We speak to KAIVAC's leader, Bob Robinson Jr., about how to view progress and creativity in business. Bob's seasoned perspective emphasizes how innovation transcends mere product development, shaping the very essence of corporate systems. Drawing parallels between KAIVAC's innovation ethos and the miracle of new life, Bob illustrates a corporate culture where evolution is as natural as breathing.
Listen to why failure should not just be accepted, but embraced as an essential component of progress. Bob's reflections on the significance of humility in leadership and the potency of diverse viewpoints in fostering innovation challenges conventional notions of success. From prioritizing F.A.I.L. as a 'First Attempt In Learning' to embracing 'commander's intent' for strategic clarity, we learn about cultivating a resilient and innovative organizational culture.
We speak to KAIVAC's leader, Bob Robinson Jr., about how to view progress and creativity in business. Bob's seasoned perspective emphasizes how innovation transcends mere product development, shaping the very essence of corporate systems. Drawing parallels between KAIVAC's innovation ethos and the miracle of new life, Bob illustrates a corporate culture where evolution is as natural as breathing.
Listen to why failure should not just be accepted, but embraced as an essential component of progress. Bob's reflections on the significance of humility in leadership and the potency of diverse viewpoints in fostering innovation challenges conventional notions of success. From prioritizing F.A.I.L. as a 'First Attempt In Learning' to embracing 'commander's intent' for strategic clarity, we learn about cultivating a resilient and innovative organizational culture.
Welcome to the third growth option podcast, where we talk with business leaders and innovators hungry to drive growth that can be faster than internal organic growth and less risky than acquisition. Your moderator is Bernal Duncan-Schpuller, chief Sherpa and CEO at Realign, who has led private equity owned distributors through turnarounds and growth. With battle proven leaders from all frontiers, we want to provoke thinking about business growth beyond conventional wisdom and binary choices.
Speaker 2:I'm Ben, or your host, talking today with Bob Robinson Jr, president and Owner at KiVAC, midwestern, manufacturer and innovator of industrial cleaning equipment. It's those floor cleaning machines that remind me of riding lawnmowers when we walk through a lobby, maybe after hours. Right, they do that. They clean big stores or commercial places like that. So, turns out, somebody actually makes those things and makes them far better, and then the company grows. Today we're just going to kind of talk about how does all of that happen, and I'm excited to speak with Bob today. Welcome to third growth option podcast, bob.
Speaker 3:Hey Bernal, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited to share our story, so I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So you grew up at KiVAC for the most part, I think for most of the last 25 plus years. I love how you called yourself the company's detective chief curious ask questions person aka sales guy in the early years right, or head of sales, and now you guys are what about a hundred person company?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're up to 140 employees, team members 140.
Speaker 2:And now you're president and chief revenue officer and maybe more passionate about innovation and improvement than ever. So we're recording this podcast on a Monday, so over the weekend you might have told people somebody about KiVAC. How do you describe KiVAC to friends last weekend? Or what did you see when you walked into the building this morning? Just sort of paint the picture of KiVAC a little bit.
Speaker 3:Exciting weekend. I'm a new grandfather, so we have a brand new grandson, otto Robinson. He is spectacular and I got the chance this weekend to hang out with him Speaking of creation. What an amazing creation to hold this new life and it's such a big responsibility. In fact, I was sitting there looking at him as he was staring at my every facial expression and his little mouth was moving and it was.
Speaker 3:The thoughts in my head were innovation or creation is just in our DNA. And here was a newly created life. And while we may create cleaning machines that don't seem as significant, every little creation is significant. So it's in our DNA. It's just the nature of who we are to create. And so I thought of him and I thought of innovation over the weekend and we walk into our building and we think about innovation and we think about our challenges and that's just the way that we are continuously wired and thinking. So it's who we are. In fact, ki is part of our name. You mentioned it. Kivac is who we are, but Ki to us is just an acronym. We've always used it. Keep attempting the impossible, keep always improving, keep always innovating, and that's just who we are. It's in our DNA to push the boundaries and move the company forward. So yeah, over the weekend I actually thought about creation and innovation Just through the form of a brand new little boy. It was exciting.
Speaker 2:A new little guy on the planet, that's right.
Speaker 3:The next little inventor.
Speaker 2:Right, that's right. So you know, innovation is one of those. It's one of those words that's become, I think, unfortunately a bit of a buzzword, meaning that it's being overused and misused and sort of, you know, used in sort of inflationary ways, right, like, oh, we're innovative and everything is innovative. But you know, what strikes me about you and your team and KiVAC as a company is that you look at innovation sort of the way the dictionary defines innovation, which is just the dictionary actually simply says the introduction of something new, and that sometimes is groundbreaking and paradigm shifting, and sometimes that's just introducing something new to KiVAC. That you know, maybe everybody else is doing it, but you hadn't done it right, and it includes, you know, sort of an obsession with execution, right, because introduction means you're actually introducing, you're not just talking about it. Talk a little bit about how you and your dad, who founded the company, what? How many years ago? Yeah, almost 26 in March, 26 years ago. Talk a little bit about how you have taken innovation past the buzzword.
Speaker 3:It's a great question. So many people think of innovation as a new widget. Right, it's this new aha moment. It's a new innovation, a new product or service to deliver to a customer. And, yes, it is that. But that alienates so many wonderful minds within our organization. Right, not everybody's an inventor. I mean, you can actually take personality profile tests and it will say you have invention, you're an inventor, it's in your DNA.
Speaker 3:So we call those big I innovations capital I, big leaps, if you will, new categories within an industry or within a product line. Those are the big I innovations. You mentioned it kind of in the intro the chief curiosity officer, the detective. When we go out into the field or when we're with clients, we are just constantly looking for this stimulus or what is the problem that you're trying to solve Now that may end up solving or leading us down a path of creation. Right, the big I innovation.
Speaker 3:But also we look at innovation in a little I innovation, which really most of the time is about human systems within the organization, and people forget that every time you solve a small challenge that's inside of your company, that's a roadblock or that is innovation. So some people think, well, I guess I'm not an innovator because I'm not an inventor and they pigeonhole or they put their own selves in a box and what Kyvek is constantly preaching inside of even the organization that every time you solve a challenge, if you're on the production line, if you're in accounting or finance or customer service and you see a challenge or a problem when you solve that problem, that is innovation. It's just a small I innovation, but you add up a bunch of small eyes and you've got one big I. Or, as the way Elon Musk says it, we want to build the machine. To build the machine and all of those little I innovations require everybody inside the organization to be thinking. So it's not just about a widget or a product. It can be that a patented idea.
Speaker 3:Big I innovation and the way we also define innovation it's meaningfully unique or meaningful uniqueness. Is it meaningful and is it unique? And if the answer to either of those is just, it is innovation. So don't think that you have to be a Thomas Edison or Ben Franklin to be a an inventor. It's anything throughout the organization.
Speaker 2:I love this phrase that you shamelessly stole. I think it was Steve Jobs who said okay, artists borrow and great artists steal, or maybe it was Picasso, I don't know, but I love this expression that you just use building the machine to build a machine. So building the machine is your team and the processes and the stuff that, all the little chores that got to get done to work on the lower case eyes, to work on the big capital, I. But I think the word attitude is important, and maybe culture, maybe attitude, maybe. Just how do you approach it? How do you show up to work every day? That is helps you to be smarter today than you were yesterday. And how do you help others? And one of the things you mentioned to me last time we spoke was driving out the fear. How important that is. Talk a little bit about the importance of driving out fear and innovation.
Speaker 3:That's great. We are science folks, right, we understand science. And back to the beginning of your setup. There, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants, right? Somebody came before us and built out wonderful systems or a piece that we can put together, and a lot of times, innovations about just connecting dots Instead of an organization.
Speaker 3:We talk about CHI all the time. Keep at it, keep attempting the impossible, just using that acronym, and that just doesn't apply to a couple. And we said that innovation is about meaningfully unique. And we just learned recently from a guru on innovation that there's a formula. And so, to your point, stealing, shamelessly right. We took the formula and we said, oh my gosh, this makes sense, this is what we naturally do. So we said that CHI is about innovation or changing the norms or going against status quo.
Speaker 3:But what is CHI? Or how do you do CHI? So that could be in anybody's organization. How do you innovate? Or how do you implement new systems? And so the formula is CHI is equal to just go back to algebra oh my gosh, here we go back in the ninth grade.
Speaker 3:Chi is equal to stimulus. So stimulus is any kind of challenge or problem that comes up or arises. So inside your organization. It could be something as simple as how are we going to package a product to? How are we going to invoice? How are we going to reduce accounts receivable days?
Speaker 3:Whatever the stimulus is or the challenge, you identify that stimulus and then, if you look at the formula, there's an exponent to stimulus and then we call that diversity, and diversity in thinking or diversity in thought. So on some personality profiles I'm a maverick, my father's a maverick, which just means we're quick start. We have a lot of ideas, but we're terrible at follow through or details. So we want to bring into the team we just don't want a bunch of mavericks, because we don't have a bunch of great ideas. That would never become accomplished or we wouldn't think about different things. So the diversity in thinking is exponential, but now it is. It's not one plus one to two, it's an exponent. It's two times two, 10 times 10. These are big differences and so when you add diversity and thinking into the equation, the possibilities become endless. You are quickly coming to solutions because it's not just one thought. One person times one, just sitting in a room is just one, but 10 people times 10 is 100. To the third, power would be 1,000 and 10,000, et cetera. So that's fine, you've got stimulus and you're in a room. It's a group of diverse thinking individuals, but the key right? So that's the numerator and the denominator. The key is fear.
Speaker 3:But if you allow fear inside of your organization or inside of your meetings, it will absolutely destroy innovation Somewhere along the line. You can imagine a two-year-old, three-year-old, four-year-old comes in, they've got a piece of paper and they drew a flower and it looks like scribble. They bring in, they say look at my flower. And as a parent, you encourage them and you say, oh my gosh, that's a beautiful, it's like Picasso, it's an art piece, right, that's terrible. But then you're encouraging oh my gosh, the creativity and look what you've done. And you're so proud of the work you even stick it up on the refrigerator.
Speaker 3:But as time progresses through our education system, somebody comes in with a bad drawing and they say look at my flower. And somebody says that's a terrible flower. Don't you know how to draw? And all of a sudden we crushed spirits. And so there's fear in the room and almost every meeting there's chains of command and it's this culture of because I said so, that's why we're gonna do it. So you have to drive out the fear that says no idea is a bad idea. Put it up on the board. We're gonna write it exactly the way it is, and people have this feeling or this comfort in knowing that my ideas matter when you allow that to run through a meeting without squashing it. Hey, we tried that. That didn't work. No, it's never gonna work. No, we're not gonna do that. That just brings fear into the room and the denominator in a math equation will absolutely drive the results down if you allow it to be there. So we have to name it tame.
Speaker 3:It Just so happens that here at KaiVeck we call it Biff. There's a whole story behind that from back to the future, that Biff was a bully. We are not gonna let Biff into the room. We're gonna drive out fear. We want your ideas and then we will formulate a plan and we'll use them.
Speaker 3:So, when it comes to innovation, it's that diversity and thinking. We need stimulus. What's the problem, mr Customer? What are you trying to work for? We bring stimulus or diversity and thinking, but we have to drive out that no bad idea, there's no bad idea. Give us your concept, throw it out there, and then we'll see what sticks.
Speaker 3:And that's just what we do. We've always done that, from the very beginning it was. We have restroom challenges. Why do we have dirty, stinky, rotten bathrooms and everybody hates to use a public bathroom. And when you bring that stimulus into the room and with some diverse thinking, we invented our first no touch restroom cleaning machine, imagine that a way to go into a public bathroom and clean without having to touch anything, but providing great results by actually removing the soil. So that's what CHI is. It's just a stimulus with diversity and thinking and driving out fear. And we do it a lot here, and not just with widgets, the big eye innovations, but also with small eye inside of our organization. And it's actually fun. It brings joy into the workplace when people, their voices are heard. You just get to see people light up like, oh my gosh, I matter to this organization, no matter what position I'm in, from blue color to white color to whatever color color you wear your voice matters.
Speaker 2:So that's us, that's who we are. And then another important word that I wrote down in previous conversations with you is the word humility, which is sort of counterintuitive. When you think of inventors and you think of Elon Musk and Thomas Edison and the big capital Schumangas 100 story, tall, I, innovations, right Humility is not a word that comes to mind. Yet when I'm talking to you and other people in your organization, you know I certainly get I'm not intimidated, right, and I certainly get the sense that you and everybody on your team puts their pants on one leg at a time. And so just talk a little bit about what that word means to you and maybe to the organization or other team members.
Speaker 3:Humility is such a that's amazing thing. When you listen to Jim Collins, he talks about level four versus level five leaders. Really, the difference to a level five leader is to say I don't know. It's just humility that says I'm not sure. And so many times leaders feel like they have to have all the answers. They're looking to me to be the leader man. That's a lot of pressure and what you're basically doing is you're squashing that diversity of thinking by saying I have all the answers. And humility.
Speaker 3:We say here fail. What does fail mean? What is the acronym for fail? Fail is just the first attempt in learning and we say we ask three questions, or we say three things here at KiVAC. Number one I don't know. Leaders hate to say that I don't know, that their team members come to them and they ask them for thoughts, and so we feel like we have to give them this answer right away. It's okay to say I don't know. That's that first piece of humility I don't know. And the second key is I need help. Again, it's humility. And then the third piece is I fail a lot.
Speaker 3:And really when you think about failure different organizations will call it PDSA, plan-do-study-act. It's a lot of failure. The key is we want you to fail. We just wanna do it fast and quick because we're learning in the process and obviously don't make a failure that's going to destroy the company. But lots of little failures will lead up. Think about anything that you've done in your life. You had to learn something new. I always use the analogy of water skiing, if you've ever water skied. Here you are thrust into water. This boat with a big motor you're holding onto a rope and your first attempt you're gonna be drug under the water and halfway drowned and you're gonna fall a lot and you're gonna like skis are gonna fly everywhere.
Speaker 2:And it ain't gonna be pretty.
Speaker 3:It will not be pretty, but every time that you fail, you could look at it and say you're a failure. You're a failure. No, you're just learning something new, and every innovation is something new to your point. So you're going to fail a lot, and when you embrace this culture of it's okay to fail, in fact, if you're not failing, you're probably very comfortable.
Speaker 2:You're not trying hard enough, right that's exactly right.
Speaker 3:So it's a tough place to be. That says, as a leader, few people wanna walk up and down the halls and ask people what'd you fail at today? You know like we wanna celebrate failure. It's typically we wouldn't be buttoned up and we wanna pretend like we have it all together and the reality is humility has to be in place. It's a hey, let's celebrate. I failed today. I'm a failure. You know like what.
Speaker 1:Anything about Thomas?
Speaker 3:Edison. When you read about Thomas Edison over 2,000 different materials, he tried for a filament so you could say he was a total failure.
Speaker 2:He failed 2,999 times right.
Speaker 3:Finally, he found a filament that would create light, and because he embraced failure, he changed the world, you know. And so it's just a different mindset and a shift in thinking, and it really starts with humility that says, in order for me to innovate, I'm going to fail. I have to prepare my mind for a lot of failure, and that's okay. So it's fail, let's fail fast, let's move forward and we're gonna come up with something great speaking of humility and Failure and failing fast.
Speaker 2:And Thomas Edison I love his quote, or it's attributed to him vision without execution is hallucination. That is, it plastered it on one of the landing pages of our website. Because, you know, to me Innovation without execution is stupid, right, that's just sort of academic. You know, highfalutin talking Big ideas. It doesn't matter unless you make the rubber meet the road right. And that Act of the rubber meeting the road, you know there will be friction, there will be screw ups, there will be, you know, failure. We just have to surround ourselves with people that want to Succeed. Bigger than the failure, right, the the occasional failure. Or I mean, I don't care if you fail a hundred times, as long as that, as long as one success Is bigger than the hundred failures, right.
Speaker 3:The key. There is a really good, strong commanders intent. What are we trying to solve for then? When you bring that nice creep of diversity together in thinking, you'll You'll change the world. If you don't give guidance or direction, people can. They can be working on things that don't necessarily matter to the organization. So, yeah, we have to have clear big picture we want to solve for acts.
Speaker 2:Then, once you get the minds together, it's amazing what happens inside your teens so there's another group of people, you know you talk about getting the group together, embracing diversity of thought. You bring your customers in as well. Right to the innovation process. Talk a little bit about how, you know, how do you get your customers involved, which, again, to some people is, you know, scary like oh my god, you know, I, I, I just want to have this ta-da moment and introduce this, you know, new light bulb to the world. And if I bring the customer into the development process and the customer understands that, oh my god, you know, bob and kivac are, you know, or do not walk on water. They're just putting their pants, you know, they're just putting one foot in front of you. How do you bring your customer into the innovation process?
Speaker 3:Yes, that's a great question, much like inside the organization when we provide stimulus, typically with an end user customer, we have to be curious or act like colombo what truly is the problem that we're solving for? Or let's just go back to the formula what is the stimulus? And when you bring your customer in, so many Organizations are afraid to say back to the humility piece, I don't know. So you caught it, the ta-da moment, and it's so true. So people come in and they they instantly hear they have this problem and they want to come right back with. Here's the solution. When you do that, you take out that humility piece or the ability to break down these barriers. Then a customer or a prospect feels like they're being sold. People don't want to be sold, they want to buy. I don't want to sell a product that doesn't work. Our whole formula goes right in line with our customers.
Speaker 3:When we're working with folks so we were presented with stimulus then we get diversity of thinking. Why would you not want that diversity, thinking of your customer or your prospective customer in the room? Because now you're starting to hear all different types of scenarios or you're learning new things about your client and the most important thing what happens is you'll see it so often when they are brought in or they're part of the innovation process and you're utilizing that diversity and thinking, it becomes their idea. And there's power when it's their idea, because it's no longer you trying to push them on a solution. They may or may not have it and we walked away from a lot of business.
Speaker 3:Hey, we don't think we can solve your challenge, but when you have a potential solution and you're working together to customize or tailor a solution to fit their specific stimulus or their need, and they have that input or their voice matters and the diversity of thinking, it drives out this fear and all of a sudden they own it and they go back into their organization and they're saying look what we have built for our organization, custom tailored solution for our specific needs. And it all just started with a simple little statement I don't know. I don't know what your problem is. We're going to need some help to figure it out and your voice matters, mr Client. We're not going to just come try and push a solution to you, because they'll. It just met with resistance. When you do that, it's interesting. It's really neat to watch.
Speaker 2:You shared an example of some safety switch. I think that you ended up naming it like the customer person was, I think, chris. You ended up referring to it as Chris, the safety switch, right.
Speaker 3:That's right. Yeah, that's funny. He was just a major customer that we worked with to customize and tailor a solution. We had a real situation. It was a real problem Somebody bumped a lever which flooded a floor and we can't have that happen. And so he had said it from, let's say, the diversity piece. What if we had some way of locking that lever in place with a safety switch so an accident can't happen? And we went back to the design board and we put it in a CAD model and 3D printed it and said something like this and you could just see their eyes light up like, oh my gosh, that's my idea. And we said we're going to call it the Chris safety switch. And it became his and he took ownership in Last week. He's now with a different organization and he came into our facility and we were looking at some new products that might solve solutions for him at his new position. And we actually walked by the machine and I flipped the lever and said, look, it's the Chris safety switch. And his eyes lit up like, hey, that was mine and I contributed to society. So now here he is, coming back with another organization and we're going to go into trial on a few new areas for him because he has this trust that he can get involved in the process.
Speaker 3:The fear is out of the room. Nothing's off the table. Give us your ideas, because we don't know, and then we'll work together. And again it goes back to that whole I own it. And we have another project like that, the Kyle step. It's a whole other thing, but it's just funny to see how this amazing ownership like that's my idea. Well, like I said, we all have this genius and it could be about a human system we're creating. It could be about a product that we're creating. All of that is innovation and when you see that and they are how, the ability to contribute it's amazing, the ownership that happens.
Speaker 2:I love the way in which you talk about innovation and you've thought about it a lot. I think you're a lifelong learner. You are a curious person that you and I are both Vistage members. In fact, we were introduced through a consultant that has worked on your team, sean O'Shaughnessy I think I said that right who is at my Vistage group. You bring in a lot of outsiders to help sort of challenge you or bring other thoughts into the building right.
Speaker 3:A lot of folks joke. They say you guys are the fractional or the consultant, the biggest consultant users that we've ever seen, and it really goes back to that humility piece. Now that doesn't mean for everything. We read a lot of books, we read a lot of articles and we come in and we do a lot of quick tests to see. But the primary is we'll bring a consultant in for that diversity of thinking what we needed. If it's a big decision, right, small, little eye decisions where it's rapid testing, that's fine. If it's a bigger decision, as a company, we want some outside influence. So we're not afraid to push pause, raise our hand, say I don't know, we need help and we bring in somebody. So it just is a humility. And that's what innovation is. It's about being humble enough to say I don't know, let's go get some outside help and be okay with that.
Speaker 2:If folks wanted to reach out to you one-on-one, what might be a good place to find you?
Speaker 3:Well, obviously, linkedin. I'm on LinkedIn. My email address is probably the easiest way to reach out. It's Bob Jr B-O-B-J-R at kivac-k-a-i-v-a-ccom, and then my mobile number is 513-967-9512. My phone's always on. You can leave a voicemail if I don't answer. Listen, we love business, we love teaching people, we love innovation, and if anybody ever has a question, how do you guys handle this or how do you deal with that piece of diversity? I'm always open. Besides, you never know, we'll get into a conversation, I'll learn something from you, you learn something from me and we'll both be better for it.
Speaker 2:I love it, I love it. Thank you so much, bob, for sharing your thoughts, your insights, your questions about innovation in your manufacturing business. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Wonderful Thank you. It was a pleasure being with you.
Speaker 2:Hey, if folks wanted to explore other growth topics, you can find me on our website, realignforresultscom, or just email me at bennobenoatrealignforresultscom. In the meantime, thanks for listening and keep growing.