The Kind of Company I Want Gateway X to Be

21 Jul 2025 · 1 min

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In this excerpt, Jesse Pujji recounts a conversation about Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” framework and the criticism that Sinek often cites well‑known companies like Apple. Seeking a less‑celebrated example, Jesse discovers Barry‑Wehmiller, a St. Louis‑based holding company led by Bob Chapman, author of Everybody Matters. Chapman’s philosophy, sparked by an epiphany at his daughter’s wedding, emphasizes treating every employee as a person and using business as a force for good. When Jesse meets Chapman, he is surprised to find that Chapman immediately asks about the business’s balance sheet, cap table, and ownership structure, explaining that a people‑first culture can only survive if the leader holds a majority stake and the company is profitable. Jesse concludes that this model—people‑centric culture backed by financial ownership and profitability—is the blueprint he wants for his own venture, Gateway X.

Chapters

You guys know who Simon Sinek is? Apparently, he was getting challenged by people going, dude, yeah, Start With Why, that's great, but you use Apple as your example. Show me the boring company that no one's ever heard of and show me that that actually still works. And he stumbled upon a company that happens to be headquartered here in St. Louis. It also happens to be a holdco. It's called Barry-Wehmiller. And the guy, he wrote a book. The guy's name is Bob Chapman. He wrote a book called Everybody Matters. And the story he tells is basically he was at his daughter's wedding. He had this Almost like enlightenment moment where you realize everybody's somebody's daughter. I should be treating everybody a certain way, and business can be a force for good. And and so Dave gets me a meeting with Bob Chapman, and I was thinking that Bob was going to be like this like nice teddy bear. And the first thing I do when he walks in, he goes, "So what do you do? What's your business? What does your balance sheet look like? What's your cap table look like?" And then he paused me and he said, "Do you know why I asked you all that, Jesse? Because I couldn't do what I do with my culture if I didn't own the majority of the company and it wasn't profitable." That's what I want Gateway X to be.