Jamie Schroeder’s finance career began on the shop floor at Ford Motor Company. As part of Ford’s rotational development program, Schroeder tells us, he spent a month working in the paint shop at an assembly plant outside Cleveland. The experience was designed around “learning the business and getting your hands on the business” so that finance could become an informed partner to operations.
That operating mindset followed Schroeder to Scotts Miracle-Gro, where unfamiliar assignments became a recurring source of development. According to Schroeder, he was repeatedly placed in situations involving ambiguity, collaboration, and the need to “create something brand new that didn’t exist before.” Over time, embracing discomfort became part of his professional identity.
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One experience taught him what it meant to be a growth CFO. According to Schroeder, stagnant category growth had led finance into a “profit preservation” posture when leadership changes at a major retailer created an opening for Scotts to pursue a more aggressive commercial program.
The proposal involved aggressive pricing, promotions, and products—and considerable risk. Instead of retreating, Schroeder tells us, finance supplied data and scenario analysis, quantified the risks, and developed playbooks for possible responses. Transparency ensured that operating partners understood both the opportunity and the guardrails.
According to Schroeder, the resulting market-share battle produced category growth that Scotts had not seen in ten years, while sales and profits rose across the category.
Now CFO of Premium Guard, Schroeder brings that lesson to another transformational setting: Finance can help a company pursue disruption without ignoring risk. The discipline lies not in avoiding uncertainty, but in understanding the business well enough to move through it together.
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CFOTL: We’re catching you just as you arrive at Premium Guard this summer, and we’ll be interested in hearing about the opportunity you saw. But for someone new to Premium Guard, what does the company provide, whom does it serve, and where is the opportunity today?
Schroeder: Great question. I’m super excited to be part of this team. It’s a great organization with great people and a great leader in Anand Bashara. I’m about four weeks in, so I had done due diligence before I took the role, but four weeks in, I’m still super excited about the company and my potential to add value to it.
Premium Guard is a global automotive aftermarket supplier. We specialize in air filtration—cabin filters for your cars, oil filters, and other engine and performance parts. It was founded about 30 years ago, and we’re at a really interesting transformational pivot for the company. This is why I’m really excited about joining.
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The company recently acquired some key intellectual property and related assets from First Brands Group. That was the mega-company that recently went bankrupt. We bought some of those assets, including the FRAM, Autolite, and Trico brands. Those are really great opportunities for us to strengthen our product offering and develop further capabilities in windshield-wiper blades, spark plugs, and even diesel-engine filtration. It was something that happened when the balance sheet was in a good enough position—this was prior to me getting here—to be able to take advantage of it and purchase those assets.
We also hired several individuals from First Brands Group—really smart experts in the field. It started with the people, honestly. Then came the brands and the intellectual property. The third phase was buying manufacturing capabilities. We are in the process of opening our first domestic manufacturing facility in Albion, Illinois.
We’re really excited about that because it diversifies our supply chain. It also represents an opportunity to restore about 200 manufacturing and operational jobs in a community that was really affected by the company’s closure and the facility’s closure. There are a lot of good things about this.
But we’re in the very beginning stages. Now that we’ve completed those transactions, as I’m stepping in, it’s: Okay, now we have to make these assets work for us. We need to get the ROI that we expect from them. We expect this to be a platform for us to become a better supplier to our customers.
What do we do? Our number-one job is to make our customers successful. These are aftermarket retailers like NAPA, AutoZone, and Advance. I don’t want to miss anybody, but I’m new, so if I missed anybody, it’s nothing personal. It is our goal to make those customers successful. By having a broad category of products, even better intellectual property and expertise, and coming to market quickly as new cars come out, we can provide the aftermarket products needed to service those vehicles and make our customers successful. That’s our number-one goal. Everything we’re doing is intended to emphasize that and make us better at delivering it.
CFOTL: With the First Brands additions, what can Premium Guard now become? Where is it headed, and why was this a strategic acquisition? Is it about creating a broader suite of offerings?
Schroeder: It is a broader suite of offerings, but it also hits on a couple of strategic elements. By having domestic manufacturing, we further strengthen the resilience of our supply chain, and that’s super critical. Supply-chain resilience is a key part of it.
The other piece is that it helps us enter some different markets as well, such as OEM products. The aftermarket is still our bread and butter. We’re not taking our eyes off the prize there. That is absolutely critical. But I think there are opportunities for us to enter different channels and strategically develop different platforms for growth, both domestically and internationally.
Some of the brands we purchased—FRAM in particular—are global brands. That opens a lot of different opportunities for us to get back into some of those global markets as well. We’re starting right now by making sure that we get the Albion facility up and running, but as we grow into this, there are a lot of different opportunities for us to grow the business.
CFOTL: Can you explain how branded products and private-label programs may contribute differently to Premium Guard’s economics?
Schroeder: We’re going to find that out. This company has been built on private-label programs. What our founder, Anand Bashara, did was revolutionary at the time. He filled a niche that nobody else saw as a need in the automotive aftermarket by putting together turnkey private-label programs. That is who we are right now.
With the purchase of these brands, it’s going to be interesting to see. You asked about profitability. We absolutely need to make sure that we approach this from a highly profitable perspective. That’s one of my remits as I come in here: to help guide that and work with the team to make sure we’re doing it.
The branded products provide us with a breadth of potential markets and channels in which to operate. We had something similar at Scotts Miracle-Gro. We had private-label programs and branded programs. I have experience with that, and I understand that those two can coexist and that you can perform very well in both scenarios. We just need to figure out how to do it here at PGI as we go forward, and I’m confident that we’re going to do that.
PGI | www.premiumguard.com | Memphis TN