What Parents Need to Know About Remote Learning
Jeff Patterson, CEO of Gaggle, has unique insight into the experience of students’ online lives in today’s remote learning landscape. Gaggle serves school districts around the country through the development and management of a digital student safety net and trained safety experts, utilized to monitor activity on devices and apps to alert schools to the possibility of students harming themselves or others.
In this talk from Tugboat Institute Summit 2020, Jeff encourages parents and employers of parents to be particularly attentive to the mental health and well-being of children in the academic year ahead. As students face the loss of school and all-important social connections, he offers valuable perspective to help families and Evergreen® leaders navigate this period and understand what’s at stake in this unprecedented time.
Grace and Grit at Tugboat Institute Summit 2020
In many ways, Tugboat Institute Summit looked different this year. In the wake of the pandemic, the annual gathering of Evergreen® CEOs, held for the last eight years as an in-person experience over two-and-a-half days in Sun Valley, Idaho, transitioned to a virtual experience.
In a year marked by the loss of so many beloved traditions and milestones, it was a hard decision to make. Our community of leaders treasures the days spent together each year in the mountains. For many, the opportunity to hear the experiences, best practices, and personal stories of peers and thought leaders equally committed to growing purpose-driven companies for the long-term—and to process the content in a setting so conducive to reflection—provides a welcome annual reset and inspirational fuel for the year ahead.
Understanding the unique value of the experience, we knew we needed to shake off our disappointment and start creating something incredible for the Evergreen leaders we are proud to serve. With that commitment as our guide, we set about developing a two-and-a-half-day virtual experience that would offer the same spirit of sharing, learning, and authentic connection members have come to expect. Members, exhibiting characteristic grace and gratitude, adapted with us and rallied behind the team as we got to work.
The result of those efforts was indeed different than our traditional Tugboat Institute Summit, but in essential ways, it was beautifully the same: members gathered and spent time with their peers; they laughed; they felt deeply; they made new connections; they gained innovative insights and practical takeaways. They were inspired.
The first opportunity to connect came through a gathering of leaders of large, multi-generational companies, led by Dr. Tom Epperson, President of InnerWill; Tugboat Forum leader training, led by Tugboat Chairman Jeff Snipes; and, First-Year Orientation. The spirit of generosity shown by the leaders of these sessions and the clear desire to learn and grow among participants set the tone for engagement in the virtual experience.
Following those focused pre-meetings, the livestream event was launched with a welcome from the stage of The Argyros Performing Arts Center, followed by Zoom breakout sessions for all attendees to conclude the first day’s programming.
The next morning, the agenda of live and pre-recorded talks included Dr. Gary Kunkle, who shared insight into academic research around sustained-growth companies through an interview with Tugboat Institute Founder Dave Whorton, and Dr. Tom Epperson, who spoke to the transformative impact of values-based leadership.
During a period when the food and beverage business has been hard hit, talks by Brian Canlis, President/Owner of Canlis restaurant, and Alissa Leinonen, CEO and Founder of catering company Gourmondo Co., reflected the powerful role of the Evergreen 7Ps™ principles of Perseverance and Pragmatic Innovation in this period. Perseverance was also a guiding light in the talk that Vicki LaRose, President of Civil Design Inc., shared. Her story of learning to trust her own voice and her leadership ability through a life and career marked by personal and professional challenge was inspiring and heartfelt.
Another clear theme of the day was the commitment of Evergreen leaders to be of service—to their employees, their customers, their suppliers, and their communities. Talks by Bill Roark, CEO and Founder of Torch Technologies, and Chris Mittelstaedt, CEO and Co-Founder of The FruitGuys, offered insight into how these leaders integrate their orientation toward service into everything they do.
Sharing a commitment to Evergreen 7Ps principles was the goal for Dave Thrasher, President of Supportworks, who spoke to his decision to guide his company to become Certified Evergreen®. Dave shared a powerful video that he and his team created, describing the importance of being an Evergreen company, which he in turn gifted to other Certified Evergreen companies.
Day two began with a topic relevant to all businesses and leaders today: Power. In a live interview with Dave Whorton, Jack Hand, Chairman of POWER Engineers, shared wisdom from his 19 years as CEO of the global consulting engineering firm. The conversation offered insight into current dynamics and long-term trends in power generation, distribution, and consumption.
Leadership emerged as a through line of several of the talks that followed that day. Allen Serfas, Co-Founder and President of Assistance Home Care, and Kevin Switick, President and CEO of Avian Inc., both spoke to formative lessons they each draw on as leaders of their Evergreen businesses. Bruce Williams, CEO of US Tool Group, shared the impact of a particularly eye-opening experience that sparked a now decades-long journey of leadership and business transformation.
Executive coach Kaley Klemp provided a valuable leadership tool through her talk, “Curiosity and 100% Responsibility,” in which she described the concept of being “above or below the line” in relationships and the three unproductive roles of the “drama triangle,” which can stifle clear communication, creativity, and problem solving. Mac Harman, CEO of Balsam Brands, encouraged his peers to recognize the role they can play as leaders of business policy and legislation through lobbying efforts. And, Jeff Patterson, CEO of Gaggle, encouraged parents and employers of parents to be particularly attentive to the mental health and well-being of children in this unsettling season as they face the loss of school and all-important social connections. He offered the idea that parents might view this academic year as a “gap year,” modifying expectations for academic achievement and prioritizing safe opportunities for socialization and wellness.
Very personal stories of key learnings in leadership emerged through talks by Carl Erickson, Founder and Chairman of Atomic Object, and Ingrid Carney, Founder and CEO of Ingrid & Isabel. Carl described the benefit of a sabbatical experience on self and business, encouraging other leaders to embrace the opportunity. Ingrid reflected on the idea of bravery and the way she has come to redefine that quality as she has grown as a leader and a parent.
It was fitting to end Tugboat Institute Summit 2020 with the theme of bravery. Ingrid is right: Evergreen leaders exhibit bravery every day as they serve their families, their companies, and their communities. In a year that continues to offer up surprises and challenges, we’re inspired by the abiding character, grace, and grit that this tribe exhibits. We look forward to welcoming members back to the mountains, and we can’t wait to continue to learn and grow together.
Diana Price is Content Director at Tugboat Institute.
Building a 290-Year-Old Global Evergreen Family Business
[A note from Tugboat Institute: Please note the author’s postscript at the end of this article, in which he comments on the connection of this topic to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.]
When I joined our Evergreen® family business, Hollingsworth & Vose Co. (H&V) in the mid-nineteen seventies, we operated four plants in the U.S. Northeast. The company’s roots go back to the 1728 founding of a paper company in the colonial Province of Massachusetts Bay. The enterprise has continually evolved over seven generations. Today, we are a leading global producer of advanced materials for filtration and battery applications, operating thirteen plants in six countries.
Our successes and mistakes with global expansion have taught us a lot about what it takes to build successful manufacturing operations in other countries. This began with our first foreign plant in Apizaco, Mexico in 1981 and has continued throughout our expansion to the U.K., Germany, China, and, most recently, India. We found that our family company culture, values and long term, Evergreen perspective have helped us on this journey.
When our Suzhou, China plant was recently recognized as a “Best Place to Work” in the Greater Suzhou area (of about 10 million people), it provided the opportunity to reflect on the 15-year journey of building that team and the significant steps and consistent effort that have led to our long-term success in China.
We had been exporting to Asia for years and had numerous customer relationships, but we realized that we needed local operations and a strong local team to have long-term success. We explored acquiring or partnering with a Chinese business, but we were unsuccessful in finding the right opportunity and fit. By the early 2000s laws had changed in China to allow foreign companies to have wholly owned operations. So, we decided to build a greenfield factory in China with the objective of firmly establishing our company culture from the beginning.
Once we had made the decision to open in China, an early, important step was to tap one of our long-term, U.S.-based operating leaders to spearhead early recruitment and development efforts. A veteran employee with a deep understanding of our culture, Ken Fausnacht (now our VP of Global Operations) made over 50 trips to China in those early years, identifying and hiring key leaders who seemed most aligned to the long-term perspective and family culture that define our company. Ken also personifies the qualities of commitment and a genuine concern for people that is at the heart of the family oriented culture we wanted to establish and continually strengthen.
Our prior experience in China had shown us that our family-oriented culture provided a powerful advantage in recruiting value-aligned team members. The concept of family and heritage is really powerful in China. We knew that if we could tap into that by sharing our history and values as 270+ year-old, seventh-generation enterprise, committed to building close relationships founded on trust and open communication for the long-term, we could recruit a core team that would set the foundation of our culture.
It was critical to recruit employees committed for the long-term because the markets that we serve require deep, specialized knowledge and experience; if you don't have people who are experts in the technology and application, it's really hard to win the confidence of the end users. Sharing our history, our family ownership structure, and the culture that reflects this heritage was very helpful in attracting quality people who met our exacting criteria from the beginning.
A critical early hire, John Zhang, came as plant manager. He naturally understood and was aligned with the culture we wanted to build. He undertook hiring the original operations team and starting up the plant, which he continued to run as we added multiple production lines over the years. (He has since moved up to be the regional Managing Director for our overall Asia-Pacific business.) We were also really fortunate recruit a phenomenal HR director, Kathy Zhang, who still serves in the role today. John and Kathy understood the culture of H&V and worked to build the local version of it that would feel right in China and that they and their team would feel was their own.
Establishing that core Chinese team was important, as was our decision to bring in people from our U.S. operations, as well as some from Europe, many of whom committed to moving to China for several years to help launch the plant and establish our culture.
Having built that team, we worked to create strong lateral connections between China-based employees and their counterparts in our other global facilities. Phone and video conferencing, as well as a heavy travel and visitation schedule, consistently connected team members. Our finance people in the U.S., for instance, developed personal relationships with the finance people in Asia, and our technology people had similar lateral relationships. Over time, some Chinese employees applied for jobs in our U.S. plants, as well, creating additional ties. Those connections were, and remain, important to our success.
The work of creating a long-term, value-aligned team in a foreign country takes perseverance and patience. It does not happen overnight. For us, across all of our geographies, it remains a work in progress. But in the case of our Chinese plant, we have seen the result of that effort in the culture that has become imbedded and in our ability to continue to grow that value-aligned team.
I’m able to see our progress during regular trips to Suzhou, but our annual Chinese New Year celebration really highlights the culture the local team has created. The evening includes skits and costumes, and everyone—including me—participates. The first year we held the event, we gathered as one table of eight. Last year, the team filled almost 40 tables, and we had employees celebrating five-, ten-, and 15-year anniversaries. Last year, as I stood with John and Kathy, who were there from the early days, I found myself marveling at how far we’d come. It felt like family.
08.11.20 Postscript
Since the time of this article, the Covid pandemic has changed a lot for just about all of us. In addition to the challenges of the pandemic, H&V and our Asia Pacific Team suffered a very great loss. John Zhang, who is featured in the original article, suffered a fatal heart attack a short time ago. John was the Managing Director of H&V APAC and was one of the founders of that organization. A wonderful leader, he was instrumental in establishing a Chinese version of H&V’s family-oriented culture in China. He built a very strong team that, despite this great loss, will surely continue his good work.
For the overall company, our people have done well responding to the pandemic. Our teams have worked hard to keep our people safe while more than doubling the output of several critical products. In addition to all the normal protocols, we developed internal sources of face masks and hand sanitizer for our people, their families, and our retirees.
H&V is a major producer of the filtration materials used in N95 masks, surgical masks, medical breathing devices, test kits, HVAC, and Hepa filters. Our teams have expedited the commercialization of new mask and gown materials. We have also received government grants to help us further increase production of some of these critical products. As with most companies, this has been a very difficult time, with lots of worries and challenges, but also a time when we see many people doing their very best to help us all get through.
Valentine Hollingsworth is President and CEO of Hollingsworth & Vose.
How to Avoid Messing Up Your Kids
With the privilege of owning and operating a multi-generational family business comes tremendous responsibility to educate children in the family about the business and wealth management. This panel discussion from the Tugboat Institute Summit 2018 highlights “what not to do” and draws on the expertise of leading family office and multi-generational business experts.
Defying Conventional Wisdom 17 Years Ago Put Our Evergreen Business Ahead
[A note from Tugboat Institute: This week, we are publishing an article written before the COVID pandemic. Please note the author’s postscript at the end of this article, in which he comments on the connection of this topic to the impact of the pandemic.]
When we launched our Evergreen® business, SmugMug, an online, subscription-based photo sharing and hosting service, we had no idea our business model was innovative. We knew it was logical, that it felt like the right thing to do, and that it solved a problem for our customers. For us, those were the key factors. We only realized later that the idea was a Pragmatic Innovation that would make us the first online consumer subscription service.
Really, this innovation was born of necessity. From day one, we had an uncompromising commitment to our customers, and we didn’t see another model that would allow us to put their needs first.
When we launched SmugMug in 2002, existing photo-sharing services were ad-based: they provided storage and sharing capabilities for their customers for free, but photos were presented alongside advertising. In this scenario, the customer might be viewing his or her family photos from a recent trip to Disneyland alongside ads for any variety of products or services that didn’t necessarily shout “family-friendly.” They had no control over how their photos were positioned. And, because that “free” storage was often supported by sales of prints or other products, customers found that if they didn’t purchase prints or use other services offered by the provider, their photos could be taken down and lost forever.
In fact, one of these “free” services lost some of our family photos. As avid photographers, this felt personal. We didn’t like ads presented against our photos, and we didn’t like the idea that our irreplaceable photos that created a treasured timeline of our lives were held hostage and could be erased forever at any time.
We got to thinking about an alternative model. How could we create a sustainable business that prioritized our customers and their photos? Ultimately, we landed on the only solution that seemed it could work: We would ask customers to actually pay what it cost to put their photos online.
Today, that concept hardly seems revolutionary. But in 2002, the mantra was, “it’s all about the eyeballs,” and no one paid for any online service. The dogma of the day was that everything online should be free to attract the greatest number of users, and it would be more than a decade before that really shifted in online consumer services.
There’s no doubt that we were outliers. All but one analyst told us that our concept just wouldn’t work. But we still felt the business had potential. And we felt that the only way we’d really know if customers would value our services was to ask them pay up front. We figured that it was a pretty simple test: If they weren’t willing to pull out their credit cards, then we didn’t actually have a viable business.
But they did. Without ever having used our service or even necessarily knowing what it offered, customers entered their credit card numbers on day one and signed up for SmugMug because they wanted a better photo sharing and storage service.
From that first day and that first subscription payment, we felt a profound responsibility to our customers. Given people had myriad free options—from some of the most trusted names in photography—the immediate expectation was that if SmugMug was charging a fee, they must be offering something exceptional. We accepted this higher expectation, and we made a commitment to take care of customers and their memories with unrelenting focus.
With that self-imposed mandate, we invested heavily in customer service and very quickly learned that our dedication to our customers was a differentiator. They felt they knew us personally. They trusted us, and we honored that trust by listening to them and responding to their requests. We ensured they had unlimited storage and beautiful galleries to share; we built what is now commonly known as “enterprise-level” access controls, providing customers the ability to manage their audience and secure their privacy. We grew and innovated based on our customers’ needs.
Now, 17 years later, we continue to be laser-focused on our subscribers. As a private, Evergreen business with a long-term view, we've never paid close attention to our competitors, instead, we focus on what are our customers are asking for and how we can deliver that. Rather than being distracted by the next bright, shiny object, we are committed to delivering customer value. And, we still feel that we can best deliver that value through the subscription model that, while no longer a brave new innovation in our space, remains our strength.
In fact, when we acquired photo and video sharing service Flickr in 2018, we doubled down on our commitment to the subscription model. Flickr already had some subscription models, but they were losing a lot of money. We immediately began to work on aligning and improving their model so customers would see the value and be happy to pay for our services.
While serving our customers through our subscription service remains our core offering, we have also responded to their requests for complementary products that allow them to share their photos in other ways. We developed a line of business selling prints, photo books, and gifts, thereby providing ourselves some revenue diversification and additional value to the customers. But even with that money coming in, we view ourselves as a subscription service first because the product sales come and go based on whether we have happy, paying subscribers.
As a family-owned Evergreen business, when we reflect on the company we have built over the past 17 years, there’s no better indication of the value of our subscription service than scrolling through our own SmugMug photo galleries. Like our first customers, I started storing my photos on our platform in 2002. I have photos of my first date with my wife, of our wedding, and of the births of our kids—among many, many other memories. We keenly feel our obligation to continue to put our customers first, to keep their photos safe. As we continue to grow and build our company, it is with that intimate understanding of the the memories that we are keeping that we move ahead.
And, as a final note, I should tell you that our unconventional approach had the additional benefit of not requiring that we raise outside capital. In fact, our original and only investment was $20.
Postscript: As the global economy shifted overnight with the pandemic, our decision to orient our business with our customers is continuing to prove valuable. Advertising revenue has significantly shrunk across the industry, and partnerships and sales are hard to come by while so many companies are struggling. Our customers, however, continue to demonstrate that their photos and our platforms are important in their life. We haven't escaped impact, but it's far less than many others with different business models are struggling with.
Ben MacAskill is President and COO of SmugMug + Flickr.
Photo credit: Aaron Meyers
Is Your Daughter Ready to Lead the Family Business?
Pamela Kan is unique—a female owner-operator in a traditional manufacturing business. Pamela leads Bishop-Wisecarver, the company her father founded in Pittsburg, California.
In this presentation from Tugboat Institute Summit 2019, Pamela offers insight into her own leadership journey as CEO of an Evergreen® woman-owned manufacturing business and her commitment to introducing and nurturing other female leaders.
Going Up: How an Unlikely Elevator Startup Is Changing the World
In 2007, after many years in executive roles for a global elevator company, I felt like I had hit a plateau in the organization. When the company went through a reorganization and I landed in a role that I did not feel allowed me room to grow, I knew it was time to go. I was ready for a new challenge.
My wife Tracy and I founded Genesis Elevator in the basement of our home that year—with our three sons, Joshua, Jared, and Mason, our two dogs, and our niece all under the same roof at the time. Starting a business right before the Great Recession meant that we had to fight hard and run lean from the beginning. But, from the start, we had a powerful Purpose driving our work.
When we decided to start our own company, we committed to making it a faith-based business. We did not fully understand how that would look in the beginning, but at a basic level, we knew we wanted to build a company grounded in the same core values that defined our Christian faith.
In 2012, through a transformative mission trip to Cambodia with my son Jared, I learned first-hand the need among orphans in that country. On that trip, I met a five-year-old girl named Vichika (aka Susan). My wife and I had raised three boys, and I love kids, but the connection I felt with this little girl was extraordinary. I came home from that trip and knew I had to do something for her—and for other orphans who could not be adopted.
Cambodia’s borders, like those of several other countries, are closed to adoption by U.S. citizens because of the rampant problem of human trafficking and corruption. Traditional adoption was not a possibility. Instead, we realized, the closest consistent family connection we could offer Vichika and other children would need to be delivered in a different way. If we could provide the necessary technology to orphanages, we could facilitate “virtual adoptions,” connecting families in the U.S. with orphans to build life-long familial relationships through video connections, as well as regular in-person visits by the adoptive family. We believed that by taking this kind of qualitative approach, we could impact change for generations to come.
Today, Saving Susan Ministry, the nonprofit organization we founded to do this work facilitates virtual adoptions and also funds trade school and college for orphans, providing them a path to Purpose. The organization not only provides personal purpose for myself and my family, it fuels the growth of our Evergreen® business. We always knew we were building a faith-based business, but this ministry has become our north star, the reason Genesis Elevators exists today.
Our Purpose fuels our Paced Growth and our commitment to remaining Private, propels our Profit, guides our People First programs, and has inspired us to approach this phase of life and the life of our company with newfound commitment and energy.
Here are just some of the ways our Purpose is reflected at Genesis Elevator today:
Paced Growth
Sustainable growth will allow the company and Saving Susan Ministry to exist well beyond my wife and me, on an Evergreen time frame. Our commitment to this company has nothing to do with a desire to cash out and get a big paycheck or check items of a bucket list. It’s about growing and innovating to continue to change the lives of orphans and the families who are blessed to partner with them.
In 2019, we launched a manufacturing division, Revelation Manufacturing, to produce residential elevators. Large, global elevator companies are not interested in this market, so it’s pretty fragmented and made up of small companies. Entering this new market and expanding our footprint provides the opportunity for significant growth. Growth and increased profitability will allow us to help more at-risk children.
Private
Our industry, like so many, is being inundated by private equity. In fact, the third-largest elevator company in the world, ThyssenKrupp Elevator, is about to be acquired by a consortium of private equity firms. We get calls from these firms, as I’m sure most private companies do. However, our response is clear: “This isn’t going to work. First, we’re adhere to the Evergreen 7P™ principles and are a member of Tugboat Institute—you can go look up what that means if you are interested; second, your money can't deliver what God's delivering for us unless you’re going to commit to the ministry (our purpose).” Needless to say, the conversation is over pretty quick.
Profit
About a year after our initial trip to Cambodia and the launch of our ministry, we held a company board meeting. We were finally breaking through the lean years that followed the Great Recession, and we were looking forward to celebrating our numbers and being able to breathe a bit easier. At the meeting, one of our board members said, “Well, Jay, as a faith-based company, your priority for the first profits should be to direct them to your ministry.” That was not what I necessarily wanted to hear, but as I let the idea settle, I knew he was right.
That first year of profitability, we committed 15 percent of our profits to Saving Susan Ministry. We have raised our annual commitment by one percent each year since. Last year, 19 percent of our profit went to the ministry. Seeing the fruits of our labor dedicated in this way is powerful and drives us to continually work toward increased profitability.
People First
Our Purpose fuels the culture of family at Genesis Elevator and guides our People First practices. We're constantly evaluating our culture to better understand how we can help our team prioritize family and maintain healthy connections. We say “Family matters to everybody. It matters to us. It matters to you. It's more important than this business.”
One benefit we have implemented to help family well-being is to make mental health professionals available to any team member or their family members when they have difficult situations that they need help with, free of charge. We know that life's tough. You don't get through life without difficulties, and we want our people to know that we are there for them and that they can have a resource for confidential support when needed.
Personal Transformation
I have been in the elevator business since I graduated from college, all of my professional life. But elevators don’t get me up in the morning. I have always loved the people I have worked with, across all the roles I’ve had, which kept me in the field, but I never felt a deeply held purpose in my work other than to take care of my family.
Now, I get up in the morning to serve the people in our company and the ministry. In the end, it is our team, sustainable profit, and manageable growth that will allow us to continue to have a positive impact on at-risk kids. With 140 million orphans in the world, we won’t run out of opportunity in my lifetime. Vichika is 12 now, and our relationship with her grows every year. We also support her brother, Mesa, who is 16, as well as another young girl, Grace, who’s six. These children may not live with us physically, but be assured they are our kids—just like our three boys. They are part of the Arntzen tribe, and they have blessed our family beyond measure.
Jay Arntzen is President of Genesis Elevator Company and Revelation Manufacturing; his wife, Tracy, serves as President of Saving Susan Ministry.
Best Practices for Creating Evergreen Value
Michael Shearn is a value investor, author on the topic (The Investment Checklist), and student of Warren Buffett’s values and Berkshire Hathaway’s approach to company building. In this presentation from Tugboat Institute Summit 2019, Michael shares what he believes creates real value in companies and offers tactical takeaways for Evergreen® leaders.
First, Take Care of Each Other
[A note from Tugboat Institute: Please note the author’s postscript at the end of this article, in which he comments on the connection of this topic to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.]
In 2011, when I stepped into my role as President of Maritz Global Events, our company culture had been negatively impacted by the Great Recession. The meetings and events industry generally had been hit hard, and our company was no exception. Focused on doing their jobs and avoiding fallout, employees were hunkered down, and the culture reflected a widespread sense of trepidation.
As an incoming leader, the situation presented an interesting opportunity for me to establish a more open and engaged culture. Early on in my career, I had the great fortune to work for a company called Conferon, which believed in the power of culture and what it can mean to the performance of an organization and its people. At Conferon, the core value—“First, take care of each other”—had been the north star and foundational principle for a powerfully positive culture.
Conferon’s founder believed that if you take care of your employees and ensure their satisfaction to the greatest extent possible, everything else will fall into place—including, but not limited to, financial performance, customer satisfaction, and retention of both existing and new talent. This core value, shared among all employees, drove the actions, decisions, and behaviors of the company.
With that experience, I knew that prioritizing culture would be my first initiative in my new role. Fortunately, while the company was emerging from difficult times, it had, since its founding in 1958, defined itself as a “people-based culture.” The core commitment to people was there—however there was little formal structure upon which to build out culture.
Over the next year, we began a phased initiative to craft a framework for our culture. We first embarked on a learning journey, taking advantage of a local training group, Barry Wehmiller Leadership Institute. From that learning experience, our leadership team went off-site for a three-day strategic planning session, during which we tore the company down to the studs, and then rebuilt the vision, the mission, and the core values together.
Central to our new framework was the value we had embraced at Conferon, which had been so formative to my leadership development—“First, take care of each other.” We reframed that value to include Maritz Global Events employees, clients, suppliers, and our communities. Having crafted our vision, mission, and core values, we then worked to articulate our Purpose, or “why,” engaging not just company leadership but our entire team. The result of those months of effort—clearly defined vision, mission, core values, and Purpose—provided the framework for the culture that has been developing since that time.
From that place, within the year that followed, several essential programs and practices were implemented to operationalize culture. First, we embraced the ethos of the dual bottom line—measuring our success in terms of fiscal performance and people performance.
Second, we eliminated traditional, annual employee reviews and replaced them with an aspirational coaching model, which is a continuous 360° conversation between manager and employee. We created the model and then trained extensively across the organization to drive a different type of accountability. Making that change has been instrumental in bringing our culture to life.
Third, we committed to creating an opportunity for our people to embrace a broader purpose beyond the walls of our company. We formed a grassroots committee of employees to support ECPAT-USA — part of a global organization dedicated to eliminating human trafficking with a focus on children. We felt it was critically important for us to get involved in this cause because our industry—built upon transportation hubs, convention centers, and hotels—is one of the main conduits through which human trafficking occurs. The decision to come together around this cause has broadened our cultural initiative beyond company and industry walls, allowing our people to embrace a Purpose that really makes a difference everywhere we go and has become an important connection point.
In 2012, having taken these significant steps to create a framework and build out our culture, we had the opportunity to challenge ourselves by acquiring and integrating a new company. This was an especially meaningful experience for me because the company we acquired was Experient—formerly known as Conferon—where I had first come to understand the true power of culture.
In my view, integrating culture is the most important piece of M&A (and often overlooked). In this case, I had a lot of confidence in the process because I knew we had done the prerequisite culture work on our side and were already on the right journey and that, together, the two cultures would not only complement on another but actually help grow and accelerate a positive culture across the whole organization.
In retrospect, an early step in this process that I think contributed to our success was to tap a leader of Maritz Travel and a leader at Experient to head up what we called an “optimization initiative,” which included 10 different work streams that were identified as critical to that acquisition, culture being one of them. Those two leaders then created teams made up of members of both organizations and they worked in collaboration to craft what our new combined organization would look like. They asked, “What needs to be combined? What needs to be kept separate? What needs to evolve?” That allowed the Experient team to understand our culture as it was reflected in the thoughtful integration process and connected our teams right away.
Today, our focus on prioritizing culture has led to Maritz Global Events being recognized as one of the best places to work in the events industry, based on direct employee survey results, providing us external indicators of the strength of our culture. Beyond the external validation, I see the strength of our culture reflected in the high level of participation company-wide in key initiatives linked to culture, like our fight against human trafficking and the aspirational coaching model. And, our turnover is in the single digits. Maybe more important, if you were to walk around our offices today and ask employees what our core value is, they would be able to tell you that it’s “First take care of each other.”
All that said, we’re not perfect. Developing culture is a journey, but we know we have an Evergreen time horizon to continue to grow and improve.
07.07.2020 Postscript
The Evergreen 7Ps™ principles are the foundation of a purpose-driven company. As Maritz Global Events has navigated the hazards of the current pandemic, leaning into the principle of People First (Maritz Global Event’s signature core value is “First, Take Good Care of Each Other”) has been a guiding light, while also an immense challenge. The face-to-face events and hospitality industry has been decimated as a result of COVID-19. In the U.S., 75 percent of hotels have been closed, gatherings of 50 or more have largely been banned, and the airlines have greatly reduced capacity. It is estimated that this pandemic will have at least nine times the negative impact on our industry than 9/11, with over $1.2 trillion in losses (and growing).
With these sobering statistics, navigating this crisis with a People First perspective front and center has been essential. Every decision we’ve made as a company is wrapped around this belief – the best way to take care of our people is to do everything we can to ensure we have a viable business to return to when the recovery comes. We’ve remained committed to viability and treating our people with empathy and respect when delivering the most difficult of all decisions – furloughing employees, eliminating positions, and reducing compensation and benefits. As a leader, maintaining a viable business with great employees is the ultimate responsibility. During times of crisis, culture is more important than ever. Staying true to one’s purpose will ensure that our Evergreen companies endure.
David Peckinpaugh is President of Maritz Global Events.
The Evergreen Experience with Grossman Company Properties and Heath Ceramics
In this episode of The Evergreen Experience™ 2020, , recorded on June 26, 2020, Dave is joined by John Grossman, President, Grossman Company Properties, and Robin Petravic, Owner/Managing Director, Heath Ceramics. John and Robin both lead businesses that were especially hard-hit early by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic—hotels and dinnerware/tile manufacturing, respectively. Having been forced to an almost-complete stop, both Evergreen® leaders are now emerging through uncertain and challenging conditions in their industries and share their experiences and key learnings.