Crafting A Permanent Legacy: A DuPont Engineer’s Leap Into Entrepreneurship

Hello everyone, this is Pete Worrell of Bigelow with another episode of the Positive Enterprise Value podcast. On this series we interview seasoned, successful, high-performing Entrepreneur Owner-Managers to discover from them a few of the breadcrumbs they have left along the way in the forest; a little bit like Hansel and Gretel as they traveled through the forest and ultimately, successfully navigated it.

On this latest episode, my guest is Gary Mottershead. Gary is a good friend, coach, and entrepreneur who founded and is the current CEO of GCP Industrial Products in Ontario, where he imports sustainable industrial products for use in North America and all around the world.

You'll hear Gary speak very openly and candidly about his path from being a chemical engineer, to his career at DuPont, to his becoming a nascent entrepreneur and then actually a real entrepreneur with skid marks on the road to show for it. And how? He dives into how he has navigated through the business over the past 35 years (that proverbial Hansel and Gretal forest), he's thought about issues like building the organization, how the personal and the professional journey are simultaneous, which then leads him to think through issues of leadership succession and perhaps even ownership succession. I have been wanting to have Gary as a guest for a long time and had a really fun time together exploring a variety of topics that even I hadn't expected. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.

Listen below or on Soundcloud here.

What I am Reading / Listening to

Sonny Boy: A Memoir (2024)
By Al Pacino

Pacino is timeless, but, I was surprisingly disillusioned by this book; it reads as if it were dictated live in one draft with no further editing or even proofing. I mean, the story is there, and the story is interesting (at points riveting). He has some great narratives about growing up and breaking into the Actors Studio and into film… but the writing is dull. The story is completely sequential—starts when he is born and ends in the present time. The writing is so conversational that you can almost hear Pacino’s voice. My mistake with this book is that I think I should have gone with the Audible.com version as I heard from a friend that Pacino reads it, and fills it with tone, emotion, even some singing. The man is a master of his craft, only wish I heard it in his own voice.

Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Quote

“What it may take to be completely fulfilled is to understand this: the natural human condition is to tirelessly strive-- and never really arrive at a ‘place’ called fulfillment. Striving is inherited from thousands of years of biological selection and is literally imprinted in our DNA. It’s what we are built to do. If we can understand that striving can result in learning and growing and never-ending positive change, then with that wisdom we are in a completely fulfilled place.”

—Pete Worrell, Co-CEO & Managing Director of Bigelow LLC

What I am Reading / Listening to

Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Quote

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