Innovating Your Manufacturing Processes with Jordan Erskine

Connect with Jordan Erskine: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanerskine/ Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to this episode of the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Jordan Erskine. Jordan is an innovative founder with 20 years of experience in the cosmetic contract manufacturing industry. Jordan co-founded Dynamic Blending. Since then, Dynamic Blending has seen over a 12,500% growth in less than five years. Jordan talks about breathing new life into a stale industry and how you can innovate within your industries. Jordan, welcome to the show. Jordan Erskine: Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here. Lisa Ryan: Please share a bit about your background and what got you started in manufacturing and the cosmetic contract manufacturing industry. Jordan Erskine: It's a crazy story. I graduated from high school when I was 18 years old. I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself. In my neighborhood, there was a guy who started a contract manufacturing company. I didn't know what that was. When I graduated high school, he said, hey do you want to work with me? At the time, there were ten employees or fewer. It was small. I said sure because at 18 years old, I didn't have any prospects for college. I enjoyed it.  I was learning how to develop cosmetics and skincare products from scratch. I learned a lot of that is chemistry and that knowledge, but it's an art form too. It was fantastic to see how some of these higher-end skincare products come to be. So I stuck with it and got my undergrad in finance. I left that company and went to another company, where we are contract manufacturing toothpaste for a large Fortune 50 global consumer goods company. We manufactured four to 5 million tubes a month of toothpaste, so it was a very fast-paced operation. I worked there for about nine years and had a lot of student loan debt. I got my MBA in international business while working there at the time. I had about $140,000 in student loan debt between my wife and m