A conversation with John Shaw, founder and president of maxill

maxill is a manufacturer and retailer of infection control products, oral hygiene products, and medical and dental disposables. Its founder and president, John Shaw, recently talked to us about where the company came from and its challenges in expanding to the American market. "There are a lot of walls built around and inside the United States," he told us. "Some are good walls. Some are bad walls." Read more below.

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1. Before you founded maxill, what were you doing?

I was personally representing the M+C Schiffer Company in Canada. They were a manufacturer of toothbrushes in Europe. I developed a very strong private-label business for them before the deutsche mark (this was before the Euro) appreciated to the point that it was no longer economical to obtain product from Europe. So I started my own company to service my customer base by manufacturing brushes in Canada. Toothbrushes were the foundation of maxill and still represent a large part of our business globally.

2. What does platinum customer service mean to you?

A maxill customer is looked after through all aspects of the relationship. Quality. Service. Price. Payment. Ease of doing business. Shipping. Quality control. Education. Transparency. Our salespeople both inside and outside are on a person-to-person sales and customer-oriented team, so our customers get to deal with the same people all the time and build personal, as well as professional, relationships.

3. Talk about your process for expanding to new markets.

For both Asia and the United States, existing customers who were buying from Canada urged us to open up satellite branches. Our customers even went so far as to provide market research on our behalf to ensure that such ventures were viable. Asia has been a huge success for us since we first opened in 2010.

4. What is the business culture at maxill?

"Uber relax casual," if there is such a thing. maxill is very much a "bottom-up" organization. It's a pretty lean company that makes decisions fast and often from the grassroots. There is zero middle management, and we intend on keeping it that way, as long as I'm around at least. Making fast decisions is not always a good thing, mind you, but things usually work out well for us. It's a very informal place to work. Suits and ties are highly frowned upon. Our investors, bankers, accountants, and some suppliers actually remove their ties before they even come in the lobby 'cause they know they are going to get a serious ribbing from everyone they meet.

5. In your entry into the US market, what has been a challenge and how have you overcome it?

EPA and FDA regulations and registrations were a real chore to get through, but we have done so nonetheless. We have a great team for that. The sales tax structure among "the feds" and the state and local governments in the United States is among the worst and most complicated and confusing I have seen anywhere in the world. The tax-compliance mess in the United States adds a significant amount of cost to the price of doing business here.

People usually misunderstand what a VAT (value added tax) is. As soon as they hear "tax," their brains shut down. But if VATs replaced existing taxes (not adding taxes), they would shed untold billions of dollars in business compliance costs in the United States—if they could ever get that to happen. I don't see that happening here. There are a lot of walls built around and inside the United States. Some are good walls. Some are bad walls.

6. Why did maxill expand to educational areas (CE)?

Our customers want to be more informed. Initially, maxill was backed financially by a group of dentists, so ongoing product development as well as increased training and education goes hand-in-hand. We now get hundreds of requests from local dental organizations for us to speak, and they usually commit to paying us a fee or buying "x" amount of product from us. We are very pleased to be recognized as a dental educational company in addition to all of the other value we bring.

7. What makes maxill so successful?

maxill is a different kind of company with a totally different business model from anything out there. We design, R&D, mold, manufacture, market, sell, ship, collect, logistic, warehouse, and on and on and on. There is no doubt that our business model is by far the most capital intensive, time-consuming, detail-oriented, and likely the most difficult road there is to travel when it comes to being the "A-team" in the dental supplies market. We have our own art, IT, software development, lab, and research department-the list goes on. We buy a lot from other manufacturers, but we also make a phenomenal amount of products directly in our own facilities both in North America and around the world.

It can be a huge headache sometimes, but the most important thing is that maxill is successful because we marry all of the "back-room stuff" with front-line field sales, inside sales, customer service, and an online presence that is transparent, world class, and that our customers really appreciate. We have several competitors that are in the "Billion Dollar Club" that would love to buy or crush us, but we continue to lure cash and customers away from them each and every day. Every year we experience robust compound growth. We simply have a lot of products that others do not have, and we can deliver them a lot more cost-effectively than what they could ever dream of delivering it for. Plus, we are a private company and that in itself has a lot of advantages too.