Episode 141: Paul Kiewiet's Defining Moments, Growing Through Adversity Series

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Andy said to me, Paul, what you're experiencing right now is a defining moment, and what you do with this moment is going to determine the trajectory of the rest of your life.

In our last episode, we started a new series, Growing Through Adversity. We're bringing together the voices of those reluctant heroes we know that have overcome serious setbacks both in their business and in their personal lives. An honest look at the unforeseen moments that change us, drawing out the essential lessons that shape our journey. I know very few people who have been through as many challenges, both professionally and personally, as Paul Kiwi. Paul is the executive director of MIPA, an industry speaker, writer, consultant, and coach. He has been inducted into the PPAI Hall of Fame and the MIPA Hall of Fame. He served as the chairman of the board of PPAI in 2007, founded a sales promotions agency, was a multimillion-dollar salesperson serving some of America's best-known brands. He loves adventure travel, has summited Mount Kilimanjaro, climbed Mount Ararat, walked the length of the state of Michigan from Indiana to Canada, and is in a constant search for his next adventure. Today we talk with Paul about the defining moments of our lives and how to see them as they really are. One quick housekeeping note, we just concluded our second community weekly social hour. It wasn't a presentation, it wasn't a webinar, it's where we gather together virtually each week and host a conversation among you and your peers through video. We discuss the most relevant topics right now. We present an idea and then break out into smaller groups to connect and share. It's a beautiful way to not only stay connected and encouraged, but to hear how other professionals are adapting to the current climate. Join us every Wednesday at 4:00 PM Eastern. You can register at commonscue.com/webinars just look for the webinar's community social hour. We would love to see you there. This episode is brought to you by Commenscue, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to begin your free trial now, visit commenscue.com. Now here's my conversation with Paul.

Sometimes when you think life is throwing you a curveball, there's a little bit of that 'Just wait, you've seen nothing yet.' And when we— when you look back at your journey, there seem to be a lot of those, 'Oh, just wait, you've seen nothing yet.' Can you start back with probably what was the one of the biggest challenges for you in business?

In business, it was that realization of being a small business. There's going to be a roller coaster. And there were those times when it was, all right, we've hit the bottom, haven't we? Haven't we? Come on. Where's the next hill? Can we start climbing it any time now? And there was just those moments of every year, it'd be like, gee, I just came off a great year. Now it's January 1st and I'm back to zero. Starting all over again and that combination of faith that, "Okay, let's make this happen again and have it happen." Paul, that's a great point, by the way, that the entrepreneur is equipped.

And in this business in particular where every business starts over January 1st, there's not a lot of residual repeat business. There's repeat projects but not a perfection of repeat business. I keep reminding distributors and suppliers that we have this ready-made muscle built in to respond to challenges before. And you're right. Every January 1st is brand new. So here we go again.

Yeah. Hit the reset button and away we go.

Yeah. We recorded with Joanne Lance about her 9/11 experience, and you had a brief experience with that. We're going to dive though into a few of those that came later in your career. And then in a few of those here most recently. But back on September 11th, 2001, you were hosting an end-user event with 150 clients and prospects when the planes hit the towers. And what happened?

That was for everybody. It was certainly surreal. I was at Western Michigan University where we held this event in a state-of-the-art business center. I was actually giving a morning presentation when my wife is at the back of the room waving frantically and interrupted me. I finally went back and she told me what was going on. I hit a switch and I mean the wall behind me was a giant screen and the image of the first tower came up with the plane and the smoke. It was, you know, people, of course everybody was shocked, but here we were on the campus of Western Michigan University, which which immediately shut down. And I had like 40 suppliers who could not go anywhere and 150 people already there. So we basically set up some quiet rooms where people could gather with a small TV and in smaller groups. And we had the big auditorium with the huge screen. Basically just allowed people to be. Those who wanted to walk the show actually did.

And so, to clarify, this was an industry trade show event, right?

Right. It was your standard end-user show that my distributorship annually put on, and we basically just tried to allow people to handle it the ways they needed to. Deal with it. Yeah. And didn't try to say, okay, everybody go. And we didn't say everybody stay. We didn't say, hey, the show must go on. It was basically, here are the various tools for dealing with it. And I had spent 19 years calling on the Kellogg Company, um, and they happened to be at that show. And about a week after 9/11, they called me and sent said, "We would like to have you come in for a capabilities presentation. We're so impressed with the way you handled crisis and we need people on our team that know how to handle crisis." Wow. So that was the blessing that came from that event. I mean, like everybody else, business went through the stage we're in right now of total ambiguity. Nobody knew what was going to happen next. What the next, what the next shoe would be that would drop.

But yeah, a lot of similar emotions. Your next biggest challenging moment ironically came right before the recession.

Yes. You know, when I, when I give presentations on the promotional products industry, and I often would like to point to 2007 as this $19 billion billion dollar year, which the following year dropped to $15 billion and joke that, see what happened when I stepped down as chairman. I happened to be chairman of—

To clarify to the community, you stepped into the role as chairman of PPAI, the industry's largest trade association, and under your tenure is when we dealt with the recession.

Right. Well, I was the chairman in 2007, so it was still During the uptick and during a successful year, and it was a wonderful time for me. I was chairman of the board of PPAI. I was the vice president of Corp Logoware, which had been the fastest-growing distributorship probably in history. In less than 2 years, they went from zero to a top 40 distributor.

I remember that, yeah.

And it was go, go, go, and with the licenses we had, I was having the opportunity to go to things like the Masters Tournament, to Daytona 500, and, you know, things really looked about as bright as they could be for a person in the industry. However, most people who are aware of the industry at the time also know that as fast as that distributorship rose, it also crashed just as quickly. And I was starting to see some of those cracks, but being in a high visibility position, I had this very uneasy agreement with the owner that I wouldn't step down while I was chairman. And by gosh, you better not file bankruptcy while I'm chairman. And, but I started making the plans that as soon as my term as chairman was over, that I was going to take a different direction. And my best friend owned a very successful business consulting firm in southwestern Michigan, basically based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was in Kalamazoo at the time, and he wanted to bring me on as his promotion marketing specialist in this consulting firm, and I was excited about, about making that change. And So in November, the man who was going— my best friend and who was bringing me on as a partner in his business consulting firm, Greg, died of a sudden massive heart attack. And so my Plan A kind of went right out the window, but I followed up with my existing plan, which was to resign from the distributorship restart my own distributorship. At that point, I still had the Kellogg's account, and so I moved the Kellogg's account over under my wife's name, the contract under my wife's name, so that we'd continue to be a woman-owned business. And my former boss, the owner of the large distributorship, had been promising—

sorry, the largest ownership, is that meaning Corpologowear?

Right.

Okay.

He had made me a lot of promises about a lot of money that was owed to me. I mean, it was a substantial enough sum that I felt comfortable restarting. And, you know, he was a very, very wealthy individual, and I had his personal guarantee that the money would be coming. But then I woke to the industry news that He had checked into a DoubleTree with a 9mm and took his own life. And there was no hope of receiving that money. And that was just like another big shock of, okay, what's the next plan? That was like in March. My best friend died in November. My business partner and boss committed suicide in March. I went to China with PPAI as the immediate past chair to continue my work on product safety and global product safety issues. And I came home and the house was empty. And I discovered that my wife of 32 years had, had left me and moved to another state. And she had full intention of taking that contract with the cereal company with her. And, uh, continuing in the business. And really, it's at this point, Bobby, where the story gets crazy.

From here, it gets crazy.

Oh, Paul. Wow. Because now we're talking May of 2008. Yeah, I had gone into mediation and separated our assets, and then the stock market crashed and the real estate market crashed, and whatever I had left was taken at that particular moment. But it's also a moment that there was some— I can't really call them anything other than graces, and one of them was When I discovered she had left, I came as close to fainting as I think a person can. I felt my knees buckle and I called, and I still to this day do not know why I called this person other than both his first and last name started with A, and all I can think of is he must have been the first person in my phone book on my phone. I don't know. But Andy said to me, "Paul, what you're experiencing right now is a defining moment." "and what you do with this moment is going to determine the trajectory of the rest of your life." What I was hoping Andy would say was, "Meet me at the bar. Let's get drunk." I think I was hoping to find somebody who would fuel the anger and everything that was going on, but he instead gave me that piece of advice., and I felt very, very childlike. It was like I need one thing to grab onto, and so I made a decision at that point that I would be a kind person. If I could do nothing else, I would try to, to put every decision through the, through a filter of what would a kind person do. And that made all of the difference. I'm kind of jumping all over the place here, but my daughters were both— one was still a late teen and the other one in her early 20s. And out of that kindness filter, I realized they were going to need their mother more than me at that particular age in their life. And they were both furious and, you know, cutting her out of their life. And by behaving in a kind manner, I was modeling to them how I wanted them to treat their mom. And believe me, being the victim is a powerful spot to be in. I'm not sure that I decided to want to give that up, but by modeling forgiveness behaviors— my two daughters and I had gone to a place called Saugatuck, one of our favorite lakeside places in Michigan. And we were sitting outside with our golden retriever eating deep-fried Twinkies, and the server had brought water for the dog. And I suddenly realized I was feeling sorry for my ex-wife for not being able to experience that moment. And that was when I discovered what forgiveness was. It was like, wow, this is just really amazing. Yeah, so, you know, things were— I was letting go of the— or I can't say I was letting go of things. Things were being taken from me left and right in a very short period of time. But my youngest daughter, who had really struggled with her feelings towards her mom, finally reconciled, went to New York and visited her. And I got a phone call, and this is where that crazy comment comes from because I was walking out of the courthouse with a default order of divorce, turned my phone on, my youngest daughter calls me and says, Dad, I'm in New York. And I'm like, oh, that's wonderful. And she's like, Dad, Mom's in a helicopter. She collapsed. They're taking her to Rochester Medical Center. And we discovered that those crazy changes in behavior had probably been because of the brain tumors that were now a stage 4. Cancer that had metastasized from her lungs. And just a few months later, she died. And the crazy part, it was on the day of my mother's funeral. So it was just this period of one thing after another after another. But because of choices that I made in attitude and and how I was going to deal with things, it worked out. Things, things, things worked out.

Yeah, you know, that's the voice of wisdom looking back on that experience. What was it like going through that experience though at the time? Do you remember how you felt?

There were a lot of— there were days of lots of pain and a lot of crying. There was also time where I was reaching out to friends and people that I knew had gone through similar situations. The wonderful part was I had people that were also people that operated out of love and could help with that. It's an old, old saying of, you know, when the student is right, the teacher will appear. I discovered because of Andy's mention about the defining moment, I discovered what it meant to try to live in the moment and to let go, the power of letting go, letting go of the past, letting go of beliefs.

Yeah, we typically live in our minds. We live in the past, in the future. We rarely live in the present moment.

Yeah, you know, and, and that's, you know, that's what worry is. Worry is simply living in the future, and it's not even there. It's, it's a, it's a made-up life that, that we're just making up. And similarly with regrets, there's, there's nothing that we can do. Certainly, I mean, I have, I have thought a million times over, you know, Could I have been a better husband? What if I would have spoken? You know, and that does no good. There's nothing in the past that's changeable. It is, and it brings us to the moment, and the moment is so powerful when we can find it.

Yeah, I think a lot of that present moment activation, if you will, comes from gratitude. Just simply stopping to— I'll do this thing where occasionally, and I know it sounds crazy, but I'll put my two fingers on the wrist of my wrist of my arm and feel my pulse for a few minutes. And it's the closest thing to prayer I think that I get to. And it's just sort of a moment. The physical act of it makes me thankful, um, and makes me pause and remember that whatever's happening right now is in some way still a gift. What's really telling about your life is that when you look at particularly worry and how demoralizing that is, if you were Paul Kiwi back then, You would have likely been worrying about a dozen things, none of which would have happened. And yet the one that you never even thought about was coming out of the blue every time. So it shows you the futility, shows you the futility of what we obsess about in our minds in terms of worry.

That is, that is so true.

Yeah.

That defining moment is powerful. You and I both, um, are big fans of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. What was your biggest lesson from that?

You know, I was fortunate also to have had Viktor Frankl as a friend at that time. It was one of the books that I had been— not, you know, personal friend, but the book and his writing. Yeah, sure. Yeah, certainly. But compared to what Viktor Frankl was going through, you know, as experiencing the Holocaust and to have that— the one freedom I have is to choose my attitude. And, you know, and I think of it now, and I've got so many friends that are so worried about the current situation with the virus and the impending recession and hopefully not depression, and how long is it going to last and how deep is it going to go. And it's nothing compared to what others have gone through. You know, I mean, even my parents who are, you know, both have been passed for many years, but, you know, they lived through the Great Depression and their stories of the Great Depression. And, you know, they were in their formative years during that time. And then Pearl Harbor and World War II, and they had to make a lot of sacrifices for many years. You know, when you take the length of the Great Depression plus World War II on top of it, that's a long period to be going through what's going to happen next.

What would you say to the young entrepreneur sitting across from you? You know, Paul, you've got a unique perspective here. Not only were you a distributor, you have, like I, but you in particular have loved and been in this business your most of your career. You have a unique vantage point in that you were actually chairman of the board of PPAI, which always gives you a unique perspective on the entirety of the industry that many of us don't have because we live in Or we only have our perspective as distributors. But you have unique perspective in all of this, and you've been through a lot of personal challenges. You're sitting across right now from a distributor, and I know many of them, and it breaks my heart, who they're emailing me, we're having phone calls, we're sharing text messages, who are saying, I don't know what to do. I don't know if I should close my office. I don't know if I should cut back staff. I don't know what to do. Now I realize you can't prescribe anything without knowing their particular problems, but in general, knowing what you've been through and what you've learned, what would you share with this young entrepreneur, this young distributor?

I think most importantly is we need to remember that this too shall pass. It always does. Things will change. We get to write the next chapter. It may not be the chapter we had in mind, and I can certainly attest to that, but we do have that knowledge that this particular set of circumstances is going to pass and we need to adjust. If we can cut back, let's cut back. I'd also highly recommend trust your gut, listen to yourself very carefully, because what I found was When I got to the point of I need to let go of what I believed my life trajectory was and started focusing in totally on what is it that I really love, and I decided I'm only going to do more of that, and what things make me uncomfortable, I'm going to stop doing them. It sounds kind of simple. The scary part is it required trusting that if I did those things, that life would provide for me. And for me, it has worked out, but it has meant that I've let go. I used to drive a Mercedes 500. I drive a minivan now. The house I live in is about the size of what my master suite used to be, but I changed my priorities, and this smaller house and that minivan are allowing me to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and do experiences and focus in on the things that just really thrill my soul and feed my soul. And these are tough times, there's no doubt about it. Worrying how you're going to pay your bills and pay your suppliers and, and what's going to happen next can eat you up. But in this moment, you have everything you need. And so really try to stay focused on the moment. As well as where do you want to be next year? Where do you want this to end up?

Paul, I can't tell you how grateful I am for you sharing your story. There's one thing I wanted to talk with you about, and it doesn't really fit into the narrative that we've just discussed, but you made a comment that when the downturn ends, and I use the when very specifically, there's always what's called pent-up demand. And this demand will be for much more than merchandise. It will be for experiences and making memories.

Can you comment on that? Yeah, definitely, because it is critical to realize that it is a when, not an if. And people are really going to be wanting that closeness, that currently being denied. So a smart marketer really needs to be visualizing what, what this vibrant economy is going to look like in 2021 and beyond, and be aware also that while we're stressing over the obvious, technology is continuing to change. AI is going to be a bigger factor in our lives. Robots are going to be a bigger factor in our lives. Autonomous cars, The world's changing very rapidly, so we really need to be looking forward and realize that things aren't going to be going back to normal. They're going to return to a growth period, but it's going to be in the context of a changing world, and we need to be ready for that. We need to let go of our old beliefs and be ready to grasp and shape the future that we want to live.

Paul, I see your life as this metaphor. You're standing on top of Kilimanjaro, which you climbed, you know, incredible, incredible feat. You've been through arduous challenges standing up on the mountaintop, and now you're helping us understand your view from where you're at to make sure we keep that viewpoint as opposed to looking at our feet as we trudge along through miserable conditions is to keep that positive outlook that you have and your eye on the future. Maybe the best way to say it is keep your heart in the present moment and your mind on the future.

Beautifully put.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.skucast.com.

Comandskew.com.

Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.