CEO Ray Hatch Featured in Dallas Business Journal

Quest CEO Ray Hatch sat down with Shawn Shinneman of the Dallas Business Journal to discuss the vision of the company, its impact and growth. Read the article below.


A Quest for growth: New CEO wastes no time boosting revenue at sustainability company

For a company with something like 40,000 client locations, the team at Quest Resource Management Group is compact.

Quest’s 120 employees all work out of its headquarters in The Colony. A provider of business solutions circulating around waste and sustainability, the company keeps its employee base focused on innovation by outsourcing to subcontractors for the dirty work.

And after a 2015 that saw its parent company Quest Resource Holding Corporation’s revenue decline by 2.5 percent to $170.1 million, the company has posted year-over-year growth of 14.4 percent, 10.7 percent and 5.9 percent during the last three quarters. 

CEO Ray Hatch, who joined Quest in February after years in the foodservice business, is leading the charge. Under his leadership, the company will look to expand its broad client base and continue to leverage data and technology to separate itself.

How does the broad base of industries in which your clients operate challenge the company?

It’s a challenge but it’s also a great opportunity because it gives us a chance to differentiate ourselves from what i would consider mainline trash companies. We don’t have any landfills, we don’t have any trucks we don’t have any processing plants. We use very valued subcontractors.

So with that, the more diverse your needs are, the better positioned we are to take care of it.

What role does technology play in the company?

Technology is huge. If we’re not providing data and using technology to enhance and simplify the process, that diminishes our value.

Data works on numerous fronts. For example, we collect data based on all those waste streams, so we know frequency, tonnage, everything else relative to the diversion. And then we make that available to our clients through a portal. They have full visibility.

What’s driving your growth right now?

 New business. We’re bringing on large-scale clients on a pretty consistent basis. One of the reasons I took this position is the brand is strong in this space and there’s a real demand for what we’re doing.

There’s a couple of tailwinds that I believe are really strong for the company, and one of the tailwinds is regulation. Regulation is growing, as we all know, and that’s a good thing for Quest in that we’re able to provide great compliance services and documentation.

The other is the overall sustainability positioning. Something like 70 percent of the S&P 500 is reporting on sustainability today. It’s a huge percentage and it’s a mercurial leap from just a few years ago. And then within that, the CEOs believe it helps their business to be more sustainable and they fell like, today, they’re not executing as well as they should be on their plans.

What are some indicators of Quest’s impact?

My favorite is that in 2015, we processed over 600,000 tons of food waste. Before Quest came along, every bit of that food waste was going into our landfills every year. That’s a real tribute to the people in this country and the solution mindset that exists.

Read the original article here.

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