Routsis Training pulls from its team to recover from loss of founder

Indianapolis — Routsis Training Inc. is growing with new customers about a year after its owner and founder, Andy Routsis, died unexpectedly on Nov. 4, 2021, leaving the company to his brother David Routsis.

David Routsis, owner and president-in-name of the Dracut, Mass.-based company, said the company is thriving under the leadership of General Manager Steve Murphy.

"I have president on my card," Routsis told Plastics News on Oct. 5 at the MAPP Benchmarking conference in Indianapolis.

"I felt I should have [a title]," he said, but the company's leadership is exploring what each of their roles will be moving forward.

While Routsis worked to settle his brother's estate, he said, the company ran well with its current leaders in place, including Daniel Stevens, senior plastics engineer, and Ralph Waterhouse, the company's senior sales manager.

"Why mess up a good thing?" he said. "The company has done well since the beginning of time. … Let me leave it as is; let them do what they do best.

"When my brother passed … Murphy was with him," Routsis said. "[Murphy] offered up help. I took him up on that and I asked him to step in as a general manager, somebody to run the company, because I need to take care of my brother's affairs."

While Murphy handled day-to-day business, Routsis helped with accounting and provided the company with access to its funding.

Not only did Routsis Training keep all of its employees and customers through the transition, but also it increased its sales over the last year, Routsis said.

The company is hiring new employees to handle more business, translating more training courses including finishing its programs in Spanish and planning to create new training products.

"I credit that to [Murphy] and [Waterhouse] because they've changed the [sales] model," Routsis said. "We were going after bigger customers, and now we're going after smaller-sized customers."

Routsis said he was close with his brother and before he passed, they spoke about the business "all the time," helping him to be familiar with the company's leadership, customers and training programs.

He didn't expect the plastics industry to be a career for himself, and his brother's passing certainly wasn't "the way" he wanted to get into the business, he said, so "there's not a big rush" to decide on his ultimate role at the company.

Routsis still has a full-time job as the director of the data center and cloud operations at Bentley University in Massachusetts.

While there are still "some unknowns" about the structure of leadership for the company, he said, "the thing we do know is we want to keep it going and we'd like to double the size of it. … Everyone seems to be on board with that."

Routsis Training recently began a partnership with thermoplastics resin distributor Nexeo Plastics to provide instructional online support for Nexeo's customers.

"Our customers want more technical information regarding application development, material selection, process optimization and troubleshooting," Lindsay Bosnjak, digital marketing manager at Nexeo, said in a Sept. 15 news release. "They are searching for online solutions geared toward these capabilities … to solve their technical and material challenges. We want our customers to know that we understand their pain points, and we have the resources to support them."