The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

From Beer Trucks to Business Leadership: George White on Innovation & Growth

• Benno Duenkelsbuehler • Season 2 • Episode 25

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This episode explores the journey of George White, a serial entrepreneur who shares insights on the power of storytelling, creativity, and structured processes in driving business growth. Listeners will learn about the importance of customer needs, effective communication, and the cautious use of AI in marketing and manufacturing. 

• The significance of creating connections in unexpected places 
• Balancing creativity with technical processes in diverse industries 
• The transformative impact of customer-focused solutions 
• Emphasizing effective communication and process documentation 
• Caution and opportunity in the integration of AI in business 
• Finding wisdom in networking and unexpected paths to success

Always growing.

Benno Duenkelsbuehler

CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN

reALIGNforResults.com

benno@realignforresults.com

Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome to the Third Growth Officer podcast, where we talk about all things growth, yes, even and especially those hard parts where you shed some skin and pick yourself up by the bootstraps. Hey, I'm Benno Dunkelspüler, growth Sherpa and OG hashtag growth nerd. We're on a mission to redefine success inside and outside the business, one TGO episode at a time.

Speaker 2:

I'm George White. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I'm currently the CEO of CM Paula. I've been involved with a lot of different growth companies in the course of my career and I'm currently located in Mason, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cincinnati.

Speaker 1:

Hey, george, welcome to Third Growth Option Podcast. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I am Benno, the host. You and I met each other many, many years ago. Actually, russ and I were doing a project for one of the CM Paula divisions back then.

Speaker 1:

But you are a bit of a Renaissance guy in business. I looked up your. You know you study. Anybody who studies political science and religion and then has a story that goes from a beer truck to US Congress to greeting greeting cards, to gifts and robots is a bit of a renaissance guy in my world. So I think I'll just introduce your background as a driver.

Speaker 1:

You'll have to fill us in on the beer truck, but you were a driver for a congressman candidate and then you were the youngest chief of staff of a US congressman back a few decades ago. You ran your own PR firm for four years. Notorious management jobs for the last 20 years with greeting cards, gibson, a startup, us playing cards up with paper, and the last eight years at the GM and CEO level. And I think you and I share an ability to see the unseen, what other people don't see, and then somehow execute it. But I really want to talk through your insights, growth lessons, and see if maybe you can share some growth lessons and insights with our viewers and listeners. So you are currently at CMPala. So you are currently at CMPala, ceo over a greeting card division and a gift division and a robotics and a metal stamping business.

Speaker 2:

So those are so wildly different Diversification is good, Benno Huh.

Speaker 1:

Diversification is a good thing. Well, diversification is very much a good thing, but greeting cards and gifts requires creativity and whimsy in addition to business logistical sort of left brain skills, logistical sort of left brain skills, whereas metal stamping and robotics don't really require whimsy or creativity, but require very much a process driven business mind. What do you enjoy about each of those left brain, right brain businesses? Maybe?

Speaker 2:

Well, I will say there's creativity involved in automation systems and metal stamping. We do come up with creative solutions to solve customers' problems. I mean to me, the consistency across all four businesses is addressing the needs of the customer. So retailers want to sell as much stuff as they can, so our job is to provide them with unique, creative product that their customers will, that'll resonate with their customers and they'll want to buy. For our customers on the robotics side, they've got a. Their problem is they don't have enough labor or they've got a process that is dangerous, dirty or repetitive and they need a different way to do it, and so we come up with creative solutions.

Speaker 2:

Every, every robotics solution we develop is a custom. It's a custom job. We are actually building pieces of an assembly line in our warehouse and on the on the metal stamping side even though you think about metal stamping being just these big machines that are stamping out the part, it shakes the building. Before you can do that, you have to develop the part and there are different ways to make the part. They're different and through engine we have engineers and the engineers actually develop and you're working to create the tools and the dyes, and part of that process is to create the best tool and dye that can not only create the best part but enable us to produce it in the most efficient manner, and sometimes it requires some unique things.

Speaker 2:

And then we actually assemble them. And so we come up with all kinds of unique ways to have our people assemble them. We've got little. I mean you would call it automation. We've automated little parts of our metal stamping plant, which you know just on our own, to make it a little easier to assemble their parts. So to me there is creativity involved in all, but to me it is, at the end of the day, it's taking care of the customer's needs and making sure you address those well.

Speaker 1:

All right, you got to tell me the beer truck story. What was up with a beer truck? Because that did not come up in the couple of pre-calls you and I had, but then in an email you're like well, it actually started with a beer truck.

Speaker 2:

And it's not on my LinkedIn, it's not in my LinkedIn career path Right.

Speaker 2:

But, the reason why I like to talk about the beer truck story is you never know where connections are going to be made and links are going to go. So when I was in college at Duke University and not only was I a poli-sci and religion, but I also was pre-med, which shows you I really had no idea what I wanted to do. The summer after my sophomore year I came home. I didn't, I didn't or no, freshman year didn't have a job, wasn't sure what I wanted to do. And one of my friends had a father who owned the Miller Beer Distributorship in my area and that was when Miller Lite was first taken off. Tastes great, less filling Taken off, sales were growing like mad. So they needed help. They needed people to ride on the beer truck and to wheel beer in and out of stores, and the stores could be anything from a retailer to a bar, to a restaurant, to a supermarket. So I did that freshman year. They paid you in cash every Friday. It was fantastic. I did that after my freshman year and again after my sophomore year. It was a great way to make money. I liked beer, which is also a good thing and then I moved on.

Speaker 2:

Junior year I had an internship in DC working for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I thought I was going to be a pointy head guy in DC. That didn't work out either. But then when I graduated I decided to take a year off from school before I went to med school. So I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and I was into politics and the congressional seat in my hometown was open for the first time in many years. So there were lots of candidates running.

Speaker 2:

So I talked to my father, who was in the politics, about the candidates and he kind of laid out what he thought and so I kind of thought one was the guy who was likely to win and I liked him. So I contacted their campaign. I said I'd be willing to work for you. What are you looking for? And they said, well, we need a driver. And I said, well, I can drive. But what's the? What's the? What do you? What do you need to know? And he said, well, you really need to know the congressional district. So I got out the congressional district and the map of the congressional district virtually mirrored the beer truck distribution area.

Speaker 2:

So I actually knew and I told the guy. I said you're not going to believe this, but I know every store in the congressional district and I can get anywhere in the district because I delivered beer there and it worked. I got the job and so I became the driver for this candidate who was running for Congress and he was a 60-some-year-old World War II vet great guy. But I'm this 22-year-old driving around but what happens is it was me and him, so it's just the two of us in the car for hours every day. So I got to know him really well. We hit it off really well.

Speaker 2:

So within a few weeks I was hired on the staff. I became his speechwriter, his primary spokesperson on the campaign, and so when he won he took me to DC with him and so my job progression went from beer truck to campaign driver, to working on Capitol Hill. And then two years later, the guy who was chief of staff in our office unfortunately passed away and the relationship that I had with the congressman was such that he asked me to be his chief of staff in our office unfortunately passed away and the relationship that I had with the congressman was such that he asked me to be his chief of staff, and so, yeah, I was 24, which was a pretty heady thing to do, but that gave me all kinds of experience managing people, as well as customer expectations, Because let me tell you, there's no customer like a voter.

Speaker 2:

Oh my God, when a voter calls the office and they want something, man, you listen and you tell them yes, I will get right on that.

Speaker 1:

Yes, ma'am, yes sir.

Speaker 2:

You hear everything and they are always right, all right.

Speaker 1:

So that's my beer truck story. I love it. So you do have a knack, I think, for simplifying things. For you know, in today's vernacular storytelling, um, when I asked you, you know how do you combine these left brain to right brain businesses? You know metal stamping, robotics, gifts and greeting cards and you know, your simple answer was well, they both have customers, they all have customers and it's about customer. You know, your simple answer was well, they all have customers and it's about customer. You know taking care of the customer, or taking care of the voter, or taking care of the customer. But I think your ability to simplify and do storytelling is very it's an integral part of your success at the CEO level. Has to be, I mean, do you agree?

Speaker 2:

I do agree with that and I think storytelling has become more important as my career has progressed. I think storytelling is being able to summarize, encapsulate and tell a story, and anybody that works with me will tell you to type out the story. I'm a big believer in the written word story and anybody that works with me will tell you to type out the story.

Speaker 2:

I'm a big believer in the written word. Yes, before I worked on the beer truck, I worked for a newspaper, uh, doing local sports covers, and so I. That's how I learned to type. And I'm a big, I'm a still still believe. You know, after a meeting I sit down, I do a recap and send it out every time. I love that I love that.

Speaker 1:

I and I'm the same way I to me, if it's not written down somewhere it.

Speaker 2:

it doesn't exist it didn't happen.

Speaker 1:

If you don't have a recap, that's exactly right, and also for me. I cannot process what I have learned, heard, read, seen, unless I write it down Exactly the same way.

Speaker 2:

And actually for me it's not even writing. Typing is a big part for me. I will take notes and then I type it, and the typing of an email for me is a way to synthesize and summarize it. Some of my associates at first they're like why are you sending me this detailed email? But we talked about you'll, you'll get used to it, Right. Right, I do it for customers too, and that was and I learned that pretty quickly that with up with paper early on, when and I learned that pretty quickly with Up With Paper early on, when we were just starting out, we had no key accounts and we'd start meeting with these larger businesses and I'd meet with them and ask them what they needed, what they were looking for, and then I'd send them a detailed plan. This is what we will do for you and this is how we're going to do it. And they would tell me we've never gotten plans like this before.

Speaker 1:

This is what we're going to execute over the next year and it's also a way I find to keep myself honest and to keep my team honest and to communicate with the customer and the buyer, who can then react to. Well, I know eight out of the ten sentences, but these two sentences that's not what I meant. You know that was.

Speaker 2:

It's a potato, potato thing, right I like, and I like what you said about keeping you honest, because the other thing about sending an email is you know I'm, this is what I understand and this is what I'm going to do, and then they can be referred back to, right, whether it's next week or next year. You said in this email on December 10th this is what you're going to do. This was the situation.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk a little bit about this storytelling simplifying on the one hand and then articulating, describing, establishing structure and processes in a business. Establishing structure and processes in a business, which is a very important part of you know, I don't think you can be successful as a CEO without any processes. Now different businesses have different types of processes and all that, but talk a little bit about how you view process development and and managing through process.

Speaker 2:

Maybe I completely agree on. You got to have processes in place and you have to have agreement amongst all that are doing it that, yes, this is the process, this is what you're going to do. And usually, whenever I go anywhere new, I you start by building the process by going to the people that are doing the work at the bottom level, because they're the ones that are seeing what the need is and how to do it. This is how I and usually the response you go well, this is how I do it. Why do you do it that way? You can learn that. Are there ways you would improve it? You can often find out from the people actually doing it that there are ways I could do this better, but they told me this is the way I always do it, so I have to do it this way. Well, maybe that's not right. So and then recording that you know, documenting what the process is, so that everybody up and down knows what the process is.

Speaker 1:

And, and I think a major part of doing processes right is to establish them, what I call, at the right altitude. You don't want them to be 30,000 foot, you know? So, generalized, well, there's a beginning, a middle and an end, and that's the process. No, it's. It's more than those three things. And and and don't be so in the weeds that it's a hundred page manual for going to the bathroom.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you don't want robots working for you, you want people to think, and so if this is the goal and this is the way to do it, they can all, and you always tell them hey, if you come up with a better way to do it, then you come tell us and we can, we can adjust the process.

Speaker 1:

Right, Right. What do you wish um 25 year old?

Speaker 2:

George had known that I think that 25, I was still working in DC, so I stayed in that job on Capitol Hill for five years when I was 24, I was in the Chief of Staff Association up there and all the guys that were my age now you know. I remember looking at those guys saying I don't want to be doing the same thing 40 years from now that that guy's doing. And so after five years I thought the timing was good to leave. I got married. My wife decided she wanted to get a phd at unc, so I decided I'd rather live in the same state, preferably in the same house, with my wife. But what I, what I didn't do, I didn't realize until later what, uh, and then what.

Speaker 2:

My job working on capitol hill as a chief of staff had given me experience to do, which, in a lot of ways, was I could have gone out and done. I could have managed businesses of a variety of sizes, could have gone in at a much higher level than I went. I didn't market myself well at all. So I think the short answer for what I would do better is I would have better marketed myself when I came out of DC. I don't regret any of the experiences that I had. After that, I went to work for a PR firm for like five years before I went out on my own and I think if I'd had the confidence and kind of thought about it long enough, my main objective was to get in the same area with my wife, right that?

Speaker 1:

was the main thing I was thinking about. You know what? That's not a bad way to live your life, right? Hey, I love this person and I want to live in the same house.

Speaker 2:

You know, preferably not in the dog house next to that house, but you know, not be kicked out, it all worked out and but I think my career, if you looked at my career path, the projection, I think you would say, well, you were here and great projection. And then when you hit, let's see, when I left DC, I guess I was 27. You went down before you started going back up and that's completely my fault. You went down before you started going back up and that's completely my fault. I have to own that. But I like your take on it. I'm going to go with my take. I'll make sure my wife hears that.

Speaker 1:

Well, I could tell you that I met my wife on my last buying trip as a buyer for Pottery Barn. My last buying trip was to Mexico City, from San Francisco to Mexico City. We met at the airport in Mexico City, got married eight months later and had spent probably 18 of the next 20 Christmases. We would always spend in Mexico City. And then, five years ago, she came back from a trip that she had done by herself to Mexico City. She's like oh, there's this place. Anyway, long story short, four and a half years ago we bought a second office in Mexico City, which is where I'm recording it from today.

Speaker 2:

But you have nicer weather in Mexico City right now than we have in Mason Ohio.

Speaker 1:

We do, you know. I like to say that I love Cincinnati. I love being in our Cincinnati house and office, but the tacos and the weather are better in Mexico City.

Speaker 2:

I will await my invite.

Speaker 1:

Done, stop waiting. You're invited. Excellent, all right. So you wish you could have marketed yourself better in your late 20s, early 30s? Yeah, and all right. Let's talk a little bit about your two consumer product businesses Up With Paper and GeoCentral. Um, geo central Um, you guys had huge growth, uh, uh, vitamin C growth, uh, during the COVID years. Right, things, things were going really uh well as they did for many consumer product companies, obviously in the early 2020s. Um, how do you see the next five years?

Speaker 2:

It a? It's a good question and, of course, a lot always depends on the economy, but the key for the two consumer products companies is for them to continue to create products that resonate with the consumers and continue to stay in touch with retailers. So you're getting them what they need now. Now I think GeoCentral is a great example, because GeoCentral was founded in 1978. Cm Paula didn't buy them until 30 years later. For 30 years they were virtually the same size, good company, solid, same size, all the way along, dependable. But that's how big they were.

Speaker 2:

We had a salesperson who we hired pretty early after we bought them Good salesperson she's still here today, kathy but she never had the product she could sell.

Speaker 2:

She understood the consumers, but she didn't have the product. So finally, a couple years before COVID, we hired a woman who works for Exotica really strong, creative, and what they did is, instead of selling just the crystals as crystals and amethyst, she actually came up with the idea let's put the crystals in a box, a really attractive gift box, and on that box so the box is attractive enough that a woman's going to pick it up and then on that box is information about the crystal, what historically the crystal has meant to people, what it's done, how people have used it over time. Great looking box. So then suddenly Kathy had something to sell and then at the same time was COVID and people were looking for meaning in the world women again in particular and so suddenly our sales doubled because we had a product that looked great, resonated with people and was in stock. You talked about COVID. The main promotion you wanted to have during Kobo was it was in stock and so that was the right product at the right time.

Speaker 1:

With the right customers and it was merchandised and packaged right, I mean, I remember that was in the roadmap actually, that we had written way back.

Speaker 2:

It took the partnership between Kathy on the sales side and Megan on the creative side to make that work, because they understood each other, they understood what each other need. Together they made it grow. We did the same thing at Up With Paper. Up With Paper had this fabulous product. I mean, it was the first pop-up card company. So what we said? It was like a Broadway stage put into a greeting card, right. Super cool, Great product. Founded in the same year 1978, for the first 40 years of existence. 35 years of existence, virtually the same size. Then, when I got there, I really connected with a creative person. She developed the product. I got the relationships with the creative CM. Paula bought us so we had the money to actually buy a product, get it out there and we quadrupled in size in five years. Because we mesh, you get the creative person. Monica was a creative person, super talented, and I went out and found the business partners and there you go.

Speaker 1:

Left brain and right brain together right.

Speaker 2:

You got to have a meeting because if you just let the creative people create, they may create beautiful product, but if it doesn't resonate on the sales side, it's just going to sit there and not sell. And the sales people have got to have good product to sell. It's got to be unique, it's got to have a reason for being in the store and the same thing, you know, like I talked about with parts or automation systems, we are the best automated solution provider because we provide customized, we listen to what the customer needs and we provide a solution to their needs. We're not just giving them a cookie cutter program how comfortable are you?

Speaker 1:

I? I had warned you. I had warned you that I would ask some ai related questions, um, are you comfortable talking about um, or just just give me your thoughts? So you know, ai is sort of just like in the 1980s and 1990s. Every conversation was about well, computerize it, computerize it. And now everything is AI, ai, right. I think people we don't really know what AI is right. There's generative AI, there's all these different kinds. I mean, how do you think about ai and how are you incorporating it in your business?

Speaker 2:

going forward, yeah, I'm going a little bit of detail, but I was anyway. It says they know exactly about ai and what's going to do for their business. That they're.

Speaker 2:

They're not doing the truth, that's right so I think we would need to split into two pieces. On the consumer product side, ai has already been helpful to us on marketing developing copy. It really does a great job. You can say write me a sales pitch for selling a crystal in the marketplace and then you say, hey, tailor that for a 25-year-old woman. I mean it does an amazing job.

Speaker 2:

That said, you have to edit it. You've got to manage that process. You can't just just ask it and then dump it on, so you've got to be careful about what you're doing. You also need to be really careful not to upload any information into a chat, gbt or any other AI. It's proprietary because once it's out there, it's going to use that information to develop more intelligence that it's going to share with others. So that's definitely rule number one Don't share any proprietary information. So I see it as helping a lot on the marketing side web contact, blogs, blah, blah. It's interesting.

Speaker 2:

On the robotic side we've talked about you know, can we use AI to help us with our basic program? Are there some basic stuff we can do ai to help us with our basic program? Or there's some basic stuff you can do and the guys don't want to use it because we are very worried about safety, that if ai is doing any of the programming you're relying completely on it. The concern is that if there's a problem my computer programmer would see it, but the ai person might not see it. So I think there is a space for it. But on the manufacturing side, getting into the business of manufacturing, actual production side, you've got to be really careful and not only do you have to edit it, like I was saying on the marketing side, but you've got to prove that it works. And at this point we think we can probably generate it more quickly doing it ourselves than we can generating it in AI and then sitting there and having to prove it out every step of the way.

Speaker 1:

But what I'm hearing you say is that AI is very much part of the day-to-day conversation with your management team, both on the consumer side.

Speaker 2:

Maybe not day-to-day, but we are discussing it pretty often. I will say the discussions that would. You know. We'll go for a couple of weeks and not talk about it all, and then we're talking about it every day for a week.

Speaker 2:

So you know, it just depends on and you, you know, when you're reading the news about a leap that's been made in progress, then you know we talk about. Hey, you know what? I just read, that somebody was using it to do this. Is that an application that we can use as well? But I would say our four companies are not in a leadership role and AI wouldn't expect them to ever be. We are monitoring it and using it as we think is fit and as works for us, but we're not tech companies. We use tech to support our business. We're not leading tech companies.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I had an interesting podcast conversation. Actually, the podcast is going live. Um, we're recording this uh middle of december. It'll go live tomorrow. Um with uh one of the senior guys at accenture, uh, the multi-billion billion dollar consulting company. Um, they are investing 10 roughly fat-fingered number, 10 percent of their profits back into ai related investments, which to them is like a three billion dollar over three year investment and that type of company, the type of business that they're in.

Speaker 1:

that's probably what they ought to be doing into becoming ready for being getting ready to position yourself in this tsunami that is coming? I mean, ai is changing faster and faster. You know, whatever change happened in the last 12 months, it'll be twice as much change in the last 12 months. It'll be twice as much change in the next 12 months and 10 times as much in the next three or four years. Right, yeah, um, so I'm studying up on it a lot. I'm reading a book, uh, nexus, um, same guy that wrote sapiens, uh fascinating book uh right.

Speaker 2:

all of us need to be aware and keep reading up on it um and and adopt it when it makes sense for us and it'll make sense for us, different industries at different times.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, exactly, um, george, any, uh, any, uh, parting words of wisdom, maybe, uh, as, maybe, as we're wrapping up this episode, thank you, first of all, for just sharing time with me and our listeners and viewers. Thank you for taking us through your kind of crazy beer truck to US Congress, to greeting cards, to robotics story and, yeah, any parting words of wisdom.

Speaker 2:

I think when I went back and talked about connect, you never know where the connections are going to occur and I will tell you that. The other crazy story about my career that happened when I went to after working on Capitol Hill, I went to work for a PR firm and I just I literally answered the phone one day because it was a call on. The receptionist was out and it was a company that was doing getting into trading cards. They had been selling cigarettes. They had, they had their sales were going to all these stores throughout the united states. Cigarettes were down so they decided to get into trading cards as something to sell. I answered the phone. They said we need somebody to develop marketing programs for us for non-sport trading cards, which used to be a thing, then weren't a thing and then we made it a thing again. That call became my own business when I left the firm and opened my own business in 93.

Speaker 2:

Um, so I mean it's you just never know where it's going to come from you got to be. You got to be ready to jump on the right idea when the right idea comes I think that's um.

Speaker 1:

I hallelujah to that right. No, because so many people, I think um sort of become too focused and maybe, you know, stay on this like one track, and then you know they think of themselves as you know, a sales person, or a product person, or a design person, or a ceo guy or gal, and then that's all they do. But you got it. You know when, when I was, uh, you know, early in my career, I had a mentor who said to me look, you're a merchant and a marketer, your job is to have open eyes and open ears, and that's your job. Yeah, just stay, keep your ears to the ground and see what you know, what can you hear, what can you find?

Speaker 2:

three years after that crazy phone call, I was on cnn announcing that superman was going to die. We were releasing a trading card series based on it. Right products were being banned in schools because they were so popular, I mean it was, it was a great it was. It was a ton of fun too.

Speaker 1:

And just as you said that you moved your, you, you, you moved your body a little bit and move it a little more so we can see Superman behind you.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:

There's Superman right there.

Speaker 2:

It reminds me of my earlier days.

Speaker 1:

Growth lessons. It reminds me of my earlier days Growth Lessons with George White and Superman. This was great, hey, if folks wanted to reach out to you. What's the best way to?

Speaker 2:

Our website, cmpaulacom, and my email is gwhite at cmpaulacom. Happy to hear from folks. Like I said, you never know who's going to have an idea. Something will spur you on.

Speaker 1:

Exactly Terrific. Thank you so much. It was great. Thanks, benno, good to see you Take care. Thank you for listening to this episode of TGO Podcast. You can find all episodes on our podcast page at wwwrealign4resultscom. You can find me, benno, host of TGO podcast, there as well. Just email Benno B-E-N-N-O at realignforresultscom. Let's keep growing. Thank you.

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Benno Duenkelsbuehler

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