Shel Chesky and his daughter, Lindsey Hermes, will celebrate Father’s Day this year discussing their favorite topic: road sealants.
The Jewish father and daughter form the senior management team of BioSpan, a Missouri-based environmentally friendly company that specializes in pavement preservation. Chesky is the company’s founder, president and CEO. At age 81, he is also looking ahead to retirement and passing the torch to Hermes, who now serves as the company’s chief operating officer.
“Have you ever seen oil and water mixed into an emulsion? Lindsey and I are an emulsion,” Chesky said. “We have complementary skills. Lindsay is an expert in supply chain management. She’s an expert in understanding very complex chemistries.”
Chesky and his wife, Pat, have owned BioSpan for 30 years. Hermes grew up hanging around the family business but forged her own path and became a top marketing communications professional. She was at a career crossroads, living in Hong Kong, when she decided to move back to her roots with her two young children in tow.
“It’s a big decision to move halfway around the world,” said Hermes, 40. “The decision was around me trying to find the right way back home to be closer to family so my kids would be able to know their grandparents and get established where I wanted us to be longer term.
“Why did I choose to do this? It’s because I had a moment in my career where I was at a fork in the road. Do I go back to large corporates where I’m one of many, just a number? Or do I go and choose to continue my parents’ legacy? Do I continue the impact that they have built for the last 30-plus years? Or do I just stay in Hong Kong and find the next best thing that may eventually bring me closer to my folks?” she pondered.
“And this is what I chose. I have no regrets.”
Chesky can claim more than 100 patents, most of which came from him experimenting with chemicals and compounds. His first foray into building things was a bit explosive.
Growing up on the south shore of Chicago, when he was 13, he and his friend Paul, a future priest, built and launched a small rocket. The device shot up 100 feet and hit the cross atop Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church one block away.
“My dad said, ‘You gotta go tell these people you did damage,’” related Chesky. “I talked to one of the young priests and told him we knocked a little concrete off. He thanked me for being an honest person. Paul got smacked for not saying anything. We both learned something that day.”
‘A little serendipity’
The Jewish kid who excelled as a student in science fairs went on to bigger and better things. Chesky’s initial foray into rocketry only fueled his desire to analyze things and figure out how they worked. He earned a master’s degree in biochemistry and microbiology from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.
After college, he went to work for Merck Pharmaceuticals, initially as a research scientist. He continued his first love (creating things) and holds 19 patents for Kerlix bandages—gauze rolls with a distinctive crinkle-weave pattern. He also raised three daughters. After two decades in the corporate world, he took early retirement and struck out on his own.
“We started out as a ‘mini-Merck’ doing medical research,” Chesky said. “Six months after I started the company, I discovered a whole new family of compounds that were totally nontoxic that we could use to make a variety of different products on a building block basis without contaminating the environment. I’ve always been an environmentally focused individual. Thank God, a little serendipity kicked in.”
The happy accident occurred when Chesky mixed two chemicals together at the wet bar off his home’s family room, where he often performed chemical experiments. One was positively charged and one negatively charged. Normally, a reaction would occur, creating a sticky, glue-like precipitate. In this case, nothing happened.
“I couldn’t figure out why,” he said. “I got so excited; I knocked it on the floor. Now, being a typical chemist slob, I planned to clean it up at the end of the day.”
The puddle sat on asphalt tile, and 20 minutes passed. The liquid was absorbed into the tile. That was how BioSpan’s soy-based road covering came to life.
The company’s road sealants now cover more than 3 million miles of U.S. roadways from Portland, Ore., to Hutchinson, Minn. The material is made from the soy-based product Chesky created. In nontechnical terms, he said, they take a soybean and “squeeze the dickens out of it.”
Having his daughter as co-president and future leader gives Chesky confidence in the future of BioSpan. For her part, Hermes believes there is room for improvement in the way our roads are maintained.
“I feel like we can always do better,” said Hermes. “Even in cold winter weather, we’re getting moisture that’s seeping into both asphalt and concrete. It’s freezing overnight, it melts during the day, and that’s where, if there’s something that’s going to protect and prolong that investment in infrastructure, shouldn’t we use it?”
‘Questioning of the status quo’
Chesky, who attends a Chabad House and plans to help fund a library in the planned Jewish center, said his discovery of the BioSpan compound is a perfect example of one of the tenets of Judaism.
“What is a shul? It is a place of learning,” he said.
“Sometimes, that’s how the best things happen,” Hermes said of her father’s “happy accident.”
“Shel is so smart that he’s going to go figure out how to take that accident and turn it into purpose,” she said. Shel offered another thought—that everyone should try and improve the world in any way they can.
“That is where I think there is a relation to Judaism in that pursuit of education, the questioning of the status quo,” he said.
Hermes has already assumed the day-to-day operations of BioSpan. Chesky said his daughter will eventually own the company outright.
“We are a high-growth, research-oriented manufacturing and marketing company that deals exclusively now with green technology,” he said. “That’s the future. We have patents that will allow us to make our roads last longer, keep our concrete foundations from falling apart, without a drop’s worth of damage to the environment.”
This story originally appeared in the St. Louis Jewish Light.