At one of my prior employers, there was a man named James who worked in the second-floor analytical laboratory. James’s lab was impressive: three GPCs, an FTIR, three GCs, XRF elemental analysis, and all the equipment needed to measure properties such as iodine value, acid value, softening point, and color. It was also packed. His shelves and refrigerator were chock-full of samples and raw materials that, to anyone else, appeared to follow no organizational system known to science.
But ask James, “Where’s the fumaric acid?” and—boom—he would reach onto a shelf and pull it out.
James knew much more than where the samples were kept. Over his career, he had served in nearly every technical role in the company: plant chemist, quality control, product development, plant support, technical service, and analytical chemistry. He knew the products, the processes, the plants, and the decisions that had shaped the business. He was an encyclopedia—although a living encyclopedia is better because you can ask it follow-up questions.
I usually visited James during the second or third hour of my day. My mornings often began by breaking rosin out of a bucket with a sledgehammer, charging it to a flask, turning on the heat, and waiting for it to melt. Later I would add pentaerythritol and let the reaction stir for much of the day, monitoring it carefully and making sure everything was operating safely. After a few hours of watching rosin melt and stir, with many more hours to go, I would develop a very scientific condition known as “cabin fever.”
That was usually when I found a reason to take a sample upstairs for testing.
While James helped me with the analysis, he would tell me stories: projects the company had attempted decades earlier, adjustments made at the plant across the street, lessons learned the hard way, and strategic decisions that explained why the business looked the way it did. Occasionally, colleagues would wonder whether all that historical information was really useful. I always thought it was. If James had worked on a similar project in the 1980s, perhaps we should talk with him before spending six months reinventing it.
James was worth his weight in gold. After more than a decade in chemical sales, I have learned that nearly every great chemical company has someone like him. You may already be thinking of the person in your own organization. If you have two team members like this, you are doubly blessed.
These veterans know what is really going on in a business. They understand the fundamentals and carry knowledge that may never have been captured in a report or database. They may not be the loudest people in the room. Some are introverted; some are not polished presenters. But our organizations are stronger when we seek them out, listen carefully, and make sure what they know is passed to the next generation.
James also taught me something larger: knowing the history of a company, product, plant, or region helps us connect dots in the present. It keeps us from reinventing the wheel, reveals capabilities we might otherwise miss, and helps us find creative new ways to do business. Looking forward is easier when we understand what came before.
That lesson became especially clear once I moved into sales and got out in the field. I had never given much thought to why a pine chemicals company would be located in the Southeast. Once I was there, the answer was all around me. The region’s loblolly pine forests had supported generations of landowners and an established paper industry. The papermaking process also yielded crude tall oil, a source of fatty acids and rosin that could be separated and turned into useful products. The chemistry, the trees, the mills, and the people who knew how to work with them had grown up together. Even competitors on other continents tended to share something with us: they operated in places with access to pine resources and the industries built around them.
Years later, a project involving fats and oils gave me another way to see this pattern. I remember studying a chart that compared oils by their fatty-acid profiles. Soybean oil, tallow, coconut oil, rapeseed oil, and castor oil were not interchangeable entries in a catalog. Each had a different molecular profile, and each profile offered different possibilities for a chemist. Castor oil, for example, is prized for its unusually high content of ricinoleic acid. Coconut and palm-kernel oils are important sources of shorter-chain fatty acids such as lauric acid. Those plants and animals have their own geographies. Follow a molecule backward and you will often arrive at a particular field, forest, farm, or climate.
My years selling rosin esters into the adhesive industry taught me to notice not only where raw materials originate, but also where the industries that consume them tend to gather.
If you have a flooring problem, for example, go to Dalton and Calhoun, Georgia—the heart of the American flooring industry. Dalton’s modern carpet industry grew from a local tradition of hand-tufted bedspreads. As that work became mechanized, the region already had the skills, machinery, suppliers, and entrepreneurial knowledge needed to build an enormous carpet industry. Find an adhesive manufacturer there, and there is a good chance they know something about flooring.
Once you start looking, these connections are everywhere. Chicago’s meatpacking industry created access to animal fats and helped support industries that used them. The Gulf Coast combined oil and gas with ports, pipelines, storage, and decades of petrochemical investment. Coal and steel left another chemical heritage across Appalachia and western Pennsylvania. Resources attracted industries; industries developed expertise and infrastructure; and those capabilities attracted still more businesses.
I remember experiencing the same realization on my first trip to northern Indiana. Someone told me, “This is the home of the RV industry.” I had no idea. More precisely, nearby Elkhart and northern Indiana form the center of American RV manufacturing. Once I knew that, the local business landscape suddenly made sense: manufacturers were surrounded by companies supplying the doors, windows, seating, flooring, laminates, adhesives, hardware, and countless other parts needed to build an RV. An industry cluster is rarely just the famous finished product. It is a web of specialized businesses that learn and grow together.
That may be the larger lesson. The chemical industry is global, but its knowledge is intensely local—and often personal. I remember towns where the paper mill was at the center of community life and practical knowledge passed from one generation to the next. A plant was not merely located in a town; the plant and the town had developed together. In the same way, a veteran such as James did not merely work for a company. He carried part of its history.
Understanding that history makes us better at our jobs. It helps us recognize what a supplier may be uniquely equipped to do. It helps us anticipate what an adhesive maker in Dalton, a resin producer near Pittsburgh, or a fabricator in northern Indiana probably understands particularly well. It can reveal connections and opportunities that are not obvious from a product list or company website.
This is something I feel fortunate to experience at Teckrez. We have true industry veterans on our team—people who have traveled these roads, walked through these plants, and watched these markets evolve. They understand not only who makes a product, but why it is made where it is and how that history influences what can be done today. That knowledge is valuable, and we have a responsibility to pass it along.
For those who are newer to our industry, my advice is simple: get out on the road. Visit the plants, laboratories, warehouses, and towns where our products are made and used. Ask customers and suppliers how their businesses began. Why was the plant built there? Which local resources helped it grow? Who remembers the projects that never made it into the official files?
Most importantly, find your James. Ask questions. Listen to the stories. Learn the history before it walks out the door. Then pass it on. Our companies—and our entire industry—will be stronger for it.
By Olivia Jobes
VP Monomers Business