willing to take that jump.

Right? you know, and you know this too. There's a lot of leaders that's like, no, I got this. You know, what do you know? You're new to this industry. You're still new to this company. But he was willing, you know, to take that chance and he was willing to get everybody else. And again, the rest of my teammates on the leadership team were all on the same boat. Like, yeah, let's try this. Let's jump in. And it was a really good process as we'll get into, right? We just didn't do it 100 % of the way, right? We were like, you know, 50 % of the

Damon Baker (06:22)
Yeah.

It sounds like the wake up call for Holland was this recognition or the point of recognition around the fact that you just had too many quote unquote good ideas inside the company. Everyone was chasing their own priorities. Departments were optimizing locally instead of winning collectively. And you oftentimes see that in organizations that haven't gone through an exercise of KPIs and business operating rhythm and establishing processes like daily management. left to their own devices, people serve their own interests. And oftentimes those interests are at odds with their colleagues and even worse off, your customers. So how did you recognize that lack of a unifying system was the real problem? And how did you get the leadership team there with you to see the same thing?

Rich Trojan (07:40)
You know, like within two years of myself joining, I was given the opportunity to lead one of our business units. And it was probably a business unit that we weren't sure exactly what to do with it. And it was more of like from an HR perspective, was like, well, do we have the right people? You know, how they're driving it. But as I got into it, you could see like there was potential with this business unit. just, unfortunately that division had some parts of it that shouldn't be with us anymore. And those are tough decisions that you have to make.

But I was able to kind of work with that team and had a great team working with me that we were able to close some divisions that weren't doing what they were supposed to, right? Just weren't making the profit that were needed. And within 18 months, all of a sudden people were seeing, well, whoa, while sales have gone down, profitability actually went higher, right? So less sales, more profit. That's not too bad. People were seeing that momentum and that's where people are like, okay, if you can do that on a small scale, can we do it on a larger scale? And we were already having some very good things that were going on, but we knew we needed to take it to just that next level of really being fully committed to what policy deployment.

Damon Baker (08:56)
Your first attempt, articulate this as lean without a teacher, the first try, so to speak. So you tried to introduce policy deployment, AKA hosin-conrey or strategy deployment on your own with the company in 2019, but in your own words, it was rough. You were the teacher during that time and the champion and the student all at once. what was that like?

Rich Trojan (09:05)
Yes.

Right. A little bit of chaos, right? People were excited because we'd be coming more aligned, right? We started changing our bonus plans so we were all aligned as a company. So that was good. And you can see people excited by it. since a lot of people had never been in an environment like this, they were excited and just thought, this is the best that it gets. Where I knew it's like, no, no, no, this isn't the best that it can get, but.

When you're trying to explain to people like, if we just go deeper, can get even better. know, sometimes people are like, well, why? You know, it's going good. This is going to go. But you can see it's like, well, it's only going to get us so far. And like you said, it's like, you know, I still am leading HR, right? And now I have this business, you know, one business unit that I'm also in charge of. So it's like, I'm doing that. I couldn't just be the champion, right? You need somebody that that they're truly dedicated because we have over 800 employees and

Only like a hundred are in Illinois. mean, the majority of our people are all around the country because we're out on track, doing what we need to do. That's really hard to get everyone going. And you know there's the cadence to it, right? It's not just that once a month policy deployment meeting. There's the level twos that have to happen. There's all the pre-work that goes in. There's the root cause and countermeasures that really have to become a part of that every day. And there was no way that I could do justice to what's needed to really make this a

Damon Baker (10:52)
Was there any, I'm sure there was something that were working well in your opinion, even though you guys were making that first attempt. Can you think back to some of the things that maybe were going well with the implementation of policy deployment?

Rich Trojan (11:03)
Yeah, I think the first thing, you know, when I joined our safety wasn't exactly where it needed to be. It was better than average, but it wasn't where we wanted it to be. So people were seeing the amount of focus that we put on safety, that that really made a huge change. And then by kind of saying like, you know, as you put that policy deployment together, like, hey, here's the top four to five goals that the entire company is working on. And in a way, force ranking, you know, what's number one, two, three, and so forth.

It sent a message to the organization, this is the priority. And as we started even working with performance reviews of making sure that people's objectives were tied back to the X matrix, and again, back then it was still too loose than it needed to be, I will fully admit that, but people were starting to see that there was a connection, that this wasn't a flavor of the month, this wasn't like, you're just doing this one year and then next year it'll be something else. It's like, ⁓ wait, now you're starting to get that cadence that we're just, every year we're gonna do this, and how do we make it better?

Damon Baker (12:03)
Did it start to slowly resolve the resource dilution challenge where you had the same individual spread across multiple initiatives when you forced the clarity of policy deployment?

Rich Trojan (12:13)
It got better, but it wasn't perfect, as I'm sure you can imagine in the beginning. But it definitely got better.

Damon Baker (12:17)
Yeah,

I can imagine a lot of really tense conversations around what we're not going to do and who's going to do it.

Rich Trojan (12:26)
you can, as you can imagine, we had, you know, those white sheets of paper all around a conference room, right? As we had, you what were the four five initiatives and then who was going to be on each team? And we just said one person per team, right? That like one person or a person can only be on one team. And the amount, right, that, you know, for certain people, that was tough. And I know in the beginning years there were times like, okay, that person can be on two teams, which was still less than the probably the four or five that they had been on in years prior, right? So I was like, again, I took the win, then we got it down to two, you know, but now we're pretty much at the point where it's pretty much like, you one and that's where we need to be.

Damon Baker (13:04)
I'm curious, did people respond to you differently because of your HR responsibility when you start bringing to the organization all this talk about a lean business system? Did they look at you funny or was that not an issue?

Rich Trojan (13:21)
No, I don't think you will. think that's the thing that, again, I'll give the people I've gotten a chance to work with on the leadership team. We all kind of came in as, you know, it's like nights at the round table, right? It was a circular table. We all had our strengths that we brought. And, you know, there were times where I could bring something, but the next meeting would be somebody else bringing something else, right? And I think that's what made us work that.

I'm a big fan of Patrick Lencioni and all his books, know, so five dysfunctions of a team. It's like, look, we had trust with each other. We had some healthy conflict. There was no doubt there was some healthy, healthy conflict that went on, but we had to get where we all were paying attention to the exact same results. And we were all on the exact same plan, right? We were all motivated by making sure the EBITDA grew and we all had the exact same measurement.

I didn't have HR measurements. That was like time to fill or about talent development. We were all in the exact same of what was the EBITDA growth and then we just had to do our positions to help with that EBITDA growth and we all got the exact same bonus at the end of the year.

Damon Baker (14:28)
Yeah, it makes the conversation much easier for sure. So what was the inflection point where you realized that you couldn't do this on your own and perhaps knowing enough to be dangerous was not enough?

Rich Trojan (14:31)
Much easier, yes.

When we got to the point where you talked about our growth, say in the 2010s, we were building all of our mobile units and we have almost 200 mobile units. These are not cheap pieces of equipment. These are million dollar plus high technology equipment. And we knew we were going to start building again. And at that point,

Damon Baker (15:02)
Yeah, and a mobile unit for the audience. Can you explain real quickly what a mobile unit is?

Rich Trojan (15:06)
Sure, so if you think of ⁓ fixing a pothole on a street, right, you see those trucks that go fill a pothole. Well, when there's a pothole on a street, usually you can drive around. If there's a defect on a railroad track, there's no way for a train to go around. So we have trucks that go onto the rail to fix whatever defect that's there. And so pretty sophisticated because there's a welder that's inside the truck that has to come out and then we have a technology that will fix that defect in the rail as quickly as possible so the trains can start running again. Because if that train track is down, nothing is being delivered to any site that they're supposed to be because the track's

Damon Baker (15:50)
So you took over what was called the equipment business unit, and this is the mobile welders. The stakes go up, million dollar mobile welders, highly technical complex, customer expectations that leave no margin for error. So that's when you decide to bring Lean Focus in. So what convinced you?

And more importantly, your leadership team, because the CEO, in your own words, for a year and a half had been saying, no, no, no, now it's finally time and you're ready. What was that moment where you decided to go all in?

Rich Trojan (16:23)
Yeah, so you know, again, we had seen the growth and it was like, I would say it's like, well, I don't want to go backwards and none of the team wanted to go backwards. And I'm like, we're going to go to this new period now that we have to reinvest in our fleet and building. And I'm like, we need outside experts to really take it to where we need to be. Cause I'm like, after you go through the training that I knew you and Bill were going to put us through, I'm like, you guys are all going to look at me and go.

Damon Baker (16:39)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (16:48)
What the heck were we doing before? This wasn't anything, right? Like I fully admit, like there's that little part like I'm gonna be a fraud now, right? Cause it's like, you you were saying you were an expert, which I never was trying to say I was an expert. But I just knew that we needed someone to be able to look at what we were doing and challenge us too, right? To have that outside view. And somebody who also had a lot of experience doing this at other companies that can say, I've seen this, I've seen this, here's what you're looking at. Really challenge and come from the outside.

which is really what's needed at that point. Because when you're so close to it and you're living it day by day, you don't even see your own blind spots. And so we had profits, so it's like we need to reinvest some of those profits back into the business, and this would be the way to do it. Plus we also knew that we probably only had at that point of the 800 plus, we probably still I would say only had maybe 25 to 50 people that really understood the process.

enough to make them dangerous. And so it was really then fully committed like, hey, we're going to make sure that all of our leaders in every department really understand this and really then have also good level two X matrix. you can only, if you do it at top level, yeah, you're going to get some benefit. But the true benefit is when it's just throughout everything that you do within the organization.

Damon Baker (18:10)
I think it's a key point to notice here that had your initial start of policy deployment not been successful and start to build credibility in the organization and for the team to start to be excited and see the momentum and driving clarity and focus and alignment and those kinds of things, I don't think you would have been set up to have the credibility that you can talk about bringing in an outside firm to help because they would look at that first attempt and go, why are we doing more of something that doesn't work for us? So don't think of it as like a failure. I think of it more as the team recognizes like we've mastered this level of fitness. Now we need to bring a personal trainer to help us with this new thing we don't know how to do.

Rich Trojan (18:51)
It's good

analogy. But again, think part of it, hopefully it's like, you never want to think too much of yourself, right? You got to stay humble. You and I have seen plenty of things in businesses where you think you're going great one day and then the next day something comes that rocks your world, A pandemic or something like that changes everything. But having that structure, and we went through different things, and obviously the pandemic even in 2020, right? The fact that at that point we had even a basic structure

It really gave us clarity for what to do during the pandemic because we had that. It was tight. I shudder to think what might have happened if we didn't have that clarity during that time. Right. But for us, we really did get stronger doing it. And again, terrible time with the pandemic. But again, there's nothing I could do to change that. There was nothing Holland could do to change that. All you can do is you weather through that storm. Right. You do your best with your employees and we send people home and then

But the majority of our team still had to work through it all. But that's where policy deployment kind of guided us of what were we going to focus on and make sure we didn't get sidetracked by those science projects or somebody's pet project that could just derail a lot of the good stuff we were doing.

Damon Baker (20:02)
So you start to find your guides and you mentioned the word humility. And I think a lot of times what comes alongside of humility is this hands-on leadership style, this ability to roll up your sleeves and get in there and do the dirty work and lead the team to where they need to go. And you and I have talked about how Bill and myself and others on the Lean Focus team didn't come in and dictate or insult the team into compliance.

They listened, they taught, they empowered you. We spent time on the shop floor with your associates earning trust from the hourly team before even mentioning a lean tool by name. So what impact in your opinion does that style of leadership have on the credibility of lean at Holland?

Rich Trojan (20:51)
It's funny, even last week I was out on the shop floor and there was, I don't know, this drill press is probably 400 pounds and Bill helped move it himself. And the guys on the shop floor still talk about this, like you guys bring in this consultant, right? And you use the word consultant and people think of like, you know, white button shirts and ties potentially, right? You got the wingtip shoes and they're like, here's this guy who's the consultant and he's getting behind and.

Damon Baker (21:10)
Wing tip shoes.

Rich Trojan (21:18)
working with the trolley and everything to push it himself and then he's over there cleaning it, dusting it off.

Damon Baker (21:23)
And he's a formerly publicly traded CEO twice on multiple boards. Yeah.

Rich Trojan (21:26)
Exactly. Right.

But you know what? I don't even think he ever brought that up with anyone on the shop floor. That's not wasn't his style at all. All they knew is he was a consultant. you know, and I think what they were teasing was some of my, you know, manufacturing leader was like, I don't think you've ever picked up a rag and dusted off a piece of equipment. Right. And here's somebody who you're paying to come in and teaching you a tool, but yet he's sitting there, sweat pouring down his brow. Right.

Damon Baker (21:31)
No. Right.

You

Rich Trojan (21:53)
side by side with the team and that was so powerful, you know, that they could see that. And then again, for the rest of our leaders to see that like, you there's no titles when you're doing a Kaizen, right? Everyone's got a part. And I think at that point, maybe I built some credibility with the guys on the shop floor, you know, understanding what they were going through, then it was like, no, no, this is your realm. This is where you're the expert. I know some tools and some things I think we can help, but it was able to show them.

You know, and I can remember after that first Kaizen, we had the hour by hour board and maybe some people were being like, okay, we're always going to be like, say if it takes eight hours to build this boom crane, that's what we're going to do. And you can see the look on the, you know, the operator's eyes of like, well, it doesn't always take eight hours. Then I'm like, time out. If you're training somebody, it's going to take longer, right? But that's what we want to know. Why? Why did it take longer? And then you can see them, you know, their eyes like,

Damon Baker (22:47)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (22:51)
well yeah, that makes sense. If I don't have any distractions, if I have all my parts, because a lot of times maybe there were part issues, that's what we want to know. Not trying to go, gotcha, you took longer. And I think that was the part that because Bill had started of just getting dirty himself and then trying to show that this wasn't a discipline thing or a gotcha tool, it was more to make their life easier. like I said, that was.

Damon Baker (23:11)
Yep.

Rich Trojan (23:15)
I think two plus years ago, but just last week it was still being talked about for how powerful that was and it's still something that lives today for what Bill did with us.

Damon Baker (23:24)
Yeah, you can really see the confidence grow in the team when they start to recognize that lean isn't this thing that management does to us. It's rather a way that we can empower ourselves to improve our work, make our situation better, teach our people, develop our people.

Rich Trojan (23:39)
Right, exactly. And again, for them, they like being busy. That's the biggest thing for job security. It's like when you look in the shop and if you're not working anything, then you start wondering, well, about my job. No one's got to worry anymore because they see the board of what's coming next and they see the plan for what we're So over these next couple years, they know they're going to be busy for quite a while.

Damon Baker (24:02)
Was there anything in the culture at Holland when you arrived that suggested to you that this humility first servant leadership style of leader would fit and play well here? Because sometimes that doesn't, because maybe you have like a lot of type A's who have been superstars and it's kind of a sharp elbow organization. It's political, it's backbiting. And then when you try to introduce that style of leadership, it just doesn't work because people perceive it as weakness, perhaps.

So

Rich Trojan (24:32)
You know,

Damon Baker (24:33)
did it work

Holland?

Rich Trojan (24:35)
family owned. The current group, it's 100 plus years, fifth generation is now working. And so when I joined, you there was the fourth generation at that time. And that fourth generation, there were two brothers, Mike and Tim, and then their sister, you know, were the main three. And all three of them had the humility. You know, when I interviewed with them, I was amazed. I it wasn't what I expected.

And so anytime they came for meetings or they were pushing, they were always very humble. And so that was very important. They personally knew people. They came for funerals. Right? Like they knew what was going on. In fact, there's ⁓ a luncheon that happens once a month for anybody who's retired from Holland. And some of the family comes down for that still. Right? They take the time. So you saw it from, you know, the owners.

Damon Baker (25:08)
Hmm

Rich Trojan (25:23)
that they put a lot of that. And that's kind of what they interviewed for, right? They wanted to make sure that people weren't thinking, hey, if you're a leader, you're in a white ivory tower. I just think, like I said, they were missing maybe some of these tools that, know, Lee could help us with. And again, they were, we didn't have to go get it approved. I didn't have to go do a big approval letter or anything else. It was really Holland deciding like, hey, this is what we want to do. And, you know, I sent you off an email and the rest has been history.

Damon Baker (25:35)
Yeah.

So now you're at the point of no return and you want to go deeper and wider inside the organization. You mentioned that Holland has 800 people. So now you want to have all 800 people touched one system. And you realize that in order to truly scale this sustainably over time, that all of the employees had to be part of that system in some way, in a very focused and prescriptive way with the playbook. So what

gave you the conviction to push for this full company adoption of a lean business system.

Rich Trojan (27:12)
My time at Danaher gave me the conviction, right? I mean, was just that you could just see how powerful it was, right? And you and I were there when there was a downturn, you know, in the business, but we already had our plans. We knew what to do during that time. And it becomes almost less emotional, right? You just, you follow the plans. You know, the worst time sometimes to make a decision you're not prepared for is when you're in the middle of that crisis. But having those, you know, prepared documents and prepared plans, if this goes wrong or...

Or if it goes right, what do you do? We had that. And so was just knowing that we needed to have something similar going in. And it couldn't just be a small few. It couldn't just be the top leaders. We had to get it all the way. And like you said, I couldn't be the one because I had other responsibilities. So with yourself and then Bill coming in, you know, there's that period, you came in January and then Bill came in and had class after class after class.

that I didn't have to sit in, I didn't have to follow up, I didn't have to worry about it. That was the best part of it. Because I fully trusted what Bill was gonna do with those classes. And at the same time, we had already kind of identified somebody who was gonna be that leader. Once Bill or Lean Focus was gonna have to be there all the time, which you guys pushed us for. Like, hey, if you're really serious, who's gonna be here every single day? And that was the awesome thing about it, that people could see this isn't a flavor of month. We've been doing it.

But now people were seeing actually how powerful it was because, you know, Bill would even say, okay, what's most important in your area that might not be and get looked at right now? So we were doing like these mini KAIZENs, right? These mini root cause and countermeasures. And people were seeing the power of that. It's like, my gosh, we only spent eight hours working on this and look what we did. What if we spent more time? But they knew it still had a fit.

Damon Baker (28:48)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (29:01)
in the whole part. We didn't want to break off all of sudden and go back to how it was of everyone doing their own thing because now we had everybody in the company all having Holland EBITA as what drove their bonuses going.

Damon Baker (29:14)
So when you go back to that point in time now, putting your HR hat on and if you were to write a case study about the signs that the culture was truly starting to shift, what were those signs in your opinion?

Rich Trojan (29:28)
The comments, I mean, you know, we do employee survey every year and that was showing up that people appreciated that we were staying consistent.

Damon Baker (29:35)
What kinds of comments would we see on the surveys?

Rich Trojan (29:39)
Comments like I said that, this isn't the flavor of the month. You've been doing it for a couple years. You're now doubling down. You went outside and got the experts to come in and teach. It wasn't just the select few or whatever, right? Everybody was invited to those meetings. Everybody was trained. You had people that wanted, if they weren't in the first wave, they wanted to make sure they were in the second wave of training.

Rarely have I had that happen, right? A lot of times everyone's like, I'm too busy for training or that, but people wanted to be in those, because they were seeing how their colleagues were benefiting from that and understanding those tools. So they wanted to get as quickly as possible into those tools. You know, I joke, people were kind of, in a way, politicking or whatever, they wanted the black dot, you know? And I kind of like was chuckling like, there's times where like, you didn't want the black dot. Like, did you knew what that entailed? like, I don't know what they're getting into, you know, but.

Damon Baker (30:28)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (30:33)
But that was the excitement of like, no, you know, people wanted to have that responsibility to be on that team and to have that cadence of just working together, you know? And so that's the thing I think that as I look back and being say most proud of it is you just see how the teamwork has just improved cross-functionally, right? It's not just silos. It's true cross-functional teams because these were, you know, things that we needed across the board. You you build a mobile welder. It's not just the team that builds it.

You've got to purchase it correctly. You've got after we build it, there's some other stuff that has to happen on the end just to make sure it's ready to go. So pretty much every single department is involved with making one of our mobile.

Damon Baker (31:17)
You've said one of the hardest and most important lessons you learned during all of this was the importance of slowing down before speeding up. And you brought in shop employees into classrooms to teach lean before ever making a physical change on the shop floor. So that requires time, obviously away from the job.

requires investment, that requires people just giving up their time as leaders as well to facilitate that, enable that. And a lot of organizations would look at something like that and go, well, what's the ROI on something like that? I geez, we get our hourly operators in here and we're teaching them technical concepts on lean.

What are your thoughts?

Rich Trojan (31:57)
Yeah,

to truly to get buy-in, you have to show all the ingredients that go into it, right? Because it's too often, especially, you you've seen, you go to the shop floor and you say, trust me on this, just do this. People are like, why? Right? What's, you know, why is it that way? And like I said, bringing the operators in, when they saw the benefits, you start with one group.

They were then the biggest proponents because what they would do is they would go out to the shop floor because everyone was asking, well wait, you were pulled in. Did you get in trouble? They're like, no, we were learning this. my gosh. And they're actually making my job easier. They're like, they're just trying to get rid of you, right? They're going to downsize. Nope. I mean, we talked about that. Like this was not an exercise to downsize. If we figured out a process that we maybe needed less people, we would move them to another area. I we made that as a commitment. Like we were not going to do that at all because

Damon Baker (32:29)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (32:51)
As I joked, know, when we started this, I'm like, so if I put together a Kaizen and we eliminate two position and I lay them off, and then I go back out to the shop floor and go, okay, who's ready to be on the second team? Who's going to volunteer at that point? Right? And so people saw that we were committed to it, but we were doing it in the right way. We were training and showing how we were making their job easier. And so

Damon Baker (33:04)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (33:17)
I didn't have to then to be say the champion or anybody else on the leadership team. It was really the shop employees who were going out to their peers saying, you want to go in there. They're going to make your job easier. The frustrations that you've had for years of not having the right parts or you had to walk halfway across the facility to get something that you need three times a day. No, they were actually buying more stuff. All right, in the shadow boxes and everything else. So people knew exactly where the tools that they were.

It's made our lives easier. And that was the fun part because all of sudden then I had hourly workforce that were coming like, hey, when's our group going next? And that's when you kind of knew like, OK, now we got it through the whole organism.

Damon Baker (34:01)
How did you get the leadership team bought into the idea that the teaching of lean concepts was actually part of the transformation work and not a distraction from it? Cause a lot of times we can want to jump straight to the Kaizen fixing something. And you just articulated this early before. It's like, if you don't understand the purpose and the reason behind some of these tools and methodologies and processes, you have less appreciation for the changes that get made. And therefore.

less commitment and buy-in to sustaining them because you don't understand the reason why they were put in there.

how were you

Rich Trojan (34:36)
You

Damon Baker (34:36)
to convince the leadership

Rich Trojan (34:38)
a couple

years before we had called your firm, had developed something I've done in a lot of the companies I work for. We had developed a key manager training. And so I had somebody who came in and was really in charge of that, you know, how I worked with. But the feedback we got from that was all this training would have been really good if all the leadership team went through it first. Because they were learning new tools that maybe not all of us had.

I might have had a piece, our CFO might have had a piece and so forth. So we kind of had that in the back of our mind, right, of that feedback that was given. And so when we were deciding this, was like, no, you know, and you and I had talked like we really need to do a good three to four day, just the leadership team learning this stuff and everyone here didn't see it. And there was a little skepticism at first, like, you know, all this because it was a December, right, when December is a busy time and all that and

Damon Baker (35:34)
Yeah.

Rich Trojan (35:35)
We find the time to do it. But by the end of those four days and how Bill trained us all, people were like, my gosh, that was so valuable. Now we understand it and we can look at our, we can look at 800 plus employees and go, hey, we're not telling you to do it. We already went through this. We fully all buy in, right? We committed to it and everyone saw that. So after that point, I didn't have to do anything every day because those four days were so critical for us.

that everyone got on the same page, saw the power of it, saw how it could be deployed through the rest of the organization. At that point, really, was just finding then time quick enough. And that was the part that was slowing down of like, we can't do everything right away because we knew there was still things that just have to be done on a day-to-day basis. So it was really putting that calendar together of when we're going to do the next training and then got to get a little time for people to use it and so forth before you move on to the next

Damon Baker (36:33)
think the run up to all of this is leading to what I would call preparing for the big test. So leadership now has to take the reins, so to speak, and start to lead by example and start to teach the team in the ways that those leaders are taught. now the student became the teacher, the teacher has to teach the rest of the organization. So you've made it abundantly clear throughout the conversation and just in times we've talked that HR

Rich Trojan (36:45)
Yes.

Damon Baker (37:03)
was this wasn't an HR initiative, that this was a business decision led from the top. So what did you do, or what did the team do at this point to ensure that the president and the leadership team were fully committed and that this became the Holland business system, not this thing from this firm that came out and taught us, but now it's ours. We're starting to live these behaviors.

Rich Trojan (37:26)
One, like I said, having the person that was fully dedicated, somebody who has been with us for 25 plus years, who had worked her way up through the organization in different roles, well respected within the organization, had a passion for lean before we were ever doing it. So when people saw her, that we were saying her full-time job is doing lean, that was a huge statement because she was in a very critical role, you know, before.

Damon Baker (37:47)
You could have gone to the

outside for that role. Why didn't you go to the outside for that role?

Rich Trojan (37:53)
Because she had been doing it on a smaller basis and we could see it. And then again, sitting down with Bill, Bill's like, she's really good. Like she gets it and she's got your history. And she had the buy-in from the organization, right, at all levels. So key, right? And then the fact that our interviews, everybody as we were interviewing, that became a part of our core questions that we were asking people. What's your experience with Lean? What's your experience with a policy deployment, right?

Damon Baker (38:01)
Mm-hmm.

So key.

Rich Trojan (38:22)
We didn't want to have to, know, yes, we'll train people, but there was a preference that if you can get people that are used to this environment, used to that cadence that goes on, it just makes it easier. You know, and we talked about, you know, when I picked up responsibility for the Holland Equipment Business Unit, you know, I got to a point where I had to hire a new general manager and a new supply chain manager. Well, that was a key part that, you know, I didn't want to have to start from scratch.

Damon Baker (38:33)
Yeah.

Rich Trojan (38:48)
I'll never forget I hired the general manager and he was going to start in January of 25, but he came to our December 24 meeting. in a way I was kind of, it was one of those humbling moments where this is his first day, he's meeting 30 other people and he's pointing out things in RX Matrix that you're like,

Hey, shut up. You've only been here an hour. You're not even getting paid for this, right? You know, probably breaking some laws. say this is the head of HR, right? But he wanted to be there. And it was like, my boss just kind of looked over me and was like, and he had interviewed him too, right? was like thumbs up. Like you could, you could just see like he's going to fit right in. And so that's been a big thing for us that, that people saw. Like, so that's why you interview for that skill too. You know, do people want this environment? Cause

Damon Baker (39:15)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Rich Trojan (39:41)
Our environment's not for everybody. I I always say there's a company out there for everybody. You don't want to just, if this isn't what you want to do, okay. But we have a cadence to things. You know, we've already put together our 2026 calendar. I know when I need to be in town, when our X Matrix meetings are from a level one to a level two, and you build everything else around that. When you do your customer visits, when I'm traveling to see our teams out, but I know those kind of sacred dates around those meetings.

Damon Baker (40:09)
Can you talk a little bit about, in your experience, when you go through a lean transformation, I think probably one of the functions that gets left out of the discussion in terms of the processes that need to change in order to sustain the culture is HR. And oftentimes I'll ask CI leaders or heads of business system, how much time do you spend with HR in formulating the lean business system strategy across the company?

Quite frankly, like 95 % of the CI leaders I talked to spend zero time with the head of HR to formulate a strategy. So you already talked about how interview questions had to change as a result of Holland making this business system leap. What other people processes had to change to sustain the culture inside of Holland around this business system? I can imagine things like performance management, values, succession planning.

nine box talent review, as you guys went through the inventory of all the HR stuff that you guys I'm sure were doing, did it have a lean red thread through it? And if not, how did you have to change those things to ensure that we were gonna sustain this pathway forward?

Rich Trojan (41:22)
Yeah, we didn't have them all those, but now we do because like you said, it's got to be in everything that you do. You know, and again, we are willing to train people coming in because not everyone's going to come in with that level, but it's one of those like, it's, it's kind of like non-negotiable and you know, my boss, you know, who I started off with, you know, he retired. but we had a good succession plan where there was a good six months that they were together. It was an orderly transition, but the person that we hired had that background as well.

So, know, so even that, you know, and I told you that third generation, had retired, ⁓ the, or the fourth generation retired, right. And it was the first time that they went to an outside CEO, but he had that same type of background. You know, I'd like to think that Holland had a little bit. Yeah. You know, right. You know, so people were seeing the, the effectiveness of this, of how it was working. And so you, once you have it, that leadership level, right. And it's bought in.

Damon Baker (42:04)
So that tells me the board played a role and yeah, the board had to play a role in that.

Rich Trojan (42:20)
there was no more fighting anymore that this is what we were doing. It was like, nope, this is just a part now of the Holland culture moving forward. And like you said, so now you have the interview questions as you're doing performance management. People have said, our process, all of our process have actually gotten simpler because it's like, know, all of our, when you do a performance management, right, you're setting business objectives. People are always trying to come up with three to five smart objectives and what it should be. Now you're telling them,

It's off the X matrix. You show people, you know, we have a three point scale, right? Three being the best, two meets expectations, one's below. You're showing people what's a three, what's a two, what's a one. And people are like, this is so easy. It's like, yeah, it doesn't need to be hard, right? Performance management is more about the conversation you're having with people than I think scoring it. But yet people spend so much time trying to come up with the scoring that they were missing the point. You know, now it's like I said, it's an easy structure and you should be just changing X to Y every year.

Damon Baker (43:00)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (43:20)
Yes, there might be a tweak. something becomes part of our daily work so you don't have to challenge anymore. So one drops off, one comes on, but it's become a lot easier for us as we move.

Damon Baker (43:31)
Yeah, I'd be willing to bet that the lack of HR involvement in a lean business system transformation is probably one of the top two or three root causes for why a cultural transformation doesn't sustain over time. know, just pick an example, like if we don't change the way we interview, select and hire, and let's say you have five to 10 % of your organization changing over every year, that's slow dilution.

Right, so you bring people in from the outside who may or may not appreciate Lean and quite frankly could be working against it when they're brought in if you're not deliberately hiring for that skill set and that understanding.

Rich Trojan (44:13)
Yeah, you know, when I was leaving Danaher, you know, and I wasn't sure I wanted to, you know, I had opportunity to move to Gilbarco, but the family really didn't want to move, right? So I was debating what to do and just started looking around Chicago. And I can remember, you know, the company I went to was the first time I worked for a family business, but I was sitting in the CEO's office and he had policy deployment up on his wall. And I'm like, okay, what time out?

And it was because at that time the CEO had worked at Belden, another company that, you know, it really is used this. And I felt comfortable and it was like, okay. And I was seeing what it was doing at a small company. Right. So it was like, you could see it like there. And again, here was a CEO who, believed in it. And I think that was part of the reason why I got the job from an HR because he's like, wait, my HR person is going to understand this and can help build it.

Damon Baker (44:44)
Mm-mm. Yeah.

Rich Trojan (45:09)
You know, and actually one of their, I always remember he joked because their number one initiative was like an HR initiative. And he's like, have you ever seen an HR initiative that's number one on this? And I kind of joked like, I'm not sure I ever saw it. Even on, you know, maybe at Danaher, that's not really what it was, you know? But he was so passionate about HR that that's where for him and I, for the time that I worked there, got along great because I understood it and there was a passion around HR.

Damon Baker (45:22)
Yeah, right.

Rich Trojan (45:36)
I've been fortunate that pretty much every leader that I've pretty much ever worked for has always believed in being a partner, right? Not just to be the HR person, be my business partner who just happens to work in HR.

Damon Baker (45:49)
So now the payoff, Holland is starting to reap the fruits of this labor in starting experience record years of performance and cultural transformation. So from 2022 to 2024, sales grew by 25 % Kegger, profitability jumped by 60 % and 2025 is on track for another record year. Hopefully that's still the case through November. But maybe more impressive than that is

the fact that the system has stuck and that leadership has stuck with the system. So what does it feel like to see the culture sustaining itself even after all the leadership transitions that you mentioned like the new CEO and these kinds of things?

Rich Trojan (46:30)
The fact to sit here on, know, we're taping this in the beginning of November and I already have 2026 laid out and we kind of know it's incredible, right? It's just, it's a nice feeling. Yeah, there's plenty of challenges and it's not all, you know, all easy and everything else, but it just shows, like you said, you get that cadence. People like that. They really do, right? They want to know what's coming next, what your expectations are.

And whether they're seeing that, you know, even for our business, you know, we'll have things that go down, but then we've other things that go up, right? And that's the part that they're like, hey, even when there's a bad thing, you guys already have a plan for what's coming next. And I think that's where it's important to be able to show people like, yep, we understood or we knew where the risks were, right? We have contingency plans for what has to happen. But when people are seeing at the same time that if you're putting together process improvements and you can lower your cost,

that even if you don't get that increase in sales that you want, you can still be more profitable with the same amount of sales. Control your destiny, right? That's the one thing that you can control. And look, this year, coming into the year, no one knew about tariffs, least to the extent that it was gonna be. That had significant effect. We sold off a business unit based on some of that. So we had to offset that, and we are still gonna have this...

Damon Baker (47:32)
Yeah, control your destiny.

Rich Trojan (47:51)
record growth on our EBITDA side, even with selling off a business unit, because we've been focusing on the things that we can control. I can't control tariffs, no one at Holland can control, like that's outside our span of control. So what were the things that we could control? What did we want to focus on? Right? And again, we've continued to make sure we're focusing on the core businesses that we have.

Damon Baker (48:14)
What are you most proud of in this transformation? I'm sure you're proud of a lot of things, but what really stands out to you? Your proudest moments or reflecting back?

Rich Trojan (48:23)
I think I

said I'm a shop guy through and through I know I'm probably not supposed to say as an HR person but the fact that like I said that people Two plus years later are still talking about bill being on the shop floor getting dirty That they saw something like, know, I think I forgot how someone said it's like it was the first training that actually was Meaningful to them that somebody on the shop floor, you know, like because again, you know, you there's training you have to do

There's a lot of HR training that you have to do that they have to go through. We do a lot of safety training, which obviously affects them and they appreciate that. But for them, seeing Lean, it really affected their day-to-day job and made their job easier. Sometimes they saw training and it was like, had to sit through this and then there was something new I had to do. This was more of like, wait, it actually made my job easier because my area was just built specifically for what I have to do. I have the right tools by me.

I don't have to walk as far. That's what I think is probably the most satisfying to me is just the fact on the shop floor that they saw the benefits of it, that it just wasn't a top level thing or, you know, carpet land, you know, exercise, right, is it really happened on the shop.

Damon Baker (49:36)
I explain it as you can see it in the eyes of the people as you walk the floor. Are they excited? Are they energized by it? Or do their eyes divert away from leaders as they walk?

shame or because of this autocracy type of environment that exists and when they're coming to you.

Rich Trojan (49:52)
Yeah. Well, and we have

one of our kind of KPI boards out there. And I knew one of my team leads who probably was the most skeptical. There was one day when he came out and goes, I have an idea to change that board. Can I do that? And I was like, I just wanted to hug him. Just the fact that you're talking about the board. And he was finally seeing, because I would say, yes, I go out there and look at the board. gives me information. But that board's not really for me. That board's for all of you.

Damon Baker (50:06)
You

Rich Trojan (50:21)
And that's where he finally understood because it's like, you know, he can't do his stuff if the group in front of him doesn't get their stuff done. So he knew how he could look at it to see where they were at, even if they didn't get a chance to talk, right? It was that communication piece. But as soon as he, you know, as he said, like, I think I can make that board better. I'm like, bring it up. You know, let's, let's talk. That's great. And he had some good changes.

Damon Baker (50:43)
think one of the ultimate proof points that the culture is sustaining is your ability to be self-sufficient. So by early 2025, Holland hasn't really relied on Lean Focus as to be an external catalyst, if you will, to sustain the lean journey. And your own people are really driving this and have become the experts, they've become the teachers themselves. So unpack for people who maybe are gonna take this journey. What does it take to reach that level of maturity where you can pass off?

to others inside the organization to get to that level of self-sufficiency.

Rich Trojan (51:16)
Well, you you've asked a couple of times, there's some leap of faith that you have to do. You know, if you get somebody right away that's going, well, what's the return on investment that you're going to take, you know, 16, 24 hours to do this? And you're like, really? You know, like, you got to give a little bit of trust for there. So you got to have commitment at the top. I can't imagine if any of my bosses really weren't fully into it or if they were like, you do this, but you can't take any time. That's never been the case. I've always gotten the time.

In fact, you like you said, being self-sufficient, you know, as I said, we just, you know, a couple of weeks ago had our offsite where we had really anybody who was going to be involved at level one or level two on an offsite. And we only did it for a day. And it was obvious by the end, like we needed at least a day and a half. Like you needed like almost a, you know, for like the level two teams to be able to like sleep on it and come back and make some things. And.

Damon Baker (52:07)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (52:16)
You know, we made sure I sent out a survey and that's what kind of came back. So it was awesome that we don't have to tell them they needed it a day and a half. That they were confident enough to say, hey, an improvement would be do this for a day and a half. Give us more time. Right? And so that was a proud moment too, that it was like great because they knew they were taken, you if you want to say they were, they were purposely saying, I'm going to need more time, be pulled away from my day stuff. Right? Because we were bringing people from Canada.

bringing people from the field and we still in a very busy time, you know, for our customers, but they saw the importance of it because now they know that they have a plan for all of 2026. And again, it's not going to be perfect. Things are going to change and you're going to have to, you know, pivot, but you have that the majority of the framework is there. The action plans are already done for what we're going to work on and have that cadence. And that's where, like I said, we know we're not at the end of the journey, right? We're still...

in the beginning as I'd like to say. So yes, I feel bad, like I said, you call or that and ask and it's like, no, you guys have trained us. We're not perfect, but we're fumbling through it together. And that's what's kind of exciting because people are seeing that and we're willing to challenge each other in a professional way and have some fun with it. Yeah, there's conflict at times, but we want to get better and we know we can get better.

Damon Baker (53:40)
So you alluded to the fact that you've got your PD set in November for 2026. You've got your goals and objectives set. It sounds like you got your budget locked in. And it sounds historically like maybe that's been a little bit more of a fire drill and a little bit more chaotic. things seem to be happening on a rhythm.

And there's a cadence to everything from monthly X matrix reviews all the way to annual strategy sessions that have been planned years and ahead. So what does it take for that cadence and leadership focus to develop in terms of that accountability? Cause I think what a lot of people misunderstand is that they assume is like lean is one more thing on top of how the business runs. When in fact lean becomes how the business runs and it brings ⁓

clarity to the initiatives and actually allows you to execute on all of the things that you've never been historically able to do because of the clarity and the focus and the approach and the methodology. So what does it take to get an organization to that level of kind of predictable rhythm that you're experiencing now? Because that's not an easy thing. I quite frankly, I took that for granted in Danaher for my tenures there that like,

things just happen like clockwork

Rich Trojan (55:00)
Right, yeah, no, you're

right. It's a great question because before I came to Danaher, I was kind of always known that I could put process in place where there was chaos. And then, you went through the same process where we get to sit down with an industrial psychologist for half a day and you get poked and prompted. Yeah, you're asking all these questions and all that and they're like, you think you know process? You don't know process.

Damon Baker (55:20)
Yeah, starting at age six, yeah.

Rich Trojan (55:28)
And there was almost this fear of like, am I going to feel stifled? But what really what it is, and I've kind of learned it, is they're guardrails. They make sure you don't go too far to the right or too far to the left. It helps you go down the middle. And there's times you bounce off a guardrail. But having that process is you're trying to go, you we're all trying to go faster, right? We want to get better. We got competitors that are trying to beat us and all that.

But when you realize that, to me, what lean and all that is, is those guardrails that really make sure you don't get off your path. And by setting that up, I learned I can actually go faster by having those things put in there. Because I know it's like I have to then slow down because it's like, that meeting that's coming up, I have to be prepared for it. Because I don't want to be read, but we know we are going to be read. Then do I truly understand why I'm red?

Damon Baker (56:18)
Yeah.

Rich Trojan (56:23)
And what am going to do to be better for it? And when you go through that, you realize like, this actually is the most important thing that I'm supposed to be working on. This is what we talked about. Right? But there's always that new shiny toy or something that comes up that you want to go do. And it's easy to forget about it. But yet when you have that cadence that you know there's these meetings and there's other people on the team, no one wants to walk in and let their team down.

So the fact that you know it's like, I have a responsibility to the rest of the team and there's going to be a scorecard that's going to show it, puts a little bit, know, pressure maybe even too strong a word, but you know it's there. You know, it's that accountability. And I think the best employees want that accountability. They want to see that scorecard. You want to know that you're winning. And I think that's been the exciting thing where you can show like, because again, we stress, right? A lot of our stuff is stretch goals.

We're okay with red. We applaud that when people say, I found what the problem is. That's why we're red. I'm more excited when I hear that than when someone says, we're green and we don't know why we're green. That's not sustainable. That may be just pure dumb luck. But when people can say, here's what's going on, or if you're green and you know why, whether it's pricing or these improvements, awesome. Well, how are you going to repeat that? And so like I said, the fact that you can see it

Damon Baker (57:27)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rich Trojan (57:45)
on the shop floor where even the team sees that. like I said, I have this one of the businesses that I run up in North Dakota. We do some work for a sugar company. so I have a gentleman who drives a molasses truck. And so one of the things that we kept track of was the EBITDA for molasses. And just this past August, he came up to me after the meeting because I was going over the KPIs. And he said, I think that month is wrong. I don't understand why I didn't

Damon Baker (58:02)
Mm-hmm.

The

truck driver said this. Yeah.

Rich Trojan (58:12)
⁓ The truck driver said that,

right? For his part, so we have like three molasses drivers, and here was one of the drivers that was asking me a question, and it was like, that's what it's about, right? Like, he understood, and for him, he was like, here's this truck driver of molasses that's like, I'm a part of the company. That's where I fit in on all this, right? Because a lot of times, you hear this too, people are like, lean's not for me, you that's in some other positions. And it's like, no, everybody has

Damon Baker (58:18)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

Rich Trojan (58:41)
⁓ effect on what's going on. And so like I said, when you have that truck driver that can come up and ask you that question, you're like, now I know it's all the way down. Right? That's awesome to hear.

Damon Baker (58:50)
Yeah, that's real. What's

next for Holland in the Lean Evolution?

Rich Trojan (58:57)
You know, like I said, this year, because we've had some consolidation, you know, we sold off a business unit, we closed, you know, another one, but now we see where the growth, we just finished an acquisition of some technology that's going to help us there. That was again, part of our strategy. So we just finished that acquisition here within the last week. So now we have to implement that. But again, we have lean tools helping us for what we're going to do with that technology. We have a plan for it.

And I think we have some other growth initiatives. We came up with a new process that we call Hammer, which basically is like the Holland automated, manganese repairs. I'm geeking out on this stuff. Where ⁓ on a ⁓ train track, the part that gets the most wear and tear is that frock. So when a train goes from one part of the track and diverts over, that's where it gets the most beat up. And really what...

the railroads have done in the past is they just cut out that part when it gets beat up and then they have to put a new one in. Well, most of those frogs are made overseas. So you can imagine the tariff cost, tariffs and everything. We have a process that we can fix it in track or we can actually, they have these frog ponds as they call it, where they have a bunch of these pieces of track that are just almost scrapped out. And so our equipment can fix that.

Damon Baker (1:00:00)
Yeah, long lead time. Tariffs. Yep.

Rich Trojan (1:00:19)
and put it back in. you think from a financial standpoint for them, if they've scrapped it out and now they can put a scrapped piece back in and let me be clear, is 100 % safe and everything else, right? So the trains can still run correctly, but that's huge, right? And so, you know, I talked about the Holland Business Unit that makes our mobile welders. We didn't have a plan this year to make any more of those hammer trucks, but we've now made two. And, you know,

where when you guys came in, right, we hadn't made any of these, our mobile welders, this year we're gonna make 20. And so we made 20 of those and we're building two hammer trucks as well that wasn't planned. And we do these real trains. Right, right? So all these things are happening and the people in the shop floor are like, we're doing more than we thought was even possible to do. And I'm like, are you running around too fast? Are you, you know, and they're like, no. Right? So they can see that.

Damon Baker (1:00:57)
Yeah, and over a million dollars a pop.

Rich Trojan (1:01:13)
And guess what? Because their bonuses are based on EBITDA and EBITDA continues to go up, they're making more money.

Damon Baker (1:01:19)
And that's why you have truck drivers of molasses asking you about EBITDA.

Rich Trojan (1:01:24)
Exactly right. Right?

They're asking because they know again, if you're financially incentivized that way, right? That's the questions that you're asking. But again, sometimes they don't ask the questions, you but now the fact that they know and they feel the connection and they know that they're a part of the company, you know, for what we're doing, we're getting more questions by all of

Damon Baker (1:01:31)
Now.

Rich, what stands out most to me about your journey is it wasn't driven particularly by any nascent crisis, quite frankly, it was driven by conviction, your leadership conviction in this example. So you took something that most companies oftentimes relegate as an HR program and turned it into the backbone of how Holland really runs. It becomes the business system and the culture and it's proof that HR can only and the company can win.

For HR leaders that might be listening out there, what advice would you give them if they wanted to be a catalyst for lean transformation in their own organization?

Rich Trojan (1:02:26)
One, have the conviction. Two, call you guys. Get that help. Look, you're not paying me to say that, but it's reassuring when you can get somebody that can come in and give examples after examples of where they've helped out. And right, I know a lot of HR leaders that unfortunately they don't have a seat at the table. I've been very fortunate for the companies that I've worked for that they valued that. And that's something that if I ever looked at another company, I always wanted to ask those questions. Well, where is your HR leader?

What are they doing? What are they involved with? And if all I heard was, they do our open enrollment and they plan the Christmas party, that's not attractive to what I'm looking to do. Those are important. Got to do them right. All important stuff. But if you're sitting there saying, I have regular meetings with our CFO talking about from a financial standpoint of what's going on. I have regular meetings with our Lean group for what's happening.

Damon Baker (1:03:00)
Yeah, right.

Rich Trojan (1:03:19)
I have regular conversations with the president as we're going through all the stuff from a succession planning, from development, from an org structure standpoint. We have this acquisition we just talked about. That's causing us to make some changes for our org structure because of how it needs to align with the policy deployment. That's what excites me, that I know I'm in the middle of those conversations. It's not just getting called in when a party needs to

Damon Baker (1:03:48)
Rich, it's been great to reconnect and to hear your story. It's always good to talk to former friends and colleagues and you should be very proud of the accomplishment at Holland and I'm sure you realize that ⁓ you're never satisfied with where you are and that you're going to continue to make progress that I have no doubt about.

So for everyone

Rich Trojan (1:04:06)
Well, I appreciate it.

Damon Baker (1:04:07)
This is what it looks like when HR leads from the front. So if you've enjoyed today's episode, please share it with somebody who thinks HR still can't drive a lean Subscribe, leave a review, and as always, stay focused, stay lean.