ILMA Compoundings January 2018 - 6

INSIDE ILMA

Company Callout
Palmer Holland Fosters an Innovative
Company Culture With an Office to Match

I

LMA: Palmer Holland has a progressive office space compared to
most chemical distributors. Some of
that takes shape in the form of technological capabilities around the office,
but a lot of it seems to be embedded
in the company culture. Did your
emphasis begin with the employees or
the environment and office space?
Eric Kielts, business manager:
I came into the company thinking
about [it] like a chicken vs. egg situation - did Palmer Holland first have
the technology and non-traditional
environment that attracts innovative,
progressive employees, or did the
company have the types of employees
that naturally led us to the space we're
in today? I figured it was probably a
bit of both.
Charlie Laurie, chief innovative
officer: Early on, and with the understanding that employee engagement
and retention would be critical to
Palmer Holland's long-term success,
we set out to address one question:
How do we become an engaging
workplace that all generations want to
work for? There wasn't ever a set-out
"go-live" date or single event that
kicked off all our efforts; it's really just
been the culmination of efforts over
the years and the implementation of a
few individual events.
ILMA: With that in mind, what does
your employee recruitment effort
look like?
Laurie: To give an example of one of
our recruitment efforts - in 2010, we
made the decision to build a college

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JANUARY 2018

| COMPOUNDINGS | ILMA.ORG

recruiting program for our sales organization. The concept behind it was:
Can we take college students who have
a professional selling degree/certificate
and teach them the technical side
of our business? Our belief was that
we could, and by the end of the year
we had attended a couple of college
career fairs and found what we call our
"account managers in training." From
there, we entered them into a structured training program in our home
office in Cleveland. This program typically runs approximately six months
in duration.
All in all, the training takes about
18 to 24 months to complete and involves a lot of one-on-one mentoring
along the way. Following the program

completion, they were assigned and
relocated to a specific U.S. territory to
finish out their field training with a regional account manager. The program
has produced a lot of youthful sellers
who have a deep, technical knowledge
of our products and the territories for
which they are assigned.
ILMA: Can you tell us about Palmer
Holland's Cleveland office? What were
the intentions behind the look and
capabilities incorporated into your
office spaces?
Laurie: Around that same year [2010],
the lease to our old office space was
about to expire. So, we initiated a
project to find potential commercial
real estate spaces to serve as our new

Future employees and clients come here and
see a dynamic office setting that wouldn't
be out of place in somewhere like Silicon Valley."
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ILMA Compoundings January 2018

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