Youngest Samples son comes home to help lead ARDL

BARBERTON, Ohio—There's a very personal reason Toby Samples picked June 3 to be his official first day as president and chief technical officer of Akron Rubber Development Laboratory Inc.

He had been set to relocate July 1 from his role with DuPont, where he worked remotely out of Washington state, back home to Ohio to lead the Barberton-based independent testing laboratory specializing in rubber, plastic and latex.

You see, June 3 was the birthday of his late father, Robert "CR" Samples, who founded ARDL in 1962. Toby Samples is the youngest son of the founder, and he thought what better day to start the latest chapter in his family's firm than on that date.

So he got his predecessor, Bonnie Stuck, to oblige. She has been with the company since 2009, first as a senior technical adviser, then as president since June 2017. Stuck will continue part time with ARDL as president emeritus.

Toby also got his older half-brother, Tim Samples, to agree to the start date. Tim has worked at ARDL for more than five decades and, as CEO, will be the 38-year-old Toby's boss.

In announcing Toby Samples as the successor to Stuck, ARDL said Toby is "set to carry on his father's legacy with a fresh vision for the future."

"Toby brings a blend of innovative thinking and reverence for the traditions that have made ARDL a respected name in the industry," the company said in a welcoming statement.

The youngest of the founder's sons has been around ARDL his whole life. He had a variety of detours away from the Akron-area firm, but has always returned.

When Toby Samples was a child, there really wasn't organized daycare to speak of. So his father, would bring him into the laboratory and let him loose with various employees. He vividly recalls being around the various molding labs, smelling rubber, feeling the buttons on the rheometers.

From there, he worked some in each of the departments. "My dad intentionally placed me in every department," Samples said. "So I worked through the chemical analytical services, doing certain reverse engineering, looking at contaminants in rubber. And then I did a bunch of administrative tasks for him as a 12 year old."

Toby Samples gets emotional when talking about his dad and what he learned from him. CR Samples worked pretty much every day but Christmas, when he took a breather. Toby got to work a good amount with his father, and credits him for much of what he brings to the job.

"Not only the passion for problem solving, but simply how to treat others as you would be treated," Toby Samples said. "And just his ability to listen to his employees and his customers was of the greatest value. And how to be a good dad."

Toby Samples has two daughters, ages 8 and 10, and he plans to let them hang out at the laboratory to learn as he had, though probably with a few more safety measures in place.

He decided pretty early on that engineering was going to be the path for him.

"Kartik Srinivas was one of our employees in engineering who ran simulation work," Samples said. "I saw his computer. I saw he was manipulating a piece of rubber on his computer screen and I said, 'I want to do that.' "

Samples was about 14 years old at the time, and as he saw the mechanical FEA engineer typing up code to put test data into his computer, he was roughly putting together his own educational path.

He received his bachelor's in 2009 in mechanical polymer engineering from the University of Akron, from where he also earned his master's in mechanical engineering in 2013.

Despite growing up around ARDL and Polymerics Inc.—a custom mixer also founded by CR Samples—Toby Samples had times during his career when he worked elsewhere.

After being a research assistant at ARDL from 2003-11, he worked as a design engineer at Babcock & Wilcox, also located in Barberton, from 2011-14. But he returned to the family firm as a staff engineer 3 for seven years, until April 2021.

He had moved to Anacortes, Wash., in 2018, working remotely for ARDL, before taking a role with DuPont as a technical service and application development engineer in April 2021. He also was based out of his Washington home for that role.

"I just switched out my plants in my office to make it a different vibe, switched up the computer and started at DuPont," Samples said. "They had me flying down to Silicon Valley once a month to serve customers and teach them about rubber and how to use rubber in their processes.

"And that was my favorite customer facing role, when it took me from behind the desk, behind the simulations to actually target markets and target customers."

And while he has always returned to ARDL, he insists that was never his intention.

"The thought behind that was always I never expected to return to ARDL during each of these adventures, and then each of them were about three years or so," Samples said, before he returned to the family fold, each time for a new challenge.

He also learned valuable lessons at each stop.

Babcock and Wilcox was a government subcontractor. There he learned how to work in the most clamped down, restrictive environment, which was a necessary mentality because of the security clearances and secrecy involved in the work.

At DuPont, Samples learned what to and not to do bureaucratically within an organizational structure. He also learned how to target markets, to do account-based marketing and how to focus on those who would become your most loyal customers.

"They also fostered mentorship, which is one of my great values, and I really want to carry that forward," Samples told Rubber News during an interview in his office.

The opportunity to return to ARDL to succeed Stuck wasn't a situation where the family and company leadership reached out to him to hand him the job. Between talking with Bonnie and a mix of family and board decisions, Samples knew the firm was looking to make a transition. And there were a number of candidates for the role.

But he couldn't help to think that this was the right time to make the move back home, for what he says is "forever" this time.

"I asked my wife before I proposed it to anyone else," Samples confided. "I said, 'Can I put my name in the hat.' And we both agreed that we can do this. And she said, 'I support you in whatever you want to do.'

"It was a hard thing for her to say that because we were in the most beautiful place in the world in Washington."

They live in a three-generation household as his in-laws live with them. They made it a goal to hit all the hikes of half-mile to two miles in their area, and recently went through the Cascades Olympic National Park so they could experience the beautiful places in Washington.

But now all three generations have relocated back to Ohio, as Samples knows the critical necessity of this role and his dad's legacy.

And while he enjoyed his work at DuPont and shining with one of the iconic businesses in industry, there were certain things ARDL offered that DuPont never could.

Making clear that he didn't want to sound vain, he really looked at it as a "virtuous" decision.

"Do I want lucrative and lazy, or do I want hard fought, virtuous, working for people I love and care about?"

In his heart, he knew however hard he worked at DuPont—and he did appreciate the connections—in the end at best he's going to end up making happy shareholders, and his successes would be more on a superficial level.

"So that was basically it," Samples said. "It was like where do I want to spend the rest of my life? What path do I want to be on? And ARDL certainly has a beautiful, challenging, opportunistic road ahead."

The Samples family still has a strong presence among the nearly 100-person staff at ARDL. Besides Tim and Toby, family involved include Debbie Samples Coffee, Dusty Samples, Susie Adaska and her son Mike, along with Katie Kelly, Tim's stepdaughter.

Toby Samples plans to lean into a good deal of the strong processes already in place at ARDL, and sprinkle in a dose of what he thinks he can bring to the business.

Besides hiring the company's first safety manager, Samples has introduced six core values: safety, quality, communication, customer focus, integrity and innovation.

And the order of these are listed with a specific purpose in mind.

The idea is that if you focus on the first three internally, you now have a solid team. Then the focus is turned externally for the final three.

"The concept is really like, 'Let's work on ourselves first, and then we'll move forward from there,' " Samples said. "There's a lot of opportunity here just focusing on those six things. And I'm really excited for that."

The new president also will draw on the three strengths he has developed through his career—two he came upon personally, and the third from DuPont.

The first of those is mentorship. ARDL hasn't had a formal mentoring program, but Samples is certain he can implement one there that fits the company culture and can lead to meaningful personal development for the staff.

Next is leading the firm forward in digitization and how that can lead to more efficient processes. Some of that can be done by showing and sharing with employees in town hall meetings, which in turn leads to them sharing ideas they might have.

"The last value that I got from DuPont is the ability to have a market focus and to really use business data to make those targeted market decisions," Samples said. "It's a very simple way of going about doing things like market learning plans, where you can just assess what is our strategy moving forward.

"To me, it's not that ARDL did a poor job at it. But it's certainly an area of growth and improvement that I can bring here."

Stuck knew it was time for ARDL to move on with a new leader, and she is confident that Toby is the right choice for the job. She went to part time in 2020 and focused just on being president, but gave word at the beginning of this year it was time to more forward with a president who is there every day.

"We did have candidates out there, but Toby, I think, is the best choice, and the reason I think so is because he knows ARDL," Stuck said. "He knows the people. He's a very talented digital engineer, and that's very important."

Another plus is that he's worked most of the jobs at ARDL at one time or another, and Stuck thinks people respect that within ARDL.

"The other thing is his youth is valuable," she said. "I think that we need someone who's going to be here long term. There have been lots of opportunities to sell the company, but that's not what the family wants to do. And having one from the younger part of the family come in, it's just so important, I think for the future."

Stuck will still be there to offer advice and guidance as needed, but purposefully in the background. She even moved to an office way down in the corner of the company's spacious headquarters in Barberton.

"The reason why is we want people to come to him because he has the ability to answer and change things, and I really think it's good for ARDL," she said.

Besides the president title, Samples also will be ARDL's chief technical officer. The goal there ties back to him being in every department at one time or other, along with his development at DuPont and understanding the ways companies can utilize an independent testing laboratory.

"It gives me in the broadest sense, the scope to then share that wisdom and actionable steps to each of the employees," Samples said. "First through the VPs, then to their managers, then to the individual contributors.

"And so the chief technical officer is, to me, a summation of, at 38 years old, I feel like I've seen a lot more of the rubber industry than a typical person. That's my edge."

He also looks to get to work with and know better his half-brother, Tim Samples, his direct supervisor as CEO, something he sees as a blessing.

Toby always wanted to get to know Tim better. But with the age difference, Tim was busy with his family earlier. Then Toby moved and had his family.

Now, though, he thinks those stars may be aligning.

Drawing from one of his core values, Toby set up a co-mentorship session between the brothers. The idea is they speak openly in a candid nature about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and they can question each other's choices.

"It's so we see the transparency. because I have a big gap to fill and I want to share everything I've learned along the way with him," Toby Samples said, along with learning from Tim's vast experience in the business. "It's just an incredible flow between him and I."

Toby remembers when he was a teenager and the Samples went through family succession training, that the trainers complimented them on how well they got along as a family.

"That to me is just my dad," the younger Samples said. "He somehow worked good parenting to where we all get along really well. And what was made clear to me by my family in the board meetings is that they trust me. They trust, even though some things I'm saying to them are hard to hear."

Looking forward to a year from now, Samples said re-engaging with the culture at ARDL is critical. And having the staff understand that clear communication from the top down and having respect for others will be the new norm.

"It's going to happen at its own speed if you will, and as fast as I can help people start sharing with each other and help discussing with each other," he said. "So really, from these improved communications, I would see in one year that people start to solve problems more efficiently on their own. That people start to collaborate quite a bit more. Having the decision structure lined up I think should improve innovation."

Samples also knows there are a lot of things that will happen that will be out of ARDL's control.

"I can't predict the future, but I know that things are of a straightforward improvement," he said. "We'll suffer if the economy suffers. Things will happen, but I'm not nervous about it at all, which is a really neat feeling. Not because I'm overly confident, but simply because I understand the people and that they are capable. They're awesome people."