Being American Matters

By Martin Buchalski

There are many factors that have enabled me to progress from a very modest upbringing to business success. One of the main reasons was that I am lucky enough to be American. Although we in the USA have problems to solve, American business talent and acumen are admired worldwide leading to unique opportunities for us to find real success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664144651

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Copyright © 2020 by Martin Buchalski.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 11/24/2020

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CONTENTS

Introduction

The Beginning

My Corporate Career

International Consumer Products Inc.

Western Europe

Central/Eastern Europe

Asia

The Americas

Oceania

Being American Matters

INTRODUCTION

M Y NAME IS Martin Buchalski. With my wife, Debra, I have owned and operated a management consulting business called International Consumer Products Inc. since 1992. Our firm has performed consulting projects for twenty of the top 25 worldwide food and beverage companies as well as some other major consumer product companies and numerous midsize and smaller companies as well. We have successfully completed projects for clients in forty-two countries.

Before spending a fifty-plus-year career in the food and beverage industry, I grew up in a very modest environment. As a second-generation American, three of my grandparents were Italian, and one—my father’s father—was born in Poland. My mother was the sixth of ten children in her family and the first child born in the USA as her five older brothers and sisters were born in Italy.

My father was a union pipe fitter, and my mother was a homemaker. My two brothers, my sister, and I along with my parents lived mainly in a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom with no air-conditioning. My parents never owned a home and basically lived from paycheck to paycheck, and there was very little money for anything above necessities. However, my parents had and taught strong family and personal values and wanted us to achieve a higher level of success, and fortunately, my siblings and I all managed to do so.

From this modest background, I was lucky enough to achieve business success beyond my wildest imagination. I had an outstanding business grounding at Campbell Soup Company for the first nineteen years of my career where I learned and then applied and expanded all the skills from that experience for the remainder of my career.

After we formed International Consumer Products beginning in 1992, we were awarded contracts both in the USA and forty-two other countries worldwide. Quite often, we competed with local firms in those forty-two countries. Many times we were told that we were awarded these projects because we were American. The business acumen of the USA and American spirit are respected all over the world. The business knowledge I received here in the USA coupled with the learning and exposure from other markets made it possible to perform the vast majority of these projects successfully worldwide, generating many repeat and happy customers.

Today, I live in a beautiful place and have a great lifestyle reaping the benefits of our hard work and sacrifice. I have an absolutely terrific wife of thirty-seven years who not only permitted me to reach outside of my comfort zone but also encouraged it. I have three fabulous daughters and five precious grandchildren who are all doing beautifully and will likely exceed our achievement for generations to come.

What follows is a biographical sketch of my personal life and career and my impressions from twenty of the forty-two foreign countries where we did projects for not only multinational companies but also local companies.

It seems that every day I hear and read things about the United States from the mainstream media that are negative regarding our country, our attitudes, and our habits, both current and historical. Do we have faults? Yes. Are there things in our history for which we should be ashamed? Yes, of course. These questions would be answered in exactly the same way in all forty-two of the countries where I have spent time and done work and, as well, the additional six I have visited.

In America, we do an incomplete and terrible job of covering news and events from other countries as well as the views of real people there. I feel that if we covered them better, more Americans would realize just how exceptional the USA is. My story helps to prove our exceptionalism as a country, but within America, my story itself is not particularly unusual. Over the years, I have met many hundreds of people here in the USA with similar success stories resulting mainly because they were American either by birth or naturalization.

This is a biographical sketch and not an autobiography. Also, I am not a hero. Heroes are people who move toward danger to protect and save others—military, law enforcement, firefighters, other first responders, medical doctors, nurses, other health-care workers, and others. I am grateful to them and their service.

My hope is that the information in this book can serve to either rekindle or at the very least reinforce pride in our exceptional country as well as our historically resolute desire to do better in the future.

THE BEGINNING

My Early Years

I WAS BORN IN Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1947 as the third of four children. When I was three years old, we moved to a town near Paducah, Kentucky, where my father was asked to work as a union pipe fitter on a nuclear reactor project. After three years in Kentucky and a year in Oil City, Pennsylvania, we moved to Paulsboro, New Jersey, where we lived from the time I was in second grade until the end of my freshman year of college.

Paulsboro, New Jersey, is a small town in the southwestern part of New Jersey located along the Delaware River across from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the time we moved there, the population was about 7,500 and racially mixed, approximately 35 percent African American, with the remainder primarily Caucasian. The residents were almost all lower-middle working class, with the vast majority employed by the local energy producers and refineries and smaller businesses supporting those companies.

The section of town I lived in was the most modest and, racially, about equal between Caucasian and African American. Almost all the businesses in the entire town, including stores, restaurants, and bars, were local except for the supermarket (A&P). All the restaurants were moderately priced family eateries. There was a bowling alley, a movie theater, a library, Little League baseball, and a number of places to play outdoor sports. There were churches of all the main Christian denominations, including the Roman Catholic church I attended with my family. Both my older brother and older sister were married in that church, and I received my first Communion and confirmation there, as did my younger brother.

Almost all