GA 050 | Six Years Later: Our Journey

You're listening to episode 50 with the Gemba Academy team.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

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It was a Sunday Night in 2008. I'll never forget. I just finished evening prayers with my baby girl and began tucking her into bed. She was around 5 years old. Before I gave her a goodnight kiss, I told her that Daddy had to go on another business trip. Now, at that time, I was working as a director of manufacturing and continuous improvement, and my job called for a lot of travel, which was really taking a toll on my family. So after I gave her the kiss and explained that I wouldn't see her again until the following weekend, she said a few words that have been indelibly burned into my heart. She told me, with tears welling in her eyes, that she hated when I had to go on trips and wished I didn't have to go. Now, I'll be honest, those words crushed me. And while I did have to go on that business trip, I finally realized there had to be another way. But I also knew I loved teach people about continuous improvement. So what we're going to explore throughout this episode is how I and my business partners did in fact find another way. And that way was Gemba Academy. Now, this is one of my business partners and co founders of Gemba Academy, Kevin Meyer. Now, Kevin wears many hats at Gemba Academy, and we joke that he's our VP of HR finance and it all at the same time. Kevin and I sat down in Palm Springs to chat about how we started the company.

Yeah, actually, I remember sitting in my office, I was president of a medical device company at the time, and I got the call from you or John and we had a little discussion on this idea you guys had of delivering video training. I think the reason you guys called me is we'd known each other through the blogging world and all up until then, and I'd been doing some other stuff of selling PowerPoint presentations and that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And this was just seemed like a natural extension of a way to give back and help train people. So of course I was very interested.

Now, if I'm being honest, I had no idea what to expect. When we first launched Gemma Academy back in 2009, I naturally hoped it would succeed. But I really had no idea. Now Kevin, on the other hand, seemed to have been a bit more confident.

I thought it would be close to where it is now, quite honestly, but in a different way. When we started this, we thought, or at least in my mind it was the target market was probably the smaller manufacturers that would have a hard time accessing high level training. We thought large companies would have training departments and all this kind of thing, or they could go to conferences. It's been really interesting watching how the need has evolved and how large companies need to speak the same continuous improvement language across multiple facilities. And what better way of doing that than video. Lean is obviously far more than just manufacturing. And so, you know, the fastest growing part of our customer base are, you know, hospitals, defense and all these other areas, service areas.

Now, as our company began to grow, it became obvious that we needed help. Now, we've always been an extremely conservative company when it comes to our finances. So adding employees wasn't and has never been taken lightly. And as it turns out, I'm usually the nervous one when it comes to these sorts of things. While Kevin has always been steady and comfortable during these decision making situations.

We are a very conservative. We have never taken on debt, we have always kept a healthy bank balance and we do that purposely because we want to take care of our families and now the families of our employees and make it a very secure place to work. So we may have been able to grow faster had we thrown a lot of money at things, but that wasn't really the point. The point was to create something solid here with high quality products. So I remember those times when we brought on our first employee and you were, I guess technically the first employee. But then bringing on someone outside of the two of us, then it takes on even more meaning because we need to, we need to be in a position to take care of that person and provide a long term stable income. We're not going to be one of these companies that hires and then has a dip and lays off. That's not who we are.

Right.

But you know, I watch the numbers. You know, I'm a little bit of an Excel junkie. And I'll know, I've got graphs and models and you know, and each month I see where it came in, I see that it confirmed it or it needs to be tweaked. And so based on that, yeah, I do have a lot of confidence. And we've seen that when we hire the right people, they contribute and contribute in ways that we don't expect. But it always adds value to our customers and then that helps us grow.

Earlier in the show I shared why Gemba Academy is so important to me. Namely, it allows me to continue to help others learn about continuous improvement without having to be on an airplane three weeks out of every month. Of course, there is extreme irony in the fact that he recorded this episode's interviews from a team meeting in Palm Springs, California, which I had to travel to. But suffice to say, I'm not the road warrior I used to be. Unfortunately, our third partner, John Miller, wasn't able to make this trip, but I was able to ask Kevin to share why Gemba Academy is so important to him.

My why basically revolves around giving back. You know, I discovered lean back around 1997 or so when I'd been promoted to run a factory, a molding operation and I needed a lot of help and I discovered Ame. Ame taught me a lot about quick changeover and some other methods and I was like, you know, this is pretty cool.

Yeah.

And it helped me be very successful in that job and be very successful in future jobs. And I just feel a strong need to help others be successful because that has helped me. So I've always wanted to find ways of doing doing that. It started off with selling PowerPoints and all, but this is now here was an opportunity for real high quality knowledge developed by guys that knew this stuff backwards and forwards far better than I did. So what an opportunity.

Now a few years into this journey, it became obvious that we needed some administrative help. So we began to look for someone. Now I actually posted a short note to my personal Facebook page and Elaine Crescione, who I had known for years through church related activities, replied that she was looking to get back into the workforce. And after some discussions, Elaine came on board in the summer of 2011, before

I started working for Gemba Academy part time and then full time, I was a full time mom for many years. So I was out of the workforce for quite a while. Even though I was volunteering in a lot of different capacities at my kids schools and different community agencies, I wasn't working for a living. And so I felt like my skills were a little bit rusty when I first started with Gemba Academy. So as you gave me more and more responsibility, it felt good to know that yes, I'm still a competent adult with a brain that didn't go to waste while I was raising my children all those years.

Now, while she'd never admit it, Elaine is excellent at her job. In fact, I've lost count of how many thank you emails and cards we've received about Elaine. To say she has a fan club would be the understatement of this episode. But with this said, Elaine's success hasn't always come easily. In fact, when she first started to speak with customers, things weren't always rosy.

I did not like that at first. I didn't think I would be doing anything that was related to sales. So it was scary. The first couple of times I had to talk to customers who were, you know, they had questions about our products and, you know, they were thinking about purchasing. So that was a little scary. But after a few of those, you get, your confidence builds up and you learn to talk to people about Lean.

Now, aside from the founders of Gemba Academy, Elaine has been with us longer than anyone, which, for better or worse, has afforded her the opportunity to experience our growing. In fact, and this is a true story, back when it was Elaine and myself dealing with customers, our CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management, basically consisted of our email inboxes. And then when we felt we got advanced, included scheduling calls in our Google calendar. So needless to say, things could get interesting from time to time.

It was a bit unwieldy.

Yeah.

And there was a lot of room for error.

Yeah.

And there were some errors made.

But in a true spirit of continuous improvement, then we found our first CRM, which served us well for many years. So talk about that. What was that transition like when we moved from our inboxes and got calendars to the CRM?

It was heavenly. It was amazing just knowing that there were tools out there to help us basically to help us serve our customers better. And it helped us stay organized and not feeling like we're missing something here or forgetting something there. It really was, it was a big relief to me when we transitioned into that.

Now, as Kevin mentioned earlier, the partners of Gembe Academy take great pride in helping our team members grow. As such, since we do our best to practice what we preach, we work hard at not giving answers to questions. Instead, we try to always encourage our team to do what they think is best. Here's Elaine's take on this approach.

Well, in previous jobs, I had always had very well defined job descriptions. This is what I was permitted to do in my job and this is what I was not permitted to do. And if you wanted to deviate from the script, you had to get approval. So when I came to work for you all and I would have a customer come to me with a different situation that Maybe required a different situation solution. I would come to you often and say, what should I do? What should I do? The customer wants to do this. And. And you would always say, well, what do you think? Do you have some ideas?

And how did you feel?

I didn't like it at first because I wasn't used to having that type of autonomy in my job. And when you're not used to that, there's a lot of fear because you think, well, what if the soul solution that I come up with, my boss disagrees with and then he gets mad at me and say, why did you do that? You shouldn't have done that. That was a bad idea.

Right, Right.

But you never did that if you thought it was a bad idea, maybe you might have offered an alternative or something and said, maybe next time we should do something more like this. But I never got in trouble.

Now, with Elaine on board, I was able to dedicate even more more of my time towards my primary core competency, content development. And while I am proud of the original content we were able to produce, early in our journey, we realized we needed help in this area as well. And that's where Greg Nicol comes in. Now, Greg joined our team as our primary videographer and editor in November of 2013 and was immediately tasked with one heck of a project.

When I was able to come aboard, one of the first projects we had was to build out our first studio, which I thought, wow, now how great is that for a first project, you know, really? But again, you know, with some collaboration and thinking about what do we need? We needed some office space. We needed. We obviously needed the studio space. It had to be acoustically, right, Obviously. We had to have the right space to put our equipment in there and to build a set and that type of thing. Yeah, that was so cool to be able to put all that stuff together. But, you know, when you close the door and inside our studio, it is rock solid, quiet, and, you know, I just know that we can shoot anything and I don't have to worry about stuff.

Now, one of the best parts of our work is how we're able to meet people from different industries and from all over the world. This is Leslie Moles, who joined our sales team shortly after Greg did.

I have people calling me from all over, so I like to Google where they're from. The other day I had someone call me, and he was. He lived near, I believe, like the Dead Sea. So I got to learn a little bit about that. I was like, oh, wow, you get to see you know, the beautiful, you know, beautiful view every day. And he's like, yeah, it's great, you know, and he enjoyed where he worked and. Yeah, so just getting to know people is kind of fun.

So with Elaine and Leslie both on board, our sales and customer service processes were running much more efficiently. We were constantly making improvements, but as with anything, we knew we could do better. Unfortunately, Kevin and myself were pretty much tapped out. So we began to search for a sales and marketing professional that could help lead this critical aspect of our business. Well, this led us to Steve Cain, who Kevin had worked with at his previous job. And while Steve did have a sales background, that wasn't what we found most appealing.

Where I saw my real fit in Gemba Academy was that we're trying to sell to the positions that I recently held. We're trying to sell to operations people. And that was my connection. I knew how this stuff was used and I knew the value of it. So I really relied on that or saw that as more of a value than being, say, a salesperson.

Now, something many people don't know is that Steve left an established position as a vice president at a strong, lean thinking company in order to join Gemba Academy, who when he was hired had less than 10 employees. This obviously took a lot of courage on Steve's part. So I asked him why he was so passionate about Gemba Academy.

Well, the first is just, just absolute belief in the product, what it is. This company represents, what we're trying to share with other companies. And it's not about, hey, buy our product. It's about this is the value of life Lean. And it's so significant, so important. It's not that it's just going to make you more profitable or it's going to make your business run better. We're talking about improving people's lives and at all levels. For those who are focused on the profit, those profits will come and enjoy that success. For the people on a production floor or in a service business, you know, making your job easier, making yourself more successful, understanding the value that you bring not only to your company, but to your customers and feeling significant because of that, I think that what that does for people, the contribution it makes to their lives, their families lives, I mean, it's just so powerful.

So far we've talked about our content development, sales and customer service enhancements which have been great. Unfortunately, these have been improvements didn't do much to help Kevin, who was still running the financial and it related aspects of our business all by himself. Well, that change when we brought Holly Seifert on board to lead and improve pretty much all aspects of our back office processes. And as it turns out, Holly worked for Kevin in a past life. So I asked her what it was like working for Kevin. Once again.

Kevin's been. He stayed pretty true to his beliefs. I mean, respect for people, he always had that at ssf. He's really in tune to, you know, what people are going through day to day. He's interested in making their lives better.

I then asked Holly what she liked best about working at Gemba Academy.

The energy, the flexibility. I'm not saying it's just because you're sitting in front of me, but just great people to work with. When you go to a place you're new, you know, there's a lot of different personalities that you have to learn and learn what works best to work with people. And it's been. It was really easy, actually. Coming to Gemba was really nice.

Now, our approach to marketing has been to always try to add value by doing things like writing blog articles or providing podcasts like this, or offering free, free webinars. Our hope is that people will benefit from this material and want to learn more about our company. Well, that's why bringing Jessica Bush on board as a marketing specialist back in January of 2014 was such a great move, since she's really helped to bring more consistency and stability to all aspects of our marketing processes.

Well, I think just having a weekly schedule of content has been really instrumental because. Because then you know that you're getting a balance of value added content that might include news articles and things that aren't necessarily directly related to sales. But we're also reaching out to our audience and letting them know when we have promotions and sort of the resources we have available to them.

Yeah. Something that you've done that I really like is that you've really focused on making sure that everything that we do, we try to add some value. Right. I mean, there may be a little sales blurb in there, but here's three podcasts you can listen to as well that are free or whatever. Right. So I think that's been really good.

Yeah.

I think it reflects the fact that we are genuinely invested in our both potential and current customers. And it's also really interesting and fun for me personally to get to engage with them in a more casual setting. I don't have to worry about making a hard sailor, anything like that. I just get to hear their stories and answer their questions, and that's really fun.

Now, as with Any company. Our ability to problem solve has been critical to our success. In other words, we get to practice what we preach by identifying root causes and applying countermeasures. Now, we also work hard to empower our team members to have the courage to face problems on their own whenever possible, since we believe that's the fastest way to personal growth. Now, this is Britt Aquilla, who joined our team earlier this year as an administrative assistant, talking about this very topic.

And I've grown in making decisions on my own. Not having to ask all the layers.

Yeah.

But just figuring it out. You know, you may not have all the pieces, but you got to figure it out, and that's the way it works.

Now, the newest addition to Gemba Academy's team is Luis Frigo, who is taking over all aspects of our IT management. Now, Luis comes to our team with an incredible background and is already improving our business. Unfortunately, Luis wasn't able to make the trip to Palm Springs, so we'll have to catch up with him on another podcast. But we were able to sit down with Jennifer Scott, who had been with Gemba Academy for one and a half weeks, when we sat down to talk about her new role as our business development manager, primarily focusing on multiscie and enterprise solutions.

I think the really exciting thing for me is because you're a tight group, I have the ability to bring in experience from another organization and talk about, you know, maybe some ideas. And I like the fact that, you know, you leaders really listen to that. You want to know how to make things better. And I can say, you know, this is what I've done in my past and it's worked and, you know, if it works, great. If it doesn't, you know, no harm. But I really want to help build these processes and make Gemba more efficient with how we, you know, enable and take care of our customers. That's what I really want to do. Working with enterprise and global customers, that's great, and that's what I'm here to do. But streamlining and making those processes more efficient so we can be a better and a tighter team, I think that's. I'm looking forward to doing that. Being a voice, having a voice.

As you've heard, my business partner, Kevin is extremely business savvy, which has. Has been a true blessing for me since this is my first company. So having someone like Kevin looking out for the company's best interest is so very valuable. Well, Kevin is also able to see trends before they happen. And while no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy. I was curious to hear from Kevin on what he thought we'd be talking about in five years as it relates to Gemba Academy.

I think it'll be very similar to now. I think, I think we're on a nice, you know, it's rapid growth, but it's sustainable, it's manageable and we're bringing on the right people. And I think what drives the path we take is what we hear from our customers. You know, there's obviously some things that we want to put out there that are a little bit different, like the culture of Kaizen, our focus on respect for people that we feel is missing in training. But so much of it is driven by what we hear from our customers. And I think that's going to take us some interesting areas. We're also going to be looking at some interesting technologies. And we're actually already doing this because there's various ways you can learn and online learning is one, obviously reading books, going to conferences, but they all have downsides. Conferences are a one or two day event attended by just, you know, almost the same people in an organization each year. You know, how do you create that? So how do you create an experiential learning model that combines all of that? And there are some very interesting technologies being developed that I think we're going to be investing in and actually are investing in to combine some of that.

Like most companies, we're far from perfect. But if I can boast a little, the thing I'm most proud of is the culture we're building here at Gemba Academy. Yes, we're still a small team, relatively speaking, and time will tell how well we maintain our core values as we continue to grow. But nothing, and I do mean nothing, is more important than our customers and team members. We truly believe in a concept of respect for all of humanity. Here's Greg again to expand on this.

I'm a big culture guy. I mean, I don't talk about it and we don't go through this kind of stuff and we don't, you know, culture is one of those things. You either. That's what a company has. Yeah, you can kind of change it. You can try to make it and all that kind of stuff. But this is something you guys originally had. I just was able to climb on board and it's comfortable. That's the number one thing I can say about our culture, is that it is so comfortable. If you've got a suggestion, and I don't care what role you play, if you have a suggestion, everybody listens to it. We talk every day, and we're not even in the same place. We're all over the U.S. probably soon we'll have people all over the world, but we talk every day. And if not every day, at least a couple times a week. But generally we try to talk every day so we all know what each other's doing. And I just always feel like I have a voice. And it doesn't even have to be in the content development piece. It can be in anything. And I know that people are going to listen to me now whether I've got a good suggestion or not. You know, that's, that's neither here nor there, but at least I know that if I've got a comment about something, I want to be heard.

And last but certainly not least, we'll let Elaine close things out with how she feels about her colleagues.

And I just love the team we've built here. We have some amazing people on our team. It's a fun group. It's a group that really works well together. I really feel so blessed to have this job and work at Gemba Academy. It's a great team.

Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free, no strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma. Over at Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos free of charge at Gembaacademy. Com.