Turning Disruption into Opportunity with Wellmaster’s James White

In this Snippets episode, Leon speaks with James White, President and CEO of Wellmaster, about leading a second-generation manufacturing business through growth and change. James reflects on the company’s evolution into a global supplier across multiple industries.

He shares how the business balances diversification with operational focus, using shared resources and materials across sectors to stay efficient and competitive. He tells us how Wellmaster approaches disruption, from shifting trade dynamics to rising input costs, and how those challenges have created opportunities for growth and innovation.

James also speaks to the company’s culture, including its long-standing profit-sharing model, and how it drives accountability, creativity, and problem-solving across the organization.

Listen in for a conversation on maintaining a business that evolves through disruption and promotes entrepreneurial thinking at all levels of the company.

Transcript

Special thanks to Cleveland Clinic for helping us bring you today's PEO Leadership's Snippets Podcast. Welcome to our Snippets Podcast. I'm Leon Goren, CEO of PEO Leadership and Innovators Alliance, North America's premier peer-to-peer network and leadership advisory firm. Today I'm very excited to welcome James White, President and CEO of Wellmaster, and a longtime member of our London, Ontario chapter and peer advisory board.

Wellmaster first opened its doors in 1987 as a manufacturing supplier, serving companies in groundwater, agriculture, greenhouse operations, and the oil and gas industry. Since then, the business has grown into a globally recognized leader in its field. James represents a second generation of leadership, having taken the reins and continued to build on the strong foundation established by his family.

Under his leadership, Wellmaster has continued to expand its footprint while staying true to those roots. Taking over a second-generation business is never simple, and James has done it in a way that both honors the legacy and positions the company for the future. And as a longtime member of our community, he's been a thoughtful contributor, always bringing practical, real-world insight to the table. James, it's great to have you with us today.

Thanks for having me.

I always like to kick it off with a couple of things that introduce you a little bit better in terms of so the audience gets to know who you are and where you've come from. So maybe we can take like 20, 30 seconds and just tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe a little bit about the family as well.

A little bit about myself. You know, I've had a twisting route to coming to the company in 2017, a varied experience. I've worked in both the private and public sector in different leadership roles and brought that experience when I came back to the family company.

And our company and the family, you know, my father, Doug, worked with a group of employees back in 2017 to form up the company, became family-owned in 2012, and it's been an adventure developing the company since then as a family-owned enterprise, and it's great to take it to the second generation.

You mentioned, because you got to share that a little bit with me, so your dad was an accountant, which is great pride of mine because I'm an accountant as well. But he went in, there's an early lore in terms of how he went in, how he restructured the business. And I love the story you shared with me about the profit sharing initially and how he got this business back on the ground. Maybe you can share that with the group because I think that'd be interesting to them.

When Doug came to the company in '86, you know, he was an accountant working for the previous owners, dealing with the bankruptcy, the previous company and the predecessor. And so, but he saw the vision, he saw the opportunity of the company and what they could do with the right structure and the right kind of team and reinvestment.

And so in March of '86, he put together a financial deal to allow the employees to purchase the company. And one of the first things they did, because not all the employees, there were only about 15 of them at the time, not all the employees bought into the employee ownership of the company.

And so they went to work and he wrote, and I have it in my desk, the hand-typed copy of a profit sharing program. So way back in this, before they even understood that there would be profit to share, they knew that this was going to be an important foundational document to the company, and it was how they were going to be profitable.

And almost everything he had in that plan was prophetic into the future track of the company. And it has been a major part of the DNA of the company and driving to the success that we're enjoying today.

Yeah, it's an amazing story, actually, how someone comes in and does that. So I have some specific questions, but I think maybe can you give us a little bit of a description in terms of the products that you guys are manufacturing today, like, and what the raw materials are in those products? Because I think that will lead us to the next conversation of the challenges of an SME today.

So the big three sectors that we serve and we're a leading provider both in North America and globally is the groundwater sector. So we provide materials for drillers that are completing everything from a groundwater well, irrigation well, geothermal, environmental monitoring well.

We also provide API 5CT couplings. So these are oil and gas couplings that are provided to drillers, whether anywhere in Canada or in the United States where there's drilling operations. We're actually one of only two companies in Canada that has an API 5CT license to monogram these, which is very interesting within Canada's ambitions to become a conventional energy superpower.

The third one is a horticultural division that Doug started shortly after he set up the company to diversify some of our markets. So a horticultural division is material handling equipment for nurseries, garden centers, greenhouses. So if you've ever been to either a mass merchandiser like Costco or Home Depot, down to your neighborhood garden center and you've bought your bedding plants off those multi-tiered rack, in North America there's about an even chance it's one of ours.

Oh, wow, that's very cool. Very, very distinct, actually, these verticals that you're playing in. And you're in a manufacturing so how do you run an efficient operation on the manufacturing side when your products are sort of playing in different areas?

So what we are is an economy of scope company. So that differs from economy of scale frameworks in the sense that we have a number of common resources, equipment, skill sets within employees, and raw materials that we can use to service multiple of these sectors and lower the average cost of producing these goods. And so for us, the coupling stock is our common raw material, steel coupling stock is what we produce into both oil and gas couplings and also what we produce into the groundwater sector. So that's a common raw material. And the volumes that we purchase to service both those give us a certain economy of scale in terms of sourcing that raw material and provides us the cost advantage there.

On horticulture, we do a broad range of fabricated products in-house, and then we have international logistics to work with offshore supply partners in that division. But that started off having excess fabrication capacity because we used to manufacture drilling rigs for the groundwater. When that technology moved on, we needed to make sure that we had alternate places to put that expertise, that labor. And so we moved and diversified into that and grew that out of it.

So it seems a bit unrelated, but once you get into the outside of the services we provide and you look at the background of what we do, there's a lot of interconnections and a lot of movement between the different employees and how we are able to compete. So it makes it a very dynamic and fun environment to work in and adds lots of resiliency and new opportunities for new market entry and new product development.

Yeah, and actually innovation, right, in your business would be key in thinking of that. So a common raw material, we talked about this is steel that you're dealing with today. So, I mean, we're reading all over the newspapers, seeing steel prices go. We got Kuzma coming up. You know, you're a small SME. How are you dealing with this, the stress of it?

I heard at an Excellence in Manufacturing consortium session, someone spoke and said, "Disruption is a business person's worst nightmare and an entrepreneur's best dream." And so for us, the key part of this is finding the opportunities within the disruption, finding ways to be better informed or to move in ways that allow us to take advantage of some of the disruption. And so we're able to do that.

So as a small and medium enterprise, and some of my background in government has allowed us to better understand some of the trends that are happening right now in the trade dispute between Canada and the United States, I was able to leverage remissions to prevent taxation from our raw material and some of our finished goods. And, you know, working that strategy and being able to leverage some of my previous experience working directly with some of the people that are writing these policies and are consulting on these policies means that we're able to chart a course that, in addition to some of the challenges, we're also seeing some real opportunities to increase market share and to develop new products. And it's really helping us to drive growth.

Like right now, our challenge is to scale. Even though we're firmly in the target of both Canadian and U.S. trade action, we're standing up a second shift to accommodate increased demand for some of the services and products we provide.

In your market today, are you mostly distributing through Canada? Are you like, what part of your business is in the U.S. today? Is it a large piece or?

A huge piece of our business is in the United States in a variety of sectors. It varies. And for example, oil and gas sector, before the current trade dispute, we were selling oil and gas couplings into our previous competitors' territories. We were selling them to Texas. And then everything changed with the trade dispute, and now we don't sell any oil and gas couplings to Texas, but there's increased demand for them in Canada as these different policies shift where those domestic products are.

In the United States, what is doing particularly well is our groundwater section where we have actually commercialized a brand new product that is disrupting how groundwater projects are being done in the United States. We call it the Press-by-Press Taper-Fit Casing Connection. It's the first novel new steel casing connection since the invention of threads and welds. And it's doing very well in some jurisdictions in the United States where we've taken up almost 100% market share in some categories of drilling in some states. And there's lots of opportunity to expand that as we get additional states on board with regulatory approval.

What's making you guys unique? Like I hear like innovation. I know the appetite for risk, but your risk is calculated here. So what are you doing within your organization to inspire this type of innovation and agility to sort of move in different directions?

Big part of our strategy, and the DNA has always been here, but we talk about being a stakeholder model governance company. So when we're thinking of our strategies, we're thinking about ownership and the expectations of ownership in terms of return on invested equity. We're thinking about team and making sure that our view is that team members are time equity investors. They want a good and differentiated return for the time, the hours they put in. And a good union between those two is the profit sharing program, which we've had in its current form since the foundation of the company.

And so that creates a lot of unity between ownership and team members. And so you get a lot of entrepreneurial thinking at all levels of the company and how we can solve program problems, how can we create differentiated value. And then we also bring team and our customers and value chain partners in as stakeholders because a lot of the times we find customers become suppliers and suppliers become customers. And then when you're in the solutions development business, when you're developing solutions and coming up with options to solve either one of those problems, it creates a positive feedback loop. They want to do business with you.

We exclusively deal with other businesses, particularly quite a few smaller businesses. And then we also invest a lot of time in our community, everything from the work that I do working with government relations folks to make sure that an SME voices are heard, a national policy dialogue, to helping local food banks and creating that community and developing that social proof for some of our e-com channels by being good corporate citizens and finding ways that our team and our company can contribute to the community.

You're dealing with your both your suppliers and your customer side in terms of the innovation, and it's really through communication and is it a structured process? Like do you bring them in a couple of times a year, or is it your team is out there constantly inquiring and direction? Like we all talk about this innovation process, but there's very few companies that are really good at it.

I think for us, it's something that's continual. It's when you're talking with somebody, you're trying to understand what is the challenge or opportunity, and is there an option for us to make a difference in that? And that's the slogan of the company, Make a Difference. My father put that in 2012. You know, at 72, he bought out his other partners and was jumping back in for another round of entrepreneurship. He wasn't doing it for any other reason than creating differentiated value.

So it's something that we do implicitly in our conversations with customers and value chain partners. Is there something different there that we can do and to think creatively every day in every interaction that we have? And so this means that we're getting great ideas that we can move forward into potential better process in terms of our manufacturing or new product development or new customer segments.

This is something constantly from all areas of the company. It's part of the value of the company because everyone has some stake in it in terms of the profit sharing, and everyone's got some interest in it in terms of we all want to work in an interesting environment and to feel like we're doing more than just punching a clock. And that's the kind of candidates that we attract, people who want to come and solve problems, people who want to come and do better here than they could anywhere else, whether you're as an ownership or a team or customer or value chain partner in the community, we want to hit above that. And I think that ambition drives innovation.

James, I want to thank you for your time. It's just an awesome conversation. And it's funny because it's so important right now. Like I'm bugging Canadian entrepreneurs to become more, take on some risk. We can only rely on the government for so much. You need to start to drive from within and encourage. And it sounds like you guys are doing that. You're doing it from a small town and you're growing. And it's absolutely fantastic.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. If you're interested in any of our live webcasts, The Way Forward Live, or any other snippets, please take a moment and visit us at PEO-Leadership.com. You'll find on our site various previous recorded webcasts, which include guests such as Morgan Housel, Professor Janice Stein, Harvard's Rosabeth Kanter, and the list goes on. Thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to seeing you again shortly. Have a wonderful day.

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