In our wide-ranging discussion, Jay emphasizes the importance of curiosity, self-awareness, and a 'hero culture' within organizations to foster quick and effective change. As an advocate for rapid execution and overcoming complacency, he offers practical advice for leaders to push their teams, but not push them away. Jay unpacks how to strike a balance between speed and thoughtful decision-making to achieve attainable and sustainable successes.
- (00:23) Welcome Jay Topper
- (02:15) Jay's Role at Fabric
- (03:47) Retail Industry Insights for 2025
- (09:00) Navigating Technology and AI in Retail Tech
- (14:30) Pushing for Speed in your Teams
- (23:56) Building a Hero Culture
- (26:36) Handling Crisis with Levity
- (29:11) Building Trust in a New Company
- (41:42) Embracing Impatience
- (44:31) The Value of Being Proven Wrong
- (49:02) Closing Thoughts
About Our Guest
Jay Topper, Chief Customer Officer at Fabric, is a US Army and Coast Guard veteran, who earned a Bachelors degree at the US Coast Guard Academy, and a Masters degree at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. After a decade serving our nation, he’s had an exceptional 30 year civilian career, holding technology leadership roles like Chief Digital Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer at Chico's FAS, FTD, Vitacost, and Rosetta Stone. He hosts his own podcast for Fabric exploring leadership and retail tech, called “Chiefly Digital.”
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Full Show Transcript
Patrick Emmons: Hello, fellow innovators. This is Patrick Emmons.
Shelli Nelson: And this is Shelli Nelson.
Patrick Emmons: Welcome to the Innovation and the Digital Enterprise Podcast, where we interview successful visionaries and leaders and give you insight in how they drive and support innovation within their organizations.
Shelli Nelson: Today's guest on innovation and the digital enterprise is Jay Topper, a distinguished veteran of the US Army and Coast Guard. With over 25 years of experience in the retail and software as a service sector. Jay has been at the forefront of driving digital transformation across a variety of industries. His career spans leadership roles in e-commerce, technology, supply chain, and customer service for renowned brands. Currently serving as Chief Customer Officer at Fabric. Jay is focused on fostering growth through customer and partner success, championing an outcome driven approach to technology and commerce.
His prior roles include Chief Digital Officer at Chico's, FAS Incorporated, where he led digital strategy, data analytics, and global supply chain initiatives, and CTO at FTD where he navigated a successful turnaround and led the digital transformation of multiple iconic brands. Jay has also had an impressive tenure at Vitacost.com, Rosetta Stone and other major companies where he played a key role in e-commerce platform management, customer experience, optimization, and global operations. With a proven track record of overseeing complex M&A activities, platform implementations, and driving operational excellence, Jay brings a wealth of knowledge on scaling businesses, enhancing customer experiences, and leveraging technology to achieve growth. We're excited to dive into his insights today on how to align digital strategy with customer-centric innovation, as well as his perspective on leading in both high growth and turnaround scenarios. Welcome to the show, Jay.
Jay Topper: Thank you. That was a wonderful introduction. I'm humbled and flattered. Thanks.
Patrick Emmons: Yeah, Jay, really, getting to know you, I didn't think you'd let us get away with that much complimentary praise, and I appreciate your patience and your willingness to allow us to tell the truth. So to kick off this conversation, I'd love that you could share a little bit more with the listeners, a little bit more about your role at Fabric and maybe some of your perspectives on what you see happening in the next couple... This year, I know we're just at the beginning of 2025. I don't know, it seems like it's going to be an interesting time.
Jay Topper: Yeah. Fabric is a platform that serves the commerce industry and our platform is called AI Order Cloud. OMS is at the center of it, and we have other components like product catalog and price and promotions and a few other commerce capabilities. As a Chief Customer Officer, I really have three roles. Role number one is, once a sale is made, then I manage the customer, I manage the delivery, the implementation, the customer service, and the follow on with what customer success is and has been is making sure that the outcomes that the customer expected are realized or exceeded after the implementation is complete.
Then I also have a heavy hand in the partnership ecosystem, especially because they're so intertwined what I do day to day. And then lastly, I'm actually a content generator for the first time in my career. I do a podcast, I do a regular blog, and because I have so much retail industry, and this is my first time on the sell side, I provide some thought leadership to the LinkedIn community and whoever happens to pay attention, as you probably know, whether that's one person or 100 people, it's always somebody that seems to be interested in a tip or trick along the way.
As far as 2025 goes, there's a little bit of hope in retail, but I also think part of that hope is just being a little bit tired of not having enough hope and 2024 was a grind for retailers and it was kind of an unknown entity going in, and I know Q4 did pretty decently, especially the really big players, some of the small players maybe not quite as well. I think 2025s going to be more of the same, and I don't think there's going to be a magical bullet. To me in retail, you need to see upper single digit growth for really all the boats to rise on a high tide and 2 and 3 and 4% doesn't do it.
But I do think there was so much spend in COVID on the digital and the technology stuff and then there was a snap back the other way. After COVID, I do think there's going to be a little bit more attention paid to modernization, which is where we play, and that's one of the reasons I came to Fabric because you can't sit on legacy old stuff where you can't get things done fast enough for very long. That was a long answer, but that's an answer.
Patrick Emmons: No, it's tremendous. Super curious. The whole consumption part of our economy, historically has helped buoy through some of those grind years, right, post-9/11 and then looking at some of the forecasts from a economic perspective for this year, it does seem like the consumers are confident, and I do your idea of, I think they're tired of being tired, everybody's kind of waiting-
Jay Topper: Yeah, they are.
Patrick Emmons: ... for this. It's like, "When's the bad news?" I think maybe that overreaction to the announcement of DeepSeek was part of that, of a little bit of like, "Well, we're looking for bad news," and it's like, "Oh, well, it's a really bad news." It was ish bad news.
Jay Topper: Yeah, yeah.
Patrick Emmons: It was scary, but nobody really knew what to be scared of. So you're thinking this year it's going to be a little bit more of the same from your perspective, single digit growth. And so what do you think your clients need to do to really put themselves in a better position to thrive through 20... you know, more than survive, potentially more than survive, maybe even grow, thrive?
Jay Topper: I just turned 64 a few days ago and I have three of my own tips and tricks that I'm going to focus on in 2024 and the first one, and it's really guidance for others that may be looking for their own north star for the year, but one is, I think that retailers need to ever remain curious. You can't find... All retailers, all companies have problems, all of them. They all have a vision and something they're trying to achieve and there's blockers along the way. It's not automatic, otherwise, companies wouldn't need people to come in and drive change and at the end of the day, even if you're a little bit worried about budgets or you're a little worried about change management or adoption inside your company, the more you can explore and open your mind to possibilities, the art of the possible, the higher probability there's going to be this connection between problem and solution that not only you believe in, but the entity, the enterprise can believe in.
And so I think even if people are a little bit down or people are a little bit skeptical, even if they're feeling optimistic but guarded, I think that's not a time to retreat, it's a time to push ahead and it doesn't mean spend tens of millions of dollars, but there's a lot going on in retail right now and a lot of it's noise and a lot of it's fake, but a lot of it's real. And being able to sort through that when the right time comes for your company is super important. And I know that in our company, and I'm not doing an infomercial for my company, but I would drop into a retailer tomorrow for three days or four days and just help them architect whatever they have going on, whether it has to do with our company or not. My company enables me to really float around the industry and just help.
And if it happens to be something that we can play in, great, but if it doesn't, I'm not held accountable to any results from that. And I think seeking out guidance from your network and from partners and vendors and people you trust and people you don't know so you can get more people that you trust, I think that's really critical because eventually you have to start fitting these puzzle pieces together because in technology especially the longer you stay stagnant, the more technical debt you rack up and the harder it is to get things done.
Patrick Emmons: I ironically just had a meeting with a client yesterday and they're like, "Things we built in 2013 and haven't taken care of are falling into that trap you just mentioned of like, hey, we have not kept current." And the term legacy usually got attached to something like 20-years-old, but we're kind of coming up on, like, there was a lot of investment in the post-2008, right, a lot of growth, a lot of investment, and some of it, if it wasn't reinvested, it's kind of hitting that wall. So you mentioned that there's some real things and some bogeyman kind of fake things out there. Can you give us some insight into what you're seeing?
Jay Topper: Well, I think a little bit. It's always been the case. I mean, I've always as a CDO, CIO, CTO, COO, you know, pretty hands-on guy, I mean, I get it, even with the fancy titles that I've had throughout my career is that I always go into technology and solutions with a little bit of skepticism because every company's trying to, every software company, every SI, every integrator, every consultant, they're all trying to serve the needs of their enterprise. And no matter how much you try to be customer focused, the vast majority of companies, the first is their own business. So even going back to things like personalization and big data and the cloud and microservices, they're not fads. Some of them are very real, but as soon as they become super popular, people start counting them. I just got back from NRF, and I'm not kidding you, there is not a single booth or conversation I had where people weren't talking about AI and what AI does for you, or hey, I need to understand what AI can do for me.
And I've been around this block a lot of times and there's just a lot more show than go right now in AI. It's easy to slap the name AI in your website. It's easy to do a webinar and talk about it. It's easy to make really good UX so you can show somebody something that looks really badass, cool, but you have to really dig into the reality of what's going on behind the curtains because a lot of that stuff just falls short just like technology forever. It just falls short of what the expectations were going in.
Patrick Emmons: What would be your guidance to somebody when it comes to, I mean, obviously everybody's got people they report to and there's always that pressure. What's the guidance that you give people around that? Obviously, AI has been around and e-commerce, I mean, Amazon with the whole idea of, I already picked your product, here it is. I worry sometimes side note, I worry about these kids who don't have to make decisions, everything's recommended to them. We used to have to hunt for things and do comparisons, and now the kids are like, "No, Amazon picked it for me." It's like, "No, I'd spend four days trying to figure out which one's the best one." But side issue, I guess AI is not new to e-commerce in any way, shape or form. So what is the guidance you would give a retailer on crawl, walk, run kind of approach?
Jay Topper: Yeah, real quick on Amazon then I'll give kind of two points that I regularly speak to with retailers, one is, I'm amazed at Amazon with all I purchase from Amazon and my family has purchased, if they looked at the ship to address, I'm surprised they can't recommend me, what kind of car I want to drive, when I want to buy a new car, the doctors I want to see, they should be able to personal profile me, just like crazy. I'm always amazed at how little the personalization is on that site and I know they do put things that are interesting. Facebook does a better job because I filter out things and I'm a boomer, so I'm in Facebook and they show me ads that are amazing. I think there's two north stars on this, and again, it fits AI, but it could fit anything.
Number one is, the things you should be looking for are the things that are going to solve the problems or the hurdles or the obstacles that your company is trying to get through at the enterprise level. And then you need to understand merchandising and marketing and supply chain and the things that are stopping these key, key functions inside of companies to reach some sort of goal. If you start chasing outside of that box, and not only do people in IT do that, but there's shadow IT in companies where they go find something really cool and go, "Hey, this'll reinvent us." It really comes down to focus and narrowing in on what's important. So that's number one. And I'll tell you right now that takes half your problems away. And then number two is, whether you have the staff to do it or you have some kind of ecosystem, you have to get into the technology.
And look, I've never coded, I've been a CIO or managed that function since 1997. I've never coded anything. I've never built a server, I've never built a wide area network on my own or anything, but I know enough to get really smart people around me, whether those are people that I'm paying outside the company or people that work for me, more often the latter, that can really get into the technology and their job in that one narrow lane is, you know, is that technology real? Was it built really well? Is it technology we'd be proud to own if we had coded it and versus how much of it is smoke and mirrors? And if you stay true to those two things and then include a whole bunch of people when you're making a selection to make sure the business side problems are being solved, I think it's just a good north star to have. And I think that regardless of it's AI or anything else, frankly.
Shelli Nelson: Well, Jay, I'm going to switch topics a little bit. During our previous call, you mentioned the human aspect and how that's an area of focus for you and also that you like to move really, really fast. So just curious if you could touch on those topics for our listeners.
Jay Topper: Yeah, the human aspect, man, there's so much to unpack there. I'll throw a couple of things out there, you could almost do a whole podcast on that aspect. I think I talked about curiosity up front. There's also, I'm a big practitioner and sometimes failing practitioner of self-awareness, knowing yourself, knowing what your drivers are. That whole old thing is you can't control everyone around you but can control yourself. And the better you can master self, the better you can influence the outcomes of others in a positive way. But at the end of the day, putting together the people side of a department, the mix of people, the people that you're managing, the matrix of people that you're involved with, the consultants or the platforms you're bringing in, making that ecosystem very functionally sound and with a real hero culture built into it is key for a lot of reasons.
Number one is it keeps people much more happier and engaged. Number two, it keeps them focused. And number three, it gets things done quickly. As far as speed goes, I've always been a speed freak. And what I mean by speed is that, once you go through these things we just talked about, hey, we have problems, hey, we found a solution, I'm an executor at heart. And the faster you can get that done correctly, the better it is for the business. It costs less and you start realizing the value, and if for some reason you screwed up, you can fail fast. So I'm a big believer in, I can't tell you how many times in my career that I've said, you set a timeline six months in advance and everyone buys in and then a month in, people say, "Hey, it's going to take two more months."
And it's like, "No, it's not. Let's figure out why you say that and let's break that down. In fact, let's pull it in a month." And I say that to people and they go, "Pull it in a month? We all came to you telling you it's going to be a month late and you're telling us to pull it in a month." I go, "Let's break it down. Let's get into the detail. What's stopping us?" And my experience is if you have that right people construct and you have people that are looking inside first, instead of pointing fingers, that you can break down the components that are stopping you from executing faster. And when I say fast, I don't mean reckless. I mean, the same thing that takes you six months, do it in two.
And I just think that brings a lot of value to the business and a lot of self worth that you're the guardian of the company that you work for and their shareholders, and I'm old school on that. I believe in that. And so going slow and being a black box and going over budget, those are not okay. And so I tend to focus a lot on not being angry at being late, but focusing on what it takes not to be late and to go really quickly and to make really well-informed decisions as fast as humanly possible with a lot of people involved. So it's hard because you're not making them in a silo.
Patrick Emmons: So I got a ton of questions. One, you're a likable person, how do you do that and retain likability? 'Cause I seem to fail that of that idea of let's go fast, let's push. And I know others who are very similar in their approach of like, "No, it's not going to take that long. We're being too safe. We're being too worried. Violence of action, it's time to go crack some rocks. We don't need to come up with a plan of how to go buy the axe. We're just going to start hitting things and then we'll figure it out on the way." But I got to imagine that you've had some challenges where that rubs people the wrong way. In the recent book about Elon Musk, he has very similar approach as you to, no, we're going to pull it in, right. We're going to make it... And his head architect is like, "We generally don't hit his date, but we do come in earlier than we would have on our own. It's not that it's perfection."
And I think so you've got different personality types, like, you're a fast mover, you're aggressive, but we all have a lot of different people on our team. How do you work with some of the folks that maybe if we look at a disc profile, they're a little bit more on the C and they want to make sure that they're not putting themselves in too stressful position. And again, all accelerated without brake is not good either, but you're saying more accelerator, less brake. Let's get to second gear a little bit sooner. We don't have to wait a hundred yards to get to second gear. So what are some of the things that you do to keep the team together?
Jay Topper: Yeah, I mean, the first thing, I put an incredible amount of trust in the direct report ecosystem that I build around me and they're involved in each other as well. And I always have people that are far smarter at their discipline than I am and what they seek and whether that's someone that I inherit or someone that I bring in is they want a couple of things. And these are the people that fit a profile of going fast. One is, they want to be enabled and they want to be able to take risks and they want to not be yelled at when they make a mistake and they don't like the word blame. I am a big believer in the hero culture that if you call out a problem that you created, way to go and everyone claps, take a moment, stop the train and applaud and because then people are not afraid instead of it, and going on the defense. I also think you have to involve a lot of stakeholders and you have to put a lot of energy there into the people that are around you.
I've been a stakeholder as much as I've been a service provider and it all has to fit into pieces. So you have to spend an incredible amount of time. And the other thing I do is I focus, I'm not a micromanager even though I'm super hands-on. What I do do is every day I wake up and I figure out the biggest things we're trying to accomplish and where the biggest problems are on those things and I go put my time on those things. And I can't tell you how many times I've presented the boards, "Hey, we're doing this big thing. I took two months to convince them to do it. Now, we're going to execute. Here's the biggest risk." And a month later I'm like, "Hey, that's not the biggest risk anymore. This is the biggest risk. Hey, that's not the biggest risk anymore. This is the biggest risk." Because you just have to keep taking that on over and over again.
And if you throw yourself into that and you are a service provider back into your organization to help remove the blockers, give a good culture where there's no blame, high expectations, people start to see that there's a real pride factor in it. I can't tell you how many people... At Chico's, we put nine platforms in about 18 months. It was like by far the biggest project I've ever done. We ripped and replaced so much stuff there and it was wildly successful. And I still have people this day saying, "I just can't even believe it. I did not believe you. I didn't think we could do this. This is the most thrilling ride I've ever been on." And I was like, "Hey, it was thrilling for me too. It wasn't just you, you guys did it too. It's not about me, it's about getting all the pieces together."
And it was just amazing. And I think a C-level's job is to get the people around them to do more than they think they're capable of. And it doesn't mean working 12 hours, but whatever hours you're giving to the company, that's the time you give and have a bunch of fun doing it. And not blaming people is not the same thing as not holding people accountable. You want to be the one that's adding value and not slowing the train down at some point. So you find your own problems pretty quickly, but I don't know, it's a symphony a little bit. Sometimes it's hard to even explain and it's scary a little bit because sometimes I've had interventions where people have come to me and said, "You said August and I'm telling you it's going to be end of year," and we end up hitting to your earlier point, we end up hitting September and I get scared.
I'm like, "Am I the only one that just doesn't believe that it's going to be five months late? Crap." One mistake. I made a really big mistake. At FTD, I hung with a partner for too long and I was the only one and I was wrong. And that's the biggest one I remember. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, but you got to get that symphony and it's not just about the soloist, man, everything has to sound really beautiful and work really well together. That's another long answer.
Patrick Emmons: It's all good. I was going to make a joke before, you're like, "Oh, we're doing a podcast." I'm like, "I don't think that's going to work out. I mean, podcast, who wants that noise?" But the hero culture, I'm curious, you brought that up a couple of times now. Give us a walk around the clubhouse of the hero culture. What do they do differently? How does it smell, feel, look?
Jay Topper: A hero culture is, and it's hard enough to do it in your own department, and then it gets harder if you're talking about your company and then if you start throwing in a systems integrator and literally nine platforms, I could rattle them off. And so you've got a dozen companies and all kinds of different departments and it's hard even just in your own department to do this, but what it really means is that, it gets back to, kind of ties back into self-awareness. It's like you can control the things you control, and when we have a problem that comes up, we have a new platform rolling out, tax is not reconciling, there's something wrong, and the business gave us the wrong tables, the connections are not working fast enough and the APIs are slow. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. With everybody, you just reward the person that finds the problem and you double reward them if it's in their own area and they're heroes to the organization because you feel good and confident in that vulnerability you have.
I mean, I have it, everybody has it. When it's like this is going wrong, you're like, "Holy shit, man, are you sure it's not them? Could it be someone else?" Like, "Hey, I'm pretty sure I'm buttoned down. This is somebody else." And if you just stopped and look at all the things that you could have done to cause this problem, is there any chance it's in your area and you reward that, literally reward that. We called it a hero culture. It's two companies in a row, I've just called it the hero culture is, then people are not only more willing to come forward, but they're actually more willing to seek first. And then even if somebody does end up pointing out, "I looked at my complete area while I was looking at that, I realized Shelli had uploaded this thing and we worked with Shelli and it's all fixed. So ergo it wasn't my fault. It was Shelli's."
Patrick Emmons: That's right, Shelli, why did you do that?
Jay Topper: But-
Patrick Emmons: We've talked about that before.
Jay Topper: You don't just applaud the milestones that are hit. You got to applaud... I remember when we first launched at FTD and it was again wildly successful and in the middle of this implementation and the busiest time of year, the site went down, like, down and we only had like 20% of traffic going through it. And we were in a war room, there's 25 people, and I flipped the lights. I said, "Stop. Hey, before we do anything, let's remember this is the first time in the history of this new platform it ever went down. Everybody clap. Okay, done. Now, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this."
It's like when there's a fire in your house, you don't want to grab gasoline and throw on it. Three seconds is okay to pause to make sure you're doing the right thing. 30 seconds is too much, but three seconds is, "Oh wait. Wait a minute, what do I need to do? Okay, ABC go." And so you have to bring levity to those problems and make those not like a bad thing 'cause they happen every single freaking day in everybody's life, personal and professional. So those are the places that you want to highlight and be willing to talk about.
Patrick Emmons: That's amazing. I think the taking a pause, I forget the name of the book, but it's written by, I think it's an F35 pilot talking about making decisions, right. And one of the things that they teach these pilots back in the day was you tap one of the, I forget exactly whether it's the speedometer, whatever, right. I'm showing my lack of knowledge here, but just-
Jay Topper: Tachometer? I don't know?
Patrick Emmons: Whatever it is, right. Just to take a bead of like, "Hey, think before you just react, right."
Jay Topper: Yeah.
Patrick Emmons: As opposed to Iceman, who's, you know, you're thinking you're dead. And of course that's great movie, but I thought that joke was going to go better. All right, whatever. They're not all winners, so I'll call myself out, I'll be part of the hero culture. That joke was bad, Pat, and it's my fault.
Shelli Nelson: Well played.
Patrick Emmons: I need a show with better jokes, so...
Shelli Nelson: Should we applaud you now?
Patrick Emmons: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Well, I'm curious, 'cause I do think that creating that culture of self-awareness and willingness to, I think 100% is a critical thing for any plan or effort to go well is for everybody to be willing to check their own stuff first and to take ownership of it. You must have done more than just said it to people, right. Is there things that you did to warm them up to it? 'Cause there's got to be that moment where everybody goes, "Okay, I can do this, right. I'm not going to..." Like, if you go to an organization, it would feel like a trap, right. Where it's like, "Okay, so that's what they say. But let's see what happens when they-"
Jay Topper: Yeah, I don't start there. No, you're right about that. I mean, you had asked, and I actually didn't answer. When I go into company, there's always three types of people. When I brought in, there's people that immediately are like, thank goodness something new is happening. And that's probably, I don't know, 10 or 15%, and they're immediate advocates and they're outward advocates. And then you've got 15% or so that are immediate detractors and you've got the majority that you don't know because they're hovering in the middle and they're waiting or they're not ever going to give it up. And the goal is to get to those middle people and be super consistent for your first whatever months it is, because you need to establish trust before people are going to jump onto that hero culture bandwagon. I don't even think I brought up those words until I was at a company for over a year.
And you do it one by one and eventually you realize that a whole bunch of those middle people are probably in either the naysayer bucket or I'm just not the declare. I've seen these guys come and go and I'm just going to hang out here until the next guy comes in and I don't like that. It is not a good place for me. And so you start to try to bucket them a little faster and detractors become advocates, advocates become detractors, and you just keep being consistent and you make mistakes and you're transparent. I'm a huge communicator, so I usually give people that work for me a lot more information than are used to getting.
In fact, sometimes I skirt on the edge of what I shouldn't even be sharing. And eventually you find out the people that are on board, the approach and the direction and the people that owned a lot of the past, you have to spend extra time because it's hard when you talk to somebody that put six months into a proposal and you walk in and look at it and go, "We're not going to sign that and we're going to reboot this whole process because I'm not convinced."
But you can't just say that because somebody put a lot of time into it and it's like, "Look, I want you to help lead it," or, "We're going to include these criteria," or, "Here's why." And so you have to spend a lot of time on the people because the people that often have been there a long time, they've also got a real heart and soul into the company and they're super vested. And I remember when Shelli and I were working together, and it was a bit of a turnaround when I went there and I don't know, maybe two months in, they went out on a boat ride for all the people that were celebrating their birthdays.
And I went to the head HR at the time, I said, "Well, we shouldn't be doing this. We're in a turnaround. What the heck are we renting boats for?" And she turned to me and she said, "We know, but we've committed for... Yeah, we got it." I was like, "Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah." I could have just come in and just started yelling that, and then another 10 people would've been detractors and then they're like, "Why is this guy being a jerk?" 'Cause it's not just about the what, it's about the how.
Patrick Emmons: Right. So could you tell us a little bit more about what that means? The how not so much the what.
Jay Topper: Yeah, I have a couple comments on that. First of all, the what, that, I think in a lot of companies you're either in growth mode and you're trying to handle growth or you're in some sort of detraction and you're trying to handle a downside event. Either way, there's a lot of change going on. And I think in my experience, almost every company I've been to, it's not a lack for understanding what needs to be done. And there's a lot of people that you could... Crap, you could drop me into a company and probably within 60 days, I don't care what department it was, I can say, "Here's five things you need to do. Not 50, but five." And they may not be the perfect five after 60 days, but people will go, "Yeah, you're pretty much right." And it really comes down to how you go about doing it and how you go about executing.
And people make comments about management and leadership all the time, and sometimes they even pan management and they say, "You don't want to be a manager, you want to be a leader." No, you need to be both. And I have a lot of respect. I've had some great managers that are really good at what they do, but when you start crafting the how, especially in a high tense environment, whether you're on a coast guard ship or whether you're doing a turnaround inside of a company or a growth story where you have to revamp all your systems and your data, there's a certain approach and that people are watching and you're setting an example, you're setting a culture, and the more time you spend upfront on that, by the time you start executing, you've got a wave of people that are already behind you.
When I first entered, even back again when I worked with Shelli, my instinct was to be on that boat and kind of pout because early on in my career, it was very much about, "Hey, this is black, it needs to be white. I'm going to get a paintbrush and I'm going to paint it." And a lot of times I just kind of ignored all the external ramifications of the pain that that was causing and the angst that that was causing or the uncertainty that it was causing. And I had a boss tell me, "It doesn't do you any good to score a touchdown if there's no one with you to celebrate." And so the more work you put upfront to where it's... What I like to say is you've kind of crossed that hump and all of a sudden there's more people on board that are wondering whether, and in fact, I've even had people that were telling me I was going too fast, finally said, "Okay, we've got enough now. Can we just go and do something?"
And you start getting pushed a little and it's like, "All right, now we've hit a point," because I love going fast, but you have to bring people along for that journey to be able to instill that type of culture to go fast. And you know when it happens. There is no better feeling in the world when you get to that point where you can just start executing. But it's that leadership piece, how you go about doing it that spells the difference between success and failure in my experience.
Patrick Emmons: You'd think, 'cause I think high performers, right. They like to go fast and they know how to push themselves, right. So when did you start to feel and realize it's not so much about the speed, but we got to get there healthy together, stronger muscles, not degraded sinew, kind of thing. Does that make sense what I'm saying?
Jay Topper: Yeah. Well, first of all, I'll fast-forward. Once I'm in a company for a period of time, there is no direct report you could ever talk to of mine that was with me from say 18 months to two years onwards. That would call me anything short of a speed freak because I love speed. I love bringing into the company, I love being public about it, I love talking about it. But that's after a little bit of time, because you can't walk in there and start talking about that right off the bat because it's not speed to start, the speed is all within me. And it's really disciplining yourself to get into the detail and understand all the unintended consequences that could happen with the actions that you're about ready to take. So it's still is fast and you're pushing yourself, but you're pushing yourself in a different way.
It's more, I don't even want to say it's on the soft side 'cause in a way it's even harder and it's getting to know the individuals. It's starting, you lose a few people, you bring a few others in, you start bringing different vendors in. You create a process of how you talk to vendors and people watch you do it and how you speak to customers and what matters. And that's why I mentioned before, and you should always be consistent as a leader, but that first six months, it's so crazy critical to be really, really, really consistent. Because if I want talk [inaudible 00:37:02], how do you make a million happy customers one at a time. So if I want to talk to a customer every single day that spend a hundred dollars in a 2 billion company, I can't do that once and just say, "Hey, pat my back," or go sit behind a customer service agent.
I have to be engaged every single day. And eventually you get people to start to see that. And that's like a stupid little example or getting into the budget and how much we spend. When you start asking questions about people's areas that they can't answer and you don't get mad about it, you say, "Look, I am going to understand every dollar we spend, and therefore you are going to need to understand every dollar." And the faster you get there, the more that the organization can trust you with that money and then to make decisions around it. And so there's a few guiding principles, and one of them is certainly money, knowing your org, knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
And so you start channeling them to start to look inside their areas more, because in high intense environments, there is an inclination for some people to look at the problems that are outside their areas. So I tend to really retreat inside my own department for the first however much time that is, and to get my own house in order and to establish ourselves and the trust in the culture within ourselves and then pop back out to the org as kind of a version 2.0 where we can then navigate a little bit more freely.
Shelli Nelson: And Jay, that kind of plays into something you shared with us earlier. You said when you join a company, not everyone who welcomes you is your friend and not everyone pushing back is your enemy. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Jay Topper: Yeah, this is a really interesting story that I was thinking about when we first started. I went to one company Vitacost and it ended up being bought by Kroger. And when I first got there, everybody's like, "Hey, you want to go out and have some drinks? You want to go out and have dinner?" And I was like, "Nah, no, I don't. I'm going to go home. I'm going to spend time with my family." And yet I'm a social person with my department. I'm actually an introvert, but with my department, I create bonds. But I remember, I won't give his position or name, but I remember one of my direct reports came up to me and said, "I know why you're not getting close to us. You're not getting close to us 'cause if you have to fire us then that's going to be hard for you."
And I said, "You've got it exactly wrong. By the time that we have formed a relationship, if there's something that happens in this company where I have to make tough decisions around positions, the people around me will respect it. And that's how close I need to be with you before we can start interacting like that, because we have to have that professional trust first before we can establish a social trust with each other." And I meant it. It's like most of the reorgs I've done and I've done some tough ones and big ones at scale that are public, that are out in the, you know, they're in 10 Q's and 10 K's most of the time. There was at least respect behind it, even in a lot of cases of the people that were impacted. In fact, I've been let go twice, and both times I was like, "I get it." And because you'd establish that relationship where there were reasons behind it and you kind of understood it a little bit.
Now, not everyone gets there because that's really hard, but I just think that you have to really establish that professional side of you first. You can be engaging, you can be fun, you could have lunch in the same room, but you got to be careful not to get too intertwined with the social aspect of business until you've established that credibility and trust. And then there's always then again, still lines you can't cross. And again, early in my career, even when you knew me, Shelli, I mean, I remember when I was hired at the company, and I don't know if this is already covered or not, but the recruiter, my predecessor, was leading the replacement of himself and the recruiter went to him and said, "You don't want this guy. He's a bull in a China shop. He goes too fast, he's going to break glass."
And Dan said, "You're wrong. That's exactly what we need because I'm not that... I'm so far away from being that human." And fortunately I was just enough on my journey of personal growth that I came in with some softer edges, but I learned more and more softer edges, which has enabled me to hold people more accountable and to go even faster because I do it with care. And people know that. Nobody ever questions my caring. It's one of the best compliments I ever get that I care, where if you come in and just start ripping shit apart, people don't think you care. And in fact, people that do that don't care to the same extent. You have to get to know the people. You have to do the hard work up front.
Shelli Nelson: Great advice.
Patrick Emmons: The term impatient comes to mind. You say move fast. And I think there's people who are very similar, like-minded, and I think a lot of our listeners, they think fast, they move fast, they're okay with the friction. And I think it's the impatience that people think, and I hear this from friends and people that I know where they're like, "I've got to learn how to calm it down." And my advice is always, "No. You got to where you got to because you've got the capacity to be impatient." And that's not a negative thing. But what I hear when, you've turned the impatience from external to internal of like, "Hey, I've got to be impatient in making clear expectations. I've got to be impatient in creating the clarity instead of, "Hey, we need to be impatient and making forward progress of like, "I'm going to be impatient in making things clear, understanding what I'm joining, what exists, why it exists, and being impatient in that way instead of what we see is impatience and destructiveness and thoughtlessness and just going into make noise."
The new head coach going to the Jets where he's like, "I don't want Aaron Rodgers in the building when I get there." I kind of understand that as a Bears fan, I get that part, but there is a certain component of like, well, why didn't... Slow down. But that impatience is, I think there's a lot of people that get to that point, and you said your own growth journey, and that's how I feel a lot of people get to a certain level and they think that this great skill and ability that they have is something that needs to be reined in instead of directed and controlled.
Jay Topper: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. It's just a different form of speed and it's satisfying a different area of impatience. And there are times and super smart successful people that I look up to, most of the time, they probably knew the answer up front and or at least had a pretty good idea of it. But I had another boss, a different boss tell me, I've learned, they're all my mentors even though they don't know it. And some of them were bullies and some of them were enablers. And my boss with Shelli was a great enabler and he used to say, "Hey, I'm right 90% of the time, but that other 10%, that's a doozy, because those are the big ones."
And so when you also discipline yourself to get into that level of detail, again, especially early on, because you can start gunslinging a little bit more later and you've got a bunch of people around you that some are going to slow you down, some are going to speed you up, you need that whole ecosystem around you for the check and balance, but you actually come to conclusions that are different than what your hypothesis was.
And if you go too fast, you miss a lot of valuable information from a lot of valuable people, even though you might be right 70% of the time or 80% or 90, by slowing down not only to get people on board the execution speed level, but you also sometimes, this is why you hear leaders often say, "I love being proven wrong." They're not blowing smoke. It's legit. It's like, "Oh my gosh, I thought this is exactly what we should do first. And now after spending all this time, this is what we should do first. I can't believe my eyes have been opened."
And I've told all my directs, again, usually after the first year or year and a half when they're the settled direct reports, "If you all come to me with an idea and you just want me to sign it, 99% of the time, I'm just going to sign it. You've already done the work I'm going to ask you to do anyway is, do you have all your teammates on board with you?" And they've done it a few times. They've had interventions with me and said, "Look, you're going down this path and you've had individual conversations with all of us and we think you're just wrong. And this is the path."
And I remember one when I was picking Zendesk over Salesforce.com on the CRM, the Service Cloud one, because I don't always get along with Service Cloud in Salesforce, great company, but they're slow and they don't fit the fast thing. And Zendesk was really fast, but they didn't have as good a technology. And I just hung my head right in the meeting. It was like a 30-minute meeting and 10 minutes in I said, "Okay, fine, I'll start negotiating with Service Cloud. You guys are 100% right."
And I knew that thing was there because it doesn't handle the order gracefully. That was the actual thing, and I knew it, but I thought where there's a will, there's a way, we'll make it work. And I have great technicians and great product managers and great business people working for me and they'll figure it out, but it was a big blocker and these guys and girls came to me and just basically intervened on me. And I've had that happen more than once. I always say 99%, 'cause I don't [inaudible 00:46:32] come to me saying, "We think you should all give us a 20% raise." Okay, fine. That's not happening. But the power of direct reports is incredible because as a leader, you have to be really sure of yourself, but you also have to be humble enough to listen. And there's a line there, because you can't stand up and say, "This is our strategy. I'm pretty sure. I don't know, what do you guys think?"
By the time you're there, you got to be talking confidently. So you got to be humble enough to take in those inputs and confident enough once you get there. But that intervention and harnessing those people that they understand, they have the power to sit you down, close the door, sit down with you even one-on-one and say, "Look, I've got to tell you something." And when they're right, they're right. And that's why leaders love to be proven wrong 'cause it means they already thought something good and now they're finding out there's something great that's better than good. And that's why it's not just lip service when you hear someone say that, it's because they've been through it. And I think some people use that lip service sometime, but the practical application of it is, you just made us better by doing that.
And if anything else, do it faster and get there quicker if you can to save us a lot of time. Speed, speed, speed is always going to be there for me. That's never going away. I've had so many people do re-platforms. I just did a big one at Chico's and I had nine different vendors and all this stuff, and they all have come to me and said, "That is the fastest we've ever gone. We thought you were crazy. We never thought we'd hit the date. There is nothing..." And it was remarkably successful, but it was the speed one, where they exceeded what their own expectations of themselves were. I'd carry that with me forever. I'm like, "That's exactly right."
If you can get people to do more than they think they can do, that's gold. And I love it when I have bosses that I'm like, "I cannot believe I'm doing this." Joe Vacchiola sent me over to India and said, "Go build a JV for pre-press. It's never been done." I mean, I gave him the idea. He goes, "Yeah, go do that." There'd never been an American creative agency for a company like ours built in India, and I went and built it and it became a JV with 20 people, now there's a thousand there. I couldn't believe he was letting me do this. It was like just amazing how much an enabling boss can be once you have established that trust.
Patrick Emmons: Well, that's amazing. Jay, I can't say thank you enough. You did not fail to impress. I've always enjoyed our conversation, the previous calls that we've had before. Tremendous leader and humble, right.
Shelli Nelson: Yeah.
Patrick Emmons: Definitely, I think it's-
Jay Topper: I appreciate that.
Patrick Emmons: ... a great hallmark of a great leader. I think it's easy to have trust in people when they're like you.
Jay Topper: Thank you.
Patrick Emmons: So thank you so much for being on the show today. Looking forward to hearing more about your adventures, and hopefully you find the speed you're looking for at some point. There's maximum velocity somewhere that you're like, "I found permanent joy," in your pursuit, so thank you again.
Shelli Nelson: Yeah, thank you, Jay.
Jay Topper: You're welcome. And thank you for having me. Thank you both Patrick and Shelli. And Shelli, it's always great to reminisce. Someday we'll have to have a side calling you off to give me your perception of me back then. I just feel like I was so young.
Shelli Nelson: We both were.
Jay Topper: But you look the same. I feel like we're just right back where we were.
Shelli Nelson: Thank you. That's very kind.
Jay Topper: But you're welcome. Thank you.
Patrick Emmons: Awesome. Well, we also want to thank our listeners. We appreciate everyone joining us today.
Shelli Nelson: And if you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, you can subscribe by visiting our website at dragonspears.com/podcast or find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Emmons: This episode was sponsored by DragonSpears and produced by Dante32.
