Providing Resources for Small to Medium-Sized Manufacturers with Kent Gladish

Contact Kent Gladish: Email:  KGladish@TMAIllinois.org LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgladish/ Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network podcast. I'm excited to introduce you today to Kent Gladish. Kent is Vice President of Member development at the Technology Manufacturing Association. TMA helps small to mid-sized manufacturers in Illinois basically with just about everything. Kent has a unique background, with an undergrad in physics and also an MBA in marketing. Kent, welcome to the show. Kent Gladish: Thank you for having me. It's always good to be live here and looking forward to our near future. Lisa Ryan: All right, awesome. Please share a bit of your journey to what led you to TMA on that Friday afternoon? Kent Gladish: I graduated college with a physics degree and said, now what am I going to do? And I landed at a company called Video Jet in the Chicago area. If you open your refrigerator, you'll find little freshness dates on just about everything in your refrigerator. That company's grown from 150 people up to probably up to 3000 by now. But that got me into my master's degree to find my home and marketing and ended up at a small manufacturer in the Chicago area called humbler. They went through another recession lost my position there, but I had met TMA along the way. On a Friday afternoon, I was able to land the position, and whenever anybody tells you the cold call doesn't work anymore, well, it's just not true. It does. I joke about that because I wouldn't be sitting where I'm doing what I do, which I love to pieces. I like to say our Members manufacture something. They're not good at all the other stuff. You have to have the manufactures in northeast Illinois. When you think about all that stuff, health insurance, and 401k, and I need a freight forward or need to redo my floor, I need to redo my ceiling. I need to figure out covid. I need. I need. I need. I need. Big gigantic companies have all those resources. They join the sma