National Gypsum’s 100th anniversary and Business North Carolina’s annual list of the state’s biggest private companies led to a rare story this month on the wallboard-maker.
CEO Tom Nelson discussed his work at National Gypsum for the story that starts on Page 66. Like his legendary father-in-law C.D. “Dick” Spangler Jr., who bought the company in 1995, Nelson prefers to stay out of the public limelight.
But reporting on the story prompted me to catch up with Peter Browning, one of our state’s more impactful business leaders. He got to North Carolina because of National Gypsum.
Browning says he didn’t have an option to be low-key as the company’s CEO during perhaps its most challenging period.
National Gypsum’s top execs were based in Dallas when they recruited Browning in 1
989 to run the company’s main division, which had moved its headquarters to Charlotte a decade earlier.
The plan was for Browning, a 25-year veteran of packaging giant Continental Can, to learn about wallboard, then move to Dallas to succeed an aging CEO.
He got the top job in July 1990, just as
the U.S. economy entered a recession that slammed building product sales. It squeezed National Gypsum, which had leveraged up in a 1986 buyout backed by France’s Lafarge construction materials company.
Moreover, the U.S. company faced 40,000 lawsuits because it had owned a business that for decades sold insulation that used asbestos. The unit never made up more than 10% of total revenue, but its potential liability totaled hundreds of millions
of dollars.
Citigroup, National Gypsum’s main lender, got scared. It declined to renew the company’s credit line in 1990.
“For the first time in my career, I had to learn to spell bankruptcy,” Browning says.
Within three months as CEO, Browning launched a bankruptcy restructuring that kept National Gypsum in the news for the next three years. Forbes magazine, then known for its tough exposés on poorly run businesses, featured Browning in a positive story that he credits for changing Wall Street’s view.
The economy recovered by 1992, with wallboard sales rebounding as Browning cut costs. A year later, the company moved its headquarters to Charlotte and exited bankruptcy through a July 1993 IPO.
During this period, Browning helped introduce Lafarge leaders to Spangler and his Charlotte lawyer, Russell Robinson II. That led to Lafarge selling a stake in National Gypsum to Spangler. Two years later, Spangler acquired the entire company.
By then, Browning was gone. He had impressed the Coker family, which controlled the Hartsville, South Carolina-based packaging company Sonoco Products, and its board that included Charlotte kingpins Hugh McColl Jr. and Alan Dickson. In November 1993, he
joined Sonoco.
Browning spent nearly seven years running Sonoco, while gaining board seats at Nucor, Lowe’s and Wachovia. After departing Sonoco, he led Queens University’s business school for three-and-a-half years.
Browning is now 84. After serving on 14 public corporate boards, he is down to one, Greenville, South Carolina-based ScanSource, which distributes devices for cloud computing. For 13 years, he’s hosted an annual, invitation-only networking event for about 70 corporate directors, sponsored by EY, Moore & Van Allen and others.
An avid cyclist with four children and seven grandchildren, Browning has visited more than 80 nations. In October, he will celebrate his wife Kathy’s 80th birthday in Italy.
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In an interview with the Acertitude executive search firm, Browning shared four timeless lessons for leaders:
• Listen more than you speak
• Be transparent, even when it’s hard
• Earn trust through presence and follow-through
• Don’t lose your humanity in pursuit of performance ■
David Mildenberg is editor of Business North Carolina. Reach him at dmildenberg@businessnc.com.