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V O L . X X V I I N O. V I M A R C H 2 2 , 2 0 2 1 12 work force, is going to be. e govern- ment just wanted us to diversify where we were locating because with Maine we do have sometimes some weather issues and it's also more difficult to transport stuff from Maine, so the government just said there's nothing wrong with Maine and you've had great success there, but can you look a little further away so we don't have a situation where we have one major weather event causing inability for the whole country to have swabs. It's another hard shift for us because we are a family-owned busi- ness and we've always been based in Maine and based in rural Maine and when you start thinking we're going to put a factory in another part of the country, we're going to have to trust the people we hire in those locations to run this factory the same way we run things in Maine and bring our culture to a new group of people. We're aiming to have that done by the end of the year. MB: Have you gotten any takeover offers from larger companies? Does Puritan want to remain independent? SW: ere are constant streams — before the pandemic and after the pandemic — there's always unsolic- ited phone calls, emails from M&A firms and investment banks. But we're a family-owned company. is is third and fourth-generation family owned, celebrating 102 years this year. So there's no desire for us to be anything other than a family owned business. e success has been from that innovation over many years. Yes, is there demand in the market for someone to look to acquire us? I'm sure there is. But we want to continue to be a Maine-based family-owned business that supports its employees and supports its community and that's really the position we're stay- ing in going forward. MB: As a manager and leader of your company, who do you go to for advice? Who do you go to people for help when you need it? SW: I go to a lot of different places. It depends on what the problem is. I have a great network and support staff, our senior management team, and a great team overall that I can go to internally. If it's more bigger picture situations, from over the course of many years, I've developed a network of people who I can call and just say 'Hey, I have this situation going on.' And we're kind of an independent support network for each other. And they do the same thing to me. And these are people all over the country, different sized businesses, but I definitely reach out and talk to them and I've had a lot of those conversations over the past year. In a lot of businesses, I have found that a lot of leaders are too proud to take advice from someone in a differ- ent part of the organization. at will- ingness to accept someone else's point of view and work through a problem has allowed us to make these deci- sions in a very efficient way and not have major problems. Jessica Hall, a writer based in Nobleboro, can be reached at editorial @ mainebiz.biz » C O N T I N U E D F RO M P R E V I O U S PA G E P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY Scott Wellman, interim general manager of Puritan Medical Products, in the foam swab production area at the Pittsfield operations.

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