Explore the leadership opportunities and challenges of taking over the family business - an institution and brand with more than 100 years of history.
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[Music] welcome to sky team's people first with morag barrett welcome to this week's episode of people first and if there's one thing i love about the future of work is the fact that titles and how we approach work has changed and the case in point is my guest today who is the chief wagon officer the chief wagon officer for radio flyer and so i am excited to introduce to you today the grandson of the founder of that company robert passin welcome to people first it's great to be here i am so looking forward to it i was saying in the green room that growing up in england we didn't have radio flyers but i saw those little carts on all of the like the the movies the tv shows that i was watching and of course when i moved to the states oh my goodness they're real they're here and they're still everywhere which is fantastic so we'll get to the company in a moment but my opening question is always the same when you were a wee lad robert and the teacher or your parents were saying well what do you want to be when you grow up what was your answer it was an artist um i was the youngest of i am the youngest of five kids and so my mom would always bring me along to all my siblings activities or doctor's appointments and she had given me this plastic art case it looked kind of like a little briefcase and i had all my materials in there for artwork and i would color and draw when i was waiting uh waiting with my mom oh my goodness so are you a landscape or were you i don't know what sort of scenes were you painting from your imagination yeah i did a lot of coloring books so though i was had a lot of help with the the lines but no i mean i never got to that point where i had a certain art form well that said show me you taught there about coloring whether you're coloring within the lines or not and what's interesting to me about radio flyer is that this is a company that's more than 100 years old now truly is iconic in the american psyche and so when you inherit a business like that how do you prepare it for the next hundred years and and keep their essence the same but innovate so it's a big question to start with but help me understand how and and what brought you to being chief wagon officer yeah well i mean growing up in the business as a young kid i fell in love with radio flyer and what it means to people and you know as a kid visiting the factory with my dad and then working here summers in high school and college and so when i joined full-time about 30 years ago the company was really at a crossroads um the company had been doing well for a long time you know 70 years at that point but we were on the decline and the main reason was because our core business was making steel the wagons that traditional classic wagon everybody thinks of when you hear radio flyer but plastic wagons had come into the market and were taking sales away from us at the same time the company and the culture it was it was just it had become kind of um caught in the past and uh so i was very young very clueless but very committed and very passionate about you know saving the business and so because it was our family business even though i was so young and inexperienced i got to do all kinds of stuff that i wouldn't have been able to do somewhere else and and a lot of times i would i did start doing a lot of research and talking to consumers and um a lot of times people would say oh where are your fire are they still in business ow and it was just i i every night i'd go to bed thinking oh my gosh are we going to go out of business um so it was really scary but it was also really invigorating because consumers would also tell us these amazing stories about when they were a kid and how they imagined that their wagon was a race car or a rocket and all these wonderful images around being outside in the sunshine wind in my hair sun in my face so i started to really key into those emotional elements of our brand versus the fact that you know we make steel wagons that's how we thought of ourselves at the time and by keying into what our brand really means to consumers we were able to really unlock the full potential of the brand and we're always navigating that that inherent tension between the nostalgia of the brand which is very powerful but it had kind of anchored us to the past at that point to being relevant and really current to what consumers want and need today you make it sound so easy but i know when you're doing a transformation like that what i tapping into it's why i do what i do for a living now is the logic of change is actually only a smaller part of affecting change because what you've identified there it was engaging the hearts and minds it's the emotional piece and whilst you're looking at the customers of the past who might be now buying wagons or different radio flyer products for their children or their family you've also got to tap into the emotion of the staff that you inherited who like you may have had long tenure with the company and be vested in but this is the way we've always done it so help me understand then what were some of the the early tactics you used to engage the hearts and minds for the staff that helped to pivot the business yeah well we had to make some really tough decisions because at that point we were essentially a manufacturer and the majority of the people in the company were related to our factory in chicago making these steel wagons and we didn't have a product development team you know we didn't have a marketing team you know we had one person in sales you know so we were a really small team most of the people were working in the factory and over the course of trying to figure out what we could become really great at we realized that the thing we were really great at making steel wagons was going away or becoming very small and and we couldn't sustain a operation with making steel wagons so we made the decision to no longer be a manufacturer to focus on brand development design product development and so we shut down the manufacturing operation and that was a very painful but critical move to survive because if we had kept it going we either would have run out of money or we would have to sell the company and when we went through that process of shutting down the factory it was really like it was it was like a you know a part of our family had died and and we treated it that way and we were very respectful to the people who were departing we did it in the most humane generous pop way we could and then after we shut down the factory we went through a year-long process with the people who were still at the company many of them had been there for a long time like you said and we started asking these questions what does radio flyer mean to people what are our values as a company you know what do we aspire to become and over the course of of the that year we were able to articulate our mission and values for the first time we had never written those down you know and as we went through the process it became very clear that our mission was to bring smiles and create warm memories that's the stories that we got from consumers and then our values were all about um quality and uh integrity and things that had been with the company since my grandpa had started it so it was a really empowering process because it was not like we were we didn't hire some my consulting firm to come in and help us figure out our mission of values we were just naming things that were really there and kind of lifting them up and polishing them and saying okay here's here's the things that we can use to bring us forward so there you're articulating again the heart what makes it special what it feels like not just to work for the business but as a customer the experience that i'm getting the memories that i'm making what were some of the trip hazards then as you were also going through that and trying to name what made the company special but also letting go of what might have been do you remember how and where you may have skinned your knees along the way well yeah a lot i mean we you know during that whole process you know we didn't have an hr a true hr function so while we were figuring out you know who was going to stay at the company we had to hire a lot of people we had to hire designers and engineers and marketers and and i had never done that and we didn't have a process for that so i made a lot of hiring mistakes um i had to learn you know what how to really hire people and and you know focusing on the job that needs to be done more than a fancy looking job description we came out with a lot of products that didn't succeed so we had to learn a lot about developing new products um so i i would say i made about every mistake you possibly could make during that process and though we did have success at the same time and that we had fortunately we had more success than failure and over time those successes became more and more and more and that enabled us to earn more grow our sales earn more money hire more people and start that kind of flywheel of success oh i like that the analogy of the flywheel but again it's the human element that makes or breaks change and it's the human element that makes or breaks companies every single day so what role have relationships played then in your success and the success of radio flyer yeah i mean that's everything i think the relationships that you know i remember being at my grandpa's funeral in 1990 so it was before i started in the in the company and he lived a very long life and a lot of people at the funeral came up to me and said you know i knew your grandpa i worked for him or i knew your grandpa i was a supplier of equipment to him and everybody said the themes were that he was a man of integrity he was kind he always treated everyone with respect um you know people told me that they never signed a contract with him it was just a handshake and so i think those are the things that i think that's how he led the company it was based on those relationships of integrity respect kindness you know mutual success and because he set such a great example and my dad was the same way um you know i learned at a very early age that that's how you need to treat people that's the right way to do business yeah it's it makes all the difference and essentially i was just looking at your products you've gone from the stainless steel wagon to so how many products does radio flyer currently have available yeah we have over 100 products and now we are we are selling in the uk now so we're growing our sales outside the us um but yeah as we went down this path of trying to figure out what we could be successful at we really focused on those outdoor active play and really things with wheels you know so we looked at tricycle scooters that's how we've been expanding our product line and i've got two here one made me giggle because the name is ziggle so you're gonna have to tell me about and then i'm looking at the picture of the cyclone and i'm what majorly came to mind there is accessibility yeah and i'm assuming is that a deliberate and over choice to provide vehicles we'll wheel toys and vehicles but they're powered by different mechanisms so for for listeners and viewers who don't know what i'm talking about tell us about the ziggle and tell us about the cyclone yeah these are we we call them alternative motion ride on so it's not like a typical pedal ride out the ziggle you get on it there's no pedals there's no chain and you just you actually just kind of wiggle it um okay and it propels it forward so and it's really really fun to ride and you can do 360s and then the cyclone you're mentioning is an arm-powered it looks kind of like an arm-powered big wheel with two big wheels and uh and yeah we are always looking for any way that we can get any kid um i mean my grandpa slogan was for every boy for every girl and i think that expands today just for everyone you know for every um ability you know so we are always looking to do that i don't know about every boy and every kid i think i want to ziggle i mean that just everything you can see on my face it just makes me so happy just thinking about it but you have actually branched out and you have the e-bikes a design or adults yeah so again like how do you make the move from wagons and kids movement to e-bikes yeah i mean it seems like maybe a leap if you haven't you know seen the development of our product line for a long time but we have just continued to evolve to really anything with wheels and when we were looking at electric bikes we've looked at bicycles for many years and because it's a an adjacent category a lot of people kind of consumers would tell us they thought radio flyer made bicycles um and so we'd hear those things and then um but bicycle categories really competitive um and so we had experienced i had seen cargo bikes you know in europe a long time ago oh yeah um where kids would where people would carry their family and and stuff and i thought that is so fantastic but then i rode one and i was like wow this is really hard to ride like it's really heavy um and then later i'd ridden an electric bike and i was and i was like wow this maybe these things could come together and so so we're really focused on um bikes that can help families replace car trips with bike trips and so that's the niche we're focused on right now is really getting these bikes that you know parents can drop their kids off at school yeah good go do groceries with all these cool accessories the kid and cargo carriers and we launched those last year and it's been going really well i'll keep an eye out for those we'll be turning into an amsterdam neighborhood before we know it that's the goal definitely well it would be definitely better for the environment and probably my waistline if i was cycling a little bit more definitely how has the pandemic then influenced the how you go to market and the business and i'm curious about how you've maintained a sense of connection and the culture within the business while we've all been working in these topsy-turvy times yeah well you know what we fortunately for us we were one of the beneficiaries of increased business during the pandemic because families were stuck at home and they bought tricycles and scooters and wagons you know to get outside and keep the kids active and engaged and entertained and we got all kinds of stories and photos from families during the pandemic that were so wonderful where people would say you know we we're we're having cabin fever and our favorite part of the day is getting outside and you know riding around the block and so we felt like you know we were a bright spot in people's lives during a difficult time and that felt really good um in terms of the team we we have a really great team we've been recognized as the best place to work many times and we just leaned on that during the pandemic and so you know we adapted like everybody else did and moved all of our you know practices and gatherings and everything to online and our team did an amazing job and now we're back to a blended in-person um virtual schedule and i think people are we're starting to hit our stride of where people are getting the stuff that they loved about being together but we're also keeping a lot of the good stuff that we learned how to work together virtually during the pandemic so as a chief wagon officer where are you on the spectrum of get yourselves back into the office to work from anywhere anytime yeah i mean we all we have we have one office in chicago and so it makes it a lot simpler for us so we have basically organized our week so that tuesday wednesday thursday we're in the office you know if and if you can't be in the office for whatever reason we have flexibility on that but we're in the office and that's when we're having our our collaboration our meetings that's where we try to focus all of that and then on monday and friday it's optional if you want to work from home or work from office and it seems to be going pretty well we'll we'll keep tweaking it i can't say we haven't completely figured out but um i think it's working pretty well i like that so as you look to the future then 10 20 years from now what's your vision then for radio flyer bigger and better i would say um yeah we're going to keep focused on our mission of bringing smiles and creating warm memories we're going to keep expanding our product line um and really focusing on families transportation for families active play for families um and i think to me the future has never been so bright for for us because we have a great team great product line and a brand that people really love so i'm just picturing you are you still known to get into a wagon and ride it down the hill you know with the brink of white knuckle ride am i can i still do that yes oh yeah i can't and actually i've been doing a lot of yoga lately so i'm increasing my flexibility when you tuck and roll as you hit a stone and it's whatever i like okay i wear that helmet though you gotta wear the helmet safely so on that note um safety person learning that's the pivot i'm making what's the leadership lesson then that or the leadership skill that you are currently working on as chief wagon officer yeah i think flexibility right now is really being more flexible to this i mean this is such a radically different working environment than the one i entered 30 years ago um and so i'm trying to really be flexible and really listen to what people need and want and what can really work for both people and the business so i'm looking at the bookcase behind you obviously i can see the beautiful bronze cast model there but over your other shoulder i won't say right or left because oh it must be your right there you go you have a tesla so tell me about that yeah well we we started our partnership with tesla almost 10 years ago and we were entering these electric cars for kids category so our team was doing a bunch of research on that and we found that everything that was on the market at that time had traditional lead acid batteries and they worked okay but they don't hold the charge as much and it takes a long time to charge them up that's like charge overnight and so parents would say to us we love this car from this competitor but it's all the battery's always dead and it takes forever to charge and so our head of product development said oh we could solve that with lithium ion batteries and maybe we should talk to tesla because they were up and coming and and so we pitched the idea to tesla and when we pitched them we said we want everything about the experience for the kids tesla to be like the adults so just like you can't buy a tesla at a car dealership you know and the equivalent then was you know wreath mass market retailers you buy it online and you can customize it you can chick pick the color you can put your kids name on the license plate you know the tesla team really loved the fact that we were we really got what they were and the whole experience was and so we launched it in 2016 and it's just been a huge success and a great partnership oh my god it just gives me goosebumps because again it's the attention to detail that makes a difference and that was something else that jumped out to me earlier this year it's funny i see radio flyer everywhere now which is a compliment not a complaint but i was reading one of the newspaper articles about the innovation that you've done in a hospital environment so for many watching or listening they're thinking radio flies hospitals what so fill in the gaps there yeah well about 20 years ago we when i first started we were just kind of organically donating wagons to hospitals we'd get a call from a children's hospital or children's area in the hospital saying we like to use your wagons to transport kids around um because it's less scary more fun more playful than a wheelchair or a gurney or something like that and so we were just donating wagons but then i met somebody from the starlight foundation which their whole mission is to make kids and family stays in hospitals more fun less scary and we struck up a partnership where we would give starlight wagons and they would distribute them to the hospitals and over the years we've donated about 15 000 wagons to hospitals through starlight and we get these amazing photos and stories of families who are in a really challenging time i mean that's one of the most stressful uh upsetting times for families if your kid is in the hospital and that this wagon you know helped them get through it and it brought a little joy to their experience and so we would get these pictures and our team would look at them and they would you know we'd see the smiles and everything they'd say you know they've got the iv pole just like wrapped on there you know with a co with a bungee cord and our team our product development team is really passionate about great design and so they're like you know we can do better than that we can solve these problems so they did a big research project where they went into hospitals our team went into hospitals and interviewed staff and they developed this wagon that's completely designed from the ground up for this use in hospitals and we call it the hero wagon um and we launched it uh earlier this year we launched it last year and it's just it's been a wonderful thing because um it just makes people's stays during that time that much more pleasant and fun well it goes back to your opening comments what's radio flyer all about it's all about helping to create memories and if during that stressful time the memory has that bright spot and it's making life easier for everybody that's just wonderful so robert as we come to the end of our time together here how can people um find out more about the hundreds of products that are now available under the radio flyer brand yeah i mean of course you can go to our website which is radioflyer.com and then i'm on linkedin so you can check check out my posts i post a lot about our team and culture and what we're doing at radio flyer on linkedin okay thank you for sharing your insights with me today thanks it's been it's been a lot of fun all right that was the dramatic pause now we move to extra credit thank you that was brilliant i got goosebumps just listening to those stories and anecdotes thanks for being such a nice interviewer oh well i do my best is that a radio flyer red water jug too yes it's it's everywhere it is everywhere okay all right so here we go with extra credit welcome to this week's take two welcome to this week's episode of extra credit where i put leaders on the hot seat and ask them the tough questions and this week i have the chief wagon officer yes you heard that right chief wagon officer for radio flyer robert passing welcome to extra credit it's great to be here all right your opening question then is to be an ally one should listen
a leadership skill that you had to learn the hard way
my first thing was listening but i that the first thing that came to mind um okay we'll take it we'll take it all right when dealing with conflict we should
uh leave nothing unsaid
so speaking truth to power bear in mind that [Laughter] i'm gonna build on that so when when speaking truth to power bear in mind
yeah there are always reasons uh for why things are that you may not be aware of all right um a leadership lesson that you would like new leaders to pay attention to
i think gaining self-awareness is one of the most difficult things to get as a leader and one of the most important okay one tip for getting self-awareness uh feedback asking people for feedback in the fee in the form of feed forward like marshall goldsmith says yeah i'll put a link to that um article to explain feed forward a very powerful tool there robert all right something that you are never without oh my phone i'm sure is what everybody says but that's really that's really true i'd say running shoes okay fair enough running shoes okay but i was about to go with you mentioned in the main episode please listen that you enjoy yoga your favorite yoga pose of the moment well my wife is my yoga teacher um so i was gonna i thought you could say your favorite yoga teacher say my wife um
i don't really it's really hard for me yoga um
i don't know i go with corpse pose for those who don't do yoga lying down on the mat at the end going i survived
but i like your favorite yoga teacher answer too you know that's a good leadership trait being able to answer the question you want all right finally then robert three words three words that you hope others would use to describe you at your best clear kind
courageous clear kind and courageous robert pearson passing thank you for being my guest on extra credit it's been so much fun thank you thank you so much for joining morag today if you enjoyed the show please like and subscribe so you don't miss a thing if you learned something worth sharing share it cultivate your relationships today when you don't need anything before you need something be sure to follow skyteam and morag on linkedin facebook twitter and instagram and if you have any ideas about topics we should tackle interviews we should do or if you yourself would like to be on the show drop us a line at info skyteam.com that's skyeteam.com
thanks again for joining us today and remember business is personal and relationships matter we are your allies [Music]