Surviving the Night

A box of matches and a poncho. That’s all Dean and his partner were given when they were dropped off in the middle of Canada’s vast wilderness, charged with making it through the night as best they could. As a teenager in Canada’s Royal Canadian Air Cadets program, Dean participated in survival training several weekends a year. Exhilarated by the challenge, the young men built a shelter, started a fire, and awaited the coming darkness.

The next morning, they were graded on the quality of their shelter and the dryness of their clothes. But what really mattered was the strength of their resolve, the resourcefulness of their character, and the life lessons they decided to take with them in the wake of the experience. Before Air Cadets, Dean had been a carefree, unfocused kid who preferred play to work. But the Cadet program instilled in him a focus and discipline that would last a lifetime, ultimately transforming him into a successful entrepreneur in the waste management industry. Currently as President and CEO of EnviroSolutions, Inc., a Mid-Atlantic waste and recycling company, Dean is known for his ability to parachute into bad business situations and turn things around. “The world is always changing, and every company goes through good times and bad,” he remarks. “It’s just like those nights alone in the wilderness. You have to know the nature of the terrain, or the mechanics of the industry. You have to know the tools at your disposal. But most of all, you have to know yourself and what you’re capable of.”

EnviroSolutions, Inc. (ESI), launched in 2004, grew through a series of more than twenty East Coast acquisitions. While some of those acquisitions went well, a number of them went bad, and although the company’s second CEO saw it through bankruptcy in 2010, the Board knew they needed a leader with a proven track record to “right the ship” and set a new course for the company. A notable waste industry consulting company recommended finding a new CEO with a minimum twenty plus years of experience running multi-hundred-million-dollar waste operations, and they sought out Dean.

At that time, he and his wife, Shauna, were living in their dream home in Seattle. But it quickly became clear that he was the perfect candidate for the opportunity. Known as a “fix it” man, Dean knew the waste management business inside and out, having performed every aspect of the work through his long career in the industry.

Indeed, as a small business owner himself, Dean has driven the trucks, sorted recyclables, welded and painted containers, and sold services to prospective customers. He was no stranger to long days. In April 2015, Dean agreed to assume the helm of ESI, and through his leadership, the company has improved significantly.

Though Dean’s success certainly hinges on his deep industry knowledge, his innate business acumen was first honed when he was a young child sitting at the family dinner table, which functioned as a “board room” for his father’s communications company, Kartronix. His parents had come from very little as his father drove a taxi to put himself through electronics school in Toronto. When Dean was six, his father started building Kartronix from scratch, running the operations while Dean’s mother handled the bookkeeping.

“My mother was tough as nails and extremely disciplined,” he remembers. “And I found another great role model in my entrepreneurial and hardworking father. My parents have always been best friends, with the most incredible marriage you could ever imagine. Every morning, we got up and ate breakfast together as a family. And we ended the day, when possible, eating dinner together. At the table, my parents would discuss all kinds of issues they were having at the company, and I learned Business 101 through osmosis.”

Just as the family was beginning to build the business that would define much of its future success, life took a sudden turn when Dean’s older brother, Darryl, passed away from leukemia at age ten. “I was six at the time and didn’t understand the full magnitude of what had happened, but I could feel the impact on the family,” he says. “Even to this day, my mom’s eyes well up when he’s mentioned. It never changes.”

Despite the shadow cast over the family by the tragic loss, the Kattlers persevered, working to give their children better lives than they had growing up. As a kid, Dean enjoyed sports, riding his bike, and hanging out with friends. He wasn’t that disciplined in school, always preferring to be playing than learning in a classroom. But he did show signs of interest when his parents enrolled his older brothers in Air Cadets—a recruitment tool for the Canadian military that Dean describes as the equivalent to America’s Boy Scouts, but on steroids. Boys join Air Cadets at age thirteen and retire at nineteen, where they don a uniform and participate in weekly parades, technical courses, instructional techniques, and leadership development classes.

Watching his brothers go through the rigorous but rewarding program, Dean couldn’t wait to join himself, and at thirteen, he enrolled at the starting rank of LAC (private). “Air cadets was a defining experience in my life because it changed me from a carefree kid into a very disciplined person,” he reflects. “And through that change, I started to know what it felt like to be successful and to win.” Dean was the top cadet in his rank for all six years of the program, and the top cadet overall for his last three years—an honor that was unprecedented in the squadron’s history. He made it from the lowest rank of LAC to the highest rank of Warrant Officer 1st Class faster than anyone ever had, becoming the leader of 140 cadets when he was only seventeen years old.

Almost all of Dean’s free time was dedicated to Air Cadets, leaving little room for organized sports and other extracurricular activities until he intentionally carved out time to join his high school rugby team. But for the most part, he spent Monday evenings pressing his uniform and shining his boots for Tuesday cadet nights, where he either took courses or taught them. He played snare drum in the marching band on Friday evenings, and on Sundays he played on the volleyball and basketball teams. “Our squadron was the strongest in Western Canada—a great group of kids from all walks of life.  Because we wore uniforms, no one cared if you’re wearing designer clothes or not,” he recounts. “It didn’t matter if your family was affluent or poor. There was no baggage, only that sense of team, mission, and service.”

When Dean was sixteen, he became the youngest of 150 cadets from across Canada to gain admission to a highly competitive six-week Senior Leadership Course that took place at an Air Force Base in Alberta during the summer. “I’ll never forget getting off the bus and being told that they owned us for the next six weeks,” he says. “If they couldn’t bounce a quarter off our freshly made beds or see themselves in the brass door knob, they’d get an inch from our faces and scream at us. No matter what we did, it was never good enough.” Long days of coursework and drills often began before 5:00 AM and ended after 11:00 PM. It hardened Dean’s discipline and resolve even further. “To this day, if you look at my Gallup StrengthsFinder results, some of my top strengths are discipline, achiever and responsibility,” he says. ”Thanks to those grueling, character-defining six weeks.”

Upon graduating from high school, Dean joined the family business, as his two brothers had before him.  His parents did not have university degrees, and higher education wasn’t often discussed in the Kattler household, so it wasn’t a path Dean considered at the time. Instead, he worked at Kartronix handling customer service, managing the shop, and selling two-way radio equipment.

When Dean was 21, his father decided to sell the business to a national company. Though the Kattlers stayed on after the transition, friction soon developed between his father and the new ownership group and within a year, they fired the entire Kattler family. For the first time, Dean faced the difficult question of what he was going to do with his life.

His brother came across an advertisement for a sales position at Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI), a publicly traded U.S.-based waste management company. Dean landed the job, marking a dramatic lifestyle shift. “There I was at 21 years old, making north of $80,000 and driving a brand new car,” he recounts. “I soon met the love of my life, Shauna, and we started dating. I had a new apartment and played a lot of golf. Life was good, but I wasn’t fulfilled. I felt like there had to be more to my purpose in life.”

A couple years later the answer came in the form of a business opportunity put forth by Shauna’s father, an “old-school” seasoned businessman who had taken a liking to Dean early on. He wanted to get out of the oilfield business in cold Alberta and find a franchise opportunity he could retire to in warmer British Columbia. After searching with no luck, Dean suggested he consider getting into the waste management business. Sometime later he flew with Dean to Castlegar, British Columbia, to look at a waste company he found called Ace Disposals. The business model was promising, and Shauna’s father wanted to buy it, but he needed someone to run it while he wound down his oilfield services business. He offered the challenge to Dean, who quickly agreed. “Not many people would hand over the reins of their new business to a 24-year-old kid,” he reflects. “I’m glad he gave me the opportunity.”

With that, Shauna’s father bought the business, and Dean traded in his sports car for a pickup truck and a minority ownership stake. He went from wearing suits to wearing overalls, and although his annual income was cut in half, he was having a blast. With hard work and business acumen, Dean spent the next six years growing the company’s revenue from $350,000 to $1.5 million. “I owe a lot of my success to my abilities as a communicator, and to my father’s influence,” Dean remarks. “He was a great at sales, very articulate and always treating people right. I was also driven by this entrepreneurial spirit—the desire to build something. I loved the adventure of trying something new and somehow always seemed to figure things out as I went along.”

In 1998, at the end of a great ride, Ace Disposals was acquired by Waste Management of Canada, with the deal contingent on Dean staying on. Before long, he was transferred to Kelowna, British Columbia, where he was parachuted into the leadership role of District Manager overseeing seven locations across the interior of British Columbia. He can still remember dropping off the company VP back at the airport immediately after he fired Dean’s predecessor and put him in his place. “Stan got out of the car and turned back to me with a grin on his face and said, ‘Call if you need anything… and good luck!’” Dean recounts.

A year later, and upon his ability to quickly establishing a track record of success, Dean was transferred to Vancouver to clean up the sales organization on an interim basis until a reorganization advanced him into a senior management position. Unfortunately, as a result of the reorganization, a new VP was put in place who decided to bring someone else in for the job he was promised—a move that almost prompted Dean to quit.  He stayed on, however, and worked diligently to support “the new guy.” Later that year Dean made a key contact with the VP in Waste Management’s Pacific Northwest Region. Thanks to this relationship, Dean was tapped in 2001 to move to the U.S. to become the District Manager of Seattle. The following year, Dean was promoted Director of Operations, where he managed multiple District Managers who were all at least fifteen years his senior.

After several years as the second in command in the state of Washington, Dean was promoted to Market Area General Manager, running all operations from San Jose through the Monterey Peninsula in northern California. There, Dean’s leadership skills and perseverance were tested by a 28-day Teamster’s Union lockout. “Due to an impasse in negotiations, we actually locked the doors on the Teamsters,” he recalls. “And as a result I witnessed teamwork like I’d never seen before as my management team and personnel from all levels of the organization came together to figure out how to keep a business operating in such adversity. It was absolutely incredible. Each morning, we had to get trucks and personnel across picket lines with burn barrels and very angry people. I even had private security at my house 24/7. In the end, we mobilized more than 500 replacement workers from across the country and were extremely successful.”

Dean repeated that kind of leadership on two other occasions after he was relocated back to Seattle in 2009 to become Area VP of the Pacific Northwest overseeing Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, and British Columbia. In that capacity, Dean was responsible for more than $850 million in revenue and 2,300 employees, and often relied on the grit he honed through Air Cadets to see the company through difficulties. “Labor negotiations were like disaster coordination,” he recalls. “You have to have a well-trained contingency plan in place, though you hope to never have to use it. On several occasions, we did have to use it, and it kept us going. If I owe my success in life to anything, it’s the discipline and training I got as a cadet.”

While he loved his time at Waste Management, in 2012 Dean decided to leave corporate life and the waste industry to become COO of a Seattle-based family-owned business called Emerald Environmental. Shortly after joining Emerald, his previous employer expressed some proprietary concerns that required Dean to take a leave of absence, so he used that time to fulfill his lasting desire to get a college degree. He enrolled in Western Governors University, under their online competency-based degree program, and by following a work-like disciplined and regimented schedule, finished the four-year Business Management degree in only 8 months. “I always knew it would be next to impossible to land a CEO role without a degree,” he explains. “I was frustrated that I had to take a leave from work, but I was able to turn it into a positive opportunity that allowed me to unlock more doors.”

The most important of those doors was the phone call in early 2015 from a recruiter contracting with Washington DC based EnviroSolutions, Inc., who was looking for someone to come in and turn the company around. That call reminded Dean of just how much he missed the waste industry. “Not many people know about the waste business, but once you’re in it, it’s addicting,” he remarks. “There’s an environmental aspect, and the fact that you’re providing a vital service to benefit society. The industry is full of very genuine people who are a joy to work with, and I love that as a CEO, I don’t just sit in the corner office all the time. I have blue jean days where I’m out meeting with our drivers and connecting with them on what’s important and where we’re going as a company.”

Through it all, Shauna has been by Dean’s side, and even after seven huge moves and a dozen homes, she rolls with the punches and lends steady support. “All successful CEOs have a steady anchor by their side, and for me, that’s Shauna,” Dean affirms. “She’s amazing. She’s my biggest cheerleader who puts up with crazy travel, crazy hours, and the challenges that business throws our way. Like me, she always believes there’s more to reach for. Together, we’re always chasing the next adventure. She grew up in a small oil town, and as a young girl decided she wanted to do more with her life. That’s been a motivation for us to always say, what does the next opportunity look like? It’s been fun to chase that.

In advising young people entering the workforce today, Dean reminds us that work ethic can take us places that book smarts can’t. “I learned from the school of hard knocks,” he says. “It’s not easy, but there’s simply no substitute for willpower and practical, real-world experience.” He also points out the importance of being open, as he never expected he’d become the CEO of a waste company. And while it wasn’t in his plans, he wouldn’t have it any other way. “Looking at my life and business through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs I like to think that I work because it’s a form of self-actualization,” he reflects. “When we bring on new accounts and grow the business I know it’s an important service and a job well done, it’s that feeling of self-actualization that drives me. When I parachute into a fire and drop seeds on scorched earth, changing out the leadership team and bringing on new people for new success, that’s self-actualization. It’s what I’ve prepared for my whole life, in one way or another, since those days in Air Cadets survival training with just a box of matches and a poncho. We always made it through the night, and we always will.”

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