Innovation by Reduction
Tugboat Institute® member Don MacAskill is the CEO & Chief Geek of Awesome, which owns the brands SmugMug and Flickr. Don founded SmugMug with his brother, Ben, and together they bootstrapped their online photo sharing company, purchased Flickr from Yahoo, and built their company into an industry leader. All this from the heart of Silicon Valley and in the highly competitive and fast-paced tech industry. Fast and frequent innovation is critical to survival in this industry, especially when you are self-funded and competing against giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.
In this Tugboat Institute talk, Don shares his approach to innovation. Awesome exists in an environment where the pressure to adopt new ideas, one after the other, and stay ahead of the curve is intense, so he has found that it’s important to have some clear guide rails, to help them avoid falling into the ‘innovation trap’ and following fads that do not last.
Watch and be inspired by Don’s insightful and effective take on innovation.
How We Increase the Odds of Acquisition Success
Burgess & Niple (B&N) is a 111-year-old engineering and architecture firm. Over the years we have done more than a dozen acquisitions. I joined the company in 1997, and as I came up through the ranks and made observations from where I sat, my impression was that many of our acquisitions didn’t take very well. It seemed that the companies we acquired were kept at arm’s length and never really became part of B&N, or it took years for integration to occur. It took me some time to understand it, but it’s clear to me now that the reasons behind these unsatisfactory results could help drive future successes: culture and staff engagement.
As an Evergreen® company, B&N’s culture and values are paramount. Being a professional services firm, we don’t make widgets. Our people are our greatest asset, which is why Talent is one of the top priorities outlined in our Strategic Plan. When I took over my role of President & CEO in 2019, we had not completed an acquisition in a decade. As we prepared for the first acquisition under our new leadership team, we sought to increase our odds of success by focusing on cultural alignment and engaging more staff in the process through what we have termed our “integration partners” program.
It starts when we are vetting a company to see if we think they would be a good fit to acquire. We dig into all the financial details and technical capabilities of course, but we have added another layer to perform a deeper level of cultural due diligence. This starts in a joint Visioning Session with leadership from both firms. We are big fans of Simon Sinek, and in this session, we talk about our Why, our Purpose, and what we can achieve together post-acquisition. We also use a cultural assessment tool that is shared with the new team before we go into the meeting. This tool has 20-30 cultural characteristics that are aggregated into different categories. The B&N team and the leadership at the firm we plan to acquire complete the assessment and then we evaluate cultural compatibility together. This helps us identify where we have the most in common and where the soon-to-be-acquired employees are likely to see and feel the greatest differences.
As we move forward with the acquisition, we start to lay the groundwork for assigning integration partners to reinforce cultural compatibility. Each person in the newly acquired firm is paired up with a B&N employee. Typically, a new employee’s integration partner is someone in a similar role, and often someone who has been through an acquisition as an employee of a company acquired by B&N. We dig into their staff’s resumes and develop a partner list as the first step. The B&N employees are then contacted and asked if they want to support the integration. We have found this is a great way to engage a wider cross-section of the firm in an acquisition and in our broader strategic planning goals.
We coach the B&N employees who agree to help on how the process will work and ask them to introduce themselves within a week or so of announcing the deal. Initially, they have calls about once a month and check in to share a bit about how long they’ve been with B&N, their experiences at the firm–both good and bad–and let their partners know that they are available as a resource. They help them with technical and policy questions, but most important are all the pieces that are not written down, like the cultural norms, and how we speak to and behave with one another. We also use these partners to collect important feedback about the onboarding experience. I, or someone from the leadership team, checks in after a few months have gone by. What is it like to be acquired by B&N? What works well and what needs to be improved? Our hope is that they form a relationship, and while we do not require that they keep it going for a specific amount of time, I know there are some people who still meet quarterly, even three years later, just to check in.
Aside from honoring our culture and improving employee retention, this process helps us become stronger and more competitive. We are a mid-sized engineering firm with 470 employees spread across the country. We are often competing with publicly traded firms with thousands of employees. Our model is made up of a network of small offices, which sometimes have as few as 10 or 20 people. If we want to go after big projects, we need to bring in resources from all around the company to make one big, virtual team that can go head-to-head with our larger competitors. As we onboard the new employees, we encourage the integration partners to pull their partners into projects, which gets everyone working in the trenches together, creates trust, and makes us all feel that we are one team. This has been a highly effective program for accelerating that kind of teamwork and assimilating people into the culture and various projects quickly and effectively.
This is similar in some ways to assigning new employees a mentor, but it’s different because the integration partner is always a peer. It’s not about training; it’s about getting to know someone and helping them find their place at B&N, and then stay on as a significant contributor. It’s important for new employees to have someone who is not a supervisor in this role; new employees do have supervisors and oversight, but this is a different kind of relationship.
Our acquisitions typically range in size from very small–about 10 or so–to upwards of 40 people, so this program does require the investment of some time and attention. Even though so many people are involved, this program is relatively simple and easy to run. It creates so much value that any costs associated are far outweighed by the benefits. Each time we learn more and continue to integrate acquisitions more effectively. It’s been a wonderful tool for strengthening our culture and growing our team and our capabilities in a culturally aligned and Evergreen way.
Fireside Chat with Dave Petersen and Dave Whorton
O.C. Tanner is a 95 year old family business in Salt Lake City, Utah. Not only are they an Evergreen® company with a deeply People First orientation, their entire business model exists to find ways to help other companies honor and support their employees and customers. They started making trophies, rings, and plaques to reward graduates and excellence in the workplace, and have innovated their way to becoming a market-leading employee and customer appreciation software and consulting company.
Dave Petersen has been with this remarkable company for 40 years and CEO since 2008. In this Tugboat Institute® Fireside Chat with Dave Whorton, Dave shares his remarkable personal journey toward leadership of O.C. Tanner. O.C. Tanner’s remains guided by the founder, Obert Tanner’s, vision and plan, and Dave shares how that vision helped him guide the company through a great many remarkable re-inventions of itself.
Watch and learn about the journey of this impressive leader and the unique and impressive, Evergreen company he leads.
A Fresh Perspective in Leadership can be Powerful, if it Meets a Few Important Criteria
It is not uncommon for a company founder to be an operator. Nor is it unusual for leadership through the early years, while a company is setting its foundation and solidifying its identity and strength, to draw from the operators who have worked there since the beginning. But at a certain point, as a company grows, scales, and moves into its next phase, a leader who sees things through a different lens can bring new insight and help a company expand in ways it may not have seen before. A few critical pieces need to line up to make this a success: the new perspectives this person brings must solve problems that have been identified, his or her mindset must be in line with the values of the company, and the new leader must take the time to learn the business inside and out.
I like to think that I met these criteria and brought a fresh perspective to Performance Contracting Group, Inc. (PCG). My education and degree in finance as well as my experience and time as a professional baseball player brought two very unique perspectives to a company that was growing fast. My perspectives and how they would enhance the leadership of the company didn’t happen overnight; I first had to learn what I didn’t know to be an asset to PCG.
I joined PCG 20 years ago as they undertook the task of helping build out the finance department. I had no experience in construction. Up until that point, and for the better part of my career there, PCG had been run by operators who had come up through the trades or had a background in construction management. That made sense as the company set its foundation in pursuit of operational excellence. When I came on board, they were growing into their next phase, both in terms of complexity and geography. They were at the point where it made sense to complement the deep operational experience with financial expertise.
I did not step directly into executive leadership; that is an important part of this story. I spent almost ten years working in our branch offices as I worked to gain exposure to the various business units within the company. My mentors guided me in my own career path all while teaching me the business inside and out. And my background in finance allowed me to help the company and fellow employee owners understand the value and benefits of being 100% employee owned, something we are very passionate about today.
Over time, and through many conversations, questions, and connections, I came to understand how to see our operations through the eyes of all employees, no matter what their responsibilities were – what we did, how we did it, what the drivers of the company were, etc. I learned an enormous amount about construction, and I learned even more about the most important aspect of it all – PCG’s identity and purpose.
At PCG, we are in the construction business, but we are about people. With our ESOP and our People First orientation, we value relationships and connections above all else. This is what sets us apart from our competitors. Ultimately, we are more people-centric than product-centric, and you can’t understand us as an organization if you don’t understand that. This is where I think my background as an athlete helped make me a good fit.
Playing baseball in college and then in the minor leagues, I learned lessons that define how I view any sort of cooperative effort. On a great team, whether it’s on a field of play or inside a business, it’s critical to understand the shared values and goals, as well as the connection points that help you achieve them. It is recognizing that there are a lot of different skills you need to play a lot of different positions. You need quality, high performing people who are talented in their own respects. You need to bring all those people together to compete to win.
An example at PCG where a different perspective can facilitate big change is an initiative that is currently underway. PCG is in the process of realigning and reorganizing a 35-year organizational structure. Our branch operations were split between two divisions, a structure that served the organization well and led to its success for many years. But to continue to grow and best serve our clients we needed a change. With my unique perspective, I felt it was important to leverage the entire organization. I wanted to find a way to create more of a One Company approach. One team. The internal walls we had built up over time no longer provided value to our identity and purpose and they were not helping our clients reach their goals. We are working to break those walls down, we are collaborating more, we are connecting more, and we are asking ourselves what value and solutions we can bring to our clients across the country. We are working as one unified team.
In the time I have been with PCG, we have grown from a $500M company to an almost $2.5B company. Today, we have over 9,000 employees. With that kind of growth come a great many challenges across the board. I like to think I bring a different perspective to the table as a leader, because I can straddle the fence between the finance and operations side of the business, all while being a team player. In any company it’s important, but often extremely difficult, to identify areas of weakness and be willing to work to improve them. With my different perspectives, I hope I am able to identify some blind spots or some areas we need to look at closely.
Above all else, I took the time to learn the culture of Performance Contracting. I joined PCG in 2003, became President in 2019, and then CEO in 2020. By this point, I had deep experience in, connection with, and understanding of the company and its values, which happen to align with my own mindset. It’s about recognizing that every single individual plays a critical role in the value we bring to our employees and our clients. It’s recognizing, acknowledging, and lending appreciation and gratitude that makes us who we are. It takes everybody–our corporate departments and our branch operations–rowing in the same direction, unified around our culture and a drive to improve and strengthen PCG for future success. I hope that as a leader, I have made space for that to happen.
Make Change in Your Community Through Partnership With the Chamber of Commerce
Bobby Jenkins is President & CEO of ABC Home & Commercial Services, in Austin, TX. He is also deeply involved with his local Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce in Austin, like so many others, is at the center of all that makes Austin a wonderful place to live and do business, including a great many programs and initiatives that are supported by and that can support local companies.
In this short Tugboat Institute® talk, Bobby encourages Evergreen® business leaders to consider getting involved with their local Chambers. He shares some examples from his own experience and highlights the fact that both Chambers of Commerce and Evergreen companies share a common goal: to make their communities better places. In addition, he shares some of the ways in which doing good is also good business.
Watch and be inspired to partner with your local Chamber of Commerce.
Balancing the Challenges and Advantages of our Small-Town Location
The headquarter offices of Chatham Financial are located in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It’s a relatively small, suburban town about an hour outside of Philadelphia. It’s horse country and it’s beautiful. The schools are great, the community is strong, and life is good for families, children, and recreation. The core of our business is advising on derivatives trading and consulting in the capital markets, which are fairly sophisticated areas of financial service. It’s definitely unusual to do that work in a location like ours; most of our competitors are located in big, urban centers. For many years, however, our small town location has served as a net advantage to us. With all the recent shifts in the world and in the markets, the balance of advantages and challenges presented by our location has reshuffled significantly, but as we emerge into the new landscape, we are still finding ways in which being in Kennett Square helps, rather than hurts us in our effort to recruit world-class talent and build a strong, excellent team.
Chatham Financial was founded by a man who left his Wall Street job because he saw an opportunity to bring transparency to the derivatives markets. He and his wife lived in NYC, but as they embarked on this new adventure, they decided to move back home to a place that was more conducive to raising their family. Everyone said he was crazy to set up a financial services firm in rural PA, but he wanted Chatham to be a different kind of company. Today, our culture is firmly grounded in that same mindset. We value work-life balance, we honor our employees’ lives outside of the office, and we communicate this value to both current employees and potential new hires consistently.
For many years, we were appealing to employees at a certain phase of their career. Once they started a family, or as they were about to, the prospect of being able to live 10-15 minutes from work, send your kids to one of the great schools nearby, and join a culture that values individual respect and balance sounded far better than commuting into New York City every day. In addition, the cost of living was lower, so while it wasn’t the high NYC salary, it all worked. We mostly recruited for mid-level employees for a long time, who were at this phase of their careers.
Once people arrived in Kennett Square, the risk of losing them to a competitor was slim to none. We are by far one of the biggest employers in town, and one of the only financial services companies, so our turnover rate was very low. People stuck around, staying for 10+ years, which allowed us to grow and develop tight, experienced teams. We felt strongly in those days that our location was an advantage in all the ways that mattered most to us.
The first shift we encountered came about before Covid arrived. We were growing and needed to scale, so we needed to recruit more entry-level employees, right out of college, than we had previously. The prospect of moving to a beautiful but sleepy town an hour outside of Philadelphia appealed to this population a lot less; recent college grads want to be where the action is, in the city. We kept at it but realized that our location was starting to present some challenges.
And then, suddenly in 2020, work moved online. At Chatham, we aim to be a team that is tight, that is together, and that knows one another well. Although we now have eight offices worldwide–in Kennett Square, Denver, New York, Toronto, London, Krakow, Singapore, and Melbourne – we try to have our teams together as much as possible. We have had to expand geographically to manage client coverage; we need to be in the same time zone as our clients and they are now all over the world. But even as we spread out over several offices, we’ve worked hard to keep our teams in each location highly connected. The derivatives trading is best done in the office for risk and regulatory reasons, but even the work that could be done elsewhere is executed in office because we have a “one team” mentality. The value of being together, overhearing conversations throughout the office, and just being present and in the mix is highly valuable to our business and our culture. No one questioned this at all, until suddenly everyone could work from home. Then our recruitment landscape shifted again.
On top of the fact that people can now do many of the jobs we offer from home, the people who are interested in the lifestyle of Kennett Square can now move here anyway, and work remotely for someone else. Our small-town advantage seemed to transform into a problem to be solved.
What have we done in the face of these challenges? Like everyone, we have made several moves to try to mitigate the downsides of the new landscape. First, especially at the junior level, we expect higher turnover and so we hire more than we know we will need down the road. As we build our junior bench, the natural turnover tends to result in the highest talent employees, who fit our culture best, being the ones who love it and stay. Those who don’t, move on. It’s a more labor-intensive and expensive strategy, but it is working.
Second, we have made a few concessions to hybrid work where we absolutely had to. As anyone running a business right now knows, the pressure to hire good tech talent is exceedingly tight. Our tech team is a critical part of our business, but most tech opportunities are remote or hybrid. Therefore, despite how highly we value in-person connection, we compromised to offer a hybrid situation to our tech team in order to be able to build a great team. For the rest of employees, our principle is to be in the office full time, though we offer ad hoc flexibility to balance life needs. We are also working hard to make the in-office experience as appealing as possible by offering perks like free lunches and investing in our office amenities.
We are also leaning into some of our other locations. Denver is hot right now, so we have been ramping up there. Our entire leadership team used to be concentrated in Kennett Square, but as we are growing in alternative locations we are now spread out between Denver, Kennett Square, and London. Again, I would prefer we were all together, but having leaders in each of our largest offices has helped build the cross-office connections. We have also had to come up in salaries and benefits a bit to be more on par with our urban competitors, but again we see more upside with these shifts than not.
And finally, we are leaning into our Evergreen® culture. The downside of remote work is that the line between work and home is more blurred than ever. If you work at Chatham and come into the office every day, that is not the case. And when you go home, you are still in the beautiful, peaceful, and comfortable community, with the great schools and the light traffic, that has always defined Kennett Square. We might have to work harder to get the right people here, but we feel confident that our location will, over the long term, continue to set us apart from the rest of our industry and help us draw the best employees who share our values and who are excited by the unique opportunity to do big-city work in our small town.
Leading the Customer Experience
Tugboat Institute® member Brad Cleveland is a global expert in customer strategy and management. His recent book, Leading the Customer Experience, along with his LinkedIn Learning Courses and numerous articles, have been translated into a dozen languages. He is a sought after speaker and consultant worldwide.
When Brad was a young man, he had the opportunity to speak with W. Edwards Deming, who gave him a piece of profound advice: drive out the fear! Many years later, Brad has come to fully appreciate the role that fear can play in limiting performance and success in an organization. In this short Tugboat Institute talk, he reminds us how important it is to create a culture in our businesses where everyone - from the customer to the employee to the CEO - can operate free of fear.
Watch and be emboldened to help drive out the fear in your organization.
Onshoring as an Evergreen Strategy
As businesses evolve and market conditions change, we as leaders adapt our strategies, experiment with new initiatives, build and rebuild our structures to maximize opportunities. In recent years, the shifts in the market have been dramatic and have caused us here at DEMA Engineering Company, like so many of you, to adapt and even roll back some initiatives that had seemed so right just a few years earlier. Some of these reversals have caused us to learn powerful lessons about what is right for an Evergreen® company in the long term, regardless of market conditions. Our journey to and from offshoring is a great example of this.
For us, the move toward offshoring started all the way back in the 1980s, when we started exploring some partnerships with companies who made injection molding parts in Taiwan. The reasons were clear; the cost of steel to make the tools and the cost of labor–and therefore the parts themselves–were far less than in the US. It was quickly becoming the case that making the tools necessary for running the injection molding parts, even more than making the parts themselves, was so expensive in the US that very few companies were doing it anymore. We found we had no choice, so we made the smart and obvious move.
This shift was happening on a huge scale, in manufacturing as well as a great many other industries. We chose to work with partners in Taiwan, with brokers who managed our relationships, instead of in China because we found that we were able to establish better relationships and communicate more easily, even though costs were higher there then in mainland China.
All of this became easier, even in China, in the 1990s. With the rise of email, communication became easier and more barriers to doing business in Asia fell. We were able to start doing direct sourcing, in Taiwan especially, and bypass the brokers, thereby reducing our costs even further. I don’t mean to minimize the role of China in all of this; we did and still do buy parts from China. It’s difficult to avoid. But it was not our primary market. For the last 20-25 years, our partnerships with suppliers in Taiwan became the core of our business for bringing in injection molded parts.
For obvious reasons, everything shifted suddenly and almost entirely in 2020. The biggest problem for us, as for so many, was the cost of freight, which had skyrocketed overnight. We went from a 40-foot shipping container costing $3,500 to costing over $28,000. You can imagine how much was dropping straight from the bottom line. Between the freight cost that had skyrocketed and the strikes in the ports, labor shortages, unreliable delivery timeframes, and all the mess we saw around covid, it was no longer workable and was imposing extremely challenging and unpredictable circumstances on our business. Add the price increases worldwide, geo-political challenges, tariffs– the uncertainty became too much. This is what pushed us to start to imagine a change.
As we started to imagine ways to mitigate this series of issues, we faced several challenges. One of the most significant grew out of the fact that, over the last 30 years, because of the situation I have described, production of certain products and processes, especially in injection molding, vacated the US almost entirely. For the molded parts, which were also hard to find, we made the decision to start molding them in the US ourselves, even though the cost was higher. We have done this in several ways.
We are able to source some of the parts right here in Missouri. We have a number of small partners here that we work with locally and we are growing that network. It’s not cheap, but we are saving on freight, and we have regained reliability when it comes to delivery times, which is huge for us. We also acquired a subsidiary company in Pennsylvania in 2006 that does injection molding, and since 2020, we have invested in that too, to help increase production. We are basically buying those parts from ourselves, so that helps mitigate the higher cost there, as we are supporting our own business. When we used to start a new project, we would go to Taiwan to get it going. Now, we are starting our new projects at home. We are carrying less inventory and we are being more strategic about the parts we do still ship from Taiwan, being conscious of the size and nest-ability, so we are shipping containers with less empty space.
All of this has helped us reduce our lead times, reduce the amount of money tied up in inventory, and regain consistency of both pricing and delivery of our products. Eliminating the wild uncertainty we were experiencing has been extremely important. But it’s a process; it will take time to truly complete this shift.
Today, we have brought back about 20% of the product we had been sourcing overseas. This number is going to continue to grow. Especially for new projects, we are bringing the tools themselves that make the parts back onshore, and then we can start making the parts here, in Missouri or in Pennsylvania. For the last three big projects we’ve done, we’ve been able to onshore most of the parts.
We regularly share this onshoring strategy with our largest customers and they are very supportive of these efforts. They also understand the benefits of reducing lead times and gaining predictability. Our business will never be entirely domestically sourced, but more and more is moving back home, and we feel very good about our decision.
I keep the Evergreen 7Ps® principles right here by my desk and I have been thinking about Paced Growth and Private in particular a lot recently. We wouldn’t be able to do this if we weren’t Private; it will take time for the investments we are making, especially in our Pennsylvania company, to yield results and return us to strong profitability. If we had a short-term mentality, we would have to follow the lower prices, like many of our competitors are doing. But we are diversifying and integrating at the same time, which will, in the end, make us a stronger company, better prepared to weather whatever the next 100 years have in store for us.
The Deming Philosophy and the Evergreen Mindset
W. Edwards Deming is universally recognized as one of the fathers of Total Quality Management. His groundbreaking work helped numerous Japanese companies, with whom he consulted in the period following WWII, improve their efficiency and performance and surge onto the world scene as formidable business competitors in the 1970s and 1980s. American companies caught on eventually, and the Deming Philosophy that he created, with its 14 principles, serves as a guide for a great many companies to this day.
In this Tugboat Institute® talk, W. Edwards Deming’s grandson, Kevin Cahill, shares his grandfather’s philosophy and some of its central tenets, which happen to align nicely with the Evergreen 7Ps® principles, in particular People First. Today, Kevin is the Executive Director of the Deming Institute and a champion for his grandfather's important and highly relevant work.
Watch and learn about Deming's work and the incredible People First insights that helped him advise some of the world’s largest companies on their way to becoming giants in their industries.
Taking Employee Training to the Next Level
Not just at my very first job, but at the first few, I had an experience that I figured was normal; I was hired, I arrived to start work, I was shown a few brief basics, and I was left to figure the rest out on my own. Like many other first-time employees, I was lucky if I even got any training. In the best-case scenario, someone took me under their wing and taught me a few things, but for the most part, I was left to my own devices to understand what expectations were, how things worked, and what pitfalls to avoid. When I left the job, any learnings that I took away were the things that I had stopped to consciously consider and understand, all on my own, and which may or may not have been beneficial to my next work experience.
The young employees at Amy’s Ice Creams have an entirely different experience.
Because of the nature of our business, making and selling ice cream, we employ a great many young, part-time employees, many still in high school. We get some folks who stay with us for a long time, but mostly there is high turnover in those employees for obvious and very good reasons – they are preparing to launch their professional lives and scooping ice cream is just the first step on the way to an eventual career.
Our visionary founder, Amy Simmons, decided long before I got here that she wanted these young people to go away with learnings that would benefit them throughout their lives, so she built a culture and a program that ensure this happens.
The foundational piece of this is the requirement that every new employee participate in two classes: Open Book Management(OBM) and Company Culture. To be eligible for raises or promotions, these classes are a must. Before covid, we taught these in person, and each was a few hours long. We have since moved to zoom, but the requirement and the content remain unchanged.
At Amy’s, we practice OBM. Right off the bat this marks a huge difference from any of the places I worked early in my life. For the most part, I had no clue about what was going on in the businesses I worked in. Like many young people in their first jobs, I think I imagined that the company was making lots of money and it was all going straight into the pockets of the rich owners. Period. I had no sense of the nuance and complexity of running a business, from the necessity of accounting for each dollar to the importance of deep, careful planning and execution. About ten years after Amy founded the company, she adopted OBM because she thought it would make us a better company, and because she wanted ALL employees, even the young, part-time ones, to truly get to learn how a company operates from a financial perspective.
In addition to this class, we invite all employees, even those who have been with us for only a week, to attend our quarterly huddle. At the huddle we look at every metric associated with the previous quarter. We review the big questions through the details: what were our targets in our key KPIs? Did we achieve these targets? How did we perform in this area, how about in that one? Where are our opportunities? We explain Capital Expenditures, including refurbishing our stores, buying vehicles for deliveries and catering, new equipment, etc. We decide what to prioritize, and we go through all of that in our huddle. We hope employees will understand key decisions like why we maintain surplus funds and how we allocate profits at the end of it all. Once it’s all said and done, they should walk away with a decent understanding of the fundamentals of business, which they will carry with them wherever they go next. Most of all, we hope they will take away the importance of being very diligent with money, whether in their personal life or in the business.
The second class we require of all new employees is Company Culture. In this class we teach employees about our values, what we believe in, how we treat each other, how we respect each other, and how much we value serving our communities. We hope that the message is clear: to us, this is just as critical to running a successful business as the financials are. At Amy’s, everyone is welcome, no matter who you are. We have no biases or judgements.
Let me give you a personal example that I think illustrates what kind of a culture we are working to create and maintain here at Amy’s. Every year we participate in the Austin City Limits Festival. It’s a huge undertaking for us as a company. For three days, two weekends in a row, we shuttle four crews a day to and from the festival. One year, soon after covid, we were a bit short on staff and our Director of Operations asked if I would drive the van. I did, and it was so much fun that I now do it every year! I love spending that time with the young kids who work for us, talking about their experience, and what’s going on in their lives. Sometimes, at the end of the ride, one of them asks me what I do at Amy’s. They have no idea who I am, and frankly, I think it’s better that way. I don’t need them to know I am the CEO; it might make them uncomfortable and less open and this way it’s just so much fun. This is the culture that Amy has created–we are all important and no one is better than anyone else. I get to benefit from this amazing culture now, and I Iove it.
I have been here for five years and feel incredibly lucky to be part of such a wonderful, People First organization. Amy and I have experienced it as a great privilege to build and steward this exceptional company in partnership with our leadership team. As a team, through discipline, focus, and a shared vision, we have achieved more impressive results than if our leadership was concentrated in just one or a few top executives. This reflects our culture of sharing, and for us, the cultural piece is everything. We are proud to be able to educate our young employees about the fundamentals of business and the importance of counting each M&M and hope they will carry the lessons on finance and on culture forward into their lives. And we are grateful for our cohesive and dynamic leadership team, which has driven the growth, strengthening, and solidifying of the foundation that will serve us into the future, 100 years or more.