215 - The Most Valuable Lessons in Leadership and Team Dynamics with Church Hill Classics' Lucie Voves

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Lucy Vobis, welcome to Listening with Leaders.

You are the CEO and founder of a company called Church Hill Classics, which should not describe your business whatsoever. The business you're in is making diploma frames and your website URL makes sense cuz it says diplomaframes.com. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. It's great to be here.

I know I interviewed you on Authority Magazine. I was totally taken by your story. Maybe if you just take a second for my audience who probably has not read your interview, and I invite everybody to go to Medium and check it out. Tell us how, when you left Dartmouth, we're both Dartmouth graduates, when you left Dartmouth, Uh, what happened?

I started out my career in brand management working for Procter Gamble and learned a lot, uh, had a great experience, but I had always been an entrepreneur. I started a couple of businesses at Dartmouth. I was washing cars and hustling in high school, and I just got restless. I wanted to start my own thing. So I started a moonlighting business. Actually based on a personal need. I wanted a picture of the main building, Dartmouth Hall at Dartmouth, and I couldn't find one. And I thought, I can't be the only alumni who wants this. So I found an artist, commissioned him to do a painting, did a series of limited edition prints, and his wife actually taught me how to frame. And I showed up on the corner at graduation at Dartmouth and peddled my framed artwork. And that's how I started this business.

Wow.

I bet you sold out fast.

I did sell out fast. It was really interesting.

So how did you get the— you just quit the corporate and just start going into the framing business?

I was a little bit afraid. So it was a side gig until I felt that I'd gotten to the point where I knew what the model was. And actually, even though I started out doing framed artwork, I ultimately transitioned into doing diploma frames. And once I started that, that was when I was like, this is a big idea. People keep graduating every year. It's a huge lifetime moment. This is really unique. And the way I made that transition was actually by talking to and listening to the customers that I had. A lot of people, they love the artwork we had and said, 'Can you just frame my diploma to match the artwork?' And oh, by the way, the Dartmouth diploma is written in Latin. So can you put something on there so people can read Dartmouth College and know where we went to school? That's how it got started in the very beginning.

Wow.

Yeah, I know. I've got my degree.

Where is it?

There it is. Right there in the center of the room.

Good.

You worked out of your home for a long time.

I did. 7 years home-based. Which the blessing of that was I kept my overhead low. It was lean and mean. I gradually expanded to other universities. I started out just going to schools like Ivy Leagues that had a Latin diploma. And then I finally realized that it didn't have to be in Latin, but I didn't really know where to go. Honestly, I started the business in 1991 to access the funding that I needed. And so it was bootstrapped and I would, I knew I, it took me a couple years to really get profitable on a school. So I was thoughtful about how I expanded. And the great part of that is I own the business 100% today.

That's pretty cool.

And, and since you started in '91, let's see, you went through the dot-com crash, you went through the financial collapse of 2008, through the crazy 2010s, then the pandemic. Now I understand the pandemic was pretty good to you.

It was, and it wasn't what we expected. When March came, people started getting sick. We started hearing campuses were closing, bookstores were closing, and I sat with my leadership team and we were like, oh my God, like we're in huge trouble. And then we sat back and slowed down and thought about it. All these kids that were seniors about to graduate, they missed senior spring. They lost the whole official ceremony of graduation and all the pomp and circumstance, and the families didn't get to share that with them. And we thought, you know what, people are still going to want to frame their diploma. And it turned out more than ever people wanted to frame their diploma. I think it became a little bit of a consolation prize for we can't go to graduation, but the business took off and we put a lot of effort on managing supply chain, rented the building next door, did all those entrepreneurial things to make sure that we could scale and we could meet that demand and added a night shift to spread people out. And it really, for me, I learned the biggest growth opportunities often happen at the most challenging times. And if you can be creative and find solutions, it takes you a long way.

How did you learn the skills necessary to become a successful CEO?

We make frames for the School of Hard Knocks, actually, as a little bit of a joke. I learned a lot that way. My 7 years that I spent at Procter Gamble was a great training ground, and I had exposure to a lot of really smart people, and that helped me, but I think it's just been common sense and learning and surrounding myself with the best people that I can and recognizing what I'm good at and what other people are way better at and building that team of leaders that have really helped me take the company to a level that I never could have by myself.

So you're working out of your house for 7 years and you're, you're How do you make the decision to leave the house and actually get a facility?

And that was a very interesting one. I went to a trade show at Niagara Falls and I ended up with a booth next door to a guy that was selling a lot of collegiate merchandise that he'd repped to a lot of different colleges and universities. And he loved my product and was really interested in testing it, introduced me to his company. Initially they told me no, they didn't think there was any market in the collegiate world for selling diploma frames. That one rep said, look, I'll take you on the side. Let's see what we can do. And then his brother took me and we did really well. And when I had the opportunity, was able to demonstrate that we could expand, I really was at a point, I was pregnant then with my third child where it was like, okay, this is either going to be a hobby. Or this is going to be a really real business and I had to get out of my basement. So I just, I loved what I was doing and I decided that I was signing a lease and had my daughter and she came a couple days early. So I had to swing by the office and sign payroll checks on the way home. Uh, so she was at my office before she was at the house, but it all worked out. I think if I hadn't been so passionate, it would have been harder, but I love what I do. Wow.

So you've been at it now, you know, '91, 30 years plus.

Right.

33 years, I think. What is it that gets you out of bed and gets you excited to go to work every day?

I love the people I work with. I love manufacturing, making products in the United States, providing great jobs to people. I have fun with the people that I work with, and it's always challenging and it's always changing. I think that's one of the things you mentioned, a lot of the difficult times that we've been through, but A business has to reinvent itself. And I think with technology, you're reinventing and hitting walls more often than ever. It's never, it's always been changing for me. And there have been new challenges that have come along. So it's been an exciting ride.

You would think that the, the Pluma frame is a pretty back to basics, conservative, non-changing product. Guess not, huh?

It's not, maybe not so much the product, the economic times. When I started the business, all I was doing was wholesaling, direct to consumers. And when the Great Recession, '08, '09 came along, we had some of our bookstore partners that didn't have Open to Buy and they couldn't bring in product. And then if they couldn't bring it in, it wasn't on the website. And if I didn't sell it and they didn't sell it, nobody could buy it. And we also had a lot of interest in people being able to really customize the frame they want the way they wanted it for their house, or they wanted special marks for graduate schools. We used that opportunity and all the challenges we were up against to create an e-commerce presence for ourselves. And did it in a way that provided support to our partners. We had to change our packaging to make it more versatile, to walk out of the store or be shipped out without being reboxed. And that was really the point at which there was a huge transition in the business. And today we're much closer to 50% direct-to-consumer and 50% wholesale, and that served me well. In the beginning of COVID the wholesale business vaporized, but I had the retail business, and then we had the retail business, and we were able to go back to bookstores and say, look, people want this. You can sell this through your website, and that generated a big spike in our wholesale business.

So today you got your direct-to-consumer website business. Ecommerce, and then you also sell to other website people who will, as a wholesaler, they'll let out product, they'll, they'll feature the product on their websites.

We do have some of those. Our predominant partners are college bookstores on campuses.

Oh, okay.

The familiar place that you went all 4 years and it's where everybody gets together at graduation.

So you've been on this 30, 30+3-year journey. What do you think is unique about yourself Lucy, that you bring to the table that's made all of this so successful?

Uh, I think I'm really resilient, um, and I'm creative. I think I can see things in new ways. I— the biggest thing is that I'm passionate and I love what I do and I love the people that I'm working with and what we're building together. So it's really energizing. Some days I come home and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm wiped out, And then somehow I wake up the next morning and it's okay, clean slate. I'm good to go.

How do you think your Dartmouth education prepared you for doing this work?

I think it helped me with being clear thinking, articulate, and just motivated and confident that I could accomplish what I wanted to. It's a liberal arts school. There's no business background training classes happening there.

It was for me, it was art history and English and Yeah, the story I like to tell is I was an English lit major at Dartmouth, and we studied— while I was there, we still had mainframes. We were still using the mainframe at Keywood Computer Center, and I'll never forget being in a seminar with English professors talking about how they were using the computers to do linguistic analysis of Marlowe and Shakespeare, because there were some pieces of work they couldn't determined. I remembered that, and 20 years later, I won a $10 million lawsuit as a result of that seminar.

Really?

Yeah.

That must be quite a story.

It was quite a story. And for a while, I went around to high schools and say, you guys don't like English, let me tell you the story. And I have a check, the check's on a plaque, and I look at how much money I earn. I, I won in this law, in this lawsuit because It was a defamation case and my client's former business partner wrote a slanderous letter to all of my client's customers, put my client into bankruptcy. And we had to prove who authored this unsigned letter. And so I hired a linguistics professor who knew all about this stuff.

Oh, that's great.

And he did a linguistic analysis comparing the anonymous letter to known samples of this guy's handwriting and it was like a smoking gun. It's just no question.

Interesting. That's great how that came back and it was in your repertoire.

And so let's not put down a liberal arts education, right? It's pretty powerful.

Absolutely.

So you've been, you've got your business now. How big's your plant?

47, 50,000 square feet? We're actually 63,000 feet.

We're in two buildings now.

Oh my God.

And how many employees? About 150, man, from zero. So where do you go from here? You've been doing this for 33 years. What, where's the company got, what do you do with the company? What, what happens?

So we're really focused on recognizing and showcasing people's biggest achievements in their life. And there's academic, there's a lot of opportunity, I think, for us in corporate markets. Uh, we do a fair amount of recognition and award framing. We've actually had the good fortune of being a 12-time Inc. 5000 fast growth company. Wow. And I actually got a call about 8 years ago from Inc. Magazine saying, we're looking for someone to help us make awards for all these programs that we do. And we saw your name because you've come up so many times. So that's been an amazing partnership for us and actually really cool because our business is seasonal. We peak in the spring and then we peak at Christmas. And they peak in the summer and then they have programs going on at other times of the year. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. We've seen a lot of opportunity with personalization, framing the way you want it. So I see a lot of growth potential and we're actually investing in dedicated resources on business development now in some new areas. So it's going to be exciting for you.

So this show is called Listing with Leaders. My background is a lawyer turned peacemaker. Is all about teaching people how to stop fights and arguments in their lives by listening to emotions, not listening to words. That's my thing.

I'm curious about, I'm curious about two things.

One, you strike me as being somebody who's got a lot of empathy, and I'm just curious about that. Am I correct in my assessment?

I, I definitely think so. I think it's always I've felt like it served me well, and it's almost being a mom, being understanding, being a shopper, paying attention to what's going on out there. I think all of those things are in my DNA, and it's been a real advantage for me. And I, I try to be humble, and I want to inspire people to be willing to take risks and help teach them. I, one of the most promising and exciting things for me is if I can inspire another entrepreneur to have the courage to follow their vision and go off the well-laid path and do something unique.

You were talking earlier about how one of the reasons that you wake up every morning is you just love the people you're working with and obviously have a, a close relationship to your entire team, 150 people. How important has listening been to you in, in developing that kind of a relationship?

I think it's critical. It's the way that you can make connections with people. I think the, the best ideas come from slowing down, and that's a hard thing as an entrepreneur. I think you tend to like look for the quick solution, flying leaps. You, and it's a big transition from being an entrepreneur, running a smaller company where you're doing everything hands-on to a bigger company where you have to empower leaders and find the right people and let go. So I see that communication is really important, and it's one of the hardest things is to make sure that you're communicating out to everybody within the company. There's probably no such thing as too much frequency, and I think we can always do better at that. But I feel like listening to what people have to say within the company and outside the company has helped us build a stronger culture and helped anticipate some of the changes that could have been real breaking points for the company. And to see those far enough ahead that we could pivot and make adjustments. Either to get out of a problem situation or to go in a direction that led to some new growth.

Right. So when you've got— I'm assuming you've got a management team that you work with. And how do you deal with the disagreements on the management team? Because I'm sure you— not everybody agrees all the time on everything.

I hope not.

How do you as a leader deal with situations where you've got different people on your team and maybe even the next layer down are disagreeing about either policy or a strategic plan or any, it could be anything. How does, how is that managed?

I think the reality is that mistakes will always happen and you have to learn from them and you have to create an environment where people feel comfortable saying what they believe or think is the right direction. And learning how to come together as a group and have consensus and make decisions together. The cohesion of our leadership group is a huge indicator of success, and we've been through times that were really rocky, and then we're in a really good place right now, and I feel like the momentum, it's just like raining down good stuff. When the energy's good and when everybody's aligned, it brings a lot of enthusiasm. But creating a safe environment where people feel heard and can speak their minds is a big component.

Yeah. You touched on something that I think a lot of people don't realize, and that is that emotional safety in an organization or on a team is at least from a massive Google study showed was the main determinant of whether or not that team was a high-performing team or not. If the people felt emotionally safe, then they outproduced everybody by orders of magnitude. And I don't think a lot of, I don't think a lot of leaders and CEOs get that. I don't think they understand that, that if you can create a safe place for people to work, not just physical safety, but emotional safety as well, that they're gonna become loyal, trusting, dedicated, collaborative workers, employees, team members.

You didn't learn that at Dartmouth.

No, and one of my first bosses at P&G said to me at one point, you're just like a bull in a china shop. I am like that. So I think it's a hard, like I have really had to learn to slow down, My tendency is to take charge. This is what we're doing. I'm moving fast, driving hard, and I sometimes I think I even scare people. So I have to be really careful about moderating myself. And that's probably one of the most important lessons that I've had.

That sounds like it's a, that was a journey. How did, tell us, just tell us a little bit about that.

I think, you know, I, I got some early career feedback like that I needed to like settle it down. And I think I recognize the importance of being able to take the other person's view, and that not everybody operates quite like I do and at the pace that I do, but everybody's got different skills and gifts. So I think you— I have to stop myself from talking and listen and absorb and focus on what are the questions that I need to ask that will help us collectively come to a good place. So asking the right questions is a really important component.

Yeah, knowing how to ask the right questions is a real art to itself. Absolutely.

When—

so when you're working, when people do disagree, how do you manage that? Presumably, I hope it doesn't get to the level where people are really angry at each other, but they have— maybe they have sharp disagreements. How do you help them How do you come to decisions? And even though people may not like the decision because it went against their perspective, they're on board and they're okay with it.

That's really one of our ground rules too. When we come to a consensus, we all need to align behind it. We spend, we do quarterly and annual planning and we set annual priorities and then quarterly priorities based on that. Priority setting helps a lot because we get aligned and clear about what we will do and what we won't do. So that helps delineate the sandbox better. Um, when we disagree, I think it's a matter of just trying to get the different perspectives out on the table. Sometimes take a little bit of time away from it and then come back to it. But I feel like especially lately we've done a really good job of being able to work through any place where we had that kind of a problem.

How do you work with— if your team's like most teams, you've got half your people are introverts and half your people are extroverts, and the extroverts will tend to dominate in a meeting. How do you make sure the introverts get heard?

I think asking questions and Managing the conversation is probably the best way to help bring those people in.

And I presume also that if you're creating the safe environment, that the introverts will feel more inclined to jump in when they might otherwise remain silent.

Yeah, I think that's really important.

Yeah. Too many people, I think, let the extroverts run amok. And you got 5 people in the room that aren't saying anything, and they're probably the smartest people in the room.

You know, we have a pretty balanced— right now we have a really pretty balanced group. Um, there are 8 people in there. One is new, but I feel like the conversation is balanced. We plan topics and we try to do a little bit more of a deep dive in each person's area periodically. So there's a focus opportunity on what's happening in marketing or what's happening in new business development or finance. And that works really well. And I think the cadence of the meetings, just getting together and having that alignment is very helpful as opposed to going away and then coming back for a long day session together. The weekly cadence is really helpful.

Interesting. And so where do you see, where do you see everything going in the next 5 to 10 years?

Our goal by 2031 is a million achievements proudly framed every year. The last million that we did took us 7 years. That's order of magnitude increase. But there's so much opportunity. There's just so many. Bright pride moments in people's lives and beyond academic, but although that's an important part of it. So we see a lot of potential and we have a lot of interest in personalization and customization that I think is going to take us far.

Good for you. One more question, I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

You would probably never know that I was an art history and English major and I never took a business course. That's a, that's a big one. I'm probably more introverted than I, than maybe I outwardly would appear to be. One of my businesses that I started in college, I did, um, party pictures with fraternity and sorority names, and I knew I didn't have the right personality to go out and take those pictures, so I hired the fun people to go out and take the pictures, and I ran the back end of it. But I am a little more quiet and introverted probably than I'm a lot of entrepreneurs.

You actually, I'm introverted too. And I would say that the 200+ CEOs that I've interviewed on this show, all but maybe 3 or 4 are introverts.

Really?

Isn't that interesting?

That is interesting.

I don't know why that is, but it, it's, and I don't know whether I can draw any statistical conclusion from that or not, but it seems that people I interview are all like me. We're all very successful people. It's not like we're shy, but we tend to get our energy from inside rather than from outside. I'd rather be alone here on my ranch with my wife and my dog and my cats than go out and party somewhere, which I have done.

Me too.

Yeah.

Interesting observation. That's great.

Yeah. Lucy, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a great conversation.

Thank you, Doug. I really enjoyed it and I appreciate it very much.

You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes. Go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.