Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about Omaha Steaks on their website: https://www.omahasteaks.com.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5).
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Nate Rempe is the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Omaha Steaks. He is the first person outside of the Simon family to serve as President & CEO in more than 100 years.

Nate previously served the company as Vice President and Chief Information Officer. Prior to joining the Omaha Steaks team, he was Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Nebraska Book Company. He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and completed his graduate education at Creighton University, where he later joined the Executive Faculty in the Department of Information Science & Technology. He has also held various independent advisory board positions including one at ClassBundle, LLC (a Nelnet company) and is a named inventor on four United States patents directed to technology and business processes.

Beyond his passion for food (and steak, in particular), Nate has a long track record of nurturing and inspiring others to become better leaders. His unique abilities and strengths motivate high-performing teams and drive business success. Nate balances his professional success with what he describes as his most rewarding role of dedicated husband and father.

Transcript
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Speaker 1 0:00
How would you like to run a 100 year old startup Omaha Steaks has been around for over a century and has been tremendously successful throughout achieving every marketer’s dream of becoming a household name. The secret, according to CEO Nate rempy, is to act like a startup and constantly innovate. We’ll give a taste of his innovative leadership ideas in this episode that you can chew on at the innovative leadership institute. We obviously focus on innovation, on helping you as a leader, adopt an innovative mindset, find out how we live up to our name online at innovative leadership.com

Maureen 0:53
this is innovating leadership co creating our future. I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the innovative leadership institute where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in this mission today is Nate Rempe, President and CEO of Omaha stakes. We’ll be talking about how Omaha Steaks continues to innovate. So Nate, welcome to the show. Thanks. Maureen, nice to be here. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about Omaha Steaks, and how long have you been at the helm, and what’s changed since you’ve been running the company?

Speaker 1 1:24
Yeah, you know, as I was sort of prepping for the discussion today, I was thinking, what is the elevator speech that describes Omaha’s takes? And I thought to myself, well, maybe I should look in the elevator itself. So I took a journey, went down the stairs, looked at the elevator in our headquarters, and it struck me that on the front of the elevator, it said a passion built into a company, a company built into an icon. One thing at the center the best stakes in the world, and that, in one phrase, really describes Omaha Steaks. It is a passion that was started in 1917 by the Simon family. They came over from Latvia to escape anti semitism, what they knew how to do was to butcher they started a small butcher shop in Omaha, and it’s kind of a fun story. They were really starting from scratch. Didn’t have a lot of capital to have a facility to run their business in the area. Was a table manufacturing company called Table supply company, so they bought the building, and they moved the CO in the name to the right on the outside of the building, and put the word meat there. So Omaha Steaks originally was table supply meat company. You could actually see pictures in the early 1900s of table supply meat company. Later on, of course, decades later, became Omaha Steaks. But that is, I think, really demonstrative of this idea of innovation, in being really thoughtful with how you create this company from scratch. Over the years, this feeling of innovation and entrepreneurship, and really the story of the American dream, has persisted in our culture. It’s a family company through and through, not just in that it’s owned partially by the family, but also that people that work here feel like they’re a part of the legacy of the business and the history of Omaha stakes. And as we talk more about how you inspire people to accept and embrace change, being a part of a story and a legacy, I think, is an important piece of that puzzle.

Maureen 3:23
I would love for our listeners to get a feel for what that legacy is, because some of them certainly work for iconic brands and others never have right? So 100 year old company, a little over 100 years now, you took over. And one of the things that comes to mind as we think about some of the iconic brands now is the things that made them iconic 50 years ago, 100 years ago, as the world changes, they haven’t evolved with the environment, and some of them will be the companies formerly known as fill In the fly, sure. So, what is Omaha Steaks doing? And what are you doing that will keep Omaha Steaks as a legacy brand and a legend well beyond your tenure.

Speaker 1 4:12
You know, at first glance, Omaha Steaks looks like a food company, lots of beautiful pictures of food every really channel we exist in, whether it’s in print or on TV or on our website, we show our amazing products. But the truth is, Maureen is we are an experiences company. Our mission statement speaks of this. We create experiences that bring people together, putting our customer at the center of everything we do is how we continue and have been successful for 107 years. We start most meetings at Omaha stakes by saying who’s at the top of the organizational chart? Quote, unquote. Now the answer to that question is not Nate. It’s actually the customer, kind of with resounding excitement. And you know, to actually put the customer first and to make decisions that put the customer first is. A difficult and rare thing, and to create a culture that feels like they can make those hard decisions, and to ensure that in a consistent fashion, that when we do things or create things or change things, that we keep the customer at the center is really the secret sauce here to how we’ve been around for 107 years, five generations of putting the customer at the center is something pretty special, and we feel a responsibility as a culture and as a team to continue that legacy.

Maureen 5:28
I want to hear more about putting the customer first. I think of an experience where I had taken a flight going skiing. My skis didn’t arrive when I did. It was late at night. I’m on hold for an hour, listening to the people on hold say how much they value me, and I’m thinking I’m sitting at the carousel at midnight watching my skis not come out, and it’s really hard to feel like I’m first sure the more I hear that voice say that, the more I’m angry. Most organizations say they are customer first. What do you do that actually makes you customer first?

Speaker 1 6:06
To create something that is really objective there, that people can kind of sink their teeth into, maybe literally and figuratively, is to stand behind the experience. So we’ve created this concept that we call the 100% guarantee, and we champion it internally, and it literally is for any reason or no reason at all. If a customer is not absolutely satisfied, then we do whatever it takes to make that right. And I tell my leaders often that it’s a neat phenomenon that sometimes the most upset customer is the best opportunity to create a champion for the brand long term, after that mistake has been made, you’re defined as a company and a brand and how you react, because you can’t do it right 100% of the time. You know, as much as you might try things happen, you might fall down, packages might be late, phone calls might be dropped, any number of things can happen, but it’s how we respond as a team and as a brand. At making that right by the customer is how we’re defined, and it’s really the answer to your question. Your skis might not make it, they might be late, but maybe your next flight’s at no cost, or maybe they upgrade your seat the next time around, and they just make

Maureen 7:18
it right. I love that idea, and sometimes the customer is at fault and they still blame you. I think we’ve all done that.

Speaker 1 7:24
It’s really not about fault, because whoever coined the phrase The customer is always right was correct, because perception is reality. And again, it’s not about who’s right or who’s wrong. It’s about being an organization that recognizes that without customers, we would not be here, and we’ve understood that so well over decades and decades that it has become at the center of who we are in our culture. You know, often people ask me, what was the best thing about covid for Omaha Steaks, which is kind of an interesting question, right? You don’t usually associate things that were great with covid because it was such an odd and challenging time for so many people across the country. It was two things. Number one is it allowed us to really transform and take some additional risk. It created some room for that. And the second thing is, is it reminded America Maureen of how important it is to sit down around a dinner table with your family and talk, have a conversation with their kids about what happened today, or have a dinner party and be the hero in the kitchen for too many years that was lost in this country, and we were all moving so fast and going out to restaurants and not sitting down with family, you know, everything from basketball games to gymnastics to, I mean, I’m right in that mode now with my kids. You know, it’s like, I feel like we’re on the road to some event all the time, but we make a conscious effort to sit down and share a meal with each other, and that’s such an important thing to develop relationships in the family. And it’s so awesome to be a part of a company that really is known for creating those experiences with family, you mentioned something that was interesting, and it’s something that often comes up, which is gifting versus sort of self consumption at Omaha stakes, one of the revolutions we’ve had over the last couple years is that we really are two businesses, and we need to operate and lead and innovate differently in those two businesses in June and November and December, we are in explosion mode, where our business scales 400% and we are just doing everything we can to make the holiday season, or Father’s Day, for example, just amazing for those gift givers and receivers. And then after those holiday season moments are over, we shift into self consumption mode. So our whole business sort of scales down. And it’s during those points where we function a little bit differently. We’ve got more room to innovate, more room to think, sort of a longer runway to make change happen. But then, of course, every November and December, we. Slot back into explosive holiday mode again. There were years in the past where that difference or that contrast was a little bit less understood. There was this thought that we could extract all of the growth that we needed in the business by acquiring a gift customer and then somehow parlaying them into self consuming our product. One of the things that I think we’ve done amazingly over the last couple of years is start to understand who our customer is in those different time periods, a self consumption customer is much different of a customer than one giving a gift. They’ve got different needs. One is price elastic. One is price inelastic. It’s been a part of the innovation around acquiring customers and understanding how to grow with those customers is first and foremost, knowing who they are and understanding how you can orient your business to align with their needs and really make that shift internally and then invest properly in them, because you know their value, I would tell you that of all the companies I’ve worked at, Omaha stakes, more than anyone has a level of sophistication around marketing attribution, investing in customers, acquiring them, understanding the lifetime value and applying additional marketing dollars to invest over time, to extract that value out of the customer, to earn back that acquisition. And it allows us to make really, really smart and cool decisions on the front end. You can think of it like our most valuable asset outside our talent is a customer. If gap accounting regulations allowed me to put a customer on my books as a physical asset and depreciate it over time, so I could invest more upfront, I would, because they do really provide value over time. And it’s such a neat story. And I wish I could invite your listenership to come into the company and see firsthand how sophisticated of a marketing engine we are.

Maureen 11:50
It sounds like also you’re including the analytics in the marketing engine, that there’s a lot of analysis of segmenting the customers, understanding which marketing efforts produce the volume of new customers you’re looking for, what marketing efforts help sustain customers and refresh them? Because, as you said, as customers, we depreciate over time. Some of us age out, others probably just taper off.

Speaker 1 12:18
Yeah, oh yeah. It’s sort of the natural progression of things as time continues on, a portion of the customer base peels off. You know, it’s a retention number. We think about data as fundamental. It’s a consumable in our business. Interestingly, our BI team is oriented directly in the marketing discipline inside Omaha Steaks, because marketing is really about data. It’s understanding where, how, when, how often, to apply the offers and the messaging to ensure that you’re not overburdening your customers and extracting growth and value out of the relationship with them. I do think it’s probably an area too, where AI really is starting to play a big factor. Anytime you’ve got large subsets of data and you’re trying to infer logically what they’re telling you. Ai becomes a key tool there. We’re seeing that as an emerging element to decision making in marketing and advertising.

Maureen 13:15
We just wrote a book on innovative leadership and followership in the age of AI. A couple of the areas we talk about are that analytics, decision making, understanding systems. I need to understand it so I know what I can ask the AI to do, right? And also, so I can ensure that the data it’s giving me is, in fact, accurate.

Speaker 1 13:35
Here’s an interesting thing to contemplate. So my background is in technology leading up to Omaha stakes, I was a chief technology officer a CIO. At one point I was writing code. So, you know, I’ve got a very distinct and deep understanding of how technology applies. It actually gives me an interesting superpower in this role that we can talk about later. But relative to AI, it does bring some clarity. AI tends to be the silver bullet problem. A lot of your listeners maybe can relate. It seems to be everything to everybody. It seems to be the quintessential answer to every problem you have. Problem x, well, AI is the solution, and I think that’s a really dangerous place that we’re in right now. I don’t think people really yet understand where and when and when not to apply AI to solve the problem, and the reality of it, that it can be wrong, that it can misguide, that it can make mistakes, and that is not the silver bullet, I think is part of the evolution and the maturation curve that the country needs to go through relative to where AI applies and where it doesn’t?

Maureen 14:41
Yeah, we’re pretty far up the hype cycle that it will now do everything. Yes, actually, a couple of the other skills we talk about is understanding AI. So what will it do? What will it not do? For sure, to me, there are some mindsets around willingness to grow and change. You talk about innovation that. How the powers AI will bring to us when it’s used properly, will be increasing over time. And pretty significant,

Speaker 1 15:08
I agree. I think if you’re in manufacturing or logistics, for that matter, you understand the relationship between scale and cost. The intersection of those two things is really where AI will ultimately be powerful. Every business wants to scale and not scale costs linearly with that growth. We like to think of automation, whether it’s computing automation, which could be AI, or physical automation, through machinery or robots, that we can make people more effective and more efficient. You know, there’s, I think, a big fear that my job will be replaced, quote, unquote, we like to think of it more as your job will be made easier so that your talent can be used even in other areas. It’s a sort of an empowerment conversation that’s been an important part of our culture as we’ve embraced automation, as we’ve been talking about internally, about how AI might apply to our ability to grow is that this isn’t a job elimination discussion. This is really how we can tackle that 400% growth in the holiday season without having to bring on an equivalent amount of temporary labor to get out 90,000 coolers a day out of our West distribution center.

Maureen 16:17
One of the phrases I heard yesterday that really resonated with me. AI is not going to take your job away. An AI enabled leader will always beat out an Unai enabled leader. So equally, you and I will not go away unless we’re not using the latest tools, at which point we become less competitive.

Speaker 1 16:39
And I think that applies to insert any innovation here, change in general, whether it’s aI because it’s kind of the hotness like you mentioned, or anything else, the idea that you must adapt as a business to remain relevant is really important. And you know, you look at Omaha stakes, 107 years of being on the front end of the curve, we’re the first to sell a direct to consumer product. We had an 800 number before anybody else. We were on CompuServe. You remember CompuServe? The sort of pre internet? We were selling steaks on CompuServe, really? We wrote the book on direct mail. Our Chairman’s father, Fred Simon, was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. So we’ve got this legacy and this decorated history of innovating and embracing change. I came into this business with that ability to parlay the thought that Omaha Steaks isn’t new to the game of change, that we have to keep doing this innovation and keep changing the way we think about improving the customer experience and making it easy to shop, and leveraging automation and AI to drive our costs out of the business, while making it a great place to work for our team members. From that standpoint, we like to think about it internally as Really 100 year old startup, and that’s what it is, that’s the mentality we’re going after. I mean, think about a startup, right? It’s a brand new baby company, inherently more risk tolerant, and it has to be because it’s in survival mode. Can’t have complacency, because if you do, you might not make it to tomorrow. Now, I think it’s a fact that OMAS takes could probably continue forward down a runway and just execute at a high level. And we’ve last quite a long time because of our scale and processes and technologies we have in place. But at some point the jet gets to the end of that runway, and it’s too late to pull back on the stocks and to get air. That’s really how we think about it, that we have to be constantly considering that execution is a key part of our ongoing extraction of value. Innovation is setting the table to do that extraction process. We’ve done some amazing things, I think, just over the short period of time that we’ve kind of been on a quest. First, we’ve had significant product innovation leading up to covid to 2019 there were some mistakes made about the quality of the products in lieu of profitability, the sizes were going down to drive gross margin. And what we were seeing Maureen was our customer file in a commensurate way, also going down. If you don’t have great customer experiences, really, what do you have? So we really, during the covid time period, took that opportunity, stepped through that doorway of orienting our business back to our brand promise of exceptional experiences, and we launched two campaigns. One was called, bigger is better. We had seen some reduction, some shrink, flation, if you will, leading up to covid on the size of our products. We reversed that to actually go the other direction. We eliminated some of the smaller portion size. We increased the counts. We leaned in to giving America more in the cooler and our average order values went up by $70, per order just in that short period of time.

Maureen 19:54
Clearly, the portions and the number count increased. I’m assuming price also increased. Faced with that?

Speaker 1 20:00
Yes, I mean, we were asking our customers to make an investment. And I think you know, when you’re in the business of cold chain, shipping is not inexpensive, and so hey, if you’re gonna invest in shipping, let’s fill that cooler. Let’s get you as much product as we can while you’re at it. The customer responded to that, because there’s this moment that happens every time a cooler arrives on a doorstep, the customer brings it in to their home, and they pull the lid off. Some light shines down from the heavens, and the dry ice smoke wafts away, and there they are. Maureen, the best steaks in the world. You open the lid of the box and they’re just beautiful. And that moment is everything for Omaha stakes. It’s what we’ve built this business on. So it’s illogical to move away from that, to make them smaller, to make the cooler smaller. So we have aggressively and consistently gone after the bigger is better campaign internally, and also the second one, which is complementary, which is better, is better. It sounds so simple, but yet it’s difficult in practice. It requires that you make investments that might be counterintuitive to the immediate bottom line, but thankfully, we can use what we talked about earlier, which is data to see the future, to understand that things like rebuy and retention and customer file growth are really what we’re after. It’s not that first transaction profitability that sustains great businesses and direct to consumer. It’s really that long term relationship of rebuying the product and the continuation of value extracted from that customer. And we’ve found success in leaning back into bigger is better and better is better. So better products, trimmed more tightly, better raw materials, larger sizes, kind of reformulating our products to make them more handmade. I mean, shoot, we even went to France to find our scalloped potatoes. So we’re using Normandy cream and hand dug potatoes from France to raise that bar to what we call internally to obnoxious quality levels, which is a thing, right? It’s a thing, and it’s translatable when you’re a part of a culture that’s in a food business, behind experiences that everyone has bought into. It just makes sense why you would lean into the products that drive that experience.

Maureen 22:22
As a consumer who’s aging, I’m eating smaller portions of meat, so clearly you’re looking at data that says I’m not the one you’re targeting. 70% of the population likes bigger. I unfortunately, as I add years to my body can’t do bigger.

Speaker 1 22:40
That’s true. I would actually agree with you. You’re trying to reduce portion size, but it’s not about only one option. It’s about giving people choice. You can’t forget Omaha Steaks. While steak is in our name, it’s not the only thing we offer our customers

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Speaker 1 23:57
You might not know this, but we are the largest direct marketer of seafood in North America, we have a huge and awesome seafood business. We’ve got sides and desserts. We just launched our new wine brand, 1917 which was the year we were founded. The name of the game is to really create the entire experience around the plate, not just the center of the proteins, not just one size, but let the customer build their meal and build the experience they’re looking for. So if you wanted a five ounce filet, we’ve got that available. If you wanted a 10 ounce one, we have it too. And so bigger is better, that’s right, but better is better. Make sure that whether it’s a five ounce or whether it’s a 10 ounce, it’s absolutely gorgeous on both sides of those spectrums, and delicious and tender. And it’s a passion built into a company.

Maureen 24:46
I love the idea that you are both able to sustain exceptional delivery and innovate, because many organizations will over index on one or the other at the expense of one. How do you organize so that that’s possible?

Speaker 1 25:03
There’s a really key secret sauce, and it’s top to bottom vertical integration. A lot of people wonder, how did Omaha Steaks make it through the supply chain? Devokery of 2021, where you couldn’t even get products into the United States, more or less, get them to the customer. It starts from acquiring the customer, marketing to them, to the technology that we use to transact, to the manufacturing of the stakes, to the delivery and the packaging we control it, top to bottom. One of the things that became super apparent during that time period is it used to be that outsourcing was popular time to market? Yes, you can achieve that with outsourcing, maybe even some cost reduction and acceleration of scale, yes, but the thing that you give up is control. It was during that point of time when control was necessary. Just a little hint, hint, control is also a huge factor in the customer experience. If you can make decisions on where to apply resources such that you apply them equally, maybe across the whole customer experience, start to finish, and then you measure how that experience is going. If you’ve got a test and learn and a customer insights practice like we do internally, and we ask our customers, what are we doing right, and what aren’t we doing? What are we doing wrong? And you learn from it, and you modify your vertical integration, because you have control. What you have is a 300 and a 60 degree engine that can really put the customer at the top of the organizational chart, like we port to do, and in practice, that is so special that we can deliver all of that, and at over years, we have built internally most of the things we need, our ERP, our website, our inbound telemarketing systems, our segmentation engines. Those things are custom technology built by our brilliant development staff that’s sitting in this building that I’m talking to you today, and because we’ve got that connectedness, and like my display behind me says the one Omaha stakes, we can talk to each other about what’s working and what’s not. On the topic of leadership, one of the things that we have really gone after, and something I’ve fostered, is this idea of horizontal leadership. It’s a concept that I think is lost often in leadership in America, in American business in general, is that a lot of times leaders think the vertical leadership, their vertical team, is what really matters. At OMAS takes not saying that the vertical team isn’t important. That’s certainly a big part of leadership. But your number one team in this company is your horizontal team starts with the senior leadership team being cohesive, speaking as one voice. When my leaders at the senior level speak to the company, they speak in a way that is together. There’s a picture of them together at the bottom of the email. They all sign it together. And what that does is it creates the perception and the reality that this organization is connected across lines of business, and now we’re working on creating that same connectedness and cohesiveness in the next layer of leadership, our director layer, which is larger, which creates some additional complexities. You know, the more people there, the more difficult it is to connect across. But the goal Maureen is to create this horizontal connectedness down through the organization, all the way down to the front lines, so that when we pursue strategic opportunities, when we run into challenges, and even from the perception of the customer, OMAS takes is one business that works together in a vertically integrated way. It’s really a neat thing to see.

Maureen 28:44
I love the idea. I’ve introduced it to clients for whom it is new. It’s hard to implement. It’s hard to get past. We at the table, have been fighting with each other for years or decades, but when we’re set up in functional silos and everyone wants to win, then the goal isn’t beating the competition, it’s beating the guy in the seat next to me at the leadership table, right?

Speaker 1 29:10
Yeah, for us, I had the benefit of being able to curate that horizontal advancement in leadership. Personally, you know, I sat at that table with my vice presidents. I’ve got eight of them across every line of business in this company, and I took a year and a half to teach them the importance of this and how to leverage this in a way that could help all of us win faster and bigger. It gets more difficult when you can’t sit in that room and curate it, and that’s one of the challenges we’re having as we move down through the organization is that at some point, leaders amongst leaders have to step forward and take on that role and be the voice of connectedness across the organization in their respective horizontal teams. So we’re far from done. But I think the most important thing is that we have a vision for and recognition. The importance of horizontal leadership as a key competitive advantage in the way we operate as a culture,

Maureen 30:06
I love that you are leading it, because in your absence, people will revert back to old mindsets.

Speaker 1 30:14
It’s true. Someone on my team recently told me that my superpower is storytelling. If you look at great CEOs, great innovators. Storytelling is a big part of the secret sauce, part of the cake that gets baked. And I was sort of able to leverage my passion, and, you know, my excitement. It’s actually what I call a PVD, which is a passion delivery vehicle, which is, which is storytelling. I can get in front of a group of people, and I can get them excited. I can boil it down into something that’s interesting. I can turn them mundane into something that everyone’s one wants to tune in and understand. I can accelerate a project. I can bring some conflict back to center, and I can paint a picture for the whole company of where we’re going. And if you’re a CEO, and this is sort of speaking to your audience, hasn’t yet thought about the importance of being able to be a storyteller and to communicate your vision in a way that everybody can understand, regardless of their understanding of the mechanics of the business, it’s really an area where some reflection and some investment of time should be made. You have to be a storyteller. You need to be able to communicate that vision in a concise and exciting way. For whatever reason, it’s probably because when I was young, my parents got me involved early in music. I was traveling around the country performing in a small choir called Pueri cantores. We would travel, and I would stand on these stages when I was nine years old and sing to an audience of 5000 people. Today, I play in a rock band. Play guitar. It’s one of my outlets, but getting in front of people and expressing my passions has never been a challenge for me, and it is a superpower, and I am so fortunate that I’ve discovered and figured out how to leverage that to inspire people and to get them to and here’s the important word, believe.

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Speaker 1 33:09
and at the end of the day, if you can create belief in your organization, you can really do anything, because that’s what it takes, is to people to believe, and so we parlay at every chance we get an overcome of adversity, a win and a new idea, we parlay that, and we put that in the belief jar, and we invest in that belief, and we consciously work to ensure that we’re fostering it in Omaha stakes.

Maureen 33:37
I love the idea of belief and your charisma, while good leadership is about a lot more than charisma, it certainly helps that you can deliver with passion. But there’s a difference between there’s a picture of a guy on the wall with the vision next to him, versus listening to you talk about something that you really do believe.

Speaker 1 34:00
Yeah, that’s so right, if you don’t believe it, I mean, I can manufacture energy and passion. It’s nowhere near kind of the level of quality of a performance, and to call it that is, if I’m really, truly believe it. And I think one of the things that has played into my hand at Omaha stakes is I do feel like I’m part of this family that Todd Simon, just a few months back, labeled me the honorary Simon. I feel a responsibility to the family and to the brand. It’s the legacy, and I think that extrudes out of the words I use and the behaviors that manifest from me in different situations. And I think people feed off that. It’s energy. It’s fuel in times of adversity, I am a sounding board of confidence in times of failure, I’m a support system, and in times of celebration, I’m right there in the trenches to high five, and that’s a good leader, and that’s what it takes to inspire a company to be great.

Maureen 35:00
We talk about in our writing, but I rarely see someone who exemplifies the idea that I am the instrument of delivering leadership. Yes, that I need to refine my leadership skills. The inspiration comes from you, the person, not from an email or any number of tools. It’s you looking people in the eye and inspiring. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 35:24
And believe me, in direct to consumer retail, the name of the game is peaks and valleys. You got to be able to weather the valley because you’ve got confidence that the peak is coming. And that’s something we talk about a lot.

Maureen 35:36
For you personally, when you hit the peaks and valleys, the valleys, specifically, where does your inner courage or what’s the fuel for that engine that keeps you going every day?

Speaker 1 35:49
My initial reaction was, I’m not sure, but I’ll try to, I’ll try to come up with a more, more intelligent answer than that. To be completely honest, there is some sort of weird X factor that I can’t really put my finger on that does help me bridge to the next thing. I think I tend to be a person that doesn’t dwell on the past. It’s not much I can do other than to learn from it. I can’t change it, and I think I got a responsibility to learn from it. So I moved directly into the sort of leveraging this idea of belief back to my teams to remind them that we can and have, for years, overcome adversity like this is just a part of the story. It’s part of the game. And if every time we had a miss, a down week or Shoot, maybe even a down month, if we went into panic mode, we’d self destruct. And so leading teams through adversity is really mostly about being calm, cool and collected, not overreacting, that demonstrating that you don’t really get too riled up about some of the short term stuff, right? Because a day doesn’t make a year, a week doesn’t make a year, nor does a month, to be honest with you. So if you zoom out, you’ve got that larger, grander goal, which should exist in every business. Where are we going? What’s the bigger picture? You bring that to center, that becomes the topic of conversation, not the immediate, short term results, but the progress and the goal of the larger progress that the organization is marching towards, and that tends to be a good, effective way to move the concern about short term results back to the real important thing, which is long term performance, the

Maureen 37:31
ability to zoom out. I just got off a client who had their P and L review, and it’s so easy to get caught up in the short term results and lose sight of, yeah, we’re two months into the year. Yeah, the year is not done, even if the results today continued for the year. We do the best we can, but years will be cyclical.

Speaker 1 37:54
You know, it’s like, ah, the old macro economic force. You know? What am I to do? Not to belabor the point, but to be a good leader is to help the organization. Weather all modes. Be them great. Be them, challenging. I might point out that there is likely a phenomenon going on that may be exacerbating this problem, which is again, back to technology and access to data. Omaha stakes has a system that reports hourly sales performance like on a mobile phone. One of the first things I did when I joined OMAS takes as CIO, which is how I started here, is I implemented a project to revolutionize our business intelligence platforms to empower team members to have access to data to make decisions. Now, so amazing, right? So revolutionary to know in real time how your business is performing, be it marketing email, be it SMS, be it direct mail, social e, commerce, retail stores, we can peer in and in real time see how the sales are performing. The contrast to that is that creates a culture of addiction to the immediate results. And so for those of your listeners that have are pursuing an environment where performance is very front and center and forward, it even requires a little bit more kid gloves in helping the culture understand how to react to short term under performance, or even the opposite short term over performance, which can have its positives and negatives as well. So as data becomes more accessible to people that are technologist or database folks, or that don’t know how to write query language to extract data from core systems, they can simply pull up a web browser and run a report and craft it the way they want. That’s really powerful, but leaders need to understand the effect that access to that data has on the way cultures behave.

Maureen 39:50
You use the word culture and behave. How do you shape the Omaha stakes culture to behave in a way that supports your. Larger long term goals?

Speaker 1 40:02
Well, Omaha Steaks has off peak about 1500 employees during the holiday time period. We hire about 6000 more people. Just to give you sense for for the difference in scale, what I want to do Mari is I want to have an individual conversation with every one of them on a regular basis, which is impossible. There’s not enough time in the world for me to sit down with every employee and express my passion and love for this business and to have a conversation with them about how they can affect it and what role they can play in the contributions they can make. So one of the things I was trying to do is figure out how I could find some place in the middle of those two things right from being the guy that only communicates to the whole organization every now and then, versus being the leader that goes down all the way to the one on one, and I think I’ve struck a pretty compelling balance. So my creative director, early on, when I first took over the president role, helped me form this series I call rempies round tables, and the idea is to do about 13 individual, 45 minute meetings over the course of a week, and will segment the population of the entire company into these meetings. And it’s an intimate, live, unscripted, one on one conversation with me now it’s themed, and it aligns with what we’re trying to do as a company in that particular point in time, but it is an authentic discussion with me, where people can ask questions and we talk about transparency and things that aren’t always popular to talk about that might be scary, might be confusing. It’s coming from me, and it humanizes me, and it allows the organization to hear directly from me, and I respond personally to the questions. And it has created this interesting dynamic of people feeling like they can approach me which I want. I want that I want them to be able to walk into my office or send me an email if they have an idea or, you know, we try to accommodate that. My amazing assistant helps me manage inbound email the PR organization. Kathleen helps me do some amazing things there, with communicating and handling this one on one communication. But leaders have to create an inbound transport and an outbound transport for more intimate communications. You can’t sit in your office and preach to the whole organization via video. Just doesn’t cut it. This is a commitment I’ve made. We’ve been doing it now, I think, almost two and a half years. And I mean, it’s a total grind. Just to be frank with you, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of dedication to do that 13 times in a week. We take one week every quarter, and we get down to brass tacks and have these conversations. So how do leaders communicate? How do CEOs communicate to the people in the company? I think it’s really important to come down to that level and to be accessible and to be vulnerable, and to be able to take questions on the fly that aren’t pre submitted via email, because then what you’re able to say is we’ve got a transparent organization. There’s not a question I’m not willing to answer because I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m not trying to Oscar the truth. And I think that transparency creates trust and loyalty, and it’s why we’ve got an amazing track record of retaining our employees and our satisfaction rates in our surveys have never been higher

Maureen 43:24
when you say transparency. I know there’s a range of what you’re able to say legally and ethically. Do you share financials, profitability percentages, that kind of thing with employees?

Speaker 1 43:38
Oh, of course. I mean, this is one Omaha stakes. We’re all in this together. There’s nuance there. There’s an art to it. You know, just sort of throw everything out on the table in an unstructured, mannish way. But there’s a way to share the truth, be it beautiful or ugly, and I think it grants you an enormous amount of equity with your culture that it’s not just a pretty picture all the time. Like, you know, this is a hard business, and the last four years have been particularly hard given all the curve balls coming at us. And so the more we can talk about those things, I think the more it creates a feeling like, Okay, I know where we’re at. I know you know what we have to work on as a team. This is the employee speaking, and we’re not going south. We’ve got our challenges, but we’re on a growth track, and this is, this is how we get there. Got to have that Maureen, got to have that piece. Otherwise it’s just it’s a black box for so many people. One of my quests is to is to open that box and to share information, because they deserve to know how we’re doing and when we’re doing great and not

Maureen 44:41
so great, I really applaud what you just said, because, as we think about AI is one of the things that’s causing volatility. Weather is causing volatility. Supply chain. You know, when I look at the news, there’s one catastrophe or projected catastrophe after the other, and for the. Precious people who show up every day to do a good job, to have a sense one, that you’re on top of it, but two, that idea that you learn to do hard things by doing hard things, and that we’re going to make it through this, and we’ll do that as one Omaha stakes, not as me against you, so we don’t start the cage fighting matches. That level of transparency just seems crucial for companies. As the world becomes more volatile for employees to trust you,

Speaker 1 45:27
it does, I think initially feel a little unnatural, because I think there’s this tendency to think, well, I have to protect this scary information because it might cause people to freak out or to panic. And there is some truth to that. I mean, you have to have some intentionality into how you approach sharing of this information, but I think it really is important. And I think the science, if it hasn’t already, will show that the more a team member feels like they have the information about what’s happening in the company they work for, the more engaged and invested and the more they trust the organization. And who doesn’t want that? I mean, isn’t that kind of what this is all about? What leadership is about is to create those feelings. And so I think we’ve tried to stay committed to that. I mean, let’s face it, it’s not always roses and rainbows. Like, it’s not like, we don’t have moments of like, oh man, we we did that wrong, or we could have done that better. And I think it was on one of your episodes. I think it was Tom from Donato that said, Hey, I don’t have all the answers. I can actually come out to the organization and say, Listen, I don’t always have the answers. I think that’s a lot of pressure, by the way, on CEOs. It’s like, oh, Nate has to know the answer to every question and have it at the ready. The reality is, I only really have one answer, and that’s we have the people, the talent to solve the problem and so, you know, and if you kind of buy into the reality of that, then everything else we’ve talked about today kind of makes so much sense. You know, if the answer to every problem is the right people, then it really is about investing in leadership and fostering and finding the right people. I mean having the right people, when you have them, it’s so clear. It’s so clear in the value and the power of that. And likewise, when you’ve got the wrong people, it’s also very clear as what you need. So you just try to learn in this role. You try to take every moment that doesn’t work out the way you want, and do a little reflecting and think about what could I have done, not to tactically change it, but to influence the organization in the culture, to move in a different direction or or to reflect on that and learn going forward. And so there’s a lot of humility in the role, right? I not to get too long winded, but I think imposter syndrome is a real thing. Can I do this big job? Can I? Can I do this every day? Can I be the inspiration when there’s not a lot of excitement? You got to figure out ways and believe in yourself that you can be that person for 1500 people. I’m now to the point in my career where it’s coming naturally and it’s just like, it’s exciting for me, because I feel like I really can inspire people to be great and do things that they may not even themselves have known they can do. I just love that. I love the time I’m in in my career in this company, for that reason, for

Maureen 48:14
me, the idea of reflection and growth go hand in hand. How am I thinking about the impact of what I’m doing that continually inspires me, especially wrapped with humility, as you’ve said, to get better at whatever I’m doing. Do you have a reflection, practice or process, or how does that fit in your daily life? It sounds like you continue to learn and grow. How do you do that?

Speaker 1 48:43
I think you have to have people in your life that can play a role to help you reflect, to keep you grounded and to give you clarity. I’ve had good mentors in leadership. I’ve got my peers. I’m in the YPO organization, if you’re familiar with that, which is an interesting outlet to talk to other presidents and CEOs that are close to my same age and have some of the same challenges, but at home. I mean, I’ve got, you know, amazing parents. My wife is, I just couldn’t do this without her. She, you know, she’s the CEO of our house, by the way, which is, I’m totally fine with, I prefer, you know. And I talked to her, and she helps me work through things and reflect on things that matter and and give me a different perspective. And one other thing Maureen, that that ends up being really important, that is kind of situational, is my middle son, Connor, is special needs. He’s such a sweet kid. We call him a kid and a half because he takes a look. He takes a little bit more effort. But I think in roles like this, you need to have a sort of a benchmark of what difficult really is, what’s really hard that allows you to really frame problems in business for what they are, which is something you can overcome, as opposed to some of the challenges that Conor has that he isn’t going to be able to directly change. Those are real. Challenges. Now, luckily, he’s got a family that just thinks he’s the world, and he’s a huge blessing to our family, which people that don’t have special needs children may not fully understand. But what he does and what my family does for me is help me understand truly, what are hard problems. And so that creates a feeling in my heart that there really isn’t anything I can’t overcome, because I have a great example in my son, Connor, of him overcoming challenges every day that I take for granted, like walking down the stairs without holding on to a handrail, or, I was going to say dunking a basketball, but I’m totally not close to being able to do that. Never have been. You kind of need that, right? Life isn’t work. It’s much more than that. And when you understand all of the dynamics about what it means to be a good human and some of the real challenges in life that aren’t related to profits and revenue and conversion and retention, it allows you to have some clarity in moments where you’re reflecting on a failure, you can navigate it more effectively and get to the answer faster.

Maureen 51:07
Nate, thank you so much for sharing your story about Connor and kind of getting teary here imagining this young man and how he is inspirational to you and your family. Thank you for modeling again, also the authenticity and humility that you’re a whole person, not just a CEO.

Speaker 1 51:26
Yeah, you’re welcome. This has been just a fabulous discussion. I wish I could do it again for another hour to be honest with you,

Maureen 51:33
maybe you become one of our regular speakers. That sounds like a good plan. And you and Tom Krause need to play some music.

Speaker 1 51:41
I play in an 80s, 90s Rock Band, which is kind of my outlet. I get to turn on the fog machine. So, you know, you need that outlet. My band is no motive. That’s the name, okay? Because we’re four professional guys that really have no motivation to do anything beyond just get together and play rock every now and then. It’s a lot of fun,

Maureen 52:02
well, and an outlet, as you’ve said, that one music is math, yeah, there is a skill building in that, and an outlet we all need something, yeah,

Speaker 1 52:13
I tell people, you know, I don’t feel in any other situation the way I feel when I’m on stage. It’s just this. And I’m sure you know others that play live music or do any type of performing would tell you when you’re on stage and you’re performing, it’s just this feeling that’s unlike any other. It’s just something that I cannot be my professional self for a moment. You know you need that departure.

Maureen 52:34
Thank you very much. Nate, we really appreciate your time and the wisdom that you’re sharing with our listeners. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 52:40
Maureen, happy to do it. Really nice conversation. Thanks for

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