One Step at a Time

CMA Ji Yoon took his expertise working for larger multinationals and applied it to a junior, vibrant company that was not only on a growth trajectory, but offered product innovation with an environmentally friendly footprint.

By Andrea Civichino

Corporate social responsibility is a concept with growing prevalence within Canada and around the world. JER Envirotech International Corp. (“JER”), headquartered in Delta, British Columbia, is one company that’s gaining more recognition nationally and abroad for its focus on preferable alternatives to the pure wood and plastics industry.

Using a patented technology and proprietary processing techniques, JER combines waste organic cellulose fibres — primarily wood flour or rice hulls, with virgin or recycled thermoplastics, such a polypropylene, polyethylene or polystyrene to produce a wide range of alloyed biocomposite products. The resulting JERtech® thermoplastic biocomposites capture the best characteristics of both wood and plastic and enable new and marketable performance capabilities. 

Founded in the mid-1990s, JER became a publicly traded corporation on the Toronto Venture Exchange in 2004.  The company’s patented technology was developed in partnership with The National Research Council - Industrial Materials Institute of Canada, an agency of the Canadian Federal government, and JER possesses the exclusive worldwide licence.  The technology centres around the interface between the organic fibre and the thermoplastic matrix of JER’s biocomposite compounds — and specifically on the inherent dryness of the finished product.   Dryness is of critical importance to both the injection molders and extruders that utilized JER’s thermoplastic biocomposites as a raw material input.

2007 was a key milestone in JER’s history as the company shifted from primarily an R&D focus into commercial production.  An entirely new management team was implemented and sales and marketing initiatives shifted into high gear.  The company closed off the year with more than 50 clients in various phases of testing, pre-production trials and even mainstream production.  The applications were numerous and spanned across industries from construction and transport to automotive and retail.  Highlights for the year include the signing of two potentially lucrative long-term supply contracts with a U.S.-based composite decking manufacturer and a U.S.-based toy design firm.   

Ji Yoon, B.Comm., MBA, CMA, joined JER after leaving an attractive position as acting CFO and controller with one of Canada’s largest building materials distributor with revenues in excess of a billion dollars to “take part in building a legacy with a small company that I saw was blazing trails.” As a father of a young family and an interest in the environment, Yoon was excited to be part of a young organization that offers a viable yet socially responsible technology.

“My due diligence before accepting the position of CFO and corporate secretary with JER included more than six months of watching and observing the progress of the executive appointments and business initiatives,” Yoon says. “I was intrigued by the eventual assembly of a new, top-notch management team with significant industry experience — a team that was clearly designed for high performance and execution.”

With over 14 years of finance, accounting and public markets experience, Yoon confidently stepped into his new role at JER, despite his inexperience working for a start-up company.  “As a CMA, I was able to pull together my experiences as a manager and visionary to immediately start building a financial discipline with the right people and the right systems,” Yoon says. “The CMA training provided me with the foundation knowledge to navigate through the business growth spurts,” he adds.

“My primary focus was to take my past experience and build a company from scratch. From the board side, I had to come up with a board compensation plan, a corporate governance program, a corporate governance committee, as well as create board charters and mandates,” Yoon says. “The CEO, Edward Trueman, and I also reviewed the competencies of our board members to ensure they were in line with the direction JER is heading.  On the finance side, with the right people deployed, we implemented an enterprise-wide manufacturing ERP system within six weeks in preparation for the next level of evolution for the company.”

Team building

For Yoon, one of the most important ways to grow a business is to get the right people into the right jobs — a critical move for a company that has doubled its revenues and is on the path to become a $100 million company. Yoon stresses the importance of building a solid team environment and implementing processes that will act as the foundation to achieve goals.

“At this stage of the company, it’s important to make sure there are people inside the organization who also have the skill sets to grow and be challenged,” he says. “I’ve added a new controller, and a couple of accountants, one of whom is also a CMA SLP candidate, and I’m looking at how we can move more building blocks to progress the business. This is really where the SLP program comes in — looking at the future of the company and the strategic positioning, then building the necessary internal systems and infrastructure.”

Yoon adds that bi-weekly meetings with his staff and monthly meetings with the entire team ensures everyone stays focused and feels a sense of ownership with the progress of the organizational growth as a whole.

Strengthening relations

As CFO and corporate secretary, Yoon sees himself helping JER define its role in the North American and overseas markets. As CFO, he provides leadership and direction to the finance team, ensures accurate and timely reports are prepared for effective decision making for the North American and Asian operations.  Additionally, he oversees the strategic planning, public reporting, treasury, tax planning, audit, investor relations and internal control functions.

“We are practically limitless in the applications for our products and which market verticals we can target, but it’s about making progress one step at a time,” Yoon says.

The market potential for JER’s products is indeed very high. The company is uniquely positioned as a custom formulator and has the expertise to adjust its material characteristics using various combinations of thermoplastic resins, organic fibres and additives.  JER can literally custom build a material to meet exacting customer specifications.

In the beginning of 2008, JER announced a partnership with Sprig Toys of Fort Collins, Colorado — a developer of environmentally friendly, “kid-powered” electronic vehicles and accessories. Designed for preschoolers, all toy vehicle and character bodies are molded using Sprigwood^®, a durable, child-safe thermoplastic biocomposite compound developed in partnership with JER.

Yoon says one of the most unique applications he’s seen the product used is to build “chicken condos.”

“We’re seeing a strong demand in the agriculture industry for the use of our product,” Yoon says. “In the egg production industry, poultry housing is usually built using MDF and plywood. The roosting chickens tend to chip at the material and often ingest the chemicals used to manufacture the product. As a more durable, safer and non-toxic alternative, our biocomposite sheeting lasts longer and can be ingested with no ill effects.”

On the international scene, the company currently operates three production lines in Delta as well as one in Banting, Selangor, Malaysia and one in Caloocan City, Philippines. Two of the five production lines are owned by JER and the remaining three lines are owned by JER through joint venture partnerships. Yoon says the Company is poised for expansion of production capacity into the U.S. markets and a substantial portion of his time is spent interacting with potential investors in the U.S., Canada, and throughout Europe.

As a recent graduate of the MBA program at Queen’s University, Yoon says his MBA and CMA training has helped him implement changes in such a short time frame.  He received his Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Alberta, and has been an active volunteer board adjudicator for the CMA SLP program for the past seven years.  Yoon also serves as a member of the board of directors and chair of the audit committee for Fireswirl Technologies Inc., another publicly traded, growth orientated technology company.

“The SLP program has a strong strategic financial focus,” he says. “As much as we need the historical-type accounting information, I saw more value in the CMA program because of its forward thinking, leadership, and operational side. As a CFO, I not only need to be strong on the technical side but I also need to make sure the building blocks are in place for JER to support its goals for expansion. So far, it has been a very rewarding experience at JER.  We are shifting the company from traditional manufacturing processes to those offering scalability, allowing us to see the forest from the trees, and we are building products that I’m proud to tell my children we are socially responsible.”

Andrea Civichino is editor-in-chief of CMA Management.

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