Gregg is President of Young Associates, Inc, and serves as Growth and Innovation Leader for Synection. He has over 30 years experience creating customer value through growth, innovation, and operational excellence. He assists leaders in developing strategies for maximizing the creation of customer value, and he provides tactical tools for creating value-based market segments and for successful strategy implementation. These tools include Opportunity Analysis to uncover unmet market needs (leading to the development of successful new products 95% of the time), Operational Excellence (for best-in-class creation of customer value), a Profit Velocity model that maximizes return on assets, and Multi-Generation Product Planning (for creating future new products that anticipate future customer needs).
Some examples of his work include:
- A process re-design, quantitative analysis case study for manufacturing auto body panels that showed how to reduce costs by 50% while simultaneously improving customer value.
- A business model for re-designing a residential construction operation to eliminate up to 35% of the cost and 4-6 weeks of construction time.
- A market study of silicone-based surface treatments in construction identified two new customer value segments, which has led to the creation of two new multi-million dollar businesses and has revitalized a business that was stagnant.
- Redirected development resources in RFID, new battery technologies, labels, wound treatment, and fractional horsepower motors saving tens of millions of dollars in wasted resources because the existing projects were not based real customer needs.
- Guided leadership of a steel fabrication company to focus on delivering customer value, so they instituted changes that increased profitability by 20% and improved worker morale.
- Taught undergraduate courses at Northwood University on Industrial Marketing and International Marketing based on segmenting markets according to customer value.
Before founding Young Associates, Gregg held several leadership positions at The Dow Chemical Company, where he advised senior leadership on customer value and customer satisfaction issues, and he led the market segmentation efforts for Dow U.S.A. In these capacities he:
Developed and taught Market Segmentation courses for Sales and Marketing, and Operational Excellence courses for Manufacturing.
Planned and facilitated multiple senior leadership workshops on improving customer value.
Streamlined Opportunity Analysis training for Dow Chemical, reducing the cost of training by 50%.
Trained and coached new Opportunity Analysts for Dow U.S.A. and Dow Europe, so R&D projects would have strong linkage to real customer needs.
Before that Young served as one of Dow Chemical’s first Opportunity Analysts, completing multiple projects with detailed cost models in five different areas of the company. These included studies of auto body panels, construction, electronics, adhesives, ceramic components, chelants, and lost-foam castings.
Prior to that he doubled Dow's adhesives business by developing new adhesives for appliances that created customer value by eliminating a difficult welding operation and increasing the durability of the finished product.