wegg® showcase: Julie Van Brunt, President and CEO, Lintech International

While we’ve never really exported, we imported from the very beginning. A lot of our suppliers are global. We have a few in Asia, several in Europe and, of course, a lot domestically. And our customers are global.

A year after he stepped back from Lintech, my father started another distribution company, this one in Mexico. We now have a Mexican entity under the family umbrella of companies, and I have been president of that company for about three years. Then on December 31, 2023, we bought a Canadian distributor called Andicor Specialty Chemicals in Mississauga, Ontario. Andicor is just like Lintech in the US, a specialty chemical distributor handling mostly CASE products. Andicor allows us to expand our North American footprint.

The big buzz word now is tariffs. We all have had to deal with that. We have been caught clearing customs on the wrong day. By that I mean, the tariffs are 35 percent the day we are clearing customs, then they drop a week or so later. But the biggest struggle we had importing was during the supply crisis in 2022, when ocean freight became outrageously expensive. When the price of your container, just to cross the ocean, was three, four, or even ten times what they normally are. We’re not facing that today, but that was a very difficult time.

Don’t give up. Be persistent. Build a great team around you because you can’t do everything yourself. Work with people you can trust, who know even more than you do. I have a great team around me. That has been crucial in the success of Lintech. There are individuals at Lintech who, when I look back over the last 40 years, I can say, “Wow, they helped us get here, or they helped us get there.” I appreciate them. I respect their dedication to the company and to me personally.