Chris Lesner
Hey, Tom, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited for you to be here.

Tom Koos
Hey Chris, it's good to see you my friend.

Chris Lesner
I have personally benefited a lot from your friendship and your lessons over the years. So I'm just, I am so pumped for our audience to get to know you a little bit. How would you feel about sharing?

Tom Koos
Well, that's gracious for you to say. I wish I got to see you more, by the way, since you're still up there in the Northern cold land and I'm down here in Texas, but that's very nice of you to say.

Chris Lesner
You made a wise move. But share with our audience a little bit about your career path, because it is, it's quite the career when somebody looks at your resume.

Tom Koos
Thank you.

Tom Koos
Well, thank you. I guess there's two ways to look at my resume. One is this guy can't hold a job or he actually has learned some things over the years. And that's the part that I'll try to focus on and share with you and your audience. I'd understand my career path. You have to start in the state of Iowa. That's where my wife, Debbie of 35 years and I both grew up. And I was from a little town in Southwest Iowa called Harlan, Iowa. It's right where mile marker 40 intersects with interstate 80. And
Coming out of high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And that's a very true statement. I did know that I wanted to try to keep playing football and baseball in college. And the problem was I wasn't good enough to go to one of the big schools. So I went to this little school called Pella or Central College in Pella, Iowa. Division three school ended up graduating from there. And when I came out of school there, there were certain things that were off the table. So things like grad school were off the table. I was up to my eyeballs in debt.
Not to be political, but I didn't have anybody that was going to forgive my student debt. I was going to have to be the one to pay that off. So I had to go get a job and start working. So I graduated from college on a Saturday and showed up at Square D Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Monday morning at 730 and started work there as a cost accountant of all things. If you know me like you do, that's hard to believe I started as an accountant.
Um, because they kicked me out of that function in pretty short order, but I started with square D, which now is the Schneider group out of France. Great company. We were making circuit breakers, uh, that would go into panel board in a home or maybe a switch at a ballpark. And I learned a lot. Uh, it was a, it was a really good way to start my career. I went from there after about seven years to a company that's now called Newell Rubbermaid at the time, but was Newell. Uh, went up to a division called easy painter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
That's when I actually left the financial function and became a marketing guy, marketing product management. I was fortunate enough there. And I actually was at Square D as well. We'll talk about this a little bit, I'm sure. They have just excellent leaders and bosses along the way that, you know, kind of started to put me in places that I probably wasn't qualified or ready for, but they wanted to give me a shot and take a chance on me and see how this young guy would do. And so I branched out of finance, went into marketing.

Tom Koos
And actually got a chance to run a division from that launching pad, another division of Newell, which is called Burns & Maddock up in New York, outside of Buffalo, New York. I became the president there at the ripe old age of 32, had no idea what I was doing. In fact, my instructions from my boss at the time were don't screw it up. And thank God, I don't think I did too badly. But from there, again, with Newell, I stayed with them and went to another division called Goodie Products.
Any of the women watching will probably know those products as it was mostly scrunchies and pony tailors and hair brushes. And it was a really fun business. Nothing like I've ever been in before, but really fun. I was there for another year and then made a career shift. I went to Black and Decker Corporation, which is now part of Stanley Black and Decker at the time was just Black and Decker. And I ended up running their global Black and Decker business. I was at.
My title was like group president or something that sounded fancy. But I ran everything around the world that had a Black & Decker brand on it. First time I really got a chance to travel the world, learned a lot about other cultures. We had big businesses in Europe and in Australia and South America. We sourced almost everything from, actually shifted into Mexico and then Asia at the time. Great learnings from those seven or so years with Black & Decker, actually just a little bit north of seven. And then I kind of made a shift.
I ended up then jumping out of what was the public world. So the Black Decker was a publicly traded company in the New York Stock Exchange. And I moved into the private equity space where I became the CEO at Jacuzzi Brands, Hot Tubbs and Whirlpool Bazz, is what most everybody would know of Jacuzzi. That's kind of the Kleenex of a hot tub now, if you will. But that was my first CEO job, my first private equity role. I followed a gentleman over there that had been a longtime mentor by the name of George Sherman, rest his soul.
He had run Black and Decker one time and then a company now that's almost $25 billion, Danaher Corporation. He was kind of the creator of Danaher. So I went to really work for George. It so happened that I was running Jacuzzi. Brilliant career move, Chris. This was in 2007. And I went to an industry completely dominated by home building and residential construction.

Tom Koos
Uh, we'll come back to that, but that was a character building time is the crisis of 08, 09, 10 hit me pretty hard, uh, and taught me a lot of lessons. Um, from there I went, um, was there about six years? That's kind of the common theme every six or seven years. I tend to get an itch and I move on. Um, my wife's thankful that I go get a new job and I know I stayed with her. So it's been fun. We joke about it, but I went from there to Weber grill. Um,
You're there in Chicago, Weber Grill is a Palatine Illinois based company. I went to work for a family that had founded and run that company. I was the first non -family CEO. There was also an ownership stake by a private equity firm so that you'll see a common theme here. And was there for about five years and then joined the company I'm currently with, which is Prime Source Brands. Mostly known with a couple of our brand names.
in fashion, Top Knobs, for those of you that have read on a bathroom or kitchen, you'll know Top Knobs or Atlas Hardware. We own Watermark Brass out of Brooklyn, very fancy bath and kitchen hardware, all the way down to distributing nails and screws. We're the largest contract manufacturer of nails and screws in the world. Distribute mostly here in the US, which is the first time for a long time that I haven't had a global business during the pandemic. That was a huge blessing as I could kind of stay stateside. So every six or seven years I've
I've kind of bounced. I've been a bit of a generalist, grew up as a finance guy, then kind of found my niche in product management. You'll notice a lot of those brands are kind of world -class brands with great products. I've always gravitated towards that and moved around a lot. We've lived in 10 states, East coast to West coast, North to South. Currently live in Dallas. We loved them all. Before you ask, our favorite was Southern California.
I was just back out there last weekend. My youngest son actually went to USC. He gravitated back out there. So we have a reason to go there. But I've been blessed, Chris. I've had great mentors, great leaders, my entire career. I've been fortunate to have wonderful people around me. Not everything has been easy and it certainly hasn't always been what you would call successful from a metrics perspective because you go through tough times and economic ups and downs. But I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Chris Lesner
I mean, it's interesting that you would say it wasn't easy because obviously crazy career path that if somebody looked at it on paper, it would not be easy. But it seems like from early on, you kind of just bumped into great leaders and probably some not so great leaders and also just got given some amazing opportunities. As you think through it, all of the brands that you've worked with are major nationally and internationally known brands. Right. And how do you.
How do you think coming into those roles, you were prepared, were you not prepared? Was it just a figure it out mentality?

Tom Koos
Yeah, I mean, that's insightful. You're not prepared. I'll start with that. There's no way. So my first really big brand was Black and Decker. And we also owned the DeWalt brand. But Black and Decker was the name of the company. It had roots back to 1918, if I remember right. And Al Decker Jr., the son of the founder, was still in the office on a daily basis. He wasn't active in the company anymore, but he had an office at the
the corporate headquarters, if you will, and he would come into the office, he'd be in the cafeteria, and he kind of ran his family office out of there. But I'll never forget the day I was named the group president for the Black and Decker brand. I called up to Mr. Decker's office and said, hey, can I come talk to you sometime this week if you have some time? Which was kind of funny because he didn't have anything to do. So he said, sure, Tom, come on, see me, let's have lunch. And boy, by the way, what a...
fantastic 90 minutes that was. We could hardly talk because whenever he was in the company cafeteria, everybody wanted to come say hi to him. He always had wisdom to share and was just a great guy. But specifically I said to him, I said, is there any one piece of advice you would give me? If you could just give me one, what would it be? And he paused and I remember he sat down his knife and fork and he said, yeah, there is. Just don't forget that's my daddy's name on that box. Which...
You kind of go, whoa, wait a second. Yeah, I didn't create this brand, but I'm now the steward of a brand that's almost 100 years old and is actually somebody's father's name on that box. And obviously it was his name. So I think from there on, it was a great lesson to understand that when you get a run or be a part of some of these world -class brands, you weren't the one that created them. Start there. Like have a little humility around.
It's more your job to steward and shepherd this thing into the next generation or make it even better than it's ever been. And so I would tell that to anybody that ever went into a job with a world -class brand is just remember you didn't create it. It's very unlikely anyway that you created it. And if you did, good for you. When you hand it off to somebody, remind them they didn't, right? And that their job is to steward and shepherd it. Now, how do you get that next big brand job? They kind of start to then springboard.

Tom Koos
So why was I qualified to maybe run Chacuzzi? One of the things was I'd run, you know, Black and Decker and I had been exposed to DeWalt and Black and Decker. Then Weber, obviously I became a great candidate because now I've got several brands under my belt and actually knew the family and had grown up in the Midwest, as I said, back in Iowa. So that then starts to build on itself and it kind of becomes part of your DNA. But I will tell you, you need a great team of people.
to continue to run a world -class brand. There's probably tens of thousands of them that have gone by the wayside because they couldn't evolve and they weren't managed well. But at the same time, it's fun because when you tell people what you do, you tell somebody you were the CEO of Weber, you don't have to go much farther. They start telling you a story about a grill that they owned or how they liked to barbecue.

Chris Lesner (11:37.130)
You know, it's so interesting because you've been surrounded by so many teams, right? And all kinds of teams. I've been around a bunch of people that you've led before in previous companies, especially. And everyone speaks so highly of you. That's one of the common themes that I hear is just people loved working with you, for you and with you. And I'm curious, how did you come up with a leadership style or do you even have a leadership style? When you think of leadership, how do you...
How do you think of or how do you act out what you've learned?

Tom Koos
Yeah, you know that I kind of like to make light of things so I'll start with you know, I paid them all off I paid them a lot of money. So they say nice things No, that's very kind of you to say and it's it's it's obviously great to hear that people Learned from your leadership, but I look I don't know if I have a formula what I can tell you is I worked for a lot of great leaders and watched and learned and have always been somebody who Said been kind of a lifetime learner
I still feel like if you ask me what's the greatest thing that ever happened in my career, I'll tell you, I hope that I haven't seen it yet. I hope it happens in my next week or month or years ahead. When you go to, why might those people gravitate to me or to a leadership style like that? We'll probably talk about the term servant leadership, which I think gets misused a lot, but I think it's pretty basic.
I had people that poured into me and then found true joy in seeing me succeed. And I define that as if you really want to know if you're leading well, it's when you actually are happier for your people when they succeed than they are. Because they won't maybe realize yet just how good of a thing they did or how good they've become at something and you're watching it happen and you find pure joy in it.
I mean, really truly happy for how well they've done. And I think I was taught that and I think I do that, at least I try to do that most of the time. And when people, you know, when that's what your leader or your boss is trying, at least trying to be like, because we're all flawed, so we don't do it all the time. But when they know that you're trying to do that, that you are really vested in them,
You know, I tend to breed pretty good relationships and pretty good boss mentor longevity, if you will.

Chris Lesner
So if that comes naturally for you, it probably doesn't come naturally for a lot of other leaders. I think a lot of leaders in general are fairly self -serving or self -focused, potentially off the bat. How do you instill that in teams you work with so that they're leading people with that servant leadership mentality too?

Tom Koos
Yeah, you know, I actually paused because I don't, I don't think it's that hard to figure out. And I'll tell you why is, you know, I mentioned that I went to college where I did, because I wanted to continue playing, playing ball. My father was a coach. My mom and dad were both teachers when I was a kid and dad was a coach. And yeah, so I'll make a statement that's going to sound funny. I wasn't that good. I wasn't that good.
I ended up playing in a couple of state championships. I played in a national championship in college. I figured out really early that if everybody around you was better than you, man, you look a lot better. You just look a lot better. And so I kind of carried that into my career. And then when I had bosses that did the same thing, I'm like, oh, this isn't that hard to figure out. You just surround yourself with people that are actually better than you. And all of a sudden you look good. You look good. And I'll give you an example. I worked for a gentleman.
Bill Frieder, Bill's passed away now, rest his soul as well. He was the president of Easy Painter. When I went to my first job at Newell, he was the president of this business. And his staff, I was the, I guess the CFO or the chief finance guy. It wasn't actually a CFO because I was in a division, so -called VP of Finance. And the five of us used to get so frustrated with him because we didn't think he worked very hard.
We didn't think he was really on top of the business. He was really good with customers, but other than that, we didn't think he really knew that much. By the way, you're going to be good at really one thing, be really good at customer stuff. That's a good thing to be really good at. But we got frustrated with him. We talk about it all the time. Less than 10 years after all of us had left that business, we were running significant businesses.
Four of the five of us were CEOs. Three of the five were CEOs of over $1 billion businesses. And you look back and go, he must not have been that stupid, right? He had this team of people, by the way, that business was only like $120 million business. And he had five people on his team that all went on to pretty good leadership jobs. And so, I think as you can start to...

Tom Koos (16:40.782)
train leaders that what their real legacy is, is their coaching tree. It's their coaching tree. Like, are you actually producing better leaders? That'll tell you if you're a good leader. If you're just leading a great company, a lot of people can do that, I think. They can almost do it single -handedly. Some people are that talented. They can just run a business. I'm not that talented. And I figured that out early in my life. And so I figured out if I can make my best skillset to recruit talented people and then kind of...
figure out how to get them to be better at their jobs, I'd be pretty good at it. And I don't think that's that hard to figure out. I think it's hard to do sometimes. You fail sometimes, but people kind of want to work in that environment, right?

Chris Lesner
What was it like trying to lead through, let's say the 08, 09 period when you were just coming into Jacuzzi to lead that and economic craziness.

Tom Koos
Yeah, it was hard. It was hard. It was my first, first time I'd been a CEO. Um, you know, I think we all have to learn at some point in time that you're probably not as good as you think you are. So even as I'm probably sounding like I'm, I'm giving credit to others and stuff, don't, don't get me wrong. I was pretty convinced. I was pretty good. Right. Um, and a nice career path going. I'm a CEO. I can't remember exactly how old I was. I think I was 40, 42, 43.
The company was about a billion dollars in sales. So I'm thinking, hey, I kind of got this stuff figured out. Yeah, no. You can't fight the economy. Sometimes right now they're saying you can't fight the Fed, right? Well, it's kind of the same thing. You can't fight an economy that just is not going to turn. I had actually, so I get there in 07, things hadn't proverbially hit the fan yet.
That really didn't happen until Lehman went bankrupt in like late 08. The signs were there, but it didn't really go bad until late 08. So I had actually recruited a bunch of people to come to our company. A handful had followed me there from prior places that I'd worked. And all of a sudden we're faced with a rough situation. We lost 50 % of our volume, or sorry, 25 % of our volume in...
2008, we lost another 25 % on top of that. So compounded more than 50 in two years. And by the way, I don't think we lost market share. It was hard to tell. There was just nobody building houses and they sure as heck weren't going to replace a bathtub or put in a new hot tub. So here I am, my first really big job, bunch of people that I convinced to come out here and we're a mess. We're a hot mess. We're owned by Private Equity. We're leveraged, for those of you that understand Private Equity and leverage, we started at six and a half. We got as high as 11 and a half.
Um, we were, we were breathing very thin oxygen on one day in late 2008. We laid off one third of our white collar workforce, one third. It was almost like count off, um, by threes. And if you're number two, you got to go home. We weren't like, we weren't like force ranking in the old Jack Welch days or, or any of that. We were cutting really good people. We were one out of three. Um, you learn a lot, right? You learn a lot. You learn a lot about yourself. Um,

Tom Koos
You learn a lot about your team and what I would tell you, it's still one of the favorite teams I ever had because they stuck with each other and they stuck by each other and they were kind of fire baptized, if you know what I mean. They just, they learned the hard way. But, but what really went on through that period is, um, look, your team needs to know that they're going to be okay. They need to know that there's a vision, there's a way out and that we're going to be okay. And I remember.
to this day, if you called my CFO at the time, who actually followed me from Jacuzzi to Weber for that period of time, we had dinner the other night and he said, you know, I look back on 08, 09 and he goes, how come you never told us how bad it was?
And I'm like, well, I kind of thought I did. And he goes, no, you didn't. You know, you would maybe tell us where we were at and why we had to do certain things. And then you immediately go to how we were going to find our way out of this thing. And so I think that's a skillset that most leaders have is they're better when times are bad, to be honest. They're better when times are bad. You learn more from your losses than you do your wins, as they used to say in, in athletic world.
Most people that are really good at it hate to lose, that's true, but you learn more. You learn number one, you don't like that at all. You don't like that feeling. And so what you do is you start to just teach teams how to put their heads down and go to work when they have to go to work. And you're teaching them when times are good, that's the time to start to shake things up. We've got a business right now that's in pretty good shape. And I like to do what I call create a crisis. You know, I'll sometimes just create one and restructure something or start a new business.
Um, cause times aren't always going to be this good. And so you got to do it when they're not so good. Cause it's a lot easier to do things then when, when, when times are good than when you got your back to the wall. But, um, whenever I start to talk a long time and I don't answer that the real answer is I probably don't know. I probably don't know. Um, I think, I think that part of it is, is being able to, um, to stare at a tough situation and find your way out.

Chris Lesner
One of the things that we talked about when we were together a couple weeks ago was speed. You know, and you just talked a little bit about some new stuff you're doing at PrimeSource. Talk about how you view just the reality of work and getting stuff done and why speed is important.

Tom Koos
Yeah, thanks for asking that. I didn't remember that we talked about that, but it's one of my kind of core tenets on how you can make a company better. And so I'll start with kind of the lighter side of it. Like, if we're going to fail or we're going to screw this up, let's do it really fast so we can move on to something else. Okay. Cause it's no fun to fail. But I kind of go, again, go back to my athletic days and my dad being a coach, I can remember him kind of, he had all these, these isms, right? That's what coaches do.
And he had one that he, you know, one day I remember he's sitting there and I'm, I don't know how old I was. I'm probably like a freshman or sophomore in high school. And he says, Hey Tommy, you know how you beat, um, size? Cause we were playing this team that was big and he goes, now you beat size. And I'm like, ah, no, I don't dad, but you're going to tell me. And he goes, quickness and speed, quickness and speed. I said, okay, that makes sense. And I didn't really know where he was going. He said, you know how you beat quickness? No, no, I'm still not.
maybe going, you know, catching what you're throwing, Dad. He said, speed. He was naive, he beat speed.
I'm like, you were out of the three, dad, I don't know. He said, more speed, more speed. The only way to beat speed is more speed. And it's funny, you know, we're in playoff season right now in the NBA. And when you listen to coaches talk, the one thing that truly scares them is speed. Cause you can't beat it. There's no way to beat it. You have to be faster. And you can say we can beat size of speed. Well, not if I'm already at, or speed with size, not if I'm in front of you, you're never going to catch me. Right? So, um,
I take that same kind of concept that I learned as a kid into business and I really do feel like if you can teach an organization how to learn faster, which means how to fail faster, and how to just move and not be scared of the failure, the learnings, and then go and fix it fast and go faster. Number one, people love that because what you have to do to go faster is you have to let it go.

Tom Koos
You have to enable people to do things. You can't let decision making go up through a body or up through a staff or up through a single person for sure. You can't move fast. So by definition, you're pushing decision making down and you better have a structure by which they can make decisions fast. And then if you, as they make them, you've got to teach an organization, you know, it sounds weird, but reward failure every now and then. Like reward a really good shot at something that didn't work and then go in and
I start to use all these stupid athletic parallels, but watch film. Watch film. Because if you ever, and those out there right now smiling for those of you that were or are athletes, here's a good one. If you play golf, go watch your golf film on video. It won't look anything like you think it does. You have to actually watch film and in business, that is, let's go back in and maybe go on with some information or ...
or tear the bandaid off if you will, or why this failed and then fix it really fast and then let's go do it again. Don't be scared by that. And so I think that's probably the toughest part of that is to get like entry level managers or even mid -level managers to reward their people for failing for the right reasons. That's really hard. That's really hard because normally you don't get promoted because you failed at something, right? My point is if you fail,
for the right reasons and you learn fast and you move on, you're gonna get promoted because pretty soon you're gonna be moving so much quicker than anybody else that you'll succeed. And in today's world, I saw a graph, this happened after you and I had lunch, I saw a graph the other day about...
AI and machine learning. And it was actually the speed of one of these chips that Nvidia is producing today versus Moore's law. Remember Moore's law that the pace of computing will double every X number of years. These new chips are like up here and Moore's law says we should be down here. And I'm like, there it is. There it is. You just got to learn to move faster. Whether it's machine, machines or people, you got to learn to move faster. And if you're faster, you probably win over time. You probably win. Not always.

Tom Koos
But you probably win.

Chris Lesner
I mean, people like being on winning teams, obviously, and I think that's one of the reasons people have loved working with you, is because it tends to be that your teams win. Thinking about what you were doing at Weber, talk about that experience, just why did you decide on Weber? What was it like to be there? How did you lead it? I think everyone who, everyone in the world knows Weber, it feels like.

Tom Koos
Yeah, you're probably right. Certainly everyone in Chicagoland knows Weber, right? Restaurants downtown and down in, or up in Wheeling and down in, I think it's on the 88 going west of town. But anyway, so I got to know a man by the name of Jim Stephen. Jim was the third child out of 12 of George Stephen. George Stephen, it's Weber Stephen.
George founded what you know as a charcoal grill. He created it and commercialized it and created the company that today is Weber. He was working for a company called Weber Manufacturing, which made buoys that were out in Lake Michigan. And he literally cut a buoy in half and you can see a buoy round and made his first charcoal grill. That's the urban legend. I'm going to stay with the story, but the company became Weber Steven because he bought out the manufacturing company and started making grills.
So I come into a situation where 12 second generation kids, I'm the first person to lead the company not named Steven. That's a starting point of a little different tact that you have to take at leadership, right? There's now, when I talked about the brand and Mr. Decker telling me about his dad's name on the box, well, this is their name on the company and it's their company. This is not a publicly traded company. This is private. And so I went into that with a little different...
Um, I hope willingness to, to listen and to understand the culture that made that happen, knowing that they probably weren't going to want to move as fast as I wanted to move back to my core tenant. And it was, it just didn't get created yesterday. This has been me most of my career. I like to move fast and I don't mind making mistakes. Well, I had to be a little more careful now, right? Uh, the family wasn't as willing to do that. And, um, over time.
We did, we made a ton of, well, we had fun. Gosh. We grew the company. We launched a bunch of new products. At one time we were the reigning vendor of the year at our three largest customers, which was Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace Hardware. Just a ton of fun. We built a new team of super talented people. And it was just, it was good. I mean, we had a global business. Most Europeans think it's a European brand. In Germany, they call it Viva.

Tom Koos
They think it's a German company. We had a big business in Australia. It was a ton of fun. Now, full transparency, I essentially got let go at Weber by five years in after a record year. I do want to say that, but the board, the family, the private equity firm decided that I'd worn out my welcome hat. I say that and I actually like to say it. I don't know if you knew I was going to say that on.
podcast, but look, I think it's the best thing ever happened to me because it's essentially getting fired makes you stop and think about a lot, right? And while I think my team was winning, I do think we were winning there. That's certainly not when you put in the win column, right? You don't set out to get fired. So it helped me build a new sense of, hey, let's revisit some things. My faith got tested, my leadership style got tested. My humility certainly improved.
You become a lot more humble, or at least you should, the day after. But it was fun. It was a great company. I look back on it with almost five years of ... I'm still super honored to have been chosen to run that company. I'm super proud of what we did during those five years. And I'm very thankful and grateful for the learning that I got throughout the entire process, including the end of the process, to be quite honest.

Chris Lesner
You know, when you talk about humility, I'm curious how much of a difference humility makes as it relates to servant leadership. And one thing that it made me think of was my first time meeting you even. And I'll just quickly share this. And I remember we were both invited to speak at this event in Chicagoland. And...

Tom Koos
I didn't do anything stupid, did I?

Chris Lesner
And we just happened to sit next to each other just by happenstance. And and you had asked, oh, what do you do? And I just said marketing, I wasn't going to get into everything I do. And I said, what do you do? And you just said sales and you weren't going to get into everything you did. And then I happened to get up and give my presentation and get back. And you're like, wow, I had no idea how much you knew about marketing. And I'm like, oh, thanks. And just kind of let it go. And right afterwards, they announce you and say, here's the CEO of Weber.
I'm like, oh my gosh, this guy just told me he just does sales for a living and and I was immediately impressed by just the humility of hey It didn't matter the title or who you were you were just curious about somebody else So how much do you think that that type of mentality has an effect on servant leadership? And how do you teach people humility?

Tom Koos
Hey, thanks for sharing that story. I don't typically think of humility as an adjective that people would describe me with to tell you the truth. Because I think you've got to be a little bit bold as a leader, right? And that comes with a bit of an attitude and a bit of an ego. So thanks for saying that. But I first want to tell the listening audience that Chris is really good at marketing, by the way. Really good.
If you want to figure out a digital strategy called Chris, but anyway, you're pretty good at what you do too. So that humility goes around. But look, I think if I was to tell you what I try to do, okay, I'll do that. Cause I think some people that might be listening to this and know me, be like, Oh my God, that guy, you know, he's not helpful. What I try to do is going back to that. If you find joy in other people succeeding, you're kind of starting with the basis that.
You probably had something to do with that. And your desire or your lack of need to take credit for that is where it starts. Is where it starts. Now, sometimes in basic kind of business vernacular, it'll be like, make somebody think it was their idea. That's too simple. That's too simple, right? Because you're still kind of thinking you're behind it. You're taking credit for it. It's when you see somebody that's succeeding and...
You took maybe a small part in it, maybe a big part, but you don't care. You don't care. You just love the success. And so, look, I've seen a lot of people do that over the years. And I hope that someday that's what people say about me. I'm still working hard at it, but that's it. Like I've got a young man leading one of my, I guess I say young. I'm probably old now, but he was really young when I first hired him. He was 22 and now he's 50.
He's run one of my businesses here. Chris, he is clearly better than I am at this gig. I mean, it's not even close. And it's just so much fun when every now and then he'll actually come ask me my opinion on something and I'm like, oh wow, he still wants to hear something from the old guy. And I think then you kind of start to develop this partnership where...

Tom Koos
Yeah, servant leadership is, you know, you're on the bottom of the pyramid, all those kinds of things. But what it really is, is when, when you're serving each other, right? When you realize that real leadership comes from making each other better. And one of you has to play the role of the leader by definition on an org chart. It's not very often that you, you know, you sit this way. And so it starts that way, but then when you're helping people and then they come back and all of a sudden they're making you better. Cause when I know he's that good.
And I have to actually be the CEO on any given day. I mean, that's kind of like, I get better, get my A game on, right? Cause people are expecting more of me now with him being quote unquote in the organization. So, um, look, you know, I, I just start with your coaches, your coaching tree. I'll go back to your coaching tree. Um, if you can look around whenever your life starts to come near its end and, and see people that truly went farther than you and were better than you.
and you had a small part in it, you probably were pretty decent at it, right? You're probably pretty decent at it.

Chris Lesner
So you shared a little bit about that person. You shared a little bit about the transition after Webber. Now you're at Prime Source. What's Prime Source doing and what are you focused on over the next five, 10 years?

Tom Koos
Yeah, so everybody's not going to know our brand name, right? We're an amalgamation of companies and brands and products. The best way to think about it is we contract manufacture a bunch of stuff under our own brands and we sell it through everybody from the Home Depot to Bobby's Lumberyard. Screws and nails, I mentioned some of the products earlier. But what attracted me to this company and what I still have on my hands is a company that moves too slow. We move too slow.
And we've got this massive footprint around the United States that can be, can be optimized and can be monetized by in so many ways. And we just kind of learn to move faster. And so we've, we've constantly been on a journey of different structures and different people in leadership roles that can learn and help us move faster and get better. We're doing okay at it. I think we're starting to get a few breakthroughs. We could use a little tailwind.
from the Fed actually to get this housing market cranked up a little bit. That would certainly help. But, you know, it's, some people say, you know, you go into a new business or even the business you have that, like I had a boss by the way, that was really good at what he did. But he used to say it was about, it was about the people, the process and the strategy, right? And I used to argue, no, it's about the people, the people and the people. Because if you've got really good people, you could have lousy processes, by the way. It's better to have good processes.
But it's better to have good people before good processes. You can have a world beater of a strategy. And if your people can't execute it, you don't understand any good, you see where I'm going. Now, you might have the best people in the world. And if you have a really lousy strategy, that's probably not great, but those people will figure that out and they'll change it and they'll shift and they'll move and off you go. So what's been fun about this job is it's given me a chance to kind of almost rebuild.
an entire team as time went by. And by the way, I don't mean rebuild by different people. There's about half the people on, call it my top 30, if you will, my senior leadership team of this company. Over half those people would be people that were here when I got here, but most of them are in different roles. Most of them are different roles. They're in a role that they're better suited for today, or maybe a bigger role than they were in then. And the other half are people.

Tom Koos
from the outside world, some that worked for me before, some that we hired called Turkey. And it's a pretty good collection of people right now that I'm really proud of. So it's been fun.

Chris Lesner
Wow. As you think through other people building teams, how do you surround yourself with those good people? If it's people, people, people, I feel like it's so hard. People talk about to find good people.

Tom Koos
Yeah. Look, I'd always take... So there's a lot of things, and I got to be thoughtful about how I say this, Chris, but team dynamics matter, right? A guy that we both know and have read a lot, Pat Lindsay only writes a ton about it, right? The dysfunction of teams and how to create good teams. And look, I probably, well, I don't write books for a reason, probably nobody read them, but I always want talent. I just want talent.
I'll always take talent and I'll try to form a team with that talent. Sometimes really talented people aren't very good team players and you got to change them out and you got to move on. But I think what starts to happen is when you get a lot of really talented people that also know how to be a servant occasionally, in other words, how to follow, not just lead all the time, pretty soon you find them leading each other and then pretty soon they're behaving as a group and a group's always better than singles, right? We know that all there's.
tons of studies and leadership books written about that. But that's what I think is happening is if you can provide the structure to do a lot of the things we've talked about to go with speed, to not worry about failing, to help each other out, to pick each other up. Over time, really good people like that. They've been looking for it their whole career, right? They may have been individual contributors or they had a bad boss.
They look for it. So once you start to get it, it builds on itself. It breeds in its own way. And I think I've seen that happen. I've seen it, you know, we've had to get rid of people. Don't get me wrong. I think you have to be just as good at firing people as you are hiring people. Because if you wait too long, you can have a cancerous side to a team. But I don't know if there's any magic. Just find talent and make sure they know how to follow occasionally. Not just lead all the time, but follow.
And they'll end up being pretty good. You know, I think the other thing I might point out is one of the things that I believe is misunderstood with teams. And I tell my team this a lot is I love conflict, man. I love it. I love it. Love it. Love it. I love, love arguments. I love fights. You know, my oldest daughter is a lawyer. I think I create a little debater. Um, she wins all the time, by the way. But I think that's under, that's underappreciated in a team environment is sometimes a really good team is.

Tom Koos
two really good teammates fighting because one feels the other may not be carrying their load, right? May not be playing as well as they could. May not be pushing as hard as they could. And so I think that tension, that conflict, that every day when you get out of bed, you better be a little nervous that you're gonna have to perform to be a good teammate is important. And that's the opposite of a team that functions friendly and sings kumbaya.
I've actually seen a really, a couple of really, really good cultures from a, a caring for each other and a being vested in each other that couldn't perform, couldn't perform because they didn't have any talent. Um, and it turned out just a bunch of really good people that liked each other and cared for each other, but couldn't do anything. Um, that's not great, right? That's not great. So anyway, I'm probably getting off a tangent here, but, um, talent usually wins if it's coached well.
And so that's your job as the coach to get the talent and then coach it and create it and mentor it and be a servant and watch it run.

Chris Lesner
That's awesome. When you think through now the rest of your career, let's say you're in the second half of your career maybe, how would you think about your legacy of leadership? How do you want people to think of you?

Tom Koos
I'm getting old. I'm not that old. Come on. So I got a few innings left. I don't know how to answer that because it starts to sound really self -serving. I'll tell you what I don't want people to say. I don't want people to say, that's the best leader I ever worked for. That is not what I want. What I'd like to hear them say maybe at my funeral is,
You know, he made me into a better leader. He, you know, he helped me become the leader that I am. But I fundamentally hope every one of those people feels like they're a better leader than I am. Right. That that's probably how I would, would love to, to find that epitaph written is that I got a bunch of people out there that liked working for me and give me a little credit and making them who they are, but really think they're better at it than I was. Um, that'd be awesome. That'd be awesome.

Chris Lesner
That's good. All right, I've got 10 rapid fire questions I want to throw at you.

Tom Koos
Oh boy, here it goes. Here it goes.

Chris Lesner
Just say the first thing that comes to your mind with any of these.

Tom Koos
Ah, okay.

Chris Lesner
Who's the first person you think of when I say servant leadership?

Tom Koos
George Sherman.

Chris Lesner
Five words that most describe you.

Tom Koos
Impatient, aggressive.
Hates to lose. That's three words. Can't count them as three.

Tom Koos
I, I, I, the, the, you know, some of them aren't that positive. All the negative ones I've been trying to work on are coming to mind, but probably a little too egocentric at times back to that one. Um, but I think in the end of the day, um, uh, I'm very outgoing. I'm very outgoing.

Chris Lesner
All right, favorite author or book?

Tom Koos
Oh, favorite author. I've got a thousand of them, but I'm going to go. So I'll go one at one of each. Um, I'll go with, uh, so, uh, you and I are both men of faith. I'll go with God because the Bible is still the best book in the world. Um, so I'll go there, but that's probably not what you were looking for. Um, I really love Malcolm Gladwell. I actually just picked up his book outliers again. It's, it kind of makes my brain explode every time I read one of his books. So I like him a lot. Um,
And I like several Christian authors. I love a lot of stuff Bill Hybels wrote back, you know, I kind of came from that coaching tree a little bit on leadership back in the day. Love Bill. I love reading C .S. Lewis. You know, I got, again, I could go on. I got dozens of favorite authors.

Chris Lesner
Love it. Favorite movie.

Tom Koos
Remember the Titans. It's got so many lessons. Yeah, don't get me going. If you ask my kids, they would all say, oh my gosh, he wants to watch Remember the Titans.

Chris Lesner
favorite food.

Chris Lesner
favorite food.

Tom Koos
Ah, I grew up in Iowa. I've got to go with steak.

Chris Lesner
Good. Favorite thing to do in your free time.

Tom Koos
hang out with my wife, play golf with my wife. She's my golf buddy.

Chris Lesner
surprising fact about you.

Tom Koos
I played the trumpet in high school.

Chris Lesner
Wow, and you stopped?

Tom Koos
That's, yeah, I was pretty decent at it by the way. And that thing went under my bed when I went to college and I never touched it again and it makes me sad. I wish I had learned to play the piano or something because I think music is a huge part of our lives. And I miss it. I miss it, but you can't just pick up a trumpet and start playing it again. You'd have to work at it.

Chris Lesner
Favorite place you've been.

Tom Koos
Hmm. Well, home is always home. So you can't count that. I love, I'm going to give you two. Okay. I love Colorado. I love Colorado. I love the, the majesty of the mountains and I feel closer to God. And I just, I just love the mountains. It quiets. I think my blood pressure goes down and it quiets me. And so it lets me think. I love the mountains. My favorite place, if I was going to say a city, Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
I used to go there five, six times a year. People are probably like, oh, Hong Kong, the air is dirty. It's the energy, just the energy. I can go to Shanghai, close second. I've not been to Mumbai yet, but I'm sure I would love that. I love energy and those cities feed off of the energy of the people.

Chris Lesner
or somewhere you want to visit that you have not been.

Tom Koos
Mumbai. Yeah, I want to visit India. I want to go to Dubai. I've actually passed on Dubai probably a dozen times. Someday I want to see Dubai. Those are probably two big ones.

Chris Lesner
All right, last rapid fire question. What's the best advice you've ever gotten?

Tom Koos
I always leave a conversation, a relationship, a meeting, a room with more energy in it than when you got there.

Chris Lesner
You're good at that.

Tom Koos
Fill the air with energy, positive energy obviously, not negative energy, but that was great advice. I was given that when I was really young. And you think about it, people, whether times are good or times are bad, man, if a leader can come in and fill a conversation, fill a meeting room, fill an offsite with energy, I'm still trying to build that skill. I'm not sure I always do that, but that's the best advice I've ever been given.

Chris Lesner
Well, Tom, thanks so much for taking the time. I know people are going to love hearing a little bit of your background, your story, and they're probably going to read a lot about you. And at some point, you really should write a book because you've got some crazy stories and a lot that you didn't share today even.

Tom Koos
It'd be about a chapter long and no publisher would take it, but thank you. You're very gracious. Thanks for having me on. I hope somebody can find a little bit out of this and just become a little better leader.

Chris Lesner
100%. We'll talk soon.

Tom Koos
All right, thanks Chris, see ya.