Speaker 1:
As a bank that focuses on business, we work with business leaders all day, every day. We have a front row seat to what's working and what has potential. The first business bank Podcast is dedicated to sharing insights to help you work better, smarter, and faster to achieve your goals. Let's get into the show.
Mark Meloy:
Hello, I'm Mark Meloy, CEO of First Business Bank. I like to welcome you to another episode of the First Business Bank podcast. Our topic today is leadership in challenging times. I'm joined by my colleague, Jim Hartlieb, president of First Business Bank, as well as Jon Tatooles, co-founder of Sound Devices, David Simon, president of Veridian Homes, and Nancy Spelsberg, president of BCP transportation. So I'm going to kick this conversation off with the question for everyone. Over the last six months, we've experienced a lot of challenges in leadership, what are you most proud of in terms of your leadership of your teams?
David Simon:
Uh, really taking it day by day and, and the moment that is right now and taking advantage of the opportunities, uh, recognizing the challenges, you know, we're a 22 year old startup and we operate in a lot of ways like a startup culture. So we've, we've something presents itself in terms of a challenge. You know, we have a phenomenal team and our people really just, you know, kept moving forward and, and really just focus their energies to, you know, to, to get through this. And, uh, you know, we're still doing that. So we're still in a, you know, in a, in a high activity mode, we really haven't, uh, you know, taken a look in the rear view mirror a whole lot with this and, or just kind of moving forward. So, uh, you know, it's, we're really proud of the way we've walked through this, even though when you look at hindsight, you had a couple bad months and, uh, you know, but looking forward, we just continue to say, this is where we're at and this is how we have to operate.
Nancy Spelsberg:
Yeah, I agree. Jon and David, I think, um, you know, looking back everything was happening so fast and, and you worry as you grow as a company, are you getting away from that ability to stay nimble and make decisions quickly and on the fly and empower people? And so I think I was very impressed with how all of our employees responded to that ever-changing, I mean, it was changing by the minute, not necessarily even by the day anymore. And for the employee group and our management group to remain nimble and make decisions and changes on the fly, I was just really, really impressed with. So it's nice to know that even though, as we're growing, we're, we're still, still, uh, nimble small startup, um, that we were years ago.
Jim Hartlieb:
Yeah, for the bank, for the bank, it was a very specific project. It was the paycheck protection program that came out early in the pandemic. You know, the, the feedback from the SBA was limited. It was inconsistent. And yet we had to rally a team of 50 or 60 remote employees to build a system, to be able to get very much needed capital out to our clients in a very anxious time. And, um, being able to do that, you know, ultimately it was 700 loans, 700 clients that were benefiting from the capital that they received. And now on the back end, you know, we're, I think we're kind of leaders in the forgiveness process. We have processed and sent to the SBA 144, roughly 20% of our applications. We have yet to hear anything back from the SBA on this process, but we're trying to do our part. And, and that was the most proud accomplishment, uh, for our team was how we rallied to try to take care of our clients in the best way we could.
Mark Meloy:
Yeah, the word that I think about the last six months for many businesses, many leaders, uh, teams really is resilience. And I think all of your comments really, really touched on that without saying that specifically, but it's the, you know, kind of the adaptiveness and I think that was a word that was used, uh, in terms of the current circumstances and the circumstances that were changing so quickly and so often. Talk about what you've seen in terms of your clientele and how, how these, uh, more stress times have impacted them and then how that has come through in, um, each of your businesses and how you've chosen to make, uh, choices or, or changes.
David Simon:
Oh, most of our businesses really focused around, um, B to C. You know, our, our, our consumer is the end user of the product in this case, homeowners, you know, um, buying homes and, um, and so it was a, it's one thing I, and I don't want to minimize this business to business, you know, you're thinking strategy and supply chain management and those types of things, you know, in this case, my consumer is dealing with a whole rapid amount of emotions. You know, how do I get into a home? Am I going to have a, a job, you know, for awhile there and earlier in the pandemic I wasn't sure if there was a tsunami or cancellations coming, right? Because of homeowners that may be unemployed, or just lack of consumer confidence about moving ahead with a purchase. Uh, soon into it, we realized that wasn't the case certainly, and, and Federal Reserve obviously, uh, managed to lower registration, which has helped.
David Simon:
And we've had a low inventory environment of, of homes available, but still very stressful whenever you're making these financial decisions as a consumer and typically a home is some of the largest, you know, investments or purchases I'll make, there's always a lot of stress. It's, think about it. You're making decisions about your family, what school district you're moving to, if you have kids in school and how that's going to affect them. So we've had to deal with a lot of just, how do we manage their own stress at a time that we've had to quickly innovate on how we changed the buying process, you know, buying and building a home has always been a very individual one-on-one experience. Walking homes, uh, visually touching and the materials that will go into the home in our design studio. Well, given the changes, we had to go completely virtual almost immediately. And we weren't in a realer position to provide the best virtual experience. So our team needed to adapt very quickly.
David Simon:
And we'll, maybe talk more about that later in this podcast. So it was really managing the, the internal change, you know, the paradigm we're all going through, um, with our own team, how do we adapt to provide them an outstanding home buying and building experience at the same time, managing their own stress and having to change in the middle of a buying, um, process, how we do business? No, we can't do this any longer. We can't walk the home individually with you right now, we have to lessen that, which is normally a high touch part of our business to minimize that. So how do we adapt and innovate, which we've, we've, we've done amazingly well and our consumers have adapted to as, as well thank, thank goodness.
David Simon:
So it has been challenging managing our own experience and our own concerns, fears, but then dealing with ultimately a home buyer who is going through a myriad of those things, uh, and their own challenges. So it's really, I can talk hours on that topic, but just high level. It was, it was an interesting, um, course with our consumer, but finding the resilience and adaptability by both us and them has been, um, really, uh, just a wonderful experience to have gone through from that end and what has shaped our business to be like in the future, um, well is going to be an outstanding, uh, outcome quite frankly.
Nancy Spelsberg:
In the trucking world, it's been, it's been a really interesting year, I think, best described by the best of times and the worst of times in March, there was all the consumer hoarding and, and there was a huge demand for trucking. And then in about mid April, after everything was shut down for awhile, there was what they called a freight cliff. And so, um, we were fortunate, um, 19 of our top 20 customers all stayed open throughout. Um, one only, the one only shut down for about two weeks and then actually reopened up to make, um, emergency field hospital beds, um, in, in light of the, of COVID. So really only one customer was shut down for two weeks. And so it was just an interesting challenge.
Nancy Spelsberg:
And then once the country started opening back up again, we have seen unprecedented demands, spot market rates are at all time highs. Um, and all of our customers just seem to be, uh, constantly behind from their production and so they've had challenges in terms of getting employees back and ramping back up, um, adding additional shifts to keep up with demand from their products. And so it's just been the, the, the best of times and the worst of times in light of trucking, the past few months has been a challenge, just keeping up with all of the demand from our customers, um, and getting shipments of raw materials to them as well as their finished goods out, um, delivered out. So it's been, it's been an interesting year and trying to communicate and coordinate with these customers and ensure that we can get timely deliveries for them.
Jon Tatooles:
Our businesses, uh, relies on freelance sound mixers who are doing feature film, episodic, television, reality sports, uh, kinds of production news and, you know, when this first really hit in the end of March, April, they were essentially dark. So we had customers who were idle, uh, you know, they were uncertain what their next steps were, what their job was. And so, you know, were the toolmakers making equipment for them. And they're not necessarily going to be buying new tools if they're not going to be working. So we saw kind of a, uh, a progressive increase in activity first outside the US which is a big component of our, of our market and then we started to see smaller productions, news style production, starting to go back into, into the field.
Jon Tatooles:
And now we're starting to see those drama pieces coming back, and we're starting to see Southern California starting to be busy again. So, uh, for our customers, it was a really uncertain time. The one thing that was a benefit for us is that in those uncertain times, when they're not necessarily working, they like to talk about gear and, uh, there, they like to talk about their, their equipment and tools and so we, you know, we're, we're very aggressive in engaging those conversations to make sure that we were part of that conversation, even though we knew that they weren't ready to buy something or, you know, the market wasn't necessarily there, we knew that it was going to come back and we want to be part of the conversation. And we, we are starting to see that happen and we're even starting to see some of the studios in Southern California, starting to go back on the lot and get back into production.
Mark Meloy:
You talked about adapting and Nancy, I'm going to pick on you because I know you adapted in and pivoted in a big way to a product that you've never made before. And I don't know if Jon or David, if, once you hear her story, if you had a similar situation, but Nancy, do you want to talk about how you kind of rallied some of your staff to, to, uh, help with the PPE situation?
Nancy Spelsberg:
Yeah, so that was actually kind of a fun, a fun project in our warehouse operation. Um, we, we will ship, uh, air cleaners, air filters and disinfectant wipes. And so when we had the stuff in stock, it was a lot of work for the warehouse staff. When we were stocked out though, then it was a wait and see. So what we did in order to, um, keep them working at full time, um, and available then to, to ship when we had the product to ship out of here is, uh, we, we were, um, assembling face shields. And so, um, we had all, we had a production line set up, and as, as time permitted, then they could assemble face shields and we actually then just donated those to various hospitals, clinics, testing sites, nursing homes. Um, it was a donation, they went all across the country, a lot to Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey, and then especially even here in Wisconsin and Iowa in the Midwest. Oh, as well as Chicago.
Nancy Spelsberg:
And so all the employees really, really enjoyed that. In fact, I had additional office staff asking to be a part of that. I think at some point, you know, you feel a little bit helpless and you hear about the nationwide shortage on PPE, and how are, you know, some of these first responders are out there without proper protection and you want to do something, you want to help. And so it, it was just a neat-feel-good thing that the employees really took a ton of pride in. We were getting pictures and thank you notes back from, from all parts of the country with, uh, giving us pictures of people using the face shields out, out on, out on the, um, while they're working.
Nancy Spelsberg:
And so it was a really neat thing I, I guess I underestimated, um, from my standpoint, it was just trying to keep people busy and do something that added value and really the amount of pride that all the employees, even those who, who weren't part of the assembly took and the fact that, that we were doing that and providing that and donating those, those face shields, um, was just, um, um, it was just a really neat thing. And so we, it was a... We did that for about two or three months. We were assembling and shipped out five or 10,000, somewhere between five and 10,000 face shields.
Jim Hartlieb:
If you, if you come to[inaudible 00:13:42] business, you'll see some of our client facing people, wearing those as well. So thanks for your donation to Bombay.
Nancy Spelsberg:
Yeah, you're welcome, Jim.
Jim Hartlieb:
We, we actually had a, a very similar experience exactly what face shields with that UW Madison, uh, open source design, which, which was easy to assemble. We worked with our vendors and came up with a design that we could build in house. And we had other, uh, local businesses in the Reedsburg area helping us assemble face shields and, uh, making PPE and we actually continued to keep that in our line because we know that our customers who are working on set, uh, often want to have kind of a safety kit and, uh, having a face shield is part of that is, is a useful tool for them. So, uh, yeah, we, we, we too took those idle cycles that we had in, uh, in April and took our energies, came up with, uh, uh, you know, product assembled it, worked with our, uh, our buyers to get material and, uh, started to build out. So it was, it was a very rewarding thing. And we still have that as a, as a model in our line. It'll, it may very well be persistent model in our product line.
Mark Meloy:
Well, Nancy and Jon, I applaud you for that. That's outstanding, how you were able to pivot and yet support, you know, the, the community at, at large. So I guess maybe fortunately for us, we didn't have idle time. So, um, we, we didn't head down that we had a few weeks where we, you know, slowed production because we were concerned about potential cancellations and so forth, but we powered right through it. We've been very, very blessed to be in a very, um, strong market, uh, housing in Southern Wisconsin, for example. But, uh, I applaud both of you for, uh, the innovation and, and what you did for the community as well. So outstanding.
Jim Hartlieb:
Good stuff. I wanted to touch on something. That's probably one of the more common questions we get at the bank, which is around staffing. Are you in the office? Are you not? Every business is a little different, some have a plant floor and you can't work remote, some are in the field and you can't work remote, others have a fair amount of office staff. And so I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how you've handled those situations, where there may be home healthcare issues, um, underlying conditions that you have to deal with, maybe David I'll, I'll start with you and maybe kind of talk us through how your staff has adapted and, and how you as a leader have had to manage that situation.
David Simon:
Yeah, certainly it's been a learning process and an evolution, uh, as we've gone through this, um, we, we really, out of the process, we had a number of, uh, team members that simply were working, many were working from home, we simply didn't have work for them. And so we said the best place for you is at home and continued of course, to, to pay them, uh, continue their employee status. Um, certainly because of PPP and, um, and, and so forth. That was what it was there for. Uh, and in other cases, um, we have, um, part of our team is already in and out of the office a lot, managing various homes under construction and communities from Madison to, to Milwaukee. So there's a lot of in and out time, but we still have over a hundred employees at our main office in Madison. Uh, so we, uh, we were very fortunate in the fact that, you know, we- as of Jan one, we didn't have enough equipment to have everybody work remotely. Um, unless you start taking your hard drives home and moving everything out and we looked at doing that.
David Simon:
So we made a decision, it was very fortunate. Um, it was right about February 1st. I said, you know, team, I don't know where this is going. This could get really bad. So order now all the equipment we needed to do to everybody, to remote working in the organization. And thankfully we did at that point place the order, because what you understand what happened is many companies did the same thing and you couldn't get, um, their orders filled. So we were fortunate enough to be able to do that, um, and moved a significant amount of our team remotely, still are today.
David Simon:
I'd say at any given moment, we probably have maybe 20% in the office and some positions just simply need to be more efficiently, um, done here. Um, so we truly tried to work with everybody's different in different situation, um, homeschooling situations, childcare issues, uh, could you do the job at night or make up for it on the weekends if possible? Um, you really try to be less, um, structured around what, you know, and how can you be open to quickly adapting to, uh, a challenging time with your team? Um, because everybody has a different set of circumstances.
David Simon:
And for us, it was about how do we move together, uh, as an organization and, and, and, and support each other. We've always had a very tight knit, collaborative organization, very social, and it's hard to do certainly remotely the pass on the back and the, the successes and sharing those successes as at work or opportunities for improvement, the, the challenges, um, but taking each and every one of those as, as an individual circumstance and trying to craft how you approach that, uh, as how we went after that.
David Simon:
And like I said, in some cases, some people just came back to work just recently, uh, in the last couple of months. So what did we really need? Somebody sitting at the front reception and when we had the front door locked and who, who is securing? Who who's coming and going into our design studio? So eventually we did bring Phyllis our front door ambassador back to our organization. Uh, so, um, it really meant you, you had to be flexible, you had to be empathetic, you had to really use your EQ, uh, as, as well as your IQ, right? Going, going through this challenging time.
Nancy Spelsberg:
We were a trucking company so our drivers are all over the lower 48 States. Um, it, it... We have warehouse workers and mechanics. So there's really very few positions that even are just could work remotely. And so we have actually stayed coming to work, coming to the office throughout. Um, we just made sure that everybody was at least six feet away from the workspaces as we put up some partitions in some, um, plastic barriers. And so, um, it, it, it was an interesting thing in the beginning. Uh, it was nice from a traffic standpoint (laughs), there was no traffic to deal with getting to work.
Nancy Spelsberg:
Um, and then we, of course tried to accommodate, we've had some quarantine orders and things. And so there are a few people who can work remotely, and we've tried to accommodate that where possible. Um, but for the most part, um, very few. And so we've been coming, coming into the office throughout, and, and I think at first everyone was a little, Oh, geez, it might be kind of nice to be at home. But then after a few weeks, I think that changed and everybody was actually thankful to be coming in and maybe just for that social aspect, that interaction, uh, you, you, you start to miss that after a while you don't have that, the water cooler talk.
Jon Tatooles:
Sound Devices, we have two, uh, main facilities in Wisconsin. We've got our Reedsburg facility, which is our assembly and warehousing and so that function really can't be done remotely. And fortunately, we've got a good amount of space and we're able to keep a very safe facility and, and continue to, and I think those individuals are in that environment appreciate having a place to go. Uh, in our Madison office, which is where I'm sitting right now, I'm the only one in the office here, uh, in this, uh, you know, 5,000 square foot space. Uh, you know, we've been set up for remote work, you know, for years and many of our engineers oftentimes work remotely. We work with, uh, remote contractors so video conferencing is kind of natural for us. We've been doing this for a long time.
Jon Tatooles:
So it was really an extension for a lot of the knowledge workers, the engineers, software engineers, uh, you know, there's some, you know, test equipment and things like that. And we have that here in Madison and it's accessible. Uh, the Reedsburg facility is still accessible. So it's, it's a balance we've certainly extended more of our remote workforce, uh, and, and more people are working remotely, but, uh, you know, it's, it's kind of a natural extension of what we're doing. So from a, from an output standpoint, we're able to continue to have the same amount of output. And I think it's a nice balance and, uh, you know, our staff really appreciates being able to kind of work between those two worlds.
Mark Meloy:
That completes part one of our conversation. Tune in for part two, to hear more thoughts from our business leaders.
Speaker 1:
If you want more content, like what you just heard delivered straight to your inbox, go to firstbusinessbankpodcast.com. And if you haven't already make sure to subscribe to the First Business Bank podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, please leave a quick rating of the show. Thanks so much for listening. First Business Bank, member FDIC.