Aggressive growth part of the plan for converter Pac Worldwide

Crickets. That's what Jim Boshaw heard from his executive team gathered at a retreat in fall 2014 when he told them he wanted to double Pac Worldwide Corp.'s sales every five years.

The company, you see, had just eclipsed $100 million in sales for the first time in 2013.

“I had lots of wide eyes and crickets,” said Boshaw, the president and CEO of Pac, which makes packaging used in mailers by couriers and online retailers.

Boshaw calls the initiative 2X. He requires annual growth of 15 percent to make it happen, too. It's an aggressive approach, he admits. But more than two years after he introduced it, Pac Worldwide has sales of $200 million.

“I think it really emphasizes and underscores the importance of setting goals for your team,” said the 47-year old from his company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. “And making sure you are encouraging alignment and providing them with all the tools for them to be successful.”

Boshaw points to Pac's work with all three major courier companies as well as the growth of online retailers for Pac's growth.

“We've got fantastic momentum,” he said, crediting his employees for making his goal a reality.

Pac's been around since 1975 when Jim's parents, Phil and Cathy, founded Pac National Inc., a broker of corrugated shipping containers. That pretty simple beginning then gets more complicated. A sale was followed by a takeover by a corporate raider and ended with Phil and Cathy coming back to take over their company again in 1997.

Jim, who graduated from the University of Washington, had no intention of joining the family business. “But it's really exciting to be part of a business you grew up with. The whole legacy piece. My Mom and Dad are great business people,” said Boshaw, who joined Pac in Redmond in 1999 after working in the corrugated box business in Phoenix.

Pac remains privately held with a unique twist. The company is owned 94 percent by the Boshaw family although Jim is the only active family member. The other 6 percent is owned by employee shareholders. All told, 16 employees make up that 6 percent ownership group.

“It's a fantastic group. We don't ever use it lure people to the business. You have to have three years of tenure in the business. And there's no specific rules. Not every vice president is an owner, but some managers are. It's a program we are proud of and we try to put more shares into the program each year,” he said.

Pac manufactures in two U.S. facilities, including one near Cincinnati (354,000 square feet) and another near Phoenix (168,000 square feet). Internationally, the company has a footprint in Querétaro, Mexico, that serves Latin America with its plant covering 120,000 square feet. The company also operates an 80,000-square-foot facility in Malaysia to better serve clients on that side of the world. All told, Pac operates 45 to 50 machines converting polyethylene into packaging.

Boshaw has created a program called STEP (Striving Toward Excellent Performance) to help reduce attrition and offer growth and development to employees. Two small groups have gone through STEP so far, which is led by a professor from Xavier University. “The team comes together to learn some skills and work on solving real world problems at Pac,” he said.

A program like STEP fits well with what keeps Boshaw up at night — creating future ready leaders.

“I think about the perpetuation and succession of this business moving forward and I feel a real fiduciary responsibility to each and every one of my employees and the families that they support. I need to make sure we are developing — at all levels — leaders that will continue to grow and develop and move to the next level within this business in order to perpetuate our success.”

Boshaw, who sees himself as a coach encouraging diversity and harmony for his employees, mentions GE's former leader, Jack Welch, and how he helped develop three executives who went on to run GE, The Home Depot and Boeing.

“You think about it, it's almost an embarrassment of riches having that kind of talent at different divisions of GE. And I want us to be developing leadership qualities at every level of this business and asking them to stretch to assume more responsibility, to provide them continuing education, to grow and develop so they can perform a wider variety of tasks and assume more and more responsibility, creating more opportunities for them but also building this business into a team of people that will take it forward.”