Clackamas, Oregon-based Pacific Seafood has big plans for growth over the next seven years, and that includes its recent purchase of fellow US seafood giant Trident Seafoods' Kodiak, Alaska, operations.

Bill Hueffner, vice president of talent and culture at Pacific Seafood, joined Catch the Current on the show floor of Seafood Expo North America, in Boston, Massachusetts, last week to talk about how the company is utilizing technology -- specifically a tool called Schoox -- to manage workplace growth across its 40 facilities in the US, Canada and Chile.

Five minutes are on the clock in this latest installment of "Boston 2025 in 5" as Hueffner explains Pacific's "Mission 31 Possible" initiative and its plans to double in size in the next seven years.

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Don't have time to listen? You're missing out! But you can also read a full transcript of the podcast interview below:

Amanda Buckle (AB): You're listening to Catch the Current. I'm Amanda Buckle.

Lorin Castiglione (LC): And I'm Lorin Castiglione.

AB: We are live in Boston for Seafood Expo North America, where we are taking the show floor by storm for an epic series we are calling "Boston 2025 in 5."

LC: That's right. We are covering as much ground as we can over the next few days, bringing you the best of the best that SENA has to offer.

AB: So, without any further ado...

AB and LC: Let's "catch the current."

AB: This is Amanda Buckle. You are listening to Catch the Current. I'm without my better half, but I think I've got a better substitute here with Bill Hueffner.

Bill Hueffner (BH): I don't know about that.

AB: So I'm sitting here at the Pacific Seafood booth.

Bill, we're doing something in Boston called "Boston 2025 in 5," so I'm putting 5 minutes on the clock.

BH: I was hoping that wasn't going to be the case, but I've watched some of the stuff that you two have been doing. It's awesome. But 5 minutes, that's cool. That goes by quick.

AB: It goes by really quick. I mean, I talk fast. I'm from New York. Can you handle it? There we go. All right.

I was going to start off by asking about Schoox, which is to drive employee development with the company. But before I get there, you put something in front of me and I'm dying to know. What is "Mission 31 Possible"? It's on the Boston show floor.

Pacific Seafood's Seafood Expo North America booth. Photo Credit: Undercurrent News

BH: Yeah, it's a bold move by Frank Dulcich, who is our CEO, president and owner of the company. We're going to double in size in the next seven years. So Mission 31 is to do that, and, you know, taking the bold investment that we took with the Schoox modern learning management system is just part of the investment we're putting into our team members to help upscale them and get them ready and to develop the next generation leadership in our industry and throughout the company.

AB: Yes. Let's talk Schoox.

Pacific Seafood has 3,000 employees across 40 facilities in the US, Canada and Chile. That's a lot. So tell me how Schoox is helping you work with these employees and how it's going to help you double.

BH: Sure. You might have heard that we just had an acquisition up in Alaska. So there's another 600 team members that we're adding to that number there in about four different locations in Alaska.

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That's part of the Mission 31. Taking a look at the resources and footprint distribution, all of these types of things. So it's going to be growth through acquisition. And acquisition sometimes comes with great team members and folks that you can add to and others they need that support. So how do we develop not just people to run the operations that we have today and all the different vertically integrated companies that we have, but how do we then resource ourselves so that we can execute on Mission 31?

And that's what we are looking at, this comprehensive way to take institutional knowledge that all of the companies in the seafood industry have; people that have been there for years.

This is one of the attractions to this industry.

But then take new people, new growth, bring those folks in, get them up to speed and match their skills in technology. These types of things can help our industry but then feed [employees] with the experience that they're lacking and don't have.

AB: So you're really setting up a team for success here.

BH: Absolutely. It's all about upscaling and starting that even with our front line. So we've had learning management systems before, but nothing that could touch the frontline like this.

And when I talk about the frontline, part of our culture is promoting from within, and we have lots of folks that are with Pacific Seafood that this may be the first generation in this country, and English isn't their first language. So how do you then translate all of this knowledge and learning and skills and different things to folks that have the capacity, but maybe we just haven't been able to facilitate that. 

AB: And that's great, because I think one of the things that we offer here in the industry is that it's hard to find workers and to retain workers. So by doing this, are you seeing the retention grow within the company?

BH: That's one of our key performance indicators is looking at retention. So absolutely.

We're looking at program systems, all of these things, the curriculum that we're building. So we've got instructional designers that are developing that. We have a video team, because most of our learners are visual learners, and it's not writing things in text in a language that may not be familiar.

So we're pulling that all together. We're developing micro-learnings, those kind of things that can be done on the job, on the job training and tracking things that we've always done.  Frank's always had this philosophy, the "Diamond philosophy," and part of that is the training must be constant.

But it's one thing to say that. It's another thing to help facilitate it and actually do it. 

Pacific Seafood's new retail branding at Seafood Expo North America. Photo Credit: Undercurrent News

AB: And now you have this actual program that's doing that for you. The Alaska acquisition here, is that something as simple as sending out a link and getting people onboarded that way, or is it a little bit more difficult than that?

BH: That's a great, great point, Amanda. This also has onboarding as part of it.

So you can then assign different things based on somebody's job or role. So you're getting the type of information you need to know to do your job. We've created swim lanes.

This is all work that's been done, kind of foundational work. We've created quick reference guides, those things, so that if you start to work at Pacific Seafood, you're getting fed, not all at once, not dumped, but different things that are going to help you actually be successful in the job that you have. Not just competency.

Lots of companies have learning management systems, and they have general soft skill competencies that you can take.

AB: One more question for you, just to piggyback off of that one.

BH: Bonus time.

Yeah, bonus time. We're in bonus time. Keith Singleton from Alaska Leader told me it's March Madness coming up.

BH: I was thinking the same thing.

AB: We're calling it March Madness over here. This is the first time that you're rolling it out, so what has actually been introduced to the company?

BH: We just started at the beginning of the year, and the first thing that we did was our performance reviews.

Our performance reviews were all done through the Schoox tool, and the next module that we'll be doing is goals. So after they've done the performance reviews, they have a conversation about goals for every team member, and then we're going to go into the module, and then these goals then will be mapped, and they'll be tracing those, and next year's performance reviews, those will automatically populate.

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AB: With Pacific Seafood being such a big company, it's really interesting to see, again, how the company is retaining employees, training these employees, and keeping, especially with mergers and acquisitions, I mean, that's just the key word here in Boston, right? I mean, leading up to it.

BH: We have to in order to accomplish this, and I do think that this is something the industry needs to look at. There are young people who are attracted to this industry for lots of different reasons, but now with health being a center of the focus and seafood being the healthiest seafood on the planet and the original superfood, if you want to think about it that way, it's attractive, and the sustainability messages that we've been projecting.

AB: Well, we'll catch up in a year. You'll have to let us know how it's panning out. Thanks, Bill.

BH: Have a great conference.