Milan Dubravcic is the owner and CEO of Pallets Direct. Centered in the Savannah, Georgia maritime market, the company supplies new and recycled pallets to customers in the Southeast. The company’s focus is providing quality pallets, reliable service and adding value for customers.
Pallet Enterprise: What is the best piece of business advice that you have ever received?
Dubravcic: Human nature is such that work expands to the amount of time allotted to it. That’s why expectations and deadlines are vital.
Pallet Enterprise: What is the hardest challenge your company faces right now?
Dubravcic: Acquiring new customers. Pallets have been in an oversupply situation for several years, and the big suppliers are selling at or below cost simply to turn inventory.
Pallet Enterprise: How has your raw material situation changed in recent years?
Dubravcic: Cores are harder to find. As a macro trend, block pallets are taking market share from stringer pallets. Most block pallets are rentals like CHEP. This means that independent pallet companies deploy an ever-larger percentage of their resources to process their competitor’s pallets. There’s something very un-American about that trend.
Pallet Enterprise: How do you decide whether or not to try a new idea in your company?
Dubravcic: The decision is almost always driven by one determinant: will it increase sales, and at what cost.
Pallet Enterprise: What is one thing you do at your company that is different from other pallet companies?
Dubravcic: We build trust with our customers. Pallets are a commodity, but trust is a relationship. With the erratic cycles within our industry, trust goes both ways. At times your customers are loyal to you, and at other times you are loyal to them when no one else has pallets. Customers view us as a department within their organization.
Pallet Enterprise: What is one of the hardest business decisions you have ever made?
Dubravcic: Having to lay off employees. I was the new head of an insurance agency with high overhead and too many employees. The new owner expected me to make the agency more efficient and to reduce overhead. Having been laid off myself in my career, I knew how difficult this was going to be for those affected.
Pallet Enterprise: What is one of the best business decisions you have ever made?
Dubravcic: Going off on my own to start my own company. Without any guarantees, it was scary at first, but it has worked out well. Success is located on the other side of fear.
Pallet Enterprise: What performance indicators do you track to measure how your company is doing?
Dubravcic: The usual things like sales, gross margin, net profit and units sold. We also measure units per load as a measure of overall efficiency.
Pallet Enterprise: Have you ever had what you thought was a great business idea completely flop?
Dubravcic: We got into polymer recycling based on a patented process for breaking down plastics into their original petroleum components. When it came time to actually sign contracts and ramp up, our partner panicked and got cold feet. Years of time and energy went down the drain.
