Episode 161: The Real Secret to Your Success

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.

Really, the reason why any of us are successful is, is because of the help that others give us.

It was Spielberg who said the delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves. Today on the SkewCast, Mark Graham and I reveal a surprising connection that we both shared early in our business journey. Though Mark and I wouldn't meet for another decade or so, we had a mutual friend, a mentor, who invested in us and changed the complete trajectory of our thinking and our future. Today we're talking about the power of mentoring and the life-changing benefit of being both the teacher and the student. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. And if you haven't signed up yet for Commonsku Sessions at Home, it's right around the corner. Sessions at Home is the promotional products industry's only virtual conference dedicated to thriving in sales. It will feature Mike Michalowicz, Danny Rosen, Dale Griffin, and Katherine Graham, and you. In fact, it's not just a conference, but a sales experience. And what I mean by that is we have an interesting exercise in store for you and your team that will help forever give you the answer to that dreaded question, who are you and what do you do? Join us for these amazing speakers and our sales training exercise on Thursday, October 8th, Now more than ever is the time to refuel, refocus, and reenergize your team and to make sales growth a passion again. You can learn more and register at commonskew.com/sessionsathome. Now here's my conversation with Mark.

Mark, what virtually no one knows— in fact, I don't think anyone knows this about you and I— is that you and I share a big mentor and influencer in both of our careers. He showed up early in our careers and he was instrumental in helping us think different about the business. Can you share that quick story about Barry Holtz?

Yeah. So we both met Barry Holtz almost 20 years ago. I had met him at an industry speaking function. It might have been at a Canadian Association event that he was speaking. And I remember just being blown away by this guy. He was on some levels from a different era. Started a business in the '70s. I think he sold it in the '90s. And so it was very much from a different era, but the way he spoke and the way that the lessons that he shared captivated me. And 20 years ago, I was a nobody in this industry. I just started, didn't know what the hell I was doing. And I just remember really being guided by a lot of the lessons that he shared. And that made a big impact on me.

I met Barry in Dallas, Texas, and I'll never forget him sitting there and he posed an interesting question. Now think about this. Think of how far advanced this was for 20 years ago for him to say this. He said, if you were to bring in an artist and commission a custom painting and frame that and brand that with a logo or build a custom t-shirt experience through an artist's work, What's the value of that unique piece that you just created? And the very young promo professional in me is looking at an apparel catalog at $5.95 on a C going, what the hell is this guy talking about?

Right?

We're in the promotional products business. And he, way ahead of his time, was getting us to think beyond commodities for sure. But he was even doing more than that. He was actually getting us to think beyond our industry, and then to truly building something of value. And that's what I remember the most. And what was funny to me, Mark, is I'm looking at Barry and he's not the kind of, you know how, you know, this is a compliment, but he's not Ted Church sitting there with his cool and suave, sophisticated approach to business. It was, you know, 20 years ago. And I remember the way this guy thought, the way this guy thought was so dynamic.

Yeah. I think that's an interesting point in terms of not judging a book by its cover. So you're being delicate. So for those people that are trying to imagine what we're talking about here, Barry Holtz is a balding guy with a conservative suit and tie on. Certainly, probably looks like the kind of person who might be selling life insurance and not a particularly creative person. Would not necessarily exude the kind of creative thinking that you just talked about. When you sat down and spoke to him, you realized that there was so much more beneath the surface in terms of what this guy brought to the table. It was fascinating. And for me, one of the things I reflected on with my early journey with Barry is that I was young and brash and probably thought I knew it all, even though I didn't really know jack. And there was something in me that was able to park that attitude and really just sit and listen. And it was a great reminder to, A, quote unquote, listen to your elders. But I think it's also a great reminder to listen to those people who you may perceive to be different than you because those are often the people who can who can bring great perspective to you. And I'm not saying that everything that he taught me was like bang on. There were certainly lots of things that were unique about my model that I think I had mastered, but there was lots of stuff I didn't know. And bringing those two perspectives together was really exciting.

Yeah. One thing I remember about him is that he had a glimmer in his eye, almost a mischievous grin about him when he was approaching the business. And there was something about his demeanor that really influenced me. Wasn't just what he had to say. It was, it was this attitude that he possessed. And he also did it in such a relaxed way. So I got the feeling that I was in the presence of an expert. But as you and I are about to get into this conversation about mentoring and mentorship and what it really means, and to unpack that big old word that we use way too often to mean, to mean many things, what Barry came across in his persona was vulnerability and this friend that I had who also sort of loved the business. And when you, when you add those two things together, where you have the vulnerability of a friend who is a very wise friend who loves business or the business or some aspect of the business, there's some magic that can happen between them and the mentee.

Yeah. Yeah. I credit Barry for the philosophy that gross margin is an attitude. And I'll never forget when he threw that slide up in a class that I took with him. So what I failed to mention before is that after I had met him, I actually enrolled in a class with him in his Toronto office, and it was called a big group, business improvement group. And there was, I think, 7 or 8 of us that attended class over the course of maybe 8 months, and it was once a month, we went up to his studio and for the whole day would go through marketing, sales, finance, all of these things. And it was like a peer group. It was really great. And he was the teacher and that had a big impact on me. But gross margin is an attitude is probably one of the greatest things that I learned from him in those very early days. And I'll say that it set me on the right course in terms of how it is that I valued the work that we produced at Right Sleeve and how it is that we priced. And I'll say for the most part that we never played the price game because that always popped up in my head, this idea that if you are worth what you are selling, there's going to be an attitude, there's going to be a confidence about you that the client will pick up on. The client will know this distributor, Right Sleeve, Mark Graham, is worth the price he's quoting because of everything that he's bringing to the table. And I never thought of it that way, but you think about anything that you buy in life that you buy from people who are confident, you buy from brands that are confident because you know that they're going to have your back. Whereas a salesperson who feels like wishy-washy and insecure and jabbers on too much, you might look and say, I don't know if this guy really knows what they're talking about. Maybe I might try to get them down on price a little bit. So that was epic for me.

In his genteel way, he was shaking me out of what I had been trained by as very what I would call industry think. Entrap by industry thinking. It was sort of causing me to expand my horizons beyond the way I was trained to think about the business and how to think more creatively and not from an aesthetic standpoint or branding standpoint, but how to think from a pricing standpoint and from an ops standpoint. He just forced me to really think. I can imagine sending this to his family would be neat. And Mark, we, we actually had decided to get Barry on the podcast, but when we went to go look up Barry's name, we discovered that he actually just passed away a few months ago.

Yeah, that was a really sad moment and I think inspired this episode, I think in part because we wanted to honor Barry in our own way, but also share the fact that he had passed. And I regret that I didn't know that. And it unfortunately took a bounce back from an email that we sent. And then I call it a nervous Google search because I was nervous as to what I was going to find. And because I knew, of course, that he was a little bit older and it turned out that Barry had peacefully passed away in October of 2019 in Pittsburgh and he died at the age of 81. So he'd lived a long, happy life, but just regret that we had to learn this way. And it just made me reflect after having spent 20 years in the industry that really the reason why any of us are successful is because of the help that others give us.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. I think that is really, really true. And we just wanted to honor some of these great people and Barry certainly was high on the list. Who are some other people, Bobby, that in your very early days kind of made you the person that you are today?

You've heard me talk about Merv many times, but probably the most influential mentor in my life was Merv, who hired me— Merv Hackney, who hired me as a kid. And he took a gamble on this punk-ass hippie kid and believed in me, you know, when I didn't believe in myself, and sort of took me to raise, if you will. But I was real fortunate in that he had just gotten into the business as a, as a success. He'd already been through a successful career and decided to launch a new experience. He was probably about on the age of 50 or so and get into this business, didn't know anything about it. Well, neither did I as ass kid. And so I was fortunate that we got to learn together. But of course, he had years of business experience on me. So we had a couple of things happening. We had us both learning about the business along the way, and then he had this incredible amount of business wisdom. But he was so influential in my life, and I have to say that the things that he taught me were the kinds of things you don't pick up in business school. For example, he taught me 2 or 3 real huge life lessons. One was he taught me about esprit de corps. You know, the spirit of the troops, long before the word culture became common coinage in our world. Merv taught me about esprit de corps, and he was constantly obsessed with raising the spirit of the troops. That he instilled in me relentlessly. And number 2, he once told me, he was a former military man, and he told me this, he said, take care of a soldier's family and you'll earn yourself a soldier. And he said that to me multiple times. And what I love about it was what he shared with me and transferred to me was a principle. He didn't tell me how to act. He didn't tell me what to do. He told me how to act. And an example, Mark, that would come to fruition later is that when it came to, in the States, spending money on health insurance is a huge, huge investment. And it's indicative of how you feel about your team., and it's indicative of Esprit de Corps. It's indicative of so many things in America, fortunately or unfortunately. As an entrepreneur, it's indicative of a lot. It shows you what— how you feel about your team. And so when it came to those decisions, I never had to ask him whether or not we invest the majority of the company's percentage in spending on healthcare for the employee. I already knew it. He told me that a long time ago. Take care of a soldier's family and you earn yourself a soldier. And now maybe that advice is antiquated. Maybe that's for a different era. And it was. He was from a completely different era. He grew up in the Depression age. So that— but the principle he instilled in me was huge. And then the third thing that he shared with me was to risk living generously. He was known, you know, he wasn't as big a financial risk-taker as he was— he took a risk on people when they were really not worth taking risks on. Obviously, present company is the perfect example of that. Yes. But he also knew that investing in people is not a gamble, but a long-term commitment. So I think those are the three big things that he shared with me.

How about you? Yeah, that's awesome. I'll quickly say before moving on that I sat beside Merv the only time I met him in person. I sat beside him at an expo maybe 10 years ago and he was there and I just happened to sit beside him and I introduced myself to him and you were speaking. So, I was having to sit through one of your presentations, which was difficult at the best of times. But, in all seriousness, I was excited to see it and I was kind of sitting with him near the back. And I said, are you excited to hear what Bobby has to say? And he said yes. And he said something along the lines about how you were a very special individual. And I'm not joking when I say that, but there was this kind of gleam in his eye and it was cool, right? And I didn't have a joking relationship with him, so I was very respectful. But it was clear that— and that's all he said. And then you started speaking. So it was pretty cool. You could tell the relationship he had with you was strong. I want to talk about one other person that had a big impact on my career and especially my early career starting off as a distributor. And this is someone by the name of Will Andrew. Will was the owner of a supplier firm in Toronto called Wack Sportswear and was a fiercely original thinker in terms of how it is that he built his product, built his supplier company, and also just built his company culture and all had a massive impact on me as someone who was I was extremely new to the industry, didn't know anything, and I really appreciated his counsel. So there were kind of three areas that Will had a big impact on me, and they were as follows. The first is that he inspired me around truly great product. His supplier line was in apparel and just had such a great eye for product development, product design. Designed and manufactured all of his clothing in Toronto. And that really inspired me because when I first started in the industry, there was a lot of blah products, not very high-quality products. They were more of the cheap swag items that you might have seen, whereas Will really redefined this idea of having truly innovative product that I could bring to my customers. So that I really credit him as someone who really inspired me to think very creatively about the product. And I've taken that to even this day now. Number 2 is the power of design and branding as a differentiator. He had done a wonderful job in creating this unique and differentiated brand as a supplier, again, within a sea of a lot of sameness within the supplier cohort of the time. Again, something that I was really inspired by and have taken those principles to CommonSkew and certainly had inspired me in building the brand of Right Sleeve in those early days. And then number 3 is I always really admired him in how he had built out his company and his company culture. You have to keep in mind, when I first started in this industry, I was literally working out of my parents' house. I had no separate office. I had no employees. It was just me driving around in a car selling products and services to my customers. It was a very fledgling situation. And Will was a few years older than me and he had employees, he had an office, he had this fantastic culture. And I just loved learning from him to how it is that he had invested in these areas and had built something really special. And certainly it was something that I took as I grew Right Sleeve and I sort of moved out of my parents' house, moved into an office, and then continued to scale that business. And so I really credit Will with helping me in a lot of areas, but in those specific areas I wanted to be specific on. So thank you, Will, if you're listening to this.

Love that. Before we get— I want us to get into, Mark, the mentee relationship in a minute because you and I are now in a position where we are mentoring others, of course. And I want to talk about how that transforms us and what that means to us and how we all need to be in those kinds of relationships. But before I do, I want to mention one more mentor, and it's Rod Brown. And this is indicative of my relationship with Rod. Yeah, we were visiting together, Todd, at QRG in Minneapolis, and the airplane had hit the ground and we'd gotten in the car. It was a fast trip. We were driving through Minneapolis and This was before, right before I came on board CommonsQ, and I was talking with Rod about burnout. And Rod, one of the things that makes, I think, a beautiful mentor-mentee relationship is when it moves beyond the textbook relation, mentor-mentee relationship, when it moves beyond the P&L and the balance sheet and actually moves into life. And Rod is really good about transcending that boundary in a delicate way. But it's also, he pulls you in. And so he I was, he asked me how I was doing and he could tell, you know, that I was disturbed and I talked to him about, and I asked him about burnout, what he thought about that. And I'll never forget what Rod said. Rod said, Bobby, you need to stop treating burnout like an off-on-off switch. Burnout is a rheostat. It's adjustable. Yeah. And you're in a situation where you can make a really bad decision. Like, for example, Mark, at the time it was like, do I need to just get out of this damn industry? Yeah, I'm so burned out. And that's fatalistic thinking. What Rod said was, no, don't trust that. He said it's a rheostat. It's adjustable. And a simple statement like that at the right time can dramatically transform your life.

Yeah, that's amazing. And I think Rod has sort of justifiably earned his reputation as the Yoda of the industry. Someone who's been through an incredible business journey with great ups and downs and obviously the same in his life. I just reflect on that Sku Camp New Orleans presentation that he did where, you know, one of those speakers that earned that standing ovation. So, certainly hit the jackpot with a mentor relationship with someone like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What are your thoughts on the mentee-mentor relationship? And let me ask it this way. How are you changed as a mentor? I think one of the things that we want to get at in this conversation is why invest in others? And now that you find yourself, Mark, on the other side where you're mentoring others, and you and I know how this happens, it's either in a formal mentor-mentee relationship like through Promo Kitchen's mentorship program, or it's informal and it happens all the time through conversations that you have. What have you learned about that process?

Well, you know what? It's, it's funny, as we record this, I literally just got back from seeing someone that was a mentee of mine or still is a mentee of mine outside the industry. So someone that I met in the tech, in the startup tech world. And this is an individual that started an event management company called Feedloop. And I just went down to go see his new office. So this is someone that started this business out of the U of T engineering faculty, like 5 years ago as a student and has now grown it to a company with, I think he's got 15 employees making all sorts of business growth, has this beautiful office right in downtown Toronto. And I was sitting there going, I mean, I don't know whether he's necessarily the mentee anymore. I might be the mentee. Right. Right. I think so. He's just done extraordinary things. And I think about that, that's maybe a long way of saying that the best thing about these mentor-mentee relationships is when you've got this incredible synergy between the relationship, where it's not like I'm sitting in some sort of godlike position dispensing advice from upon high to the person who doesn't know anything. That's no fun for either party, to be honest. And I think that there's such great give and take where you learn, you feed off the energy and the way that these maybe younger people are thinking about things. Listen, I've got as much to gain, if not more to gain, in that relationship. And I think for me, if I look back at any of the great pairings that I've had through Promo Kitchen, all of the people that I've been fortunate to be paired with, there's always some dynamic in that relationship where I'm blown away by what I have learned from the other party. And inevitably, the reason where they don't work, to be honest, is when you don't have that give and take. So that's why I think they're important.

Yep. If the quote-unquote teacher, if what they value is humility, one of the aspects that they value is humility, they don't have all the answers, they don't know all the right ways, The student is as much the teacher as the teacher is to the student. And, you know, this will happen in a formal teaching setting as well as in the mentor-mentee relationship. What I've actually found, I kind of hate the language around mentor-mentee. And really what I think what happens is when it moves into a true mentor-mentee relationship, words like accountability and mentor-mentee are synthetic words. What we're really talking about is friendship and generations and age and sex and all those things be damned. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you have two people willing to share their life experiences with each other vulnerably. That's what constitutes a mentor-mentee relationship. And what doesn't work is when one part of that is not willing to either invest or to be humble enough to accept.

Yeah, that's a good point.

What advice would you have for mentor? And then I'm going to ask, what advice would you have for mentee?

So based on my experience in, in both categories, I think that my advice for a mentee is to let your guard down. It can be hard to be vulnerable. And listen, I speak from experience, right? Everyone's got their ego, they've got their pride, they don't want to look like they don't know the answers. But when those walls are put up in that mentor-mentee relationship, you're not going to get as much out of it. When you're sitting there trying to prove something or you're hiding things or you're just not being as vulnerable as possible, then I think it's not going to be a great use of your time. And listen, in those early days, I made those mistakes, so I'm speaking from experience. If I switch gears and think about my perspective as a mentor, I think it is so important as a mentor to listen as much as possible, to really open your ears to what the other person is sharing with you. Probably listening more than you speak, being very careful to share experiences as opposed to offering advice. I think that's a big thing because as soon as you start offering advice, I think you end up having the other person gets their back up or they may disagree or they get into a debate with you. Whereas it's harder to debate if you say, well, listen, I was once in your shoes Here's what I did. I don't know whether this is the right thing for you, but here's what I did and here's where I stumbled or here's where I was successful in that decision. I think that that has a lot more gravitas. And I think in other cases, it's fair to say, listen, I don't know what to tell you. I've never had that experience, but you know what I can do is I can listen. In a lot of cases, that's something that has a powerful ability to help other people.

Yeah, I think my advice would be the same to both mentor and mentee is that when, first of all, one of my examples is from outside the business world. So I grew up on, as you know, Mark, on a ranch in Texas, and it was 4, you know, wayward punk kids, boys, and it was the bottom 10% of society. And they would enter into this sometimes court-mandated ranch that they would go to. For some, it was the last chance before they went to juvie or some other place. And they were suddenly put into an involuntary mentor-mentee relationship. And a couple of things happened. The mentors learned a lot. The mentees learned a lot. The mentees had to make themselves vulnerable. One of the business lessons that transcend to business and personal is what I would advise for both mentor and mentee. There's always a presenting problem that starts the relationship. Therapists call it the presenting problem. This is the thing you're really struggling with. Maybe for kids, it's a drug addiction. Maybe for business people, it's profitability. I'm about to lose my business. Maybe they seek out a mentor because they need to own a business and they need to decide, or a career decision. So there's always a presenting problem. So for both people, what I would advise is to think and invest beyond the presenting problem. Into relationship. Because once you transcend the boundaries of we're only talking business or we're only here for this moment, I think it's okay if you do that. For example, Mark, a lot of folks call me about stores and they'll always have one presenting problem. What's interesting, even when you look in the micro world of stores, I'll talk with them about their presenting problem and then I'll say, but that's not really your real challenge here. And then we get into a real conversation about things. So I think my advice would be to move beyond the presenting problem, think beyond the presenting problem, and be willing and open. It doesn't mean you have to commit to it, but be willing and open to enter in a true relationship.

Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true. It's been neat to speak about this. I think it started off with people that had an impact on us, and then it's been an interesting way to transition that into more of these formal mentee-mentor relationships. Yeah.

Well, the truth is we both got misty-eyed when we heard about Barry. You on your end and me on my end. And we knew we had to talk about it. So here we are. You know what? If you want to become a mentor or a mentee, there's a great program at promo-kitchen.org that you can sign up for. Highly encourage you to check that out and invest.

Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't recommend the program highly enough.

All right, Marcus. Thanks for chatting.

Thanks, Bobby. Thanks so much for tuning in to 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.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.

Mm-hmm.