The PE Shift: Leadership Transitions
in Private Equity June 2025

Alistair Ross 0:03
Our guest today is Matt Soule, former president and CEO of Ennis Flint, a company which grew to become the largest manufacturer of pavement marking products before selling to PPG in 2020.
Matt previously spent time in investment banking and private equity, working with such firms as Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Equity Group Investments and 1st Union Capital.

Matt, it's a pleasure to have you.

Matt Soule 0:27
Great to be here. Thanks Alistair.

Alistair Ross 0:30
Well, Matt, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey leading up to your time at Ennis Flint?

Matt Soule 0:39
Absolutely, during college, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do and ended up as a history major. I then found my way into private equity working for a small firm in Charlotte, NC for a couple years before going back to Business School.

Post Business School, I moved briefly to New York and then Chicago with Merrill Lynch in their M&A corporate finance groups. I then joined a private equity firm, Sam Zell's old non-real estate private equity firm in Chicago in 1996 and I stayed there until 2000 when I moved back to Charlotte.

I had always wanted to own or buy a business, and I didn't quite know how to do that, especially as a 22 year old. But private equity was a fantastic way to learn how to go about doing that, and it gave me pretty much every tool I needed other than the actual money to do it.

So in 2004, I and my business partner purchased a company called Flint Trading, which was the precursor of Ennis-Flint. This was a single manufacturing facility located in central North Carolina that focused on a very specialized area of the pavement marking industry.

Alistair Ross 2:28
And you saw a lot of success with Ennis-Flint starting from when you and your business partner acquired the business, right the way through its exit in 2020? Can you share a little bit about that journey?

Matt Soule 2:40
Sure. My partner and I actually went in thinking this was a five-year hold and we would try to grow the business a little bit, sell it and maybe go try something else. But we ended up absolutely falling in love with the business and the industry. The people were fantastic and we recognized it was an industry that really nobody had focused on. It was really something that I'd never heard of before getting involved with the company.

That said, and obviously, as you drive around every day, you see the number of roads which all have markings on them and it is critical that each is marked. Because if you're ever driving at night in the rain, those markings are literal lifesavers.

And so, we felt that we were not only making a quality product but also having a positive impact as well. The business became an interesting challenge for me too. We asked how do we grow this industry? How do we make it better? How do we improve the standards?

We started by reinvesting in the business. We used all of our cash flow to grow the number of sales reps we had, to invest in R&D and to make acquisitions.

Over time, we did a half dozen or more acquisitions over the 17 years that we were in the in the company and that ultimately allowed us to go from being a very small niche player to the largest in the world.

Alistair Ross 4:19
It sounds like an incredible journey Matt. How do you think starting off in private equity and investment banking shaped your approach to business? It sounded like Ennis Flint was highly acquisitive.

Matt Soule 4:30
Yeah, it was. It was fantastic training. From learning how leveraged buyouts work to understanding what was the right leverage to use. How do you identify red flags in the beginning and going forward after you acquire the business? How do you measure things? How do you know if it's going well? What are the hidden costs of capital? For example, was there too much inventory or too many receivables? Are you paying your payables too quickly? What are you spending? Do you have Capex that you don't need to spend and things that aren't just on the P&L, but certainly reflected in your cash balance or your reduction of debt capabilities. So that was probably the first thing.

The second thing was understanding how critical management is, not just the CEO, but the entire executive team and even the next level down. I saw multiple companies that had a fantastic industry and not such a good management team and it's hard to make money in that environment. You can have a mediocre company and a great management team, and you can still make great money.

And I think that was the other big lesson. It's one thing to hear that, it's another to see it in real life, with the dozens of companies that I was involved with in my banking years.

Alistair Ross 6:06
You hit on such a great point. People play such a critical role in in driving value for an organization. Given the acquisitions that you did over the course of your time with Ennis Flint, how did you handle the integration of those people that you were absorbing into the business?

Matt Soule 6:30
Well our industry was very mom and pop. As I mentioned, there were a lot of very small or even medium-sized businesses that had been run by family, often for multiple generations. And when my business partner Steve and I purchased Ennis-Flint, one of the things we agreed on was that we were going to run it like a private equity owned business.

We were not going to fund our kids college or buy ourselves fancy cars every other year. We were going to run it exactly like a real grown up business needs to be run. And I think that was critical because it's a better use of cash.

Some of the companies we acquired didn't have that level of rigor.

I have a lot of respect for the folks that can build a business. You know, we bought rather than built from Ground Zero. And so the folks that can do that are a different breed, but oftentimes they're bored with the day-to-day and mundane financial aspects of business. So bringing a Private equity mindset to mom and pop businesses was sort of our initial plan.

As we acquired the companies, obviously you'd look at do we shut down a facility? Can we consolidate and save some money?

You're going to see synergies, but the biggest single thing I think we learned sometimes better, sometimes worse, was that the critical item for success for us in acquisitions was employee and customer retention. [Customer retention went hand-in-hand with employee retention in many cases, so we asked ourselves can we keep these critical employees that we acquired and thereby keep our critical customers]

And it doesn't matter how much money you save in purchasing if you lose 40% of your customers. It was a bad deal.

Alistair Ross 9:42
For sure, as you think about the number of acquisitions and the scale at which the business grew, can you share a little bit about some of the metrics you measured?

Matt Soule 9:53
Sure. When we bought the business it was $18 million in revenue and it had a single facility in Thomasville, NC, making a product called preformed thermoplastic. This was a very niche product in a much larger set of pavement marking products.

By the time we sold to PPG in December of 2020, we had over 600 million in revenue and almost 1500 employees. We had 28 or 29 manufacturing facilities on in South America, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

The US and Canada were our biggest markets, but we were all over the globe.

Alistair Ross 11:20
I can imagine there was added complexity with the businesses as it scaled and grew over time. What were some of the new key roles and new leadership hires that you made for the business over the years?

Matt Soule 11:33
I think there were a handful of roles that really weren't on our radar early on, when we were an $18 or $20 million revenue company.

For instance, public affairs. It is just not something you can afford as a small business. But it was important to stress the importance of markings and push to get incremental funding for the highway safety industry.

Even things like autonomous vehicles and other emerging technologies need pavement markings in order to function. They're still mostly camera based and they understand that if you don't have good pavement markings on the road, you increase risks of a wreck or fatalities on the road.
So it was important this was understood at the highest levels.

I think the other big one was in Supply Chain Management.

Some of the components are typically only manufactured or produced overseas and we started out buying through distributors in the US because we didn't have the capability of having an international supply chain manager. By bringing in a leader there, we were able to source directly from South Korea, China and India. So that was another significant transition as we grew that saved us money.

Building out a safety network was also critical. As we grew, we were trying to be the leader in the industry and certainly didn't need workplace incidents that could cause us to lose our reputation with state governments that purchased our products.

Alistair Ross 15:19
So public affairs, supply chain management and workforce safety were three critical functions for you. What about the management team? How did the ELT team change from the early days in the 2000s up to 2020?

Matt Soule 15:36
Yeah, early on, it was a small team. I oversaw sales and finance, and my business partner oversaw operations and R&D. And we had a plant manager, and a VP of Sales. But that was pretty much the entire team.

As we grew, we hired a CFO. My partner ultimately retired, but for a long time, the two of us kind of co-managed the business. We brought in a full-time supply chain leader, a COO and hired a general counsel.

We hired a full time HR person and product management and product development was a new position for us as well that was on the executive leadership team.

Other than Steve and I, every other position was created along the way.
And in the end, there were 12 or 13 folks on the executive leadership team. A couple of them would have been overseas, like the South American business leader, Asia Pacific Business leader, European Business leader and then about ten of us in the US.

Alistair Ross 17:17
And how did you approach planning as it related to your organizational structure?
Was organizational structure and people planning something you reevaluated annually?

Matt Soule 17:33
It was something we reevaluated every year but the temptation was always to hire from within.
Sometimes things didn't work out. We did use executive recruiters at times but in hindsight, I wish we would have used more, especially for certain key roles.

Alistair Ross 18:56
You have had to navigate a fair amount of disruption over the time you spent with Ennis Flint, starting with coming out of the.com bubble when you acquire the business, and the financial crises of 2008/ 2009, and then right the way through to COVID in 2020. How did you steer through those experiences?

Matt Soule 19:49
Yeah. I think the biggest challenges we had were over the 17 plus years were all those exogenous factors.

We were a much smaller company in 2008 and 9 but 2009 was the only year in the first 10 years when we owned the business where we had negative year over year revenue and that was only down two or three percent. Some of that is because the industry itself is, for better or worse, very slow moving. It is government dollars primarily, even if it's going through contractors, but it's federal dollars, state dollars, city and county dollars. All commingled in many cases, and those dollars don't tend to be up 30% one year and down 30% the next. There's kind of a smoothing effect and we were the beneficiary of that in the 2008, 2009 period.

That said, it was a scary period because there were certain areas that had severe budget crises and performed significant cuts and you didn't know how far that was going to ripple over to other states. I'm pleased to say we did not do any layoffs during that period, feeling like we had a good financial position. The team had been loyal to us and we wanted to be loyal back to the team and I think it garnered quite a bit of goodwill.

In the 10 years between then and COVID, our biggest challenges were really related to supply chain shortages. And there were a number of factors like for instance the deep freeze in Houston.
A lot of the resins and base materials for our paints and thermoplastics came out of producers in Texas.

For those producers, their plants were completely shut down and we just couldn't get product.

Of course, that was the winter season when that happened, but they were offline in some cases for months and our industry is not a top dollar payer for certain things, so we weren't first in line when they recovered.

Our biggest season is spring. As people order markings that they need for the summer, and so we had shortages, and we had to put customers on allocation. When you are having to call a long time customer and say you're only going to get 70% of what you ordered, they tend not to understand.
And so I think the Houston freeze was a big challenge for us then.

Another example was a yellow pigment plant in China that produces 80% of the type of pigment we use and it's specified in one of our categories of thermoplastics. What happened was that a fertilizer plant next door blew up and took it out. The Chinese government shut down the entire industrial park and we were all scrambling. We had to go on allocation again.

Those situations were the worst because you disappointed your customers. And you know, they understood the concept but didn't like the message that we were giving them. And if competitors happened to have a little more material than we did, customers would go there and then they would stay there.

Alistair Ross 25:18
Speaking of supply chain challenges, there's a lot of parallels given what's happening from a tariff perspective today. Do you have any recommendations for CEO's that are thinking about rejigging their supply chains.

Matt Soule 25:44
Yeah, I think my best advice would be not to put all your eggs in one basket.

While pricing is often better, if you go with that incremental volume, it's not the best move in that doomsday scenario which can really burn you. So, if you can have two suppliers, great. If you can have three, even better. Maybe a sixty-thirty-ten split of your volumes. At minimum, if you do have to go with one provider for whatever reason, then make sure they've got multiple manufacturing sites.

I would never go with a single manufacturing site with a single vendor.

Alistair Ross 26:26
Great advice. Switching gears to your current roles, you're currently working as an advisor and board member for a few PE and VC backed businesses. Can you share a little bit about your experiences there?

Matt Soule 26:42
Sure. I'm on four boards total. Two of them are private equity backed. First one is a company called safety markings. It's a pavement striping company in Connecticut that services the New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island region and it was purchased by a private equity firm a little over a year ago with the intention of growing the business organically and through acquisition. There's a lot of consolidation happening in the Traffic Safety industry right now generally.

The second is a company called Plasticade that is a Chicago-based manufacturer of all of the orange things that you see on the road, the barrels, cones, barriers, roll up signs etc. that are on the road.

They are the largest in their space selling to distributors as well as contractors. They were purchased by a New York based private equity firm in the second half of 2024.

For the other two boards, one is a start up in the healthcare industry in North Carolina and the last one is a local Community College nonprofit.

Alistair Ross 28:07
I see a little bit of a theme on some of these boards, staying close to what you know well.
What do you enjoy about those roles, Matt?

Matt Soule 28:21
They've been a ton of fun, and I think the most fascinating part for me is how small the world really is.

Neither of those companies were competitors to my old business. One was a customer, the other was in a related area but didn't cross paths at all. And I really enjoy being able to connect the dots of the industry and connect the people - whether it's for hiring purposes or a potential joint venture of some sort. Being a sounding board keeps you emotionally charged and keeps the competitive juices flowing.

It's very different being on a board for private equity-backed companies than it is for a startup without any institutional capital, versus a nonprofit. Those are three very different types of boards.

The private equity boards are certainly the most professional as they should be. Each private equity firm has a little bit of their own process and handprint that they leave with a business.

Some of the themes are the same like how do we grow? How do we increase market share?
How do we expand geographically? How do we expand our product suite?

Thinking about those problems is exciting, and of course, having a pool of capital available from the private equity firm also allows things to happen a little bit more quickly than with the other types of boards.

Alistair Ross 30:35
I'm sure it's a lot of fun helping these businesses evolve and grow.

Matt Soule 30:48
Absolutely.

Alistair Ross 30:49
Turning back to the industries you've worked with in directly, what trends do you see shaping the future of manufacturing?

Matt Soule 30:59
Yeah, I don't know that I'm qualified to opine on that one. I know my old industry and related industries in the Traffic Safety space. But if someone's interested in the Traffic Safety or product manufacturing within the Traffic Safety space - whether it be in a traffic control services, striping services, technology of traffic control, or traffic flow, or manufacturing again, whether it's the Plasticade side or the Ennis-Flint side or something else. I would say that it's an industry that has a huge number of long-term employees that really, really care.

They care about the function of what they're doing - i.e. making the world a safer place for driving.
And again it's a calling for a lot of the folks that are in the industry, and so the passion is a bit unlike most of the industries that I've seen, which is a great thing.

The trend is very much consolidation within the industry, and that is across the board. Whether it's the services, the technology, or the manufacturing. All of them are consolidating via private equity at this point. That trend started maybe six or seven years ago and has only accelerated in the past several years. Historically, it's a slow growth GDP+ business. But it's also very steady in an economic downturn, as I mentioned. Even in a severe downturn, you're unlikely to see a major contraction like you might in many other industries.

The other thing I would say to anyone interested, the technology is changing, and it will change the industry. Driverless vehicles, for example; we've been talking about them for a decade, and they were going to be here in full force five years ago and yet still they are limited.

It will continue to come more slowly than the experts prognosticate because there's too much red tape. There is too much of an embedded infrastructure around people driving their own cars, concerns about communication with each other and the hacking of autonomous vehicles, along with some of the ethical dilemmas in the insurance side of things that need to shake out first.

There is a whole book of litigation that hasn't been written yet on who's at fault for various things that may happen down the road with autonomous vehicles.

It is a fantastic industry, but it is certainly not one without its without its challenges and I think as it is consolidated, larger companies will be able to push through some of these technologies and change a little more quickly than they have in the past.

Alistair Ross 34:25
Really interesting. You know, looking at your transition into those board positions, what advice can you share with other CEOs who are considering making the same transition?

Matt Soule 34:38
Yeah. I think one of the things that that I've learned; there's kind of an old adage that you guys have probably heard that is, "there's no right way to parent, but there are a whole lot of wrong ways".

I would say the same thing for leading a business or being a board member. My advice to somebody who maybe has just left a CEO type role and is looking at other options.

The first would be, don't jump too quickly into new things because you're afraid of being bored.

Relax, let yourself enjoy yourself a little bit. Get a little bit bored, and figure out what it is you want to do, and eventually that offer you can't refuse is going to present itself. And you'll find the right thing.
Learn how to say no effectively. I will be the first one to say that I did not follow my own advice.

On that, people had given me that advice and I thought, "No way, let's jump right in", and it was the wrong thing to do.

The other thing would be to keep in touch with your colleagues and friends - have calls, do lunches, have a breakfast. Go to an industry event if it presents itself and keep your network warm because you never know when it will lead.

Alistair Ross 36:20
Terrific advice.

Well, it's been so great speaking to you about all of this, Matt. What's next for you?

Matt Soule 36:31
I'm enjoying the intellectual challenge of serving on boards and would love to continue to do this for a number of years. I'm still in my 50s for a little while longer and I'd like to have a good mix of private equity backed and nonprofit board roles going forward.

Alistair Ross 37:08
Any company would be lucky to have you. Thank you so much for your time, Matt.