CeDUR CEO Barry Gleichenhaus has led a transformation at his company in the two years since he was first named a titan, and the changes go beyond his response to the pandemic.
The company has taken multiple initiatives to drive growth, including hiring a new chief revenue officer and new chief operating officer and building a new sales team of former college athletes and training them on sales and product knowledge. Gleichenhaus also has a succession plan in place for when he steps away as CEO, something he had not done previously, he said.
The focus of each of those changes is people, the key ingredient to a successful endeavor, Gleichenhaus said.
“Building teamwork and collaboration within teams and across teams is critical to rapid growth and customer service,” he said. “We look for people with passion and drive for the business that want to learn and compete every day. We have been able to teach people the sales process, manufacturing processes, and product technical knowledge. We have learned to hire for attitude and develop skills and knowledge.”
CeDUR, based in Aurora, Colorado, is a leader in synthetic roofing products with plans for aggressive growth in the near future.
“We are growing from a niche market position, when we started the company, to a market leader position,” Gleichenhaus said. “I am now meeting other market leaders to team with them and to learn more about the building materials industry from them.”
Gleichenhaus was named a titan in 2020. Since then, CeDUR has grown sales over 40% in calendar year 2021 and 20% in 2020, despite the challenges presented by the pandemic. “We were able to continue to grow even in spite of the challenging environment,” he said. CeDUR has doubled its output and grown its sales team in the last two years and now has a four- to five-month backlog of booked orders for customers all over the world.
“It’s been fun to be recognized as a titan,” Gleichenhaus said. “By far the highlight is the other titans I have met as well as people I have met at titan events. As an entrepreneur, it is really difficult to build a network of like-minded people since we don’t have a ready-made network.”
