C-Suite Speaker Verl Purdy seeks solutions with data, determination

As a boy growing up in rural West Virginia, Verl Purdy ’73 MBA walked a mile from his family’s farm to a one-room schoolhouse with a coal fire for warmth and water fetched in buckets. The path from those hardscrabble times in a mountain hollow to his life today has been a journey of discovery and dedication.

At the Belk College of Business C-Suite Speaker Series earlier this spring, Purdy shared his story with 200+ students during a chat with Belk College Dean Richard Buttimer. The C-Suite series brings some of America’s most influential business leaders to UNC Charlotte to connect with students each semester. Most recently the series hosted Purdy, now managing partner with Cadrillion Capital, founded by the Purdy and Yuhas families to invest in healthcare information businesses. Purdy also met with a smaller group of students following the talk.

As he has made his way through life, Purdy has learned the value of believing in oneself and of taking advantage of lucky breaks. In his interactions with other highly successful people, many have told him how good fortune — and their responses to opportunities — played a critical role in their lives.

“The difference (compared to others) is that they seized the opportunity,” Purdy told the student attendees. “Many of you will have luck, and you will be afraid to put your toe into the cold water and try it.” Those he knows who have flourished took a chance on luck, and they also overcame bouts of bad luck, such as changes in the marketplace or society, which he said often cannot be anticipated but must be managed.

In a second piece of advice, Purdy encouraged attendees to believe in themselves. “All of you, like me, will sometimes have someone telling you something negative about your ambitions, your capabilities, your goals, or what you want to do,” he said. “You know yourself. Do not ever let anyone define you, or do not ever let anyone keep you from your achieving your goals.”

As an undergraduate studying chemical engineering at West Virginia University decades ago, he ranked in the next-to-last place in his graduating class. He decided to pay no attention to naysayers.

“If I had listened to my professors, I’d have graduated and said, ‘I’m a failure. I’m never going to amount to anything,’ ” he observed. Instead, with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree earned as a member of Charlotte’s first MBA graduating class, Purdy has built a career as an innovative world leader in food production, agriculture and health sciences enterprises.

Evolving entrepreneurial spirit

“When I was in the engineering school as an undergraduate, entrepreneurship was basically unheard of,” Purdy said. “I didn’t know anybody who was an entrepreneur. Leveraged buyouts, and venture capital and private equity, and those sorts of industries just didn’t exist. My colleagues in engineering school all decided to follow the path of being a professor, a researcher or a scientist, and I was the only one who chose management.”

Purdy started his career in chemical engineering as a shift foreman, a difficult and challenging job. He moved to Charlotte a few years later, as a 26-year-old production manager with BASF, determined to grow his future.

“I discovered the MBA program here at Charlotte,” he said. “For the first time ever, I had case studies of businesses. I had a chance to experience entrepreneurship through introducing a product. In one of our classes, we had to develop a new product, and my product was a little container for vending machines in hotels that would hold a disposable razor or a toothbrush and toothpaste for all those travelers that had forgotten those necessities.”

With the world-relevant lessons from his MBA classes, encouragement from college then-Dean Allan Palmer and experience in industry, Purdy moved to New Jersey with BASF. “That really opened my eyes because we were buying and selling companies in the United States, and for the first time I got to see how that process worked,” he said. “I got to sit down with investment bankers. I got to sit down with the folks who did the economics and cash flow analysis, and that really inspired me.”

Data as a driver

Those early experiences set the stage for advancement through varied business opportunities. In 1980 he joined Rio Tinto Zinc chemicals treatment company as its North American president and CEO. Shortly after, in 1985, he started AGDATA and over time grew the agricultural data marketing and analytics company into the largest in the world in its field.

“We collected the data from all of the agricultural activity in the United States, and later in Canada, South America and Europe,” he said. “It sounds ancient to say this, that along came the Internet and along came laptops, and this revolutionized the way information was distributed. We found out that we could provide sales representatives in animal health and agriculture with a laptop full of information to make a sales call. We started using math and science and hiring university professors to do predictive analytics.”

Leaders of the companies AGDATA worked with had assumed that farmers made decisions based on age and education, skewing their approach toward younger and more educated people as the presumed early adopters of new technology and products. The data that his firm collected and analyzed proved that the driving factor, instead, was the size of the farms, regardless of the farmer’s age or education level.

“It’s economics to them,” Purdy said. “They had such a production level, they could calculate the profits of that change. We used all sorts of predictive analytics, and we managed all the rebate programs.”

That meant that his company’s clients developed enough confidence in AGDATA and its data processes to entrust it with billions of dollars to transfer on to their distributors, retailers and growers. “We used the data-gathering techniques, and that was what separated us,” he recalled. “We knew everything there was to know about a corn grower in France. If you were growing grapes in Italy, we knew how to calculate how much grapes you had by how many bottles you bought to make your wine.”

Company leaders formed relationships with the CEOs of animal health and agricultural companies, and AGDATA became a valuable supplier of information about technology advances and the impact on the companies’ supply chain and other processes.

Family collaborators

In 1997 he, along with sons Scott and Steven, started MedData, which became the national leader in insurance eligibility verification services. AGDATA and MedData were sold in 2009 and 2010, but Purdy and his sons, one a doctor and one a lawyer, have continued to collaborate in business ventures.

Driving Purdy is the determination to discover the answers to problems through data. “I love information, and I love to look at data and see what it says and what we can determine from that,” he said, laughing as he confessed that his wife Sandra describes him as a nerd.

Purdy continues to embrace emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. A current project is focused on building a nationwide team to use anonymized hospital data to consider disease and ways to potentially revolutionize treatment.

“We’re going to see if we can look at the massive amounts of clinical data that we have, and can we predict — with artificial intelligence — disease outcomes,” he said. “Today, we treat patients and then when someone develops a disorder, we treat the disorder. I am positive that health care in the future will be predicting disorders, and changing lifestyles and changing medicines to prevent the occurrence of that disease. Artificial intelligence is the only way you can do that.”

Quality characteristics

Even as he continues to explore new business opportunities and search for new solutions to enduring problems, Purdy and his family also are focused on giving back and treating people well. He holds out the characteristics of honesty, integrity and good manners as hallmarks of the type of people he wants working with him.

He still recalls one of his first supervisors in the chemical industry. “He was a participatory manager,” he said. “He would have us all to lunch, and he would want to know what we thought, and I was just so impressed with the fact that he didn’t run the business authoritatively. He ran it by group consensus because he recognized what I know today. If I have an idea and I randomly pick ten of you and we discuss that idea, a better idea comes from that. And I always say that when I walk into a room, I know I’m the smartest person in that room — because I know that I’m not.”

The Purdy family’s contribution to causes that make a difference is immense. In 2018, the new Purdy Center for Science and Math opened at Charlotte Country Day School, and West Virginia State University has announced the largest gift in the institution’s history to establish the new Purdy Center for Agricultural Sciences, as just two examples among many. Each year, a number of high school and college students receive college scholarships from various Purdy family programs.

“All of our scholarship money goes to those who are academically talented, but economically depressed,” Purdy said. “It’s a family value. In Appalachia where I grew up, we helped everyone in need, and I never got over that. We would like to make just a little difference in life.”