Jon Huntsman - A Plan for All Seasons

A plan for all seasons: Jon Huntsman

Del Marth

LUNC IS NOT Jon M. Huntsman's concept of maximizing time. He often skips it, preferring to work through the noon hour exploring opportunities in the free enterprise system.

Use time to the fullest, is his credo.

"When I was a boy, I wanted to be a builder of American Businesses," he says. Today, at age 47, he is president, chairman and owner of Huntsman Chemical Corporation, a polystyrene manufacturer headquartered in Salt Lake City. And he is still building.

Revenues in 1983-84 were $240 million; in a few more years, Huntsman promises, they will be $2 billion to $3 billion. On the basis of his past performance, he can be expected to keep that promise.

"I maximize my entire time by focusing on three things in life," Huntsman says. "My business, my family and my church work. Youhave to be well organized, to avoid going off on tangents."

It is doubtful he has ever gone off on one. His career reads like a railroad timetable, timed down to the minute of arrival and departure.

Purposefulness is part of Jon Huntsman's heritage. He is a highly active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints--his family came to Utah in 1847 with the first Mormon wagon train--and lifelong purposes are important to Mormons. Huntsman has methodically designed his business career.

After four years of Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and two years in the Navy, Huntsman, at age 24, picked his first job with great care:

"I analyzed where I could get the best background to solidify my goal in learning business. I decided on a medium-sized business, one with $30 million to $50 million sales a year, a basic business like food."

He signed on in 1961 as a trainee at Olson Farms, Inc., a major egg producer. After five years, he had become the Los Angeles firm's executive vice president.

A problem with egg cartons at Olson's introduced Huntsman to polystyrene, an oil derivative used today in plastic packaging in appliances, toys, hardware, food and electronics.

"Consumers in the 1970s bought eggs in pulp containers," he says. "The containers leaked, and they broke. We began experimenting with polystyrene, trying to make a soft, liquid-resistant foam container."

The experiments led to a merger in 1965 of Olson's packaging division with Dow Chemical's packaging division. But the new firm, Dolco Packaging Corporation, faltered under technical people who knew little about marketing.

Huntsman, put in as Dolco president in 1967, quickly made the necessary changes. The 30-year-old executive moved out "all the engineers and technical people and moved in a group of bright young men who didn't know it couldn't be done.

"By the time I left in 1970 we had a smoothly running business, had introduced polystyrene egg cartons to America and had 30 percent of the market."

Huntsman figured he was right on schedule: "After almost a decade in this type of industry, I felt comfortable knowing how to run a business. I felt it was time to move out on my own."

But government, not business, singled him out.

Roland Rich Wolley, a California attorney close to the Nixon administration, recommended Huntsman to White House aides. An invitation soon came from Elliot L. Richardson, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary.

"I was enticed," says Huntsman, "because the position was so different from what I had done before." He signed on as HEW associate administrator.

But his dreams of roles in corporate America were not shunted to a siding. Before he left for Washington, 13 friends and associates from the packaging industry established Huntsman Container Corporation with a $1.3 million investment and received a commitment from him that he would leave the government by 1972 and return to become the new firm's chief executive officer. Of the 1.3 million, $300,000 came from Huntsman and his brother, Blaine.

After six months at HEW, Huntsman was moved into the White House as President Nixon's staff secretary. That was not surprising, says Terry R. Parker, for 11 years a Huntsman business associate.

"John has a tremendous ability to motivate people. And he is inspirational. He can still set a fire under me, keep me and the organization going."

In 1971 Huntsman Container Corporation needed a fire under it. It was not making money. The investors beckoned Huntsman, who was finishing his first year at the White House.

President Nixon got Huntsman's resignation, and Huntsman Container got its CEO.

Huntsman remains on the fringes of politics. HE and Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) are Utah's Reagan-Bush Cochairmen. Some of his associates are certain Huntsman will be Utah's governor someday. Meanwhile, he keeps his contacts in Washington, where he is on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce board of directors.

"But, frankly," Huntsman says, "the excitement and thrill of business far exceed the corresponding benefits of full-time public service."

Huntsman Container in 1972 was fighting for survival. But the CEO assured his investors, he says, that he "wouldn't go back to the well-head for more money." He created the Big Mac container for McDonald's, he built polystyrene plants in Europe and Australia to provide packaging when fast food chains moved overseas, he bartered products for raw materials during the 1973-74 oil crisis.

"When you are struggling and need to legitimately come up with money," he says, "a man's mind can be brilliant."

Huntsman's enterprise not only put the container corporation in the black, but he also succeeded in attracting buyers. He and the other original investors sold their interests for $34 million.

A wealthy man, Hunstman turned to his church work. He was asked to be president of the Mormon mission in Washington. It was a three-year assignment, during which he and his family (wife Karen and nine children) "directed missionaries, opened new churches and converted 4,000 people to our faith."

The work was rewarding and familiar, for Huntsman has always devoted as much time to the church as to business. The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City is only a block from his corporate office on the fifth floor of a shopping mall/office building complex.

"Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights I work at the church," he says. "And Sundays are most productive. I leave home at 6:1 5 a.m. and return at 10:30 p.m. after 15 hours of straight church work."

Says Jack Calton, Huntsman's chief finance officer: "You never met a more organized man."

SO ORGANIZED, in fact, that 10 months before his Washington church assignment ended in July, 1983, Huntsman was putting together another polystyrene business. He bought Shell Oill Company's national polystyerene division, then acquired Shell's Carrington, England, plant and an independent polystyrene plant in Belpre, Ohio.

When his church assignement ended, he was sole owner of Huntsman Chemical Corporation. "It has taken me 25 years" to get his own business but, he says, "you kind of do things in bits and pieces. You don't start right out as your own boss.

"You build and develop and create friends in banking, in production, in marketing--and you put them all together."

Huntsman runs his plants at 96 to 100 percent capacity. He believes there is a "niche for tightly run, tightly managed companies that have a firm control on costs, that keep overheads down, that are marketing-oriented."

Says Terry Parker, who is Huntsman Chemical's senior vice president: "Jon's a great concept person. He has that unique ability to conceive something and then implement it. Most executives can do only one or the other."

Poorly managed businesses with profit potential do not escape Huntsman's entrepreneurial eye. He recently acquired Utah-based Olympus Oil Company and Prospector Square, the latter a hotel/resort center in Utah's mountains. He has transformed both into profitable enterprises: The oil firm has annual sales of $30 million, the resort, $7 million.

Despite his outstanding record as an entrepreneur, Huntsman boasts of no unusual insight, no formula for succeeding in business. Yet co-workers marvel at his grasp of every facet, every minute of his waking hours.

Huntsman says that those three things he focuses on in life--business, family, church--"all require the same administrative skills. They all require relating to people, letting them have authority and responsibility."

And, above all, he says, "maximizing time."