The Inspiration: Steve Smith

In the heating-and-cooling industry, they’re calling it “The Great Consolidation” as the pace of company acquisitions has risen from about 20 in 2011 to 120 a year by 2019. Meanwhile, The Great Consolidation is slamming head-first into the pandemic-born Great Resignation, as firms battle for a share of the scarce pool of talent on the market.

That’s the environment Chris Hoffmann has faced since 2016, after taking over the St. Louis-based, family-owned business his father began 28 years earlier with four employees and a simple business model. Today, while he watches competitors grow through acquisition and consolidation, Hoffmann sees an alternative path: scaling up geographically and serving existing customers more deeply.

That’s why he’s expanded into Nashville. That’s why he’s exploring adding pest control to his suite of commercial and residential services. But there’s still that other nagging problem. "The companies that are going to be able to grow are the ones that can solve the talent issue,” Hoffmann said on a recent industry podcast. “Everyone knows that. Everyone's talking about that."

In this episode of On Principle, we talk to Chris Hoffmann about how he came to realize Hoffmann Brothers would have to make some big investments to thrive in a heavily fragmented but consolidating industry. What drove his decision to grow by expanding his service area and his services? Why did he decide against buying his way into new markets by acquiring existing residential and commercial services firms?

And what does it take to move from simply recruiting talent on the open market to growing your own in a newly built, 15,000-square-foot training facility?

Related Links

• The Hoffmann Brothers website
• The family office site Chris and his family created to manage investments
• More about Peter Boumgarden
• The Koch Family Center for Family Enterprise
• A piece Chris Hoffmann wrote for the Tugboat Institute on employee engagement
• The St. Louis Business Journal reports on Hoffmann Brothers’ expansion
• The Olin Brookings Commission project referenced in this episode

Credits

This podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistance
• Austin Alred and Olin’s Center for Digital Education, sound engineering
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support

Since 1999, the digital agency that Brian Williams and his brother cofounded has weathered—often just barely—some tough blows to the economy. There was the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Then there was 9/11. Then, the global financial crisis of 2008.

In fact, that last shock compelled Williams to create a formal business development function at Viget—a team that would market the firm, demonstrate its expertise, drive in-bound business leads and keep the phones ringing. Viget hummed into its 15-year anniversary in 2015 with an energizing employee retreat near Boulder, Colorado, where the firm opened a new branch office.

But when the year drew to a close with dismal results, Williams was worried. Yes, Viget had built a business development function. But it hadn’t created a way to forecast and project revenue, anticipate when existing projects would end, maintain a pipeline of “back-up” projects for slow times and rigorously manage existing projects.

There was no external economic shock, yet business had collapsed. “This was a crisis of our own making,” Williams said. “My mistakes led to us being in this precarious position.”

With potential layoffs looming ahead, Williams issued an off-the-cuff rallying cry that came to be known as “Best 6 Ever”—an audacious goal to exceed Viget’s previous best six-month period. And the team rallied. Extra hours. Aggressive marketing. Sharing the #Best6Ever hashtag internally. Meanwhile, Williams and his team worked to create version 2.0 of Viget’s business development team—complete with all the accountability measures that hadn’t existed before.

Today, Viget’s biz dev function is more sophisticated. The business is more profitable. The firm’s leadership is better equipped to accurately forecast revenue trends. And Williams sleeps better at night.

Related Links

• Viget’s website
• Brian Williams’ bio page on the Viget website
• More about Jackson Nickerson from the WashU Olin website
• Jackson’s Wikipedia page

Credits

This podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistance
• Austin Alred and Olin’s Center for Digital Education, sound engineering
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

This story is not really about the first pivotal moment Camryn Okere navigated. That’s the moment when the pandemic upended plans for a college internship and shuttered a business she had grown to love. In that moment, she decided to gather some mentors and some fellow students across a few universities to create a boutique consulting firm serving small community businesses—and providing experience to budding business leaders.

No, this story is about another big “oh, shoot!” moment, after that volunteer, student-driven firm—Rem and Company—took off across 20 college campuses, recruited more than 650 student consultants and served more than 300 small businesses around the country.

It’s about the moment Okere’s partners in the early days of Rem and Company started charting another career path, found appealing full-time jobs and left Okere to figure out how to make her baby a sustainable enterprise. She didn’t want her work—providing professional experiences for students and services for local businesses—to die.

“My moment was truly understanding that something has to change,” said Okere, BSBA 2020. You want it to become something, but that means the systems have to be built to make it sustainable.”

What was Okere’s story and how did it lead to that moment? How much of herself had she invested in Rem and Company—and why? What compelled her to think the enterprise was something worth sustaining in the first place? How did she realize that the model as it was created wouldn’t be sustainable? What steps did she take to traverse that “oh, shoot!” moment for Rem? What can we learn from her experience? And in what ways was her experience transferable to larger enterprises?

Related Links

• The Rem and Company website
• Rem’s Instagram and LinkedIn pages
• An Olin Business magazine story featuring Camryn Okere
• Olin Blog story about Rem and Company soon after its launch
• More about Staci Thomas
• Camryn, as a WashU sophomore, was featured for winning “best room” in a residential life competition.
• Camryn and Rem featured in her hometown newspaper

Credits

This podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistance
• Austin Alred and Olin’s Center for Digital Education, sound engineering
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

In the wake of the global pandemic, some of the loudest voices in corporate America proclaimed the end of work as we know it. Lockdown, it seemed, had proven workers could be productive from home. Work-from-home came into vogue. We’d never have to commute to the office again, some suggested.

But as pandemic-era restrictions eased in mid-2021, Steve Degnan, then chief human resources officer for Nestlé Purina PetCare, joined other senior leaders and prepared to bring its workforce back. All of them. In-person.

“It was not without controversy,” Degnan, EMBA 2008, recalled. “It was our belief that better work happens when people are together. But we did lose people.” Indeed, about 30% of Purina’s workforce declared its dissatisfaction with the return-to-work policy, which launched in 2022. The company, for years a leader in worker satisfaction ratings on jobseekers website Glassdoor, saw its scores plummet in the wake of the decision.

Beyond their basic belief that employees work better together, Purina leaders had also just gone through a process to combat “big company diseases” such as lumbering decision-making and single-stream work processes. They’d fostered greater agility in their work teams, empowered team members to make decisions, coached effective collaboration.

“That work was being blown up,” he said. Degnan, now retired, recalled how senior leadership knew it would have to spend some of its cultural capital to implement a decision that many rank-and-file employees would support—but that a small and vocal group would not, including a large share of Generation Z and Millennial team members.

Why did Purina buck what seemed to be a trend in its approach to the workplace? How did it manage the communication of that requirement? What were leaders willing to sacrifice to make that decision—and what were they not willing to sacrifice?

RELATED LINKS

• More about Steve Degnan
• More about Andrew Knight
• Bloomberg: “People Working in the Office Spend 25% More Time on Career Development” (paywall)
• A version of the same story that’s not behind a paywall
• Nestlé Purina PetCare
• McKinsey & Company: “Americans are embracing flexible work—and they want more of it”
• Business Insider: “Here's a list of major companies requiring employees to return to the office”
• Nina Leigh Krueger: Her On Principle episode, “Out of the Box”

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistance
• Austin Alred and Olin’s Center for Digital Education, sound engineering
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

In early March 2022, the skies over Irpin, Ukraine, sizzled with Russian missiles and thundered with mortar shells. Under those skies in the first days of Russia’s aggression, the lead software developer for a Chicago-based startup huddled in his parent’s basement when the air raid sirens sounded.

For a substantial investment of thousands of dollars, the leadership at that startup—Phenix Real Time Solutions—could hire an extraction team to relocate their Ukrainian-based developer and his parents to relative safety in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.

"It didn't take any convincing for our CEO or our founder,” said Kyle Bank, BSBA 2014, and the COO at Phenix. “It was, 'What's it going to take? How do we do it?' Same thing with our board of directors. Not one word of hesitation.”

It was a situation Bank never anticipated when he joined the video streaming company in 2016. Bank joined soon after Phenix found a Ukrainian software engineer through an outsourcing company and built an in-country development team around him.

That programmer's harrowing ordeal with his parents, who are in their 70s, started with a walk through a Russian checkpoint and across a makeshift bridge to replace the bombed-out span. They had to hurry to the Ukrainian-occupied part of Irpin, where they could catch a ride with volunteers to neighboring Kyiv. A day later, the extraction team—actually, a single driver employed by an organization that arranges such things—would collect the threesome and their belongings.

“The experience of getting out of Irpin to Kyiv was probably the most dangerous part of the story,” the programmer said as he described the ordeal, which included a 13-hour drive to Lviv through more checkpoints and around battle-damaged roads. Said Bank: "I was absolutely glued to the computer screen all day trying to find out if he'd made it. It was a nerve-wracking day."

The programmer was the focus of this particular episode. But it wasn’t the only thing Phenix did for its Ukraine-based team of developers in the early days following Russia’s aggression.

RELATED LINKS

• Website for Phenix Real-Time Solutions
• Kyle Bank on LinkedIn
• Story on WashU Olin’s website about Bank’s story about the programmer
• Vice News report from Irpin by Ben Solomon mentioning the Irpin Bridge
• More about Kurt Dirks
• "Leadership in Dangerous Situations," a book referenced by Dirks, to which he contributed

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistance
• Austin Alred and Olin’s Center for Digital Education, sound engineering
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Christine Chang recalls the moment in the back seat of a cab, heading across Manhattan to her next appointment. She and her cofounder, Sarah Lee, finally had to have a tough conversation about the future of their beauty business Glow Recipe.

The pair had originally built a successful business focused on curating Korean beauty products produced by other manufacturers. A business that had generated a significant customer following and an engaged fan base through savvy use of social media. A business that generated the majority of Glow Recipe's revenue, which was reported to be $1 million in their first year of business and growing triple digits year over year.

But the other 10% of their revenue was calling to them. That was the revenue that began to grow in 2017 after Glow Recipe started its own in-house brand of beauty products. And there Chang and Lee sat, in the back of a cab in early 2019.

“As a growing but small team, we were being pulled in multiple directions by having to manage a rapidly growing in-house brand and another business vertical together," Chang, BSBA 2004, recalled. “We talked seriously about whether this was sustainable. Five years from now, what will we wish we'd done? By the end of that cab ride, we had aligned.”

The curation business had to go. Glow Recipe would be all-in with its in-house brand of products. People would have to be let go. Inventory had to be shed. Their online community of fans and customers—invested in one version of Glow Recipe—would have to be invited along for a difficult transition.

Skincare brands are typically known to position their brands as either serious and clinically efficacious or whimsical and fun. Glow Recipe's mission was to combine both worlds into a line of products that delivered results but were also sensorial, joyful and approachable.

“It was a massive pivot to shut down the curated business,” Chang said. “As the brand grew, we realized we couldn't do both.” Two years later, the pivot paid off as Chang and Lee’s company continued an explosive growth trend.

RELATED LINKS

• The Glow Recipe website
• Elanor Williams’ page on the WashU Olin Business School site
• Christine Chang’s Instagram page
• Glow Recipe on Instagram
• CNBC reports on the Glow Recipe story
• A report by Katie Couric Media on Glow Recipe

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistance
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Special thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin’s Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Akeem Shannon was stressed. In three weeks, his Shark Tank episode would air, the episode where he’d pitch Flipstik—a novel cellphone attachment that doubles as a kickstand and a sticky wall mount.

He knew one thing with absolute certainty: Whether or not the “sharks” on the popular ABC-TV show offered him a deal, he was going to sell some Flipstiks. Probably a lot of them. And he didn’t have any. Or any money.

At the time, in mid-October 2020, Shannon’s startup was so young he sometimes sold only one Flipstik a day. One bright spot: He’d recently landed a commitment of $50,000 from Arch Grants, a St. Louis nonprofit that provides capital to startups willing to plant roots in the community.

With the Shark Tank air date weeks away, he contacted his manufacturer in China. “I need product. Lots of it. Right now,” he said. He mobilized his team to build a makeshift distribution warehouse. He upgraded his website’s software to handle the crush of transactions he expected. He maxed out his credit cards.

It wasn’t enough. Ultimately, he had to pick up the phone to Arch Grants, which was supposed to pay out its commitment in quarterly installments. “Is there any way I can get some cash up-front—right away?” Shannon pleaded. “I don’t have two weeks to wait.”

The cash arrived. The episode aired—with one more hitch. Ninety seconds into his segment, ABC broke in with news from the 2020 election. “I just cried when it happened,” Shannon said. But it didn’t matter. He’d set the hook. He reeled in Shark Tank fans, with orders totaling more than $100,000 in just a few days. When the episode repeated on January 1, 2021, sales spiked once again. 

Ultimately, Shannon got an offer from one of the sharks—a deal that later fell apart off-air. Yet for Shannon, the episode was a turning point. The last-minute race to prepare, the 11th-hour request for cash, maxed out cards—it had paid off.

RELATED LINKS

• The Flipstik website
• Akeem Shannon’s segment on Shark Tank (including his rap)
• Akeem on Instagram
• Michael Wall’s faculty page at WashU Olin Business School
• The St. Louis Business Journal on the Inc. rankings

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistance
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Special thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin’s Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

At the start of the day, Lisa Baron and her board of trustees gathered for the fifth strategic planning cycle in the 20-year history of Memory Care Home Solutions, the nonprofit Baron founded to serve families with Alzheimer’s patients. How would they expand? How would they diversify their revenue sources? How would they create sustainable long-term earnings?

But after dinner, at the end of the day, the planning facilitator put a question to Baron and her board, a question she wasn’t expecting at all. “You can grow incrementally,” the facilitator said, “or you can change the world. What do you want to do?”

The question sent a bolt of lightning through Baron and her board. It changed the focus of their strategic planning entirely. The game was no longer just about contract reimbursements, revenue streams and federal grants. It wasn’t only about seeking inclusion in employer assistance programs or third-party healthcare contracts.

It was about advocacy for families. It was about forming coalitions to influence policy around memory care issues. “It was huge,” Baron said. “It opened us up to the power of more people helping us achieve more than we could by ourselves.”

Within weeks, work had begun to expand the agency’s vision into the advocacy space, using the experience of hospice workers—who moved the palliative care practice from the fringes of healthcare into the mainstream—as an example.

What steps in its history brought Baron and Memory Care Home Solutions to this moment? How are they building the groundwork to “change the world”? And what can business leaders learn from Baron’s experience?

UPDATE SINCE THIS EPISODE

Lisa Baron announced her retirement from MCHS in December 2022 and officially stepped down May 31, 2023. According to Jill Cigliana, the organization’s new executive director, “Lisa continues to inspire and guide MCHS in her new role as founder and director emeritus. She remains involved in advocacy and policy work on behalf of people living with dementia and family care partners.”

Since the approval of the fifth strategic plan, Cigliana said the organization has focused on building out its dementia navigation service line based on the Care Ecosystem model of care developed at the University of California-San Francisco. “This work connects us with a national team of researchers and collaborators to advance best practices in dementia care and is aligned with our strategic goals. Additionally, we have been meeting with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services to inform a payment model for dementia care services.”

On July 31, MCHS was invited to Washington, DC, to attend the advisory council meeting of the National Alzheimer's Project Act. At that meeting, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a test program to roll out a dementia care model which will be covered through Medicare benefits. “This means that for the first time in this country, there will be a covered benefit for Medicare beneficiaries who are living with dementia, including education, training and paid respite for their family caregivers. MCHS will continue to be involved in the testing for this model of care.”

Said Lisa Baron, “It's thrilling that we are being included in the national conversation. This is exactly what we were aiming for.”

RELATED LINKS

• Memory Care Home Solutions website
• From Small Business Monthly: “Time With The Boss - Lisa Baron, Memory Care Home Solutions”
• Nick Argyres’ page on the WashU Olin website
• Lisa Baron testified in 2016 about Alzheimer’s services to the Special Senate Committee on Aging

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistance
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Special thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin’s Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

The voices in today's bonus episode may be familiar to On Principle listeners. They're voices from previous guests, sharing stories about some major “Oh, shoot!” moments they confronted in their businesses. They came together for a special "On Principle Live!" event at WashU Olin Business School on September 1, 2022, called "Now What?" The event was the first of our Leadership Perspectives events for the academic year.

Featured Guests

• Alaina Macía. An Olin MBA alum and president and CEO of MTM, a nationwide non-emergency medical transportation service provider.
• Angel Likens, third-generation president of Bogey Hills Country Club, a St. Charles, Missouri, institution since 1962.
• Jason Wilson, an Olin Executive MBA alum, coffee entrepreneur and owner of Northwest Coffee Roasting Company.
• Gerard Craft, St. Louis chef and restaurateur and owner of Niche Food Group, with eight restaurants in St. Louis and one in Nashville.

Credits

This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Lesley Liesman and Judy Milanovits, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistance
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Special thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin’s Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

When this month's guest and I originally talked, she remembered the toilet paper woes in the early days of the pandemic as a turning point for consumers, a time when supply chains entered the common lexicon. We decided to take a deeper dive into the topic by going further into that original interview from May 2022.

Credits

This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School. Contributors include:

• Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Lesley Liesman and Judy Milanovits, creative assistance
• Jill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistance
• Hayden Molinarolo, original music and sound design
• Mike Martin Media, editing
• Sophia Passantino, social media
• Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
• Mark P. Taylor, strategic support
• Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Special thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin’s Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.