You've Got a Great Product to Sell... Now What-Jay Skinner, Integrity Commercial Products

Jay Skinner came to Cleaning Processes with Jerry through a referral from Brad Anderson at Royce Rolls — if you haven't heard Brad's episode yet, go back two and check it out.

Jay is the Marketing & Sales Manager at Integrity Commercial Products, the proprietary product arm of Integrity Rotational Molding. Owner Terry Stemple — 25 years in custom rotational molding — brought Jay in last June to launch a line of heavy-duty waste receptacles, tilt trucks, and dunnage racks built to NSF, USDA, and FDA standards. Jay spent 30 years in plastic pallets before this, including a startup called Stratus Plastic Pallets that owned the URL pallets.com back in 1993, before most people knew what a URL was.

What we covered:

• Why Jay scrapped the direct-sales playbook and went all-in on manufacturer's reps
• The 85 booth swipes at ISSA Vegas that completely rewired his go-to-market plan
• The structure: manufacturer → rep → distributor → end user, and who pays who
• How he built the rep network region by region — Buzzeo and Associates in the Midwest, Lifespace Innovation Group on the East Coast, Genesis Supply in Florida and the Caribbean, Durable Safety Products in the Southwest, RPM Co. across Texas and the Plains, and Clint Close in Iowa
• Why regional relationships and "the language" of a territory matter more than most manufacturers think
• Building a website where reps and customers can grab brochures without playing "go fish" with their suppliers
• Terry Stemple's working definition of integrity: "What you do when nobody's watching."

Quick note from Jerry: I had to wrap this one a little faster than I wanted — I was in a rented studio, and the next session was knocking at the door. Jay was a good sport about it, and he'll be back on the show down the road for the longer version of this conversation.

Connect with Jay: Jay Skinner, Marketing & Sales Manager Integrity Commercial Products, Plainfield, IN Cell: 317.922.7526 | Work: 317.837.1960 ext. 210 JSkinner@ICP-Sales.com IntegrityCommercialProducts.com

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Transcript

JERRY: Hi, and welcome to Cleaning Processes with Jerry. Today we're going to sit down with Jay Skinner of Integrity Commercial Products. Jay came into my world through a gentleman named Brad Anderson. If you haven't listened to Brad's interview on this podcast — I think it was about six weeks ago, two podcasts back — please go check it out. It was a great show.

Jay had met Brad at the ISSA show, and my name came up because I'd met Brad earlier. So Jay reached out and asked to join the show. Before we taped a couple of days ago, I spent some time watching a few of Jay's YouTube videos and listening to some podcasts he'd been on, and I'm glad he joined me. It was a great conversation.

One thing I want to mention up front: I'm in the process of moving, so I wasn't in my normal recording setup. I went to a little podcast studio I rented for a predetermined amount of time. The podcast was going great, but we'd taken a little longer than normal to set up. Next thing I know, my time wasn't up, but somebody was knocking on the door outside. It threw me off — I didn't know if my time was up or what. So I really rushed the ending and we cut it slightly short. My sincere apologies to Jay for that. I've put all his contact information and website in the show notes, so please check it out. I also promised Jay we'd have him back — we'd love to.

So sit back, enjoy the conversation, and if you like it, please share it with somebody so we can keep growing this community. Thank you.

The Interview

JERRY: Jay, thanks for joining me today. It's been a process getting together. We crossed paths at the ISSA show, talked a couple of times since, traded emails and texts — I've really enjoyed your company. I'll tell everybody right now that this morning, while drinking my first three cups of coffee, I spent about two hours going through your YouTube videos and podcasting content, and I'm more than honored to have you here. So Jay, tell us about yourself. I basically have to be quiet for the next 30 minutes and let you go. It's your show.

JAY: Thank you, Jerry Bauer. I'm the Marketing and Sales Manager for Integrity Commercial Products in Plainfield, Indiana. The parent company has been a custom rotational plastic molder for 25 years. I was hired last June when the owner, Terry Stemple, decided he was ready for a product guy who could come in and develop a product line he'd worked on 25 or 30 years earlier for another company. That line had essentially been mothballed.

It's a product line of beautiful commercial-grade, super heavy-duty, last-forever waste receptacles, tilt trucks, and dunnage racks. Terry bought the molds a couple of years ago, refurbished all of them, and was sitting on the whole line. Then he called me.

He knew me from a 20-year relationship — in a past life I used him as a molder for some of my products when I was in material handling. I was part of the startup of a company called Stratus Plastic Pallets. We built an international plastic pallet company, all rotationally molded, and Terry was one of my molders along the way. We had a great relationship and a good reputation. So he called me, and that brought me here.

This is a beautiful family business. Terry needed someone to set up a proprietary product line that would augment his custom molding work, where he's already molding products for other people. I always say: if you've got big cowlings around a giant fan on the roof of your plant, it's possible Integrity Rotational Molding made them. And in this cleaning business — think about the cowlings and tanks on the ride-on cleaning machines, the ones people drive around. Almost always rotationally molded. You might be riding on machines with our cowlings and tanks right now. Terry's been doing this with a worldwide business. But I'm the guy bringing on the product line. "Turn on the trash cans, Jay." That's what he said. And that's what I'm doing.

JERRY: How many lines of products does he have? Or how many different products, I should say.

JAY: Best way to describe it is Integrity Commercial Products. Here's one of our catalogs — and I'm going to share my screen, because the internet is very important.

By the way, in 1993, when I was part of the startup of Stratus Plastic Pallets, we were an internet company. We had a URL before the internet was really a thing — when it was still in DOS. Pallets.com. Can you imagine? Back then I think they just awarded them. The owner of the company was a venture capitalist who did a lot of work in Silicon Valley. He grabbed pallets.com and it eventually became the most-visited material handling URL in the world. It was wonderful. But it took until about 1995 or '96 until we actually had a website. Back then we were still trying to figure out what email was and whether we needed it.

JERRY: Just so the audience knows — I'll include the website of the company in the show notes, as well as some of your other endeavors. We may get to talk about those too.

JAY: So when we look at what we're doing here at Integrity Commercial Products — I'm going to hit share. One of the things I want to talk about is how I actually set up the business. The title of this show should probably be: "I've got a great product. I'm ready to go to market in the JanSan or food service business — the ISSA kind of business. What do I do? How do I build this thing?"

I'll tell you the story.

Here's our website. None of this existed when I got here. One of the first things we did was interview a bunch of digital marketing companies. We hired two — one to improve the already beautiful Integrity Rotational Molding site, and another to build what you're seeing here at Integrity Commercial Products. The structure is: Integrity Commercial Products is the parent, and underneath that we have three divisions — janitorial products, food service products, and Integrity Rotational Molding linked underneath. People may recognize this structure from other companies. And imagine — one day there's going to be pet products, hospitality products. You can go on and on.

Then look at how we've set it up. We have dunnage racks, which is an interesting word — I'd never heard it before. These are plastic pallets with ventilation that people put in refrigerators and freezers at convenience stores, restaurants, anywhere they've got food. They meet USDA, FDA, and NSF food requirements. We've got the full line of beautiful, decorative, last-forever molded trash cans. We've got minders and tilt trucks. Good tilt truck providers are very valuable, and we're bringing on this full line — people are eating it up.

I also made it easy to use. The website is built so our manufacturer's reps in different territories and our customers can hit a button and pull down a beautiful brochure. Think about how many times you've had suppliers where every phone call is "go fish" — you have to wait for them to email you a file or something. How silly is that? Instead, everything we've got is right here, ready to go. I hate "go fish." Jerry, have you been around big corporations when you call for help and the answer might as well be: here you go, go fish?

JERRY: It is.

JAY: I hate go fish.

JERRY: Here's my question — are you selling to end users, or are you going through distribution?

JAY: We're going through distribution. Solamente. Only. No direct sales at all.

This is a beautiful lead-in. This is why I'm proud to be here. This is my first live, go-live show, and I'm proud to be on yours because you were recommended to me by more than one person as someone to get to know. And here we are.

I had a goal on my whiteboard: lay out the distribution model by January 10th. Got it done on the night of January 9th. There was also "tell Denver" and "figure out what TUG is" — I'll tell you about that later. The DPA show in Orlando is coming up — I'll tell you about that too. And one goal that people questioned: we're going to do a live online show in April 2025. It's May. Close enough. Did it. Thank you for letting me check that off.

JERRY: Just so you know, we couldn't actually see your bulletin board because I don't think it comes through when you're sharing a screen.

JAY: Oh my gosh. Well, you'll see it in a minute — that's my bulletin board behind me.

JERRY: No problem.

JAY: You're going to see awesome products. The whole shooting match. We built this so people could see what we're doing. There's the owner of the company, Terry — Integrity Rotational Molding, Integrity Commercial Products. This guy is a legend in the business. He's the one who told me: integrity means what you do when nobody's watching. And that's what we're all about.

JERRY: That's fantastic. So who are your distributors? Are they janitorial houses, food houses for restaurants, Grainger? Not necessarily the names — I'm not trying to pry into your company's secrets — but what type of distribution are you in now, and what kind are you looking to get into?

JAY: Good news — I don't know if the names of my manufacturer's reps are supposed to be a secret. I don't know why they would be. I'm so proud to be associated with them. I think I'll be telling these names in the course of these conversations. Here's what happened.

I joined the company having done a major rebranding project a few years earlier for another company involved in distribution, so I had some idea of this. And I'd spent three years as the B2B guy for an Ace Hardware franchise. So I had distribution experience. But Terry got me into this. I'm a full-time employee here.

The thing was, I thought I was going to ISSA. That was our first goal — go to the big international show in Vegas. We set up a 10-by-20 booth, beautiful, in the new exhibitors pavilion, which is gorgeous. I came to the show and got 85 swipes. All of them were manufacturer's reps and distributors, and a couple of colleges and municipalities. I thought I was going there to sell trash cans and tilt trucks. Instead, I found this whole world of distribution.

The big guys — the municipalities and colleges — were saying, "Who do you sell through?" I didn't know. My previous company, for almost 30 years, was very B2B in the plastic pallet business, direct to end users. Highly engineered equipment sale. I sold on every continent except Antarctica. That was a very different world.

After talking to the people who came to our booth — heavyweights, famous people in this industry, owners of big distribution houses, one guy who's been called the most influential person in 100 years to the JanSan industry — I was so proud they were stopping by. They saw what we were doing and said, "This is beautiful." All of a sudden I realized: we need to do distribution. Let's set it up pure and clean and make it easy for them.

That's what we figured out. From November to the middle of December, I had conversations with people everywhere, asking, "If you were me, what would you do?" The answer came back the same everywhere: set up distribution with manufacturer's reps. Nobody can afford to hire 30 of their own salespeople, put them in an office, and send them out cold-calling on end users. People don't do that anymore. We did that in the '90s. No way today.

Find great, high-powered, smart, honest, full-of-integrity manufacturer's reps. Let them work off a good commission. Help them be successful calling on distributors and finding end users to pull deals up through the distributors. Everybody wins.

That's what we decided. December came around, I realized that's what we needed to do. Did some final verification calls with everyone involved, talked with our management team — which is very collaborative; we have a big management team — and we all agreed. January 9th, I drove the stake in the ground.

Then I got hold of these world-class manufacturer's rep organizations I'd met, most of them at ISSA in Las Vegas. The first one was Buzzeo and Associates, right here in the Midwest. I'm so proud of them. The two main guys helping me cover Indianapolis, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia are two stand-up guys — Mark Musselman and Courtney Lewis. And guess where my first sales came from? Right there. My own state. I'm in Plainfield, Indiana — crossroads of America. Indianapolis is right next door, and I'm 10 minutes from the airport. So when you want to come visit us, this is where we are.

JERRY: No problem. You do know I'm a Midwest boy, don't you? I'm originally from St. Louis, Missouri. I like people talking about the Midwest.

JAY: That's what we are — we're doing Midwest. But then I started finding people in different territories. I've been in sales and marketing since I was about five years old, and one thing I've studied a lot is behavioral dynamics — understanding that different regions of the country have their own language and way of being. All sales is relationship oriented. People make the purchase in their heart, and then they cost-justify it later to paper the file or satisfy some boss. If you talk to people in a region who are familiar with the language, the colloquialisms, who have good contacts and are well-regarded — they're going to do the best for you.

On the East Coast, going up into New England — wouldn't it be nice to have a good Boston, Massachusetts, fast-talking financial guy who happens to know everybody in the country and knows all the top players in all the big organizations, from stem to stern? When I mention this name, people say, "I know him, he knows everybody." I said, "Let's get East Coast, New England, and then we'll do some national accounts too."

I hired a guy I met who I bet is a legend in the industry — Jeff Monroe, with Lifespace Innovation Group out of Beverly, Massachusetts, near Boston. Perfect New England and East Coast organization. He knows everybody, super smart. When I was talking to him I got business references — one was Barrett, the former executive director of ISSA. I got on the phone with Barrett and he said, "I've known Monroe forever. He talks a big talk and he delivers. His customers will tell you. I'll refer him to somebody, and later they'll come back and tell me — that man actually delivers." I said, I want him on my team.

JERRY: Just to clarify — I've never met Jeff that I know of, but I know the name because I've worked throughout New England a fair amount. I'm sure our paths have crossed. Now, how many manufacturer's reps do you have across the United States at this time?

JAY: Right now I've got that group. I've got to tell you about Genesis Supply — let me tell you about my guys. Eric Liebert and his group. It's a combination. This is for Florida and the Caribbean. I met them through a referral from a giant distributor in Florida. As I was talking to him, wanting to be part of what he was doing — and for any manufacturers listening who want to get things going, listen to the path I'm taking and see if it makes sense for you. You can call me. In a couple of years I'll probably be doing talks at ISSA about this for new manufacturers who don't know where to go or how to put this together.

I'll mention Jim Supply, Bobby Zagers — another awesome individual who's put together an incredible program in Florida. He came by my booth and we talked. "What would you do?" Finally I said, "I want to be involved with you. Who would you recommend as a great manufacturer's rep?" Next thing I know, Eric Liebert and Gary Gaviria with Catalyst and Genesis — and two other guys, Yamil and another. What a group covering Florida and the Caribbean.

Then I got introduced to another group: Durable Safety Products. Nobody knows them — why? Because they were brought to me by the former head of sales for Little Giant Ladder Company. The owners of Little Giant have sold since then, but they're still friends of mine. They recommended Clint Close, their 20-year guy who put together their entire distribution network. Clint and I got to be friends. He said, "I've got a group in the Southwest and Southeast that would be awesome for this. Give us a chance." I said, "It's not JanSan — what are you doing?" He said, "They can sell it. Let's see what we can do."

I said, okay — let's do something different and get some dedicated individuals. They're called Durable Safety Products. Five or six reps covering a bunch of states, run by Scott Sturgill, who's very well known. Scott and his sidekick are down in Florida. I told him, "Scott, you can't have Florida, but I'll take all the rest of the states if you want it." He said, "Deal."

JERRY: I have a question about manufacturer's reps — I am not one. When a manufacturer's rep is selling, say, a dozen trash cans, or 50, or whatever — is the customer getting billed from the manufacturer's rep, or from you, your company?

JAY: Good question. First — when you're having conversations and people use the word "customer," you have to ask: who's the customer? When you're going through distribution, the customer is the distributor, who has salespeople in the field calling on end users.

The manufacturer takes the product to the rep. The manufacturer's rep takes it to the distributor. The distributor sells it to the end user. The distributor is the one who gets the check from the end user and cuts the check to us.

The manufacturer's rep is the equivalent of what we used to do when you'd hire a room full of salespeople and say, "You're in charge of this part of the country, you're in charge of that part — now start making phone calls, travel, go to end users, make sales." The manufacturer's rep is that. I pay them a commission instead of a salary. They might have three, five, six, up to maybe 15 product lines they represent, and it's their job to do a good job for all of us across all those manufacturers. They are my sales team. That's where my main interest is.

JERRY: Years ago, I should have become a manufacturer's rep for many different companies. I should have — and it goes back to how you started this conversation about big companies. You can't put all your trust in them because they're bought and sold, they spin off, and you're out looking for new employment. I worked for Ecolab, then a regional company, then they sold to Swisher, Swisher sold back to Ecolab. It was a vicious circle that wasn't going to work out. Years ago I should have done that.

JAY: You'd be a great one. Let me know when it's time. Okay — here we go. Let me tell you about my last group. This is true networking. The whole thing is networking. ISSA was the grandest, and that's why we're here today. This is networking. The audience is networking. Go ahead — I'll be quiet.

JERRY: No, I just want you to know —

JAY: My other rep group is called RPM Co. — the Rude and Picker Company, headquartered in the Dallas-Houston, Texas area. They cover a multitude of states with superstars. They were referred to me by somebody else, and man, am I glad. I made friends with them and they're doing an awesome job for me in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri. They'd like Arkansas and Louisiana too, if those weren't already taken when I got to them. But they've got plenty to work on with us. Eric Rude and Steve Picker and their gang run a fantastic large organization. And this is as large as they're going to get — it's very personal. They're out there doing incredible things. I want to shout out about them too.

I'm proud of our manufacturer's rep organization. They're so good. I want them to have all the business they can possibly get and be very successful.

By the way, I mentioned the guy who put Little Giant Ladder Company together — you remember?

JERRY: Yeah.

JAY: Hal Wing was the founder. He's the guy who invented the infomercial. Then there was his brother, and Doug Wing took it over after Hal passed away. They worked in the business all those years out in Utah. Clint was part of building their big rep organization all over the country and the world. I called Clint — he lives in Iowa now, and he flunked retirement. I said, "Clint, here we go."

JERRY: Clint — I think my time's almost up. Could you wrap things up?

JAY: I'm going to tell you about Clint. I hired Clint to do Iowa, and he's picking up a little Nebraska, and he's a superstar. I would hate to miss him. So we've got the manufacturer's rep organization, and now they're going out to distributors and end users together. The principals of our company are out there supporting the entire effort — going to buying groups, meeting with other rep organizations in our group, finding new ones, doing training, visiting customers. It's all about loving and supporting our group that's going out there to make happy customers. People will be thrilled to be doing business with integritycommercialproducts.com.

JERRY: Great. I'm going to have to end this and I apologize — we got a late start because of my fault. I'll put all your contact information in the show notes. I appreciate the time you've given me today. Let's do this again.

JAY: Good. If people want us, call us. We're here. Integrity Commercial Products.

JERRY: Jay, I appreciate it. I'll call you when I get wrapped up here.

JAY: Okay, Jerry. Thank you for having me.

JERRY: Thank you.

JAY: This is beautiful. Bye.

JERRY: Bye now.

Jerry's Outro

JERRY: And that wraps up another episode of Cleaning Processes with Jerry. Big thanks to Jay Skinner for coming on the show and sharing his perspective. You can find all of Jay's contact information down in the show notes — if anything he said resonated with you, reach out and connect with him directly.

If you've got a story worth telling or experience worth sharing in the hospitality cleaning world, I'd love to have you on as a guest. Drop me a line — the door is always open.

Before you go, do me a favor. Hit that like button, share this episode with someone in the industry who'd get something out of it, and head over to HospitalityCleaning101.com to check out the brand new resources page. There's a lot of good stuff there I think you'll find useful.

Thanks for listening.