Ep. 3 - Culture Beats Strategy: Walmart Leadership Lessons with John Owen

Corporate strategy looks clean on a slide deck, but the actual execution of a business plan is entirely determined by human behavior. Many companies waste millions trying to force an established operational blueprint onto a completely different market without assessing local realities. We sit down with John Owen, Senior Vice President of Headquarter Client Development for Walmart at Acosta Group, who shares how a series of proactive, unscripted decisions shaped a highly diverse international retail career.

We get into what it was actually like to report directly to retail titans like Tom Coughlin and Bill Fields during Walmart’s hyper-growth era of the 1990s. John walks us through the tactical friction of category management deployment in Mexico City, the financial lessons of managing a corporate profit and loss statement, and the strategic missteps of trying to replicate American retail culture inside Germany. We also break down the high stakes of competing directly against future Walmart CEO Doug McMillon during a intense period of market share rivalry with Kmart.

The harder part of corporate leadership isn't analyzing data; it's maintaining absolute organizational clarity when a business scales to millions of customers. John highlights the hidden operational risks of managing cash flow in independent business ventures and the friction of returning to a massive organization after nearly two decades away. True leadership requires constant, repetitive reinforcement of foundational principles rather than relying on standard corporate perks or superficial engagement programs.

If you care about corporate leadership, international retail execution, and data-driven category management, you’ll get a lot from this conversation. Please subscribe to the channel and share this video with another professional looking to build a sustainable career in the consumer packaged goods industry. What is the single most critical leadership lesson you have learned from a professional mentor that still guides your day-to-day decisions? Let us know in the comments below.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi everyone, welcome to Between the Isles, part of the Doing Business in Bentonville podcast series. I'm your host, John Reeves, and I'm really excited today because I've got somebody I think you're really going to enjoy hearing from. You know, I've been talking about culture and uh for the last couple of podcasts, and this is an individual that exemplified Walmart culture, and I think you're going to be amazed at the diversity of this gentleman's career. And I'd like to welcome John Owen.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Hi, John. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invite. And uh be looking forward to this since you know mentioned it a few weeks ago. So thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

John, like I mentioned, you had a very, very diverse career. Why don't you walk us through where you started and uh and some of the stops along the way that you had and maybe share some of the stories from some of the people that that you worked with?

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Yeah, I'd love to. So as a little background, I have a slightly odd accent. I was born and grew up in South Africa. I actually went to the same high school that Elon Musk did. He was three or four years behind me, so I didn't know him, but I thought that was interesting. Uh we as a family emigrated to Australia when I was in the 11th grade, so I finished high school there and came to the US to go to college and play tennis and uh studied at Arkansas Tech, you know, a few hours down the street. Uh, left and went back to actually my family had moved to the UK, so I uh went to the UK, worked there for a year, and just I didn't want to live there. It's a beautiful country, but um I liked America. I think the girls are prettier and uh opportunities are more and the weather's better and uh it's cheaper. So I got myself an interview at Walmart, uh flew myself here, interviewed at Internal Audit. Uh lucky enough to get the job because I had a little experience doing some audit work and for the company and I was working for in the UK. So yeah, lucky that someone invested in me to get me a work visa, and for that I'm eternally grateful to them. So, internal audit was my first uh role. Um we used to team up and jump into Grand Am at 6 o'clock on a Monday morning and drive somewhere. Uh, if it was 10 hours or less, we had to drive. If it was 10 hours or more, we got to fly. And we got to live on 15 bucks a day for food, which was a challenge, um, especially making almost no money, but that's what we did. Uh and you know, you talk about stories. Um, I think in the first month or two I was at Walmart, um there was a year beginning or year-end, I can't remember, probably year-beginning audit meeting where you know the entire audit department was in the meeting, and Paul Carter, who was the CFO at the time in the early 90s, late 80s, uh, came to the meeting and, you know, was going to address the group. And was first thing he said was, you know, those of you who are new, stand up and introduce yourself. So I was one of them. I stood up and had a slightly stronger accent than I do now, but uh told him, you know, I'd come from the UK, and he says, Oh, interesting. So come see me in six months and tell me something about European retailing. John, I don't think he actually meant it. It's a bit like walking down the street and saying, hi John, how are you doing? It's just, you just say it. Right. But I took him seriously, and I've told this story probably hundreds of times to young people, not as a braggadocious story, but just to say, you know, in life you make your opportunities for yourself. Right. And the world owes you nothing. Uh, but you know, some people will recognize an opportunity and others won't. But so uh I took him very seriously, literally at his word. And so I left that meeting, and first opportunity I called my dad in the UK and I said, You gotta get me every uh article you can find on any retailer in the UK, all their annual reports, and mail them to me. Because that that's I hate to say this, but back then there wasn't email. Right. It was new. And so he posted it all to me, and I spent, you know, Sundays because we worked, traveled all week and Saturday morning meetings, and then wrote audit reports, and then Sunday was laundry and doing this report. And so six months to the day, I walked uh down to Paul Carter's office on Executive Row with a bound report, and I never forget his assistant's name, it was Terry Shields. I said, She said, I can how can I help you? I said, Well, I'm here to deliver this report that Mr. Carter asked for. So she said, Okay, well, he's in his office, go see him. So I walked in and I said, Mr. Carter, this is the report you asked for. He looked at me like I had three heads. He never expected it. He'd probably forgotten about it, but you could tell he had some recollection. And and uh I guess he was impressed enough that the next week I was out of internal audit and I was working for uh Randy Laney in the Treasury.

SPEAKER_00 4:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

And uh so that was an incredible.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

So it it paid off. He wasn't expecting it, but but you provided it anyway, and he was impressed with it, obviously. So that that was uh you kind of took that into your own hands and uh and took that opportunity. I mean, he did ask for it. Reminds me a little bit about a story that I have with uh somebody that you know very well or knew very well, uh, Bill Fields, who at the time uh was the executive vice president of merchandising, and I was buying men's dress shirts. And if you remember, Bill was a was a tall figure that uh uh he could look over your over the wall of your office, you know, and I always do when he was there, but he peered over and he said, Hey John, when are we ever going to get a decent dress shirt? And then he walked off. And so I spent two weeks analyzing everything. I pulled, I bought dress shirts from every company. We analyzed it, and I went into him with a report and uh shared it with him. He goes, Oh, I just I I was just uh wanting to see what you would do. So uh, but that's that's kind of part of the Walmart culture, is always uh giving you something to think about and some and and some kind of a challenge to come back with. So that's a great story about Paul Carter. Paul Carter was the um he was the executive vice president of or see, he was the CFO, actually, chief financial officer at the time. Great guy, great cultural leader. And so from there, uh what did what was your next stop after uh Treasury?

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Uh next stop after Treasury was I uh uh actually ran into, I actually pulled Tom Coglin aside. So Tom Coghlin was uh you know he was CEO of Sam's Club, and then he came over to Walmart and was running the specialty groups for Walmart, which were their own standalone operations and PLs, which was pharmacy optical, shoes, jewelry, tire loop express, and I think the snack bar. Right. The old snack bar. Yes. So they were their own operating groups and he that he was running. So one of the jobs I had in the uh in the treasury was I was asked to to figure out how we came up with a new method of allocating uh accident costs because they were spread like peanut butter across all stores, and it wasn't fair for those stores that were doing a really good job of controlling it. So I had to come up with a new method for for you know actual accident costs reflecting on the PL, but I had to get everybody's buy-in before it would roll out. So I was audacious enough, I guess, to grab Tom at the at the end of a Saturday morning meeting and I said, I need to talk to you about something. He looked at me like, okay, who are you, sort of thing. And I never forget standing over a gray trash can uh outside of the auditorium and saying, Here's what we need to do, or here's what I want to do, and here's the impact on you. And I would just walk him through it. I remember him just looking at me like, who is this guy? You know, there's the audacity to tell me what he's gonna do.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

And so in a different accent.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

In a different accent, exactly. Um, but in you know, interestingly, about a week and a half, two weeks later, he he asked me if I would go be his finance guy, uh, running specialty groups. And uh, you know, he he asked me what I made, I told him, and he said, well, that's not enough. So he gave me a 40% increase, and that sent Paul Carter into an absolute tizzy because he thought that was in you know way too much in Walmart days, but Tom didn't care. So I went to work for Tom as his finance guy, uh, managing the finances of all of the uh the specialty groups. Oh, that's great. So, you know, I I reflect back, and as I've been thinking about this conversation we're gonna have, you know, I think I was incredibly lucky and blessed to work directly for some of the people that, you know, I think were exceptional leaders at Walmart and incredibly influential, not only within the company, but on young people. And you talk about culture. I think they really invested in in people. It wasn't their own ego that you know they were after. It was about how can I help these people and help the next generation and influence them. Right. Certainly that was Tom's Tom's belief. He was a hard-charging, incredibly charismatic, larger-than-life figure who you know got things done, but he helped people along the way also.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Yeah, he was he he uh I remember Tom very well as uh uh he could be a very intimidating guy, um, but he had a big heart and he cared. And um, and so that's that's why I hold him in such high esteem and his legacy in such high esteem. One thing I'm I'm hearing from you though is you took the initiative to to do the report for Paul Carter. Yeah. And you took the initiative to go talk to Tom. Um, and then and both times it was you were rewarded for that. Uh so that's kind of a pattern that I'm seeing with your career, was you were never one that was intimidated enough to say, well, I'm I'm just I'm not gonna go talk to Tom. And I can tell you, that was that would have been an intimidating conversation, especially if you didn't know who you were at the time. So uh kudos for that, and and it looks like it paid off for you too.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

So I don't know what I was thinking, but it just seemed like you know, I was given a job to do it.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

So well, that's kind of a I I know you pretty well, and I've seen that happen throughout your career too.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

So it's a great example for people. Yeah, and you mentioned you know Tom and how he invested in people and culture. I have a but I have a have to share a couple of Tom's stories because this is also one I've told a hundred times. Tom had a a built of loyalty with people that was extraordinary, right? And so I I was this was probably 1993 or four. I'm mid-early twenties, and one Friday afternoon he said to me, So what are you doing this weekend? And I just finished building my my wife and I's first house. I didn't build it, but it was built and had some drainage problems. And I said, Well, I've got 20 tons of red clay, dirt, just delivered to the house, and I'm gonna spread it this weekend. And he looked at me and says, Well, I'm a I assume you have a box blade. And I said, I'm a city guy from Africa, I have no idea what a box blade is, right? And so he said, Well, I'm guessing then you don't have a tractor either. I said, No, sir, I don't have a box blade or a tractor. He says, Okay, well, eight o'clock tomorrow morning, give me well, first of all, give me your address, I'll be at your house at eight o'clock in the morning. And you remember back in those days, while the official rule of um, you know, Saturday morning meetings is we had to work three a month, but most people worked all of them, right? And certainly he would have. Uh, but he decided that instead of that, he would come to my house and bring his tractor on a on a trailer and help me spread my dirt. Right. And at eight o'clock he showed up just like he said, and he opened the back door, got a case of Chinese beer out, put it on the sidewalk, he cracked one open, handed it to me, and he cracked another one and started drinking it himself. And you know, he said, now get your get your big butt on the back of this uh box plate and you know, because it needs some extra weight, and we're gonna spread your dirt. And two or three hours later we I think drank most of the case of beer and finished spreading the dirt, and he said, There you go, and he left. And you know, he didn't have to do that for anybody, but he did that for people, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. But yeah, there was nothing you know il legal that I wouldn't do for that man because of what he, you know, how he invested in me and what he did for me. So and he did that for a lot of people too. Yeah, he did uh he did lots of those things. I'll forget he walked around one day uh to his direct reports and handed out Iron Man Time X watches.

SPEAKER_02 11:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

And uh people were like, What are these for? He says, you know, you guys now make money, you've got stock, you're getting options, you've got profit sharing, you can afford, you know, things that your customers can't. He says, I want you to wear this Timex watch when you come to work, because when you look at it, you'll remember who your customer is. I thought that was an incredible way of reminding people, you know, don't forget who your customer is, don't forget who you serve. And I think that's a that's a great illustration of the culture of how he embedded that in, you know, the people that work for him, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:28

Right, yeah, for sure. Great story. So you worked uh after the uh treasury. What what next steps did you take on your woman?

SPEAKER_01 12:40

I went to work for Tom. Okay. Uh and I was his finance guy for a couple of years. And then um Ronnie Hoyt was Bill Fields finance guy, okay, uh, who then went off to run optical division. Okay. And so I was asked to backfill Ronnie. So then I worked directly for Bill Fields as his finance guy. So essentially I had the PL for Walmart U.S. And it was my job to make sure that the PL came in and that he had a report on his desk every single morning showing what the what the PL for the month was looking like. So basically he had a daily PL and he, you know, he would work, he would walk into the office, John, at eight minutes after six every single morning if he wasn't traveling. Right. And I worked really hard. Eight minutes after six. Eight minutes after six. It was like clockwork. Yeah. And uh, you know, if there was a problem with the reports, I had to go down to the three-story building where the ISD office was and get the Doc Matrix reports and you know, key them into a spreadsheet and put it on his desk. Hopefully, most of the time I had it there by you know five after six. But if I didn't, then I'd go find him in the smoking break room, which was which was across the hall where he and J.R. Campbell and Dave Dybel and others were looking over the numbers and talking business. So that was, you know, it was 5 30 to 5 30 for a few years. Right. Right. But it wasn't a wasn't work. It was it was uh a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Yeah, for sure. So you worked for you worked directly for Bill Fields. That's that's uh Tom Cog and Bill Fields, two great, great leaders uh for Walmart in the in the 80s and 90s. Um and then you went to Department 10 as a DMM. Yeah. So that uh you did that for a while, and then where I got to know you was in uh 1997, we both got the call to do an expat assignment in Mexico City. And uh if you remember right, um CIFRA Walmart had a joint venture partnership with CIFRA, which was the largest retail conglomerate in Mexico, and they had been running uh, as a partnership, 24 super centers. I believe there was 50-something Sam's clubs at the time, and then uh the CIFRA part, Autora, Bodega Autora, they owned a restaurant called Vips, very much like a Denny's. Uh, and then they owned a department store called Suburbia, which was my mostly uh apparel. So they had this massive conglomerate. They asked us to go down uh to concentrate on the supercenters. Um they were 24 and um they wanted us to kind of bring the things that were going on in the supercenters in the U.S., which were really rapidly growing, so they figured they had the same opportunity in Mexico. So we went down there uh to do that along with Mark Schwartz. Uh Mark had had been running the Super Center Division in the U.S. So Mark went down, and yourself and me, Chuck Kirby was down there uh kind of to lead the merchandising charge. You were a GMM that had a lot of the hard lines areas. I went down as a DMM for apparel. Um so tell us a little bit about that, uh, relocating your family to Mexico City and doing that expat assignment.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Yeah, so it came out of the out of nowhere, right? Got a call saying, Hey, we go to Mexico, and and I was so into Walmart, just so Walmart, I said, what time do you want me there? Right. Not even, I may have gone and asked my wife if she wanted to do it, but I may not have as well. Uh so yeah, I had responsibility for hard lines and consumables. Right. So we moved the family, had two young kids. Um we moved down there and stayed in a you know, expat uh sort of high rise and was safe and was a big city for sure. Moving from Binville to 17 million people, Mexico City was interesting, but a fantastic culture, fantastic people. Uh, just loved the whole experience.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

It was a great culture, and yeah, I we moved, we all lived in a um Interlomas, which was a part of Mexico City, fairly recently developed, a lot of high-rise apartments. We both lived in high-rise apartments there and drove. Um, and I remember you as one that embraced the culture. Some some people that went were a little bit nervous to go anywhere without a driver, uh, but you embraced the culture and drove everywhere. In fact, I think you drove to uh some of the other cities in Mexico. Um so it was a great experience, I think, for us. But the point I wanted to make about Mexico as an expat assignment, uh, they wanted you there because you were a cultural leader. And part of what Walmart tried to do, and we did it with Canada, Mel Redman and I talked about it on my last podcast, how we spread the culture there. So that was kind of the charge uh in Mexico, too, is to get people that would emulate the Walmart culture. A little bit more difficult with Mexico because of the language difference than it was in Canada. Would you share some stories about that?

SPEAKER_01 18:04

You know, the the folks in Mexico that at the company were uh were very fluent. Uh, they were look there weren't many, you know, communication challenges. Right. You're you you're right. We was trying to how do you infuse what what makes Walmart good into Mexico? So for as an example, there was no category management in Mexico, so they didn't have line reviews. And so how do you how do you figure out assortment and how should you make decisions? And you know, you review all the suppliers' offerings. And it was the Wild West back then, right? You had a lot of suppliers just had merchandises go in and just put stuff on shelves, and it was an incredible number of people that were just you know free labor. Yeah, but they moved stuff around and they did what's kind of what they wanted to, so we tried to bring some category management discipline to uh to the process, which was which was interesting, and they embraced it. Yeah, and then we also brought some of uh Walmart uh merchandise to it. So you know what was working well in the US, like how do you take that to to Mexico? So uh I launched Equate uh pharmacy products or over-the-counter products and in uh worked with Perigo, one of the great suppliers of Walmart, uh, and O'Roy dog food, and we introduced that in Mexico. And uh you know, so that took about a year, and and uh then uh we had purchased, uh we had just purchased this German hypermarket chain called Vertkoff. Right. And so, you know, as part of the, you know, okay, who are we gonna go have help with that acquisition or the the you know walmatization of um I was asked to go do that. So what was expected to be a two-year Mexico assignment became a one-year Mexico assignment, and then off to off to Germany. So that was the next adventure, which Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

I I'm very curious. One thing I wanted to say about Mexico um was you and I were very much drilled on everyday low price philosophy at Walmart. I mean, Walmart had at the time a 1% advertising budget. Nobody ever came close to that. And even when we ran the monthly circular, there were no sale prices. It was these are our everyday low prices. So when we went to Mexico, um, Mexico was in the pro or was in the habit of running an ad every week with everything 40 to 50% off, like the entire category, men's socks 50% off, or diapers 50% off. And it drew a tremendous amount of traffic. But if but the first thing we did was say, oh, well, we're everyday low price, so we did away with those weekly ads. And uh boy, sales just tumbled. So we had a dilemma of how do we introduce everyday low pricing in Mexico. And the other thing that that we found out real quick was um every supplier had teams that would go to the stores and stock their product. They would hire laborers to go stock their product. And I remember Mark Schwartzman, well, we don't need that. We need to train our people to do that. So he dictated that we do away with that. Yeah. And we found out that, you know, when we did away with that, all of a sudden there was the in-stock levels were terrible and the sales uh tumbled. So we had to say, well, let's modify that. So I guess my point is when you go to another country uh and you want to bring the culture, you also have to try to understand their culture and and try to figure out how to weave the Walmart culture into their culture. And I think at the end of the day, uh that happened. Mexico today operates over 400 supercenters, so um, and we went from 24 to 400, and they're still growing. And uh, so that's the point. But back to Germany. Um, you left in the middle of the the Mexico assignment to go to Germany. Yeah. How was that compared to Mexico?

SPEAKER_01 21:56

You know, f fascinating, you talk about the whole uh uh The Mexico um learn and and uh don't just you know push your culture entire or your business process or your business approach entirely on a on a different culture, it may or not work. Right. You know, I think we we stumbled a few times. You may remember running, I remember the your your 50% off entire categories. It reminds me the time we ran the entire liquor department off 50%. Right. Yeah, we got in a lot of trouble for that.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Well, all the expats bought a lot of liquor.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Yes, we did. We did. But you know, I so went to went to Germany and we bought this very successful, very high volume. I I can't remember how many stores they were, but they weren't a they weren't a bunch, but it was a big hypermarket chain. But you know, the German culture is very different than the Mexican culture. I think the Mexican culture, a little more sort of open and you know, not accommodating, but okay, we're here to learn. But Germans are very different, right? And I didn't necessarily love Americans to begin with. And I'll never forget um the direction from Bobby Martin, who was running Walmart International at the time, was to go over there, and to your point, let's learn. Let's they're very successful, let's not screw it up, let's spend a year or two learning the German culture and then figure out what we should do to change. But but something short-circuited that, you know, let's learn for a year, and I think it was 60, 90 days max. And he said, okay, that's it. We're going EDLP and we're going to Walmart ize this thing. We're like, hey, what you know, what happened to the the learned for a year and not screw it up. And I think, you know, if you look back and the post-mortem on on Walmart's uh investment in in Germany, not just uh Wertkoff, but you know, Spar. And uh we pushed a culture on a different culture that probably wasn't ready for it. Right. We didn't necessarily want it, and we didn't believe enough of what was you know German in the in the in the German retail business, and we tried to Walmartise it. You know, you can look back, it cost Walmart a lot of money, and we're no longer in that country. So I think, you know, understanding that how you approach different countries and the speed with which you do it and how you do it is is unique in each place, and that's was an expensive lesson.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Yeah, so Walmart uh they were in Germany at one time, and no longer they were in uh South Korea at one time, no longer they were in Japan uh at one time, no longer now.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

And and the UK with all of them. Right, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 24:13

But and ASDA, I think, was pretty successful, but they ended up selling ASDA. But uh, but if you look at Mexico is is very successful today, Canada's very successful today, and um I think China's coming on. Uh the stores in China, uh especially the Sam's Club over there. Um, I was just there last month, and uh it seems like things are going very well for the international division in China. So I don't know if uh about the expat assignments originally in China, but it seems like that's paying off pretty well.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

So when uh when you came back, uh you got a call from Tom Coughlin. I did. And uh he wanted you to take on the role of store of the community. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what that involved?

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Well, the the role got named uh store of the community on the back of a napkin in a bar one night. Uh myself and Doug Dang were sitting around saying, okay, we've got to give a name to this thing. So the project that Tom asked me to do was, you know, Walmart had started opening stores on different coasts, right? So when we began, it was a lot of Central America, Missouri, Arkansas, you know, Kentucky, and you know, customers were different, but not as different as the customers are in Oceanside, California and Delray Beach, Florida. Right. And we used those two exact stores, by the way, as examples of, okay, if you study these two markets, how would you assort the store, starting at a very macro level to say, you know, if if in Delray Beach 70% of the population is 70 years old, uh, then how should a store look if you would design it from scratch for that location, not take a prototype that exists already and just force it on that town? How would you think about it? Yeah. And so if you think about category management principles of how should I assort items on a shelf, you can take those principles and say, how should I apply that to the size of the category within my department, and then how should I think about those same principles as the size of the department within the store? So, example, uh the pharmacy in uh Delray Beach should be huge because that's who you're catering to, right? Right. Oceanside California, very different town, young families, they don't need that. So it's it's the macro space allocation, category space allocation, then item space allocation, which we didn't do well. But you have to have a process to to to sort of uh educate merchants on how do you do that, not only at store design, but also at a at an item level. And so this whole notion of how do you teach people how to do that was was sort of the project, and store the community name was born, and I worked with a group from Procter Gamble who was super helpful, and you know, you because they were as good as anyone at category management principles, just how you then create that same principles at different levels in the store, not just at a category level.

SPEAKER_02 27:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

So yeah, that was um that was an 18-month uh exercise.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Still in use today, which I was gonna ask if you still use that today, you know, those principles.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Company I work for today, Acosta Group, we represent a bunch of clients, and every line review we do, which is I think the single most important thing of selling to Walmart, which is that's your chance, right? To influence distribution and uh you know items and new items and and so on. So uh if you don't end a presentation with, you know, here's where we should put these items, or here's why we should expand distribution, because it's the right thing for the customer, uh, and here's the stores where that makes sense, then you make the life of the buyer easy because you've done the work for them. Right. And if you do it well, and I think we do it pretty well using Spectra and some of the tools that allow you to do it, you you know, that's still incredibly important today, hasn't she? The customer's still important, and you've got to know where that customer is that's gonna buy that product, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:00

So and I think you and I both agree that it hasn't fully arrived yet. It's a work in progress always, and there's always room to improve it, and and and the population changes and things change too. So staying on top of that is probably pretty important.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

The demographics of this country are evolving every day.

SPEAKER_00 28:19

The next stop of your career is uh one that I find uh pretty fascinating. You um all the years of Walmart, yeah, and then you take a job with Walmart's at the time biggest competitor, Kmart.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

How did that happen?

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Well, if you told me I'd done that when I was you know started with Walmart, I'd have said there's no chance in you know anywhere that that would happen. But uh I you know uh expats at least years ago were um were subject to uh leaving a company because the company either forgets about them a little bit or doesn't repatriate them very well, or you you grow in ways the company doesn't recognize, or but very few in that era, um I think nine out of ten people didn't stay with a company for uh more than 12 months. I never thought that would happen to me, but yeah, it did. And um, you know, there was a gentleman called Chuck Conway who took over from uh who was the CEO of uh Kmart and he hired a bunch of people, Mark Schwartz being one of them. Right. Uh and I got a call saying, hey, you want to come and run, um, be senior vice president of Hardlines and uh at Kmart. So it was an interesting deal. It was a promotion.

SPEAKER_00 29:31

And Mark Schwartz, uh knowing you from Mexico, knew what you were capable of. And so he was hired, I believe, as the president of Kmart. Yeah, so he reached out to you. And you have a funny story. You and Doug McMillan, uh, who recently retired as the CEO of Walmart, great, great leader, I think we both agree, were uh both senior VPs at the time, him at Walmart and you at Kmart. Yep. That's correct.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Yeah, we've we've actually chatted about this and laughed about it, but uh I had the exact same. I had hard lines at Kmart and he had hard lines at at Walmart. And we'd known each other in the company because you know we were there as young young people. And uh in fact, my face was on a bullseye on the back of his door, of his office, uh, because it was cutthroat competition. He was in Take All My Business, and I was trying desperately to get some of his. And I told him, I said, I think I took a one-point market share from you in Toys in 2000. I believe that's true, but you know, it doesn't matter because Km1 went bankrupt and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

But um I'd have to, I'd love to see that bullseye. I wonder if that still exists. Maybe he could autograph it for you.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

You know, I when I first saw him next, it was in about 2005 or six, after I'd come back from uh from a different uh back to Bentonville for the third time, uh and I went and see him. He was running international at the time, and we were just chatting. I said, So, you know, is the is the bullseye gone? He smiled and laughed. He said, Yeah, the bullseye's down. So that was good.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

He had a different personality.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

But you know, you said great, he's a fantastic guy. Um, just such a good leader, did great things for Walmart, and uh I'm a huge, huge Doug McMillan fan. And yeah, although we competed for a year, he won. So you're still around the way. I'm still here.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

And you're back in Bentonville or back in Arkansas now, so that's great. All right. So I mean, I'm I've got to tell you, this is one of the most diverse careers uh from anybody I've ever talked to. But your next uh stop along the way was Fresh Start. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

So uh when Kmart went bankrupt, yeah. Uh, and there's probably an old podcast about how that happened, and yeah, and you know, interesting and they don't exist anymore. But um, the board fired all of us. Right. Uh and so, you know, it was a that was an ugly, uh, ugly process when you're being uh sued for whatever it was, I don't even remember, but um, I just wanted to break from corporate America. It was uh bad taste in my mouth, and you know, you can't control things, and you know, you then you're subject to all these different legal problems. And um, so Schwartz and I actually um our families have become friends, and we we trekked out to South Dakota and started a uh chain of convenience stores and a trucking company. We started with one sea store and then we bought a few groups of them and five and six, and so we had 23 of them. Uh, and then you know, Schwartz is a very intelligent guy, very bright, um, maybe one of the brightest sort of intellectual people I've ever worked around, but he's also very aggressive.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

He's very, yeah, he's very aggressive.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

You know, it was uh we had we couldn't buy these things fast enough. We debranded all of them from Amacos, Conacos, Texacos into our own brand. And we had fuel cards, and you know, it was uh it's probably the hardest job I've ever had. Yeah, even though it was a relatively small company, I think 50, 60 million dollars. But you have to, and when you're doing that, you have to know how to do everything. So you know, I remember some of my friends, you know, Doug Dane and and others who would, you know, laugh, you know, how much business do you do? And I would tell them, I said, Oh, that's that's cute. You know, we have more we have we have more business in return diapers than you do all you know all year in revenue, which was probably true. But I reminded him that you're in Bay and you have no idea where cash flow comes from. You have you know how to make decisions that cause you know sales to go through a register, but that's all you do. And so running a little company and all the complexities of some one day I had to fire the controller because you know uh the person was not you know behaving accurately, and I had to be the controller for 12 months and do bank reconciliations and and figure it all out was hard, but you have to know how to do everything. So it was a credible learning experience that you probably people don't you know probably recognize or um not give credit for, but it's just it's hard doing your own.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Right, and and you're starting this company from scratch, so you don't have the advantage of a culture that was built or established prior to that that that kind of elevates everything.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

So you know, I think about when when the price of gas goes uh goes up and down, uh remember the lessons of hey, where did all my cash go? You know, because when when the price of fuel goes up, your cash goes out of the bank because it's in the ground. Yeah. And you don't see it again until the price goes down, and that can that puts people out of business. Right. So it's uh anyway, so we uh we we did the stores and then we said, well, we can make money trucking fuel to our own locations, and so we built a trucking company, and it was just all a bit uh much, and I you know, five kids at the time, and just we wanted back in Arkansas. So uh we moved back and um it was a great experience, learned a lot, but then I went to Nielsen. Right. Ran a Nielsen uh team for uh Walmart globally, and the challenge there was, as you probably remember, uh in the early 2000s when Walmart was really exploding growth in the Super Center division, uh they stopped sharing point of sale data with the the Nielsen of the world and the IRI now now Circana, but they stopped sharing POS because they didn't want the world to see the success of the supercenters primarily. So they went dark. It was called going dark, and that was a big, big change for the industry. And so they said, look, your goal is to get Walmart sharing POS again because we need it, they need it. Yes. So we spent a few years trying to figure out how to illustrate to Walmart that the what they gained from sharing POS was was larger than the risk. Right. And so we had to find these stories of, you know, here's what you're missing because you're blind. Yeah, but you're blind in the marketplace. And so if you weren't blind, here's what you would see. And I'll never forget, you know, explaining that or sharing these examples with John Wesling and Scott Huff and trying to get ambassadors to say, you know what, we should really do this again. And I never forget sharing an example of Dollar General had created this unique size of tide. Right. And Walmart was losing share in in laundry because Dollar General had created this size that was was doing really, really well and was taking share from Walmart. And we showed them how that was happening. And I think that was the straw that broke the camel's back, and you know, three or four years after that that role, taking that role, Walmart started sharing data again. And uh but that was a that was a challenging time when uh when Walmart was going through Project Impact, if you remember that ordeal. Yeah, where uh so I'm more working on trying to feed information to these these folks making these decisions, which we all know were bad decisions, but you know, trying to feed information to them from home scan panel, which is the only thing they had access to, it was uh it was a pretty interesting time.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Saying, man, this is a bad idea, guys. You may may not be doing this. Like we were all stupid, they were gonna do what they're gonna do, and you know, that story is also history, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:57

Didn't work out too well. Yeah, uh, but you do it, you try it, you fix it, or like we've talked about before, you do it, you try it, and you figure out it's not the right thing to do, so you kill it. And uh that's that but I remember Nielsen very well as a buyer, um, because uh when I was first being a buyers buying men's underwear, we used to track our market share through Nielsen to understand if we were gaining or losing market share. And and you certainly didn't want to be losing market share as a Walmart buyer, so you always were looking for that report to see where you stood.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

But I'm laughing because I'll never forget it was so frustrating that buyers were hoping that Nielsen would tell them their share change. Yeah, and the only tool we had was HomeScan Panel. Home scan panel is only 100,000 households, and it's directional at best. It's got incredibly valuable information in it, but market share is not one of them. Right. Right? The degree of accuracy could be three, four, five percent. So I'll never, you know, people were looking up saying, what's my my pet food market share this month? And it had gone down a half a point, and they're like, oh my god, what's happened? Well, nothing's happened because it's all within the degree of of error, right? And that could be four or five percent. But so trying to answer every question with homescan panel was was uh was challenging and frustrating, and frustrating for us and frustrating for Walmart because they they wanted accuracy and you just it's not what it's designed for. Right. So fun, fun times.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

Right. So you then you s you worked for uh Crossmark. Yeah, company that's large company, right?

SPEAKER_01 38:29

Uh fairly. Um it's now part of the Acosta group. Acosta purchased Crossmark about 18 months ago. Oh, okay. So it was one of the three big brokerage houses, and I met met the owners of this company on a hunting trip, and I thought, you know what, this sounds like an interesting business. They were nice, yeah, nice people. I enjoyed them, and so you know, I I'll give this a whirl. So I left Nelson and went to Crossmark and had an absolute blast. Loved working the uh it was um I understood how Walmart worked, right? Um, you know, helping small, medium-sized uh companies sell their products to Walmart. So I understood that because I'd, you know, been a merchant and and so for five years that was uh fun. I ran the Walmart team and then you know we actually had pretty good success, and I got promoted to run all of retail and all of uh operations for cross market in Plano. So we for the third time moved away from Bentonville down to Plano uh and spent three or four years doing that. The company was um sold to private equity, and that has a tendency to change things. Um CEO in town, and they just it's different, right? So um I decided I want to do something different, and so I went and ran a food company for uh another private equity firm called Green Chili Food Company, and um did that for for a while until the pandemic hit and about 50% of our business was uh on the west coast, and a vast majority of that was in the convenience channel. Uh and when the pandemic hit, as you know, probably remember California shut down, certainly all the gas stations shut down, and so the it was gonna cripple this company. And right, right, and you know, I was um very lucky that uh I drove from Dallas to Austin, Texas to attend Bill Fields' funeral.

SPEAKER_02 40:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:17

We talked about Bill earlier. So you know he passed away in Austin, and so I I drove down to show my respects, and I had a great love for Bill Fields and uh walked in the funeral home, but there's there's Doug McMillan, Charles Redfield, Andy Barron, you know, all these guys who I knew and grew up with. Doug and I chatted for um you know a few weeks post the funeral, and that's just when the pandemic was hitting. And you know, he said, You want to come back to Walmart? And I said, I would love to come back to Walmart. I did not like living in Dallas. Yeah, too much concrete, too hot. And you know, just it was gonna be very the pandemic had a had an impact on lots of little companies, and so I was uh very grateful for the opportunity and uh came back and was VP of Store Layout and Design.

SPEAKER_00 41:02

So you had a uh a quite a long period of time from your first time at Walmart to your second time at Walmart. What did you see that had changed during that time?

SPEAKER_01 41:12

Well, 19 years to be exact, and I'd say long time. Yes. Probably too long. Yeah to be honest. And I would never forget Doug saying, I'm just warning you that the culture has changed. Yeah. Because he knew the the Walmart I grew up in, and he also knew the Walmart that had evolved. And you know, the best illustration I can uh have made when people ask me that question is if you um if you gain a pound of weight a year for 20 years, yeah, you don't notice it. Like I think if people are in the culture, it's very gradual. Right. It's like gaining weight's gradual. If you woke up one day and it gained 20 pounds, you'd like, great, what happened? And I think that was a bit similar for me to go back into the organization. It structurally was different. Um, still a company I love and admire, and it's incredibly successful, but culturally it was different. Yeah, um, people had changed. Um just the way they operate changed, you know, very much more a matrix organization. Lots of people seemingly responsible for you know what used to be the responsibility perhaps of one. Yeah. Um and different. Like I'm not saying it's better or worse, but I think it was much bigger, more complex. Yeah. And uh, you know, I think it was um not the same fit for me that it was, you know, when I was in there the first time. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

When you when you and I were there the first time, um, we were we were at we still had the Saturday morning meeting, yeah. And um that to me was a place where um you learned a lot about what everybody else was doing in the company. And you may not know somebody personally, but but you knew who they were, and uh and you knew what they did, and and there were everybody that would come to Saturday morning meeting would report on what they were doing. Um so it seemed like we were a very, very close knit. Now, you know, we we probably have Walmart's grown multiple, multiple times since then, and uh a lot of change has happened. So I understand where you can't bring everybody into a Saturday morning meeting anymore and that type of thing. But um it seems like it's a little bit different. But the good thing about Doug, um, and the good thing about Walmart is they understand change. And they and Sam Walton said it himself, change is necessary. So the fact that Doug was there during the original times that you were there, and he was there when you came back, that was great that he gave you the advice to be on the lookout for that. But uh personally, I think um at one time, and you and I talked about this earlier, the culture at Walmart, I like to say it was on life support at one time. And I think Doug did a great job of bringing it back to where it is. It's and we're in the middle of Shareholders Week this week, or Associates Week, as it's called now, was called Shareholders Week earlier, and you can feel the excitement in this town when people are driving around and they're all dressed up in their Walmart apparel, and I'm hearing cheers and uh all over town. So I think that's a testament to the fact that the culture's still alive. But then you I mean, this is an amazing career, John, and I was wondering if you could just sum this up by maybe giving us uh uh an insight on how important culture is, because you've worked for multiple different companies and you've worked where the culture was strong and maybe where the culture wasn't so strong. So, how important is culture to a company?

SPEAKER_01 44:47

Well, John, I think it's the single most important thing by far, right? I think that culture beats strategy every day. Like you can have a great strategy and a lousy culture and you won't win. You can have a great culture and an average strategy, and you'll you'll probably do pretty well because your great culture means people come to work, they like working, they're gonna give you their best. Right. Right? They see opportunities, you take care of them personally. They want, you know, I actually saw something this week that my assistant sent me, which was that people don't want pizza parties, they don't want, you know, happy hours, they want to be respected. They want opportunity, they want, you know, the ability to have flexibility, they want to be respected. Right. And those are all part of culture. So the first thing you better work on is culture. Yes. Uh, and it reminds me a little bit of uh, you know, we haven't talked about David Glass, but he was an incredibly, you know, maybe the most look, there's been tremendous CEOs in Walmart, but you know, in the 90s, there might not have been a better CEO in corporate America than David Glass. He might not have been the most, you know, outgoing guy, but he instilled a culture that I I still think about and reference today. And his his was about um clarity. Right. Right. And he and it took me a while to figure out what he was doing. I'll never forget going into those first Friday morning executive meetings where I had to report on the numbers. And you know, I was young, and and uh when David Glass at the end of the meeting you know took the microphone and people went quiet, and it's like, oh, the CEO's gonna you know give us his direction. And I, you know, fiercely wrote notes, and he said things like, you know, we should we should work on lowering our costs and we should you know take care of the customer and we should you know assort the stores right. It's like, well, those are fairly basic things. Okay, got it. Right. I wrote all the notes down. Next week I went back to that same meeting, and at the end of the meeting, he took the microphone again and he basically said the same thing. And I thought, well, that's weird. You know, he said that last week, and then he did that for three or four weeks, and I thought, this guy's he's going a little crazy. Like he keeps saying the same thing, and then it dawned on me. It's like that's how he's ensuring that the Walmart culture doesn't get lost, right? It reminds me of a book uh by Patrick Lancioni called The Advantage, and it's about, you know, and his four points are very simple. It's establish a great leadership team, instill culture, reinforce culture, and then reinstall culture again. Like it's that's how important it is. Or clarity rather than culture, but same, you know, they're synonymous, right? But it's clarity, clarity, clarity is a is a part of culture. I think when people know where they stand, they know where they're going, you communicate well, you share opportunities. So long-winded answer to your question about culture, it's the single by far most important thing. If you can create a great culture in an organization on a team, you're 90% of the way to winning because you'll get the best out of people. I mean, that was the brilliance of some of the early Walmart leaders and still some today, but I it it it fascinates me.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

And one of the reasons why I've been focusing on culture is because people say, hey, what what do we need to do to be like Walmart? And the number one thing that I always think about is do you have the culture? Are people taken care of? Are they excited about what they're doing? Do you have the culture? And I remember very specifically uh when Sam Walton passed away, and you and I were both there um at Walmart, and the community was wondering about is David Glass going to be able to come in and fill the shoes that Sam Walton did? Well, nobody could do that. But he was the kind of guy and the right guy to identify what needed to happen from there. And he did a fantastic job and really drove Walmart through some incredible growth periods when people were thinking, oh, what's over with, because there are cultural leaders no longer there. But he established it and carried it on. And I think Doug uh McMillan did the same thing. He he made sure that culture was front and center, and uh, and that's what people are are going to today is culture.

SPEAKER_01 48:49

Yeah, no doubt. Nurture it.

unknown 48:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:51

Keep it for sure.

SPEAKER_01 48:53

Very precious.

SPEAKER_00 48:54

Yeah. John Owen, great to see you. I really appreciate you uh coming on and joining me for this and sharing um you know your amazing, amazing career and still going.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

Thank you for the invite. It's been an absolute pleasure. Great to reconnect with you. I'm so glad we ran into each other a few weeks ago. Um, so many memories, and um, you know, congratulations on your your career and what you're doing now. You seem to be having fun and making a difference. And and uh so thanks again.

SPEAKER_00 49:23

All right, thank you.