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Prem Patel describes his life as “one giant episode of How It’s Made,” and rightly so. Fueled by insatiable curiosity, he is a lifelong learner who has a knack for picking up information and channeling it to solve problems and identify opportunities.
After joining ChemQuest this year, Prem quickly became involved in numerous business strategy projects, as well as our expanded focus on business development efforts. I recently had the opportunity to chat with him about his background and experience, as well as trends he’s tracking in the specialty chemicals and advanced materials sectors.
What do you consider to be some of your career highlights prior to joining ChemQuest?
It’s been a diverse career, for sure. I learned a lot while traveling the world working for Rogers Corporation in the specialty materials, urethanes, and silicones industries. Their materials end up in all sorts of different markets and end-use applications. From funny things like Krispy Kreme ovens to the latest Nike shoes to Boeing airplanes and automobiles to now lithium-ion batteries. I got a pretty good view of the whole manufacturing landscape, traveling to all the OEMs and getting to experience the culture, and most importantly food, in all these different countries.
Another highlight was working at Milliken. I was first exposed to their flooring business, and then I worked throughout their chemicals business in plastic additives and performance colorants and ingredients. I thought I knew what science was. Ha! I engaged countless Ph.Ds. who had spent their lives literally focusing on very specific chemistries with uses in niche applications, like nucleating agents for a polypropylene resin or a polyethylene resin, UV adbsorbers for PET, and dyes for laundry detergents. Their innovations were a part of the value proposition for countless items families use on a daily basis, and I learned incredible amounts of information about all kinds of chemistries and materials while developing a tremendous appreciation for the whole scientific process.
Why did you decide to join ChemQuest?
I had moved on to a corporate strategy role at Ingevity, where I was building out the corporate strategy function to help the company explore options to diversify their business amidst major threats to their core product lines. It was an interesting role in that it incorporated both corporate strategy, innovation, and ventures workstreams. I connected with startups, venture capital groups, government offices, national labs, and industry leaders who were all open to collaborating in the spirit of building their businesses to better align with long-term trends.
I was intrigued by the possibility of doing this type of work not just for one company but for many companies in different industries as part of a consulting business. I had spent 20+ years traveling the world, understanding various customer and market needs while building innovation and sales pipelines to build out business for my companies, so why not help multiple companies. I also felt it would satisfy my “why,” which is to help others by constantly improving myself and sharing what I’ve learned along the way.
That said, without my own lab or support staff, I knew that in order to satisfy both my intellectual curiosity and desire to help businesses grow, I would need to work with an organization that has an established bench to have innovation capabilities. ChemQuest came first to mind. I had done an acquisition in a previous role where they were the strategic advisor, and so I saw the deep knowledge they had. Unlike a lot of the classic management consulting firms that I had also worked with, I felt the ChemQuest team had really “walked the walk” in these different roles across industry and would quickly be able to deliver value to clients through their deep bench and unique lab and operations capabilities.
How has the work that you did prior to joining ChemQuest supported you as you work with our clients to achieve their goals?
I always like to hit the ground running in a consulting engagement where I can quickly assess the situation and start to deliver solutions, processes, and deals that create value. I’ve spent my entire career building out businesses and innovation portfolios, as well as restructuring and acquiring businesses. I obviously don’t know all things, but I’ve developed deep expertise across a number of areas and I’ve pieced together a great view of the whole manufacturing sector, including the different chemistries, materials, and processes. Coupled with the expertise of the ChemQuest team, this enables us to deliver value to the client.
When I had been working with consultants in my corporate strategy roles, I often felt that we had to teach them about our markets so they could come up to speed about our industry. It brings me great joy to be able to share existing knowledge and allow the client to quickly understand the options and determine where we want to spend time digging deeper.
What types of ChemQuest projects have you found particularly compelling thus far? Are there areas that you enjoy more than others?
I’ve always been curious about how things are made, but I am truly a business and strategy person at heart. I’m drawn to business transformation projects and strategy engagements where we’re not only helping people understand what options they have and how those markets, chemistries, and materials work, but we’re helping them prioritize.
Management in a lot of businesses could do any one of a dozen things, and it would probably be okay. But ChemQuest works to help our clients be great. Our clients can’t do all dozen things simultaneously, or they’d just crash and burn. Instead, I really enjoy helping people narrow down their option set by articulating a cohesive, compelling story about why those specific opportunities present the greatest value based on their desired risk exposure. Those engagements definitely give me great joy.
My passion around business came from my parents, who are immigrants to this country. Almost my entire family, except me and a few cousins, were born in India and immigrated over for us to have a better life – part of that was the American dream of owning and running your own business. At every family get together, there was conversation about buying a business. We always would walk into a store or restaurant and try to understand how it could be run better. I was surrounded by that kind of conversation from the get-go as a kid.
What trends are you seeing that are impacting our clients’ businesses and what their goals might be for the future?
One of the biggest things I’m seeing, not technical but a very tangible issue, is that talent’s not coming into chemicals like it used to. A lot of talent is aging out, whether retiring or semi-retiring. Those companies now don’t have the know-how, market knowledge, or even market access and relationships to execute their growth plans.
That talent gap has to be managed through partnerships. Products, technologies, or sales channels don’t have to be invented “here” – they could be developed through collaboration with outside organizations. The whole partnership model is a major trend, and we’re even seeing it with large players like petrochemical companies in Europe now. These companies are struggling because there’s an oversupply of some resins and growing regulatory hurdles, and they’re now trying to figure out how to stay alive. They’re partnering with companies in the U.S. or elsewhere and rethinking their business models.
One other trend is near and dear to me. I’ve always been very outdoorsy, very into nature. I hike and kayak. I grow all kinds of things in my garden and am passionate about the quality of our environment. I’m seeing – both from my previous plastics role with Milliken, where I sat on recycling and bioplastic committees, and then in another role at Ingevity where we looked at a lot of bio-based materials – all these different ways for the world to try to be more sustainable.
The dust is far from settled on this, but people are clearly trying to use less energy and less water. Whether it’s bio-based, biodegradable, compostable, chemically recycled, mechanically recycled – it’s yet to be determined how much either one of these attributes is going to matter in the long term. The key is that people are trying to be more efficient, particularly with energy and water consumption. From the standpoint of a specialty chemicals or materials company, if your innovation allows something to cure faster or use less heat, water, or labor, you should probably be marketing and refining that value proposition because resources are only going to get tighter as populations and economies develop.
Prem can be reached at ppatel@chemquest.com.
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