Can Affiliates and Influencers Help Drive Sales? They Have for Tacony
Pragmatic Innovation is one of the Evergreen 7Ps® principles, but it’s not new or specific to Evergreen® companies to continually seek innovative ways to expand their reach and drive sales. What is new, especially in the age of digital marketing, is that the pace has picked up quite a bit. While we may be a 78-year-old company in a traditional industry – we are a manufacturing and distribution company that provides the world with better solutions for sewing, cleaning, and home – we’ve embraced the power of social media and online platforms to expand our reach and drive sales.
About two and a half years ago, led by our Director of Marketing, Tracey Wiltshire, Tacony Corporation began to explore collaborations with influencers and affiliates. For ages, our primary channel for selling our products was through independent retail and brick-and-mortar stores. It had become clear that, in order to stay competitive and drive sales, it was time to try something new. So, we leaned into leveraging the power of social media and online platforms.
Our first step was to understand exactly what influencers and affiliates were, how they worked, and how they might help us move our products.
Influencers are individuals with a significant social media following who can help promote the brand's products, often through sponsored content. They excel at creating brand awareness and engaging with a broader audience, though they may not always generate immediate sales. To make this process more efficient, we’ve partnered with platforms like LTK, which allows us to reach a wide network of influencers on one centralized platform. By using LTK, we’ve streamlined our influencer efforts, enabling us to manage multiple influencers at once in a cost-effective way.
Affiliates, on the other hand, are participants in programs like ShareASale or Awin, who promote products through unique links, earning commissions for sales generated through their referrals. This method is considered low-risk and was a great place for us to start; businesses only pay affiliates after a sale is made, making it a cost-effective strategy. This is where we have focused our efforts for now.
Working with affiliates can get complicated, as there are many different types. As we set out on this new journey, we explored partnering with various types of affiliates, such as coupon and deal sites, content creators, and loyalty and reward programs. These affiliates help drive traffic, often through special offers or cashback deals, to our improved e-commerce sites. In advance of this initiative, we did a lot of work on our sites, making sure we were prepared for the increase in traffic and that they were set up to maximize conversion rates when people landed there.
Another way to understand how all this works and why it is effective is to look through the lens of the customer. Understanding the customer journey within affiliate marketing is key. While consumers may be unaware of the complex mechanisms behind the scenes, they often encounter loyalty programs or special promotions while browsing online. For example, a consumer might find a Tacony promotion on Rakuten, which leads them back to the brand’s site. This cross-platform exposure drives traffic and builds brand awareness.
Publisher sites represent another critical aspect of a successful digital marketing strategy. These are platforms where companies can feature their products, through lists like "Best Stick Vacuums,” for example, or other similar rankings. While getting featured on these sites often requires additional budget allocations, the exposure can be invaluable. For example, at Tacony, our commercial floor brand, Powr-Flite, recently saw a single, significant $13,000 sale from an article featuring their product as a top pick for tennis court cleaning. Sometimes the investment is minimized when these publisher sites, driven by good content and well-maintained accounts, seek out products to feature. This can result in organic traffic and sales without any investment at all.
We are still refining our approach, but we are gradually expanding our affiliate programs, exploring new platforms, and adapting to the dynamics of digital marketing. The initiative is still in its early stages, but the results so far have shown promise, especially in reaching new customers and driving online sales in a cost-effective manner.
As much as we have seen success with these initiatives, this strategy is not without challenges. Getting listed on these sites requires not only financial investment but also a deep understanding of how the affiliate marketing ecosystem works. As I think I have made clear, it’s complicated! It's about striking the right balance between visibility and cost-effectiveness, a delicate dance that my team is doing a great job mastering.
If you have not stepped into this world yet and are considering it, the first critical step is to make sure your online platform is ready for the traffic that you hope will be coming your way. No number of affiliates or influencers will help you if your site is not ready to convert your visitors into sales. The next strongest recommendation I have is that you make sure you have someone on your team like Tracey, who is willing and able to dive in and become fluent in this new language. She has been instrumental in this work, and it’s complex. If you are looking to start an affiliate program, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of researching competitors to understand the market standards for commissions and offers. Fit can vary widely. For instance, in the sewing industry, we’ve found that 10% is the standard commission, with some outliers like Joann’s Fabrics offering as low as 2% due to their volume. Understanding these intricate dynamics allows our team to set competitive and sustainable commission rates from the outset.
Once you have taken the leap, managing your relationships with affiliate programs requires constant attention. Regular communication with affiliates is critical to ensure they have the necessary tools, such as landing pages and promo codes, to effectively promote products. This proactive management is crucial for maintaining a healthy conversion rate, which has been the most meaningful metric we track.
In terms of how this is affecting our bottom line, like I said, the early results are promising. We set a goal to grow e-commerce sales to 20% of our entire portfolio. When we undertook this initiative, we were basically at zero and today, a year and a half later, we are at about 14%. Some product lines are selling at higher volumes online than others, but 14% is the average across the board.
Embracing affiliate marketing has been far from simple. We’ve learned that it requires a blend of strategy, constant oversight, and adaptability to the digital landscape, which evolves at a dizzying pace. Yet, as Tracey and the team have demonstrated, with the right approach, it can be a powerful tool to expand a brand’s reach, increase online sales, and build lasting consumer relationships.
The CEO's Dilemma: When and How to Hire a President
A couple of years ago, I was attending a Small Business Association (SBA) class that was specifically designed to prepare the CEOs of government services companies to graduate from being a small business and enter “no man’s land,” as described by Doug Tatum. As the conga of CEOs who had successfully navigated the “too big to be small, too small to be big” waters talked to us, one made a comment that was not, as I saw it, directly related to main topic of the class. But it struck me square in the forehead. He said, “if you wait until you’re already tired to transition out of your CEO role, you’ve waited too long.” It wasn’t long until I realized that the comment was, in fact, quite directly related to the topic at hand.
When I started AVIAN in 2006, I was my own first employee. I worked eight-hour days in support of a government customer, and spent my nights and weekends working on the company trying to make it grow. I worked non-stop. It took five years to reclaim my evenings, seven years to get my weekends back, and a decade to find some semblance of work-life balance. By year 12, the company was running smoothly, allowing me to spend more time with my family. It felt like I had “broken through,” we had made it, and the company was secure. Then came year 17, and the realization that small business graduation was fast approaching.
We found ourselves thrust back into start-up mode. I was working 16-hour days, nights and weekends, only I was 20-years older. When people asked how things were going, my answer was ‘sporty.’ I thought back to the SBA class and I realized I was already tired.
Approaching the end of your tenure as CEO is always difficult, but I think founders have an extra challenge, having worked so long and hard to raise their company up from nothing. But when you run a business, hard work is the norm, so how can you tell when the time has come for real organizational change? When grit and perseverance are no longer the keys to finding your way out of a tough spell? It’s not easy, but here’s what it looked like at AVIAN.
We had hit what Les McKeown calls the "whitewater" stage in Predictable Success. Operations within the company became increasingly complicated as we were preparing ourselves to start competing with billion-dollar giants versus other small businesses. The fun part of scaling was over; I was back to the grind of working nights and weekends, but this time with far less energy and enthusiasm.
I thought back to the SBA class again and realized the time had come. I was CEO and president and there was too much ground to cover. Between running AVIAN, integrating a recent acquisition, and launching a startup, I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t concentrate on strategic growth while still managing daily operations. I needed help. It was time to bring in a president to handle the day-to-day, so I could refocus on vision and long-term strategy.
Once I decided it was time to promote my Chief Operating Officer (COO) to president, I took the idea to my board. My COO, a retired U.S. Navy Commander, had been with AVIAN for over a decade, proving himself a very capable business leader, so he was the natural choice for the president role. The board agreed, but they wanted a detailed plan for how it would work in practice, a concept of operations.
Together with my COO, soon to be COO/President, we mapped out the new organizational structure.
As two retired Navy Officers, we were meticulous in our planning—clarifying reporting relationships, defining responsibilities, and even considering the cultural shifts this change would bring. I was to fully transition into the CEO role, focused on growth and strategy, while my COO would fully manage the operational side as president.
In the CONOPS design, we agreed to one critical element; if my COO was to be president, I must fully allow him to be president. He re-designed the company’s organizational structure the way he wanted it to operate, and put in place a whole new leadership team, hiring one new key position, and promoting four people into leadership roles. He had a few asks of me: refrain from making any decision on his behalf, not attend his leadership team meetings, and let him be in charge. I had one ask in return: to shield me from issues that don’t really require my attention by creating some sort of screen or filter and not distract me from my new role. Symbolically, I even moved my COO into my large president’s office and myself into a small corner office on the other side of building to make it clear to everyone who was now in charge.
I was immediately ecstatic. So many items from my habitual to-do list vanished, as they shifted over to the new president. After the shift, we established a drumbeat of meeting fortnightly to make sure the transition was going smoothly and the CONOPS was working as designed. We called it the Same-Page meeting. And then slowly we began to witness cracks in the new construct; as with any major change, it turns out it wasn’t quite so easy.
Despite our careful planning, one of the biggest surprises was the innocuous cultural resistance to this shift. I’d underestimated how deeply my presence was embedded in the company’s culture. Even as I tried to step back, employees kept looking for me to be a part of things and comments like, “you’re missed when you’re not here” started to creep up. Don’t get me wrong, the new president was doing an amazing job setting his own strong, caring culture, but letting go of the old takes time. More time than you think.
Another issue was the overlap in roles. Our new president retained his COO title while stepping into the president position, which created confusion about responsibilities, especially among his fellow C-Suite. This blurred the lines in our leadership structure—a mistake I now realize needed to be addressed.
The last was my own understanding of my new role. As the CEO, I am a visionary who never met an idea I didn’t like, but that comes with consequences when I break the new organizational structure lines and start sending opportunities directly to the business development team who feel compelled to act. It’s not a pleasant feeling to hear your senior leadership team talking about ‘reeling in Kevin,’ but it’s to be expected and properly managed.
We are a year into this transition and AVIAN is in a decidedly better place, but we’re still experiencing some growing pains. My president runs the company effectively, giving me the space to focus on strategic initiatives like partnerships and long-term growth. We meet every other week to stay aligned, and I’ve managed to step back from the operational details.
I expect that once we better settle into this structural shift, life is going to improve. I feel closer to reconnecting with the passion and excitement that characterized the periods where we burst through a growth period and felt successful. The company IS in great shape, and we are most of the way across no man’s land; now I just have to finish the work of making sure it stays that way long after I am no longer the CEO.
Are there any universal lessons here for CEOs, and especially founders, contemplating a similar move? Here’s what I’ve learned. Know when it’s time; don’t wait until burnout forces your hand. Plan meticulously, but stay flexible; you need a clear CONOPS, but be ready for the unexpected—especially when it comes to company culture. Clearly define roles; avoid overlapping titles or responsibilities. Respect the cultural shift; transitioning leadership isn’t just a structural change, it’s an identity shift. Employees need time to adjust, and the new leader needs space to grow into the role. Finally, don’t underestimate symbolism; small gestures can significantly impact how the transition is perceived.
Transitioning from a hands-on President & CEO to being a strategic leader isn’t easy, but it’s necessary for sustainable, long-term growth. As with all phases of company growth, the rewards are preceded by challenges, and nothing is as easy or smooth as you would hope. But if you have reached this point, and especially if you are an Evergreen® leader, you have been doing this long enough to know that the best outcomes are worth the hard work and the struggle.
Another Way in 2025
Dear Friends of Tugboat Institute®,
On this New Year’s Eve, I am happy share that in 2025 we are making several big steps forward in supporting the broader Evergreen® community, of which you are a part.
Since our founding, our vision has been two-fold. First, that Evergreen companies will go from being underappreciated to being broadly celebrated for what they are—attractive employers, partners, suppliers, customers, and community members that can be counted on to be trustworthy, fair, and reliable for the long term. Second, that Tugboat Institute will be the unrivaled resource for Evergreen CEOs and their businesses, providing a values-aligned support network unlike any other with additional, valuable services that evolve and grow along with our members and the broader Evergreen community.
For most of our first decade, our Pragmatic Innovation efforts were designed to support our members directly, whether through trusted peer experiences, unique content from members and Evergreen thought leaders, insightful biannual member surveys, intimate forums, or programs that go beyond the member experience, such as our Certified Evergreen® program and Tugboat Institute Gathering of Teams. This work will never cease; it has been and will always be critical, and it will be our honor to keep working toward this goal forever (for 100 years or more!).
Now, just over a year into our second decade, we are excited to extend in more deliberate ways what we have learned over the past decade to a broader, global audience of Evergreen leaders, founders, thought leaders, students, and supporters. We would love to help all Evergreen companies–regardless of size, location, industry, ownership type or background—become even stronger, more mature Evergreen companies to the benefit of their teams, customers, suppliers, owners, communities—and society.
An important first step in this direction has, in fact, been in the works for five years now—a book. After many years of urging from friends and Tugboat members, I finally sat down in 2019, and talked it through with my dear friend Bo Burlingham, of Inc magazine fame. It has been a true labor of love for both of us, and it has been my privilege to work not only with Bo, but also with our senior editor Scott Berinato at Harvard Business Review Press. I’m thrilled to announce that Another Way: Building Companies That Last…and Last…and Last will publish on May 6, 2025, and is available for pre-order now at your favorite online bookstores and at this link. Your early orders help support greater distribution of the book at launch.
A second and third step forward are coming soon and here is a sneak peek at each.
Ten years ago, we launched our free, weekly Evergreen Journal® (EJ) newsletter. Today, after publishing a new article or video every week for over a decade, we have huge library of timeless, invaluable content. This past summer, we surveyed this community to learn more about your interests. Based upon that feedback, in February 2025, we will launch the Evergreen Journal+ (EJ+), a subscription-based platform that will provide access to our entire library of almost 300 articles and over 200 videos with unique filters and search capabilities, alongside new tools like live online conversations and my book list. Stay tuned for more details soon.
Later in 2025, we will officially launch the Evergreen Growth Navigator by Tugboat Institute (EGN) on our website—our third initiative that has been two years in development. It’s a powerful, yet affordable tool for CEOs and presidents to assess their company’s performance across the Evergreen 7Ps® principles and identify the highest potential areas of improvement.
To our Tugboat members, thank you for urging us forward in this work. For everyone in our Evergreen community, we are so honored that you have chosen to be part of our Evergreen movement, and we look forward to serving you in better, more meaningful ways in the coming years. We hope Another Way, the EJ+, and the Evergreen Growth Navigator will all be new, valuable resources in your leadership learning journey.
As we continue to build this important movement together – company by company, leader by leader, founder by founder – we welcome your participation and your feedback!
Here's to 2025. It will be a big one, and we can’t wait!
Warmly,
Dave Whorton
Founder & CEO, Tugboat Institute
Turning Values into Action
Great Lakes Dental Technologies has been a fixture in the orthodontic and dental lab industry for decades, since long before I joined as President & CEO in 2022. And, I’d venture to say, it has been Evergreen® since its founding in 1967. Our co-founders’ commitment to our industry and their staff led them to sell the company to the employees, creating a 100% Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in 1990. Great Lakes is an industry leader, and a wonderful community in itself; for all these reasons, when the opportunity to join the team was presented to me, I jumped at the chance. It matched my desire to transition away from companies that were building to sell. Some of them were great companies, but something was missing for me without the long-term, Evergreen mindset. However, just because a company is already Evergreen doesn’t mean it’s perfect, or right where it needs to be.
Great Lakes has a simple vision statement: “Delight our customers. Respect and help our co-workers.” I love the simplicity of that, and I never want to change it. It’s so straightforward and effective. The great company culture and long-term decision-making created strong employee loyalty, with some employees staying over 46 years. However, despite being deeply grounded in strong values, the company has seen the development of some poor habits over time. While longevity and culture are strengths, they can also lead to complacency if not paired with ongoing discipline and intentional efforts to continually align values with specific, teachable behaviors.
Coming in as an outside CEO, one advantage I brought with me was the ability to see things with fresh eyes. I could see things that the long tenured team could not. I saw this as an opportunity – find a way to get back to best practices and increase the power and impact of the values and vision that were already ingrained in the company and the people. But I wanted to be careful to do it in a way that didn’t alienate or disempower the amazing team that had been at the company for so long.
To tackle this work, I enlisted the help of an organization called CultureWise. They provided a helpful framework and process for achieving our goal: match our great values with specific behaviors that will allow us to easily and clearly take the values off the walls and put them into action. CultureWise taught us that ritualizing and ingraining a finite number of behaviors in your team is what really reinforces the transfer of the value to a behavior. That made a lot of sense to me, because the values were already in place.
We started by creating a group to work on this that consisted of team members from a variety of departments, in a variety of roles, and with a variety of tenures at Great Lakes. The first exercise we walked through was to have everyone reflect and share the ‘Great, Great Lakers’ who most exemplified the best of our company and its values. Once we had the brainstormed list on the whiteboard, we started talking through why each person had nominated their choices. It got powerfully emotional, actually, with one long-time employee talking about a new HR Director and how profoundly she had changed his life in the laboratory. It was extremely meaningful, and it was completely sincere.
Our next task was to connect these great stories to qualities and values. This took some work, and in the first few versions, some sounded too journalistic, while others sounded too “gotcha.” For each value, we then connected them to a behavior; what would it look like to act on that value? We ultimately identified 27 fundamental behaviors that encapsulated the company’s values. It was so great because at the end of the exercise, I looked at the list and realized that these were the values that had existed since 1967. All we had done was document them.
27 behaviors may seem like a lot, but we wanted to get granular and to be extremely clear in articulating what it looked like, for example, to “embrace all perspectives” or “invest in yourself.” We didn’t want to run the risk of any of it being too abstract and therefore ineffective.
The list is not ranked, but at the heart of the 27 fundamentals are three core behaviors that are essential to Great Lakes’ success: Think and Act Like an Owner, Never Compromise on Quality, and Do What’s Best for the Customer.
Think and Act Like an Owner: This behavior is about instilling a sense of ownership in every employee. We are an ESOP company, we own our building, and we own our land. We have no debt. When we recruit somebody, we make it clear that this is our place. If there’s a snowstorm, we come dig out. This is ours.
This sense of ownership extends beyond physical property to include our reputation and relationships with customers. Employees are encouraged to take initiative and make decisions with an owner’s mentality, reinforcing a culture of accountability and pride.
Never Compromise on Quality: As a medical device company, Great Lakes serves a highly demanding clientele—doctors who expect nothing less than perfection. We like to say that we treat the customer like we would our own child in the chair. This commitment to quality is non-negotiable, and employee-owners understand that their work directly impacts the well-being of patients.
Do What’s Best for the Customer: This behavior encapsulates the company’s customer-first mentality. We refer people to our competitor if they’re better at something than us because we expect to work with these doctors 25 years from now. Our long-term perspective ensures that employees always prioritize the customer’s needs, even if it means foregoing short-term gains.
27 behaviors are far too many to memorize, so you may be wondering how a list of this length can be effective. To ensure that these behaviors are not just words on a wall, we have ritualized them into the daily routines of its employees. After we implemented our fundamental values, for 27 weeks, I wrote a piece every Monday morning, each focused on one of them and shared it with the full team. These pieces were often deeply personal, and each aimed at illustrating the importance of each behavior. Once I had made my way through all 27, the leadership team took over, and now one of them highlights one fundamental behavior each week.
The fundamentals are also incorporated into meetings and performance reviews. I don’t start every meeting with a behavior, but I often do. I also start every board meeting with a story illustrating a behavior. When we have monthly all-company meetings, I get a volunteer to talk about that week’s fundamental behavior.
These rituals serve as constant reminders of what Great Lakes stands for and how employees are expected to behave. They also provide a common language for employees to give and receive feedback, making it easier to address issues and celebrate successes.
One of the most powerful outcomes of this approach has been the empowerment of employees, especially those in leadership positions. We recently promoted seven technicians to supervisory roles. They are now managing their former peers, which can be a challenging transition. However, the fundamentals provided a language and a framework for giving constructive feedback and coaching. They can say, for example, “Hey, how are you being relentless on improvement? Maybe you can be a little more exacting.” This approach has also helped create a more open and honest culture, where employees feel comfortable discussing difficult topics. “Speak courageously” has moved us forward on this front a great deal.
I’m happy to report that this initiative has moved the needle and has brought the values, which were already excellent, back to life in the day to day of each employee-owner at Great Lakes. The sense of ownership is at the heart of what makes this all so effective and powerful. It extends to every aspect of the business, from the quality of the products to the relationships with customers. It’s a model that has stood the test of time and, especially now that we have moved through this exercise, will continue to drive Great Lakes’ success long into the future.
Managing Success: The Art of Persevering Through Upturns
Perseverance is one of the Evergreen 7Ps® principles and it’s critical for any Evergreen® company’s survival. Contrary to what many assume, however, it doesn’t just come into play when times get tough. In my time as President & CEO of MCG Explore Design, an Architecture and Interior Design firm based in Alaska, my team and I have gained insights into the importance of persevering through both downturns and upturns. MCG has weathered storms and soared to new heights in the more than 30 years I’ve been with the firm. Through the vagaries of the past few decades, there have been several pivotal moments that have driven home this important truth.
I joined MCG straight out of graduate school. I started drafting and moved into my current role 25 years ago. Like any company that intends to endure for the long term, at MCG, we expected that the road to success would not be a straight line, and right from the start, put some strategies in place to enable us to get through the downturns that were sure to come. Early on, for example, we adopted a ‘distributed leadership model’, in order to foster equal opportunity through independent agency, accountability, and shared success among the leadership team. This approach not only empowers individuals but also fosters super-collaboration and innovation, leading to exponential-paced growth for our company.
One specific outcome of this leadership structure has been reducing our vulnerability. Each of our seven leaders has complete freedom to pursue projects and clients on their own. The intended result has been to create a diversity of ‘lines of service,’ each on their own timeline and following their own cadence. As we move through any project, we “roll on” in the early stages and as we near completion, we “roll off.” The rolling off on the backside is where we are making the most profit, as bills come due and are paid and work closes out. This creates a sine wave of work, billings, and income with each 'line of service.’ By creating space for multiple lines of service, each driven by their own engine and following their own plan, we end up with multiple sine waves that move at a variety of frequencies; as we are rolling onto one project, we are rolling off another, and so on. Overlapping sine waves create a median between high and low waves that is a line that is nearly flat, indicating economic stability. This means the money is coming in more or less steadily and we avoid periods of drought where we could become vulnerable to unexpected costs or expenses.
This is just good hygiene; it is part of our plan to level ‘Booms’ and ‘Busts’ both locally and nationally. It helps us stay disciplined and gives us the courage to take risks when the right opportunities arise. It also reduces the feeling of having lots of ‘extra’ cash that might cause us to become careless if it all came in at once.
Another strategy we employ that helps us stay poised for opportunities and avoid unanticipated consequences is a deep look at long term management and success. Like any strong and successful company, our strategic planning includes looking out ten or even 15 years, and doing what we can to create lines of service that will start to prosper in that timeframe; this process of assessing the now and lensing into the future is essential for cultivating a generational company. We need to keep imagining what is coming next, knowing that what makes us competitive today will not suffice tomorrow. A current example of this is our initiative in construction management; we will open a construction management line of service later this year which will, over time, allow us to compete with the larger companies offering industry specific expertise with nuanced, clever stewardship. It will take time to grow it to maturity, but we see this as an area where demand will be high in the future, and we want to be ready to be super-collaborators when that time comes.
Our distributed-leadership model and our strategic planning are examples of safeguards against vulnerability in tough times, and they’ve been remarkably successful, to date. A final, important way we guard against complacency and vulnerability is our commitment to smart growth; it’s an essential tenet to success.
Both 2012 and 2017 were tough years for us. We didn’t have our lines of service where they needed to be, and we had to reduce overhead. I had to make some hard choices and let a few people go, including one person who had been with us for 20 years. It was awful. Eventually, we started to move back into better territory, won some great contracts, and were feeling like the rough patch was behind us. In the last four years, in fact, we have had our biggest years ever – one after the other.
This created pressure to ‘staff-up’; I started hearing, “We’re doing really well – maybe we should look at hiring a few people?” But our experience in 2012-2017 taught us that this is not good discipline. We learned that a nimble, light, and quick super-collaboration suits us best. We leverage each other to turn the corner and accelerate to success together. In response to the calls for renewed hiring, therefore, we had to tap the brakes on that and re-center the conversation. We spent some time thinking about the impact on our overhead. Were these new lines of service going to endure? If so, what did we need to do to support that? If we’re not sure yet, we wait.
Over-hiring during upturns is one of the biggest mistakes we made in the past. In general, when it comes to growing the team, we choose instead to stay nimble, light, and quick. We use consultancy to add resources where we need them and to do the heavy lifts we can’t manage. This is not only a strategy for avoiding layoffs in downturns; this also keeps us, the core of the company, involved in important areas like client relationships, business development, and strategic thinking.
More is not always better. Maintaining this discipline during upturns can be challenging, because when you are feeling flush, there always seem to be easier, faster ways to resolve tensions. Perseverance here is critical; if done right, it will help lessen the need for extreme perseverance during the next downturn!
The key lies in being cautious with success. It's about not resting on your laurels and leveraging opportunities wisely. Instead of succumbing to overconfidence during boom times, we aim for strategic, Paced Growth, we evaluate risks meticulously, and we stay prepared for unforeseen circumstances.
I’ll leave you with a metaphor I like to use that I believe is relevant. In my mind, everyone is either leaning in or leaning over, at all times. ‘Leaning in’ declares “I’m here to help you” but I have discovered that ‘Help’ and ‘Control’ are the same word – a shocking realization actually. When we are leaning in, we are not listening, collaborating, or really engaging with our interlocutor at all. Agency is lost because it is usurped by a leader’s efforts to ‘help.’ When we are ‘leaning over,’ on the other hand, we are looking in front of us to shine light on what needs to be done, all while preserving the agency of our interlocutor, who retains full rein of the outcome. Both people involved in the interaction have their eyes wide open, focused on the task at hand and on what lies ahead. Leaning over is like Inception.
Our energy is trained forward, and we are ready for anything. As a business leader, no matter how flush you feel or how impressive your success, the moment you start leaning in more than leaning over, you lose the perspective of agency and trust. This can be the first step toward the precipice where you are no longer ready for what lies ahead. Lean over at all times, and you will be ready to persevere through whatever lies ahead be it challenges or opportunities. We are all creatives and need to embrace ‘Our Design’.
The Predictive Power of Culture Analytics
Evergreen® companies, who value their teams and put People First, believe deeply in the importance of a strong culture. However, the critical value of a strong culture is not simply a matter of faith. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Oliver Staehelin shares concrete data around the specific, strategic advantages a strong culture can give a company. In a world where competition for great talent is not going to ease anytime soon, this is not an optional undertaking for the company that wants to retain a strong team over the long term.
Oliver was an early member of Tugboat Institute, while he was leading the culture assessment company he co-founded with Stanford Professor Charles O’Reilly, Pomello. His early career and all of his subsequent work confirmed for him that culture is not a ‘soft’ topic, nor are its benefits immeasurable.
Watch and be inspired to transform your company’s culture into one of its greatest strategic advantages.
A Peek Past the End of the World
Has the age of globalization come to an end? Given current demographic, political, and economic realities, what will the coming decades look like? And importantly, as business leaders, how can we best position ourselves to not only survive, but to succeed in the coming era? Peter Zeihan tackles all of these questions and more in this thought-provoking Tugboat Institute® talk.
Peter Zeihan is a leading geopolitical strategist and the author of The Accidental Superpower, The Absent Superpower, and, most recently, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. His sometimes uncomfortable predictions for the future are grounded in geopolitical analysis that relies heavily on demographic, political, and economic data. Whether or not you agree with his analysis, he reveals some realities that bear serious consideration as you, as a business leader, prepare for the coming decades.
Watch and consider the myriad factors that will shape the political, economic, and social landscape in the decades to come and how they might affect your business.
Supporting Community and Business Through One People First Initiative
The story I want to share with you today starts with the convergence of two separate stories, that happened to intersect at just the right time. One is the story of the evolution of my company, Refined Technologies Inc (RTI), and the other my introduction, through a friend, to a sector of society that needs attention. Both stories are grounded in the People First mindset that I try to bring not only to my work, but to my life in general.
First, a bit about RTI. RTI is an oil and gas service business. We go into refineries, petrochemical plants, and other hydrocarbon producing facilities and we help them clean their equipment when it is time for turnaround and maintenance. RTI has evolved over the years. Initially, we were a chemical business; we sold chemicals to the refineries who used them to do the cleaning themselves. Then we saw an opportunity, and we became a service business; we started bringing in our own teams to do the cleaning for them. When companies shut down part of a refinery to clean the equipment, they can’t just shut down production, so our clients were having to bring in temporary facilities to keep the work going while the cleaning was taking place. Finding temporary facilities is complicated, and our clients did their best–with uneven results. It’s important to do this work right, or it can become a safety issue. Eventually, we perceived an opportunity and a need to rent and install the temporary facilities ourselves. In this newest phase of our business, we have evolved from a light asset business to a heavy asset business, so in addition to the cleaning work that we continue to do, we now need to store, maintain, track, certify, and inventory all our equipment. Our team is growing quickly, and like many of you, we are finding it challenging to fill all our open positions in today’s labor market.
As all this was happening at RTI, I became involved in an initiative that a friend had started in Kansas that has to do with fair-wage work for incarcerated people. I was inspired by the work they were doing to support this marginalized population, so I got involved in a prison reentry ministry. The essence of this work aims to solve the enormous challenges incarcerated people face as they reenter society. They are at a massive disadvantage.
In Harris County, Texas, which is the Houston area, there are approximately 15,000 men and women released from state prison each year. That’s in just one county. This does not include federal prisons, so the true numbers are staggering. As I got involved in this work, I learned that there were organizations doing a variety of reentry services, but those organizations were not able to offer enough services to even come close to meeting the demand.
In Harris County, when prisoners are released, they are dropped at the Greyhound bus station, given $50, and told not to recidivate. The odds are stacked against them, to say the least. In 2017, with a group of friends, we started a nonprofit that provided reentry services. We named the organization CrossWalk Center, positioning ourselves as a metaphorical crosswalk, looking to help formerly incarcerated individuals get from one side to the other safely. It immediately became obvious that in order to make the transition back to society successfully, you need housing, you need support, and you need employment, so that was our focus.
As I was working on CrossWalk, at RTI, we were growing. We had just started this maintenance business and needed a lot of people to maintain the equipment we had acquired. Unemployment in Texas was, and still is, very low. It’s reported at 3%, but in reality, it’s essentially zero. We were struggling to find employees for the new jobs we had created. We had a revolving door of temporary employees, coming in, working for a while, and then failing drug tests and leaving. We were trying to run a business that was safe and reliable. It wasn’t working. It finally occurred to me that maybe my work with CrossWalk could intersect with my work at RTI.
I sat down one day and talked with one of our supervisors in the maintenance department and asked if he would consider hiring ex-offenders. He had recently been ordained a minister and he said, absolutely. So, in January of 2018, we hired our first CrossWalk guy – Smitty. Smitty was 51 years old and had done 25 years in prison. He wanted to work. To say that the experience was a success is an understatement; Smitty is still on our team today, and now works as a supervisor.
Since bringing Smitty on board we have learned a lot. We didn’t get it all right from day one, but we are doing it with consistency and repetition now. Today, we have about 40 team members who have come through this program. Many, though not all of them, have become involved in a ministry program. That is not a necessary part of it, but we have found that it is necessary that they find some higher reason for living. Whether it’s God or family or something else, it’s about making the decision to change your life.
Aside from being able to offer an important opportunity to these individuals, we have also seen great results from a business standpoint. This has become an invaluable addition to our business and created an aligned and differentiated culture and team. Our turnover rate is less than 10%, and we’ve been able to successfully grow and scale this new arm of our business.
We are working with local businesses now, trying to help other employers implement programs like ours. Together, we hope to find jobs for 500 formerly incarcerated individuals in the greater Houston area this year. There’s a process to follow and education is a big part of the conversations we have with these other Houston businesses. You can’t just go down to the bus station and start hiring people. It works best when you work with a partner organization, whether it’s a ministry or not, who can educate and support this population. Partner organizations help with a robust interview process that helps you select the people who are most likely to have success, stay clean, and be dedicated employees. It’s a work in progress, but it’s growing, and we are thrilled.
Today, I am a major advocate for second-chance employers. What started out as a ministry passion project has opened my eyes to a big problem in society. We are facing a huge hiring crisis, in the $20/hour jobs as much as the more executive level jobs across the country. At the same time, there are 19 million people with felony records in the US. The unemployment rate for ex-felons, unlike 3% for everyone else, is somewhere around 45%. There is no reason to believe that is going to improve anytime soon. Why shouldn’t we try to solve both problems at once? Solving the problem of how to help ex-offenders can become a real solution to a business problem. We took a calculated risk, and it’s been a great success.
If I have one piece of advice for the Tugboat Institute® community that I have learned from this experience, it’s this: if you are interested in being in business for the long term and you care about your communities, which I know you do, why wouldn’t you consider this as a possible solution to both your problem and to a growing problem in our society? It has huge potential to be a win-win for everyone.
Don’t Assume They Know!
As I began working with several Tugboat Institute® members over the past year, I saw a pattern. Even the best run Evergreen® companies experience the same challenge: the need to routinely and clearly speak their Purpose and plan deep into their organizations.
Failing to deeply and clearly communicate is one of the most common opportunities for improvement from among the 50 growth practices covered in the Tugboat Evergreen Growth Training Series. Left unaddressed for long periods, this communication deficiency can significantly hinder organizational performance, eat away profits, and undermine the firm’s long-term full-growth potential.
Each day employees throughout the organization, down to the lowest levels, are required to make decisions. Many of those decisions require deviating from normal standard operating procedures, if there are any, and applying a bit of creative experimentation. A customer has a unique problem, a package needs special handling, there may be a better way to execute an important task. The CEO or President needs to be certain that when employees take such initiative, their actions and desired results are highly consistent with what their Evergreen company is striving to achieve and aligned with its Purpose and growth plan. Otherwise, employees are likely to make decisions and take risks that are not in the best interest of the enterprise. This causes entropy, which essentially means sub-optimal efficiency created by a significant variation between what is being done and what you want done for the long-run good of the firm. This can, in turn, destroy productivity, waste resources, and shrink margins.
The good news is that addressing this critical issue is fairly straightforward. Evergreen companies must focus on the core components of effective communication: clarity, frequency, and reach. The Purpose and plan must be clear, easily understood, and consistently reiterated to embed them into the collective memory. It is not enough for the Purpose to be hung on the walls and printed on t-shirts, although that might be a start. Purpose and plan, need to be discussed everywhere: annual meetings, team meetings, strategy offsites, the newsletters that go out, holiday events, etc. Remind, remind, and remind again. And they don’t just need to know what they are; they also need examples of what they look like in action, or how they play out in the activity of the team. From the first hour a new employee goes through on-boarding, they need to be enculturated with Purpose, and they must be reminded over and over throughout their working tenure with the company. These consistent and repetitive interactions cascade the message from the leadership team down to the lowest level employees.
Fortunately, implementing effective communication strategies does not require exorbitant financial investments. The primary costs are time and attention, particularly at higher levels of the organization. If your Evergreen company is small, this is the place to start. The potential returns on this investment are substantial.
To further enhance communication efforts, for Evergreen companies that are larger and have the means, hiring an experienced and dedicated specialist can be a prudent move. This individual would be responsible for managing and ensuring the consistent dissemination of these critical messages throughout the organization, thereby maximizing their impact. This step can set you on your way to removing one of the obstacles that stands between you and optimized Paced Growth.
The significance of effective communication in an Evergreen organization cannot be overstated. It bridges the gap between the executive leadership team's strategic decisions and the decentralized implementation of those decisions throughout the company. By clearly articulating the company's Purpose, as well as the growth plan, and continuously reinforcing them through conversation, companies can mitigate entropy, enhance productivity, safeguard margins, and significantly increase their odds of long term, profitable growth.
Is this a problem in your organization? Take the first step to find out; look outside of the leadership team and evaluate how well your Purpose is understood and brought to life by every member of your organization. Recognizing the importance of effective communication is critical to unlocking the full potential of Paced Growth, and fostering a culture of shared Purpose.
