David Peacock, CEO of Hytrol Conveyor Co. in Jonesboro, has a bachelor’s degree from The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. “The Marines paid for my education,” he told Arkansas Business.
Peacock spent 12 years in the U.S. Marine Corps. Through his military career and afterward, he has lived in 13 different states. With a background primarily in operations, before joining Hytrol he worked at Rubbermaid, Textron, JLG and Cargotec, a European company.
Peacock says that of all the places he’s lived and worked, Jonesboro is the most neighborly.
The boom in retail delivery has been a game changer. Is Amazon one of your customers? Other online retailers?
Amazon is one of our many customers. The reality is that everyone in retail today is an online retailer. To not be online constrains a company’s ability to engage with customers.
Have supply chain disruptions affected your business, and if so, how?
Absolutely. Every day our folks face another disruption. My supply chain team has done a solid job overcoming these challenges, but that success comes at a cost. Yes, there’s a business cost, but less tangible but ultimately more impactful is the cost in stress that’s experienced by the team. Our employees have been dealing with these challenges since early in the COVID-19 pandemic with little relief.
I’m both proud of what they have accomplished, and I am concerned about the sustainability of continuing to overcome these disruptions.
Hytrol is known for going above and beyond to recruit workers, so how are your employee efforts faring, and are you having to try new things?
Recruiting and retention are a daily challenge for the company, but I don’t feel we are having to try new things. We are holding to our belief in our core values, and they continue to drive our focus on our folks.
For example, we put air conditioning in our Fort Smith facility to match the air conditioning that we have in our Jonesboro production area. Taking care of our folks is the right thing to do, and doing the right things drives retention. We talk about careers at Hytrol and not jobs. We want our team to be here for 30 or 40 years, not just six months. Understanding that, we make it a collaborative effort to ensure that our employees have the opportunities to have careers. It is a lot more than simply a job.
Could you give us a brief update on the Fort Smith operation?
Our Fort Smith operation is doing wonderfully. We are ahead of our hiring plan, for example, and we just completed installation of our paint system. This will smooth our workflows significantly.
The team in place there has hit every milestone that we have put before them. I don’t believe anyone felt that we could stand that operation up and begin delivering a product to customers in less than 60 days. But Phillip [Poston, the company’s director of Fort Smith operations] and his team worked hard to make it happen. They have done such a remarkable job that we are exploring expanding their operation already.
With the demand for capacity in our industry at all-time highs, the Fort Smith operation’s ability to grow beyond our initial plans is very exciting.
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