Jay Steinfeld  
core values are not just what you say you want to be. They're not aspirational goals and ideals. They're actually when you wake up, what propels you into action? And how do you behave about that?

Jeff Ma  
Hello, and welcome to love as a business strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business where we want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from, we believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I'm your host, Jeff moll. And as always, I'm here to have those conversations with real people with real stories, real businesses. And recently, I had the opportunity to go to a conference here in Houston, called the shine conferences, talking all about culture and invited a number of people to come speak about their experiences and their expertise and just about culture in general in the workplace. And I and I was completely blown away and inspired by My guest today, who's been gracious enough to come join us. His name is Jay Steinfeld. And I've actually known about Jay for a while because I have his his book. And I'm gonna talk we're gonna talk about that today. But Jay Steinfeld. He founded and was the CEO of blinds.com, which many of us know, we should all know, because it was the world's number one online window covering retailer and one of the greatest kind of online retailers in general of all time. And it was bootstrapped in 1996 for just $3,000 from from his Texas garage, and then it was then acquired by the Home Depot in 2014. And remains that way today. So Jay was the CEO and later joined the Home Depot online leadership team. And after stepping away from those roles in 2020. He teaches entrepreneurship at Rice's University Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. And he also serves on several private company boards and on the board of the public company, Mason Knight. He also supports numerous charities and he is an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year is earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Houston Technology Center. I saw him as an awesome public speaker. And he does that a lot as well as he's active as an industry speaker, talking about corporate culture, core values, how to scale startups disruption, and he's published over 100 articles and writes a column for inc.com Fun Facts he's he is I love that when these get shared so I can have them. He also sings in the same barbershop shop quartet of which he's been a part of for nearly 50 years. And he lives in Houston with his wife, Barbara, and has five children, eight great grandchildren, which I quote he refers to as his eight startups. His book lead from the core, the four principles for profit and prosperity, I have my copy, right here is a Wall Street Journal bestseller. It's amazing, I highly recommend it, we'll link it up to just so excited. And Jay, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so happy you're here.

Jay Steinfeld
Oh, thank you, Jeff. Appreciate the introduction. Good to be here. Well,

Jeff Ma  
I want to jump into this. But I have a question I always want to know first before I start any conversation, and that is simply what is your passion. And how did that come to be? Through

Jay Steinfeld
my passion? My passion is about seems a little trite, but about seeing how good I can become. Let's see how if I can influence others to be the best that they can be. What I've what I've learned, and what the book lead from the core is about is my core values, which I learned a long time ago, and they've evolved over time. And I realized that my passion when I wake up the core values, what I love to do is evolve, to experiment to see if I can evolve better, to speak up and have other people speak up to me. And all that is fun. So the fourth core value of what I am really passionate about is enjoyment, enjoying the ride. All of this for our company was to help people become better than what they ever believed possible. And when I think about how do I define success, my success is about being in the continuum in the process of doing all those things of getting better. And if I can help other people get better, which is also part of it, then I have been successful. So that's my definition of success being in the process of getting better and helping everybody within my sphere of influence to get better. That's what I'm passionate about.

Jeff Ma  
And, and you're doing it I mean your book lead from the core, I think has already helped many people testimonies all over and it's it's it's incredible and I I almost want to just dive right in. So maybe, for people who haven't read it, I know you have some, you know, I actually want to start with the word kind of like, I guess core when you go when you come when you talk about core values. I think there's a lot of different definitions people might already have in their head around what that means. Can you define what core values mean to you in the context of your life and your book? Sure,

Jay Steinfeld
Jeff, first, let me say what they're not core core values. And core is not about what you hope to become. I mean, there's lots of things that you want to be in what you want your business to be. But core is what you actually inherently, in your DNA are, what you are, and how you behave. Because core values are not just what you say you want to be. They're not aspirational goals and ideals. They're actually when you wake up, what propels you into action? And how do you behave about that? So for me, the core is what propels you into action. And I mean, action, not just how you want to be, what do you do today? That's your core?

Jeff Ma  
Do you have a, like an optimistic or realistic? Like, what kind of view do you have on this core? Because like, I'll just kind of say bluntly, like, are some people just rotten to the core? Do they wake up and not want to, you know, do anything of positive value? Is that is that a kind of core you're talking about? Or do you have a belief that there's a, like a good core and all of us?

Jay Steinfeld
Well, I wouldn't want to say that. There's any one particular person or people who are rotten to the core. But there probably are, I'm sure there are. But you can say that also about your business. If you don't know what your core values are, they're still core values being displayed. So if you were to ask people, even if you have not explicitly defined what your core values are, people kind of know, they know whether you respect people, whether you love people, whether you think about customers first, they know whether you're open to experimentation. They know whether it's okay to express yourself and say what you really believe. So whether you know it or not, you have core values, and people will know what those are. It's up to you to craft them and make sure that the core values that you really believe or what Ms made you successful today, and what you want to use to scale into the future, that those are the kinds of people that you have. And those are the only kind of people that you have, so that you can continue to do what you've done so well.

Jeff Ma  
So maybe jumping a little ahead here, but I think the listener is probably already asking, Okay, great. I have my core values. And you just said, I need to surround myself with only those people. Like logistically, how do you do that? Or how do you find these people, these diamonds in the rough or whatever it is that happened to fit perfectly with these values?

Jay Steinfeld
Well, they're not diamonds in the rough people, people come in all different flavors, it's up to you. If you if your flavors strawberry, then just look for people who are strawberry. And that doesn't mean anything other than just knowing that the core values are people who are in my case, want to experiment want to express themselves want to find out how good they can become and love doing that. Not just accept the idea that change is inevitable. And I've got to just learn how to do that. But who relish change, who relish seeing what type of evolution they can have, and how they can influence the company, influence everybody around them. Those are the kinds of people in my case that I must have. And you find very quickly, if the people are not like that, in two weeks, they pretty much get ostracized. Because if somebody has, you can't be arrogant in a situation like that in an environment like that. Because if you're arrogant, and you're not open to change, you think hey, I'm an expert. I know what I'm doing. Don't tell me what to do. Well, anyone who is believes they've known everything is basically on their way down. Because nobody ever knows everything and whatever you know, and even if you didn't know everything, which of course is impossible, everything that you know is going to change because all the facts and the environment, the macro economic conditions and everything which worked in the past, it's not necessarily going to work in the future. So you got to be humble and and we interview for that. We interview to make sure that people are open and want to change. That's these are actual interview questions. So I'm not saying that the core values that you have should be the same thing that I have But whatever they are, you should devise interview questions that specifically try to ferret out and ascertain whether they have those values. And then if you've got people who are doing really well, and yet they don't have the core values, you got to really think about whether they're going to be a bit good for the future of the company. And you have to maybe think whether they should still be there. But if you have people who are not doing that well, but do show all the core values, it could be that those people should just be in a different role. Maybe you put them in the wrong role. And those are the kinds of people that you want to invest in, and you want to you they've got to have the skills, of course, but if they don't have those core values, then you really don't want to invest in them. We had the number two salesperson that blinds.com was starting to exhibit core values that were the antithesis of two of them. And I'm not going to go into the specifics. But we had to let her go despite the fact she was our second highest salesperson, you just can't allow that kind of behavior in the organization. Unless, you know, your core value is to be a jerk, and to just stay exactly what's on your mind with no filter whatsoever. That's not a really fun place to be in. But there are cultures like that. And if that's your culture, then the people who aren't like that are gonna get weeded out.

Jeff Ma  
That makes sense. I want to dive right into something that you're probably tired of explaining to people. But I think the four E's is incredibly important. I found it such an important lesson. I wanted to fit that in here. So would you mind explaining what the four E's are and how they came about?

Jay Steinfeld
Well, sure, the four E's are the car culture, our values are what allowed us with virtually no money and just a handful of people, people to beat Home Depot and Lowe's and everyone in the blinds business online, including Amazon. That's how important these core values are. The core values are something that I actually didn't believe in at all, when I first started the business. So it's not like I started the business have these core values in hand. And that's how we were able to succeed. I basically didn't believe in that. I thought it was BS. But a year after I had started the business, my wife Naomi, who had been sick for five years with cancer passed away. And that was a waking up for me to start thinking about what is important to me. How do I define success? How do I raise my three young children and start this new business? So long story short, I began a lot of introspection and asking and a lot of reading about how people define their core values, what they mean. And eventually came up with three core values. One of which I realized wasn't at all true. But even my evolution of myself includes the evolution of the core values themselves. So that's what they are the first one, and they're all again, in the interest of our stated express purpose of the company, not to be the best in the world that selling blinds. But the but helping people become better than what they ever believed possible. And becoming better is not about achieving, it's first becoming a better person. And if a person feels like they're respected, and that they're being invested in, and they're being listened to, and you're being generous with your time, and information, and training, and you really want them to succeed if your stated view is to help them become better than they ever believed possible. How can you want to be anywhere else, as long as you're being adequately compensated, and people hardly ever left the company, because everybody was helping everybody else evolve. So the four E's evolve continuously. And that means everything, every process, everything we do, ourselves and each other, our suppliers, our vendors, our customers, our community. The second in order to evolve you have to take chances, figure out what's wrong with you. And then experiment to see what you can do better. And I don't just mean you. It's like all your process, how you advertise how you onboard, everything, supply chain, and you experiment and take chances and see what happens for us. I mean, I'm risk averse. I say experiment without fear of failure. But what that really means is don't have anything to fear. When you don't have anything to fear. It means that you look at the downside risk of an experiment. And if you can live with that downside risk, there really isn't anything to fear. You know, when I think about it, starting the whole company was an experimentation without fear. I already had a blind store, I was a shop at home decorator and thought, I've heard of this thing called the internet. So free 1000 bucks. So what's, what's the downside? So I just started tinkering with it. And eventually I started selling online when I heard that Amazon, this was 1993 When I first went on, and then when I saw that Amazon was selling books, I said, Hey, you can sell stuff online, let me experiment selling blind, it was just me selling actually, people would call into the showroom, they'd say, all of our customer service representatives are busy. And then they'd call me in my car and my cell phone, I'd call them back from the car. That's how the whole thing started. It was an experiment. So you experiment without fear, there was nothing to fear. So being upside, that's how you should look at almost all risk, low downside high upside. And then in order to figure out where you need to get better how we need to get better, how to get great ideas, you want everybody to speak up, because everybody in your company has some idea of how to get better, how they can get better what the company needs, how customers can be better served. So you want to make sure people aren't afraid of speaking up. They're not afraid of having any conflict at all. Because a lot of times I may say something that that is that seems like it's inconsistent with something I said in the past. Or maybe it was inconsistent. I should be accounted, you know, be accountable for that. And someone should say, you know, Jay, I heard you say this last week, now you're saying this, I don't get that, can you help me understand that. So you want people to speak up, and you want a diverse workforce, so that you get diverse views and get all sorts of data points. And that's fun. And that's why enjoying the ride is so important. It's not about the pinball machines, and the foosball and the free food and all that although we had that too. It was really about doing things that people said we'd never be able to do about becoming better than we ever believed possible about doing things that people said we could never do with having less money than people felt we needed. So that's great when you can do things that people say, oh, you can't sell blinds online. That's a stupid idea, which is what everybody told me. Well, it was just an experiment wasn't really trying to get rich out of it or prove people wrong, I just wanted to try, it seemed like a fun game. And that's how I approached it. So those core values were the kind of core values that we made sure that other people had an overtime, even though I am gone from the company from May 2020. I look at all these posts on LinkedIn and other places on social media, of talking about the company and what they're doing. And they're still talking about those core values, they're still talking about them, and crystal clear, because they know that's where we were, which is why I wrote the book. It wasn't really to make it a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Although that's good. It was really about having some type of history, some type of document that the people@blinds.com could look to and say, Oh, this is how we were this is how we got to where we are, this is why all these things are so important. And yes, now I get it. And they can then use that. And at scale. We using the leverage of that information. And then I started using it as I was teaching and in my speaking and all these other places. So it's kind of worked out, too. Yeah.

Jeff Ma  
And it must be great to have have been an employee of blinds.com, or, you know, Home Depot after and see that this book is stating all these things that you felt and you are part of that, I think that must be an incredible thing for them to have. So it's awesome that you were able to get that into book form.

Jay Steinfeld
It is what's also cool is how Home Depot has used the book. In part of their leadership modules, they created six modules on entrepreneurship, using parts of the book, to teach people how to be more entrepreneurial, so that they don't get into this. You know, bureaucratic, concrete that just causes them not to be able to evolve themselves. So they see the benefit of being entrepreneurial, even though I had $150,000,000,000.04 100,000 employees, maybe more. It's hard to get something like that to move and to evolve, but they have. And that was actually very gratifying that happened even after I left. That was two years after I left that they did that. So

Jeff Ma  
that's amazing. So one thing I read is that one of the things that I think you say or that is kind of within your lexicon is this idea to bring humanity back into business. And our literal tagline here with love as a business strategy is to bring humanity back to the war. Please, let's connect on that. So can you kind of give your spiel for what you mean, around bringing humanity back into business? Because it's I mean, we're saying the exact same thing. But I want to hear from you.

Jay Steinfeld
Well, first, there's this feeling that you have to be a jerk to be a CEO, that you have to be a jerk to lead, and that you basically you're yelling at people and telling them what to do. And it's my way or no way. And the some of the most actually, impressive and successful people that you can think of as entrepreneurs are that way. But you don't have to be that way. You really don't, in fact, is better. If you're not that way. It's so much more fun to actually give people, not just humanity, but respect, is giving people respect too much to ask, isn't it isn't just more fun, doesn't mean that you don't hold people seriously accountable. And that, but being accountable for asking people to be accountable, means to be humane to somebody is being very clear in what you expect from those people. So there's nothing wrong with saying this is what we're going to do. And this is when we're going to have it done. That's more respectful than just saying get it done fast. People don't know what to do with that. So the more clear you are with direction, the more training you give them, the more resources you give them, the bigger voice that you have, the more you make sure that you've hired them in the right position, is really being generous. It's not being stingy and giving them as much money as you possibly can. Not giving the least amount you can possibly get away with people know if you're doing that or not. So if you're if your mindset is in default, what can I do for this business that gives people more money, more investment in their future, and still actually be in the long term best interest of the company. If you start there, instead of how what's the least I can do, people were going to stay, that's in turn going to lower your employment costs, it's going to lower your training costs, you can actually invest in people because you know, they're not going to leave. So there's some of the reasons that most of the time, people don't invest in people because they know they're part time they're transient, why invest in somebody if they're going to leave? Well, if you can turn it around, and say, by giving them more, they'll stay longer, and they'll become better people, they'll help me figure out what needs to be done. Well, that's just being asked just being more generous, and respectful to people. A typical example is somebody saying, you know, my door is always open, just come on in, I've got an open door policy, and you go by that person's office, and it's never open, it's literally closed. And their blinds are closed. Instead, say something like, if you've got something, send me an email if you want, or if it's something you really want to talk to me about. I will come to you, I will come to your office, I will come to your cube, I will come to your desk, I will come we'll sit down in a meeting room close to you. I want to hear what you have to say that is more respectful. That is being that's bringing humanity into the into the to the business. I

Jeff Ma  
love that I in my story, it was literally the same thing I would in my past, I would go up to everyone and say I have an open door policy just come in. door's always open. And my door was literally physically open. But nobody came through they because they, they were afraid to talk to me. So it's, I'm

Jay Steinfeld
not saying that everybody is going to still be there's this aura of the CEO, that you have to understand as a leader that people just generally don't want to, you know, they're afraid. And occasionally some there will be one person who has absolutely no compunction about coming to me. And you know, those are the people I like the most. And they'll they'll no other people will know about that. And we'll go, Hey, we need to tell Jeff to go in to talk to Jay because he'll Jeff will talk. So they'll all get together and talk to Jeff and Jeff will come into the office and kind of represent the ombudsman. For others that are a little too afraid. But there's ways to speak up. You don't have to do it publicly. You don't have to do it in a meeting. But if you don't speak up and you have information, you're actually being kind of lying. You're saying everything's great. When you know there's nothing that can be better. So you really do need to encourage and if somebody does speak up in public, especially if they're new, you can say wow, you know, you're only been here two weeks. and you're already disagreeing with me. That is awesome. I think we should all stand up and cheer for Barney, who just got into this into the organization and has the nerve, the confidence to speak up, that is expressing yourself and boy that you're gonna get along really well, buddy. You do things like that, instead of shutting them down, then we tried that five years ago. That's a stupid idea.

Jeff Ma  
Jay, I want to know, in your teachings and your speaking and in your, in your mentoring or whatever spaces, does the word love come up? And in what context? If so?

Jay Steinfeld
Well, I use it in a way, that may be a little different than how you're hoping I'm going to say, I think expectations, okay. There's, there's this book called The discipline of market leaders. And it talks about, there are essentially, three ways a business can be it can be a product leader, Apple, there can be operational excellence, Walmart, Home Depot, or there can be customer intimacy. blinds.com Zappos companies like that. And that doesn't mean that your company is only one of three, it just means you kind of lead with that. That's how you think first. And I call that a love language. That's your love language. Do you? Are you product leader, organizationally efficient? Or are you customer intimate? And when we were acquired by Home Depot, because they had a different love language. And maybe you've heard the book, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, everybody has their own definition of love. And if you define love one way and your significant others and other than you think that the other person doesn't love you, because they're not speaking in that language. Well, we had to understand that our love language was customer intimacy. And Home Depot's was operational efficiency. And we had to not try to change each other's love language. We had to say, well, they're starting with operational efficiency, we're not going to say, Don't you care about customers? Well, of course, they care about customers, but they're starting with operational efficiency, because they're $150 billion. You bet. If you can tweak one bit of efficiency, you may make $10 million in a day because you just tweak one little bitty thing is incredible. So we were able to merge our core our core values and our culture with Home Depot's so that we didn't have this thing that normally happens when a big company acquires a little one. And you just basically it falls apart, we understood each other's love language kept the most part and tried to change the other. Of course, we couldn't really change Home Depot, they could change us.

Jeff Ma  
What was that part of the deal when when Home Depot acquired was that part of the consideration of like how the culture would stay intact as part of the deal?

Jay Steinfeld
It was from my perspective, it wasn't really written into the deal that they wouldn't do this, they wouldn't do that. But when Pixar was acquired by Disney, they did create some type of sort of rules of engagement that said guidelines as to how we want to be so that you Disney doesn't, won't crush. What's made Pixar so good. And we were thinking along that same line, I read about that in a book. And we did it we actually wrote a letter that was signed off by the legal department and said, we get to keep our titles we get to keep our are new or separate corporate name, that we will stay in Euston, things like that a lot of different things. compensation program would be the same. That wouldn't be because it's not like a company comes in and says you've got to be like us. They've just know that what's been successful for them, works for them, and why not then apply that same process to the new company. And then you have these unintended consequences. And they did say when they acquired us, Look, we have this habit of acquiring a company and just sucking the life out of them. And we don't want that to happen to you. So anytime that happens, where you're we're about to do something where we think it's good, and you think it's not speak up. Well, one of my core values is to express myself so that I had no problem and we did that and there were multiple times I needed to speak up, and even about what our core values should be home depot thought, well, but there's eight core values at Home Depot, and you've got four, you now have 12. No, we don't have 12, we have four, those are our core values, we honor your eight. And we accept them as really good core values. But those are not ours. And were separate. And they did allow us to, to keep our autonomy. And I give them a lot of credit for that.

Jeff Ma  
That's amazing. That seems very rare in this day and age to hear that being successfully done that way, especially in acquisition so well,

Jay Steinfeld
and it's still, we're doing an unbelievable amount of revenue right now. And pretty much because they've allowed us to stay true to ourselves true to our core values, to maintain our love language, and to, and to make sure that there is nothing other than just respect generosity, and humanity. In our workforce, the way we defined it. It's awesome, doesn't mean that when a new person comes like we have a new boss, you got to go through all the training, you got to train them, as in green cheer, they come to the office and see all the fun and see if people are smiling and having a good time and hitting all of our numbers, which is super important, too. Of course, it's not just about fun and doing things different. But you've got to hit your numbers, especially if you're a public company. And but we did and we have far surpassed any expectations as to what they thought blinds.com was going to do. I mean, we're just killing it. And all the technology that we've built is now being used in all the stores 2400 stores, it's now I think, going into Canada, and then eventually in Mexico. And in a port being applied not just the blinds, but the technology that we built in Houston, just as little group as using the technology to sell other custom configurable, hard to buy products, like decks and vanities and storm doors and countertops and a lot of other things. Which is really fun. Where we have become better than even I thought we would be. Although I always said we would do it. I just never quite knew for sure.

Jeff Ma  
What an incredible journey. I mean, J watt is last bit here. Before I have to let you go. What is next for you like what are you looking forward to on the horizon? You've accomplished so much. You have this amazing story, amazing book, that's all here. Is there something you're still aspiring for something you're still reaching for now?

Jay Steinfeld
Well, as long as I just get a little better every day, I feel that success. So I'm going to I'm going to spread out as wide as I can keep reading, keep learning. And I'll figure something out. I'm not worried about it. I went to teaching, writing the book joining all these boards of public board which I've never been on. I've got my my eight startups, my grand, my grandkids, yeah, each one of them is different in their own way. I want to spend time with them. Travel with my wife, we're going to New Zealand for five weeks, in in a few weeks. That's going to be an experiment. So, you know, building a house, just trying new things and seeing what I can do before I die. I mean, that's kind of just squeezed it all out. Don't leave anything out. That you could have figured out before. It's too late. No regrets.

Jeff Ma  
No regrets. Jay, I really appreciate you taking the time today squeezing us in to your to your experimentation and I really appreciate what we've learned from you and what you've

Unknown Speaker  
shared today. Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it.

Jeff Ma  
Absolutely. To our listeners. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. Please do. Go check out this book. It is really worth your read lead from the core of the four principles for profit prosperity. Jay Steinfeld, incredible story, inspirational. You have a lot to learn, and I really appreciate him for joining today. Appreciate you for continuing to listen to the podcast. We hope you're checking out our book love as a business strategy. As always, if you haven't yet, please subscribe, and rate but with that, we'll let it we'll see everybody next week, and I hope you have a good one.