Episode 5 – Guiding Change with Former AmeriPride CEO

Welcome to the TRSA podcast, providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you. Welcome back to another episode of the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast by TRSA.

 

I’m your host, Jason Risley. On today’s episode, we’re going to open up the vault and listen to a live speech that former AmeriPride Services CEO Bill Evans gave to a class of students at TRSA’s Executive Management Institute. During the speech, Evans shared his thoughts on leading organizational change and developing a strategic planning process to drive business results. What has changed since Evans made the speech? Well, he’s no longer the CEO at AmeriPride Services.

 

Aramark purchased the company for approximately 1,000,000,000 dollars in the deal that closed on January 22, 2018. At the time of the sale, Evan’s successful leadership had boosted AmeriPride to annual revenues of roughly $600,000,000. While he’s no longer the head of the company, Evans will share his insights from his time at AmeriPride with TRSA members at the 105th Annual Conference and Exchange scheduled for October 16th through 18th at the Meritage Resort and Spa in Napa, California. He will appear on a legends of the industry panel along with Bruce Boynton of UniFirst, Allen Bubas of Linens of the Week, Tom Storm of Washing Systems, and Donald Struminger of Mohenas. For more information and to sign up for the annual conference, go to www.trsa.org/annualconference.

 

Now let’s listen in on Bill Evans’ speech recorded in front of a live audience of linen uniform and facility services leaders at EMI. Let me talk about leading change. I think it’s one of the most, important things that leadership, roles really have. And, the first is to recognize the need for change. And a lot of what I talk about here, I won’t talk about it as a company.

 

You can also think about it as a department or a branch. Whatever role you’re in, you can kinda relate to some of the comments I’ll actually have. First, the family ownership recognized that need, back in 2007, 2008. Bruce Diner and the board recognized that, you know, we weren’t necessarily doing bad. And, we’re growing, but our competitors are growing faster, which, you know, means we were losing share.

 

So that’s not a sustainable thing. So we needed to change. And, so Bruce brought brought me as well as some other outside talent into the business to help kinda put that change in place. And, you know, AmeriPride being a 125 years old now is, you know, part of sustainability has been its ability to adapt and change over time. We’re just a little slow for the math.

 

So what we needed to do is kinda set the reason for change too and I’ve got a few team members that are in here with me that have heard this before, but you really need to kinda make sure the organization needs to know that you need to change. So we use this in the business world. There’s this, analogy. It’s called burning platform. And forgive me if some of you’ve heard this, but it’s just a story about, there’s a oil platform in the North Sea and the thing catches fire.

 

These these are monstrous kind of huge, almost skyscraper type things. And, they actually found this guy, you know, they rescued him. They said, wow. What, you jumped off the platform. What’s what’s up with that?

 

How did you do that? Have you ever seen fire in the water and big chunks of steel and and whatnot? And the guy said, well, look, you know, I I could either stay on the platform and die for sure or jump and maybe survive. So how do you set so the change kind of piece is, well, if I just stay the same, I’m gonna die. Now that’s a little dire.

 

The company wasn’t gonna die, but how do you kinda set the stage for change that look, we cannot keep doing the same thing the same way as we would have to actually make a big change. So we kinda got that out with the senior team, make sure that, we got the reason to change and, you know, recognize I think it was, I think it was Ben Franklin that said, boy, if you expect different, results, when you’re still doing the same thing, that’s sort of the definition of insanity. And really, it is. You can keep trying harder and that might not work. You have to change change things.

 

So executing change. Well, first, you know, if you’re gonna bring an organization or a department through a lot of change, one of the first things to do is make sure they have some kind of a kind of beacon of something they can look at at the horizon and say that’s not gonna change. I got some constants. So what we use is our company values. And our company values are respect, responsibility, integrity, and trust.

 

We did a pretty big job almost emerging. If you go to a Mirapart facility just today, you’ll see, you know, posters on the walls and things on desks and stuff that kinda talk about the values. We made sure that that was job 1. So when you did all the change, it was very fair for anybody in organization to kinda raise their hand and say, hey. I think that’s inconsistent with the values.

 

And we wouldn’t be because we’d already made sure that it wasn’t. Right? But it’s really important to kinda have people say, okay. It’s consistent with the values. Will we agree?

 

We’ll keep moving ahead. Now for a brief message from TRSA. Participate in TRSA’s 2018 charitable effort supporting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. TRSA chairman David Potek selected the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society as the association’s 2018 cause. Your donation supports an organization that uses 76% of what it raises to directly fund life saving blood cancer research worldwide, provide free information and support services, and help blood cancer patients seeking access to quality, affordable, coordinated care find their voices.

 

For more information and to make a donation, go to www.trsa.org /annualconference. Now back to the episode. And we also implemented a strategic planning process to lay the foundation for the future. During this process, we first needed to figure out really who we were and what we wanted to be. Kind of interesting for a 120 year, back in a 1920 year old company.

 

Look at our place in the industry, our strengths strengths and weaknesses, areas of opportunities, so basically a SWOT analysis. We actually, utilized some outside resource to help us put together this planning framework. And we also did a big job of sort of surveying our customers, employees, and vendor partners to learn more about ourselves and our customers’ customers’ needs. And what became clear was there a big opportunity to improve operational efficiencies while differentiating ourselves through customer service. That’s a big deal.

 

We had to kinda recognize that really what we do in our business is we sell service. Yeah. We do laundry and everything else, but, you know, honest honestly, anybody can do the laundry. Customer doesn’t see the laundry being done. It’s that service point.

 

So we sell service. So we organized our management structure to align sales and service teams under functional leaders to really kinda push the change quicker and begin our process of standardizing and centralizing many functions. We, like many, had a very distributed decentralized organization. We’ve pulled a lot of that back in to kinda create more sort of centers of excellence so that our market leaders could kinda concentrate on the markets and not necessarily administration and back office stuff. Big that was a big, big change for our for our company and our culture.

 

We defined and broadly communicated our vision, mission, and strategy, and we also established a process for developing annual operating plans that would help us achieve our our strategic goals. Today, if you talk about, merit pride and you ask them, hey. What are your AOP goals? You know, your operating goals? They’ll be able to tell you, which is that’s a big change.

 

We didn’t have those 4 years ago. So we’re in a much more kinda consistent rhythm of of business. To achieve all these kind of changes and and and things, we needed capable and committed employees. You know, we’d be in be in upgrading organization through a strong, people management process. And, so as I was telling some of the folks today is, you know, one of the reasons I gotta be flying back to Minneapolis tonight is to be back, tomorrow morning.

 

We we, begin the executive level day and a half for our people planning process. We have a business rhythm now that works through the organization, and those that are in here from AmeriPride have already done their work to help assess and, you know, do succession planning for the organization. It kinda all rolls up. Eventually, I’ll present that to the board in terms of who our future leaders are at the succession planning. It is one of the most critical things you can do is kinda assess and help manage and coach your your people in your organization.

 

So I would say that the, two most important things is really to deliver business results, yet we like results and develop people because that’s how you’re gonna get results done. Unfortunately or fortunately, that generally requires changing the status quo. You need to change things. So whether you’re a production manager or a service manager or or at the AirMark, we yeah. Yeah.

 

AirMark. Right? The Mirapride, we call the service managers, customer operations managers, your GM. You know, all of those roles, require you to change things up occasionally. You can’t just do it the same way all the time.

 

So what were some of the lessons that learned as, which would be applicable to to me as a CEO or a production or service manager? 1st approach is to have a structured planning process and framework. And then you on my notes here under underline framework because that’s important because you wanna be able to kinda continually reassess the process, but establishing a framework or an approach allows you to do that in a way that’s not having to kinda reinvent the wheel every time you go through a new an annual planning process or or a strategic planning process. Get the right talent in the right places. That’s really that sounds pretty easy.

 

That’s the hardest work you have is to get the right, right talent in the right places. Clearly communicate the reasons for change in the plan to employees. Be true at your core values and make sure everyone knows it. So communications, I can’t overemphasize that that enough. You know, one of the things we did at Ameriprise Services is we were a little bit kind of under the radar for a lot of years.

 

We had because we’re a family owned and a very private family, and, I think we mistook, the family’s desire to be private to kinda not have company show up in the news or be involved in kind of public, ideas. So we hired a communications director as as as Joe Richey knows and Jason and people to tears. They we’re always sending them stuff to get in the magazine. We’re doing press releases. You know, communicating is extremely important to help kinda retain customers and employees, recruit talent, and because people wanna be associated with something that people have heard about.

 

And if you’re in Minnesota, people have heard about Ameriprise a lot more than Ameriprise. So we’re trying to kinda get our our name out there a lot more, more than it had been in the past. Next item is be transparent with your customers and vendor partners. And I think that’s a pretty important piece to do as well. We also were a little bit more hands off with our our vendor partners.

 

Hey. You’re there to kinda we’ll keep the hook up the wall up and not let you know that much about us. And, you know, I I’m I’m a risk taker. I’d much rather kinda have information out there, have people know a lot more about us than less because they can help you better. And that was a couple of weeks ago.

 

I was at, invited to speak at, Washington Systems annual, kind of management conference in talking. They’re a strategic partner for us. We do things together that are in you know, we have to be more intimate with each other than we would have otherwise. So I think it’s very important to be transparent, open, with your strategic partners. Get key players on the board with your plan early.

 

You you know who those people are. Everybody that runs departments kinda know who lead people are, who the go to people are. Make sure they’re on on your change wagon early first. Don’t try to do too much at once. You know, one of the things we’d like to do is, you know, potentially to almost boil the ocean.

 

Right? That just doesn’t work. And for those of you who’ve been involved in some of the Covey principles, you know, that, you know, pick the short list, you know, because the whirlwind of work is always out there. And if you don’t have a shortlist, you’ll just get buried by kind of the day to day. So, you know, really don’t try to do too much and develop that shortlist.

 

Also, develop lead and live measures. What do you expect to get done? I know in the very end, I like how business results, but what are the lead measures on the way to predicting whether you’re gonna hit those, those, those business results? So, measure, measure, measure. So lead measures, I think, are really important on a plan for.

 

They could be, you know, pounds per operator or whatever they are, but you gotta have those to be religious about them. Then you can kinda track your your progress. Recognize and reward your people and celebrate successes. So have some milestones and make sure you recognize the, you know, achieving those milestones. If you don’t hit them, have a game plan to hit them.

 

But when you do, make sure that you have a bit of a fanfare and inspiration for the organization. And lastly, you know, one of the key really values of Ameriprise is trust. And I believe trust is critical in aligning people and achieving results. You need to trust each other, trust leadership in each other. Trust actually helps you go faster.

 

There’s another kind of company thing called the speed of trust, and I think it’s really important. You know, this in these this, kind of curriculum that you guys are going through, you know, year 1, 2, 3, and 4, you develop a certain level of trust with your with your teammates and your, your fellow, participants, and I think that’s pretty important because you will learn faster when you trust each other more. So it’s interesting. You can see that play in all all areas. So as leaders, I think, you know, my my kind of parting comment would be, is to foster broad communication and transparency.

 

Be more open than not. Hard to do in a competitive industry. Secrets are actually fairly few. You know, you gotta keep it. So be more open and people will rest together, faster.

 

I think it’ll help trust build trust within your teams, across teams, and, you know, doing so can actually take you a very, very long way. So I think I did okay. So that’s 6 minutes to 1. So thanks very much. If Joe, has any questions, I’d be happy to answer any questions about AmeriPride or, my background or IT general as long as it’s not for AmeriPride.

 

How to recruit talent. Exactly what you’re talking about. Like you’re in our class. We’re talking about benchmarking talent and how do you warm your bench and, how do we market ourselves as an industry. So I’m curious as to what attracted you to the industry.

 

Well, it’s interesting because that, you know, Barb, it’s a great question. I mean, you know, how first of all, you know, PepsiCo is a monster company. This is okay. So guess what? I figured out I’m not gonna be the CEO there.

 

Okay. So so maybe at this stage, maybe I should just take a different turn. And this was actually very, for me, it was just I happened to be running a, a thing for Pepsi that was actually Minneapolis. It’s a private, little beverage start up company, and and, I was doing this on a temporary basis for them. And I kinda we just crossed paths.

 

So the certainly for a company like AmeriPride or Ralsco or some of the private companies in particular is if you’re in a public company, you know, private companies look pretty good because you don’t have the quarterly earnings calls and all the kind of stuff that you gotta go through, all the nonsense you gotta go through as a public company. So one of the things to do is if you’re you know, you can you can kinda merchandise the private company piece pretty easily. Well, it doesn’t help GK or Cintas or anybody else. But I think the, what we could do, and Joe and I were talking about this as the industry is is we need to kinda recast our industry as really the environmental stewards, you know, bar none the best. So everything we do 10 years from now is, yeah.

 

Yeah. I know we do laundry. We do we deliver stuff and but, you know, we’ll have the best trucks or the most fuel efficient or electric or CNG. And our plants, by the way, will be, you know, waste free. We’ll figure it out with the, you know, washing systems and Ecolab and everybody else.

 

And we need to kinda take the industry to be not so much of a laundry industry, industrial laundry, but more of an environmental, you know, just the best there, you know, environmental steward. And so I think that, Barb, if you kind of if we can do that, particularly young folks today, that’s a huge deal. I know that the younger folks in our in our company are much more aware and much more inquisitive about, hey. What’s going on with the water or what’s going on with the air? And that’s a great great question.

 

Thanks. Thank you. Yeah. The back So, you know, in year 4, I’m kinda curious if you see any threats to the industry as a whole or any, you know, oncoming paradigm shifts that people at your level are looking at that maybe some of us don’t see? Well, I I think the biggest was, in line with what I just answered Barb’s question on is, you know, regulatory threats are a big deal.

 

Right? And, how do you get in front of those? And part of it is just being sort of on the right side of the EPA or on the right side of of whoever. And if we’re actually really an environmental steward, we’re actually become the experts on that. You know, we know as much as the EPA does, then, you know, that threat kinda goes away.

 

Actually, we’re we’re we’re on the driver’s seat. I think barring, you know, something like, hey. For some reason, somebody outlawed uniforms or something. Right? These are some things you can’t anticipate.

 

But, generally, I do believe we’re kind of in the driver’s seat on this. I don’t think we have to you know, the US is a pretty litigious, you know, area, so you got all the things we all deal with, whether it’s, you know, EEOC issues or or OSHA issues, and I think it’s a matter of just kinda being ahead of them. And, you know, I was just sharing a story just, today that’s, you know, companies still didn’t kinda convert to non NP detergents and because they’re afraid of the quality. Well, a lot of us have done that a long time ago. Find the quality out of it.

 

You know, it’s just, you know, if you don’t make those changes, you are in fact gonna be on the wrong side of, of of regulations and issues. So I think it’s a matter of, you know, let’s just be in front. You know? And that the answer I give to Barb, I think, is the best, best idea of kinda staying away from those threats. I don’t foresee anything other other than that that you need to our industry versus any other kind of industry.

 

Bill, you mentioned early on about change and, when you first came on, you really kinda looked at your organization and basically Launders Laundry, you know, not to put words in your mouth. But to differentiate yourself, you talked about the service aspect. How long did it take before you started to see that change take place with your your service reps and the relationship with the customers? And then what types of metrics have you used to measure that? Well, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s still underway.

 

Right? You’re sitting next to next to a guy here, Greg Gilay, who who is the he runs our North Dakota, service organization. And and that’s, you know, that would be at the forefront kind of the very best in kind of what we have from a service standpoint. They have a very high sales mentality, customer mentality, and we’ve got folks that are still like, well, those customers are in the way. Right?

 

You know, it’s just it’s the issue of of so one of the ways we measure stuff, we actually have contract with a company called Loyalty Resource. It does a constant level of surveys, you know, every quarter or every month or forget how many. They they do it so it’s statistically significant. So you can use this information to see, are we making progress, you know, with our customer service measures. So we have, you know, particular measures that we use and some of them were responsiveness and some are about product availability or product quality.

 

And we get all those and we kinda measure our progress on performance. And, you know, and it’s interesting in in good markets where you have good leadership, you see those measures move faster. And so that’s what I say. It really kinda comes back to people and talent and leadership. And if you get people that really believe and they care about the customer and they, you know, realize that what we’re really here for is service.

 

And then, honestly, we’ll get the laundry done, and we can put the good process in place. Boy, that that area between the laundry and the customer is where all the variety and variation is. Right? So if you have good people there, you got a great chance of, retaining and growing your your base. Kent?

 

Yeah. Bill, first of all, I wanna thank you for being the introductory speaker for this afternoon’s class on business paradigms and change. Couldn’t have been Great. More perfect. But not to leave you, not to put you on the spot, just from your experience.

 

And we’re gonna discuss some of these areas this afternoon. What would you see as the 3 biggest obstacles to make some of the changes that you were talking about, in the organization? What were the biggest things that you faced with the the bare I’ll try to come up with 3, but it may be culture, culture, culture. Right? So, literally, it was a big deal for AmeriPride.

 

First of all, to go through what they went through with, you know, who’s this guy? We’ve always had a Steiner member or a family member kind of running the company. Meat. What does Pepsi have to do with laundry? Right?

 

Because you got all those issues. The culture was very decentralized. We joke about this, but, you know, boy, as long as they set the check-in from the branch, they’re on their own. Right? Doesn’t matter.

 

And we had actually a system set up, you know, kind of an ERP that was actually individualized to all the different branches. So, I’d be remiss by not saying one of the things we did is we, we put in a new ERP kind of route accounting and and, accounts receivable system through ADS, if you’re a member or associate member here. That was really kinda game changing for us because it all of a sudden put everybody on the scene. So it’s just, believe me, with a pain in the butt. If you’re out there in the field, you know, it was really a pain.

 

And we look back today, we actually tailored things and kinda made them a little you know, we try to get them so it fits, you know, it fits Bismarck and it fits Minneapolis and it fits, you know, LA. We look back, we never should have done that. Right? You know, could’ve get a ERP rollout, certainly not. You don’t change anything.

 

You know, force it in, and you’ll be thankful later. And today, for the last several years, we’re doing all that that cleanup if you want. So, but it was culture that drove that kind of desire to try to make it work for me here versus having a change. So I literally will tell you, I think I can’t I can’t go bound, you know, I can go culture 1 through 10 almost. It’s really changing, the way it was.

 

What coach did you call banks have changed? It is a hard decision. Right. And it requires great communication, great planning, and, a lot of resilience. Thanks all for listening.

 

Have a good day. Thanks again for listening to the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast by TRSA. Hopefully, you gained some insight from Bill Evans’ speech that you can take back to your company and use when leading initiatives. If you liked what you heard on today’s podcast, you might be interested in TRSAs Executive Management Institute to help advance your career in the linen uniform and facility services industry. For more information, visit www.

 

Trsa.org/emi. Additionally, we have 4 episodes of this podcast available right now on iTunes in addition to This 1. Make sure you go back and listen to them all. Subscribe to the show and give us a rating and review.