McKune spearheads M. Holland growth, acquisitions

As chief financial officer of Northbrook, Ill.-based resin distributor M. Holland Co., Pat McKune has seen company sales more than triple as a result of organic growth and five acquisitions.

McKune said the company has taken a "three-pronged approach" in its acquisition strategy. The first was filling out its footprint in the United States.

M. Holland acquired Christler Chemical and Plastics Inc., a Wilsonville, Ore.-based distributor of engineering and commodity thermoplastic resins, at the end of 2012, giving the company a presence in the Pacific Northwest.

"It was really the only sort of blank spot in the company from M. Holland Co. in terms of geography that we covered," McKune said. "It was a logical acquisition for us."

The second strategy was to expand internationally, specifically south of the border.

"Expanding into Mexico was a logical option because while we had customers in Mexico, we really didn't have a presence where we can provide the same kind of full-service distribution services that we do in the United States," he said. "We began a search for a company in Mexico, and we wound up partnering with [plastics and chemicals distributor Grupo] Solquim, who has been our partner since 2015."

McKune also noted the acquisitions of resin distributors Able International Corp. and Tril Export Corp., both of Puerto Rico, in 2016.

The third prong of the acquisition strategy was exploring and expanding the business within specific targeted markets, such as Birmingham, Mich.-based Polymer Z LLC in automotive in 2015 and Andover, Mass.-based T&T Marketing in wire and cable in 2017.

"Those two acquisitions were very market segment-specific, where we were looking to grow and expand our capabilities in a specific marketplace," McKune said.

Looking ahead, McKune said he is involved with building out the financial side of the company.

"We're building out our shared services organization, meaning that when we've acquired all these businesses, they have their own financial organizations, right? They have their own leadership in finance. They have their own processes and systems," he said. "One of the things that we have been doing is bringing together under the leadership of my team here in Northbrook, a shared services concept where a lot of those teams now are reporting into us here."

McKune said the company is optimizing some capabilities it has to bring to the organizations, such as treasury and financial planning and analysis.

M. Holland is also developing and building out its own financial planning and analysis capabilities as an organization.

"We've implemented adaptive planning, which is a tool for budgeting and forecasting and financial reporting that we implemented about a year ago," McKune said. "So that has become more part of the fabric of what we do as a financial team and bringing together has helped us consolidate all of our reporting out of our subsidiaries because they're all on different systems."

The company has also been working on a new enterprise resource planning system that McKune says will bring all systems together to one global ERP.

"This ERP implementation is a little bit complicated in the sense that there are a lot of systems that sit outside of the ERP system that we have to connect to it. … Today we operate on three systems, and we're going to bring together all of them to one global ERP. That is a key initiative for us that has got our organization involved," he said.

McKune graduated from Lewis University in Romeoville, Ill., with a bachelor's degree in accounting and Loyola University Chicago with a Master of Business Administration.

He said his interest in accounting first came from a teacher in high school: "I was more so inspired by [accounting] as it related to probably the teacher I had in high school who made it interesting for me."

McKune was an adjunct professor at Lewis University and worked at Blistex Inc. as the vice president of finance, Stevens Communications as CFO and Holly Hunt as CFO. He has been CFO of M. Holland since October 2005.

Suky Lawlor, M. Holland marketing and communications manager, nominated McKune for CFO of the Year.

Asked the best advice he has ever received, McKune had several options from which to choose.

"I have this credenza here and I have this travel whiteboard that I have, and I've got 20 lessons on it. … I would say some of the things I've learned or have been given advice on or are important to me or think about, No. 1, say what you do and do what you say. Communicate, be transparent, tell people what's going on, tell people what you're going to do, and then follow through on it. I think that's a critical aspect to success anywhere."

Another one: "Don't let perfect get in the way of good; I think that tends to make people slow and unproductive." And third, "It's not what you do, it's how you do it."

"I think I have been able to demonstrate to our organization that finance is a partner to the business. It's not something separate that we do and that we just produce backward-looking financial statements and financial reporting," McKune said. "We're a partner to the business that we can bring business intelligence, we can bring a set of knowledge and information to what we do every day that has a financial slant to it and that our financial team is asked to be at the table when important decisions, meetings and discussions are being held."