Bisons in the family business—the Duhas

They perfected the paint swatch—and then globalized it. 

Now Winnipeg-based Duha Group makes more than 30 per cent of the world’s supply of colour sampling tools for the paint industry. From swatches at your local home-improvement store, to brochures for speciality coatings, to design-forecasting palettes that set the year’s colour trends.

“We’re sworn to secrecy on that,” jokes Rick J. Duha [BComm(Hons)/82], Chairman and owner.

UM Chancellor Dave Angus sat down with Rick J. and son Rick G. Duha [MBA/2019], the company’s Chief Business Officer since taking the reins in 2020, for this latest installment of Bisons in Business, a series showcasing alumni who are leaders in their field. 

The fourth-generation business prints paint—not ink—with exacting precision for hue uniformity that’s next level. They produce more than 100,000 different colours a year, with locations in eight countries for clients in 130.

They’ve mastered the craft of colour while also becoming a leader in lean manufacturing (so much so they run a Center of Excellence to teach others on the topic).

Chancellor Dave Angus: How did your business get its start?

Rick J: It was a joint venture between my grandfather, who emigrated from Hungary, and my father who was coming out of high school. It was 1947 and a lot of the spots in university were taken by veterans returning from the War so the decision was made to start a printing company—in the house and in the garage. My dad was the pressman and my grandfather was the salesperson, and they were predominantly printing for service clubs, for Rotary, Kiwanis, things of that nature.

I was about five or six when I started coming in on Saturday mornings with my dad to the factory. I’d get 25 cents an hour to push the broom around.

It went from a small printing company to a global success. What were the game-changing moments to get there?

Rick J: In 1962 we made an agreement with a company out of Minneapolis to coordinate and cooperate on this color technology. That was the beginning of really focusing on colour—the origin of what today is the bulk of the business. 

When my father passed away in 1991 about 20 per cent of our business was commercial print. The first decision I made was to exit commercial print entirely. That’s when we said we’re going to be all about color. We opened our first foreign factory. That was in Buffalo, New York. And then a series of partnerships grew our global business: Mexico, Australia, Singapore, France and Germany.

When did you enter the business?

Rick G: I was in seventh grade and spent the summer in the factory putting the screws into the fan deck. So I got an early taste and got to know a lot of the people who are still working here today.

But, just like any young adult finding themselves, I took a bit of a detour. I went in a different direction at first. I decided I wanted nothing to do with the family business. I thought: paint chips aren’t that sexy. I did my undergrad in outdoor recreation and tourism, and I worked in commercial tourism.

But I came to understand that my real strength was in leading people, being in front, making decisions and planning the strategy of a business, so I came back after my undergrad degree. I joined full-time with the intention of doing an MBA and just learning a little bit about business and then I’ll figure it out. And I immediately fell in love with the business at that point. It wasn’t about the paint chips, it was about supporting the 300 people that work in this business.

Would that be a recommendation for somebody starting in a family business enterprise—to get your hands dirty?

Rick G: If you study family business, there’s two different ways to bring the next generation in. One of them is: you finish school and get three to five years somewhere else where your name’s not on the door, and you learn how to be an employee before you learn how to be an owner. And I did that to a certain extent.

I had probably 10 or 15 different jobs throughout university. I didn’t have what I would call a career setting, though. I came back here to really start that.

Growing up, through high school, I worked in every manufacturing department here. When I came back I didn’t start in a manager role. I started doing the work like everybody else, and I worked with our operations excellence team, transitioned into production planning and worked as a production planner for a number of years. I built up my knowledge of the business in a way that allowed me to have a good base of understanding, and I’d worked with a lot of the key players.

One of the things I learned early on is: it’s really important to approach people as mentors. They have something to teach you. One of our long-time customer service managers—she was my grandfather’s secretary. She has seen this business come up from very small all the way ’til now. Being able to work with someone like that—they have so much knowledge to teach.

Rick J: There was never any direct pressure for the next generation to come into the business. It was a decision they had to reach. Certainly, we exposed them to what the business was about, which some would say was maybe trying to orient their thinking, but I honestly don’t believe we did that.

My father became enamored with the notion of family business and actually created the Winnipeg chapter of a group called the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise back in the early 80s. There were two families that did that—the second was the Seier family, who owned Vita Health. Interestingly, a year or two later I met Karen Seier, who would later become my wife.

I had the good fortune of understanding a lot of the fundamentals of a successful business from an early age, from some pioneers in the thinking of what family business would become. So we had a really good foundation. 

And then my father passed away unexpectedly from a car accident during a work trip in Australia and very quickly we realized a lot of things. The three of us—my brother, sister and I—spent a whole generation working in the business, and I’d say that it was very rare that there was ever a debate. And the debates were short and we found a way to resolve them and I think it was because of that foundation we had. And today, we have a very active Family Council.

What kind of student were you while at UM?

Rick J: I never took courses that were designed to give me high marks. I knew the job I was going to go to when I was done my studies so I took courses that were designed to help me, like tax law, workplace health and safety fundamentals.There was a lot of courses that I took that no one would ever take if they were trying to get good marks. But that wasn’t what I was trying to do.

The first week of university I managed to get into the fraternity system. I made the decision between second and third year to move into the fraternity house, which was a local house here in town. I actually lived there for two years and my mother was convinced that I was going to hell in a handbasket. But, interestingly enough, my grades actually went up. I certainly wasn’t an honour student, but I finished on the on the good side of that ledger.

How about yourself, what were the standout moments for you as an MBA student?

Rick G: I spent a couple years working here—there or four—and then went back to UM to do my MBA in evenings and weekends while I was working full-time. It was a breath of fresh air in terms of how to learn, being able to apply things from the classroom directly in the business.

Once I finished the corporate finance course, we were assessing one of the largest investments that we’ve made as a company—a new press that we put in in 2019. I used the modeling that we learned in that class to put together the financial modeling around putting in that machine. It was really interesting to see everything work hand in hand.

What else from your UM experience do you use today?

Rick G: I don’t think it’s any particular skill I learned at the University of Manitoba that was specific to a course. What I learned was how to understand the curriculum, how to research it, how to get along with my classmates, how to get group work done and ultimately create a foundation for the skillsets that I get to learn later in life.

That’s probably more acute today, with AI. You can say, ‘I’m going to learn AI in school’ but you’d be out of date the moment you get out of class. You’re probably out of date from the time you open the textbook. So, what you’re really learning is fundamental skills. We’ve all heard the adage that the five highest paid jobs in five years haven’t yet been invented. So how do you prepare for that? You need to have a good basis in thought, in culture, in relationships and be worldly aware. That’s what I learned at university.

A lot of the baseline, task jobs that people have when they come out of university—articling as a lawyer or being a junior at an accounting firm and grinding through audit—is what AI is going to go after first. 

So how are we going to train the next generation of professionals without getting access to that on-the-job learning? Adapting the curriculum in university to make sure that we’re building that on-the-job skillset is going to be incredibly important in order to make sure that we have that pipeline for future professionals.

You’re on the inaugural board of IDEA START at UM, with its focus on bringing ideas to market. How important are efforts like these?

Rick J: Startups are a major part of the ecosystem in many places that I’ve traveled to around the world, and we as Manitobans have not done as good a job as we could to foster an environment where those ideas can find their way to commercialization.

The success of this city will depend on having lots of different businesses, ones that are established and ones that have yet to be established, and that will form the foundation of success for Winnipeg and Manitoba. And I think anything we can do to advance that cause is a good idea.

What skillset is going to be important for graduating students to have?

Rick G: The ability to express yourself in a unique way. One of the things that Large Language Models are forcing on us is almost a homogeneity of language. Everyone’s speaking like a chatbot and table stakes is going to be proper grammar and expressing yourself effectively, but developing your own unique writing style is going to become that much more important. And spending the time while you’re writing your essays and doing the work in university, and not just having it generated from an LLM, is how you develop that voice.

Duha Group has a big focus on lean processes and manufacturing.  

Rick G: We built a program here internally called the passport to world excellence. Basically: the white belt, yellow belt, green belt, black belt of learning how to do continuous improvement. When you start here on your first day you attend your first white belt training session, learning the basics of continuous improvement. And each of our staff is on that journey, somewhere along the way, to grow towards their black belt.

That program we’ve built was very interesting for outside companies. The Duha Center of Excellence will take a group of professionals and teach them the passport system so they can eventually build their own.

One of the center points of our continuous improvement system is our huddle boards. Each department meets at this huddle board on each of the shifts and they talk through the last 24 hours and the next. Any safety incidents, any quality incidents, but most importantly, any ideas you’ve had to improve the process. This is the 25th year since we started continuous improvement and we’re about to hit 50,000 ideas that our staff have come up with on those huddle boards and have been implemented.

It’s such a success story for a family business. What do you think your dad would say about where Duha Group is today?

Rick J: I’m certain he would be thrilled with the progress we made. But then he would say: you need to work harder.