The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests Benno Duenkelsbuehler

Post-acquisition integration is where most M&A acquisitions succeed or fail. Steve Nunn is CEO of Intista, a company that helps to integrate acquired small-to-midsize companies (“air traffic control for integrations”). As a follow up to Ep #18 with Steve, in this episode we’re having a chat about his journey of bottling his secret sauce - by building a subscription online training model that “turns employees into integration managers” and a Mastermind Group for graduates.
 
2:53 - “We develop a five-step process…it’s just simplifying a way to integrate businesses… these five steps are equal in importance but differ greatly in length and work effort.”
 
3:56 - “Small-to-midsize businesses fly at a different altitude (compared to) billion dollar companies, where the integration process will be much more detailed, more arduous.”
 
4:34 - “I use this image of ships going through the water and the size of the business is the size of the ship… the smaller you get in business, the more reactive and more affected they are by the turbulence of the change that goes on…but they’re more agile.”
 
6:40 - “With teaching what I’m doing I’m actually getting employees to learn my business… I’m actually putting myself out of work.”
 
7:54 - “We turn your employees into integration managers.”
 
11:25 - “It was very hard, creating a simple process… if it was simple to write a simple process, somebody would have done it before.”
 
15:40 - “I took anyone’s advice. Sometimes that wasn’t all that useful. In hindsight, I would have tried to validate the advice… be careful who you listen to.”
 
16:27 - “I made so many mistakes…but did make it in the end… this ‘keep going’, ‘I made so many mistakes’ has really stuck with me on this journey.”
 
17:22 - “You cannot grow unless you’re willing to make mistakes, able to make mistakes and keep going, fix them… and don’t make the same mistake twice.”
 
22:22 - “In consulting you become worried about giving away the secret sauce…but I see it as an opportunity to build trust… the more you give away, the more you can do together.”

If you’d like to speak with Steve one on one, you can email him at Steve@Intista.com

Preet Brar, global brand leader in consumer goods and guest on this episode, understands markets and teams. I asked her about changes in the external markets, and how to lead teams internally to bring ideas to reality.
 
External - new ideas in the market:
3:52 - “There was a lot of cross-category buying… people that were in one category historically, started to experiment with other categories.”
 
4:50 - “People who were just using brick and mortar retail (now are) trying online…. Wholesalers are trying to go direct to consumers.”
 
5:46 - “Sustainability, eco-friendly product… nobody took it seriously. But now… it’s not a nice-to-have, but it’s a need-to-have thing for brands now… the consumer is ready to make the change.”
 
10:50 - about the share economy and re-use, re-furbish, and renting: “Home Decor has an opportunity to do something similar. The consumer is ready… it’s about somebody coming up with a platform…with ease for them to start using it.”
 
15:12 - “Shopping online is going to get easier and easier, the technology continues to improve. And I think it’s going to be (online vs. brick and mortar shipping) close to 40/60 or 50/50 by the end of this decade.”
 
Internal - leading teams to bring ideas to reality:
18:05 - “Everybody on your team needs to know what success looks like, and where they’re contributing… it’s taking that vision, creating it bite size, sharing it with your team: This is who we are…what we want to do…that creates an environment of belonging and understanding. And then it builds trust.”
 
21:05 - “Sometimes you overestimate what you can do in a day, but underestimate what you can do in a year.”
 
21:48 - “If you’re indispensable, you’re not a leader - how do you make yourself dispensable?” - “Being dispensable is freedom.”
 
23:30 - “Mentorship goes both ways. We have to coach and be coachable.”
 
25:03 - “It’s much more important today to have energy flowing between departments, within departments, between the more senior folks and the more junior folks… creating an environment where energy is flowing, whether you’re sitting next to each other or 5,000 miles apart, just talking on a Zoom call.”
 
26:12 - “As a leader, you want to help people identify their strengths, and kind of see it for themselves, what they’re good at, and build on that.”
 
26:50 - “I wish I had known decades earlier that I have to embrace my superpowers, and I have to help others embrace their superpowers.”

My guest is John Lanman, a consumer products CEO/General Manager who cut his teeth in Marketing roles with well-known names like Thermos, Blyth Candle/Fragrances, and progressed to GM or CEO of Oriental Trading Co and Precious Moments. John and I both served as Board Members, and here John shares his thoughts on the importance of balancing growth initiatives within the context of resource constraints.
 
3:03 – The “forest versus the trees. As a CEO of a midsized business, you have to manage the forest. You cannot just get excited about your two or three favorite big, beautiful trees because that doesn't make the forest.”
 
5:03 – “To fuel a midsized business, to get it to the next level or the next inflection point – it's really never just one thing. It's a lot of little things you got to sort of line up… it is a multitude of non-sexy, smaller things…that in aggregate add up to significant overall growth for a company”
 
11:18 – “I've been amazed just listening a lot as a new leader. Most of the ideas for success within a company are within the walls of the company. It's just a matter of creating an environment amongst people that allows those ideas and thoughts to rise to the surface and sometimes you have to tease them out.”
 
12:27 – that’s “how you captured the hearts and minds of the people that you are listening to, because now you’re using their ideas.”
 
17:37 – “the reality is that execution is what carries the day… “
 
18:32 – Thomas Edison quote “Vision without Execution is Hallucination.”
 
20:18 – “The most difficult thing (in) smaller P&L businesses… (is the) resource constraint. For example, they were behind in digital commerce, e commerce and they were way too legacy in traditional wholesale bricks and mortar selling, and they were very good at that. But as that world shrinks… we've had to move and evolve an organization and that involves people and skill sets and moving people around retraining, finding new people for very specific roles that didn't exist in the company before and I'd say that's probably the most difficult is getting the people and skill sets aligned with the challenges facing a business.”
 
24:27 – “Half the battle is getting your employees to trust you that you're a credible leader, and that only comes through talking to them, constantly listening to them.”
 
29:34 – “The rate at which change is occurring, the speed of change is increasing every year, every month… I think the next five or 10 years are going to be more exciting and more in need of seasoned leadership than the last five or 10 years.”
 

This episode evolved from a conversation I had with Tara Dikos, EVP at Transpac, in which she used the phrase “chasing leaders” - here, we talk about what that means, how to spot talent, learn from talent, and also to recruit and develop talent, especially in the world of consumer businesses that develop and sell products from factories to retailers. 
 
6:48 - “I find retail fascinating…it’s so complex… because you have to understand product, you have to understand people, you have to understand employees and customers, and there is so much psychology that is part of merchandising and retailing.”
 
8:27 - “I’m curious if you remember how or when you decided or came across this concept of ‘chasing leaders’? - Yeah, well, I still chase leaders. I have a list of people that I want to continue to have intentional conversations with.”
 
9:20 - “We were raised that we were no better than - or less than for that matter - than anybody else. We can lead, we can follow, or we can (in Tara’s dad’s words) get the hell out of the way…and all three choices are good choices at certain times. You have to know when to choose which.”
 
10:24 - “My goals had to shift from short-term financial goals to long-term career goals. And in order to do that I had to chase leaders and not just a paycheck. I wanted to connect with the brightest minds in our industry.”
 
11:19 - “I’m incredibly proud of walking into the room alongside the smartest people.”
 
12:10 - “A theme you carried throughout a lot of your podcasts is genuine curiosity and passion.”
 
13:51 - “We hire people and are looking at it based on their attitude and willingness to learn…(not) necessarily the mantras or phrases, it’s their behavior.”
 
16:05 - “Because that’s how he (Gary Friedman) carried himself, he made more of his life than he would have without that attitude.”
 
20:01 - “Have regular meetings with your current staff…shake things up…if you got good people and they’re not in the right role, change the role. - We call them ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ meetings.”
 
21:27 - “Get involved in industry associations. You and Michael (Nieves) talk about the Gift and Home Trade Association. I can’t recommend GHTA enough…both for leaders and aspiring leaders… it’s an incredible environment, to network and to engage, be present and mindful, meeting people that are expressing a desire to learn and grow.”
 
24:53 - “A lot of people that we hire are underdogs. I say that I myself was probably an underdog when I started here.”
 
25:22 - “If you move people around…don’t only look at the results they create and the skills they have, but look inside the people, at their dreams and desires.”
 
27:03 - “I would tell my younger self that it is okay to have boundaries…it’s okay to slow down sometimes.”

Growth does not happen in a vacuum, we grow with others and do so in a thousand different ways. In this episode, Patrick Keiser, Executive Director of Heart on Main Street - a non-profit organization and community of retailers, for retailers to learn and grow their business - shares how he spearheaded building this particular community. The ‘why’ behind this community is something he feels particularly passionate about, and in the spirit of Ben Franklin there is even a bit of “doing well by doing good”, as Heart on Main Street helps his employer’s customers. 
 
2:08 - “Main Street businesses are an incredibly important part of our communities, of our local economies…they employ local people…they buy from local artisans…they are the back bones of our communities.”
 
3:06 - “There are so many challenges that Main Street businesses face and…the internet era has not been kind to Mom and Pop (stores).”
 
4:24 - “There was this really big support of the Shop Local movement…if there is evidence of a movement, there’s existence of a need.” (Some 100,000 of now only 300,000 local stores closed their doors in the last 20 years)
 
7:15 - “I wanted to see… what do retailers need if we could bring a community of people (together)... invested in the success of Main Street. What can we do?”
 
8:19 - “So you went to ask the everyday experts, the people that actually know, right?”
 
11:51 - “That was the impetus of Heart on Main Street. How do we…help them make a more meaningful impact…and help those retailers really grow their business?”
 
12:15 – 17:15 Patrick explains the four pillars of Heart on Main Street: 17:16 - “Came up with four pillars that would help them: Grants, Education, Mentorship Programs, and Friends of Main Street.”
 
22:32 - “A little bit of anxiety is a sign of intelligence.”
 
Learn more by reaching out to Patrick directly: Patrick.Keiser@HeartonMainStreet.org

My guest on this episode is Tom Ungrodt, a Gift & Home Industry Community Builder and sometime (re)ALIGN Sherpa. If you’re interested in growing by joining or intentionally building industry groups, this episode is for you. Tom shares his experience as a former Vistage Chair and current Community Builder of the Mission Possible group, what it takes, why industry executives want to get together 3-5 times a year to share best practices and to move the industry forward. 
 
2:23 - “The purpose of this was…(to) address serious situations, good or bad in our industry.”
 
4:21 - “The mission is to unite gift and home leaders, (it) makes for better decisions, creates a much wider perspective and builds a strong, trusted network.”
 
5:23 - “I introduce the subject, a lot of them come from the group, I moderate and facilitate the conversation and steer it in a direction that again, would be useful for the people in the room.”
 
6:34 - “We talk about ways that you could retain your employees… talk about some of their programs and…how they go about keeping these employees.”
 
8:17 - “You have people knocking on your door wanting to join, you have CEO’s, owners, executives…that don’t want to leave and they keep showing up.”
 
9:07 - “Every business large or small, certainly needs to have some sort of value statement, mission statement… it was fun to sit down and discuss this, bouncing ideas around...it’s just a matter of putting it on paper and I never did that before.”
 
10:05 - “You can’t read the label on the wine bottle if you’re sitting inside the bottle.”
 
10:53 - “You have one good meeting, the next meeting has to be better than that one.”
 
13:05 - “It takes probably 2, 3, 4 meetings, for someone to really become comfortable with sharing… and if they don’t share, I pick on them, I pull them out of the crowd… no one’s there to collect dust…you’re all going to participate.”
 
14:29 - “How have you built trust? Being very honest… trust isn’t something that you just turn on a light bulb and it’s there. It’s taken many years to get that together.”