Culture That Survives the Exit: How Jay Steinfeld Beat the Odds

Jay Steinfeld is the Founder and former CEO of Blinds.com, the world’s largest online retailer of window coverings, which was acquired by The Home Depot in 2014. Under his leadership, Blinds.com grew from a bootstrapped startup in his home to a billion-dollar enterprise, earning a reputation for innovation in e-commerce and technology-driven growth. Jay is also a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Lead from the Core: The 4 Principles for Profit and Prosperity and the Entrepreneur in Residence at Rice University’s Graduate School of Business, where he shares business insights.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:27] Why Jay Steinfeld started his business after being fired
[6:37] How losing his wife and mother shaped Jay’s perspective on success
[10:58] Jay talks about making decisions with incomplete information
[18:52] The Four E’s culture at Blinds.com: evolve, experiment, express, enjoy
[22:18] How hiring for curiosity and change helped the Blinds.com culture survive an acquisition
[27:38] Practical ways Jay showed employees they were valued
[36:14] Balancing risk aversion with consistent experimentation
[46:50] How rigid corporate plans can discourage innovation and growth
[51:44] The partnership strategy that helped Blinds.com attract The Home Depot
[58:31] Why Jay stayed with The Home Depot years after selling Blinds.com
[1:08:35] Jay talks about singing in a barbershop quartet with the same group for over 50 years

In this episode…

Building a company is challenging, but building one that thrives without losing its soul is even harder. Leaders may talk about culture, growth, and decision-making, yet few manage to scale while keeping people engaged and energized. How can you create a business that grows sustainably, empowers employees, and thrives even after major transitions?

According to entrepreneur and leadership expert Jay Steinfeld, the answer lies in focusing on people and constant improvement. He emphasizes creating an environment where teams evolve continuously, experiment without fear of failure, and feel empowered to express ideas openly. Leaders should hire people who embrace change, reward contribution without artificial limits, and encourage constant reflection on daily improvements. By making thoughtful decisions despite incomplete information and designing systems that prioritize learning and growth, organizations can build enduring cultures.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Jay Steinfeld, Founder and former CEO of Blinds.com, about building a culture-driven company that scales effectively. Jay explains how personal challenges shaped his entrepreneurial mindset, the Four E’s framework for company culture, and the partnership strategy that helped position his company for acquisition.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“I just did the basic, fundamental things that you needed to do to get a little bit better every day.”
“My definition of success through all of this is just being in the process of getting a little bit better.”
“I believe that you need to experiment without fear, because that's the only way you get to the truth.”
“What matters is what you do. And just do the things that you say you're going to do.”
“If you have to train customers how to use your product or service, you've got a pretty complicated product or service.”

Action Steps

Encourage continuous improvement within your team: Ask after every project or meeting what worked well and what could improve next time. This builds a habit of reflection and helps individuals and teams get slightly better every day.
Create a culture where experimentation is safe: Encourage employees to test ideas without fear of punishment if they fail. This fosters innovation and allows organizations to discover better processes, strategies, and solutions.
Hire people who embrace change and growth: Look for candidates who are curious, adaptable, and willing to speak up with ideas. Teams built with these traits are more likely to evolve, collaborate, and contribute to long-term success.
Make thoughtful decisions even with imperfect information: Waiting for perfect data can slow progress and cause missed opportunities. Leaders who make informed but timely decisions create momentum and keep organizations moving forward.
Show employees they are valued through actions, not slogans: Invest in training, provide clear expectations, and be present in conversations with your team. When leaders consistently demonstrate respect and support, employees feel empowered to contribute their best work.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00

Hi. Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond, as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Jay Steinfeld is the founder of Blinds.com, one of the earliest and most successful e-commerce companies in the world. He bootstrapped it from his garage in the early 90s, grew it into the number one online window coverings retailer and eventually sold it to The Home Depot. But here's what makes Jay's story rare. He didn't cash out and disappear. He stayed on for over six years. Helped integrate Blinds.com into Home Depot, and somehow kept the core values, the culture in the people, intact long after the acquisition. Jay is a Wall Street Journal, best-selling author of Lead From the Core, teaches entrepreneurship at Rice University, serves on multiple boards, and has spent decades experimenting on how to build businesses that grow without losing their soul. This episode is about culture that actually works and leadership that holds up under pressure. Jay, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Jay Steinfeld 1:12

Thanks for having me, William. And let me just say when you said the word decades that made me feel old. Oh no,

William Harris 1:21

I'm at the point now I was talking so I was at Timberwolves game last night with some friends, and we were talking about how there are now moments where I will reference things to our employees, and it's a movie that came out before they were born. And I'm like, Oh, this is bad, because I remember that movie when I was in like, high school. Yeah, I do want to give a shout out to Dr. Jeremy Weisz over at Rise25. He is the one who put us in touch. Jeremy, Rise25, they produced my podcast going on I think three years now. Can't say enough great things about them, but Jeremy, thanks for putting me in touch with Jay here. I've got one more interruption, then we'll get right into the good stuff. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt Elumynts is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800 million and then one that ipoed. You can learn more on our website at elumynt.com, which is spelled elumynt.com, Okay, on to the good stuff. Jay before Blinds.com, before Home Depot before the book. What actually set you on this path? Was it ambition, necessity, or something else entirely?

Jay Steinfeld 2:27

I don't think it was ambition. I think it was necessity. Some people get motivated inherently or externally. But I needed money. I needed to do something. I had been fired for my job as VP of Finance at my Nike discount mufflers. I was floundering a little bit about trying to figure out what I should do next. My wife started a drapery shop, and I needed a job. So I just said, Okay, I do that too. And then that was a brick and mortar store that was in 1987 so then I realized a few years later, in 1993 that there was something called the internet, the World Wide Web, and just started experimenting with it, and it all worked out.

William Harris 3:12

Now, if I remember correctly, you've always been entrepreneurial. I think you said you even started a job in college to pay for college. Do you think that being forced to bet on yourself early shaped your trajectory?

Jay Steinfeld 3:28

No question when, when you are an entrepreneur, you're faced with very little money usually, and you've got to figure out ways. We call it guerrilla marketing. You have to figure out ways to do as much as you can with as little as possible. I think the definition that some people use as an entrepreneur is they do things that you don't think are possible by using less money than you think is possible. Well, that's what I did my whole life, whether it's selling cookies for my little league team, or selling custom T shirts in high school for all the teams that where I was playing, we were making money, or in college, where I would I would either be a waiter, grade papers and do both of those things, and during the summer, I would go door to door, selling street address numbers and spray paint those on people's curbs. And that was good money. I mean, I'd make $5 every time I sold one of those, and I would do two for nine. So that was nice. I'd get in my overalls in the morning and work till about one o'clock in the afternoon, till it got too hot, and made a decent amount of money doing that and doing the waiter job at night, and just it was just sort of inherent in my life. I needed money. I couldn't whine about it. I just had to take action. And I think that's a lot of the things that you do as an entrepreneur, and things that a lot of people don't realize as an entrepreneur is. You just have to take action. You have to take that first step. People hear about it, but that's what I did. I was not afraid of doing the things that had to be done. And I've always said I really am not that smart, and I really never did anything that exceptional. I just did the basic fundamental things that you needed to do to get a little bit better every day.

William Harris 5:22

I think there's a quote by Walt Disney that says, keep moving forward. And I talk about that with my daughters all the time. I've got 1512, and 10 year olds, and sometimes it's like, they're going in to clean up their room and they're overwhelmed or something, right? And it's like, Okay, do you know where this one thing goes? Put that one thing away, right? Okay, do you know where this one thing goes? Put that one thing away, and it's like just that action of just moving forward, one step at a time. What is that next step that you can take? It To your point? A lot of times, entrepreneurship is that same way where it's like, you've got plans. You've got your we're going to talk about some of your thoughts on plans later, but we got plans. And you've, you're you've got this idea of where you want to go, but more often than not, it's just making sure that you could take that one next step.

Jay Steinfeld 6:02

Well, you have plans, and you know most of your plans aren't going to work anyway, so Right? Why not just start?

William Harris 6:09

Yeah, I want to get a little bit into you before I get into the book, actually, which I did order. I read the book here. I can't say that I read every page, but I read most of it, but before I get into that, I want to talk a little bit set the stage for some people too. You've lived through two losses that I think would break most people, your wife and your mother. How did that shape your definition of success?

Jay Steinfeld 6:37

Well, I was married for 25 years. Got married right out of college, and she died, Naomi, of breast cancer, sick for five years, and that that happened right after I launched Blinds.com. So my mother had died while I was in college, also of cancer, ovarian cancer. She was 46 my wife was 47 so what that did was create some urgency, some urgency that I had to move quickly and not just sit idle. So if anything it did, it gave me the perspective of time, the perspective of you, life is short and you just need to hustle.

William Harris 7:24

Yeah, I feel like we don't want to go through moments like that. We don't wish that on anybody. But there are people are going to either take away from situations like that. They're either going to take that and say they're going to fold up their arms and quit, or they're going to use that as an excuse to go down the wrong path. And then there are other people who say, I'm going to use this as motivation to do the better thing. Were you always that way or or, How did you cultivate a mind that said I'm going to use this for benefit instead of excuse.

Jay Steinfeld 8:02

I don't think I ever consciously thought that I'm going to use it for benefit. In fact, there's a part of me knowing that part of my success comes from my insistence on doing things very fast, in making very quick decisions because of the the finite amount of time that's available for these decisions, there's a little guilt in thinking, would I have been this successful had my mother and wife not died? It's, I don't really like to go there, but it is something that I think about. It has shaped me, and I don't believe you. You just have a set of facts. It's it's like I was on a board call right before this, and we were talking about what we thought was going to happen this last year, and what did happen. And now we're looking at the next board meeting and thinking, What, does the budget need to look like? Well, these are the facts. We are faced with, the facts, and now we have to make decisions. Do you say, well, these things didn't work, and we're going to make sure that we use that to good effect, or we're going to fold neither. It has to be true. You just say, these are the facts. I'm still wanting to be successful. I still want to grow. So just objectively, what must you do? It's not about the emotion of getting through it or being brave or being courageous. It is inherent motivation that the circumstances dictate. You must decide now you could fold under the pressure. That is, that is true. But if you've got the mindset of this, I have to do this. I have three children. I have to make money. I have no choice but to actually be positive cash flow and make money. And we always this. My company always. Made money from the beginning, because I it had to make money. I couldn't do anything super big, because I had to pay the bills. I had to pay for three children. I was a single parent. So what am I going to do? There's no other place to get the money except what I earn.

William Harris 10:16

I love that you called out like you have to make a decision. You can fold and make no decision, but that's, in and of itself, a decision. There's a Do you remember Home Improvement the TV show with Tim the tool man? Taylor, yeah, there was this moment where Wilson the neighbors telling Tim about this deer that's stuck in the headlights. And he's like, Tim, all the deer has to do is go left or right and it's not gonna hit Get hit by the car, but if it doesn't make any decision, it's getting hit by that car. And I feel like the more I talk to entrepreneurs who have succeeded, the more that ability to make a decision becomes probably one of the most paramount characteristics that they can have. Can you make a decision?

Jay Steinfeld 10:57

Yes or No, and it's not just making a decision, it's making a decision with the knowledge that you don't have all the information that you would like to have. And that's what prevents people from making the decision, oh, I just need to get this much more information. I need to talk to that person. I need to get a little bit more data on this, or whatever. You just have to decide. Now. It doesn't mean you make big, big, big, existential decisions without having data to support it. Sure doesn't mean you just jump off a cliff and try to figure out how to fly on the way down. You have a plan. But for me, I never actually jumped off a cliff. I would just jump where it was maybe a foot or two off the ground, and if I couldn't fly, there was nothing to fear, because I just landed two feet lower. So I never bet the farm. I always thought, Well, I'm just going to get a little bit better. And my you, I think you asked me about my definition of success. My definition of success, through all of this, is just being in the process of getting a little bit better, and if I get just a little bit better, I consider that successful. But even more than that, it's not just about me getting better. It's about helping anybody within my sphere of influence, anybody who I had a meeting with. Did I? Did I make the people in that room better as a result of my presence in having that meeting. If I presented to an all hands meeting, is the organization better as a result of me presenting? Am I a better presenter? Because I now figured out something that worked better or worked worse, and now I need to either do more or something or less of it. If you basically ask yourself for everything you do, which is tiring, what did I do? Well, when that happened, no matter what the event was, and what if I had the chance to do it again? Would I have done differently? And if you ask yourself that question, and you ask everyone around you that question, everybody will automatically ask, begin asking themselves that question, and you get this autonomous growth, because everybody is asking each other how they can be better, and everybody is helping everybody else get better. And as a leader, you just sit back and watch, because everything is getting better right before your eyes, with you not doing anything but setting the right environment and having the right people who not only will will cope with change or cope with self improvement, but relish that change. And when you do that, you can be successful multiple times during the day. It's not about, oh, this we achieved 100 Arr, or we got this customer, or we sold the company. Yeah, those are success events, but the idea of life is to be just a little bit better and successful throughout the day. I really believe you can have multiple success points throughout a day.

William Harris 14:01

That's such wise words,

Jay Steinfeld 14:03

and it's so fun. I mean, yeah, and then, and then, when you find out things that are wrong or bad about yourself, or it's the answer is not, man, I really suck at this. It's, hey, I suck at this. That's a great opportunity to hire somebody who doesn't suck at this and can really do well, or I know this is something I hide for work on, and when I do look, we're doing so well now just imagine how great we're going to be when I figure that out. So the more that takes find out that's wrong, the happier you can be. Gives you more opportunity to get better.

William Harris 14:37

That takes a lot of self awareness. But to your point, if you can shift that thinking to that model, then it makes each one of those discovery points now an excitement versus something that you're sad about.

Jay Steinfeld 14:48

Right? It's exactly right. If somebody wrote to me today in a LinkedIn post that I developed a culture of a of a growth engine that. Supported, not only the business, but individual people to improve every day. And in fact, that's true, because the mission of our company was to help people become better than what they ever believed possible. That was the mission of the company. Everything, everyone that within our sphere of influence was to get better our customers, our vendors, our suppliers, our community, our our associates, our employees, for sure, but every in ourselves. So what can we do to get a little bit better with every experience you have? Are you a journaler?

William Harris 15:37

Because this sounds like something that I remember reading in the daily stoic Marcus Aurelius, right? The Roman emperor, he would do that at the end of each day, basically, like, go through a list of it's like, what did I do do? Well, what did I not do? Well, what can I improve on? It's like, this is like his nightly ritual. I'll admit that I will sometimes lay in my bed and think about that. I don't journal it. But like, did this become, like a formalized process for you, where you're writing this down each day, or how did you go about becoming having that mindset?

Jay Steinfeld 16:05

Well, it's a little tiring, because when you actually do what I said, and that is every interaction you have, you ask yourselves those questions. It can it can be tiring. So I don't journal, but I have lists. I have to do lists, and I prioritize those to do lists. And I think about where I am now, and I think about where the organization needs to be. And I measure where I where the puck is going, so to speak. So where does, where do we as an organization, need to be six months from now, a year from now, two years from now. I don't go out more than two years, because who knows what's going to happen more than two years from now, but I do think about this is what has to happen right now. And if we don't do this as our North Star, then we're going to be in trouble. So absolutely make sure you get that number one priority, a must win. Has to be won. And if not, you got to figure it out. And then you keep you just keep moving. And if you do that, you have an organization again that is expanding like a sponge, not like a ladder and everything. Everybody is getting better and better, until you just look around, you go, Oh, my God. We had 17 people. Now we have 500 people. I don't even know who those people are. I don't even know what department they Oh, they've been here three years. What I've never seen them before, and they look so happy, and they're out there doing some Gantt chart or whiteboarding things, and you just sitting back and watching them having fun and laughing and knowing that they're they're contributing and becoming better themselves as a result, as a leader, what can be better than having people around you, smiling, laughing, growing and having a company that's every day getting a little bit better? It's feeling my wife so contagious, you go to your playground every day, and it's true. Yeah, there was never a day, not one day, that I didn't go in thinking, this is going to be great. Even though there were some difficult times, it was still great to have the opportunity to try to figure things out, like a big puzzle.

William Harris 18:20

Grateful for the opportunity to figure things out. I like that. One of the things that I found very intriguing is that you set up a culture, this culture that you're describing that survived the founder, so even when you're gone, this culture exists. I think a lot of cult founders do believe that culture dies the moment they sell. But the core value that you set up at Blinds.com Those are still alive more than a decade later. Why didn't your culture disappear when you left?

Jay Steinfeld 18:52

As you can probably tell thinking about people and developing people was the number one thing as a leader that I believed was my role, setting a vision, getting the right people, resources, and executing, I mean, that's, that's the essential. But to do that, you had to have the right people, and you had to give it and have an environment, and that environment was based on four tenets, four principles, the Four E's. One was evolve continuously. I've already talked about that second was experiment without fear of failure. I've talked about that you can't evolve without experimenting. To reinforce that, we had two giant test tubes. They were six foot tall and about a foot and a half in diameter, by the way. Where do you get giant test tubes like that you have by somebody who makes tubular glass. And there was a bong maker in Austin who I got, hey as part of being entrepreneurs figuring things out, right. Very resourceful. Yeah. So he made me a giant Bong. I. Of two test tubes. Anyway. In one test tube was a bunch of marbles. Of all experiments that we did that worked, and the test tube was only about 25% full. Right next to it was another giant test tube, and the marbles were in there. Of all the experiments we tried that did not work, and that was full of marbles, so that everybody who came in, every guest, went right past these two giant test tubes of marbles and knew this is a company that experiments without fear of failure. Okay, so that was, that was the essence of our company, evolving and experimenting. In order to experiment evolve, you have to figure out what to prioritize and what to do. So you want people to speak up, because they're the ones doing the work. They're the ones that are going to know what you should be doing, probably more than you. So the third E was to express, express yourself. So we wanted everybody to have a voice and not be bashful about it, so we would get good, unfiltered information. That's still hard. Even though I'm sound enlightened and available, it's still hard for people to do, but they did it. And the Fourth E was, enjoy the ride. E enjoy so if you work really hard, and you do things that people said you couldn't ever do, and everybody's got a voice, and everybody's getting better. What could be more fun in business than that? Okay? Oh, by the way, you end up making a lot of money, and you grow at high rates, and you end up having the companies so so valuable and coveted that Home Depot ends up buying it, and it's life changing for me and all the people who were there. So how did it how did it not change? It was so integral to the company, baked in the people that we hired needed to actually not just allow that to happen, but to have within them the propensity and the desire to relish to do those things. We tested and interviewed for people who wanted to change, who loved to change, who loved to speak up, who wanted to have a voice. If you weren't that type of a person, you didn't last more than a couple of weeks. And how do you find those people? How we can, we can talk about how we did behavioral questioning to do that. And I love that question. I have to do it. But just to finish on this one, it was baked in. We needed to do it. Everybody wanted to do it. We had the right people to do it. Now, when a big monolithic company like Home Depot, or any big company comes in, they usually have their way of doing things, and they can't help it, but just want to change things and have all these unintended consequences. My job at Blinds.com after selling to Home Depot, was to be the ambassador on behalf of the culture and behalf of the employees, and for the first three years, I did nothing but explain and educate and defend that culture. Now it also helps, and I don't want to diminish this. You have to hit your numbers because you have to have the credibility. So the first thing make your numbers and you have the credibility to do pretty much whatever you want, as long as you're making your numbers. So we were making our numbers. And therefore, when people said, you know, we've thinking about changing your comp plan, because nobody else has a comp plan like you, and we can't do that for you, because you're just, you know, you're only $200 million at the time. We're 79 billion Sure, so we can't let you do that. So I went all the way up. I started off at the low level, and kept going up until they finally I got to the EVP of HR, and he said, Yeah, we're not going to change that. Fine. So I spent a month having to go through meetings and memos, and finally, just got to the right person. And that's what I did for years, and made sure that people viewed us as a as a platform, as a technology company, not as a blinds retailer, which was another thing that we needed to do, is we developed a platform that would sell not just blinds, but any complex, customizable, hard to buy product, which we were doing, which is one of the reasons I stayed so with me there, defending the culture, with the culture already baked into the people, and they would leave if the culture left, because they were thriving and even now, which is 12 years later, most of the people are still there, wow, and I haven't been there for five years, and it's still there. So I won. It was something that we we were very deliberate about and defend. It. But two, you have to give it to Home Depot for not screwing it up and making a decision that, okay, we want to do this. But okay, I see it. He's making his numbers. All right. Let him play. Let him have test tubes. Let him have Mars. Let him have a continuous improvement board where everybody wrote on that board all the things that they were working on to improve in their personal lives, and let them erase it every week and come up with new stuff. We would never do that, but it's working for him, so let him do it. And even when I left in a new CEO to play took over, who was my successor that I chose, it stills stayed, and now he's left, and somebody from Home Depot came in, and before they even put him in there, they came to me and said, Hey, Jay, we're thinking about this guy to run the GCC. What advice do you have for him? And would you meet with him, and let's have go out to dinner and make sure he understands what makes GCC tick. How did it? What happened? What is this 4e culture thing that you guys do? Does it really work? So he, they met with me, and he I've checked in with him. He's called me from time to time. They're still insistent on keeping that culture. And if you go to any of my posts on LinkedIn, there's a bunch, or see anything about Blinds.com, they're still talking about the Four E's. They're still talking about the culture that is that keeps them there and that keeps them successful. I'm proud of that it's and he should be. Who have left. There's some people who have left and started these giant companies, which is another big success story. I think they understand that the culture that they have is important. And one of the first things they did was understand what their culture should be, not what my culture was at Blinds.com, but what they believe their culture is and what inherently motivates them and propels them into action, because my core values should not be your core values. These are core to me, not to anyone else. They're not things that I read in a book. It's they're not things that I was told I should have as a core value. They are my core values. This is who I am. So this is what we do.

William Harris 27:25

Speaking of those core values, I feel like a lot of companies say that people are their greatest asset, but almost none of them behave like it's true. What did you do tangibly that proved it wasn't just a slogan.

Jay Steinfeld 27:38

Oh man, there's so many things. First, being generous. And being generous doesn't mean giving them a lot of money. Because we were small and we in Houston, which is where we're based. I say we are based as if I'm still there. I always

William Harris 27:55

say I'm not your child, right?

Jay Steinfeld 27:57

Yeah, my child. It will always be my child. It will always be my company, where were we going on that? Sorry, the things that

William Harris 28:04

you did tangibly to prove people

Jay Steinfeld 28:07

so being generous with people means giving them money, adequate money. Don't limit the amount of money they can make, because if they're providing great capacity, why should you cap their their That's not That's stupid. Who cares if they make more than you? They're worth it. They're bringing in the money the profit. Do it generous also means provide adequate training, provide adequate instructions, provide adequate expectations, so people know what they should be doing. Be clear with your attention when you're having a meeting. Put your frickin phone down and talk to them and listen and come back with other questions, so that you can really be present in every conversation that you have. If somebody says, you know, I've got this idea, and I'd like to come to your office and talk to you about it. Get out of your office and go over to the employee and sit down next to them and say, I'm going to come to you because you have something that you think is worth in and having the the balls to talk to the CEO. I mean, a lot of people won't do that, so you go to them. So that's being generous. So if I'll give you another example, please, when we had an all hands meeting was called, say, j and we were doing that for, I don't know, 20 years. Every week we had like, a 15 minute and I would just say whatever I felt like saying, that's what I call say j and but also took questions. And one day, somebody who had just been working there for a couple of weeks stood up and she she said, I just heard you say something. And it's completely different than what I heard in training. Would you explain like, what should I believe to be true? Now? How many people would actually in front of 500 people, all the people there stand up, takes guts and con addict the CEO, and ask a question like that? So what's your answer. You said, what do you do? So your answer could be, well, I don't know, I'll have to get back to you, or I don't know what they were thinking, but this is the right first. I said, Who are you? What is your name? And I said, everybody should stand up and cheer for her for having the guts to ask that question at all. Beautiful. And of course, I mean, how many more people, people seeing that? How are they going to respond in the future, if they've got something they want to talk about, you think they're going to be bashful about speaking up? They may not speak up in front of the whole company, but they may send a note. Or in some cases, there's this one person who had no problem coming up to me at all, because she has a lot of gumption, and there were a bunch of people who didn't want to do that, so they would all band together and tell her, her name is Dixie. Let's tell Dixie, because Dixie will go right into Jay's office and tell him all the things that we want to tell him. But they would do that, and they wouldn't be bashful about it. So that's what you do. You just really show I guess it's just respect and attention and being there for your people and investing in them, and not just saying that we want you to to get better, or saying that we want you to improve, but providing the resources. We had a training center called the Iliad, the I don't remember what the acronym is, but something like the Institute for Learning, innovation, advancement and development, I think that's it. And the Iliad was about growth and having modules that we could teach people in this in the the officers of the company taught the classes so we didn't have outsiders come in and do this. We did it. We created our own courses and taught people, and people would go into other people's classes. It wasn't like the IT person was just teaching it people. He may talk about planning, or she may talk about how you do scrums, or how you do the planning of use cases and how you prioritize those, which is a skill that would apply to any kind of prioritization, so people would sit on on those things, and that that's how you get people to buy into the culture, by actually behaving like you're talking. Whatever you say does not matter. What matters is what you do, and just do the things that you say you're going to do. And that's going to be far ahead of what where most people are, who, one, aren't even clear as to what their values are, and two, change them all the time. And three say it, but don't behave, or they allow another one is allowing inconsistent cultural behavior to exist without causing changes either in them or just extricating them from the organization because you've tried and it's not working, and those core values, if you let them become something different, people will say, Well, you don't really even care about those core values. If you did, then how would you allow that person to do what

William Harris 33:36

they're doing? I love everything that you just said. I feel like that is something that we've tried to do at element. We don't limit the bonuses at all. We have an unlimited bonus that people can earn based on what they're contributing to. It kind of like to what you said, and this idea of just being intentional about everything that you say or do, it's actually something I'm coaching fourth grade girls basketball. My daughter's on the team and coaching them, and that's something that I talk about with them often, is I say, I want you to be intentional. If you're going to shoot, shoot on purpose. If you're going to pass, pass it on purpose. No lobby it right. Like, like, pass because you meant to pass. And I remind them and I like, this is not just true in basketball. This is true in life, in everything you do, do it because you meant to do it. Do it on purpose. Be intentional. And I do think to your point where it's like, if we say one thing, but we're not intentional about the follow up on it, that it becomes very clear that it's not actually a core value. It is just something that HR came up with, put on a poster, and it doesn't actually mean anything. It has to be intentional.

Jay Steinfeld 34:36

Yeah, it has to be intentional. It has to be actually a real core value, it can't be. We're not recording them. Are we?

William Harris 34:46

No, we are we are okay? Is that okay?

Jay Steinfeld 34:48

No, I just we went back. So one of the things I think it's really important about when you establish what your core values are, is that you don't have them as. Operational goals, like we want our core values to be this. Your core values are what have made you successful, and what cause you to be successful and to achieve things that you otherwise would not have been able to achieve. So what are those? What are those things inherent in the organization? Look at the big events that have happened. What happened to make that true? And look at those things and say, Oh, wait, our core value is not attention to detail. Our ours is actually looking at two sides of the same coin and not being so detailed on one side of the corn, but looking at all the sides of the corn, including the edge. So we're looking at every asset. Our core value is to look at all the facets, not except one, or be dogmatic about any point of view. As an example,

William Harris 36:00

you said you said that you are risk averse, but you experiment constantly. How can both be true?

Jay Steinfeld 36:13

It is a paradox, but I think paradoxes are important to understand when it comes to business in life, I believe that you need to experiment without fear, because that's the only way you get to the truth. It's the only way you find out better ways to be I also don't believe that you should ever bet the farm and not do something that if it turns out not to work, you're toast. So that's and by looking at your asymmetric risk, where you see the upside and then you see what the downside is. If you can look at anything you're going to do and see the downside, risk is definitely something you can live with. Yeah. I mean, you wish every decision you made was going to be turned out to be right, but you know that's not true. You know it's it's impossible. So accept that, and just know that the downside risk is something you can live with. And therefore, what is there to fear? There is nothing to fear. So it's not about being courageous in the battlefield. It's knowing that even that the bullets are made of air, or the bullets are rubber, there's no exclusive in there, and they're not metal, and if they hit you, it's going to hurt. Doesn't mean it's not going to hurt, sure, but it's not going to kill you, and you just keep going. So that's that's way you can be risk averse, which I am, but also continue to experiment. Because you're you're furiously experimenting, and if something works, you do it more, and if it works again, you keep doing it. And if it doesn't work, you stop, or you figure out, what was it about that that if we had changed a little bit and we had done a little differently, might have that worked? Maybe we'll try that. So there is nothing to fear, even when you experiment a lot.

William Harris 38:15

I've thought about risk versus reversibility in this idea, where sometimes we're worried about the risk of making this decision or taking this action or whatever, but remembering that a lot of things are, let's just say, reversible, or at least diagnostic. I guess maybe there's a better word where I would say sometimes, if you're not sure what the right decision is, literally just taking in action can become diagnostic in and of itself, because if you do the thing and the result you get the result that you wanted to that was the right decision. If you don't, you can go back and change things. It's not like set in stone, where, well, that was it. We can't change it. More often than not a lot of these decisions, you can go back and say, okay, hey, we thought that we need to do this. We did this. That wasn't the right thing. We can course correct now that

Jay Steinfeld 38:59

I agree with that, but I will say that the way I think about it is, just because you make a decision and it turns out to work, doesn't mean it was the right decision. Sure, it's like in poker, you can, you can play for a hand, and it's the it's a stupid move, but that's there. You draw to an inside straight and you get the card, it was the wrong move, but it worked. Was that the right decision? No, it was not the right decision. It just happened to work. So you have to be careful about false positives.

William Harris 39:32

I do like poker, and that's a good example, because I've definitely won some hands I should

Jay Steinfeld 39:37

not have. Yeah, and you and you lose hands that where you played it right? Yeah, yeah. So that's the thing. You have to look at your in your business, the decisions that you make, and don't get a big head about things that are working just because it worked out, it may have been the wrong decision, and things that don't work out, it could have still been the right decision. And. At that time based on the information that you had. So don't, don't get all weepy about it. Things not working out. It was still the right decision at the time. What did you learn from it? What could you have done differently? And move on?

William Harris 40:16

A lot of people probably made some very right decisions in 25 and then tariffs hit. And you know, clearly it was the wrong decision, but you had no idea of knowing that it was the wrong decision at the time. It was still the right decision. Yeah, to your point,

Jay Steinfeld 40:30

that's where luck plays, plays, sure. So that'll be if anyone, any successful entrepreneur, tells you that they weren't lucky. They I think they have to be lying.

William Harris 40:43

Yeah, that's so important. I don't think we talk about that enough. I've got a 15 year old daughter, and, you know, one of the things she would maybe want to do is to be, like, a professional singer, right? And, like, not just like, kind of make it, but like, really make it. Like, that's a pretty normal teenage thing to want to be. And, you know, she'll ask, what's like? Well, what's the path forward for us to do that. What does this look like? It's okay. Well, you're doing opera classes at the U of M. You are doing these, you know, lessons for piano and guitar. You are doing these things. You're You're, here's all the things you need to do that to acquire the skills you need to be able to do blah, blah, blah, blah. But then I also just reminded, I was like, and then you just got to pray and, you know, hope that there's some luck that falls your way, because it's like, you can do all of those right things and you don't get that break. And then there's somebody else who maybe didn't do any of those right things, and they get the break. And so it's like, but in order to be there, you have to do these things, you've got to put in the time, you've got to put in the practice, you've got to make sure that you are at least positioning yourself to be in the right place at the right time, if there should be a right place at the right time,

Jay Steinfeld 41:43

right you, you make, you make your own luck.

William Harris 41:48

You, you brought up e as the or enjoy as the Fourth E. And I wanted to learn a little bit more about that, because I will say that again. Going back to I draw a lot of parallels from parenting, because that's that's the stage that I'm in. So it hits me, I

Jay Steinfeld 42:02

and I have five children and eight great grandchildren. So whatever analogy you're going to come up with, I'm going to like it. Okay. You can appreciate this.

William Harris 42:11

So again, coaching fourth grade girls basketball, and you can sometimes see where they get in their heads. And there was this dad coach of the other team that was just reaming these girls out. Very unfortunate. I actually talked about it after the game. Was like, I think you're taking this a little like, little too far for the level of play the threat here. But it was one of those moments where you could see that his team was just so far in their head. They were a good team. We crushed them in the game, and it was just because our team was actually having fun. And I reminded our girls too, that it's like more often than not, the team that's enjoying being out there is likely going to win more than the team that doesn't enjoy being out there, because it's easier to work harder, it's easier to practice, it's easier to hustle, it's easier to do all those things. If you enjoy what you're doing, you get burnt out too far, too quickly. Otherwise, how did you come up with this idea of enjoy? And what are some practical ways that you made the environment enjoyable?

Jay Steinfeld 43:14

Well, success breeds enjoyment. So for sure. So let's, let's not, let's not be, let's not be absent of the idea of when you do all these things and you actually grow and you're profitable, and you get more customers, and you become absolutely number one in the world, that's really fun. It's fun to win. Yes, it's not fun to lose. So that's number one. Okay, I'll give you another example from say j1. Of the things we did in say J was we introduced every new employee, or, I should say, each employee introduced themselves in say j by doing one of three things, singing a song, telling a joke or dancing, Oh, nice. Oh. And then they end up they would, they would start doing these other presentations, like maybe they would do a magic show, or maybe they would do some kind of musical thing. But that was so fun. It was, it was the best part of say, J's is the is the employee introductions. Some of them were so good and some of them were so bad that it but they were all fun to watch, and you just wanted to give everybody a hug when they went up there and had the guts to do what they did, because that's, I mean, that's what we're doing. We're enjoying the ride, and this is part of the fun. And standing up there and singing something, or doing some some talent in front of 500

William Harris 44:59

people. Takes, cuts,

Jay Steinfeld 45:01

it does, and everybody is laughing. And afterwards would go up say, That was so awesome, and that joke was really stupid, but that's that's a way to have fun. When people came into interviews, this happens, happened all the time. They go into interviews, and then they'd come home, they'd get the job, they come in, and they'd say, when I went through that interview process, I looked around and everybody was smiling and laughing and having a good time. I thought it was an act. I thought they were just acting like that because I was there, and it's not true. They're like this all the time. I'm shocked, and when people from Home Depot would come in, because it was really important for me to get the people, the senior people from Home Depot, to come to our office, to feel the excitement, to feel the culture, to see those test tubes, to see the whiteboard to see people smiling and laughing and having fun. We had, most of our people were actually a call center. You think people in a call center have fun? Well, ours did. They would. We had decorating desk contest. People hardly ever left. We had an 8% turnover, and wow, call center, it's like 70% over 100% but we invested in people, so they would stay and they were having fun. So that's what we would do. We would look like a startup from the beginning. We acted like a startup from the beginning, and we never changed.

William Harris 46:34

Yeah, you said something earlier. We were talking about plans, and I said, I want to get the plans here a little bit later. But there was something you told me, either you told me the last time we talked, it was in the book, I can't remember where plans are evil. What do you mean by that, and what should replace traditional planning?

Jay Steinfeld 46:50

Well, plans, in themselves, are not evil. When you when you get to a big company, you have what's called plan, your budget. So I'm talking about capital P plan. Got it like, this is the stated plan that we're going to that why have now represented to the higher ups, and this is, these are our numbers, and we're going to track them. Got it Home Depot, we tracked them like, every day. Like, wait a minute, we do this every month. You want us to do this every day? What? Yeah, so we, they were really good at execution, and they learned, I'll tell you, culture. We didn't have to learn about execution and operational excellence. We learned a lot from Home Depot about how to do that and how to do reports and how to really look at things and and to anticipate. And by doing that in conjunction with having fun and experimenting, that was like the perfect balance. So we grew too as a result of being part of Home Depot. So that's really, that's really the key, is just making sure that you're you're growing that you're looking to the people who are around you to get input from them too. And you're going to have fun. It's just, it's, it's just naturally fun. But when you have a plan that says you're going to hit this number, and you find a way to actually do more than that, you start thinking, Wait a minute, I'm not sure I should do more than what my plan number is. Because if I do the next half of the year, they're going to re budget me, they're going to replan me, and they're going to, they're going to, it's a moving target. And now, instead of needing a 20% growth now that I hit 25 they're going to want 25 want 25% in the next half. So what people do in big organizations is they say, let's not grow 25% that's working, but let's hold that off until the next year, when we're going to need to get another 25% out of it. Or you go into a room and the plan is to pick up a dime, but you see a quarter, and it's going to take a little longer to go to the other side of the room to pick up that quarter. What do you do? Well, I would go pick up the quarter, for sure. In a big organization, what's the risk that you're going to pick up that dime and pick up the quarter? And someone's going to say that wasn't your plan. You've now beaten plan, and that's not what we wanted you to do. Are you not following plan? Are you not following our guidelines? And you get in trouble, even though the number is bigger. So you don't have upside potential when you're when you're surpassing plan, but you have a huge downside risk if you don't make it, so you end up being less risky and less ambitious, because all you really want to do is hit that number, or you're going to risk having a higher number the next time, or or it's not going to work, and you're going to get in all sorts of trouble, like you're going to get fired. So that's what I think. That. How do

William Harris 50:01

you fix that? Then get rid of you can't get rid of plans. They're still gonna be there, right?

Jay Steinfeld 50:05

You, if you feel like you're being inappropriately replanned, you, you talk about it sure, like, Okay, we did go up, but we really were only going to go 10% we were able to do this, and we think that the upside of that was just this year, and there's going to be diminishing returns on that. So yeah, we'll go up. We appreciate that. But could we instead of going up 25% How about 15? And you negotiate these things, you just have to be open, because they also know when they replan you, that they're pushing. They everybody sure everyone to have ambitious research stretch goals. But if you don't hit those goals, you're in big trouble. If you're off by two bips, two percentage points, the narrative is going to say underperformed. If you're above by two bips, they're going to say even you can't win, it's always worse than what than what you actually perform. So that's the problem with with plan. If you don't have a plan, sure as well, just you know

William Harris 51:27

you need a plan. You need to measure it. Yeah, I want to talk about your big brother little sister. Strategy with Sears Wayfair ultimately made Blinds.com irresistible to Home Depot. What's the Insight founders miss when they think about partnerships, and how did the big brother assist? Big Little Brother, Big Brother, Big

Jay Steinfeld 51:44

brother, little brother, yeah, and it's what we did, was we created this, this technology platform that would work for for not just blinds, but for other companies. But it wasn't that's not what the original goal was. It was to create this platform that we could use it to help designers and decorators sell the products and create websites for decorators and designers by having these instantly customizable websites for them, and they would represent themselves, but we would be the back end, and we'd be making a percentage of everything they sold. The technology was great. The EX, the strategy of doing that was not great. It didn't work at all. It was, it was complete bust. It because, for whatever reason, it didn't work. But we still had the technology, and we had the opportunity to bid on the Sears business and create a cart to cart integration with them, so that we would become the blinds department, like a lease department in on the blind on the Sears website. We already had the technology to do it that we had used for these decorators and designers. So we ported it over and said, Sure, we can do that. No problem. And we spent, like a week transport, transferring it from a designer centric UI to one that would be for Sears. And unbelievably, they said, Okay, you guys can do it. That was shocking that we got it. And then from there, we contacted Wayfair and said, Hey, how would you guys like to be in the blinds business? We can do everything we did a car to cart integration with Sears. It only took us 90 days to completely integrate our technology into all their enterprise wide pipes. And they said, Sure, you can do this in 90 days. I said, Yeah, guarantee it. Wow, you'll do it. If you'll do, put your people on it, we can do this in 90 days. And they said, fine. So they did it. So now we had, we were doing the, all the blinds for Sears, all the blinds for Wayfair. And then shortly after that, Home Depot saw that too and said, we're not having anything. We're not letting you do that for sure. But what it also did was it told Home Depot and Lowe's, who was also vying for our business as well, that what we had created was a platform that could integrate in an enterprise, public company, and that worked. So that gave them a lot of comfort to say, well, not only are they number one in revenue, but they've got some technology that is powering Sears and Wayfair. It must be pretty damn good.

William Harris 54:38

And did you do that on purpose? Did you do it on purpose? You're like, I'm going after serious and Wayfair because I want to get Home Depot's attention. Or it was like, ah, Home Depot was unreachable at that time. I went with the ones that were

Jay Steinfeld 54:53

willing to work with me. It wasn't as crafty or manipulative as Sure. No, it was really just, this was another way to grow. You're thinking, how do you go after all these consumers? And it's it you have to really work hard at customer acquisition cost and getting that down and lifetime value and all the things you do to get for sure repeat business. So but there's a limit to how much you can do and how fast you can do that and still stay profitable. Remember, we were always profitable, and we always wanted to maintain profitability, especially when we were thinking, we can be selling it. So if they're buying us and they're profitable, wow, that's That's great. So we did that, and just thought, this is just another way to grow. And once we got the Sears account, we just said we should just see what else we can do with this. Now, frankly, it never amounted to a lot of money. It wasn't a lot of revenue, but it sure made us look good, and it gave us the halo effect of being coveted with a technology platform that they believed in, and it was that it wasn't a veneer. It really was, was that. So it's, I guess, that's experimenting without fear for the design, the designers and the decorators, that was an experiment. Would you say that worked or didn't work before it was a failure? Sure it wasn't a failure, because it created the technology that we use, that that when Sears asked us whether we would want to pitch our ability or bid on it, we had the technology ready. We were in the right place, as we were talking about, before we were lucky enough to be approached by Sears and had technology that we use for an experiment that most people would say failed.

William Harris 56:46

It reminds me of, there's a parable. I don't remember what it's called, but there's like this guy and all right, I'm gonna see if I can remember that. I haven't told this in a while, so I think his his horses run away, and his neighbors are like, oh, man, what terrible luck you have, right? And he was like, Well, you know, whether it's good or bad, I don't know. And then the next day, he sees some wild horses, and he's able to, like, capture the wild horses. And they're like, oh, what great luck you have. He's like, Oh, whether it's good or bad, I don't know. And then his son's trying to tame one of the horses, falls off, breaks his leg, and they go, oh, what terrible luck you have, whether it's good or bad, I don't know. And then they come and draft his son, you know, for the army, or whatever, the Imperial Army. And they're, you know, but he couldn't go at that time. They're like, Oh, wait, good luck you have it. Whether it's good or bad, I don't know. And the idea there is that it's like, we don't know if, whether the things that we've just encountered are good or bad, like, in and of themselves, they're neither good nor bad, right, falling and breaking your leg, or the experiment that failed, quote, unquote, but actually led towards this good. Is it good or bad? I don't know. Right? Like, it's just a thing, right?

Jay Steinfeld 57:50

Yes, and that's, that's basically what our core values are. Experiment, evolving, experimenting, expressing ourselves and having fun doing it.

William Harris 57:59

Yeah, I want to talk about staying after the sale, because I think it's a rather unusual choice. I know a lot of people have actually had a lot on the podcast that have sold their businesses, and sometimes have intention to stay for a while, and then they just can't. They're just, it's a tough thing to do. Um, you stayed for almost six seven. I had to get that in there for my teenagers. You stayed for like, six or seven years. Why did you decide to stay for as long as you did?

Jay Steinfeld 58:31

Well, I was having fun and I was still living my core values. I got my money so it wasn't, it wasn't for the money, although they were paying pretty well. But if you if your core values are the four that I've talked about, and I could do that in the company, and a lot of opportunity to speak up now, expressing myself was like every day, having to do that and figuring out how I could get better in working with the politics and working with the bureaucracy, and then working with the resources that were available and the strong, smart people at Home Depot, how do you best work with them who don't really understand what you're doing or how you're doing it, or why you're doing it, but figuring All those things. That was, those are my core values. So it was fun that, yeah, so that's, that's one. It was fun. The second is, I needed to make sure that the core values remained when I was not there. That was a big one. And then the idea of taking this platform and applying it to other hard to buy product categories, like custom decks, custom counter talks, tops, custom vanities, custom sprinkler systems, custom all this stuff, custom doors. I wanted it garage doors. I want. To see that happen, because it was, it was part of our vision a long time ago, but we never went into other product categories because we felt like we'd be taking our eye off the ball, and there was so much low hanging fruit just in blinds that why, why split out and do something else when there was still what we thought was much easier opportunity in the blinds business, once we were with Home Depot ha, now we have the expertise in all these different product categories. We had customers coming to the Home Depot website looking for those products. We had no acquisition cost. They were already coming Sure. We had nothing to do but take our platform and merge it and integrate it into the Home Depot website. And they actually ended up integrating it into their little phone that they use in the store, I can't remember first phone or something like that, where each of the associates could help you buy blinds in the store with no training. Why? Because the technology that we use was put into the phone, and that technology was the same technology that customers used when they bought blinds at home, and if they could do it with no training, because you don't train sure customers on if you have to train customers how to use your product or service, you've got a pretty complicated product or service, and that's probably not going to work in a direct to consumer product. So this worked, and so there they could do it a day. One employee could help a customer buy blinds with no training at all, just by going through all the different prompts. So it was it was great.

William Harris 1:01:47

I I want to shift and start talking about who is Jay Steinfeld, because I think it's fun to get to know the human being behind all of these brilliant ideas. You talk about having a list of things that didn't happen and being grateful for them. Tell me about this list.

Jay Steinfeld 1:02:08

Well, before I we talked about making the wrong decisions or the right decisions, and sometimes the right decisions don't, don't work out, and vice versa. Well, there were a lot of those things. And I think, well, I had this one guy who was going to be an investor, my original investor. He was a pretty famous guy in Houston and had a big furniture store, still does. And he agreed to be a 51% investor and give me all the money that I needed, which was not much. It was like a million dollars or something to make my first acquisition, he he bailed. He looked at somebody within his organization, looked at the website and saw a bunch of mistakes, and said, This is not going to work. And he did. He bailed, as it turned out, which I thought was going to be a great deal, I got other investors who were much more closely aligned with what my vision was, and that worked out tremendously well. Had that other worked out, probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. If that other person had been the investor, I doubt very seriously we would have grown the way we did lots of things like that in acquisition that I wanted to make and thought for sure it was going to happen. We were two weeks, two weeks away from thinking we had gotten the deal, and we had all indications. It turned out we didn't get it, and it's a good thing we didn't it would have added a lot of complexity, a lot of growth, inorganic growth, but a few weeks later, that's when Home Depot came around and made us the offer. Had that been there and we were still in the integration stage, they may have been little less likely to do it because of that complexity. Lots of oh, okay, how about IAC Barry Diller's company, who had owns all sorts of big they bought us. We actually sold it to them, really. I mean, we didn't actually close, because we were just a week before closing. Thank God that deal didn't go through, because we ended up doing 10 times what we got from Home Depot than what we got from IAC now, it was way earlier, and that was going to be a good deal. That was going to be life changing, but it wasn't what Home Depot ended up paying. So that was something that I wanted to do. We had an investment banker. We were a week before closing, and they bailed. They just said, we're not doing it. So what are we going to do soon? Sue Barry Diller and IAC No, yeah, we say, Okay, walk away. Fine. And that didn't work. And then it wasn't until many years later that Home Depot came around. So you look at these things and you say, Yeah, I wanted to do that. It didn't work. Okay. If. Turned out better, not not, not working.

William Harris 1:05:02

So I think, did you feel that way at the time though? I mean, that deal falls through. It's easy to say, Okay, that didn't work out. But like at the time, is it soul crushing? And you're like, Okay, pick yourself back up. Or did you have that attitude then you're like, Okay, that didn't work out.

Jay Steinfeld 1:05:16

Was it soul crime? No, none of those things were ever soul crushing. I'm not saying I wasn't disappointed, especially that act at the time when IAC was going to buy us. I mean, I really wanted that to happen. I was already thinking about how much money that was going to be, and I had a much higher percentage of the company at that time than I did when we sold to Home Depot, so that was going to be a lot when it didn't happen. Yeah, I was disappointed. You just keep going. Yeah, it didn't affect my ability to keep growing. I actually, and now I think of it with a lot of joy.

William Harris 1:06:00

Yeah, right. Hindsight is 2020, right. So what they say?

Jay Steinfeld 1:06:05

But I don't believe in fate. I don't okay that something was meant to be if it if it doesn't happen, you go, Oh, it was meant to be. No, okay. It was something we wanted to do. We meant for it to happen. It didn't happen. That's not what we wanted. Okay, maybe it'll work out, but it wasn't meant to be. If it was meant to be, then why did we even pursue it? We shouldn't have even pursued if it wasn't meant to be. I don't, I don't, I don't think you have these predetermined fates. You make your, you make your your own success and luck, and you have to work hard at it.

William Harris 1:06:45

Going back. Is there anything that you would do differently now, knowing what you know now that you would go back and you're like, This is the thing I should have done differently. I should have said this differently, done this differently, like, this is how I do things.

Jay Steinfeld 1:06:59

Now, there's a lot of things that that were the wrong decision, really, truly wrong decisions. And wish I had made change, like the people who I had hired things a strategy that I was going to try to do lots of things like that. But the approach, if you want to know who I am, what I say is, if any of those things turned out to have happened, would I have actually sold the company when I did for that amount of money, and be able to stay on six years later and have the opportunities that that has given me by being on all these boards and teaching Entrepreneurship and writing a book and doing all those things. Would that have happened? I don't know. I can't say it would have been true. If any butterfly effect, if one thing changed, if one variable changed, might I have had a completely different life. So the only way I can actually think about this and maintain my sanity is to say I know I made mistakes. I know it's not everything. I wanted to do things, things didn't happen, but thank God it ended up the way it did. And I'll go back to what I said earlier. The only thing that that causes me some some anguish is thinking that one of those variables was the death of my wife and my mother and I, you know, obviously did not want that to happen, right?

William Harris 1:08:33

Yeah, I understand that you are currently or were in a barbershop guitar. Are you? I think you are still currently in a

Jay Steinfeld 1:08:43

barbershop quartet, right? I am in a barbershop quartet. The 40 acre 440. Acres was the original land of the University of Texas. The original 40 Acres. So we were the 40 Acres because we started this at UT in Austin, we've been singing together, same guys for 52 years. We still sing and when we're together, it's like we're still in college. We were joking with each other. We're hugging each I mean, it's it's hilarious. It's so fun. My son, one of my sons got married last year in Mexico. Well, the Quartet normally is invited to every big event, every wedding, every bar mitzvah, any big events we have, namings, but they weren't invited because it was just my son's friends and close family. But what we did is we about a month before the event, I went to Dallas, where two of them live, and another one from Houston drove up, and we recorded a couple of songs, and then we played those at the wedding. And. And they were huge hit. It was awesome. It was great. So, yeah, we still in college. We were, we were serious. We were, we were in the we sang in the international competition. We were the Southwest District champs. We sang all over the country and got paid by doing all that's chose. It was, it was real. It was it was a real thing. And we had coaches, we had uniforms. It was serious, but again, we had fun. And we were experimenting. We were interpreting the music. We were having. We were expressing ourselves and God having applause at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in front of 10,000 people. That was pretty heady. That's pretty cool. So yeah, the 40 acre four, I just changed my license plate on one of my cars and it says 40 acre four.

William Harris 1:10:53

That's so cool. So what part do you sing? And what is your favorite song to sing?

Jay Steinfeld 1:11:01

Well, the songs we sing, you wouldn't know they're older songs. I mean, we do some, some newer songs, some of the some Beatles stuff, but it's basically true barbershop type of songs, Irish love songs and stuff like that. In fact, one of the songs I do like to sing is called the Irish blessing, and we sang that at my son's wedding. The Irish blessing, May the road rise up to greet you and the wind be at your back. Things like that. I sing tenor. I'm a first tenor, and the first tenor in a barbershop quartet sings the melody. So I sing the melody, oh,

William Harris 1:11:43

that's cool. Now, if I remember correctly, one of the things that I like to do at Halloween time is I've got a pickup truck, and I take my daughters and their friends and whoever's going trick or treating, and we load them up in the back of the pickup truck, right, which you're not supposed to do that very much anymore, but we do it anyways, because we're just driving around town here, and it's kind of fun and just, you know, come on, popping from door to door. But I understand that you went quite a bit further in the back of a pickup truck at one point in time.

Jay Steinfeld 1:12:13

Think I know what you're getting at. When we sang in San Francisco International, we had no money. Couldn't afford even two or $300 for a flight to San Francisco from from Austin, where we were living. So we got in the back of a pickup truck. Or are the tenor in a quartet sings a falsetto, the highest part, and his father had an RV, and had a pickup truck attached to the back of the RV, and we're going at about probably 50 miles an hour. So it took us four days, five I don't know it took forever, but we were we couldn't stay in the RV, so we had to stay in the bed of the pickup truck, and we were lying down in that pickup truck for four days from Austin to San Francisco.

William Harris 1:13:08

Was there a cover, like a to know, cover on it, blown in your face? Okay, cover,

Jay Steinfeld 1:13:13

yeah, but you know, you couldn't stand, you couldn't even crawl. You had to just slide in. Did you work

William Harris 1:13:21

on songs while you were there? I mean, like, what kind of conversations do you have? Is just laying next your buddies?

Jay Steinfeld 1:13:28

I remember learning Morse code. Somebody new Morse code. And I said, I'm bored. What can we do? He goes, I know Morse code. You want to learn Morse code? I said, Sure. So on the way to San Francisco, I learned Morse code. That was, that was interesting. But when we would sing, we would sing anytime we stopped and would practice. So we would be at a koa campground or something, and we'd be singing our songs. And we didn't even think we were going to make it to to to international. And we said, Okay, we've only got two really good contest songs. We need to learn two more. And we had to learn them in route to San Francisco because we never thought we would make to the next round. We didn't make it to the next round. So those songs probably would have been pretty embarrassing, because the capability of professional barber shop quartet sure are unbelievable. I mean, they're, they're all professionals, so it's really hard to compete with them anyway. But yeah, that was, that was going to San Francisco, and we, we look at each other like, Why the hell did we do that? Everybody choice again. It's, yeah, you have, you have a goal, you've got to get somewhere no other way than to be lying down the back of a pickup truck.

William Harris 1:14:46

Everybody needs good stories like that, of things that you did when you were younger. And you go, why did we do that? And then you say, I'm glad we did. Yeah. I also understand you are fiercely competitive. Have. You ever take you that too far?

Jay Steinfeld 1:15:03

Well, I've never been asked that question. My wife would probably tell me, yes. Okay, I think I mean, I'm pretty good at sports, and I was playing ping pong, and, you know, she popped one up and I slammed it or something, which you would with when somebody gives you an open shot like that. And in the meantime, I was just sort of playing defensively, just keeping the rallies going. But I did that shot, and because it was there, I had to. I didn't have to, but that was probably taking it too far. That happened almost 20 years ago. I still hear about that shot. That's good. We'll be talking about ping pong or sports, or how competitive I am, and she'll bring

William Harris 1:16:03

that up. Well, I appreciate that. I like to be competitive. I'm sure I've probably done some things like that with my wife and pickleball or something like that too. I can maybe sometimes take things a little too far, but you don't mean to like the like you said, the ball pops up, and it's almost instinctive. You see the ball. Your eyes get big, and you just like, I gotta smash that thing. Yeah, that's that.

Jay Steinfeld 1:16:24

Is that what we were supposed to do with that shot? Yeah? Yeah. That is like, why are you even playing?

William Harris 1:16:31

Yep, um, Jay, I've really enjoyed getting to know you. I've learned so much from you, so much about you. If people wanted to work with you or they wanted to follow you, what is the best way for them to just follow and learn from you?

Jay Steinfeld 1:16:46

Best way to learn is to buy my book Lead from the Core. It was a Wall Street Journal bestseller, which was shocking, but it was so doing that is the best way to learn about the whole history. And there's lots of strategies and tactics in there. And connect with me on LinkedIn. I am active there. I respond to questions. I'm interested in helping out and giving back, which is why I'm on these boards, and why I teach, and really why I wrote the book in the first place is to try to give back and why I'm on not for profit boards as well. I mean, this is the time where you say I've got some skills. How do I apply these skills and continue to evolve, continue to experiment, continue to speak up, and all of that is fun. When I see other people successful and helping them be successful. That's my definition, again, of success for myself, helping people within my sphere of influence to get better. So why would I not do that? So connect with me. Contact me. I will respond. These really

William Harris 1:17:56

are your core values. You see it like you said, through everything that you're doing, Jay, I appreciate you sharing your time and your wisdom with us today and your knowledge. It's been a lot of fun getting to know you.

Jay Steinfeld 1:18:08

Thanks, William. Appreciate it.

William Harris 1:18:10

Thank you everyone for listening. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:18:15

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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