Why Supply Chain Leaders Are Key To Solving Systemic Business Challenges With C.J. Nord
- 10 hours ago
- 44 min read
C.J. Nord is the Founder of Supply Chains for Good, an organization that applies supply chain expertise to social impact, public safety, family prosperity, and circular-economy challenges. With nearly 30 years of experience running manufacturing supply chains, she has collaborated with government and private entities to avert major supply chain disruptions and support public safety. C.J. has also created initiatives such as “There’s Cash in that Trash” and has engaged in advocacy work addressing racially biased law-enforcement training targets.
Here's a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:49] C.J. Nord shares her journey into the supply chain industry
[7:01] How supply chain professionals learn to constantly adapt, adjust, and predict operational risk
[10:27] C.J. explains the origins of Supply Chains for Good and her work preventing major supply chain disruptions
[15:02] How the supply chain can help solve large societal problems
[23:54] C.J. discusses how “There’s Cash in That Trash” applies profit-driven circularity to wood waste and other materials
[34:23] Packaging waste, single-use plastics, and why supply chain design can reduce excess transportation and storage costs
[46:26] How bioenergy can create a strong ROI by reducing electricity costs, disposal costs, and waste-hauling truck trips
[53:20] C.J. proposes a “Fed for the Supply Chain” to anticipate disruptions and protect the national supply chain
[1:06:04] How volunteering in classrooms led C.J. to expand beginner-level supply chain education for high school students
In this episode…
Supply chain leaders do more than move products — they solve the hidden systems problems that shape businesses, communities, and everyday life. When waste, regulation, education gaps, or infrastructure breakdowns threaten progress, the right operational mindset can turn those challenges into opportunities. How can supply chain thinking help solve problems far beyond the warehouse?
C.J. Nord suggests treating the supply chain as a practical tool for protecting people, strengthening businesses, and building effective systems. As a manufacturing and supply chain leader, she encourages professionals to look for root causes, use data before accepting regulations or assumptions, and design circular systems around profit instead of penalties. Start with the problem, bring the right partners to the table, and build solutions where every stakeholder has a reason to say yes.
In this episode of The Tao of Pizza Podcast, Mark Hiddleson chats with C.J. Nord, Founder of Supply Chains for Good, about using supply chain expertise to create social and economic impact. C.J. discusses her “There’s Cash in That Trash” initiative, turning wood waste into bioenergy, and why supply chain leaders need a bigger role in preventing disruption.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Specialized Storage Solutions, Inc. contact phone: 707-732-3892
Mark Hiddleson's email: markhiddleson@aol.com
THE TAO of PIZZA: How the Simple Practice of BEing Can Unlock a Life of Deep Peace, Unshakable Clarity, and True Prosperity by Mark Hiddleson and Bettyanne Green
“Optimizing Every Aspect of Return Logistics With Dennis Hoang” on The Tao of Pizza Podcast
Quotable Moments:
“I really believe that you only lose when you quit.”
“Big changes take a lot of work. They take years.”
“We are actually the experts in designing systems that work for everybody.”
“Start with what gets your goat.”
“When you put all of us at a table together, I firmly believe there isn't a problem we can't solve.”
Action Steps:
Apply supply chain thinking to bigger challenges: Reframe social, environmental, and operational problems as systems that can be redesigned through the right partners and processes.
Start with the problem that “gets your goat”: Choose the issue that frustrates you most and turn that passion into sustained action.
Build circular systems around profit, not penalty: Design reuse, recycling, and waste-conversion models that give every stakeholder a financial reason to participate.
Involve supply chain professionals earlier: Bring operations, logistics, procurement, and manufacturing experts into policy, regulation, and standards discussions to prevent costly disruptions.
Invest in beginner supply chain education: Introduce high school students to supply chain concepts and careers to grow the next generation of problem solvers.
Sponsor for this episode:
This episode is brought to you by Specialized Storage Solutions Inc.
Listen...
I have been in the logistics and storage industry for several decades. I know I don’t look that old, but it's true.
We provide industry-leading warehouse storage solutions nationwide.
So basically, if you have a warehouse that needs Rack, Shelving, Carts, Conveyors, or Mezzanines, we help with....design engineering, installations, inspections, and repairs to help clients optimize their logistics operations.
Sometimes people don’t even realize that we can actually help with permit acquisition services.
We take a holistic look at your entire business supply chain ecosystem to develop the resources for continually improving your operation.
To learn more, visit specialracks.com or give us a call at (707) 732-3892. One of the best ways to learn more about our products and services is to follow us on Instagram. And there’s a link on our website to do that.
I will even give you my personal email address for podcast listeners, so email me at markhiddleson@aol.com if you’re ready to take your warehouse storage and retrieval systems to the next level.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:00
Welcome to The Tao of Pizza, where we feature top logistics leaders, entrepreneurs, and supply chain innovators, and share their inspiring stories with a holistic twist.
Mark Hiddleson 0:14
Mark Hiddleson here, host of The Tao of Pizza Podcast, where I talk with top industry innovators in the warehousing, logistics, and supply chain business with a holistic twist. Before I introduce today's guest, C.J. Nord. This episode is brought to you by Specialized Storage Solutions. And look, I've spent decades building warehouse systems that actually work, and after conversations with clients and peers at Manifest in Las Vegas, one thing is clear: innovation only matters when it shows up on the warehouse floor. At Special Racks, we provide industry-leading warehouse storage solutions nationwide, so if you have a facility that needs racking, shelving, cards, conveyors, or mezzanines, we help across the full lifecycle: design, engineering, installation, inspections, and repairs, all focused on real throughput, real people, and real constraints. And here's something many folks don't realize, C.J., we offer permit acquisition services, so yeah, we handle the red tape, so you don't have to. We take a holistic,
C.J. Nord 1:14
a big deal.
Mark Hiddleson 1:15
Yes, it is. So, if, if you want to learn more, you can visit our website at Specialracks.com or call us at 707-732-3892 And just for podcast listeners, I give my personal email Markhiddleson@aol.com Yes, I still use AOL, and yes, I'm proud of it. I'm really excited to introduce today's guest, C.J. Nord is a respected manufacturing and supply chain leader with more than three decades of experience helping organizations navigate complex operational challenges. Known for her sharp supply chain insight and strong ethical leadership, C.J. has worked across government and industry to help prevent disruptions and protect public safety. After her own battle with cancer in 2019 she founded Supply Chains for Good, applying supply chain thinking to tackle societal issues and drive meaningful change. She's also the architect behind the innovative There's Cash in That Trash Circularity program and passionate advocate for expanding access to supply chain education, and despite all of that, her dog is still not particularly impressed. Right, C.J. Welcome,
C.J. Nord 2:30
Max. Is hard to please
Mark Hiddleson 2:33
pizza. Yeah, we have to give a shout out to Max. He's the company mascot. I want to talk about first, what was your journey like before you got into supply chain, and how did you get started in the supply chain industry?
C.J. Nord 2:49
Oh, you know, before I got into supply chain, I got in really young, and like so many people in our, of our generation, Mark, I fell into it, right, I picked up a temp job when I was 19 years old, putting boxes on a shelf of a warehouse in for a new company called Office Club, which has since been bought out, you know, and and I showed up on time, I guess I seemed relatively intelligent, and they offered me an opportunity to become part of their purchasing team, you know, as a just like the lowest level assistant that you could imagine, right? And that was my beginnings of getting into supply chain, and I have to say it just hooked me from the start, and one of the things that I, that I think is really the, the key for me, and that I see in, honestly, I see in everybody that loves their career and supply chain, is that I really have always hated to be beaten by a problem.
Mark Hiddleson 4:04
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 4:05
I hate it, right?
Mark Hiddleson 4:06
Yeah, and yeah, called per tenacity. I used to have a plaque behind me that's like a combination of persistent and tenacity.
C.J. Nord 4:15
Tenacity, I, you know, I've been called Bulldog Stubborn,
Mark Hiddleson 4:21
yeah.
C.J. Nord 4:21
And I just, I really believe that you only lose when you quit, you know. There, it's the, the, the things that we're seeing not happen in our society that everybody wants to see happen, you know. The thing is, is that we're just given up too early. Big changes take a lot of work, they take years. There will be multiple failures.
Mark Hiddleson 4:43
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 4:44
to keep picking yourself up and going back to the job, right?
Mark Hiddleson 4:47
Yeah. My number one, I have values. It's funny, somebody challenged me to put them on the company wall, and it's like, well, these are big. My thing is, the opportunities we face are big, so we dream big. We know. Never insult human capacity with small thinking and playing safe with our gifts, and it's like speaking up, right? When you, when you know something, or you can do, or not giving up, not giving up. I love that. One of the ones I worked with had a picture, and it's famous. I think it's like a frog in the mouth of a big bird or something. The frogs, like, never, you know, don't give up, you're
C.J. Nord 5:22
right from that, the movie Galaxy Quest, right, never give up, never surrender.
Mark Hiddleson 5:30
Yeah, so that never surrender, and then you find that in the supply chain it is like things happen, and things, there's always exceptions.
C.J. Nord 5:39
Look at the stuff we pull off on a daily basis that people don't even realize we're doing.
Mark Hiddleson 5:43
Yeah, you
C.J. Nord 5:44
know, the I have a good friend who is part of the union leadership at the Los Angeles port, and during the pandemic, he and I caught up just for a phone call, and he was stumbling over his words, and he, and he said, C.J., forgive me, I've worked for four months straight, 16 hours a day, and I'm just tired, and that's what you know, he's not alone, most of the dock workers worked seven days a week, double shifts to clear the pandemic backlog,
Mark Hiddleson 6:24
yeah. There were a lot of, lot of heroic stories,
C.J. Nord 6:28
heroes
Mark Hiddleson 6:29
I know, supply chain, and yeah, keeping, keeping things moving. We do a lot of business in the food supply chain.
C.J. Nord 6:37
Oh,
Mark Hiddleson 6:37
it was important,
C.J. Nord 6:38
tough,
Mark Hiddleson 6:38
yeah, it was with things changing, and you know, people still need to eat, so there was a real sense of urgency to, you know, be safe and follow all the protocols. I mean, we were trying to be as good as we possibly liked, and even if it was changing daily, we're on phone calls with people changing, go, what are people doing, you know, to stay running and keep food at the grocery stores. Basically,
C.J. Nord 7:01
it's, you know, one of the things that you just said regarding change that I think it's difficult for people when they first enter the field, but then, you know, if they're going to stay, they get their groove with it, but, but we're, it's never set it and forget
Mark Hiddleson 7:16
it, yeah,
C.J. Nord 7:18
never ever, right, it's really a matter of being able to continually adjust your sales, right, and, and to be, become an expert at that, and, and eventually I think we get really good at foreseen problems through, through both a combination of our experience and our education.
Mark Hiddleson 7:41
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 7:41
I think that we are better predictors of risk than most other professions,
Mark Hiddleson 7:49
and you do have to be constantly flexible and adaptable, and it does wear some people out. It's true, it isn't for everybody.
C.J. Nord 7:58
No, yeah, it's really not. If you want to set, you need to go into a different field. If you can't really roll with that,
Mark Hiddleson 8:06
and I will say, I love - I work in a lot of different industries, we do, and I'm not going to say anything bad about any of the other, but just the people that run warehouses, logistics, you know, from the ops managers to the general managers to the shipping managers, it's a really everyone has like a good vibe, you know, like you said, even if it is a bad day, and I've been in other industries where you walk in the door and you're like, it just kind of sucks,
C.J. Nord 8:31
yeah, we're that, like, the the energy is really bad here, you know, yeah, it actually, the, you know, I, I was the supply chain leader for the, for the whole supply chain, and so I had the pleasure of working with the warehouse, you know, the warehouse teams work for me, receiving work for me, and you know, honestly, that's where I had the most fun. If I needed to take a break from my desk, I would go and chat with the receiving manager, and maybe help them put a couple boxes away, and just I like that, you know, one of the things that I think is really great about the supply chain field, in particular if you're in warehousing or manufacturing, and or manufacturing, is that you, you get to get up from your desk a lot, and you know, go out to the warehouse, check inventory, look at a quality problem, and that just really keeps it interesting for me.
Mark Hiddleson 9:30
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 9:30
interesting and exciting. I, when have you ever had a dull day?
Mark Hiddleson 9:36
It's, it's not, no, because if it is that dull, then we take off and have some fun with our toys. We have a solution for that too. So I want to ask you, I'm really curious about Supply Chains for Good, and, and how you started the work you're doing, but almost everybody, I mean, I was thinking, we've, I've had. A lot of different people on this podcast, because it's connected to my business, is sponsored by my business, but it's also the things I'm personally passionate about. So, we've got an intersection here, because you're using the supply chain for good to create value in the chain in so many different ways, and the cash for trash. So, I don't know which one I want to talk about first, so, so help me lead into that. How tell us about supply chain for good, and how is it related to cash for trash?
C.J. Nord 10:27
Well, okay, okay, yeah, I think I can pull that together. So, what I've seen through the years, long before I founded Supply Chains for Good, I was involved in multiple efforts that sought to prevent disruption to supply chains, and like we were talking about before, a lot of that goes on below anybody's radar, right? We're catching buses before they fall on people every day, and nobody even knows it, right? I've led efforts to protect the right of the owner operator trucker to continue to dry out of the LA Long Beach port. In the early 2000s there was an effort that was, it seemed, underhanded, which would have overnight removed the ability for those truckers to draw out of the port, that would have removed 15,000 trucks from the drayage system,
Mark Hiddleson 11:39
and that's
C.J. Nord 11:40
the math on that, do the math on that, right? It couldn't, it could not be allowed. Yeah, and so I went to the Institute for Supply Management, and I went to the California Furniture Manufacturers Association, and I said, will you back me in, as you know, as the, as the face for both organizations against this abrupt change, right, and in both did, and we were able to avoid that change happening overnight, right, and so in there's another where the state of California tried to change the flammability law for furniture manufactured in California to the flammability code for hospitals with no supporting data. Yeah, right. They, you know, us and data,
Mark Hiddleson 12:39
yeah,
C.J. Nord 12:40
right. You know, like, we don't just know the data, we know why
Mark Hiddleson 12:43
The data is the data.
C.J. Nord 12:44
Yeah, right. And so I participated in the effort against that. Again, there was not a safety concern. It was just arbitrary, this of the state trying to impose this in the in I partnered with the Association of Woodworking and Furnishing Suppliers, again the California Furniture Manufacturers, and and we defeated it, and the individual that tried with the state to get that to happen was was let go,
Mark Hiddleson 13:20
Yeah, and you don't know what the motivation was, because some of these I look at, and we have, you know, in the circularity argument, there's a, the laws are constantly changing with racking, and especially, and the safety, but it's not making it any safer. So, like, I've just, I was kind of crying in my beer about this at a conference, and another friend, competitor walked up and just shared a story. He said we have rack pallet racking that we installed three years ago. The customer wants to move it to the other end, and this isn't California, it's another state. The customer wants to move it to another end of the building, and the manufacturer is saying, well, that those aren't any good anymore, you have to order new. He goes, they're three years old, I mean, the codes couldn't have changed, so I think you know I have my theory. Like manufacturers, their goal is to sell more stuff, so if it's not.. and probably we do a lot of reuse, recycle. That's why I'm passionate.
C.J. Nord 14:14
Oh gosh, I mean, I've rarely.. I have rarely purchased brand new racks, unless it was for a massive project.
Mark Hiddleson 14:22
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 14:23
You know, we've done, yeah, we've done, we've done projects where it had to, you know, there was a specific steel mill run to support, you know, but, but we always try and, and by using a rack, that just makes sense.
Mark Hiddleson 14:37
So it's similar to what you're saying, they raise the standard, and what's the end goal? You know, more regulation, but it doesn't provide additional safety. There's no data,
C.J. Nord 14:47
right?
Mark Hiddleson 14:47
You know that. What's the likelihood that someone's going to be injured because of this? Is
C.J. Nord 14:52
you know, so if we could just kind of stay on that for a second, okay? One. Yeah, I think what I'm working on, my first book, hopefully not the last book, but the first book, and it is called The Heart of Supply Chain, a book about power, and by power I mean our power mark and the power of supply chain that people don't realize, they don't realize how powerful this is. It is past nuclear power. It is the power and the link that is missing from solving the massive problems that we see all around us in the world. Look, supply chain is essentially the science of systems, and the world's problems are systemic or systems problems. We are actually the experts in designing systems that work for everybody.
Mark Hiddleson 15:55
I'm getting chills
C.J. Nord 15:58
after this. I want you to look in the mirror and see the superhero that's looking back at you. We're, we are way more powerful than we realize, because you know, also, Mark, we, the supply chain people tend to be modest.
Mark Hiddleson 16:12
Yes, absolutely.
C.J. Nord 16:14
Yeah, we're not, you know, this, it's the sales folks that are blowing the horn, right? We're, we're the, you know, we're the doers, the doers of the world, and we don't stop for a minute and go, "Damn, I really pulled off something incredible, you know, and, but, but there are there are multiple examples, although not a huge amount, but multiple examples of people who have used their supply chain expertise for the for good, right, for the greater good, and I'd love to get into those a little bit, but one of the the mission of Supply Chains for Good is the protection of children and family prosperity and and I mean in that order, right? One of the things we know in the supply chain is that the sequence matters, right? Yeah, so when we as a society do our job to protect first, just as we say safety first,
Mark Hiddleson 17:21
yeah,
C.J. Nord 17:21
right. Safety first, foremost, and above all else, right. When we get that right, families prosper, businesses prosper. When we fail to protect, we have essentially broken the supply chain. We've, we've weakened the supply chain, and it will break where we have failed to protect, and that may sound all fluffy and unicorns and rainbows, but it's not. I have one practical example after another. We can use retail crime in California as an example. We failed to protect businesses. Closed downtown started to become, you know, just places for the unsheltered to pitch their tents.
Mark Hiddleson 18:13
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 18:13
businesses failed because we failed to protect. If you start thinking about it, you will make that connection repeatedly. If a business is running an unsafe operation, it's going to get them, it's going to get them in their pocketbook.
Mark Hiddleson 18:34
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 18:34
right. This, this is a fundamental principle that I think people need to become more aware of, and through the book I hope to convey the moral authority that we need to get that done, because I know that there are many times when the supply chain professional is at the table for board meeting or staff meeting, and they make the argument to do the right thing, and they're defeated. I know that that's the case
Mark Hiddleson 19:08
for reasons more like cost or profit or some other
C.J. Nord 19:12
short-term vision,
Mark Hiddleson 19:13
short term,
C.J. Nord 19:14
and they, you know, where we'll, we'll say, you know what, that's not going to work for all the partners, right, or I need to see your factory, because I don't know if your factory is safe or not. That's compliance with the California Supply Chain Transparency Act. Yeah, we need to have the moral authority that a doctor has. All right, so if a doctor is at a board meeting or the staff meeting, and the doctor is asked to do something that doesn't comply with their ethical code to first do no harm, right, the doctor says no. It's against my code, that's respected. We need that, you know. They need to respect us at the same level that they do the medical profession. The supply chain field is also twice as big as the medical profession. Imagine if we all stepped up.
Mark Hiddleson 20:19
Yeah, there's a lot of power, a lot of power in the supply chain.
C.J. Nord 20:23
There really is. Look, you know, we, we've, we frequently use the word, the phrase supply chain and economy interchangeably, right? And what? Look, that's because the supply chain is the operating system for the economy. We're running
Mark Hiddleson 20:40
it, it really
C.J. Nord 20:41
right, we're running the economy,
Mark Hiddleson 20:44
yeah. And when it was broken is when everyone started talking about when it was working fine for decades. Five, six years ago, nobody knew what supply chain was, but
C.J. Nord 20:56
I know a lot. Yeah, yeah, the running joke I always tell the students, the running joke between us is, hey, the pandemic finally showed everybody what supply chain is.
Mark Hiddleson 21:05
Yeah. Oh,
C.J. Nord 21:07
right. We were all walking around going, hey, and everybody finally knows what we do,
Mark Hiddleson 21:11
even like.. and he works for us now, he's 22 but there's wild ones. Like, you, someone asked a question, he was go, supply chain, why is this not happening, or whatever supply chain, like you know, just like it's the answer to why any problem is happening, it's
C.J. Nord 21:25
right, right, and as if that's the entire answer,
Mark Hiddleson 21:29
right,
C.J. Nord 21:30
right, like you know, because one of one of our strengths is the ability to determine the root cause of a problem, right, and I think
Mark Hiddleson 21:41
how little tweaks in the system can can mention into this wild thing you didn't even think,
C.J. Nord 21:47
right? Continuous improvement is is small changes,
Mark Hiddleson 21:51
yeah, incremental
C.J. Nord 21:52
small continual changes, right? And I have from having taken part in multiple efforts, where I was interfacing either on behalf of industry or just as a citizen with elected officials. I have understood from those experiences that they need a supply chain at the table, but they rarely have it. We are missing from councils, committees, elected positions, and we need to start taking our seat in those roles. I don't anticipate a whole lot of supply chain people having the stomach for what it takes to be elected to public office. I mean,
Mark Hiddleson 22:46
I have a lot of intestinal fortitude, but it doesn't,
C.J. Nord 22:50
not in that, not, not that way, right?
Mark Hiddleson 22:53
But I even felt the calling like a heart call, and it's just like, man,
C.J. Nord 22:58
I've explored it, and truthfully, Mark, I think that we're more effective outside of that system, driving it like we would our suppliers, because you know, if you think about it, all of those tax-funded agencies, they are our supplier of services and infrastructure, and we need to treat them like that,
Mark Hiddleson 23:23
yeah,
C.J. Nord 23:24
and, and to literally guide them and drive them, and we have what it takes to to play a significant role in improving, improving society for everybody in a way that would benefit families, benefit children, and businesses all at the same time. There is cash in that trash program. Absolutely, does that.
Mark Hiddleson 23:50
Yeah.
C.J. Nord 23:51
Nothing,
Mark Hiddleson 23:52
you,
C.J. Nord 23:52
nothing sacrificed in it.
Mark Hiddleson 23:54
One of the things I loved about your stories, you said steel has a robust recycling industry. And then it's funny, for us, like recycling is the last resort. I mean, we recycle hundreds of truckloads of steel a year as part of our business, but our goal, we want to reuse it and repurpose it, and not just because we have big hearts, want to save the planet, there's more profit in the reuse and reselling, but there's a, you certainly have to reset, you have to relieve, we can't keep everything, you know, if I had millions and millions, or maybe you could, like I said, I'm saying you can't, but the limiting factor is the space and the money, you do, you have millions of dollars to sit on steel that you know you could potentially sell, or you could potentially, so we tried to do a balance of recycle and repurposing, but I'm just curious, if wood is one industry where, where you're is it's because of your experience in the in the construction industry that you want to do this similar thing with wood, where there's a, there like right now, there's an outlet for steel, because there's people who process it, you can send it, but what. But now you're creating that for other
C.J. Nord 25:02
for wood, yeah, yeah, so and just to clarify, my experiences in wood products manufacturing and furniture manufacturing, most of my 30 years in running supply chains for manufacturing has been in that sector, so when I was trying to, you know, you know, I'm a little weirdo. It's going to totally come out in this podcast, so awesome, right? Will weirdos unite? So
Mark Hiddleson 25:32
I'm, or I would call a nerd. I like to nerd out on
C.J. Nord 25:35
nerd. Oh, for sure. Listen, Nord's a nerd. I am a nerd, and all my friends are nerds, and you know, power, the power of the nerd,
Mark Hiddleson 25:46
absolutely dig in there, take the extra time, because I'm excited, I'm curious, I'm, you know, I'm curious about learning,
C.J. Nord 25:55
so it's, it's terrific that you have so much familiarity with the, the steel, with steel in general, and, and you know, we all, I think, have to thank our parents for so much, but my father was a steel worker, and he infused in me an early love of manufacturing, a very early love of manufacturing, and I was raised with knowledge about steel and metals in general, you know, and I clearly remember him saying, "Oh, sis, you know, steels all recycled, people drop off old bikes, anything, old cars, it all goes right back into the steel mill, right? And you know when you're told something like that, when you're four or five years old, right? You're, you spend.. you think about it, right? I'm going to be 59 next week. You've been thinking about these things for a long time, and when you gather your experience, it all starts to come together into ways that solutions can form, and so one of the, so I was, I was walking around my, my little house, thinking about how can I help supply chain save the world, and, and what's taking so long to form this circular supply chain, right? What's taking so long? Yeah, it's just a supply chain, what are we doing wrong? Right, this should not take that long, and it didn't appear to me that it was coming together at all. You see efforts here and there, but it's not coming together right, like, and then I started to realize, well, what the working model is steel and metals, and that industry has recycled their waste for centuries, and so the whole supply chain to do that, from the scrap metal yard to the hard working parent with God knows how many jobs, that picks up the old barbecue in front of your house, right. The supply chain is built, and it flows because every single partner makes a little money along the way. So, there's cash in that trash is a message to drive the effort for circularity on profit. Figure out profitability, how every player is going to make a profit at this, and then you have a winning, then you have a winning formula, so profit not penalties, trade not taxes, that is what we have to build, and look, we built bigger things, Mark. We built this. We built the supply chain that's in place right now.
Mark Hiddleson 28:44
Absolutely,
C.J. Nord 28:45
You know, I've been doing this since the early 90s. It's literally our work that built the linear supply chain that takes, makes, and disposes of everything. We're what we have to do is remove that disposal step and figure out how to make a profit out of all of the waste that our industries generate and when I so so to get myself to figuring out how to do this and this is this is where I totally cop up to being a weirdo I imagined myself as the supply chain manager for Planet Earth, and that Earth was my factory to protect.
Mark Hiddleson 29:30
That's a good place to start.
C.J. Nord 29:32
It actually releases your thinking. Yeah, it's like I removed a barrier in my thinking when I did that. Later, I realized that it was actually the application of one of Eisenhower's principles. So I'm a weirdo, but so is Eisenhower. So that's our way,
Mark Hiddleson 29:52
Buckminster Fuller, yeah, of how we think about.. I didn't like the fact that I love. I'm a Bucky Fuller fan, but he used the spaceship metaphor, you know. We're all, we're not passengers on spaceship earth or crew, and I don't like that he called Earth a spaceship, because it's, it's so much more than that. But it's a good
C.J. Nord 30:16
no, but you're right, we're the crew,
Mark Hiddleson 30:18
we're not passengers. So I love that, and I love colors. So I published the book in July, and there's one chapter on economics, and it's put the eco back in economics. And when I think it goes with starting where you're starting, where it's like it's not like the earth that says, well, there's these three pillars of sustainability, and the ecosystem is one of them. It's like, no, the whole thing is the ecosystem.
C.J. Nord 30:42
I know
Mark Hiddleson 30:44
it's like, no, it isn't. It's the whole thing, and so
C.J. Nord 30:48
you know,
Mark Hiddleson 30:49
thinking it's like,
C.J. Nord 30:50
yes,
Mark Hiddleson 30:52
three legs, and it's one leg of the stool. It's like, no, it's everything that the whole stool is made up of. Even the fact that we call it a stool is part of
C.J. Nord 31:01
One of the things that I explained to the high school students when I had the pleasure of going into the classroom is that supply chain is the interconnectivity of all things. You can have a volcano erupt in Iceland, remember that, and it disrupts the global supply chain, nothing is disconnected. It is all one single system, and we really have to look at that, look at it that way,
Mark Hiddleson 31:29
really.
C.J. Nord 31:30
Um, but supply chain people know that, we know that in our gut,
Mark Hiddleson 31:33
we do, yeah,
C.J. Nord 31:34
right, yeah,
Mark Hiddleson 31:37
yeah. So I'm really interested, and so, so what I think, too, is what you're talking about, making it profitable, and I learned this in college in economics. We don't really, things aren't costed correctly, because we haven't added the cost of getting rid of something, like if you say, "Here's this, what's cost to make, because this is what the minerals it took to get out of the ground, or the labor, or whatever, but it's like, what about when that product causes pollution. What's the cost?
C.J. Nord 32:02
You know, we could really talk about that all day
Mark Hiddleson 32:06
costs, and people like, well, it has to be profitable. It's like, well, for what?
C.J. Nord 32:11
What's the real cost?
Mark Hiddleson 32:12
What's the cost?
C.J. Nord 32:14
What's the real cost?
Mark Hiddleson 32:15
The life cycle of the ones I've seen, because I'm in the supply chain, drives me crazy that I think there must be a solution. Is packaging like there has to be, when they do recycle corrugated, there are programs you can bail it, you can do all kinds of things, but there has to be something for reuse in corrugated, you know, with the same kind of pickup system. You're like, what's the supply chain? What do you do with all, because now Amazon, everyone has 20, not everyone, but there's, you know, drive down the neighborhood, and there's usually boxes in front of people's house, so to me that model, that's a cost that's going to be associated with, I mean, I don't know, I don't have to,
C.J. Nord 32:55
Yeah, I agree with that, and I think that there are solutions for all of this, you know. You, you had pointed out that the, the most economical solution, just to reuse it. Yeah, you know, and, and in our parent, when our parents were first setting up their home, and when our grandparents ran their homes, everything was reused, if it had purpose, it, you know, in one of the things I remember that you would get scolded about is you didn't use
Mark Hiddleson 33:28
it up, right?
C.J. Nord 33:30
We don't use things up,
Mark Hiddleson 33:32
yeah,
C.J. Nord 33:33
right, we, we toss them when there's still plenty of good,
Mark Hiddleson 33:37
yeah,
C.J. Nord 33:38
within them,
Mark Hiddleson 33:40
brown paper, I mean, we were usually like my brown paper bag, used to be my suitcase, like I would get the best brown paper bag, and that's where I went to visit friends of it's like my kids all have Samsonites, but I don't know, you know, it was younger, I've still, it's, I've always, my grandfather actually taught me how to fold the paper bags, yeah, I was young, was probably six or seven, and you know, just kind of crumple it, and they do kind of fold themselves, but if you don't do it, the edges get messed up, and he's like, no, if you do that, then you can't reuse them, and they always reused it for all kinds of stuff, the trash, or they would,
C.J. Nord 34:13
oh, all kinds, yeah, yeah, there's very little trash, you, you'd mentioned packaging.
Mark Hiddleson 34:23
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 34:23
I believe that the, at the, at the core of our problem for packaging single-use plastics, in particular, is that we have liquefied so many things that don't really have to be liquefied. Now you know what a nerd I am, right?
Mark Hiddleson 34:50
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 34:50
I actually
Mark Hiddleson 34:51
go back to, like, the root of the problem is not the packaging, it's how we're distributing that roof. So you mean,
C.J. Nord 34:56
right? It's the, you know, if you think about it, let's. Just think about how many jugs, plastic jugs have been sold, transported, taking up warehouse space, you know, fold that out all the way through the supply chain, right? The excess that comes from having that liquefied
Mark Hiddleson 35:24
powder in a box,
C.J. Nord 35:26
my like, like you're like mom and dad did, like grandma and grandpa did, right, and one of the, one of the neato, really neato in that works really well innovations that that has come through recently, and I don't think we can really call it an innovation, because I'm pretty sure we're just going back to the old ways, is they've they've made detergent sheets, so there is big, as like a dryer sheet, right, and and you just take those and you put them in the seventh generation is one of the companies that makes them, but the box, the cardboard box that that comes in is as big as a box of dryer sheets, and it has as many loads in it as the big bottle of Thai.
Mark Hiddleson 36:17
Wow, yeah, and nobody's using those big bottles, to like save rainwater, or do their dishes, or carry water, to you know what I mean, that's that really,
C.J. Nord 36:27
for the most part, they're hopefully going into the recycle bin, you know, but you know, another, another example, so there there's low hanging fruit,
Mark Hiddleson 36:38
yeah, because that's a petroleum-based product, right, to where the cardboard box is recycled,
C.J. Nord 36:43
and also look at the shelf space. Think about the cost of transportation. We talk about cost. Well, wouldn't it be fun to run the transportation cost for bottles of Tide compared to the cost of moving those little boxes, right? Just run the fuel savings, just the diesel savings.
Mark Hiddleson 37:09
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 37:09
And then the space in the warehouse, right? These solutions are right there for us, but it will not happen without supply chain leadership.
Mark Hiddleson 37:25
So, what are some ways? So, all my friends are in the supply chain. Anyone who listens,
C.J. Nord 37:29
me too. That's right. I have very few friends that are not in the supply chain.
Mark Hiddleson 37:33
What do we do? Where do we meet up? How are things? What? How do we? How do we learn more about the cash for trash? And because.. and I have, we don't do a lot in the lumber industry, but I mean, I do have friends in the hardwood company, so I'm interested in that, that I just like to introduce them to your program, or like, you know, start talking about how do, how do people really roll up their sleeves, you know, from from here on, now that we know about C.J. Nord and plug Supply Chains for Good, and what do we, what should we start doing?
C.J. Nord 38:05
You know, I just wanted to say that everybody can reach out to me with what problem do you want to solve, what are you passionate about, what pisses you off.
Mark Hiddleson 38:18
Those are the good,
C.J. Nord 38:20
That's where to start. That's where to start, right? I started with wood waste, because I've been - it's been bugging me for decades, right? I've been trying to figure this out for decades. Start with what, what with what gets your goat?
Mark Hiddleson 38:35
I like,
C.J. Nord 38:35
right? And I will work with you, and there are three aspects of my business. There's one forming the circular supply chain based on profitability, the other is advancing beginners level supply chain education. There's no reason why it shouldn't be taught in every high school in America.
Mark Hiddleson 38:57
I love that.
C.J. Nord 38:58
Gosh darn it's one of the largest fields in the nation, and it is rarely taught in high school. And then the other is pro bono advocacy work. I work with communities. Next week, I will be at the Capitol in Sacramento, lobbying for bio energy, whatever you, whatever you want to achieve, I'm here for you, and we'll walk through it together. And you know, my website, Supply Chains for good.org, it's easy to reach me.
Mark Hiddleson 39:31
We will have that on our show notes.
C.J. Nord 39:33
Great,
Mark Hiddleson 39:34
I'll make sure that you know we'll have your LinkedIn profile, we'll have a link to that, and the cash. I noticed that the cash for trash is kind of in the on the homepage, kind of the middle at the bottom, so people can learn more about it there,
C.J. Nord 39:47
the but so let me talk about the the so the program
Mark Hiddleson 39:53
knew there's something new. Share, share what, what's the newest thing that you're working on?
C.J. Nord 39:58
Oh, well, or whatever. But
Mark Hiddleson 40:00
what do you want to get, we have
C.J. Nord 40:04
time,
C.J. Nord 40:04
but okay, so the quickly the solving the wood waste problem, the some of the problems that that our society is is creating that we need to fix is one we are trying to create the circular supply supply chain with motivating it on taxes, penalties, and grants. Wrong way, we are trying to build a circular supply chain one company at a time. That's flat out foolish, right? We need to drive it on profit and trade, and we need to shift whole industries together.
Mark Hiddleson 40:45
Yeah, to create an ecosystem, that's the way it's an ecosystem.
C.J. Nord 40:51
Yeah,
Mark Hiddleson 40:52
operators and end users, really. It's and then, and curate, or what are really those parts of
C.J. Nord 40:58
relationships, those partners, right? And, and so, again, you know, kind of walking around thinking, okay, if I'm the supply chain manager for Earth, how do I do that? And it occurred to me that the partnership that you need to form is with the trade associations, that's what they're there for.
Mark Hiddleson 41:17
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 41:17
they're there to protect the industry, this protects the industry, and so I partnered with in July of 2024 I partnered with the Association of Woodworking and Furnishing Suppliers, and their director, wonderful, good-hearted man named Angelo, and I have known each other for about 20 years, and I went up to him and I said, you know, Angelo, these, these disposal fees, they're killing the woodworkers, we, we gotta find a solution here, man, you know, it's getting worse every year, and he said, yes, each, okay, yeah, we'll, you know, we'll partner with you, they paid me a very small stipend for a year of work and gave me access to one of their employees who partnered with me in trying to figure this out, a booth at their show, they did webinars and things like that. At first, we thought, what can you do with wood waste, and you have to solve the composite wood waste problem, not the pure wood waste, it's the IKEA furniture with laminates, that's the problem to solve, right? Because all of that is landfilled, all of that you have to pay to dispose of, right? Because
Mark Hiddleson 42:32
there's no way to recycle, reuse the composites,
C.J. Nord 42:36
it does, there's no this supply chain is not built,
Mark Hiddleson 42:40
so it's not there yet. We're just not there. We don't
C.J. Nord 42:44
have.. we haven't built this supply chain, but it's also.. there's a way that it's very early stages. So, about about two months into the project, we realized that we could actually use the wood waste to generate electricity to run the factory,
Mark Hiddleson 43:03
the actual factory that's making it.
C.J. Nord 43:06
How about that wood waste that they generate can be pumped right back into me, made into electricity to run the factory, and there's no, you know, we were talking earlier, use it up, right, use it up at the end of that process, which is called biomass, or often referred to as bio energy. At the end of that process, you have a couple of byproducts that are actually worth a lot of money, and so you know, I once I realized that that was doable. Several of the woodworkers who were kind enough to partner with me said, "Well, yeah, C.J., everybody knows you can do that, but the state had never let you, right? Okay. Well, so why, and can I change that? Right. It turned out that actually the state of California has passed a couple of laws to encourage bio energy and it was really comical. I spoke with a young engineer who was in charge of the advancement of bio energy with CARP, the California Air Resources Board, and a young man, easily young enough to be my son, and he said we'd really like you to do this. How come you're not? And I said we didn't think you'd let
Mark Hiddleson 44:31
us. Nice, we
C.J. Nord 44:31
didn't think you'd let
Mark Hiddleson 44:33
us. The resources board turned out to be an ally in that case.
C.J. Nord 44:36
Actually the Air Resources board is undergoing the permitting for the systems, the there's so bio energy, the the biomass reactors process the feedstock used to be called waste, now it's really fuel, right, the the. Process the feedstock through a process called pyrolysis, which is heating in the absence of air, and it's like your oven on a self-cleaning cycle. The systems are locked down completely, enclosed. They have very specialized filters on the inside of it. They don't run out of gas. There's no air quality issues from these systems at all over the last really short period of time, less than 10 years, there's been a group of really innovative manufacturers of these systems that have developed smaller modular systems. They used to be huge waste energy plants that cost $50 million. Right, well, you know, you can't. There's no ROI like that. I've been able to find systems that are as little as $200,000 to really an average for a mid-sized manufacturer comes in close to $2 million When that system goes in, they're offsetting, or I should say, removing their electricity bill and their waste disposal bill, and I'm seeing at the most of three year return on investment, usually closer to a year and a half to two,
Mark Hiddleson 46:21
which is what TFOs want, right? That 18,
C.J. Nord 46:24
That's you know, you look, they, they'd say yes every time if it was a one year ROI, but there's nothing wrong with a two year ROI when it makes you energy independent. The other reason, you know, when you find that you really have a solution, you really solve the root cause of a problem. One of the things that we see is that you see a domino effect of other problems that you saw. You know how that happens, right? If you misdiagnose the root cause, the opposite is true.
Mark Hiddleson 46:55
There's problems you had no idea
C.J. Nord 46:57
you cause a bunch of problems. Yeah, you cause a bunch of problems, right? So, this solution of bio energy, it is like with a midsize manufacturer that's putting a system in, in Orange County. When their system goes in, they'll take 800 truck trips off the road a year, hauling wood waste,
Mark Hiddleson 47:19
because that's a, that's the cost of the disposal, is there is a really cost, a real cost there of trust,
C.J. Nord 47:27
a real cost.
Mark Hiddleson 47:28
So there's no use for it staying on the property. It basically can go on a conveyor belt right to the plant, right?
C.J. Nord 47:35
Right, right. It's interesting. One of the high school kids that I was high school with is great, though they challenge you, and I love that. One of the kids, when I was explaining the program at a high school in Newport Beach, she said, "Yeah, but what you're doing doesn't prevent trees from being cut down, and I said, "Well, does it need to, actually? And then I started giving it more thought, and actually we've returned wood back to its original use for humankind, and if that isn't circular, I don't know what
Mark Hiddleson 48:10
is. It is, yeah, right.
C.J. Nord 48:12
One of the things that we, one of the incorrect ways of thinking about how to form the circular supply chain is that the item, whatever that waste commodity is, has to be returned to its original form. We can actually convert a lot of things into energy, and our nation desperately needs energy by 2030. The US Department of Energy anticipates 100% more power outages.
Mark Hiddleson 48:45
Oh, I can see that. Yeah, we had a client that had to run generators for cold storage for months because of power, and they have, luckily for them, they have a solar roof, but it wasn't enough.
C.J. Nord 49:00
No, it is. These, yeah, usually these energy systems require a combination of things, but the, but the biomass systems made correctly can really pump out a lot of power.
Mark Hiddleson 49:14
And then, what about the opportunity for people who don't have it to contribute to someone else's planning is that ecosystem in place.
C.J. Nord 49:23
I love it. Again, let's think again of the metal supply chain, right? So the steel mill is the upstream driver of all of that waste, right? The steel mill is what's drawing it up, right? The woodworking factory is going to be the steel mill, that's the, that's the draw to take the waste up through upstream, because it's creating so much value, it's going to create energy, it's going to create a synthetic bio gas, it's going to create biochar, which is. A, so valuable that it's been nicknamed black gold. My friend, you may remember in the last century that that was crude oil,
Mark Hiddleson 50:07
but there's a new black gold,
C.J. Nord 50:09
there's a new black gold, there's a new black gold, and it's biochar, right? So, and on the heels of this, biochar can be made into highly valuable advanced materials like graphene and hydrogen, we can make fuel-grade hydrogen, right? So there is cash in that trash, isn't there? So, because we have now defined how you can make a profit out of it with a good ROI, the factory will be what draws the broken consumer furniture up through the recycling system, and so you know how people put their old barbecue out on the sidewalk
Mark Hiddleson 50:58
dresser dresser drawer IQ, right?
C.J. Nord 51:02
I envision a day when that old dresser has the same value as the old barbecue, and probably the same hardworking person with multiple jobs is going to be the one that picks it up and takes the barbecue to the scrap steel, and then takes the dresser to the scrap woodyard that chops it up and feeds it to the woodworking factory to make power out of, or maybe somebody else decides to invest in a biomass system to make power out of it. I've seen a really cool model where a biomass reactor goes into abandoned gas stations and powers EVs, and so that, that is literally, they're literally collecting trash to charge EVs.
Mark Hiddleson 51:54
Yeah, and there's probably enough of that trash already ending up at landfills.
C.J. Nord 51:59
Oh, my friend in California last year in landfills we disposed of 40 million tons,
Mark Hiddleson 52:10
and so plenty. That's the play. I mean, you can capture it there now before people change their habit. I mean, it's a habit change to not, you know,
C.J. Nord 52:18
I think the, you know, thinking through the supply chain that's in place right now? I think that the key player for routing what is going into the landfills is going to be the smaller waste haulers that specialize in yard waste and wood waste. There's a whole group of companies that are smaller companies, and we're just going to, you know, go up to, you know, so and so's waste hauling and saying, and say, you know what, I can get rid of your tipping fees and shorten your trip by you just taking the wood waste over here, why would you not say yes to that?
Mark Hiddleson 52:58
Yeah, absolutely, right,
C.J. Nord 53:00
increases everybody's profitability. If it's okay, I'll just cover it. The one I know we're kind of running,
Mark Hiddleson 53:08
and I do want to talk about your latest product.
C.J. Nord 53:11
Okay, so this is only going to make sense to the people that you and I are trying to reach. We have all kinds of disruptions in our supply chain that are predictable that we should see coming, but we don't, right? But we don't see them coming. Nobody does anything about it to prevent disruptions, and you can see them coming a mile away, right? So we've given some thought to that. Our nation has the governing body the Fed that oversees our financial systems? I firmly believe that we need a Fed for the supply chain, a governing body of mark people like you and me who will oversee our nation's supply chain and make the adjustments that are necessary to make sure that we do not continue to have disruptions that lead to recessions. Now the next step in that is, well, what would that board need? They would need a global MRP system, so for those of, for those that are listening that are not familiar with what those, what that acronym is, MRP is Material Requirements Planning, and it was really the inception of MRP at IBM in the 1980s that is the beginning of how supply chain is today, that is when everything became interconnected, right. We need, and it's not that hard to put together a global supply chain, a global MRP for the supply chain that oversees what's coming in on the ocean. Right, and if you think about the data that we need for that, it's there,
Mark Hiddleson 55:04
is there,
C.J. Nord 55:05
it's there, it's, it's in the harmonized tariff schedule. Yeah, the data points that we need are there. We could put together a global MRP, so one of the things that has been, I mean, just the, to quote the hokey old song, "The Wind Beneath My Wings" has been the partnerships with Ed, with universities, and the part, the partnership with the USC Vitterby School of Systems Engineering has just been everything to me. The professor there, a guy who is my absolute hero, named Ted, my Ishiba, reached out to me when my program was first launched, and he goes, "Hey, you got a pretty good idea here. Do you want some help with that? Like, absolutely, as low key as you can imagine. So he's been, so I have teams of capstone students that partner on every single one of my projects, and that's just been huge. So I went to Ted, and also a professor with the University of Mary Baylor in the Houston area, a great guy named Dr. Jim King, and, and said, you know, what about this as a student project, and how about having the two universities work together on it, and both, thank God, say they said yes, and I, we had talked about obtaining customs data information to be able to model that, but it, I felt strongly that California, California is headed for a massive fuel crisis, and I feel I felt like we needed to do that modeling first, so California, we're really in trouble, and you know very well that when you cannot prevent an out of stock, the next thing that you do is you get your red flag and you wave it as high as you can, so everybody can duck, because it's coming right, because the problem is coming and you can't prevent it, so that your next obligation is to inform everybody, so they know that that that problem is coming right. If you can't stop the hurricane, tell everybody to get below, right. So, what we're doing now is we are modeling California fuel supply, gasoline and diesel using the 2025 sales of gasoline and diesel in California in the 2025 production, and then what production and distribution is in 2026 because we have two refineries that the state has lost, so we've lost supply, we have also lost over 400 gas stations just as of this July or this January. Sorry, so we have a deficit in supply, and we've lost a whole chunk of our distribution system primarily in rural communities . I feel like this comes from having people in elected offices trying to form solutions, but not knowing how, right? They were not overly critical, but they couldn't find the root cause of a problem with two hands and a flashlight.
Mark Hiddleson 58:42
Yeah, it's
C.J. Nord 58:43
the solutions suck, you know,
Mark Hiddleson 58:45
yeah, the people that have spent their life in business solving problems, I mean, day to day to day, day
C.J. Nord 58:50
to day, we do it every damn day, right
Mark Hiddleson 58:52
on companies, or I go, like, I was on the launch yesterday, there were five or six of us, I mean, there were some fires put out in those meetings, you know, I mean, I usually don't have my cell phone in a meeting, but yesterday was one of those things where we all knew it's like, guys, if something comes up and you know someone was in the warehouse, we were touring it, the people giving us a tour, they had to stop and handle an exception, like to keep the ball rolling, and I don't until you live that, I mean, there's no way to learn that without,
C.J. Nord 59:18
no, you can educate for it, you know, and I, I firmly believe the need for continuing education, lifelong learning, but that just is the foundation that you need when you go out there and start doing it, and then when you start doing it, you understand the complexity as well as the simplicity,
Mark Hiddleson 59:39
the right motivation, but I love, I love so much about what you said. We're gonna have to do round two.
C.J. Nord 59:46
Oh, Lance, Lance,
Mark Hiddleson 59:48
but I want to recall it's to go to the Supply Chain for Good website, and we'll have a link to it. Let's connect with C.J. Nord on LinkedIn, and it's. Specifically, in the, in the furniture manufacturing industry, if there's opportunities, and I know
C.J. Nord 1:00:06
anything with furniture, wood working
Mark Hiddleson 1:00:09
cabinet shop, too, like big cabinet,
C.J. Nord 1:00:11
anything, anything made of any type of wood.
Mark Hiddleson 1:00:16
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 1:00:16
So you know, for example, the disposal of wood waste is a massive problem.
Mark Hiddleson 1:00:24
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 1:00:24
It's hitting everybody that makes stuff out of wood. You can ask companies like Chet Pallets, the area that they've recently said, you know what, we're not going to accept your wood waste anymore.
Mark Hiddleson 1:00:37
I know a couple huge pallet guys. Yeah, so now you're starting to get my juice,
C.J. Nord 1:00:41
yeah. How the guys' fences construction waste,
Mark Hiddleson 1:00:46
yeah, construction. That was going to ask you, because that could be a good one, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of capacity. So this is tied to like last mile deliveries, because there's there's got to be a lot of backhaul opportunities for stuff like this to where the freight point trucks are moving empty, and if there's that much stuff that has to be moved, you know it's just a way of packaging it, loading it, you know.
C.J. Nord 1:01:09
Oh, that's all right, you know, you can, that's doable.
Mark Hiddleson 1:01:13
But I mean, it just adds another stop. It's another for trucking companies, instead of hauling empty trucks, if there's this other opportunity or source, you know, I'm just.. that's how I think about.. that's what..
C.J. Nord 1:01:25
yeah.. well, you know, so that's.. that's what starts to happen, yeah.. when you have, you know, in our conversation, we were actually two of the positions in the supply chain, right? I run a supply chain, but all the way through I've been a procurement person, right? You have your strength in distribution, warehousing, and logistics, right? And when you, when you put all of us at a table together, I firmly believe there is a problem we can't solve.
Mark Hiddleson 1:01:58
Yeah, so I want to be at some of those tables. I want to get involved in the government stuff, so, so we'll have afterwards, but I want to be the first to thank you so much. I was so excited. Oh, and I want to give a shout out to DC, and I might mispronounce her name, but Sephrigola - I know her only from LinkedIn - she's written a book recently, and she saw your presentation at an event, and she posted on LinkedIn, and then I read that, and that's why I reached out to you. So, I wanted to give..
C.J. Nord 1:02:26
oh, it was..
Mark Hiddleson 1:02:28
Do you know DC?
C.J. Nord 1:02:29
I know her, you know, she's one of the friends that I made through LinkedIn, and.. and we met for the first time after knowing each other for maybe three years, and like calls, and I, you know, love pictures of her kid, and all, all the rest of that, but, but she's really one of the the supply chain professionals out there that knows in her heart that supply chain can save the world, and that's the message, supply chain can save the world, and we are the superheroes to get it done.
Mark Hiddleson 1:02:59
So I'm going to send her a LinkedIn message, and invited.
C.J. Nord 1:03:02
Oh, dude,
Mark Hiddleson 1:03:02
I wanted to be invited on the podcast, and it's funny. Some people, and then I want to reach out, and you were just so intimately disconnected. So I'm definitely, definitely gonna reach out to DC, because I've been wanting to interview her. She's really bright. She's teaching a class on LinkedIn, and I've seen her on other podcasts, so I definitely say yes. I tell her C.J. said, dude, she's one
C.J. Nord 1:03:28
of the hardest working supply chain people out there, too. Yeah, she works so hard, and I, I could just go on and on about how impressed I am with her, and she's a, she's a young woman, and I think I think that she's going to continue to rise all the way through her life. There's also Steve Robinson, the founder of the supply chain project, he's taking the retail returns that are ending up in the landfill and routing them to nonprofits.
Mark Hiddleson 1:04:04
Okay, I've had somebody - I've had her with Return Dennis Hoang from Pattern, is actually a return company. They focus on because returns are killing people, because the cost of return something is like 10 times more than when it goes out,
C.J. Nord 1:04:18
and we're seeing that
Mark Hiddleson 1:04:19
I've been receiving it, putting it back in inventory, cleaning it, giving the credit to the customer, like all this stuff, and so they, their solution, they buy returns, so instead of somebody doing it in house and bringing it, they're in the high-end apparel business, and they have agreement, and there's like all this is nuance too, because high-end retailers don't want their stuff being sold at a discount, their returns are caused, so they've created these agreements that kind of work, a world that works for everybody, like you're saying, because people think,
C.J. Nord 1:04:46
yeah, we can figure it out,
Mark Hiddleson 1:04:49
cost, yeah, the,
C.J. Nord 1:04:49
You know, the children are going without shoes, and we're throwing them away, and last year, my friend, we threw them away. I'm glad you're sitting down 9.5 million pounds of retail returns in the landfills, yeah. Kids are cold, we're throwing away coats,
Mark Hiddleson 1:05:11
yeah. Problem, like you said, it's not -
C.J. Nord 1:05:15
we just have to build the supply chain, and it's just a supply chain, yeah. You know, we're
Mark Hiddleson 1:05:21
I long wanted to ask you one more question. This is, I looked at the list of the things you volunteer for, and how does that drive? Like, how does that work? How are you? Every look at this, like, oh my gosh, she's doing all this stuff, but I mean, just share how that works for you. We talked a little bit, a little bit before, that I like going and speaking to classes on supply chain. There's a few local high schools that teach supply chain. I really got energized by that, but I felt like I was doing a lot of volunteer work. I looked at yours, like that's why you shouldn't compare yourself to other people, because they could be humbled sometimes. But just share a little bit about how volunteerism is helping you achieve what you want to achieve, you
C.J. Nord 1:06:04
know. It was volunteering that got me here.
Mark Hiddleson 1:06:07
Yeah,
C.J. Nord 1:06:08
and you know, in I used to friends that help kids find their career path have been inviting me into the classroom long before I established Supply Chains for Good, and they said, you know, Siege, can you come in, talk to kids about supply chain and manufacturing, and I'm, I love both, love him, love him, and I'd get the kids all excited about it, and they'd go, Where can we learn more, Miss Nor, and I'd be like, I got nothing for you, and and it was my being in front of the kids that that volunteering that helped me find the path to creating Supply Chains for Good and in establishing a partnership with V Care Academy, who is my provider of high school level supply chain curriculum, and you know, when you, I tried with some of the more well-established, well-known supply chain organizations in the United States to establish a beginner's level supply chain education, but it's got to be cheap, and it has to be written for high school kids, it's got to be entertaining, all of those things, right, and I got strung along, strung along for really about two years in trying to, you know, solve this problem of the beginner's level supply chain education, and I went to the founder of V Care Academy, Z Shan, and said, we're missing the kids, we're, we're, we're not teaching the beginner in, and the kids are missing out, and within 10 minutes he said, "Yes, we'll do this together, let's spend 10 years on
Mark Hiddleson 1:07:50
it. Nice, nice.
C.J. Nord 1:07:53
And so now it's taught in five Orange County school districts, and in August we start at the largest ROP center in the state.
Mark Hiddleson 1:08:04
Nice, congrats.
C.J. Nord 1:08:06
It took a lot to get here.
Mark Hiddleson 1:08:08
Oh, C.J., I want to be the first to thank you so much for coming.
C.J. Nord 1:08:12
Thank you to Mark
Mark Hiddleson 1:08:13
and your ideas. Yeah,
C.J. Nord 1:08:15
I'll bless your heart. You gotta be called crazy for a long time before people understand that it is possible.
Mark Hiddleson 1:08:23
Yeah, I love it. I love it.
Outro 1:08:26
Thanks for listening to The Tao of Pizza Podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. Bye.