Hall of Fame: Browitt used associations to make connections

VANDREUIL-DORION, QUEBEC — A Society of Plastics Engineers' activist and materials distributor, Terence Browitt doesn't forget his humble background in England, where he was born in Nottingham in 1941, as World War II raged.

“We were very working class. Nothing special,” he recalled.

Terry's dad, Jack Browitt, was stationed in Iceland, at an anti-aircraft position to keep the Germans out of the North Atlantic.

“My father was away fighting the war. As a matter of fact, I didn't see my father until I was 4 years old,” he recalled.

The family moved to Melton Mowbray, famous for its pork pies. His father had left school at age 13 to become a butcher's apprentice, then started his own business.

“My father was the official meat supplier for a pork pie manufacturer,” he said.

Browitt went on to get a degree — in physics, no less — and came to Canada to begin his plastics career. He founded Terinex International Ltd., and continued a decades-long second “career,” as an activist with the Society of Plastics Engineers and the Canadian Plastics Industry Association.

At NPE 2015, Browitt, 73, becomes a member of the Plastics Hall of Fame. His son, Paul Browitt, who is president of Terinex, nominated him for the honor. The elder Browitt discussed his career during an interview Terinex's office.

International flair

Browitt was SPE president in the year 2001-2002, giving his globalist perspective to the society during a time of intense change.

“We were also beginning to feel the impact of the Internet and we were beginning to feel the changes of manufacturing going to China. The change of people's mentality. My feeling was that as business in North America became more and more global, it struck me that SPE should be more global,” he said.

SPE had just started the Australia/New Zealand Section. Browitt called on SPE to form an alliance with CPIA. He was the first president to hold a council meeting in England, in 1999, as SPE's vice president, international. He also hosted a council meeting in Quebec.

“I'm the most fortunate person in the world,” Browitt said. “I was educated in England, lived in Canada and worked a lot in the United States.”

And he noted that SPE certainly has become highly international today. The society's new CEO, Willem De Vos, is from Belgium. Vijay Boolani, an industrialist in India, is SPE's president for 2014-2015, a term ending at Antec this week.

It all began back in 1970, when Ralph Noble became the first SPE president who was not a U.S. citizen. Noble, a Canadian, joined the Plastics Hall of Fame in 2009. The nominator? Browitt.

That makes Browitt the second Canadian to become SPE president. Browitt and Noble are neighbors in Hudson, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal.

“At SPE, we don't want to be inward looking. We want to be outward looking. And international globalism is outward looking,” he said.

Coming to plastics

Turning back to his blue-collar roots in England, Browitt said his parents stressed he would get a good education.

“They pushed me into grammar school and forced me to university,” he said. He earned a degree in physics from Queen Mary University in London.

Before graduating in 1962, he had visited two aunts, one who lived in Missouri and one in Toronto. He got a taste of North America. There were not a lot of job opportunities in England, but North Electric Co. recruited on campus, and offered him a job.

They moved him to Montreal. He earned $410 a month — about three times what he could have made in England at the time.

Then the whirlwind hit: “I arrived in Canada on Sept. 26, 1962. I started my career in plastics on the 27th. By the 29th I moved into a boarding house — next to a family whose daughter, Louise, later became my wife!”

They got married in 1965.

At North Electric, he did research and development work on insulated PVC wire and cable for power transmission and telephone lines. After four years at the utility, he joined a group forming a compounding and recycling company, Phoenix Blending Ltd. He left after about 10 years, looking for another type of plastics position.

He approached a lot of other people in the industry. One was Lenny Fine of L. Fine and Co., a recycler and materials trader in Peabody, Mass. 

“I said ‘Look, give me a job, let me be your rep. in Canada.' He said, ‘No I won't but I will help you start your company,'” Browitt recalled.

Starting Terinex

The Arab Oil Embargo hit in the early 1970s and the resin supply dried up. After the oil began freely flowing again, companies built up big inventories, just to be safe. Browitt started Terinex in 1976.

“I just started knocking on a lot of doors, and I said, ‘I'm Terry Browitt and I've been in plastics now for 12 years. Can I help you in anything?' And most of the time, they said, ‘Oh not really, Terry. And then it was, ‘Come to think of it, Fred, don't we have pipe of obsolete material in the back? We've been trying to get rid of that forever. Terry, get rid of that shit for us,'” Browitt said with a hearty laugh. “And I did! And that's literally how I started.”

His wife, a French Canadian, handled the phones and kept the books while Browitt was on the road.

He called his mother and told her he was a “consultant.”

“No one would pay me to be a consultant. But they all said Terry, get rid of that crap. And at a very short period of time I was breaking even and then doing very well,” he said.

Personal connections

Browitt had joined SPE in 1965, on his first job. Now at Terinex, SPE become even more critical. At the 1977 Antec, officials of a major color concentrates maker asked him to represent them in Quebec.

Now Browitt was a physics major. He knew PVC from his wire and cable days. But color concentrates? Browitt the entrepreneur may not have known “polymers,” but his SPE contacts paid off.

“I knew people. And you had to be able to pick up the phone and call someone anywhere in the world. And say look, I've got a real problem. Can you help me? Through SPE you met people, and not only just meet them. You got to trust each other too,” he said.

The SPE colleague could be a resin executive or high-level engineer, so you have be confidential.

“You built that trust up by going for a beer after a meeting. And you sit around and talk. Get to know each other very well, indeed,” he said.

He laughs again. Browitt is an outgoing man who freely admits he misses seeing his friends at SPE. He said the Internet is “cold and impersonal.”

Browitt was SPE president during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Travel fell off. SPE's conference revenue fell 21 percent in 2001. Seminar income plummeted by 40 percent.

“We did everything we could,” he said. “We cut costs. We reorganized. And this is when teleconferencing became more and more popular. All of a sudden, you couldn't travel but you still wanted to do things.”

Browitt couldn't wait to get back on a plane. He kept pushing for meetings.

“You can do all things on the computer, but I'm not pressing the flesh,” he said. “You can't ask someone how their wife is. Or empathize with someone who's having trouble with their children. It's only when you do a conference and go and have a cup of coffee. It's that sort of thing that breeds the atmosphere for successful business.”

When he stepped down as SPE president, he wrote personal thank you letters to the bosses of every member of the executive committee, for supporting their employees' volunteer efforts.

He likes what SPE leaders are doing these days.

“SPE's to be given a lot of credit for the way it stuck in there and redefined its product,” he said.

Browitt also played a key role in Canada's plastics industry, serving on the board, and as treasurer, of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association. CPIA was formed in 1997 by the amalgamation of the three Canadian plastics trade associations.

Retired CPIA CEO Pierre DuBois sent a letter supporting Browitt's induction into the Plastics Hall of Fame.

Browitt himself retired in 2009. He remains a director of Terinex.

And what does this social animal do now?

“I run a couple of bridge clubs. I'm on a hiking club. I'm on the board of a local nursing service,” he said. Oh, also the board of a local theater group.

That's the thing about volunteering. “If you show the slightest bit of interest, you're in. But I love it!” he said.

Check out a video profile of Browitt.