Build people, build business

Welcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top executive leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. Now let's jump in and get started with our next guest.

Welcome to the Built by People podcast. Today I'm joined by Ken Sebaski. Ken, thanks for joining me today.

Oh, you're welcome. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Absolutely. To start out, tell me a little bit about your career journey. You know, the unexpected turns, what ultimately led you where you are today.

Oh, gosh. Well, given I. Given I've worked for 53 years, it's an awfully long journey. So I'll.

I'll.

I'll hit the highlights or the things that. That kind of shaped me and who I am. It's. To start with, it's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast is the name of it. One of my great bosses and mentors in my past. Yeah, gosh, five, six years into my career was a gentleman named Bob Eckert, who ultimately went on to be the CEO of Kraft Foods, as well as the chairman and CEO of Mattel. So he was a very successful leader, but he was a great mentor also. One of the first lessons he. He taught me as a young director of marketing and then soon to be a vice president of marketing working for him was, you have a simple job. All you have to do is two things. Build people, build business. And if you're not sure which one to work on, work on the build people part. Because the better a job you do on building people, the better a job you'll do at building the business. And that's been the closest thing to a mantra that I can say I've had throughout my career. It's something that if you'd work for me at any point, you would have heard me say it, you would have heard me talk about it, you would have looked at my calendar and saw that it was my focus, that I made sure that I was spending more than half my time on people things. So what enticed me to want to participate in your podcast is the fact that it's called Built by People because very few businesses that I've been a part of where the people haven't been the key to the business. So I'll leave it at that. My career journey started when I was 13 years old. I was laying in my backyard on a hammock reading a book and a gentleman that I affectionately refer to as Mike the Butcher wandered across the street from his butcher shop which was literally right across the street from my mom and dad's house and leaned on our fence and said hey, how'd you like to work this summer? And I said doing what? And he said well, why don't you come by around 4:30 and I'll show you what I'm thinking and you can tell me if you wanted to want to do it. And I did and the rest is history. I worked with Mike at his butcher shop which was called Freezer Pack from the time I was 13 until I was 21 and was packing up a U haul to drive to Chicago and go to business school at the Kellogg School at Northwestern. And Mike had a very successful business. He sold his business for a significant multiple and a significant premium and got himself a 52 foot yacht boat that he summered in Minneapolis St. Paul on the St. Croix river and wintered in Naples and had been a very successful man. And so many of the things that I practice I learned from him. I mean customer service, simple story. The biggest thing we sold were boxes individually wrapped flash frozen steaks. And so in Minnesota in the summer you sell a lot of those because people want to take advantage of the very short summer and grill. And so you know, you from Thursday morning until noon Saturday you know that those were just flying out the front door. One Saturday morning a woman came in with her box. The boxes were white bleach board stock with a logo on it and the name of what kind of steak, whether it be ribeye or top sterling, whatever. And the box had obviously sat out somewhere warm because all of the box had turned basically bloody red and brown kind of thing. When all the stakes had thawed out and all the juices had gotten out and she came in and crowd full of people. Imagine a customer service center of a grocery store butcher shop. But that's all there was. And the woman said look what somebody sold me. What are you going to do about this? And Mike was waiting on her and, and he, you know, took the box and said I am so sorry that we did this ma' Am hold on a second. And he came back and he gave her a brand new box. And then he gave her a coupon for another box, free to come back and get. And said, I am so sorry, you know, please accept my apology. Here's a brand new box, here's a coupon. She can come back after you use this one up and get a new one. And she thanked him. And you know, later that morning when there was a lull, I was like, what the hell, Mike?

Huh?

And he's like, well, the way I figure it, I gave away one box, two boxes. But I bet you I sold 20, 30, 50 more by, you know, the people she's already told about how I treated her and how the 15 people standing in the foyer ordering their own boxes of sake saw me act says, I think I just got some good word of mouth advertising without having to spend a nickel on other than two boxes of steaks. And it was like, okay. I mean, so it's. And he was always. Those are the kind of lessons that, that, you know, Mike taught me. It was, it was Mike who suggested I go on to business school, you know, out of college. It, it was, you know, Mike who actually tried to hire me when I got my mba. And, and I said, no, I didn't want to go work for a, you know, a small to medium sized butcher shop. I wanted to go to work for General Mills. But I, you know, Mike. Many of the initial lessons in my career came from, from Mike. There also was another early mentor in my life, and that was my nanny, my maternal grandmother, who we affectionately called Nanny. Nanny was five feet tall, 95 pounds. You know, at least in my dictionary, if you look up matriarch in the dictionary, there's a picture of nanny because she was at 5ft, she was large and in charge, and there was no doubt about it. And she was very good about teaching you life lessons and things that you carried with you. It was like one, one of her favorites. I know it wasn't hers. I know she didn't make it up, she stole it from somewhere. But who cares was you got two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, one mouth, use them proportionally. I mean, you know, and I always would say that to people and when I'd apply it when I was joining somewhere and in my first few months, make sure that I was spending more time listening and observing than I was talking, because that's the way you get to understand the business. That's the way you get to understand people. That's the way that you gain Their support. And that lesson came from Nanny and I both applied it and taught it throughout my life. She also used to say one of those I love, which is, if you don't know what to say, say the truth. It's just easier to remember. I have two very important role models I used throughout my life very early on, and I was lucky. That luck probably is what describes my whole career because I've had great mentors. I mean, I've had five or six different leaders that I've worked for that taught me so many things. You know, I talked about Bob Eckert and Build people, build business. You know, Rob Hawthorne at Pillsbury, you know, thinking about the customer and the notion that the customer writes the checks, you know, act like it kind of thing. So my career has been blessed by the kind of mentors I have, which is why now in my retirement, one of the things I'm doing is I'm mentoring what I call baby CEOs. I have a. I have five or six, all men right now. But there's a. There's a woman that I'm speaking with that could possibly become a mentee. They are new to being the top of the house. They're new to being in the C level role. And, you know, I'm meeting with them, most of them every other week, one or two of them every three weeks. But it's. It's helping them have someone to talk to who's been there, done that. And to me, it's kind of like giving back. It's what I had throughout my career. Why not with people I meet who may not have the luxury of that kind of a mentor? Have that. So it's paid off for me in terms of the perfunctory notion of my career. First 21 years were in the food industry. Great big companies like General Mills, Kraft, Pillsbury, conagra worked my way up through marketing roles until I ultimately was VP of marketing at Kraft and at Drackett. Went to Pillsbury to run their Green Giant business. Also ran the refrigerated baked goods business, then ultimately became senior vice president of sales and customer service for North America. I'll stop there because that was probably one of the major learning moments of my career in that I had a job where there wasn't a P and L. You're the head of sales. There wasn't all these marketing metrics. I mean, you sold stuff, and everybody that worked for you, for the most part, was somewhere where you couldn't look them in the eye. I mean, and so you know, I still remember this lesson, and I'll, I'll try to make it, you know, not, not R rated for the kids listening. But one of the things I did when I first was made the head of, of sales and service at Pillsbury was I invited the top hundred managers in the sales organization and think a sales organization with 8, 900 people. And so the top hundred brought them to Minneapolis, got them together. One of the things I had done many times in new jobs is I walk people through what I call my who am I? Presentation. It's sort of, why am I here? What do I believe in? How do I evaluate people? What have I been asked to do? What do I need from you? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in one of the slides, I talk about my beliefs. And in there I say, trusting, trustworthy behavior. You know what you say you do, you do do kind of thing. And in there I said, listen, folks, don't fuck with me on that one. And Pillsbury was the kind of company that had 800 lines that employees could call into to leave anonymous tips or complaints or questions or things like that. And our CEO, a gentleman named Paul Walsh, who's a great CEO, by the way, he right now serves as executive director of McLaren Racing. So he's flying high in F1, running the best team in F1. But he would listen to those recordings every morning. He'd get in 6:30, 7 in the morning. Listen. He knew I got in early, called me like a seven. He said, sebastie, come on up and see me. I said, what's up, Paul? He said, oh, we need to talk about your gathering Light yesterday. I said, oh, great, sure, come up. And he said, was there some point in your conversation where you use the Effenheimer? I was like, yeah, it was like when I talk about trusting, trustworthy behavior. I said, don't with me on this. And he said, yeah. He said, you know how we're really strong in the South? I said, well, yeah. He said, well, there's a lot of sales managers in your, in your team that are from the buckle of the Bible Belt there. And you swore in front of them. And you're their boss. You're like the big guy. And he said. He said, now, it's not about you swearing. That's not why I brought you up here. It's about you understanding that in the kind of job you now have, in the kind of job I have, your volume on, your microphone is turned up to an eight, whether you like it or not. I mean, it is you cannot look everybody in the eye. You cannot explain what do you mean? They just go with what you say and they interpret it. And what they know from what you said yesterday is you swore and you know they didn't have, you didn't have a chance to apologize or for them to not feel bad about it because you can't look them in the eye and have a one on one conversation with all of them. And I was like, shit, I'm now in a role where you can't touch everybody. Where you can't. And it struck me, it was like, oh God. And it was probably one of the best jobs I had. It was the best job I had up until that point because it was all about people. I mean a sales organization is a people organization. And yes you got metrics and yes you have hit goals, but it is all about people and personalities and people in the right place and all those kind of things. So that was a major transition for my leadership. I don't think I ever could have become a CEO of a company if I hadn't done that. I mean it was that transformational. I went from Pillsbury to a shorts tin at something called Department 56 and then on to ConAgra where I was president of their grocery brands division. Think products like Orville Redenbacher, Chef Boyardee, Hunt's tomato products, Wesson oil, et cetera, et cetera was a three and a half billion dollar division of ConAgra. And it was in Southern California, was out there. And two things happened. One, my mother in law was d diagnosed with lung cancer and it was terminal. And conagra decided it was going to consolidate all of its operations into either Omaha or Chicago. And so I knew I was moving, I knew I was moving sometime in the next 12 to 18 months. And you know, we also knew that we had a mother, mother in law that was dying as a family. We made the decision we wanted to get back to Minnesota and there were no more food companies for me to work for in Minnesota. I didn't want to move to Chicago or Omaha and commute. And so I just started looking and I landed on my feet at Polaris. The manufacturer of ATVs, motorcycles, snowmobiles, you know, deck boats, et cetera now and had a chance to get out of the food industry. And I still remember how many of my friends that I grew up with in the food industry thought I was just an idiot. For one, going from a president of a division with a president's title to being I was chief customer officer you know, think sales, marketing, dealer development, new business development, that kind of stuff was what was under me. I reported to the CEO directly, I was part of the executive team. But you know, in my friends in the food industry, I was taking a risk, I was getting out of the industry, I was taking a step down. They didn't need to know that I actually was making more money and had bigger incentive programs and all that kind of stuff. But in their minds I was. It was easily the best move ever in my career because I realized what fun it is to work for a smaller company where your learning curve is like this and where you had to think about how doing this on Orville Redenbacher, on Green Giant could be applied to doing this inside Pillsbury. And it was a ton of fun. It was a whole different product line. 3 to 5 year development cycles sold through dealer networks. You know, a smallish company, it was a billion dollar company. But when, when the average price of what you sell is $10,000, you don't sell a lot of them to generate a billion dollars in sales, right? I mean, and so you. It was a small company and that there was no looking back. It was also a mission oriented company. The mission of Polaris was to get people out. It was there they talked, their tagline was the way out. And the whole point was to use their vehicles to get outside, to get out in the wilderness, to experience nature. And that was the kind of mission that permeated everything. And so I had my first real experience at a company where the mission was court everything from Polaris. I lost out in a horse race to become the next president and as a result my job was consolidated and I had to move on. The good news is that a past board member of Polaris knew of me and hired me to become his president and COO at Capella Education Company, an online university with just adults with primarily graduate degrees that was growing 30% annually. So I moved from one small company to another small company, to an online business, to a rapid growth business and it was just more of the same, but also to another mission business where the mission was educating adults and giving them the tools necessary to extend their careers. I was president and COO there I had a chance to become CEO of another online institution. And from there I joined Alpine Investors as a private equity firm. I was an operating partner where my responsibility was to help with portfolio companies, sit on boards, serve as a consultant, maybe an interim executive, any, all of the above. One of my companies was America's Thrift Stores. We had reasons why we had to remove the CEO. And so I stepped in on an interim basis to be CEO and to find my successor. And when I stepped in, I found more things wrong than we thought or knew. And so I made a commitment to staying on for a year. And six months into that year, the board asked me, would I do this permanently. My wife and stepdaughter flew out to Birmingham to see schools, visit areas, go to the beach, go to the mountains with all the things, and decided, yeah, we're going to do this. And so by the fall of 2014, we picked up and moved from Orange County, California to Birmingham, Alabama. And I was CEO for, you know, 12 years and saw the company go from 16 stores and 40 million in revenue and a million in EBITDA to 40 stores and 130 million in revenue and 13 million in EBITDA in that period of time. So all being part of another mission driven company where the mission for us was to give back. Because when you're a thrift store, you just give back by being. You keep stuff out of landfills, you provide things for people who can't afford other places. You're creating jobs as you're growing. And for us, we had charity relationships. You know, we'll give three and a half million dollars to great charity partners like Make a Wish and Children's Miracle Network this year. So last 12 years have been a great ride. And the last half of my career has been tremendously exciting because of the growth curves, because of the mission orientation, because of the new industries. But none of it could have happened if I didn't have the 21 years of foundation at, you know, consumer food companies with great bosses who taught me a lot.

Wow, Ken, I love that. And what a, what a testament to just amazing, amazing career. That's really cool.

This is going to be a very

hard question for you to answer. And so maybe we focus on kind of the latter half of American thrift stores. But, but what was maybe an initiative or one or two initiatives that you rolled out that you're really proud of during that time? Oh,

I can, I can speak to, I'll do a couple, but I'll, I'll grab back in my past and grab one and then I'll, then I'll speak to probably the biggest one, America's thrift stores. In my past, one of the businesses I was asked to run, I was, I was running the green giant business for Pillsbury. It had another business that had basically the Pillsbury business. So think of all the Pillsbury branded The things in the grocery store, the, you know, frozen things, the dough in a can in the refrigerator case, biscuits and cinnamon rolls and stuff, the cake mixes and brownie mixes and stuff in the. In the middle of the grocery store. That was always run as a single entity. But of those three parts of the Pillsbury brand, one was significantly more important than the other, and that was the refrigerated baked goods business. And it was a, at best, stagnant, at worst, declining business. And my boss, the. I reported you to the president and COO who reported to the CEO who had called me to yell at me for swearing. And they decided that, you know what? This business needs focus. We're going to pull it out. We're going to give it to Sebaski, you know, and we're going to ask him to fix it. I mean, and so they asked me. They came to me and they're like, okay, we want you to run this business. It's like it's half the size of the Green Giant business. Yes, but it's four times more profitable than the Green Giant business. And it's not growing, and we need it to grow. I said, okay, then can I pick my own team? Can I look across the company and pick somebody from R and D, somebody from sales, somebody from marketing to be my vice presidents, you know, and work with me? And they said, yes. And so I got the team right. And then we started looking at what was going on with the way the business was run. And basically what we discovered was a real myopic focus about our business is the business of refrigerated dough products sold in cans in the refrigerated case. It's like. But that's not how customers thought about it, because it was part of their baked goods universe that, yes, they might buy cookies out of the dairy case, yes, they might buy biscuits, but they probably were going to buy biscuits out of the frozen case. They're probably going to make their own. And the whole perspective was, when your business is only this 8 to 10ft in the refrigerated case, and you far and away dominate that, you don't think creatively. You think, I got 80 share. I got 85 share. Hell, I got 99 share of biscuits. You know, I'm. I'm winning. But then when you say. And you open the aperture and say, no, we're part of baked goods. And for cookies, we may have 99% share of the refrigerated cookies. We have three share of cookies, and there's a whole shitload of Things going on with cookies that we aren't doing because we're complacent. And so basically what we did is we redefined the world. The business used to be called the prepared dough business. Prepared dough, meaning. And we changed the name of it to refrigerated baked goods. We changed all of our market share calculations to be the broader market. And so instead of pounding our chest and saying, look, we got 99 share in cookies, it was like, oh, shit, we got 3 share in cookies. And then we started looking at what was going on around us in other categories. And you saw Mrs. Fields with big chunky cookies, you saw great big biscuits and cinnamon rolls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we got to start doing some of those things. But to do some of those things was going to require investment and capital. And so we went to the board and said, look, we can grow this business, but to grow this business means that we have to for at least a year, and maybe even two, not have to grow profit. And if anything, we may even have to, like, let profits decline. And that was a hard sell, but they agreed. And we then basically put together a pipeline of dozens of different new products that we inserted. We had to convince the grocers to let us expand the size of the section in the refrigerator case. We had to come up with ways for them to do that without them having to incur labor and costs. So we literally had to create a section that went in and we'd put it in. The net result, we took the business from 600 million to almost a billion dollars in two and a half years. I mean, by just thinking about the business on its side, as opposed to in the way that it had been thought about. So the lesson there was always kind of tip the business on its side and look at it in a different way. Redefine the market, redefine your competition. Look at that redefined competition for ideas, and then apply those ideas back to your business. Meaning that's what we did. So that was historic example. America's thrift store example was basically a wholesale change in culture and team. The business was not a growth business. It was not opening new stores. It was the. When we made the investment, it was to open new stores. And so. But to open new stores, we had to have a pipeline of people. To have a pipeline of people meant that the bench that we had needed to be, you know, top notch. Which means that out of the 16 stores that we had store managers on, there maybe were two or three or four that were going to stay. And we had to replace all of them. And so to attract people of the caliber necessary that we were looking for for the future, we ended up having to pay more, which meant we had to figure out and keep growing and put the right processes in place and all that. So it was a fundamental shift in talent that was necessary to ultimately get to the point of being able to start adding new stores and expanding. Because in the thrift business, it's not like you can go grab someone from Target or Walmart and say, hey, run this business. You can grab them from there, make them an assistant manager, teach them the ropes, the business and then promote them. But you couldn't start adding new stores until you had that bench. And so, you know, we started building that bench. We started hiring, I think we had 15, 18 people from Walmart, 8, 10 people from Target, half a dozen from Dollar General, all, a few from Ross, all to create a pipeline to then start opening new stores. As we brought them in. We also clearly grooved the processes around how we did what we did. So it was scalable and expandable. That meant new technology and information Systems in an 18 month period installed Netweet, Netsuite as our ERP. We installed Day for is our HRIs, we installed Dundas as our business intelligence system, all within 18 months. So imagine building a team, building a pipeline, finding store locations, putting those processes and systems in place all at once over a two to three year period so that we could then start opening three, four, five stores a year to get to the 40 we have now.

Wow, that's awesome.

So it's a lot. I mean I've had lots of fun in my career. I mean it's. And I've had success. I mean it's like success is fun and so it's always more fun when you grow. And you know, it's funny because you know how people ask you what's like, what's your elevator speech? What's the short version of telling somebody who you are? Like if you're going up eight floors in elevator. And I talk about me as being the growth guy. I mean I grow things and at the simplest level, I grow my family. I mean I have four kids and one step kid and I think they're all very successful. I grow roses. I mean my dad taught me how to grow roses and they're all, I got a whole bunch of them around my house that I planted since I moved here to Birmingham and that I grow businesses and I've had the luxury and wonderful success of Being able to grow a whole bunch of businesses across multiple industries. So I grow things.

Like I said, you're a wealth of knowledge. And I love this. I have one more question for you with time permitting today. So if you could leave one piece of advice for our community. Maybe something you wish you had known earlier in your career or something that you learned over the course of your career, which I'm sure you learned a lot of awesome lessons. But what would be that one thing?

Well, find. Have. Seek out a mentor. I mean, have, have someone who you know you can talk to, who can talk to you, who you can learn from, who you can ask questions of. And in most cases, that's not going to be your boss because the subordinate superior relationship doesn't necessarily allow that. In some cases it does. And you're lucky then. And I was lucky in that respect. But I think having had mentors throughout my career that were teaching me things that were indelible, that were not just about the job I had, but the future I was moving toward was so critical. So that would be one. I think the second one would be the, the one that I learned early on in my career about customers. And it's like it's one last story. Sorry, I'm a storyteller. I should have warned you. At General Mills, when you start as a marketing assistant, one of the things you do within your first year is you do three months of sales training. So you literally get out in the field, join at the hip with a salesman. And mine was a gentleman named David Ambrose. He was the sales manager responsible for the super value account. Super value great big wholesaler. And I was in my sales training with him when General Mills was launching Honey Nut Cheerios. So you may not ever remember a day when there weren't 10 different flavors of Cheerios in the cereal aisle. But there was. There used to be just a yellow box. And Honey Nut Cheerios was the first one. And all of the research, all of the testing that General Mills had done say that it's going to be the largest new cereal ever introduced. And their research was right, it was. And it ended up being. It's a multi in it in and of itself. It's a multi billion dollar brand. I mean, Honey Nut Cheerios, a multi billion dollar business. Go figure. We were making the sales presentation to the buyer at Supervalue. And David Ambrose, being a smart salesperson, scheduled the appointment for the last appointment right before the Friday afternoon buying committee meetings so that the buyer would have all the thoughts about Honey Nut Cheerios. Fresh in his mind and, you know, very thoughtful. It's like, so we were ready. Back then, you didn't have laptops, you had flip charts. You know, we had a cooler with milk, we had the cereal, we had bowls and we were ready to go. We got the, the appointment was at one. We were going to have 30 minutes. We got there at 12:30, we were all set. One came and went, 1:15 came and went, 1:30 came and went. And at 1:40 the gentleman comes out and gets us and says, hey, I got 10, 15 minutes. The buying committee's at 2 and I just need a bio break before I go into the buying committee. So what do you got to sell? And so we basically just fed him the cereal and talked. And as we're driving away, we're on not an interstate, but still a four lane road that you can turn on and off of. And I'm like, what the hell, David? I mean, how could they try? I mean, the biggest loose cereal. I mean, I'm just ranting and raving. Pulls off to the side of the road and he shuts the car off, turns in his chair and he looks at me and says, I need you to pay attention. This is probably going to be the single most important lesson that you'll get in this whole sales training. Okay? He's got my attention and I look at him and he said, the customer writes the checks. You don't get paid, I don't get paid. The company doesn't make money unless they write us the checks. And while they may not always be right, we have to act like and treat them like they write the checks. It's that kind of customer focus that I brought with me everywhere. I literally told this story, went around all 16 stores to introduce myself to the employees and I let them know that their next paychecks that at the bottom of their pay stub it would say the customer writes the checks. Act like it. I mean, because I think that whomever your customer is, whatever your business is, you're in business to satisfy the needs of the customers. Either needs that they know they have or even needs that they don't know they have. I'm not sure there was a, there was a driver of a van that thought, you know what? There's not enough cup holders in their van. Until Chrysler put out their minivans with a dozen cup holders in them. And people realized, holy shit, this is nice. We have cup holders. I mean, but the point being, products are developed, service are developed to meet a need of a customer. So you need to act like the customer writes the checks. So those would be the two things that I find a mentor. Remember, the customer writes the checks.

Ken. Yeah. You're a wealth of knowledge, my friend. Thank you for joining us on the Build by People podcast. Thank you for your years of service and who you are. Really appreciate your time.

I appreciate it, too. Thank you so much for asking me.