Foundational Leadership: Growth Doesn't Start at the Top

Introduction

You should write a book. These are five words I have heard with growing frequency over the past decade of my life. It started with the occasional friend making the lighthearted suggestion but soon grew into a choir of voices asking me to bring my story and the history of Trinity Products to words on a page. This got the wheels turning in my mind.

Around five years ago, I was on a plane traveling across the United States when I began to write my story and the history of my company. As I did, I became more engrossed in the process. Before I knew it, I had pages of notes typed up in a Word document and knew I had something.

Unfortunately, a few days later disaster struck. Someone from my IT department kindly offered to upgrade my laptop. And without giving it much thought, I traded my old one, and they wiped it clean. In the process, I failed to save all the work I had started on this book. And before I knew it, those twenty thousand words were a mere memory. This left me to wonder if the idea of writing a book would remain an idea forever. But despite this setback, I knew this was something I needed to do.

In July 2020, I was chatting with a venture capital guy from California when he made this remark: You make business sound so simple. Have we just made it too hard?

I paused and then nodded yes. Business is simple, I told him, but it’s just hard to execute day after day—like everything else in life.

That was when he added his voice to the choir with those five key words: You should write a book!

At that point I knew I needed to do something and resolved to start the process again. I called my friend Jack Stack, whom I reference several times in this book and who is someone who served as the inspiration for the way Trinity conducts business today. We talked for half an hour, and he addressed the need to help leaders in any position—managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners—to flourish.

After I hung up the phone, I started writing.

There are some days I swear it feels like Big Brother is listening to you. A few days after this conversation, I received a call from Advantage|Forbesbooks, and their representative introduced himself with a proposal to write a book. As he spoke, Twilight Zone music started to play in my head, and as a sales guy, I immediately assumed some electronic device had heard me mention writing a book on one of my office computers, and some algorithm had prompted them to give me a call.

Much to my relief, when I asked the representative, he assured me that had not been the case. This left me to shrug in amazement at how the universe works. As we spoke for more than an hour, I shared a rough outline of the story I am about to unpack in the coming pages. I told him about how I got started in sales and how several twists and turns directed me to start my own business. I shared several of the key principles that helped us succeed for over forty years.

And as I prepare to share these with you, the reader, I can tell you there is no magic sauce contained in the following pages (I guess this doesn’t make me much of a salesperson!). But I can offer you some hope for your journey. I can share how I took a start-up company to over $300 million in organic, nonacquisitional annual sales.

The great news is my story is not complicated. As I tell any business leader I encounter, you can do great things if you just master the fundamentals. It starts with showing up each day with a desire to have fun, tell the truth, work hard and smart, and, most important, lead from the bottom. The folks at the bottom of the organizational pyramid are your foundation and those you must win over each day. They are the heart and soul of your company. If they succeed, you succeed. If they fail, you fail. You will hear me repeat this old concept repeatedly in the coming pages: the more you give, the more you receive. Because I believe this with all my heart, I have determined to be the greatest giver I can be, and I challenge you to do the same.

Instead of being a constant taskmaster who urges troops into battle each day, become a servant of others and seek to elevate them in place of yourself. Remember, your boss is always the customer, and your best assets are your employees.

After implementing the same basic principles for decades, my Trinity leadership team and I are convinced we could enter any arena of business today and sell any product using the systems and structures we have and be enormously successful. These concepts are that good.

I mention this because you might know a bit about my history in the steel industry and be tempted to think, Well, these ideas Robert has might work for his organization, but there is no way they will work in a different environment. I can assure you they will, because they are universal in how your employees and customers want to be served.

Leading an organization, at any level, is hard work. But there are steps you can take that will make you a stronger leader and create an environment where your team wants to show up to work.

There is no magic formula. The principles I outline are simple, and the toughest part is executing them every single day. Are you ready? Do you have the desire to take this journey? If so, it’s time to take the leap.

Takeaways

imgarrow.jpg Always back up your work!

imgarrow.jpg Think of some ways you can focus on the foundation of your org chart to help build relationships.

imgarrow.jpg Your boss is your customer—how can you better serve your customers and make their lives easier?

imgarrow.jpg The more you give, the more you receive.

CHAPTER 1

Take the Leap

The day I got cheated out of a $5,000 commission check was a turning point in my life.

It was 1978, and I was making around $700 a month, plus commission, selling to end users and pipe distributers. The small steel pipe company I worked for was based out of Denver, and one of our major clients was Valley Steel—the king of the pipe universe. While other companies such as ours were getting by with only a couple of million in annual sales, Valley Steel dominated the industry, selling $200 million of pipe at a time when prime steel sold for $400 a ton (about a fifth of what that same product costs today).

Because they were the titans of our industry, I worked hard to establish strong sales connections. Fortunately, my sales manager, Sal, used to work for them and knew all the key players. The introductions he made soon paid off, and within a few months I sold them five thousand feet of forty-eight-inch-by-five-hundred-inch surplus pipe off the Alaskan Pipeline. Because I made a dollar-per-foot commission, this sale looked like my first big payday.

With this purchase order finalizing just a few months before Christmas, I looked forward to a prosperous holiday season. A few days before December 25, I received an envelope in the mail from our company and tore it open with excitement, grateful I had finally struck it big! To my dismay, the only thing inside was a fifty-dollar Christmas bonus check from my company. Normally I would have been grateful, but not today.

I called up the owner of my company in Denver and asked him about the commission check. He responded by telling me Valley Steel had not paid him, and there was nothing he could do. I couldn’t believe what I heard, and something about that didn’t ring true. I knew the guys at Valley Steel, and they were good people. Something was wrong.

Being young and naive I called up Harold Mayberry, the chief financial officer (CFO) of Valley Steel, and asked, Hey, my boss says you haven’t paid us. Is that true?

His response stunned me. "Ask your boss how much your company owes us."

I hung up the phone, angry and feeling cheated. The owner of my company I had just spoken with not thirty minutes before knew all about this arrangement all along. He understood that any money we made on the sale of steel would be used to pay down his company’s debt and would not find its way to me in the foreseeable future.

Later that afternoon, I walked into Sal’s office, told him what happened, and announced I was going to quit. That was when Sal threw out an interesting proposition.

Why don’t we both quit and start our own company? he asked.

Something about Sal’s question rang true. A few days later I said goodbye for good to working for someone else, and with $15,000 we launched Trinity Products.

I Always Knew I Would Start My Own Business

But as with any great leap, there are often a series of life events that make that step appealing. For me, my entrepreneurial journey began in my teenage years.

Starting my own business was something I had always wanted to do. The how, where, or why were never clear, but I knew this was the path for me. It was only a matter of time before it happened, and the mistreatment I experienced gave me the perfect excuse to chart a new course.

This thought of being my own boss was probably a mixture of circumstance, willpower, and genetics. Something inside told me I wanted more, but I can also see how my upbringing shaped my entrepreneurial personality.

I grew up in an army family and traveled all over the world till the seventh grade, when we moved back to my dad’s hometown of Charleston, Missouri. This was a community of haves and have-nots. There were the uber wealthy and those living paycheck to paycheck. That said, there was little talk about which of these two groups you were in. Even though my family landed in the have-not category, my dad made sure we focused on the one thing in life we could control—work ethic. He instilled in me the desire to outwork everyone around, and this mindset served me well even before I became my own boss.

A pivotal moment occurred in 1970 when my mother passed away from a heart attack. With my older sister already off to college, I was left alone in a house with just my dad. This painful experience forced me to grow up at a young age and made me take responsibility for my needs and wants.

Part of taking responsibility involved getting a job. In 1969, at age fifteen, I met a local farmer named Ed Marshall, who owned a farm of over ten thousand acres. He hired me, and I worked with him almost every summer until my senior year in college. Mr. Marshall trusted me and handed me more and more responsibilities.

At sixteen, I managed seven of his hired hands. Most were young girls who would sit on the front of the tractor and spray the fields for weeds as I drove. But this small step into leadership increased my confidence, and Mr. Marshall’s passion motivated me to succeed. Robert, think about how much land we could farm if we only ran the tractors all night long! he would tell me.

There was a healthy sense of mutual respect. I wanted to be like him, and he could see I was good at my job and eager to succeed. We became friends.

While I did not see it then, every experience I gained during this season prepared me for the day I would start my company. It toughened me up and gave me the inner confidence I needed to succeed.

Growing Pains

In the early days of Trinity, Sal and I formed a strong partnership. He was a tough, conservative, and principled business owner. There was no way he was going to let an outside situation end our business.

Because he was tough, we had our share of healthy disagreements. I would push him on the need to expand, and he would urge me to play it safe. I had to beg him to purchase a fax machine, and every new area of expansion felt like a battle. We had two different mindsets that were incompatible for the long haul. He wanted to collect a stable paycheck, and I wanted to grow and improve every day.

Due to his gruff I’m the boss nature, I often felt I was in a place of damage control with the employees in our company, trying to smooth over tough conversations. There was always some form of drama taking place. As our company expanded and we hired more people, this grew more tiresome, and one situation became the final straw.

At this point in our company’s history, we were in only the structural- and used-pipe business. It wasn’t glamorous, but we cut and welded pipe and built a strong customer base.

Eventually, we made rolled-and-welded pipe. This involved taking plate cut to the correct length and rolling it into a pipe can. Then we would weld these together to make new pipe. This was a natural progression for our business, because we could now make any size outside diameter (OD) or thickness and expand what we offered customers. This took us into the fabrication of signs and diversified our business.

While traveling to a plate mill in the south (Tuscaloosa Steel), I saw heavy-gauge forty-eight-inch-by-one-inch coils all thrown into a pile. What are those? I asked.

The manager responded that they were hot box coils and considered scrap because they had cooled below pliability and couldn’t be rolled.

My eyes lit up when I saw this, because it seemed like a great opportunity just waiting to be brought to market. (I’ve found these kinds of opportunities are always out there if you keep your eyes open and have some imagination.)

This pointed me back to my friends at Valley Steel. They had a fifty-year-old cobble leveler that could level up to four-inch plates. They were used to level cobble plates that were rejected because they were not flat after they cooled.

This led me to an important question: How do we get the coils pulled and cut to have the plates leveled? After giving it some thought, I worked out a deal with a company to pull the coils and torch them into twenty-foot lengths. Then Valley Steel would do the job of leveling. This meant I could buy coils of steel for just a few cents, have them cut and leveled, and turn a 25 percent profit for a new market. It seemed like a match made in heaven!

This went well at first, but after my third round of purchases, Valley Steel said the leveler was broken and would take $1,000 to repair. I offered to cover the costs myself, but they were not interested. There was a rumor that they were close to going out of business—one I found hard to believe.

I asked if I could buy it from them, and they agreed to sell it for $5,000. Here was the problem. When I took this purchase idea to Sal, he wasn’t interested. From his viewpoint, it was too much money and too much risk. Finally, after much back-and-forth, he consented, but only on the condition that I sold another one of our pieces of equipment to cover the costs.

We selected our pipe-cleaning machine, and that weekend I stood in front of our new fax machine and sent out sales flyers to every used-pipe company in America. The pipe-cleaning machine sold that weekend—catching Sal a bit off guard. He had hoped this caveat would discourage me from moving forward, and when it sold that fast, he had no interest in this new purchase, which he did not understand or want. I said that was no problem and bought it anyway. When he asked where I was going to put the leveler, I told him I would place it on my half of the lease we had signed.

Because we were fifty-fifty partners, there was little he could do, and this breakdown in communication spelled the end of our business partnership. It was in the summer of 1992. Sal and I had been in business together for thirteen years, but now it was obvious our paths were heading in different directions. For the next six months, I was at the yard every morning at 4:30 a.m., leveling plate. My wife, Shelly, would come by with the boys and bring us dinner, and I would return to the house after dark. There were a lot of long days, flush