Episode 319: Turning a Big Vision into Real Strategy with Todd Mawyer, TK Promotions

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. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew. Todd Moyer is the president and CEO of TK Promotions and yet another very successful entrepreneur in this industry who started during a recession in 2008. There's a bit of a pattern here. Starting during a tough economic climate creates grit, determination, and a quest for survival that permeates the business long after the recession is over. And Todd is a leader who never stops trying to learn about how to lead better, how to grow his business to the next level, which is a large part of our conversation today as we dig into his most recent history, reorganizing his business and learning how and what to focus on moving forward. And one more thing we get into in this conversation is how your peers and even competitors in your market can become friends, advocates, and supporters of your success. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Commenscue. And speaking of how peers contribute to your success, we just dropped a brand new community forum. Now, as you know, community has always been a hallmark of our innovation in the industry, but we've now fine-tuned that mission by creating easier and deeper ways to share. Because this new forum allows you to hyperfocus on niche communities and topics. So for example, if you're in sales, we've made it easy to connect and share ideas with other salespeople across the CommensQ distributor network. Or if you're in a production role, we've created a channel just for production pros. Likewise, if you're the CEO or leader, we have channels just for you. We're already seeing deep engagement from our early participants on topics like financing your business, how to structure your support team, and international sourcing. And just like our ordering platform, Our new community provides hyperrelevance to your challenges and opportunities now, a tremendous boost to real-time idea sharing. Our new Skewmunity forum features permission controls for CommsQ customers for your teams, as well as a highly requested feature, a global search bar to easily search through posts and ideas. This community forum is available today for all CommsQ distributor customers to join. Just log into your CommsQ account and visit skewmunity.commsq.com. And if you're not a Commscue customer and the community forum sounds very intriguing to you, visit commscue.com/demo for a quick chat with our team and you'll get two amazing experiences for the price of one. The work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow and a direct connect to a community of the fastest growing distributors in the industry. Now, speaking of fastest growing and one of the most successful, On to our conversation with Todd Meyer of TK Promotions. Todd, thank you for joining us, my friend. Welcome to SkuCast.

Glad to be here. Appreciate your opportunity to join you.

You bet. You have a fairly robust team structure, and you've layered in more management to help you grow the business, including hire a VP of Sales a few years ago. You've changed your structure a lot over the last few years. How, how have you done that? Like, how What has, what has changed the most?

Sure. Yeah. For years, we were a pretty flat organization and culminated in, you know, me at the top and then a lot of team members underneath me.

Right.

But back in 2019, felt the need to begin building a leadership team to help us with growth. And I brought on Wayne Vaughn, our VP of sales, who was an industry veteran at the time, and promoted Tracy Phillips. To become our VP of Finance and Operations. And then Ricky Taylor, our director of production, was also promoted. And so the 4 of us became the leadership team here at TK Immersions back then. Right.

I'm sure that had to help you immensely because it sometimes feels like you're just pulling on your own. Yeah. On the leader, in the leadership quadrant.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when, when you start the business, you're, you wear all the hats. Right. And as you grow the business, you can't continue to wear all the hats or you'll get burned out. And so you find people that have unique abilities in certain areas, you give them the keys to that department or that area and let them go. And you kind of encourage them, help them, cheerlead them throughout the process. And we've spent a lot of time and effort building that team, not just capability-wise, but the kind of the trust and the accountability within the group is also a big piece of what we spent a lot of time doing over the years.

Right. You're a big believer in EOS, in the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which we have had several distributors talk about this a lot, but you, you're a big believer in this and it's really impacted the way you run your business. Can you explain EOS briefly to listeners and how that's really impacted the way you run your operation?

Yeah, I appreciate that. Again, back in, this was 2020, Bobby, fall of 2020, I had reached the point in my professional career that I was kind of running out of answers. For where the business needed to go and how to get there and how to structure it. And reached out to a friend of mine who had just gotten into implementing EOS into companies and grabbed coffee with him. And long story short, we started implementing EOS at TK Promotions in January of 2021. And EOS is, you know, it's a, it's a simple concept of practical tools that that help businesses align their efforts to their vision. And a lot of the vision for us at the time back in 2020 was up in my head. And so this got it down on paper and it helped make sure that everybody was rowing in the same direction and certainly aware of where we're going and, and know how they fit in that process. So it was very impactful for us to make sure that, you know, we, the efforts that we were doing, we were working really hard. We're going towards something and not just, you know, falling flat every year.

Yeah, I've always felt like EOS and CommsCue really complement each other because CommsCue is this internal engine that gives infrastructure to your order management process and your team, and then you have the EOS layer on top of it which can lead to a management structure, leadership, sales goals, things like that. Do you go to market differently today because of this shift that you've had over the past couple years in your structure?

Absolutely. Yeah. So through the EOS process, you develop a pro— you know, what we call the TK Way, our proven process, which helps us identify here are the steps. If you work with TK Promotions, from engagement, which is our first— excuse me, education, which is our first bullet point. So we want to make sure our team is educated to do their job. So we encourage all of our team to go through PPAI education. We encourage Common SKU Hack Snacks. We encourage, you know, local vendor trade shows and things like that to make sure that we are ourselves equipped to do the job when the time comes. And then that goes into developing your 3 uniques. So we as a company have developed 3 things that we think nobody in the industry offers that we do. One of them, a lot of people might do, but not all 3 of them collectively. So we've certainly defined those and we go to market selling those things, one of which is a collaborative cloud-based project management system, AKA Commonsku. It is a, one of our uniques that we feel like helps differentiate us from our competitors in the marketplace. So just kind of identifying those things, we might have known them in our heads prior to, we didn't market them. We didn't articulate them to clients when we're pitching them on new, new relationships. And so it just kind of put these things in a, in an order for us to start expounding upon them in a more elaborate way. And it's very well received. People love to hear when companies have it together and know what they're talking about and not just trying to pitch product or pitch pricing. So it's, it's been very, very beneficial for us in that space.

Yeah, I love that you go to market very intentional with CommsCue as a collaboration platform with your clients. That's just amaz— that's, that's so cool.

And the way, like you said, collaboration is our, one of our core values. So, okay. That was a part of how we operate, but also a part of the system that we use. And we, again, speak into that, that word and that effort to make sure that people understand we are different. And this process that you're gonna use when you work with us is gonna be different than you probably have ever experienced. And you know, most of the time people comment back to us and say, this is phenomenal. Thank you for using this platform as opposed to another one.

Yeah. Since you have so much great structure built into your business, you once told me about the impact of EOS, comments to you, how that's helped fuel your growth. How do you, and you just told me you finished your, your meeting with your team. How do you set goals for your team?

Yeah, we, on a high level, we have an annual 2-day retreat, EOS retreat, where our leadership team gets away and we set the course for the year, but also the 3-year picture. With EOS, there is a, a 10-year target. So in 10 years, what's the revenue and what does that look like? What are the measurables? Going to look like for us to get there? And then, so that's more of a kind of a pie in the sky, you know, number and measurable. And then we narrow that down to the 3-year picture. And so every year when we meet as a leadership team for our 2-day annual retreat, we make sure that that 3-year picture is on target to help us get to that 10-year target. And then we also, then we narrow it down to the 1-year plan and we make sure that, hey, is our 1-year plan going to get us to that 3-year picture? We just break it down and, you know, when you back into something, when you have a big vision, you back into it, it helps you kind of make sure you're on track to accomplish those things.

Yeah.

And then we share that with the team. So annually we have a state of the company meeting. That's an all-day meeting, you know, half discussion around the table and half team outing together, team activity. But, you know, quarterly we go through the previous quarter's financials and the upcoming quarter's goals. The one key component with EOS is that the information is shared by all. And there's a, there's a high level of transparency that we have at TK Promotions through this process that just allows us to make sure that everybody's up to speed with where we're going, how we're trying to get there, and then how their individual efforts kind of contribute to that overall goal.

Does that weekly cadence also, everything sort of rolls up to that monthly, to that year, to that 3-year, to that 10-year? Yeah.

Yeah. If you want to narrow it down even further, so we have weekly L10 meetings, which are level 10 meetings. The goal for those meetings is to, at the end of the meeting, rate it from 1 to 10, 10 being the best use of your time for that hour, hour and a half. And our average is probably 8.5 to 9. There are times we all have 10s. There are times we have 6 through 9s. Just depends on, did we address the right topics? Did we, you know, did we Do we talk honestly and openly about things? Do we have healthy conflict? There are a lot of components in that. And, you know, during those weekly leadership team meetings, we do ours on Mondays at 9 o'clock. It's the first thing we do all week. We go through a personal and professional best from the previous week. We go through headlines for vendors or clients or team member shoutouts that are things that have come up throughout that week that we want to make sure that the rest of the team knows. We go through our quarterly rocks. So what we have said this, this quarter, what we want to accomplish, and it's a, it's an off track or on track. There's no discussion about, well, once I get this done, then it's off track or on track. And then we, we do to-dos. It's a lot about accountability, Bobby. And you know, I've found that when you're accountable to something, you're more likely to be getting things done on a timely manner. And we're, we hold each other accountable to that. So it's a very productive time. We have one for our sales team, we have one for our production department, and we have one for marketing and then leadership team.

That's cool. Can you give us an example of like a quarterly rock, big, big goal that you've either accomplished or maybe that's in the hopper right now?

Yeah, we, last quarter we had a, one of our sales executives coordinated a client showcase at the client's, it was a college down in North Carolina. And it took, we invited 5 to 6 suppliers to attend. Coordination on getting the space there on campus. Obviously all the promotional efforts marketing-wise and, you know, promotional items that we would give away during the event. And so it was more than just a standard, you know, walk-in, walk-out event. So one of our sales executives took that on as a personal rock. And so it elevated it to the point where our leadership team was involved to help make sure that was a successful event. And in all reports was a smashing success. That's cool. We talked about it this morning in our, in our, our, our monthly meeting. Another rock was, you know, we had a client that we were starting to do some more business with and approached them about being a preferred contracted partner versus just kind of being one of their vendors. And, you know, working with legal, working with them to kind of narrow down the specifics of the contract, that was something that was important to make sure that if we locked ourselves in with this company, the business will increase. If we don't, we're just going to get what we're getting for the most part. And so it kind of moved us forward with one specific client that without kind of elevating that to the, to a rock level, would've probably just spurred and spurred and spurned and never really kind of accomplished anything.

That sort of leads to my next question, which I was going to ask. Sounds like your goal is to have contractual arrangements with all of your top clients, obviously, and otherwise you're at the mercy of their, their shopping excursions, if you will.

Is that—

that's a common tactic for you?

I wouldn't say it's our go-to market strategy. However, you know, when you look at business that's contractual, if you're doing your job, you shouldn't lose it. But it certainly helps to know that there's a contract in place as opposed to wondering, right? Are we gonna have their business next year? I will say, you know, one of the things, one of our kind of go-to-market strategies when we're looking for new clients is we, we try to find somebody who values the relationship.

Yeah.

A contract can, can be a little less relationship driven. However, if we work with a client that does value the relationship, a contract just further cements us in there and, and, you know, hopefully it never goes anywhere else. But that's, that's certainly something that we try to strive on is developing and finding clients that do appreciate a relationship with us and aren't just in it for price, aren't just in it for, you know, rush orders. You know, hey, there's a mutual thing here. Like, we're happy to help you with these things, but you need to know what, what it puts on us if we need to do these. And so that, that's, that's worked out well. We find that kind of common ground on the relationship.

Yeah. You know, as a distributor, I liked an annual agreement that was sort of renewed annually, and it was like a service level agreement because it did two things. It was accountability for our own team and response times and things like that, but also it was sort of a more formal relationship with the customer that felt locked in a little better. Yeah. Do you, do you have a specific niche or market that you focus on?

You know, prior to the EOS framework, I would say our focus was in the kind of the government space.

Mm-hmm.

That's how we got started in business. And, you know, since then we've diversified and we've, we've got more of a targeted effort. Our, our target market according to our EOS organizer is collegiate and corporate markets. And specifically in corporate markets, we target transportation and healthcare. For the collegiate clients, we're targeting the Mid-Atlantic region. And so we've, we've kind of named a geography, we've named some sectors, we've named, we want to work with clients that again, value the relationship, that have similar core values as us. And it's really helped us narrow our focus. So we're not out there just trying to find anybody who wants to work with us. That's, that's not the goal anymore. It's to find the right clients. With the right amount of spend in the right areas that we know that we can kind of build upon and kind of grow over the years.

Yeah. You have minimum spend thresholds, obviously, with clients that you work with.

We do. Yeah.

What— let's talk a little bit about TK and Commonsku. Why did you initially decide to engage with Commonsku?

I love talking about this one.

Okay.

So back in 2015, I believe it was, I connected with a good friend of mine, Robert Fiveash, who was coming through town.

Good friend of ours.

I do not remember I don't remember why he was coming through town, but he said, hey, I'm going to be across the street. You want to grab a drink? And I said, absolutely. For Robert Fiveash, I'll do anything. And so we were sitting there at the bar just kind of catching up, talking about challenges with business, you know, workflow and things like that. And he said, hey, you know, we've been a beta tester for this cloud-based project platform called Commenscue, and I think you might benefit from it. I don't think I've even heard of it. And started looking into it and quickly became a fan. I think we adopted it within a couple of months that fall in 2015. And we've been avid Commonsku users since then. So, you know, coming up on 9 years now. And, you know, I'm grateful for Robert and his, you know, certainly forethought to make sure that I was aware of things like that, to know that, you know, a struggling business to try to find, you know, we were having problems with the bottleneck and processing orders. And CommsCue opened that up to one, to have better, you know, sales presentations. It's more attractive on the front end when you're working with a client. Certainly a more robust order entry, order processing, you know, project management piece on the back end as well. So it's been, it's been very helpful for us and I appreciate all that Robert has done for us.

He's on vacation right now. Otherwise I'd text him live on the air and say, hey, I'm hanging out with Todd.

I texted him earlier today about hanging out in a couple of weeks. So we'll see.

That's great. I love that we just made this full loop of connection. How does CommsCue help you and your team keep an eye on the pulse of what's happening in your business? I mean, that's tremendous to layer the EOS and CommsCue together because it gives you this like full power transparency.

Yeah, I mean, you know, we utilize the management dashboard, you know, daily. I do. I mean, that's kind of my role in that. You know, you can see important information at a glance. You know, like I said, we're 8 years in, so I'm learning new stuff all the time in the platform. I attended a webinar a few weeks ago with Aaron Futuray, and he educated me on things I've never known about the platform. And so this, I feel like it's a tool that is there that is very useful, that has so many bells and whistles. It's a continual learning process. And so I need to make sure that myself and our team is continually learning, continually. We have hack snacks here internally. Aaron had a hack snack thing in Vegas several years in a row, and so we kind of adopted that internally.

Oh, that's fun.

Great time. Yeah, Ricky, Ricky Taylor, our director of production, runs those on a, on a monthly basis, just a different topic in CommsCue.

So nice.

We try to make sure that it's something that we're always improving upon, and it's, it's certainly been impactful in our business over the years.

Last question about CommsCue: how do you think it's impacted your growth?

Yeah, I mean, as we've added people, not all of them are based here in Richmond. We've got one guy's in Philly. We've had several that have been, you know, not physically here in Richmond. So it's, it's an easy add-on for a remote individual, but it's also an easy platform to use on the go. You know, if you're traveling for business or traveling for, for personal, you can log on to the cloud-based system, access it anywhere in the world. You can get on and send emails on behalf of somebody else. And, you know, it's a very collaborative system that, you know, we, try to take advantage of as often as we can. You know, our previous one was desktop-based, and if you're not in front of your computer or not in the office, you're out of luck. So it's really just helped expand our network as well internally in the industry. You know, getting to know other people who are on the platform, attending many SKUCons, attending many events that you guys put on, and really just making sure that my team knows it's, it's it's a project management platform, but it's also a community. Yeah, I think that's important for people to feel like they're a part of something, and, and Commscue has certainly done that.

Yeah, I just love everything about this. The communities, even the heart of like a quasi-competitor coming in and telling you about Commscue, right? That's, that's, that's fascinating to me, to show you how cool this industry is and, and the people that are connected here. Let's talk a little bit about Todd. What do you enjoy doing when you're not working?

When I'm not working, well, I, I have more time on my hands. I used to work until about 10 o'clock every night. Right. And now that we have the EOS structure in place and a team built to help with these things, I don't have that need anymore, which is nice.

Yeah.

So I love spending time with my family. I've got 3 young children, ages 9, 7, and 5. And so we spend a lot of time in the backyard around the fire pit. We spend a lot of time at church together. We spend a lot of time, you know, doing sports together with them. So it's a good time to spend with family at this, at this age. They're, they're not too independent, but they're also not too dependent. So I'm trying to cherish this phase of life. I love playing golf, love getting out with friends and family to play golf. And those, those are probably the things that probably take the most of my time outside of work.

Who has been the biggest mentor in your life or, or, and, or share a piece of advice maybe they gave you?

Yeah. So two people come to mind, one industry related and two not industry related. So I'll start with the not industry related. I'm a big Dave Ramsey follower. He's a Christian-based financial advisor out of Nashville, Tennessee. He's written many books. He runs a program called Financial Peace University to help people with personal finance. And one of the concepts that he's written in his Total Money Makeover book was just the aversion to debt. And one thing that I'm proud to, to say about our business is from the first day we started in business to today, we've never had to borrow money for the business. So we've been able to make decisions based on the benefit of our, our customers and the benefit of our employees and not the benefit of the banks. So when we're investing money and resources, we're investing it into people and not to a conglomerate that probably could care less about, you know, them. And so it's just allowed us to have the freedom to do that. And it's allowed us to certainly grow at a reasonable pace, not grow too fast, but also to realize, hey, you know, this is a fun business to be in. Let's make sure that we do it with the right people in place and the right clients. So we've made good calculated decisions along the way to allow for growth. Yeah, that's cool. My industry-based mentors, again, going back to the Brand Fuel Guys, Robert and Danny have been almost too nice to me over the years. I wonder if there's something at the end of the road, Bobby, that I'm going to find out. Both very gracious in their time. I have one instance that I recall. I reached out to Robert, who's probably an hour and a half down the road from us.

Right, right.

I reached out to him. I said, Robert, I've got an opportunity to pitch a company on a multimillion dollar program. I do not know what I'm doing. Can you help me? He's like, all right, let's talk. So I went down there. We met, we talked. He came up here. We met, we talked. Robert drove up to present to this client with me in person about their online store capabilities. He pitched it as if he was my vendor. We used his slide deck and we tweaked it for TK Promotions. Nobody does that.

Yeah.

Nobody does that.

Yeah.

But Robert Fivash does. And Danny Rosen has always been the same for me. He's a little further away, so I don't see him as often, but those guys with Brand Fuel have been mentors to me beyond belief. And I'm very grateful for both of them.

Same. Yeah. One quick story. We were once on a car ride heading out to the coast with the— and I was with Robert and Danny and we had, they had a prospect call., and you know, I'm a distributor at that time. And so they wanted me to join as a member of their team, you know, on the prospect call. So we just had a great time talking with a potential client together. What a cool, what a couple of like, they're so unique. And Todd, it's no surprise, no surprise that you're connected with these guys. You had one more, I think. Yeah, that was it.

I mean, so Robert and Danny on the industry side. Oh, those are the two.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's awesome. I always think of them as one, but yes, those are the two. I got you. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. What's one more question, Todd? Last question for you. Is there an article, book, podcast, or video you've seen recently you'd recommend folks take in?

Yeah, going back to the EOS framework, their book is called Traction by Gino Wickman. He wrote that book. It's a very easy read. It's all about the EOS framework, the 6 key components that every business should, should be focusing on and sharing them with their company. So that one, just because of our EOS journey, is very dear to my efforts here. The other book, and I just recently read this, I saddened that I had not read it before, was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I just picked that up probably 2 months ago and finished that. And it's common sense stuff about treating people right. You know, if you treat enough people right, you'll get what you want, you know, and just how to make sure that you are presenting yourself in a way that people want to work with you. And I've been a firm believer in people buy from who they like. Yeah. And if we're out there in the marketplace just creating friends, we're going to influence people. We're going to— we're going to do business together and it's going to be great. So yeah, those two books probably are the ones that I would say have been the most impactful more recently for my, my life.

Yeah, both of them very timeless books with the lessons they have to teach. Todd, thank you, my friend. I always enjoy hanging out with you. We do not get to spend enough time together, but thanks for being willing to show up and share your wisdom with the community and for being such a longtime supporter of Commsky.

We love you. It's my pleasure, Bobby. Thanks for the time. You bet.

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