Brian Rist is the President & founder of Storm Smart Industries which he founded in 1996. Brian was able to spot an opportunity and has pioneered the innovative technology that Storm Smart uses to keep homes safe from hurricanes. Since the start Storm Smart has been named one of INC’s 500 fastest growing privately held companies and last year Storm smart did $50 million in gross income! But over the years that type of success was not always the case. On this episode Brian discusses the importance of your people, how to create a great culture and always continuing to have a growth mindset.
This episode is an entrepreneurs playbook and one you won’t want to miss!
Sean DeLaney: Brian, welcome to What Got You There, how are you doing today?
Brian Rist: Doing great, thanks for having me.
Sean: Yeah, no, this is a tremendous honor for me being in Southwest Florida. Watching the success you’ve been able to build. But I wanna dive back to the origin story a bit. What were you like as a kid, did you have that entrepreneurial spirit?
Brian: Well, I was very fortunate that I grew up in a home where my family was involved in small business, so I watched small business from a very, very young age. As a matter of fact, when I was in high school, my dad helped my younger brother and I own our first business. We owned a coin-operated laundry mat that taught us about working in the very beginning, and in the end that actually paid for both mine and my younger brother’s way through college, so from a very young age, I kinda learned about being in business, watching him first of all, and then getting the opportunity that he gave us.
Sean: How did that even start with the coin-operated business?
Brian: Well, my dad was in the dry cleaning business and owned a strip plaza and he decided to break one part of it off to make it a coin-operated laundry back… I don’t even wanna say when, but he thought it would be a good learning lesson for us to take care of the machines and go every day and clean the place up and make sure everything’s in order and actually taking the money out and counting it and doing all the things that you do in a coin-operated business.
So from probably my sophomore year in high school, all the way through when I actually went off to college, we ran up that small business.
Sean: I always try to learn through osmosis, even these conversations, I’m learning from you. What do you take away from your dad? Just seeing him operate that business day in, day out.
Brian: Well, were several things that he taught me at a very young age, and unfortunately he passed at a young age, but what it was all about was hard work and perseverance. I remember from some of my first memories he would get up and be open our business up at 7:00 in the morning, and worked ‘till 7 o’clock at night five days a week and then Saturday was a short day he only worked till three, so five and a half-days a week he was just putting in tremendous hours and I would watch him and he would always be there himself. Because that’s how he knew that things were running well.
Now, that business didn’t grow into a very large business but it just continued to feed our families and provide a very nice lifestyle. So, it was about customer service, knowing your customers and perseverance and hard work.
Sean: It seems like those values have remained and instill in you and the companies you built.
Brian: Yeah, I don’t know that there’s any shortcut. I wish I could say I figured out a way to call in or running a company, I’ve not figured that out. I don’t know that’s even possible. So I still… Even though there’s others who are in charge of day-to-day operations, I still show up here every morning around 7 o’clock in the morning and stay till later in the day.
I just… If you wanna lead and you want something to grow and you wanna become of it, it’s often good to set the right example and if I don’t show up for work, why would I think everybody else would?
Sean: Yeah, no, lead from the top. I’m really intrigued about the younger years though. And what do you think you were gonna end up doing? Obviously, you had that entrepreneurial mindset.
Brian: It’s funny that you ask that, ’cause I often do reflect on this. I never in my wildest imaginations… Ever dreamed that what we started and what the life we lead would become the life we have.
I pinch myself every day. And knowing that we’ve turned it into today, we employ over 200 people.
I could never have scripted what happened. I’m very, very proud and happy and excited and passionate about what happened, but you just get up every morning and you really try to do the best job you can, and try to lead a great life and it’s amazing what can happen.
But so when I was going to high school, and college I was going at a time when the Vietnam War was on and all kinds of things were going on which didn’t give me a great feeling of future success. And we tried several businesses before we got to this business, that didn’t work and so then eventually found a business that work. But you learn when you do good things, good things happen. And obviously, the converse is this true, if you do bad things, bad things happen. And who has time for that?
So we just cut up and swing the bat every day and see how hard we could hit the ball. And then you found that you surround yourself with great people, then your life becomes easier, in… And the only way that could become… They’re gonna be great people, if you treat them that way.
And so you really just get better at being involved with people and helping people grow their lives, and letting them lead. Probably the best thing that I could do is get out of the way of a lot of people who do run this business. But if you had met me 30 years ago, and said, “You’re gonna run this big company, and it grow into one of the biggest companies in Southwest Florida,” I would think that you probably had too much wine or something, so it really…
I don’t know that many people, I don’t know, I didn’t start out with the idea. We’re gonna build a big company, we just start out and try to do the right thing and the beginning maybe get to it, but in the beginning, we were struggling, we struggled for a lot of years before it started to gain some momentum, and game some rhythm and then it worked. But to say that I, scripted this whole thing from early age is just not true.
Now, the curious part of the whole thing is that the school I went to was a very big school about fabrics and technology and it was in Massachusetts, where the mills, the textile mills were and my parents were both in the garment industry, when they were young, but then I ended up in the fabric industry, and using fabric as a hurricane protection advice, which is almost a 1000% coincidental. But it’s just kind of funny how it all worked out. My college is and was one of the biggest textile universities in the United States, but I was no part of that, I was in the business school, I started on an engineering school, but I transfer to a business program, and it was just all about business and then I didn’t really have the passion to really own my own business in the very beginning, but as time moved on, and you just start to think you have better ways of doing things and working for yourself. I thought it was more fun than working for somebody else.
And if you’re gonna be in a leadership role, why not being the real leadership role? And that’s kind of how we got in business. It was a… Why run a company for somebody else, your whole life when you could have a chance to run it to yourself.
Sean: Yeah, a lot of threads I really wanna dive into but one thing I’m curious, you mentioned we had a few businesses that failed.
Brian: Sure.
Sean: Any, you remember?
Brian: Oh, many, many. I’ve been around the construction business my whole life.
So we started out being in the masonry business, and the stucco business and that kind of rose and fall with the economy and new construction. I was a carpenter and a rough framer for a long time when we were in the construction business, we built houses for quite a few years, and then with the economy changing you run through cycles.
And so I love to build a house. There’s nothing that maybe gives you more pride than just take it a piece of earth and then building something that somebody lives and their families live in and we developed whole streets and that was just really exciting. But some of the variables are beyond your control, like all of a sudden in our case, the mortgage business went through the roof and what used to be maybe a five or 6% mortgage, I remember went up to a 18%. And people simply couldn’t afford houses at that time, the economy shifted, and it just didn’t it instant work out.
But you learn things and hopefully, if you do things right, every time a business fails, it’s not really a failure. It’s just another learning experience.
Sean: Yeah I’m really intrigued by that. You learn from the failures. What was your mindset like during one of those times, did you think you’d eventually be successful with those?
Brian: Sometimes necessity is the… Is the mother of invention.
And I just knew that real failure wasn’t an option. And you just have to get up the next day and the sun comes out again and you try again and I don’t know that it’s a failure as long as you learn something and nobody gets hurt when things close down. So yeah, that business didn’t continue. I don’t know that I would call it a failure because I did learn what I didn’t wanna do the next time. I did learn more about financing and cash management employees and all the things that you learned along the way that are necessary to run a successful business.
So, although, those businesses didn’t continue, we did our best to make sure nobody was harmed when things went the wrong way. But if you learn something, then I think then it is still a success in some ways.
Sean: Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t be failure. Maybe growth opportunity or something like that. And I’m really intrigued. You mentioned a few things about cash management, anything you wish you would spend a little bit more time on when you were younger?
Brian: Oh, I think. And when you run a business the thing that they should probably spend a lot more time on in college and education is psychology. A big part of being any kind of business success or not success is about people and the better you are at understanding what motivates people, what helps people to grow and just be better is a lot about psychology. The nuts and bolts of the mechanics of cash management. That’s kind of just cut and dry but the whole, I believe the whole trick to running a business is getting people to wanna do what you want them to do.
So I don’t know that they ever teach you enough in school, about psychology.
Sean: This is something I never imagined we were gonna talk about something I’m actually fascinated by. If there’s someone young listening to this, and you talk about psychology, how can they go further on this topic?
Brian: Well, I’m not sure that I’m the expert at it, but truly it’s about personal relationships, it’s about motivating people, it’s about training people correctly. Those are probably necessary components. As businesses evolve, most times when you start out, you start out with it just being you doing most of the things. But that’s not scalable. And so in order to become scalable, you have to have others to have that same dream.
So what you… My secret is you have to be clear and creating that dream and that vision and that passion of where you wanna go and the better you get at telling that story, the better you can get at having people follow you down that road. And that’s really one of the tricks to building a bigger business is to get more and more people to be singing the same song.
Sean: It’s interesting, came here a few minutes early, saw how you interacted with the employees and every single time it was almost you were highlighting them and I just…
Brian: Well, you learn a lot of things as you keep doing this whole thing and then nobody really cares what you get done and I don’t really care if I get the credit as long as the results are what we need and I know that the stronger people I can have on my team, the stronger my team becomes. So by making sure that everybody knows that they’re certainly appreciated they feel more free to do, make their decisions. Sometimes in business, people are intimidated. Some people have a style of management, which is managing by intimidation.
I find that to just be counter-productive, you want people to make decisions, you want people just to go and not be worried about what’s gonna happen next. Obviously, you have to make sure that you keep everybody in somewhat in check, but you want people to be themselves and do more. If they’re worried and scared that if every decision they make their head’s gonna get chopped off, they won’t make decisions, and in your company won’t grow. Here we really have a culture that kind of helps things out, and that is if you work for Storm Smart and you make any decision with the idea that you’re trying to meet or exceed a customer’s expectations, you’ll never get in trouble you simply won’t.
Our goal is we have a zero tolerance to bad customer service, so we want everybody to be able to make decisions on their own. I can’t possibly make all the decisions that are here every day. And when people make decisions, if you make a 100 decisions a day, they’re not all gonna be right, it’s just humanly impossible, we’re all humans.
But if you make all of your decisions with the customer in mind, the best interest of the customer in mind, we’ll be a successful company.
Now, there may be some things that we have to correct along the way, so that we don’t… It doesn’t match what we wanna go but we’re not gonna chop your head off to do that. We just kind of go through more training but we want our people to feel free about making decisions as long as the idea is to do the right thing, and have the customers’ expectations in mind, we want them to do that. Now, that only happens when they have confidence in what they’re doing and that only happens when they make decisions right or wrong, and their heads don’t get chopped off.
Sean: It’s remarkable when you start to empower people, what can come out of them. You mentioned confidence a minute ago. How is your confidence, how has it been throughout your career? Is it any different now than it was early?
Brian: You know, you… Yeah, as you gain momentum and you gain strides and you gain market share you certainly drink the tea a little bit more.
So when you’re first starting out, you’re on kind of thinner ice and you’re a little tentative about the decisions you make. I by nature wasn’t a super confident person. I don’t know that I was ever in confident person, but I certainly wasn’t as confident as I am today. But when you see things going the right direction and when you talk to people and you see success, it just has a natural effect of making you more confident.
So I’m a pretty confident person today because we’ve been doing this for 25 years now, and we have grown it into a very one-of the largest companies in Southwest Florida.
And with confidence you feel freer to make decisions and that usually means you make better decisions. Now again, if you make 100 decisions a day they’re not all gonna be right, but you must have the wisdom to say, that wasn’t really good. So now, we don’t make that mistake again, what do we do next?
I think often the only bad decision is really no decision and that’s so many people just don’t make decisions but once you start going and you start making a series of good moves you just naturally become more confident.
Sean: Yeah, one of my ethos is momentum breeds momentum, those little wins compile on top of each other. I’m really intrigued though, as you sustain that success for a long time, and the decisions you have to make, how do you avoid some of those major errors where you believe in your confidence too much?
Brian: Well, you really… First of all you surround yourself with great people, and you don’t stick your neck way out all by yourself. And usually I’m very, very blessed. I have a team. The inner circle of our company is a team of a lot of, I believe, extremely intelligent people, so we make…
I very really make a decision without having bounced it off the people that are closest to me, and usually they’re pretty honest with me. I don’t think they treat me with kid gloves or anything like that. And you don’t… As a leader, you don’t want to have a circle of people who are just yes people ’cause then you do make bigger mistakes but generally speaking, if you have a group of three, five people that you make decisions with, the odds of making a really bad decision are pretty small.
So, but then we don’t make big decisions quick. You have to make decisions. That’s my job, to make decisions every day. But the bigger decisions we really try to think about and look at the pros and cons and look at the risk, that’s connected with it and make sure that the reward is far bigger than the risk you’re taking, and moving that fashion.
We employ today over 200 people. And I take paying those people and employ those people and the welfare of those people extremely serious, so I always try to make those decisions with that in mind.
I also believe that again, if you do good things, good things happen. So we make decisions that are just fundamentally correct. It’s not that difficult.
There’s the right side of the fence, the wrong side of the fence, and there is the middle of the fence.
We all know what’s right and wrong, and you just don’t do things that are wrong, and so if you’re doing things that are right, you generally don’t get in that big of trouble.
Now, sometimes you don’t have all the information that you might need to make a decision. And hindsight I would have made a different decision if I knew everything I knew, then. But if you’re clear about the decisions you’re making and you’re making them out of what is the best for the people concerned for some kind of great reason generally those decisions are not pretty good.
Sean: You mentioned feedback and I’m always interested how business leaders are able to surround themselves and get the necessary feedback ’cause you mentioned earlier at times people can be afraid of higher-ups. So then how do you get them to be honest and truthful?
Brian: Yeah, I, it’s a kind of funny the four, five people who are in my closest circle don’t seem to be too worried about telling me when I’m right or wrong and it’s really, really healthy that way. So you have to create that culture if you’re a tyrant, and when somebody doesn’t agree with you, you bring out a hammer. That’s probably not gonna encourage future communication.
Here today, especially within my inner circle, they know their job and then they’re professionals, so they know they’re confident, what they do as well, and they know that… I encourage them to say what they think. If you just only listen to yourself, you might be getting bad advice but if you listen to three or four other people who are fundamentally, in line with you, you’re probably gonna make good decisions and then you try to keep them close to you. The three or four people that are closest to us, to me have been with us for a long period of time. It’s not a new relationship. That doesn’t mean others don’t come in and out at times, but you, you try to find people who share common values.
Sean: Yeah, I think people is probably my biggest take away from this conversation. It’s a reoccurring theme thus far. I’m really intrigued though. One of Inc. 500 fastest growing companies, tens of millions of dollars, 200 plus and employees. Let’s go back, origin story, how does Storm Smart even start?
Brian: It’s interesting… What happened was I was in the garage door business in a small way before Hurricane Andrew. And I had always read a lot of different books and stuff like that and all of a sudden there was this storm, it became Hurricane Andrew, and it was heading towards South West Florida, and I had read how Home Depot did some of it’s logistics and that when a storm was coming to a certain area or likely to impact a certain area, they would already have trucks deployed towards that area, staying out of harm’s way, but so that they could have inventory as quickly as they could.
So, Hurricane Andrew hit Southeast Florida and we ended up having inventory almost the next day, and I realized that the next thing you needed it was people and we figured out a way through a fax blast ’cause in those days there was an email and those things there… And we sent out a fax to other overhead door companies throughout the United States to try to gain labor, and so we got involved in the rebuilding of Southeast Florida, the homestead, my South Miami area right at the very, very beginning and we ended up putting out 5000 garage doors during the next 18 months. Hurricane Andrew hit on August 24th. We work every single day, seven days a week, from August 24 till Thanksgiving. It was the first day I took off and I learned how to deal with a disaster and it wasn’t all successful, because we were a lot of lessons that we learned.
Yeah… You could write all the business you needed you wanted to write, but in a lot of money came through the door but all of a sudden you took a very small company and blew it up a 100-fold and then after 18 months, you looked around and said, You know we ran through all this money, but how much money do we have?
Because you bought new equipment, you were just spending money, as quick you can because you were trying to mobilize and an attack as fast as you could but sometimes that growth wasn’t controlled and we spent a lot of money.
But during that storm, I realized that the garage door in those days because of the code was the largest opening on most houses in Florida, but it also was the lowest wind-rated opening, on the house, so was the largest opening, was the weakest opening and in my opinion, what happened in the Southeast Florida was during Andrew that garage door was the largest opening on the house, the weakest on the house, started getting hit with roof tiles and all these things, and all of a sudden, it started buffing that garage door so it started oscillating and then eventually failed and so just open up the biggest opening in your house. In those days, the attic access was in the garage, on most houses and it was simply just an inlaid piece of sheet rock or plywood, and so all of a sudden this huge gust of air and pressure went into the garage and blew that attic access of and caused that pressure to increase, an attic and just blew the roof right off the house, or moved it around and then the house started to fail.
So we realized that the the biggest opening the house was the weakest opening. But if you could protect that opening, all of a sudden you were protecting the biggest opening on a house.
So because of my relationship with looking at the doors and being a structural person we developed, I developed, a system it was called a garage door bracing system that we pioneered and invented and it took that weakest opening and made it one of the strongest openings and that was really the first product we brought to market, and we eventually sold it through Home Depot and it took off.
So that was the first product we brought to market. But when I watched all the problems with Hurricane Andrew and all the awful things that happened to people when their houses were destroyed and they were living in tents and trailers and it was, and just being displaced overnight by one storm and just changing their lives, I just kinda knew that must be a better way of protecting homes than what we were doing. In those days, the only way you really protect homes where as you put plywood or maybe corrugated panels on your house, and hurricane protection really wasn’t a big part of anything, so I just took it upon myself to think that just had to be a better way of doing it.
So then the building code started being changed and developed so the statewide we addressed the codes for hurricane protection, and we took part in a lot of those conversations, so I got to learn a lot and how progress was gonna be tested and all those things there and then all of a sudden we started thinking, “Okay fabric.”
The space shuttle was a big thing going on then and a lot of the space shuttle was actually made of a fabric, and then some of the newer, more modern cars had a lot of nose pieces that were made of a fabric, and then bulletproof vests were made of fabric and we thought, “Well if you could make a vest strong enough to stop a bullet, why couldn’t you use it to protect against hurricanes?”
And so we contacted the people at DuPont, who made Kevlar, which is the basic material of a bulletproof and we started talking to them about our idea and they seem to listen.
So we started working with several engineers from DuPont, and then their mill that they made the fabric was call was called, a place called …, who actually weaved, the material that made the Kevlar and we started testing products to try to develop a new kind of hurricane protection. At that time, the only code about hurricanes was the Miami Dade code, and it was all about protecting the glass and when you took a fabric and put it in front of piece of glass, it had a lot of flux to it, so it would continue to break the glass and the one way you could make it work was by building it way away from the glass which I wasn’t very attractive in most applications, and then … was spending a lot of money, DuPont was spending a lot of money and they started wanting to recapture their money and they were really, really proud of their Kevlar and so it almost didn’t work from a price model from what we were trying to do with it so we kinda backed away from it, for a little while.
Then as time moved on Florida started developing its own building code, which is… Today is a Florida Building Code and their engineers said, “You know what? It’s really not about protecting the glass, it’s about protecting the envelope of the house.” If you can keep the envelope entact, regardless of what the glass breaks are not, your house’s chance of surviving a major storm are dramatically increased. Well that opened the door to flexible products. And you didn’t have to build this tent way away from your window, it allowed a system to be used that even if the glass brok,e as long as the envelope of the house stayed with intact, you could… That would qualify as hurricane protection and that was the whole theory of the new Florida Building Code, one of the theories of the new building code so it allowed flexible products.
So then we were raising a child at a point… And I noticed she was on a trampoline and I noticed her bouncing up and down and it could hold her weight and it was outdoors and it stayed out, and it stayed out in the sun, didn’t have a UV issue, we thought if it could hold me or her on a trampoline, what would it do if we tested it with a missile flying at it and all those things? We took what was basically trampoline material and brought it to the testing lab and tried to test it out and it worked almost perfectly and that’s how we first started developing storm catcher.
Sean: It’s so interesting you mentioned just seeing the trampoline, I was gonna ask this question five minutes ago when you’re just talking about the idea generation and your ability to conceptualize. Maybe if I use this material here… Have you always been that creative?
Brian: I’ve been very, very fortunate. You just have this little thing that beeps in your ear and says, “Well what if you try this,” and you try it, and then once you start developing… The first product that we brought to market was by far the hardest product we brought to market. But after you get a little bit more successful, some of those barriers break down, you have more confidence to do what you’re doing.
And so yeah, we, we kind of always… I’ve kinda always been… This is was made for this, but what if you tried it that way, and what happened and take that chance just knowing that you just have to watch it, and if it starts going the wrong way, you gotta bring it back, but if you don’t take chances your chance of getting across the finish line are probably small.
Sean: So you’re able to think long term. I’m always curious about the business leaders that are always just so busy in their business that they can’t step back and think long term. How have you been able to do that over the past 25 years?
Brian: Well, it didn’t happen automatically. I can tell you that much. I tell you a short story. When our company was just first started growing, I was doing everything. I remember, I was working all day and speaking at night and I was going through… At the time the batteries to cell phones weren’t all that strong and I would go through two and three cell phone batteries a day on seeding rolaids like you wouldn’t believe. And a lot of our marketing that we do involves us public speaking and telling our story and trying to teach people about the value of protecting our homes.
And I remember giving a speech one night, and this friend of mine happened to be given, we kind of started doing speeches together each night and he was watching me, and he said, “You know, Brina, you just gotta slow down, you’re not gonna… You can’t go forever at the speed… You’re going at.” He said you just really need to think about something different.
And he said I’ll tell you my company, we hired another person to work with me and things change so I decided to take a chance with under his advice and I hired, I took our best sales person and said, this. “Once you come off the road and you come to work with me and you take over this part of the business and I’ll take over that part of the business.”
And I was scared to death because he was a fairly high price sales person, and all of a sudden I was doubling really almost doubling our payroll and that was very concerning ’cause we weren’t doing that well to start with. But I brought him inside and he became our vice president after a short period of time, and our business never slowed down it never ever, he more than made up for his… the cost of his payroll. And we became scalable, and… And we just kept growing from there, we’ve been very blessed that we’ve been picked by Inc. Magazine five different times as one of the fastest growing privately held companies, United States. But me, offering him a job in our company to take a lot of the burden off of me so that I could work on the things I was strong on and he could work on the things that he was strong on and I didn’t have to make a decision. Every decision, it just worked, and we went off like a rocket ship, and probably have never slowed down since then.
Now he’s since retired. But when I did that, it showed me that by empowering others, that’s the only way your business is really gonna continue to grow.
So I saw that… If you share common beliefs you don’t have to make every decision and they’re not gonna make every decision in the same way I would, and that’s just something that you have to deal with. Now, if you have good communication skills with each other, then you will be able to get closer and closer to those decisions. But a long time ago, I figured out I wasn’t the smartest person in this company, so… A lot of times I learn a lot. And they made others made better decisions.
As you continue to grow if you’re inside the business, you can’t see the outside and so many of the decisions that you need to make in order to continue to be successful you need to see from the outside ’cause you feel saying that you can’t see the forest because of the trees, it’s just so very, very true… And there’s just a lot of cliches that we use that really just how we run our business and that’s one of them.
And so I figured out that if I step out and let these people who are probably better at day-to-day operations or sales, or marketing are accounting then I could look at bigger picture things and see where we wanted to go. If my heads down all day long, and I’m dealing with every day-to-day problem that comes down the path there is no way I can see five years out or seven years out. And as your business grows, you need to see five years out or seven years out or it’ll come and walk you because time goes very, very quickly, and if you don’t start planning ahead, it can really be a problem.
Sean: I’m thinking relinquishing control could be one of the most difficult things a business leader can do. So I’m wondering, once you take that step relinquish some control empower the people below you, how do you let them run and do their job?
Brian: Well, first of all, hopefully you pick the right person and people, but you have to be okay with knowing that they’re gonna make different decisions than you might make. But again if you have that culture of will make all decisions with the customer’s best interest in mind as long as those decisions are in line with that, than life goes on and it’s not bad.
And then you speak with each other and say, You know, I… You made that decision. I would have probably made this decision and talk to them. And then you find out that maybe there were things that they knew that you didn’t know or maybe they didn’t know that you do know and you speak with them you work with them, and you have to be approachable.
Again, they’re not gonna make these decisions, all of them right out of the box correctly so you just have to talk with each other and be professional and be open with each other so that they can learn more about what you’re trying to do. If you’re clear in your mission and your clear in your direction as time moves on… If you choose the right people, they’ll start to make decisions in line with what you wanna do and if you build a strong enough company unless they do something just tremendously wrong, you might be surprised how good it turns out.
Sean: Let’s run through a scenario here. You’ve got the right person in place, you know what they need to go do. You know most likely the correct answer. They don’t know it yet. Do you let them make that mistake? How do you prep someone for the…
Brian: Yeah, it depends on what stage in the game you are, but sometimes the answer is yes. You probably more often try to coach them a little bit without making the decision for them, you try to show them different scenarios that might lead them closer to the goal line. If you cut your legs off, and make that decision for them, they won’t grow, so you gotta take that chance and you gotta believe in those people, and so you might make suggestions or encouragement, or talk, but you want them to make that decision right or wrong, and then if you know that it might be a close decision that you keep them close, so then if it starts to go the wrong way you’re able to help them swing it back. If you make decisions for the goodness of the customer and what’s good for Southwest Florida, even a different answer then what you might have thought was the right answer might not be a wrong answer, it might turn out to be even better than you thought.
And again, we’re here and the things that we won’t do or just do anything wrong. And so, as long as you’re going on the right side of the road you might be interesting how you get there.
Sean: Yeah, I’m sitting here listening. And it seems like a lot of higher level thinking, and then just a lot of experience. I’m really fascinated by culture. How you continue to instill the value when you go from five employees. 10, 25, 50, over 200 now. How do you keep growing that culture with a growing workbase.
Brian: The culture of… There’s probably nothing more important than the culture of a company, it’s just ultimately important.
There’s several ways that you do it and one is you lead by example.
I don’t know how I can expect people who work for us and to have a certain culture, if I don’t practice it, doing the right thing, trying to make Southwest Florida a better place. Those are the principles that we build our company on.
So you first lead by example, and you never wave or… I can’t say you do it this way, but I’m gonna do it the short cut. That’s just not the right way of doing it.
And then, you reinforce it, and you get out there. And we do a lot of things that are in the public and we do a lot of civic things and all philanthropic things, so that we’re out there and we try to tell that story of how, why and how we do it and the reasons for it and we try to hang those carrots out there to try to… we here, we try to hire the greatest people we can hire and then we try to make them greater.
We do that through education, the people at Storm Smart, if they wanna go to school, whether it’s online school, or at one of the colleges, or any of the schools around here, we’ll pay for their education, there’s certain requirements that’s be pre-approved and things like that, but we want our people to become greater because we know that the greater our people are, the greater our company is gonna be, so we do everything in our power to make them greater. And then you treat people correctly and you try to make them better people and make them grow and create a safe environment and an environment that people wanna be in. For all of us or most of us we spend more waking hours here at work than we do doing anything else.
Why would you wanna spend that time at some place you don’t like or that’s miserable or it’s unproductive, or unhealthy.
So one of the biggest jobs that I have that I take the most seriously is making sure that we create a safe environment here at Storm Smart. A healthy environment and I believe if you do that, then people will grow and if you help them grow, they’ll naturally be loyal to us. We want people to sing the same song as we sing, because that’s what makes us better.
Sean: If you have 200 people and they’re not all enjoying what they do day-to-day, it’s gonna be difficult to run a successful business.
Brian: It’s awful, it’s awful. And you do that by saying, doing what you say. And so when we make pledges to our people, when we say we’re gonna do something, do it.
How can I expect you to do what I ask you to do if I don’t do what I say I’m gonna do? It just doesn’t work. And so we try to stay consistent and stay open. We also try to listen, and so that we hear what they have to say because out of the mouth of babes, there comes a lot wisdom.
Sean: You mentioned leading by example, I think you might know we’re gonna go here. You do the continuing education, but yourself, here you are, and now you’re getting your Master’s in entrepreneurship correct?
Brian: Well, a lot of people said I had to become smarter and I was starting out at such a low point.
And as your business grows, if you don’t continue to grow with it, I don’t know that you’re gonna continue to grow. In order to have your business grow, you must grow as well. One of the ways… One of the great ways of growing is by learning more so after being away from college for a lot of years, I decided about three years ago to go back and get my master’s degree for a number of reasons, and one was that one of the problems we have here, a Storm Smart is a lot of us have been together for a long period of time, and a lot of us have grown together, but in many cases, this is the biggest company we have ever worked for.
And when you’re a company of a certain size, you can do things in a certain way as you grow, you can do it a little bit different way, but, as you start approaching to be a bigger company there are issues that things… We just don’t know what we don’t know.
And so, in order to solve that problem, I figured I would go get some more education, and so I got involved with my school back in Massachusetts, and I spoke to them about trying to do an online training program all in the educational program and they were very open to this discussion so I started taking online courses back almost three years ago. And this may, I’ll pray I will eventually walk but a couple of things, one is I had almost had to do it to in order to continue to be able to make this company grow, I had to grow. But I also have this, I’ve had the opportunity, mostly here at FGCU, and go out and talk to some of the kids out there and share a little bit about the story of how we got here. And sort of like we’re doing right now. And then you watch their faces and it’s just the most amazing night of your life and if… you who cares how much you know if you don’t know how much you care and what good is knowing all this, if you don’t share it.
So it’s really fun to go out and tell the story. And if I can change just one person’s life, if I can get them one more person interested in becoming an entrepreneur, home run.
So someday when I don’t work even as much as I’m working now here I’d like to perhaps teach at some university, here it happens to be at FGCU but… Maybe with online education who knows where that is.
Also, again, sharing our story, I’d like to get a shot at writing a book about what we’ve done here. And only that only comes when you have certain credentials and a Master’s would be one of them.
Sean: Yeah, I feel like I’m getting a lesson today, which is why I love these conversations. Two things I really admired you for is your curiosity and then your growth mindset and you mentioned reading early on, and I’m wondering are there any books throughout the years that you just really enjoyed you learn from, or maybe even other experiences, you’re just taking a lot away from.
Brian: I-I’m a huge… I love to learn.
So I am constantly listening to podcasts, I’m constantly listening to audio books. I could tell you that Jim Collins has written a series of books that I just think are amazing and so I constantly read them. I like reading about other entrepreneurs who have been successful in life. I recently listened to the guy, Howard Schultz. I recently did the Steve Jobs books. And all those people that have led companies, just I find them so interesting and it’s such a learning experience.
Sean: It seems like you’ve really have been able to learn continually throughout the years and I’m just thinking now, looking forward, looking to the long-term success of Storm Smart succession here. And then how do you pass this company on how do you let it succeed even beyond you almost?
Brian: Well, I’ve been very fortunate in since the story I told you earlier, I had a vice president who eventually retired, and I’ve had a couple other people who served as vice presidents over the years. But we decided almost three, two-and-a-half years ago now, I met a gentleman who actually was the Economic Development Director for Lee County at one point, and he had an amazing pedigree and he was far more educated than I was, and we brought him in, I met with him, and I starting to share some of the struggles, ’cause at that time we were again growing rapidly and we just couldn’t hire enough people to fill all positions, but yet we… We couldn’t catch up. We just couldn’t catch up.
And I spoke to him on a number of occasions about what we were doing and he shared a lot of stuff about Lean and Six Sigma, that I wasn’t all that familiar with and so he came in as a consultant first, and looked at different things, and we got to know each other a little better and over the years and so one thing led to another, eventually he became… we granted him the title “President and CEO” and he really runs the day-to-day operations of our company and he takes more and more of the day-to-day stuff. And I stay more with the sales, still mostly to sales and marketing, but a higher end stuff, with the idea that I’m backing away from the company. Daily routine. And he’s taking more and more.
We’re two and a half years into this experiment and we’re moving along and we’re certainly further we were than a year ago but there’s a lot to it because some of the things we spoke about the culture, the culture of our company is so important. Again, the nuts and bolts of business, you can kinda read about those, but the culture of a company and the DNA that makes up a company, and the way you treat customers, the way you treat people and employees that’s something that you’ve gotta get right, and it’s something that probably don’t read in a book, you gotta kinda learn as you go and how you treat people. Those are things that we’re working on that are what make us different. Today in the world of automation and computers, you can automate all kinds of systems, but we’re in the custom customer business so… And so, we don’t ever want to lose site of our dealings with our customers. I’m very, very proud at today and for a long, long time, 62% of the business we do here at Storm Smart is because we did somebody’s brother, sister, cousin, or mother through referral based business, and I believe that’s the correct way of growing a business, and I’m very, very proud of that. But that only happens when you treat people right. Meaning things we have a saying, we started out with a saying, “If you take care of customers, your business will take care of you,” and that’s not one of those cliches that just seems to be… So we believe in… But as you grow, you learn it a little differently and you say you take care of your employees, your employees will take care of our customers, and your business will take care of you. So that’s just a fundamental building block that we have in our company that we believe in, we preach, we are. And those are things that you gotta convey over time with your employees and with the leadership.
Sean: You said 62% of the business is referral.
Brian: Yes.
Sean: That’s unbelievable.
Brian: I’m proud of that.
It’s just a testimony to the people we have here. If you have to buy new leads every day, your profit margin might get really, really thin, but if you do the right thing, people care, and people will refer you. We’re a marketing company. There’s no doubt about it, but the majority of our business comes because we did, we took care of you, we did what we said you’re gonna do. And why would you wanna have a business that didn’t?
Sean: Very remarkable. I know you’re always looking forward. I wanna step back for a moment just to look back. 200 plus employees, tens of millions of dollars a year, one of the fastest grown companies. What is it like looking back over the past 25 years?
Brian: I’ll tell you a couple of things and I have to reflect on this. I pinch myself on a regular basis, ’cause I can’t believe it all happen. I am so proud of the things we do.
It’s almost surreal in, in many ways because it has been 25 years or almost 25 years, which is a significant part of my life, but it has gone by so fast and he is another cliche, “If you love what you’re doing, it really doesn’t seem like work.”
I’m very, very proud of the people and the things we’ve accomplished and what we can do to try to make Southwest Florida a better place and I pray that we get to be able to do that forever.
Time goes very, very quickly. We’re approaching the end of 2019.W’re starting another decade. It goes by very, very quickly. And especially when you’re busy, it’s not been all good days. And we first started out we struggled a lot we didn’t know who we were or what we were doing, and it took three or four years to start to get this momentum going. The last 10 or 12 years have been a rocket ship.
Ever since Hurricane Charlie hit the Charlotte County area, it’s almost like a blur. We just started growing, we had 23 people when Hurricane Charlie hit here and then all of a sudden we went up to 100 people and we just started growing ever since then. And then you’re so busy growing and trying to make sure you’re doing smart growth and staying ahead and developing new ideas and new products, it goes very, very quickly. If I was to sum it up, I would just say I’m extremely proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. I’ll tell you that it’s certainly… I’m not the one who deserves credit, it’s the people that are here, there’s a bunch of people who have been here since the very beginning, and it’s their hard work and they’re putting up with me that really makes the whole thing work, and so I really have to give a lot of credit to those people. Honestly, they’re the ones doing the heavy lifting.
Sean: I’m not sure there’s a better place to end then circling back to the culture of the people. You continue to highlight them. It’s an ethos of you, your company, anywhere else you want the fans the listeners checking out to find out more about yourself or Storm Smart?
Brian: Well, yeah, we’re certainly a digital company, we certainly have StormSmart.com and BrianRist.com, and our Facebook campaigns. We like to be out in the public, if you happen to be living in Southwest Florida, were often at events. One of the things that I enjoy doing… I probably sit on the board of, I don’t know, seven or eight different non-profits to try to help them do it. So we’re out in the community, we sponsored the fireworks and Cape Coral and Port Charlotte, we just recently did the whole thing with the Honor Flight, people and giving back to our veterans is a huge part of costumes weren’t what we stand for.
We like to be out in public we’re not a hide-and-seek type of company, we’re pretty easy to find.
Sean: That’ll be linked up in the show notes, and also at whatgotyouthere.com. But Brian Rist, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.
Brian: This has been my pleasure. It was fun, I can’t believe we spoke for an hour already.