Transcript

Michael Palumbos (00:00.142)
Welcome everybody to the Family Biz Show. I am your host Michael Palumbos with Family Wealth and Legacy in Rochester, New York. We've got a great show today. We've got Randy Carr from World Emblem, second generation family business and really excited to have you here, Randy.

Thank you a lot for having me.

So the number one history or tradition on the show is we just start with talking about how, you what did your entry into the family business look like? Was it something that was immediate? Was it something that planned, unplanned? What did that look like for you coming into the family business?

Yeah, I mean, I take the whole hour and do that piece, but I'll do the nickel version. So my father had an emblem business that manufactured emblems and labels in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And it went out of business in the late 80s. And like through high school and like grade school and everything else, I thought that's where I was going to go. So I never took any of this like schooling seriously at all. about junior high school or when I, started to have some problems and I started college my first year and his company went out of business like instantly, like out of nowhere.

You know, I've sort of learned over time now that nothing happens instantly. Like it was, but he's not around anymore for me to see that or ask those questions. But you know, what I know now is that nothing happens, nothing is instant or very seldom. It's just a lot of mistakes over time. But so that said, I was in college and my brother was in college and he pulled us out of college and said, we're gonna restart this business in Medley, Florida. So you need to come with me. And it was either you pay for school, do it yourself.

Randy Carr (01:32.942)
or we're going to restart the business in Medley, which is a suburb of Miami. So we had one customer and I was running machines and my brother was running the shipping dock. You one customer leads to two and you know, kind of on and on you go.

It was trial by fire for you. And you pulled right into the family business.

I wish I had more photography. wish I could make it sound more dramatic, but it was about as dramatic as it gets because there was nothing. took whatever he could take from the business that fails. So it was two or three embroidery machines and some inventory and an old AS400 computer system. Yeah, I was like, I didn't know anything about business or anything. I just knew that he made emblems, but I didn't know the first thing about it.

So we fast forward now and 35 years later or 33 years later and we have 12 bunch of employees and we're making a million of them a day on Sundays. So it's like a remarkably different, a remarkably different scenario.

Sure, so let's talk about that. I mean, it's gonna be hard to digest 35 years. One, I just wanna say congratulations. It is so hard just running any business. And I show the statistic to people on a regular basis and that's 91 % of businesses in the US.

Michael Palumbos (02:58.902)
make less than a million dollars of revenue. 99 % of US businesses are under $10 million of your annual revenue. To get to 1,600 employees, I know you'll far exceed $10 million of revenue. And to do that from grabbing a couple of machines and you and your brother and dad pulling this thing together over 35 years, that's amazing. Congrats.

Thank you. You know, again, it's not, I don't know if it's anything to like, I appreciate what you're saying. And like for a moment, it's an awesome feeling to hear you say it, but it's, it's like even this morning, I was like, I'm in my ocean planning, my annual planning. I woke up at four 30 this morning and like almost had a panic attack and like things are really, really good where we are. Right. But I'm still like, you know, no, like what if this happened? What, and you start telling yourself stories. So it's every day there's like another

you sort of go through those highs and lows and you almost have to talk yourself off those cliffs. But really appreciate you saying thank you. Really appreciate you saying that. Thank you.

We call that the CEO doom loop. And you're not alone. Last year we wrote a white paper called the CEO Playbook and I did it on family. Just as you're looking at it and interviewing all these CEOs is, am I good enough as a CEO? Do I have the right people? And it's this constant back and forth. Do we have the right strategy? And it's hard, it's hard.

I know it.

Randy Carr (04:21.966)
Yeah, yeah. mean, there's what thousands and thousands of books and podcasts and consultants and you know, it's, you know, it's like anything else. Like it's the right recipe at the right time with the right execution. But I mean, we found a couple of things that we, they, like I swear by now and I know that work. Okay. And I found a lot more than it doesn't work, but I got a couple of things that I know that we're doing right. So

So let's talk about, let's go back and forth. Let's talk about one thing. Let's go one thing that you are proud of that you're doing right to share with the audience so that they get to hear that. And then let's talk about some of the things that, know, like through history, let me just tell you what didn't work. And that's the joy, you know, my joy of this show. I can't tell you how many family businesses or CEOs have written us and said,

Hey Mike, you know what, I just really want to say thank you for XYZ show that you did. That resonated with me so much. So I'm telling you, Randy, the things that you're going to talk about, somebody else is thinking about it and about to do it. So I appreciate it.

Again, I'll give you, appreciate you asking again, and I'll give you like what's relevant now. So, and again, nobody's sort of screwed up more than me and made more mistakes than me. Fortunately, I'm still here. Like, so that's like awesome. But so what's relevant now? So coming out of COVID, and I've told this story before, but coming out of COVID, you know, the business starts to take off a lot like everybody else's. knew we needed to, we were going to have our time getting people back to work.

And we didn't think that we would be able to compensate financially, compensate them as much as enough to augment. I mean, I'm sorry, we knew we wouldn't be able to raise prices enough to augment the amount of pay the comp that we had to pay in order to not reduce our gross margin. So a good friend of mine at Wackio, I was talking about it in forum and he tells me, well, try lean and he's a fully, he's

Randy Carr (06:16.11)
17 years in a lien, he credits it for saving his business during the 2008 financial crisis. You know, I've read, I'm 60 second lien, I've sort of gone and a lot of stuff on it, but never really understood what it took. I thought it was just kind of cleaning your desk and putting some stuff on a board and kind of all this stuff. Never really understood the true meaning of it. he's like, look, here's what you do. You call this company in and it's expensive, but...

and they're going to show you how much waste you really have. And it's a company that does turnarounds for PE firms. A PE firm buys a business, they come in, they rip out all the costs, they roll all these businesses up and they sell it. Well, I'm not looking to do that. What I was looking to do is to do something sustainable. He goes, that's not the point. You call them in to see what's possible. In a year from now, you're going to know what's possible. And he was right. So I called them in, knew what's possible. We saved a couple of million dollars. And that's without any capital costs. All of it was consulting. They left and everything fell apart.

He says, yeah, that's, that was supposed to happen. The second part of this thing is you call University of Kentucky's True Lead Programming and then you now change your culture. And he was a hundred percent right. So we're now two years into that journey and our gross margins improved six points. You know, for the first time I can sort of walk around my factory and I don't have to point out things that are wrong. The people there are already problem solving. They're using their, their T zeroes, T ones, FMDS boards. They're doing eight step problem solving. So.

for the first time we're producing consistent margin month after month and it continually gets a little bit better every single month. Our on-time performance is where sometimes it was from 60 % one week, 80 % 60, we're known as unreliable. For the last six months, we've been in the high 98s and our revenue is up 15 % from last year. All that stuff is very positive, but I still woke up this morning like, oh my God.

What if this customer does this? So I'm like telling myself this story. I have to talk myself off that ledge. And it took me like two hours to say, like, that's not real. That's not real. So anyways, but that's what, that's the best story that I could tell you today of something that's not sexy, but it's a hundred percent worse.

Michael Palumbos (08:27.63)
So let me dig into that a little bit because I think that I've experienced this, I know I've experienced this with other CEOs and I just wanna break it down just a little bit. We bring a consultant in and the consultant's job, they're not there teaching your team how to. They're teaching you what you need to do. And a lot of times the consultants do a great job of identifying all of these pieces, but then like you just said, then they leave, but we don't have the team up and running, we don't have the culture to be able to support these pieces and that's where

University of Kentucky for you, kinda act like a coach to help you change those pieces. Does that sound right?

That's exactly what happened. The consultants came in and the reality is I could have kept the consultants on staff and I probably still would have been better, but it wouldn't have been ours. Right? So the difference was, you you came in as a UK came in as a true teaching organization. These are the guys from Toyota. They're the ones that set up Georgetown in the Georgetown manufacturing plant. 20, 30 year veterans of Toyota went to go teach at UK. You know, I'm fortunate enough to have them as my coach.

They're on site at my factory in Atlanta and factory in Mexico. They're actually here with me today doing our mid-year Hoesher review. And what they're doing is changing the culture of the business. I give the example, it's equivalent to hiring a personal trainer, going to the gym with a personal trainer. He works you out, works you out, works you out. Then you start doing it on your own. He leaves, you fall apart. What UK does is teaches you how to, gives you the workout program, teaches you how to diet, teaches you how to mentally think, gives you something sustainable.

They're still around if you want them. They don't need to be. And it's been game changing. really like.

Michael Palumbos (10:05.39)
Let's talk about this for a second. Look across your first level of leadership team and then the second level of management. When, from the time the consultants came in, more so when the University of Kentucky came in to start coaching you guys on culture and what needed to change to be able to make that happen, what was the, how many people decided to opt out of making changes?

It was more of collective decision for me with them. Okay. It's still, and it's still happening. Like, you know, I can tell you, I'll give you my leadership team. For example, it was structured in such a way where, you know, somebody used this word for me the other day. I wouldn't call it the friend tax, but it was like, I'm loyal to these guys tax. So there was three or four people on my senior team that I had this kind of, they've been with me for 30 years and I had the sense that they had to be in management. And like, you know, it was like, you know, what if I,

What would be the impact on them and me and the business if I moved them out of management? You know, and that's an example as UK came in and their CHRO development person came in and talked to my director and like, do your work charts all wrong? Like you got to resolve. You've got to clear up the following. I'm not telling you what to do, but we know from best practices that your work charts wrong that you need it structured like this, this, this and this. And they put it in front of me and it was like real clear at that point. It took like 20 minutes for them to point it out. And once they did that, then I had to like,

have the spine, which I didn't have, but I had to come up with the spine to move people around. And that took me three months to do what should have taken me 10 minutes, but it really took me three months to tell, you know, nobody got fired or anything, but I had to put people in certain roles and push them off the leadership team. And, know, one person walked out, but, you know, but the reality is.

I know, I think it's so important that most often, especially in family-run businesses where you've got your brother and your dad are the key family members right now, but on top of that, you treat the employees, you treat your leadership team members, they've been with you 10, 15, 20, 30 years in your circumstances, they're family. And so that shift to say some people aren't,

Michael Palumbos (12:12.538)
the right people on the bus, you know, they go back to Jim Collins. Some people aren't in the right seats of the bus and some people aren't doing the right things even though they are in the right, you know, in the right seats. And what you just said, the spine, I will tell you from experience, to do it in three months is Herculean for most CEOs. Because I've got several right now that are two years into process, two years into, you just don't have the right people.

but I'm still coaching you on these pieces and going through this with you and you've got to make those decisions.

You know, I sort of know what I'm bad at at this point. Like, you know, I know what I'm not good at. So the nice thing is I do have enough of a leadership team where I'm telling them, hey, like, I know I'm not going to be doing this. You got to push me. And even my leaders will push me. You know, so we haven't opened enough correspondence in that respect. But yeah, I mean, that was probably the biggest thing. But it wasn't just that. That was a small sliver of it. It's that plus, you know, roles and responsibilities, plus getting the standard work straight.

And we're just talking the factory. We haven't touched the office yet. I haven't touched the sales organization yet. I think that the thing like that I, if, if that I want to get across is that it's the gift that keeps giving. Cause once it's in, you know, the power of 1200 people, all using problem solving, using standard work. mean, I'll give you one more example before you like jump topics. There was one, there's one thing we do here since the first day and it's sewing name emblems. Sewing name emblems. The first thing we ever did sewing name emblems.

You would think it's the best thing we do. We sell between all of our locations about 100,000 of these things a day. We get the orders in by three o'clock in the afternoon and they're all shipping by seven o'clock at night. 100%, 99.9 % are on time. You would think we're the best at this process. Just, I don't know, month ago, we made one change to the way we lay these down on the machines. We picked up 15%. Right, so that's the thing. It just keeps giving. It just keeps giving.

Michael Palumbos (14:13.234)
So one of my favorite phrases is what if. What if we try this? Well, we can try it and if it doesn't work, we can always go back. But if you think that, you know, if you can open up the idea that maybe there's another way of doing things, the worst words are, well, that's because we've always done it this way. So good for you. Nice. So let's change topics for a second. I want to come back to some of the other things, but like you and your brother and your dad.

or they'll feel really good about that.

Michael Palumbos (14:40.11)
started this business together, what are the first five years looking like for you? What did you focus on? What was it that allowed you, most businesses fail in the first three years, why didn't you?

All right, one, was horrible. First of all, my brother and I never worked before. So it was in a warehouse in Medley, is sort of not the best part of Miami. And my dad had a nice business before. So we lived pretty well in New Jersey. There was no direction. My dad was a Northeastern textile guy, so he was pretty intense. He was just coming off of family business, so he wasn't feeling the best about things. It was a disaster every day.

The first five years was a disaster, not the first year, the first five years. But the thing about my dad is he knew people. He was able to get an order or a customer. And then we would ship stuff, it would never get there. Everything we would ship was wrong. But he was somehow able to keep people engaged because he knew them from his past life. every day was hanging on by a thread. I don't know if we knew, I don't know if we made money the first 10 years. He passed away in 2000.

So, you know, I think

You know, after he passed away, was the, you know, it's 2000, the internet sort of became, I would say more, a little more mainstream, probably five years before. Business starts in 1990. You you asked about the first five years, I would say between 95 and 2000, we started to dabble with tech. And that probably saved us more than we know now. Just, you know, leaning into what the internet could do for us. None of our competitors were doing it. So there was a lot of, we became very

Randy Carr (16:24.224)
adept at using the internet to move files around. I think that was one of the things that put us in a place where we were able to sell to some of the clients we still have today.

love the fact that you said that, because I think we're in a spot right now today that's very similar with everything with AI. It's, you know, if you're not using AI and if you're not learning how to use the prompts, and that's really the key word is, how do I prompt AI to get what I'm looking for out of it? And how do I start to, you know, utilize these tools? You're going to be a dinosaur five years from now. Heck, it could be five months from now, the way things are going.

mean, Ray Kurzweil and these guys are thought leaders in the space and they're saying, you know, they're saying in three years from now, the landscape's going to be markedly different than it is today. Like, again, I'll give you an example. It's a great segue into like what we're doing, but that's exactly, we took all the learning from 25 years ago. It's the same thing. Like, you know, we're mildly invested in the 3D printing product, heavily invested into AI things that aren't just the prompting. It's getting our data ready for when we can use AI to

aggregate and serve our data up to two specific audiences, whether it's our own employees, whether it's our customers, whether it's suppliers, the way the AI is going to use the data that exists is only as good as the data is prepped. So, because all it really is is aggregating a bunch of data and, you know, using intelligence to serve it up in a specific way.

I want to make sure we hit that real quick again. What you're saying is we all have data, whatever business you're in, but it's garbage in, garbage out, no different than computing, but with AI, it's more of it, faster of it. So if you don't have your data cleaned up and ready to go, it's just going to give you bad data back out.

Randy Carr (18:09.486)
You just won't get the results you think you're gonna get. There's other things you could do with it. We're in the design business, so there's a lot of design tools out there. if somebody can figure out how to take the design tools and render a piece of artwork faster, there's a win there. Or there's places where you can arbitrage certain jobs. That's not to say we're eliminating positions, but there is growing without growing. So as a business grows, we don't have to hire the same amount of people we otherwise would have to hire.

And also I think, like you said, the word augment, I think that's a really useful term in this world. A good designer, like give me AI and all the graphic stuff that goes with it, and I'm still gonna output stuff that looks like garbage, because I don't understand the design around graphic design and what it's supposed to look like. But you give that tool to someone who has the eye and has the training, has those pieces built right into their repertoire, and give them AI, now instead of about

producing a hundred different things a day, I can do 500 or whatever the math is, and just making them better, faster, stronger, that's awesome.

It's both like we were, I'm in my planning right now. I stepped out to be in this conversation, you know, and my director of sales is like, well, if I don't have it immediately, how does that help me? I was like, dude, it helps you because number one, what took us two days to do is now going to take us 20 minutes. It might not be immediate, but you're step one of, you know, a thousand steps staircase and like step one is the first step. It's the hardest and it's about changing all those mindsets.

But again, I think it goes back to what we did 25 years ago, which is leaning into tech. know, 25 years ago was a little different. Now I have, I'm surrounded by people that can really take this stuff and run with it. But at end of the day, the thought isn't much difference. Like lean in, let it take you where it needs to go, but you gotta lean in. Now you gotta be willing to, you gotta be willing to like, you know, hit your, hit your, hit your.

Randy Carr (20:05.014)
wagging to specific courses. know, during COVID, whatever it was, face masks or NFTs or whatever, you know, and my marketing director was like, well, know, NFTs, she was making fun of me. was like, dude, you you don't, yeah, NFTs maybe, no, but the blockchain maybe, yeah, but it's all built on the same infrastructure. So, know, maybe we try to use AI for the artwork bit and it doesn't work, for example, but we've learned as we went and all that learning will turn into something and we're learning before anybody else.

So that's going to give us a competitive advantage over everybody else in our space.

You had mentioned YPO earlier. How long have you been a YPO member? I'm a Vistage member. I probably have a lot of the same kinds of things. We sat through an AI class and I was just blown away at they have AI for salespeople where you record the call in the background and it tells you, here's where you lost the sale, here's where you got the, here's the things that you're wrong. like, are you kidding me? We use AI, so we're this bizarre firm that does.

See you down there.

Michael Palumbos (21:04.642)
business coaching and helping people to grow their business, we also wealth management and business exit specialists. so we want to do tax analysis. And what used to take me two hours to go through a tax return, I can plug it into AI and it gives you some incredible data, better than I would have done it, and I get it in 30 seconds.

There's a lot of people that are going to get disrupted. There's going to be a lot. But there's also going to be a lot of jobs created too.

It'll all work out in the end. But to your point is jump on the bandwagon and start learning what you don't know so that you get exposed to some ideas and some different level of thinking. Find some gurus that you like to listen to. Yeah, that's it.

That's it. That's all you really can do right now. I mean, for us, it's find a business problem you have and see if you can use the technology to solve it. Yeah. You know, that's what we did in two spots. And that's it for now. There will be a third and a fourth and a fifth. But like, that's what I about step one of a thousand staircase step. Like, you got to take that first step. And in this case, that's, know, we think the, you know, we think these are legitimate business problem. One is incredibly challenging. Another one is fairly easy. It's clean up your data. Yeah.

So that was a big learning point for me is hearing that you went through that 2000, 1999, 1998, 2001 timeframe and took advantage of it and you're doing it again now. What were some of the other missteps that, if you look back and say, oh my God, if I could take away those two things, I would have loved to have not done that.

Randy Carr (22:37.142)
Yeah, I'll give you two. It always comes back to hiring the wrong people. I'm sure you've heard this one a thousand times. One of them was a consultant to do an ERP switch over. I went, you know, this was around the time of clone computing. were building their own workstations. We didn't have a lot of money. I didn't understand the value of R &D that went into the building of a computer. I thought building a clone is the same as building, know, Dell building a workstation. Again, this is dad died 2000. The building was valued zero. The business was valued zero. And

You know, this guy started us off on a 10 year sort of cursed journey in the world of failed ERP implementations and failed development infrastructure. We never could actually get off it. until what I would say is almost, you know, five years ago where we were just in one bad ERP system versus one bad homegrown piece of software. built another piece of software to fix that piece of software and we could just never get out of that loop, you know, and then a higher the guy, like the one guy, I mean, he's the higher.

And he comes in and he sets us on the right path. what that, you know, for some reason I had this fear of, know, once you hire somebody like to go back to 2000, you hire the computer guy that's doing the work and you're scared if you fire him, your business is gone. And you go through that cycle and you actually just perpetuated to make it worse. You end up firing them anyway, because that's what ends up, that's inevitably what has to happen. And you know, once we did that and I got that, by the way,

him and four others behind him. All bad hires and just no one could ever get it straight after the first one was done. But once you get that right guy, like the magic happens. You know, so it always comes back to like the bad hires and you know, and I could, again, I could probably, I probably have three dozen of them that I've, but like on the IT side, it was the most, you know, there was never malfeasance or anything like that, but just.

just a bad hire, a bunch of bad decisions. I was overly involved, which is probably part of the problem. We just never could get it straight. And then I would say, half a decade ago or six years ago, we finally got it to the point where we're on the right track and we're now, we've replaced all the tech debt, but eight figures were the tech debt. It's not a small number. And all the lost opportunities that came along with it.

Michael Palumbos (24:59.202)
I think that's in every aspect. We've heard this a thousand times, whatever business you're in, that's not the business you're in. The business we're all in is the people business. have employees, we have clients, customers, we have suppliers, and at the end of the phone, at the end of the email, at the end of the text message, there's a person there. And it's learning how to make the right hires, it's learning how to...

bring in the right relationships with customers, suppliers, right?

No, I mean, even like even with customers, you know, just because they give you money doesn't mean they're a client. Yeah. Like once you know what you sell and you know what you're really good at, you know where you're making money. You know what your sweet spot is. You know, only then can you really optimize that, get better at that and continually to lean into that, make more money. You know, I would go back to where we were doing jobs for people that were like sort of offshoots of what we do. And we probably lost as much as we made on the other side for a decade.

And those customers happen to be the most difficult. So even I would say, even to your point, a bad customer relationship is as bad as having the wrong employee.

Yeah. What would you say are some of the other keys of your success? I want to talk about it from a family perspective. How do you and your brother interact to keep that relationship and the business relationship in sync?

Randy Carr (26:24.654)
So again, when we first started, like neither of us knew anything. Somehow or another, I got this role as CEO with a coin toss. You know, we've grown into our roles over 35 years. We now understand what it means to be a shareholder and it means to be an employee. You know, we own shares in public companies. Both of us own shares on WorldEmo. And, you know, both of us, if the business does well, we'll take a distribution. If it doesn't, we won't. And then we get our check to work in the business. You know, so he gets his check to work in the sales department.

And he reports to my director of sales, he reports to me, he's not on the executive team. He does, he does sit in board meetings with me. And so, but we've only learned to understand that a couple of years ago. So getting to this point was not a straight line. You know, it was a rocky bumpy road where he and I always didn't agree on a lot of things. And you know, again, like it, wasn't enough to break the business, but there were many times where almost fistfights, times we didn't speak for weeks.

you know a lot of things that we said we shouldn't have said.

Was your brother on the leadership team at one point?

Yeah, yeah, because he out. Right, because he was an out, right?

Michael Palumbos (27:29.198)
I love what you're talking here. want to make sure, the point is, yeah, is that there has to come a point in every business when we go from making decisions about the family and decisions as owners to decisions about the company. And once for anybody that's amassed any level of wealth, the odds are, know, all of a sudden somewhere along the lines, the attorney says, well, we need to put this into trust. And if we don't think about that trust as its own total entity, you're going to get into trouble.

along the lines, it's got to be a totally separate entity, its own ID number and everything. And I think that that becomes a really good statement around the business is when we start to look at we're just stewards of this business and hopefully the business will continue long after we're both gone. And when you start to make that shift, magic does start to happen a little differently. Love that. Go down to

We approached it differently. mean, a lot of it came because he didn't like the meetings. He didn't like the weekly, the two hour weekly status meeting and the three day planning meetings. He just didn't like it. And I was like, dude, you don't have to do it. what are you thinking, bro? If you don't like it, go sell with custom, go spend time with clients. Like do what you'd like. If the business does well, you're going to make more money than you need. So like, don't worry about all that. Like just do what you're good at, do what you like, and we'll hire somebody to do this stuff.

So yeah. You know, that's another really good point from another aspect is that, you know, not everybody, just because your name is on the door, just because you're an owner of the business, it's A-OK to be an owner and working out in the field or in sales or whatever. You do not necessarily have to be on the leadership team.

Too bad it took 20 years to figure it out. No, but seriously, I think back to all the opportunities that were missed because of the fact that my dad died when I was 27. And we didn't have the experience in the business to curtail or not make the mistakes that I've already told you about, that put us down these kind of goofy paths. My son just started working here six weeks ago. And I'm getting into that point also, just making sure he understands that.

Randy Carr (29:40.236)
You know, you now we have a wealth of experience and have a fantastic leadership team now that he can learn from. And like, we didn't have that when we started. So all the experience comes from kind of stubbing your toe.

And to your point on that, real quick, you you found the University of Kentucky to help you to implement and change the culture and take, you know, the lean manufacturing ideas and bring them to life for your company. There are plenty of university programs and consultants out there that are working with family businesses and, know, with family business being 68, 67, whatever the number is of the businesses that are out there.

You know, there's lots of data and there's lots of experience and things that you can share. Don't go trying to reinvent the wheel all the time.

In one of these podcasts, somebody asked me, what's the one thing, if you could say one thing, and mine was find a mentor, like find somebody, like get involved with YPO, get involved with Vistage, get involved with EO, depending on where you're at. there are people that there's not, know, for me, it's, you know, I keep saying, all right, I've seen this before. Like, that's what I keep telling myself. In YPO, they've seen it. Like, there's not a person in YPO that hasn't seen it and they all want to help.

and they don't have a stake in the game like the consultant that I was telling you about 20 minutes ago. They don't care if you don't like their opinion. The computer consultant cares because he's billing me $10,000 a week. Or at this point, it's $500,000 a week. it's all relative. The point is that in EO and YPO, everything's experience sharing. No one's telling you what to do. When I had that experience, this is what I went through. This is what I did. I found out with UK and Lee, like all that came from that.

Michael Palumbos (31:15.468)
Yep.

Michael Palumbos (31:18.87)
In terms of the business today, share with us kind of the plethora of offerings. I think it's, you you're spending your time with us and sharing some things I'd like to hear a little bit about, you know, world emblem. You know, I know you make emblems and do a lot of embroidery, but break that down for the lay person.

Yeah, no sweat. again, the business started in 92, really 90, but we incorporated World Emblem in 92 or maybe 93. And before that, it was like an offshoot of my father's company that failed. Started selling emblem name tags like you'd see on a gas station driver. Then we went to like the specialty emblem with pictures embroidered with pictures. know, fast forward a couple of years, we now make sublimated emblems, sublimated badges. We make the badges that on the NFL jerseys on the crest.

that's called flex style, that type of badge. We make PVC badges, leather embossed, leather engraved. We're probably the largest decorator of headwear in the United States. know, every, our stuff can be seen in the airports on headwear, on jerseys, on baseball fields, on UPS drivers, on people at the gas station, management, FedEx drivers, of that whole sort of range. The military, police, TSA, that's.

That's helpful, I appreciate that. To your other comment about YPO and EO and Vistage and all of these CEO groups and mentors, there's an old saying that says if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, do it together. And I would echo what you said. If I could go back and wave a magic wand.

and do things differently, I would have asked for more help. would have, and you know what's shocking is like one of my mentors now in his ace and every time I ask him for help on something, he's always, what can I do? Tell me how I can help. And in hindsight, I didn't ask enough of him. And he would have been glad to have shared his experience.

Randy Carr (33:05.836)
And most of the time you kind of know, you know, you're not doing it. Like I knew I wasn't doing it. All the things that I was doing wrong, I knew it was, I knew it was being done wrong. I knew there was a better way. What I know now is I think I have a confidence that I know it, you know, and I keep telling myself, all right, I've seen this before or, that's like what I saw about this morning. All right, man, I've seen this before. This has happened before. Just let it pass or drink water or something like if I don't have a good night's sleep, but it's, you know, I've seen this before. This will pass.

And that's my go-to with these.

For your business right now, if you're looking over the next 12 months, what would you say are your top priorities over the next 12 months?

Well, you know, probably the biggest thing is to continue the implementation lead. That's inside of our control. So, you know, we control our gross margin by continuing to problem solve and maximize the things that we do really well.

You know, again, there's a lot of stuff that's out of our control, you know, given what happened Saturday and what's happening in the presidential race, what's happening all around the world. So I'm not really going to focus on that. You know, the one thing I should tell you about our business that's unique is that we manufacture in the States, Canada, Mexico, and we have a factory in Europe of all of our competitors manufacturing China. So, you know, when I talk about manufacturing or controlling what's in our space, it's how do we get orders in and out of our factory in one or two days or three days? My competitors take seven or eight weeks to do the same thing.

Randy Carr (34:31.499)
So people pay a little more to buy stuff from us, but they know they're going to get it in the time period that we say, or they're going to get it. You know, they know they're not going to get what could arguably be more additional tariffs or more trouble coming from a different part of the world. you know, again, we'll continue to focus on that and we'll continue to focus on our tech investment. We invest nine to 10 % of our revenue in technology. So the difference of companies in our space are 3%.

So, you we believe we're a tech firm that manufactures emblems. Most people think they're emblems that have the tech, that use technology. We look at tech as a significant strategic advantage. Others look as tech is a cost center. And I just don't, I just don't look at it like that. never will. And I'm hoping, you know, I'm hoping we keep that in mind.

What are the biggest pain points you're trying to solve over the next two to three years?

You know, we have our ocean, is our plan, our breakthrough plans. You know, we have a couple products that we're trying to develop. We can't seem to get off the blocks with them. You know, one is a specific type of IP around something I can't get too much into, but we're having a hard time getting focused on that. So that's, would say that's frustrating things that I'm thinking about because we manufacture in Mexico. I'm a little concerned about the political environment in that country as well as the States. Uncomfortable with the amount of inflation, uncomfortable with the,

with the environment in Mexico as it relates to electricity and logistics, to the point where we put in full racks of solar panels and full batteries between their power grid and our factory. And we're the largest importer in the world. So mind you, it's quite a few batteries in between the power grid and our plants because of the instability, because of the underinvestment made in electricity in that country.

Randy Carr (36:20.686)
You know, things like that have me little concerned that I'm losing sleep over. We have some customer concentration issues that have me losing a little bit of at night. Things like that. I'm not overly concerned about the US or Mexico from a political standpoint. I brought it up a couple times, but I don't see the catastrophizing happening. Although, you could read, there's a couple books or magazines or whatever you could read and go down that deep and real easy.

So, thousand percent. Taking a look at, you have a son coming into the business. What is, have you mapped out your succession plan? Have you thought about what's next for you or, you know, any of those things for you or your brother?

Not as much as I probably should. 52, he's 22. But you know, there's days I'm like, I can't do this for about 10 years. Like it's, you know, I'm still pulling 70 hour weeks, but it's because I like the 70 hour week. It's not cause I need to. But I have enough work where I could work 100 hours. I'm also trying to, you know, I think the biggest thing with my son though, I should say is so he's six weeks in the business. And when we talk about it at work or at home, find it interesting that like, when I'm looking at it from a third person,

an outer body bit that I want him to be proud. And I never thought like that, you know, so like, like he's in my ocean meeting and I'm, I keep looking at him to see, aren't you impressed? Like, aren't you impressed? You got to be impressed. Like, how are you not impressed? You know, so so I find that interesting about I find that to be, it's not something I expected. So but

Okay.

Randy Carr (38:01.202)
I'm excited for him that he's here. He's in my CR department. He's working in the lead department because I think that that's the most structured area of the business. Then I'll put him in IT. These are the areas that I think are strategic, but he's a charismatic dude and he's going to naturally gravitate to sales. I know it. But if he learns these things first, he'll learn a systematic way to optimize the rest of his life. And for me, yeah, mean, at some point, I don't have any intention on selling, but there's always a price. Somebody comes along with a crazy amount of money. But I love the idea of a third generation of the business.

like that.

And do you have other kids that may think about it?

I do, he's 20, he's on a different path. Though his path will be different. My cross for him is that I hope he never needs for anything. You know, that's my piece.

I have seven kids so totally understand that statement.

Randy Carr (38:46.7)
So, know, one's path is one way, one's path is another, and you just kind of hope you're there to support.

Yeah, I came up with this concept a long time ago called the parent transition because I screwed it up so badly. And I think that it's, when the children are of certain ages, obviously you have to be the parent. You have to be the one that yells at them so that they don't go into the street and you're there guarding everything. Moving from parent

to coach and allowing them to make mistakes and allowing them to do that stuff is really difficult for a lot of people. And then there's another spot that we really actually, in my opinion, and this is purely my opinion, we need to be colleagues with them because they are, as my son says, I am a grown adult, Dad. And your opinion as much as I love you doesn't really matter sometimes.

Stephen Covey is dependent, interdependent, it's dependent, independent, interdependent. He's got that. So yeah, mean with my older one, it's a lot of that. I just hope my relationship stays as good as it is today. But that's on me.

There you go.

Michael Palumbos (39:58.286)
It is. That part's on you. We need to listen more than we talk and be interested more than we want to tell them the path to take and whatnot. That was a, I think I've shared this on the show before, met with a client who was in hospice and asked him what he most regretted. And he said he had.

know, four girls and the only time that he really spent with them was when everybody was all together and he wished he had spent some more one-on-one time with each of his kids. And from that I've started doing at least, you know, once, two times a year, you know, a couple times a year where we're going out and doing dinner, going out and doing something and just being that one kid so that can find out what's going on in their world.

There are so many books on like the emotional like Tuesdays at Lorry and the last lecture and kind of there's there's sort of all these books on this stuff that you know you can read them and just get past them or you can read them and sort of land on man I'm gonna die when I do like I ain't gonna regret the money thing but in the moment it's hard to say that.

Randy, you have been sharing a ton. I really appreciate it. Let me ask you this. You're sitting on a family business panel and you've got an audience in front of you. What would you say your handful of things that you'd want to make sure that you leave them with?

Yeah, I'm going to go back to the old like faithful ones is to surround yourself with good people. By that it means EO, Vistage, YPO, like the organizations are ridiculously invaluable. Anybody that's an entrepreneur, it's the first thing I tell them. The second thing is, like I told you before, this too shall pass. And for me at this point, I've seen this before and to have a little faith. And the third, find a mentor. So nothing I've said is technically grounded in any wisdom, but there is a little bit of experience in it.

Michael Palumbos (41:41.696)
I think it's grounded in a lot of things. Very few of us have 1600 employees. I think that stubbing your toe and making the mistakes and doing those things, and then if that's the wisdom that you're sharing with us, I think we need to be paying attention to it.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I appreciate you saying that. It's sort of my go-to.

We are as CEOs of whatever size company we are, most of us are a little bit, it's been luck, I just worked harder than everybody else, I got a little lucky, we're maybe a little self-deprecating and we don't pat ourselves on the back enough and don't look at all the good that we've actually brought to the world and you've done a lot of good. Think about all the people, those jobs and their families and the things that you've done on that side. So give yourself a thumbs up.

Appreciate you saying that. Thank you so much.

Randy Carr, World Emblem Thank you everybody for listening. This has been a great show. I hope you've gotten a lot of takeaways. You may have to go back and rewind and listen to some of Randy's wisdom that he dropped on you. My name is Michael Palumbos with Family Wealth and Legacy in Rochester, New York. Go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you can hear this again and listen to the next episode of the Family Biz Show. Thanks everybody and have a great day.