Entrepreneurial Grit: The LPC Origin Story
3 June 2025
In late 2001 (December 14 to be exact) just after 9/11 and the birth of my first child (daughter, 10/23), I bought the nucleus of what is now Larson Packaging Company.
I had worked nine years as a management consultant in strategy and operations in the US and Latin America. After some exciting times in the US, and then Colombia, I opened an office in Peru working with many different kinds of familiy-owned companies and helped them modernize, focus and improve. I was elected Partner and returned to the US, but found it boring and bureaucratic. I tried the high tech start-up thing, but realized I needed to get out of the rat race and run my own business. In Latin America, I liked family-owned, entrepreneurial businesses and had helped some to dramatically improve. But the benefits accrued to others, and I wanted to not work for “the man,” but to make—and implement—my own decisions, build a team, and see where it went.
I didn’t have aspirations to take over the world, but wanted to be a good husband and father and provider, and be home. Curiously enough, that’s now a “thing” called ETA (Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition) and the latest thing in Business Schools, but I did it with no support. I knew I wanted to do low tech manufacturing, starting with wood, and stumbled (no, it was strategic! Honest!) into the packaging industry.
We’ve grown from a $2.5MM business to almost $50MM and a broad line industrial packaging manufacturer/fabricator. We excel in Customer Service, Design, and flexible, fast manufacturing. Against many marketing folks’ recommendations, I called what we do “Smart. Packaging. Fast.”
I’ve learned a lot in the last couple decades. I’ve had successes, but also encountered many roadblocks and even some failures. I acquired the business with SBA financing, and almost immediately interest rates went way up, hurting our cash flow and our viability. It was difficult to pay vendors, and we had to stretch them out. Only relationships and being honest with them, and some payment plans made it work. We made it through three recessions. For the longest time, we were capital constrained and couldn’t pursue the strategy or opportunities I knew we wanted. Everything had to be bootstrapped. That also made it tough to build a team, and unfortunately, I made some wrong hires.
That was almost catastrophic — in early 2013, four key people left and started competing companies in the industry, obliterated our design capability, and our core team had to scramble. At times it seemed chaotic. All of this led us to review and upgrade any manual and inconsistent processes.
Of course we scheduled our jobs, and had a robust system, but despite our best efforts we spent A LOT of time updating the schedule.
Why?
Well, customers change their mind, vendors aren’t always reliable, mix can vary greatly, employees do not always have the right skill and their discipline is lacking, machines breakdown, quality was not always perfect, data is not readily available nor accurate nor communicated and sometimes communication was difficult.
A Private Equity investor once told me that “it’s way easier to manage a $20MM business than a $2MM business.”
It’s so true.
I knew that could kill us if we operated as everyone else did.
To some degree, customers — and our competitors — treated packaging as a commodity business. Even when it came to engineered and custom products. Most sold purely on price, rather than the value they created for customers. Our industry had many fragmented competitors, some who were kind of shady and unprofessional, who didn’t deliver on what they promised.
The big ones had siloed organizations and even product families — making decision-making and communication slow and dysfunctional. Many are incredibly sales-oriented, rewarding sales people for volume and revenue, or demanding large order quantities. They don’t focus on what’s best for the customer.
This leads to overselling capacity, long lead times and missed delivery dates.
Schedules become reactive with production responding to whoever yells the loudest. Ultimately calls, email and requests are not answered timely in a timely fashion — or even at all.
Many of these operators are short-term oriented, living for today and not focused on improvement nor sustainable business models. And it was clear when times got tough that it was unsustainable. Most competitors work at break even and when times got tough, several went bankrupt or sold out to bigger competitors for pennies on the dollar..
We needed to grow, but also be efficient and effective.
I felt the path to that was through lean manufacturing.
From my background, I always knew we wanted to have excellence in manufacturing and be lean, and work to implement Toyota Production System. And way back when, I studied Danaher Corporation that acquired companies and applied the “Danaher Business System” to create operating improvement. But Lean didn’t seem to apply that well to a job shop like ours. Fully implementing 5S was a challenge.
I had some of my ex-Booz, Allen friends come to help us. They had lots of Boeing and other operational experience. But our volumes were low, the mix was different. I began looking at high mix, low volume models and how to implement Lean in a job shop environment. I read books on “job shop lean,” and discussed with my consulting friends.
None of it seemed to be what we needed.
We also tried to think about marketing.
What were we good at, what did customers want and value? Quality, reliable, responsive, price. All true. But it turned out that customers almost always wanted things quickly, and when they absolutely needed it right away (for whatever reason— their customer needed an expedite, or maybe an internal screw up), they relied on us to “bail them out.”
Everything seemed to be “now” and FAST.
So we talked more to customers and analyzed what we were good at. When we looked at what we were doing with our customers, and where we were most successful, we realized that it was all about getting our customers what they wanted with high quality, when they wanted it, which was FAST!
And without hassle, problems, or whining.
The reasons were irrelevant. Maybe they couldn’t plan effectively, or they were being responsible to their customers. Perhaps they had limited space, urgent new product introductions, or wanted to keep inventory low but never go line down. Or maybe they were in a fast-moving industry.
What mattered was that we were responsive.
We could expedite orders when the customers were desperate. And in general, we were pretty fast at manufacturing, even if we weren’t yet Lean.
So, we hit upon a key differentiator in our market and to try to become the most professional packaging company in the industry, with integrity, and like Danaher, develop a business system—the LPC Business System.
In 2014, the idea of Smart. Packaging. Fast! was born, and we started working to be faster in customer service, design, and mostly manufacturing and fabrication as a key differentiator to make orders and products flow, exceed customer expectations, and to become a more sustainable and successful company.
I resolved that Larson Packaging Company would always be FAST, RESPONSIVE, and focused on the CUSTOMER no matter what, while TAKING CARE OF OUR TEAM. Our vision is that LPC is the pre-eminent and customer-preferred option for custom industrial packaging in the markets we serve. That we have transformed our industry for the better — with a focus on professionalism, partnership, consistency, service, and creating flexibility so our employees and customers can focus on their priorities, not packaging problems.
And that we help customers gain efficiencies, reduce damage and enjoy flexibility with a true packaging partner.
It turned out to be a good strategic direction.
These days, there is less competition between companies per-se — the real basis of competition is between supply chains. So we endeavored to be a good partner and integral supply chain member with both customers and suppliers.
Modern supply chains are very lean in operations and therefore it was important for everything to be just-in-time to keep inventory and space utilization low while ensuring operations run well and lines don’t go down. Or perhaps the nature of a business or organization was such that planning and forecasting were difficult leading to last minute changes and/or emergencies. Still others had new products and needed speed to market. And now, leading companies like Amazon, Tesla, Door Dash and Uber Eats, SpaceX, Home Depot, everybody in AI, and others are all talking about speed to market and speed of operations.
Customers want great service and want their orders NOW!
Just one problem! Easier said than done.
Years ago in business school (Chicago Booth), I read the book The Goal by Eli Goldratt. I find that many customers know it. It’s a novel about business improvement, based on what Eli calls the Theory of Constraints (TOC). And as I discussed above, I tried many times to implement lean principles in our organization with some, but with limited success.
I’ve often thought about The Goal and how to benefit from it.
After toying around for several years with something I read online called the Velocity Scheduling System (VSS), I finally signed up Dr. Lisa Lang and the Science of Business team to help us learn their system based on TOC, Eli Goldratt’s principles, and The Goal. I read The Goal a couple times, knew it, but just couldn’t figure out how to implement it. I had doubts, and it seemed both too good to be true, but also maybe hokey.
Dr. Lisa developed a visual system for us to bring TOC and The Goal to the job shop floor. We measured WIP (work in process inventory) and cut it in half the first week.
We built “full kit” of materials, tools, drawings, and people before we started. We focused on finishing, not starting, work. We focused on getting FAST, and FLEXIBLE.
We also honed in on making working with us a frictionless experience.
It worked!
Less WIP inventory, faster velocity, more effective, no chaos, very flexible, and more capacity.
And we grew! Customers saw it.
That was 2019. In 2020, we acquired First Class Packaging in San Diego. Our first order of business was to implement the Velocity Scheduling System.
It worked yet again.
We’ve been applying VSS and TOC in our Company ever since, in Customer Service, Sales (we shifted to an inside sales model), Design, all with one team throughout the company. Then we added on “Requisite Organization.”
We are becoming a well-oiled machine, but even if we’re still not quite where we want to be.
Our Customer Service is fast and excellent: we see it in the numbers. We are on time and fast, and we see that in the numbers, too (we measure everything by the way).
We know how to scale and add capacity when needed.
Perseverance and grit, making the right moves and investment, and taking risks seems to have worked out.
My basic philosophy was always to take care of the Customers and our People and we always have.
I talk a lot about our company as a family, and that permeates our culture, but we’re professional and what I like to call a “real” business. With the company-wide “Larson Business System”— based on VSS and TOC/JSP, and ISO9000 QMS, our values, data driven and analytical, Smart. Packaging. Fast.
We’ve forged ourselves into one team across multiple sites.
We consolidated our customer service team to working in CRM with a ticketing system. Now over 90% on time ticket performance and 99% on time order performance.
We consolidated our design team and are automating data management and design processes. We Implemented Sales Process Engineering in moving to an inside sales model.
We invested in new equipment and integratied it into operations. We shifted to PowerBI reports and that lets us manage the company with less effort, based on actual data.
We’ve created a scheduling role and moved key functions to the plants to make them accountable. Our QMS (quality management system) is now in the cloud, improved procedures and consolidated the company in one QMS and ISO registrar.
What’s more, I’m very proud that our culture has accepted the need for continuous change and improvement and the pace at which we’re doing things.
I could have gone to Wall Street and been retired by now. But I went into consulting, and then my own business because I just want things to run well and as best as they can. I like fixing things and have a knack for seeing what could be improved. (My wife hates that!)
That’s why we focus on continual improvement. I want our business to be the best it can be, grow, but not take over the world, and help our customers and our employees.
We know we’re FAST, and on-time, without fail. We’re confident that, for the right customers, we deliver superior value compared to our competition.
But we started to realize the packaging industry kind of sucks, and no one would believe us if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes.
As a sidenote, it’s actually a shame that so many customers accept mediocrity from their packaging suppliers. “That’s just the way it is…” we hear. Or “so and so sucks, but they’re cheap,” not realizing the savings that flow from an efficient process, good design, lower inventory and shipping on time without penalties, not to mention not needing an army of admins to manage their crappy packaging supplier. End of rant!
Thus, our dilemma is how to educate the market and convince companies that if they were to wave a magic wand and make all their packaging problems go away, they could actually have that.
Our response is a Smart. Packaging. Fast. Guaranteed! Program.
Sure, customers would like effective, well-engineered, custom packaging that performs and is easy to use, often without tools. Sure, they’d like to get all their custom packaging from one vendor who is the actual manufacturer or fabricator. Sure, they want to get it fast, and if they could, reliably, they could improve their operations, lower inventory and space required to do so, reduce admin and babysitting of suppliers.
But who’d believe they could really have all of that?
That sounds both a pipe dream and risky. Well what if we took on the risk? What if we were so confident (we are!) that we could have the shortest lead times in the industry, set a due date with the customer, and achieve it 100% of the time that we could guarantee it?
Not an empty guarantee. I mean something real, with teeth. That if we fail (we won’t), we will give the customer money back!
Who does that? We can and we do.
We are working on other innovations in packaging in terms of performance, sustainability, and more. But we believe this is a game changer, and it’s all because of decisions we made years ago, and investments, training, systems, processes and know-how we’ve put in place over the years.
It’s compelling, and working, and I’m proud of it and our team for making it possible.