Jason McCann, CEO of Vari Talks Vision, Values, Culture, and Resilience
Key Takeaways:
Company Vision
Vision can start small and expand to something greater over time
Vari transformed from elevating desks to elevating work to elevating people and working to build something to last beyond a lifetime
Getting a vision in place - even a simple product vision starts the process
Find a macro trend to ignite things
Ask yourselves questions about your true mission and purpose to elevate and expand the vision
Let customers inform your vision by keeping the focus on them
Model the companies you admire - not the vision statement but the ways they do business and innovate
Company Core Values
They begin with the people driving the company forward in the beginning
Core values are a proxy for the CEO and founders as the company grows beyond a number of people you get to know individually
Observe what’s already present and driving you forward
To scale effectively, you need to become intentional about defining core values and culture
Hire to your core values (credit to Jeff Lamb, President and COO of Vari)
Entrepreneurial action-oriented core values are important
Getting clear on and leaning into your core values forces evolution of your vision
Side note - you can see some of this in place at Vari on site visits and in the LinkedIn feeds of the entire company
Rhythm/Communication
Daily check-ins are critical at each stage
Jason sticks to the Advantage Meeting Model popularized by the Table Group, with daily, weekly and quarterly meetings, adding extra communication in times of challenge
Jason was in every sales meeting at first. As the product vision and culture matured, he stepped back to view aggregate data
Being in different places requires some creative adaptation but doesn’t change focus
Leading (Leading Through Challenges)
It’s important to lean in to leading - share challenges but be the “calm in the eye of the storm”
The company was prepared and practiced at shifting to a distributed work environment
Add some extra efforts to keep people focused and encouraged
Growing up in hurricane country teaches you the power of overcoming disruption as a community
Links
Book recommendation: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Patrick Lencioni is founder of the Table Group and helped Southwest Airlines define it’s core values. Jason likes The Advantage by Patrick.
Interested in how ResultMaps can help you build your vision? Start with our vision course, now half-off
Past installments
Andy Petranek, Co-Founder & Chief Evangalist at Whole Life Challenge`
Will Bunker, Co-founder OneAndOnly (now Match.com), VChatter,President; investor in 160+ tech companies, 5 exits
Arjun Dev Aurora, Founder and CEO Retargeter; Founder, Valence; Nike, Investment Committee
Lori Williams-Peters, VP Business Excellence, InvisionApp Inc.
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
At ResultMaps, we're on a mission to help the world be its inspired best. As part of that, I share interviews with CEOs and leaders who've been able to scale companies from a few million in revenue up to 50 million and beyond. We taught teamwork, leadership, and a range of other ideas.
In this session, I got to speak with someone I've known and admired for a very long time: Jason McCann, CEO of Vari. Jason's leadership is consistent within his company and externally within the wider economy. What I love most is how consistent all of it is with who he is and has been as long as I’ve known him as a person.
There were mic-drop worthy moments at three different points in the interview, but for the sake of time, we’ve left the order of the conversation intact.
There has been some light editing for readability.
INTERVIEW
Scott
What role did vision play in Vari’s evolution and how did that vision evolve with the company?
Jason
In starting with the company, originally we were called Varidesk. My partner Dan was having back pain and standing at a cardboard box (with his computer on top of the box). So it was just one of those moments where he couldn't find a solution for himself. He had a dream of what became the very first product.
So we grabbed one of our heads of product design and the three of us sat around Dan’s desk as he described it:
“Could this product slide out of my box?”
“Could I instantly be standing whenever I wanted to?”
And we said, okay, great. We built a prototype from that session where it was David drawing it, Dan describing it. Over a two-hour period, we created what became the first Varidesk.
And so (the vision was) building the prototype, sharing the product, starting to use it ourselves. Dan was using it, David was too, and other people inside of Jemmy - that's the company that we were incubated inside...once people started to use it, we realized we're onto something. But we needed to show it to other companies and other people.
As we were looking at the prototype, the idea that “sitting is the new smoking” came out. It was coined by Dr. Levine from the Mayo Clinic. So there was this momentum, this thing. “Hey, there's a trend out there. Sitting is the new smoking. We're onto something.”
We were going around and looking for companies that we could share the idea with because it's one thing when your team loves it, but It's another thing if you can actually find true fans in people outside your organization that love a product. So we showed it to Verizon - that was our first customer that we showed it to.
It is the night before the presentation, I was laying there thinking about it. What am I going to say? It's Verizon. What I came up with was to say this: “At the end of the day, we're trying to create a happier, healthier, more productive workspace. That's a win for the employee and a win for the employer.”
And that started our journey.
As we elevated our vision and we got going and started selling product out there, our vision became “creating workspaces that elevate people.” Over that seven-year period, we've had quite a few steps in there that I'd be happy to share with you.
Scott
What stayed the same as a top agenda item, or top rallying cry, from day one to now? And how did you find you had to inflect things in that vision?
Jason
I think from day one it's been a relentless focus on the end user.
And so first, as I started down the journey, I grabbed the Tony Hsuieh book Delivering Happiness and said “we are going to focus on the fan - the customer.” “Customer” was the term at the beginning. We're going to have relentless focus. If they don't love the product, we're going to take it back.
Nobody at the time was taking back furniture. This was seven years ago. So we would ship out a Varidesk and if they didn't love it, they would send it back. But less than 2% - for a while there, even less than 1% - would send the product back. So there was this immediate reaction to it, they loved the product.
The other thing is you get all this great survey data by having that relationship direct with the customer. When we entered the furniture industry, I didn't realize how the furniture industry works. It's set up in a dealer network. Just like the automotive industry of a handful of manufacturers, a thousand plus dealers, they each sell their specific brand.
There's one brand, they only sell one brand of furniture. Just like the automotive world. You can't buy a Chevrolet from the Ford dealer. You can't buy a steel case desk from the Technion dealer. It's so antiquated.
They also talk about pricing of lists and discount. They have this fake opaque way that they price everything.
And so we just sat there and said, “okay, this doesn't make any sense if we focus on the customer, in the same way that Zappos did, but really focus on that customer. If we have a direct relationship with the end user, the way that Tesla's come into the automotive space, (and) we believe in everyday value from a pricing (standpoint).”
If you look at Sam Walton's pricing model, or the way Jack Bogle Vanguard or Jim Senegal built Costco with everyday value in mind, then focus on people and culture the way Southwest Airlines does. You start to peel back and say, these are all the best businesses that are already out there. How do we take all of those and encapsulate them into our company?
And could we build a company that can live beyond my lifetime? And so we started on this journey with Varidesk. We eventually got our product line so big that we've dropped the term “desk” and have now elevated the brand to Vari. And the company's now Vari.
Scott
That's amazing. I love that you modeled companies you admired in doing this. I know we both read and admired a lot of Patrick Lencioni’s work. Do you have core values? How do you make those into something concrete and tangible? Because I hear a lot of CEOs say, you know, vision - we know it's important, we know culture's important - but isn't that stuff kind of fuzzy? It seems like you guys do just an amazing job of making it very real and tangible.
Jason
When we started on the journey, I would argue, because I was hiring all the people, I was looking for people that would work hard, had entrepreneurial fire and grit to them, that I believed embodied what I would argue are my core values of just being an entrepreneur and a hard worker.
That's sort of where it started. Once we get to like 50 or a hundred employees, I had my marketing team come in and say we need to define the core values. I was kind of like, what are we going to say? And I'd kind of read all these business books, but I didn't know how to get through the process.
I had already created Vari University, so we had learning and leadership going on. So, we were doing things right. I asked the consultant Corinne to come in and would she help take us through this process of how do I define the core values. She said, “give me the people that embody them.”
I picked 17 people that worked for me - we had about 120 employees at the time. It's a little over 10% of the employees, along with Dan and me. And she just sat down and interviewed us and she just asked random questions.
What happened was these six core values came to the top and she said, “the beauty is you've been living your core values since day one, you just didn't realize it, you didn't talk about, you didn’t define it.” And I realized at that point, once you hit 50, a hundred employees, you've got to really define those core values because I can no longer interview every single person that's going to work for me. I need to make sure that I hire for those core values.
And it just happened to be a blessing that the day that we had the first draft of our six core values come out, I was giving a coffee tour to somebody because we do tours here of our headquarters all the time. It was Jeff Lamb - he was the former chief people officer at Southwest Airlines.
I'd always wanted to meet somebody that was a chief people officer because you read about them. So I'm giving them a tour and I said, “we just got this draft of our core values, will you take this and just give me some feedback on it?” And he was on a coffee tour and I was just networking - and it's amazing how God works - and eventually, Jeff now works with me and he's my president and chief operating officer.
And what he defined - he said the way that Southwest airlines is, you hire to your core values, your culture is then built on top of it, and the DNA actually changes over time as you hire people to that, they become the fabric of it but they all embody those core values. So the culture is built on top of that.
And as we went through this process and we realized that we're much more than a desk company, we went through the same challenge with our mission. Are we creating a happier, healthier, more productive workspace? Is that what we're doing here? And we started to just think about that.
As we elevated our vision, we said “what we're doing is creating workspaces that elevate people.” What that becomes is a much bigger mission and vision for what we're doing, about transforming cultures through thinking about the future of workspace: being flexible, caring about health and wellness and physical health and mental health. All those things around the workspace of the future.
So now we create workspaces that elevate people and that's our North star that we're marching towards each and every day.
Scott
As you're going through these different points, were there particular challenges that came up that you found this Northstar idea helped you manage through, or make decisions through, or maybe get through some challenges as you're going from these different inflection points from say 50 to a hundred and on up in headcount?
Jason
Yeah. As you think about it, each level becomes a different challenge.
So at 20 people, you know everybody. And so we’d hit some roadblocks, like we had a website crash. You'd get everybody in the room and we're going to fix it and we're going to roll up our sleeves and you literally grind through it.
You get to 50 employees and you know everybody, but it's not the same team that you started with. It becomes a new challenge of just, you know, growing.
Once you hit a hundred or 150 people, you don't know everybody, you don't know if they have dogs or cats or who their loved ones are - you start to not be as connected. And so it's important to continue to hire and find people that get your core values and so that everybody's aligned to do that.
And then as you get to - now we have over 350 employees - you think about the next tiers of everybody gets our core values. From the onboarding process to everything that we celebrate and talk about inside the organization is built upon these core values.
Then we're always marching toward “how can we create workspaces that elevate people?” In the beginning, we thought we were going to be an e-commerce company and we were going to sell products and it was going to be this...everybody flies to Dallas to see our headquarters.
What we realized by listening to the customer and creating a fan for life - that’s one of our core values - by creating a fan for life, I can listen to our fans, get product ideas, understand all their pain points, and it actually gives us new product ideas of how we can help them transform. So all of that has helped us grow our business.
Scott
I love that. As you're managing these inflection points, as you're going through just growth challenges, how do you guys create structure of your time? Do you set up weekly meetings of different teams or people checking in daily? Both in a normal environment.
Jason
Pre and during? At 10 or 20 people, we were having daily stand-ups and we went to it. What I realized once we got a little over a hundred people, I had lost my personal rhythm of having daily meetings.
I didn't know who Lencioni was two years ago until Jeff Lamb actually introduced me to him on that coffee tour. He's like, “have you read any of Lencioni's stuff?” And I hadn't. I was Jim Collins and all these other books. So I started reading the Advantage, and I realized, okay, I need to have daily meetings. And so they were kind of rough at first, and not perfect, with my direct reports to really focus on building that relationship with my core direct reports.
So I have a standing 8:45 meeting with my team today. It's a Zoom, but that meeting happens with my direct reports every day. I have a staff meeting, and I do it to the Advantage style. It’s a non-agenda staff meeting every Tuesday morning. I have an all-company meeting at least once a quarter, probably every couple of months.
With what’s happened, obviously we've gone through this whole supply shock and demand shock that's happened with COVID-19 that's impacted the entire world. We immediately deployed our emergency response team that we had already practiced. We were a 100% laptop. We were already set up to work remote since day one, and it was just the way that we have built the company because every once in a while in Coppell you have a brown out. So I had always set up everybody to take their laptops to Starbucks or wherever if we ever lost power in the building or heaven forbid something happened. We had always operated like that since day one.
We have a leadership team of about 18 people that are all functions. And we were set up so if we had a disaster, this team would have been immediately deployed. So we deployed that team immediately the Friday that all of this came down, and we said, “Hey, we've got to shift to remote and we got to deploy it.” Then the standing meeting we were doing twice a day.
Right now we are back once a day. I do a daily email to the entire company. I have an all-company Zoom meeting with over 300, and I think we had 370 participants because even some of our suppliers are allowed to sit on these meetings every Monday morning at 10:00 a.m.
So my culture sent everybody a coffee mug with Vari on it, because we normally have coffee and talk and whatever. And we’d start it every Monday, we’d kick it off with a coffee with me and we've talked about exactly what's going on.
And doing all those things around taking this crisis, it's really allowed us to focus and provide clarity for the things that we've got to do, but it's all about what, when she and I, everybody talks about is over communicating. Sometimes they'll get two emails from me in a day. It’s typically one email five to seven days a week that's going out. So definitely Monday through Friday, typically one on the weekend, then all company meetings. My daily staff meetings, I still have a 9:00 a.m. with my leadership team on this COVID issue, and we're running through full steam ahead as the team has gone through it.
And then the second thing we've done is adjusted our rallying cry. So while we had a 2020 strategy, I sat through one of Lencioni's talks and they talked about a short-term rallying cry. And so I grabbed my team, I said, “Hey, so our rallying cry is keep rowing until the wind catches our sales.” And it was a term that my dear friend Paul had told me 15 plus years ago during SARS and said, “Hey, we just got to keep going because eventually it's going to catch our sails and we can focus on opportunities to grow.”
So work from home has suddenly become a thing that we're good at. So we can now suddenly shift our marketing and our sales efforts to helping other companies work from home.
The second thing is continue to build relationships because people will come back to the new norm of what the office is going to be like.
And the third thing is we can grow. So our online learning, our TED talks, the book club, we're doing yoga here, I'm doing it right after this. I got team yoga with my entire staff.
And so all those things we can continue to grow our brand, our health, our wellness, our culture. Those three things are our short-term rallying cry while we weather the storm and keep rowing out there.
Scott
Do you feel that there's really an opportunity to strengthen your culture? Whether it's sports teams or the military or what have you, it's getting through these challenges together often builds esprit de corps. What are your thoughts on that?
Jason
Yes. I think as a leader, your job is to now lead. And as both a team member and these leaders, all of us can lean in. I would argue that at these moments here we're actually leaning in, the culture's getting stronger and stronger.
So even I noticed by having that daily talk with 17 or 18 leaders all on a Zoom call, it's actually connected even tighter to a larger group of leaders out there. By having my daily email on, and obviously the teams can email me back, I'm getting daily interaction with hundreds of my employees that are talking about what's going on.
By my breaking down - from an authentic standpoint - that, yeah, I'm stressed too and I'm trying to figure it out, and I've got kids at home doing homeschool and I've got life challenges too. And I've been authentic about it, but I've also shared stories about, like, I was talking to my grandmother on the phone who's 97. I talked to her the other day, and she's in quarantine right now in Tennessee. She talked about being at 21 years old going through World War II and having coupons before she could buy anything, and sugar, and whether you had money or no money. Just settling back and listening in, she said to me “everything's going to be okay. We're going to get through this.”
I think our culture is actually getting stronger.
The other things we've done is an app called Duck, Duck, Goose or Goose Chase and it's this fun thing. And again, it's connecting with our teams by sending out the coffee mugs. Again, it's got the swag and we're all connected for these moments.
We had some onboarding so some of our team members we literally hired. And so we sent them a giant cardboard box with the onboarding kit because it did all start with a cardboard box. The team all signed it and they all onboarded remote. So again, they’ll learn our values and culture and everybody's done it via remote.
So I would argue that we're learning how to strengthen the culture and then we're sharing it with other great companies out there.
Scott
That's outstanding. So we have some common roots. We grew up in a place that routinely the ocean tries to destroy, calms darned close and then builds back. That’s not mention the different economic crises. Did any of that inform you?
Jason
Oh yeah. I think growing up in Galveston and just seeing the impact of the hurricanes out there. I would say there's two lessons.
One, I go by a mantra. I personally always try to operate like I’m the eye of the storm. I recognize that no matter how crazy everything is around me, I've got to remain calm, centered, focused and I got to keep moving. So no matter what's going on, I've got to keep going.
Also, you think back to the hurricanes that hit us when we were all trapped there - I think it was for eight or nine days without power, and I want to say it was 84 - 83 yeah - and we’re wading through the water to go get food and all the food in the kitchens rotted overnight. Like, all this stuff. But then we went out and we chopped down trees with the neighbors and we pulled back and everybody rebuilt and they raised some houses on the beaches.
And so to get through that, I think it pulls the community together and so I, yeah, I would say those are probably the two biggest takeaways. I think growing up in Galveston, you learn resilience and you learn how to be the eye of the storm.
Scott
I definitely relate. And you mentioned the challenges of working from home and family. For different reasons you did some different traveling at different times while the company was growing. How do you manage and run a company and have time for all these things while your company's growing and you're navigating?
Do you have any a-has as you care to share or any methods you've evolved that have really become what you tether yourself to to stay on top of your time?
Jason
Yeah, I describe with Vari, if I had been 25 years old, I would have crashed his company into the ground. Because I wouldn't have surrounded myself with great people. I would have tried to do all the work myself. I probably would have levered up and gotten a bunch of debt. And instead, I focused really small, making small bets to get the company profitable so we didn't have to raise money, so I'm not distracted by outside investors.
I think two, dialing in of what exactly we're going to do - we started with happier, healthier, more productive workspaces, but now elevating our vision to creating workspaces, elevate people, it's allowed me to sort of see everything needs to stay inside those guard rails around us as we think about the future roadmap.
From a travel perspective and all of that, I think that's just the nature of it. But I think the beauty of us being challenged to work from home right now is we're leveraging the power of MS Teams and Zoom and Skype and all these other tools, and it's just almost challenged me to think, okay, I can be more efficient. Maybe I don't need to make these trips all the time. A long time ago, I adjusted it to where I would be as efficient as possible. I will day trip to New York if I can, if I can knock out my meetings, if for some reason I have to be there.
But I think if you can hire great people around you and they each have their own core competencies - again, aligned to your values - understand what you're trying to build here, and they're empowered to make decisions...It takes a lot of pressure off you as a leader to get through a lot of these hardships.
But it doesn't come without grind and grit. And if you don't have that, you're not going to make it. So you've got to decide too, how bad do you want it? You know, watching my mom and her hair salon as a kid, you know, she decided she wanted it bad and she was willing to work for it. And so just thinking back to those roots, it's just been since day one. I want it bad.
But I also recognize all the decisions I make are impacting 350 plus families plus thousands of companies that we're associated with. We have over 3 million customers worldwide. So that doesn't weigh lightly on me. I feel the pressures of that, but I'm also honored to get a shot to do it and lead a great company and really build a great brand that can live beyond my lifetime.
Scott
When did you feel pressured to figure out to bring in people? Because I know early on, you know, you were out all around Dallas putting your desks in places to get people to try them out and give them a try. They still see you go out and do that. But presumably at some point you had to go, okay, I'm going to have to spend a little time in the office or make sure I'm working on the business. Did those things happen as the company grew? Were there specific points there?
Jason
Yeah. I think at first, you know I was in every sales meeting. At first, having that conversation with the customer that you're trying to convert into a fan, you're getting all that great feedback. So Dan, David, the three of us, even Coca, the four of us would join these meetings so we're listening to every little tidbit the customer said. And then once we've got the product just right, then we can train somebody how to go have that same conversation.
Now I've got over a hundred sales people, we've got thousands of data points every day that are coming in from technology reviews that are online, and I've got a team of four people in my data science group that all they do is aggregate the data so that we can look at it and see what's working.
Where, I used to read every review - and I still read a bunch of them - now I look at the data first and try to see where the red, green, yellows might be. Do I have a 4.87 rating or a 4.2 rating? What are the stars? And then where I can drill in and see where those pockets are. But initially somebody had told me early on, if a small group of people can love it, a large group of people can like it. So focus on getting the love right.
And so I focused really hard on getting the love right so the ripple effect would be like, once I got to this really large group by just having a small group of people that kind of like it, it's pretty good. Ultimately it's not going to be that big of an impact. So really focusing on that.
And when my chief marketing officer joined - and he was hired as director of marketing - his first thing was he aggregated all of the reviews that were there, and he did a word cloud. And the number one word that people wrote about the product was love.
They said, I love my Varidesk. And at that moment I said, we no longer have customers. We have fans. And by taking that word, which is so powerful because you love your pets, your wife, your loved ones, your partners, your kids, everything. But to say I love a product means you're onto something.
So to start tracking net promoter scores, and I wasn't tracking those or any of those things. Now to start watching all that because I've got all these employees making an impact, we've just elevated what we're able to do.
But at first it's all you. And you’ve got to decide how bad you want it and you need all those connections so that you're getting it to the right decision so you can get that love right...so it can be a huge ripple effect out there.