Alex Frommeyer - Co-Founder and CEO of Beam Benefits: Founder vs. CEO, Creating a Feedback Culture, and Building a Midwest Startup

Alex Frommeyer  00:00

You can see six inches in front of your face, you're just trying to survive, to discover the next thing. And so there's nothing more energizing to me than not knowing what's around the next corner and desperately wanting to find out.

Callan Harrington  00:15

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Alex Frommeyer. Alex is the co founder and CEO of Beam Benefits. Beam is a digitally led employee benefits company that offers dental, vision, life, disability, and supplemental health coverage. Today, Beam has raised over 200 million dollars in funding. You'll hear me refer to Alex by his nickname, Fro, throughout the episode, and this was a really fun conversation. We talked about the opportunities and challenges of building a startup in the Midwest. And I thought Fro gave a great take on this, both talking about what he went through, and how he sees the current landscape today, and I thought it was really interesting. We also dove into the difference between the role of the founder and the role of the CEO. I thought this was very interesting. And it really became crystal clear to me what those differences are after hearing him walk through this. I know this is a pretty common challenge with founders of scaling companies. And I thought he gave a great breakdown of both what those differences are, and what his transition as CEO was like. For as successful as Fro is, he's also one of the most down to earth people that I've met. When you listen to our conversation, it becomes obvious why that is. He is a big believer in both being self aware, and building a culture around feedback. Getting into this was my favorite part of the conversation, because I really believe that getting feedback is a gift. And I loved hearing the lengths that he goes to at Beam to make sure they have an environment that both supports and encourages the giving and receiving of feedback. I thought it was excellent. So with that, let's get to the show. Fro, welcome to the show, man. I'm excited to have you on.

Alex Frommeyer  02:43

Thanks for having me, a long time in coming. Glad we're doing it.

Callan Harrington  02:46

I know it. I know. So where I would love to start out, tell me the story of how you met Drive.

Alex Frommeyer  02:53

We were based in Louisville, Kentucky at the time, and the "we" is also not much to speak of. This is when Beam has one employee and our three co founders, so there's four of us total in the business, Beam is probably eighteen months old, maybe actually even a little longer. And we're in Louisville, which is a phenomenal town. I go back often, I'm actually due back there pretty soon, and a place I love, but this was, you know, very early in Louisville's startup scene, its tech ecosystem. And so there's a lot of interest at the time amongst the leaders of the startup ecosystem to invite more movers and shakers regionally and even nationally to Louisville to really boost and bolster and accelerate the startup activity happening in the city and show it off as well. And we had all started hearing in 2012, about this mysterious new venture capital firm that was based up in Columbus, Ohio, and was founded by a couple of former partners from Sequoia. And they had raised, especially at the time, especially for the Midwest, a boatload of money. The initial funding was 250 plus million. And those rumors were floating around, and then the news got even more interesting. A couple of people from Drive Capital were going to be at the Kentucky Derby, which happens the first Saturday of May every year. And this was a big part of Louisville's, I think, economic development strategy at the time was to leverage the global event of the Kentucky Derby to get people like, for example founders of Drive Capital, to show up to Louisville and then, you know, take advantage of their presence physically in the city to, you know, introduce them to companies and make connections and just deepen that connective tissue. Something that I think still happens today, and I think it's actually really clever, and really smart thing to do. Drive Capital was, we knew that a couple of the partners from Drive were going to be at a particular party the morning of the Derby, like a brunch party that happens every year. So I and a couple of my angel investors arrange for invites to this party, because we know who's throwing it. And my now wife, then girlfriend, Amelia, and I show up to this party. And, you know, one, maybe two mint juleps deep, decide to wander over to the little area where these two partners from Drive Capital were hanging out and chatting with folks. And I delivered what I think is the first, not elevator pitch, but mint julep pitch in startup history. And the mint julep pitch consisted of a company that aspired to go into dental insurance at the time, we were really a technology vendor for dental insurance companies, it was kind of our original business model. And that pitch earned us really a second audience, which was now in Columbus in front of and with the entire Drive team. And that really coalesced what became a summer, this is 2014 when all this happened, a summer's worth of trips up to Columbus, working on what became our series A fundraise. And ultimately, my co founders, and I'm moving to Columbus, where we've been ever since.

Callan Harrington  06:29

I love that story, because I've heard it's- what's so interesting is, it's not necessarily, you know, I've heard people went to the Kentucky Derby and then met their, you know, lead investor, but the story of, it's amazing how many times just trying to find yourself in the right room makes such a significant difference. Of course, I've done that in sales my entire career, but I've heard this now from the founding side so many times. I guess, here's a question that, that I have for you is, what were your thoughts? Was it just like, I have to hunt these guys down? I remember when they came. Just for our listeners, I can't understate how big of a deal that was for Columbus. And if you were invested in from Drive, and you were funded from Drive, that was a big deal. And of course, they've had such a significant presence here, just in general and outside the Midwest as a whole. But what was your- was your mission, this is the only two people we're trying to talk to, we're gonna wait for the right time, and when that time hits, we're pouncing on it? Or was it if it happens, it happens, you know, we're not really thinking about it too much?

Alex Frommeyer  07:37

At the risk of revealing too much about my personality, the idea that I would have left this brunch without talking to these two people is so like, I can't even tell you how small that probability is. It's not on the map. It was probably pretty awkward, if you were like omnisciently observing this, all I'm doing is just staring and looking at them the whole time. You know, there's the pretty girl at the dance. And you just got to talk to the pretty girl at the dance. And, from my perspective, the only scenario, the only outcome of this meeting, or this going to this party, attending this brunch, was not just meeting Drive Capital, it was there will be a transaction that comes from this. We'd needed to raise capital at that time. There was nothing like them in Louisville, in Kentucky, or in the Midwest, probably in the middle forty states of the US at the time. And so if you wanted to raise real capital, you basically needed to do it on the coasts. And Drive was the lone exception to that. My co founders and I were pretty convinced that we wanted ourselves to continue to be based in the middle of the country. And so for us, it was this was not a another shot on goal oh, too bad, it didn't work out. This was our chance to go from being total outsiders to the startup world and the venture capital world, to becoming legitimate insiders and having the capital and the capability to actually take a real home run swing earlier in our careers. And that was something that I think enticed us beyond just an itch to scratch and was very much a Drive Capital or bust scenario for us.

Callan Harrington  09:32

So that's pretty interesting. Was it, would you guys have continued to try to fundraise if you didn't get an A class investor like Drive?

Alex Frommeyer  09:39

Yeah, you know, I think, you know, if you zoom back to that period of time, there were basically three ways to get a deal done north of roughly a million dollars of proceeds. You could raise from Drive Capital, path A. You could move your company to New York, Bostin, California, maybe Seattle and Austin, and then raise money, you know, locally, since that's, you know, pretty much exclusively how it worked. You know, be physically near the investors, join those ecosystems, be legitimized inside of those ecosystems, and then raise capital. Or you could cobble together a million or a couple million bucks from high net worth individuals, small funds that existed at the time. You know, locally, there would have been, which, you know, we didn't know because we, we were in Kentucky, but you know, a Rev1 or Rev1 equivalent. The Ohio Tech Angel Fund existed, you know, you can cobble together capital, and maybe be able to hack together a million or two million dollars, and then hopefully show enough traction, to get to the size where you could raise money from real California VCs, but not have to relocate your business there. So much has changed. This is not that long ago, we're talking 2014. But the number of funds, the size of those funds, the number of seed funds, which was barely a concept back then. And there certainly were many options, you know, first round existed and not much else. Even Y Combinator at the time, it was still a very small check, it was like tens of thousands of dollars, if you were in Y Combinator. And the ecosystem was just so under built. And since it was pre COVID, there was a categorical belief that you needed to be physically located near the capitol in order to raise that capital, because nobody raised money virtually. There's very little precedent for it. So you, and there was a strong belief that in particular, if your company was not based in the Bay Area, you were amateurish, or there was no way you could build a real company of real size, of real outcome, without being located in the Bay Area. That's where all the talent was. That's where all the capital was. And so you were just probably not committed enough, which would have been the sentiment, if you were happily located in Louisville, Kentucky, or Columbus, Ohio at the time.

Callan Harrington  12:14

How's that changed? You know, of course, there are more funds. Do you feel, you know, the obvious answer is that there's still a significant advantage to being in one of those areas that you mentioned, San Francisco, New York, Austin, whatever, some of these, Boston, some of these big ones are st. Do you still feel that's a significant advantage? And if you're starting this from day one, are you still doing this in the Midwest? Or would you start this get the initial funding from one of those big areas, open a satellite office in Midwest? Which happens quite a bit, we're seeing that pop up, I see that pop up all the time now, where people put a second office in Colombus, especially in insurtech, because it's such an insurtech hotbed. What is your advice? I know you you mentor a lot of young founders, what is your advice to them in that scenario?

Alex Frommeyer  13:03

There's probably two things. There's a, which is an interplay that I spent a long time on, I spend a lot of my own mental energy on this, which is the difference between idealist thinking and realist thinking. There's a pragmatic answer to everything. And that's a big piece of how we've built our culture at Beam. Really starting with my co founders and I, we filter for what is pragmatic, and then what do we want to be true, what do we wish to be true? And those are often different answers. This is a good example of it, we would have pursued success at any cost, including moving the business to wherever the capital dictated us to move the business. And if that meant living in a place that we didn't really want to live in like San Francisco, we would have ultimately moved to San Francisco, that would, that would have been the pragmatic thing to do to get the capital that we needed to build the company that we wanted to build. And I would advise founders today accordingly. If that is the pragmatic thing to do, if that's the right thing for the business to do, then that's what the business should do. However, what we wanted to be true, the the ideal version of this was to build it where we wanted to be, and where we thought actually was best to build the company, which was in the Midwest. And what has changed, I think, from just seven, eight, nine, ten years ago, and today is there are so many examples now of companies like Beam that have been able to scale in smaller cities or cities that previously did not have real venture outcomes or venture returnable businesses. And if you zoom in on Columbus, for example, just a few years after we came to Columbus, CoverMyMeds already well on its way by the time we arrived in 2014, and exits for a billion plus to a major acquirer, a hometown homerun success story. And that I think inside of Columbus validated a lot of what Drive Capital was talking about with investing close to customers and investing in overlooked venture markets. And Matt Scanlan and his founding team, I think are great examples of people that were fantastic founders, entrepreneurs, and operators, and may or may not have ever themselves done what they did the way they did it, if they would have been located in a different place, or if the market would have been at a different time. And so I think it's this really interesting thought exercise to do now, in retrospect, a little bit, which is were all of the great tech wins on a seventy-five year basis, you know, post World War II to present day, were those wins because the people and the capital were coming together in places like Silicon Valley. And there wasn't anything else happening elsewhere. Or were there actually phenomenal founders and entrepreneurs everywhere that were never really able to flourish, or to scale to the degree that they otherwise could have, if they would have just happened to be located somewhere else. And I think both are a little bit true. I think there's absolutely some magic confluence of factors that placed Silicon Valley, for example, specifically where it is in space and time. And I think it's also true that there were always great entrepreneurs in Ohio, and many of them probably built ten million dollar businesses, but could have built hundred million dollar businesses or billion dollar businesses and just never were able to connect the talent, the market, and the capital together in that magical way to be able to make it happen, until just the past few years.

Callan Harrington  17:03

I tend to agree with that. I think one of the things that I saw just throughout the ecosystem in the Midwest was there was always a big focus on revenue, having good unit economics from day one. And really growing off of your own revenue, you may get, you know, a million, two million, in kind of initial capital. But the goal was just to get to cashflow positive and build what you said, you know, a ten, twenty million dollar business, and you weren't getting as much investment, especially until Drive came around, in moonshot goals, really, really, really, really, really big ideas. So what you're saying actually makes complete sense to me. So let's talk about that a little bit, right? Right out of college, moonshot idea in my eyes, you're going to build a toothbrush that tracks habits, and then ultimately turned this into an insurance company. Where did that come from?

Alex Frommeyer  17:53

It was a very first principles build that my two co founders and I became really obsessed with after for, about eighteen  months, running a services business. We were undergrads when we started our first company together. And keep in mind, I think, very important to our story, for all three of us, is that the moment we started a startup, we didn't know he was starting a startup. I didn't know what a startup was. I had never heard that phrase before. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't have a concept of what that was. And that gives you a sense of like, when you know, great ideas can come from anywhere. This is a good tactical example of that. We were really just trying to exercise a creative muscle and kind of escape our fate, as, you know, line level engineers in nameless, faceless corporations. And that led us on a path that spun wildly out of control in a good way, offering really cheap per hour labor attached to three really smart, hungry ambitious engineers. And so we were saying yes to everything. And we were probably pretty weird to the people that we were working with. Because we were doing technical writing, custom electronics design, CAD modeling. We were doing manufacturing consulting, websites, anything we could get our hands on, across a pretty wide spectrum of skills, both like hard and soft skills. If you owned a business or knew someone that owned a business, I was just drilling my sales pipeline, mostly just out of raw ambition to find evermore interesting work to do. I think the first couple of years of that services business got us really excited about having some experience under our belts to prove that we could build things, we could do some zero-to-one work. And pretty quickly we became interested in doing our own zero-to-one work. So we pretty quickly rotated to taking some of our time, and instead of doing client work we were trying to invent our own products. And at the time, one of the hottest companies in the healthcare market was Fitbit. And they've created, you know, a common everyday pedometer. But now it was internet connected. And that connectivity, which was really only possible because of the very recent proliferation of smartphones and Bluetooth embedded in those smartphones, it was just now possible to not just have a pedometer that worked, but one that actually could track in a live and persistent way and go deeper. We were really inspired by Fitbit, because it was like a hardware device, and my co founders and I are hardware engineers by training. There was a mobile component to it, which was the thing to be working on at the time. I mean, everybody was trying to build an app for something, right? Foursquare was probably the coolest company in the world at the time. It was for healthcare and for health outcomes. We were very inspired by the idea that you could build technology that could help people lead healthier lives and change habits in a way that could compound in a really valuable way over a really long period of time, to help people be more productive and healthier and happier. And we became pretty inspired by Fitbit. And then the final leg of the stool for what created the beginning of Beam. And the first connected toothbrush was we had a lot of family members in dentistry. And one of our clients during that services business that we were running was a dental manufacturing company that just happened to be located in Louisville, Kentucky, and we did a bunch of work for them and learned a bunch about, you know, dental product building inside their manufacturing machine. And all of that came together, and we're like, well wait, this is a really obvious thing to do. The first principles build on why the common everyday toothbrush should also be internet connected, so you can gamify and get credit for dental hygiene and preventative care in the context of dentistry, to us was a really obvious application. And it was just about getting the tooling right to be able to do it in an affordable and scalable way. Which proved to be harder than we thought. But it was still something that made a lot of first principles sense to us even back then.

Callan Harrington  22:17

So you've got the idea, you guys are going down this path. What did you find to be the biggest challenge going from zero-toone?

Alex Frommeyer  22:26

The fact that we knew nothing. And it goes back to what I said earlier about not even knowing that we were a startup. So we didn't know that you can get capital to help grow your startup. Because we didn't- we didn't know investors. I only broadly even understood what that meant, and certainly didn't know anyone like that. And so we didn't know there was, you know, a capital market to help us with our idea. And there were a lot of capital costs involved building physical products, going zero-to-one means cutting molds to shoot plastic. And that was a design challenge which costs money, and that meant design, you know, CAD modeling software, which costs money, and then that men prototype molds, which costs money and then getting, you know, real mold made, so you can build at scale and setting up a manufacturing line. And so we knew the basics of the product development process, but we could not connect that to the capital we needed. So the services business really became the early unlock for us, because we were doing service contracts and keeping all of those profits off to the side. We weren't taking any of that ourselves, nothing came off the table, nothing, no salary. And we were using that money, we were banking it, to be able to buy first some CAD modeling software. And then we use that to do more client work more quickly, to make more money faster. So that way we could afford our first molds. And that then created our ability to build the first connected toothbrush, the Beam Brush. We built the first version of that almost completely with our own capital from the services business. So for us going zero-to-one was challenging, because we couldn't earn the next step of the product development process until we had done more services work to get the money we needed to make it happen. And so looking back on it now, I have no idea where the time came from, because we were running effectively two businesses concurrently. And we were all three of us were in our masters of engineer program as well. So we were full time students. Two of the three of us had part time jobs, and then we were running effectively two startups simultaneously, a services company and a product company. I'm not sure I slept for an eighteen month period in 2012 and 2013. But I've also never had more fun since. I mean, I think it's like, it will be the most fun eighteen months of my entire life, because of what we accomplished and everything that happened in a really compressed timeframe. That to us was like, we were just, you know, fog of war, right, you can see six inches in front of your face, you're just trying to survive, to discover the next thing. And so there's nothing more energizing to me than not knowing what's around the next corner and desperately wanting to find out.

Callan Harrington  25:39

When did you find out?

Alex Frommeyer  25:40

Late 2012, things really started to come together. We had produced the first Beam Brush. And so we were finally able to, you know, really test in market, a live product, you know, a Fitbit equivalent for a toothbrush at the time. And we'd started attracting attention as well from press and media, we were kind of hot fodder in the the tech press for being kind of an interesting thing, right, you know, a toothbrush that's connected is kind of an absurd sounding idea, especially back then. And for us, it was fun, because we were doing something tucked away in Louisville, Kentucky not knowing, you know, our left hand from our right hand, but all of a sudden, TechCrunch wanted to write about us, and like, oh, that's really cool. We also attracted a small amount of investment capital, we're talking a six digit number here, that was the capital that was available in the local angel community at the time. And we had also started attracting attention from dental insurance companies. They agreed that there was an opportunity in taking the data of preventative dental care. And thinking of that, as an underwriting factor, wouldn't you like to know of your insured audience, who's taking care of their teeth every day and who's not, right? That's great risk selection capabilities for who might have a cavity in the future and who might not have a cavity in the future. And so we were also seeing the first inklings of Beam not being just a consumer product, but one that could distribute through a channel relationship, like an insurance business, and that there was a business model that could go beyond just transacting a toothbrush. And that was what really got me fascinated and ultimately created the strategy to not just sell to dental insurance companies, but to become one ourselves, was business model design. To see a business model where a dental insurance contract, which is reoccurring revenue, a theoretically infinite lifetime, for a customer, to bake inside of it value added services and products, like connected toothbrushes, that could then become a part of a differentiated insurance offering. I thought that was fascinating. So as we learned more about how these insurance companies worked, and what made them go and what they cared about. We became more and more interested in building our own dental insurance company.

Callan Harrington  28:22

That's really interesting. I never knew Beam started from a services business, because I love that. I love the services business to start to found a company, found a tech company from the services business, such a great model to go by, especially if you don't want to take capital from day one. And I'm not saying there's a right or wrong way to do it. I just think it's a great model to go after. So one of the things I'm super curious to talk about is, and I know you had a great, I believe it was a TechCrunch, or it was TechCrunch or CrunchBase. I can't remember what the article was. But you talked about going from a founder to a CEO. And I would love to talk about, you know, how you see those two roles as different. What precipitated you even starting to notice that those two roles are different. And what I think is really interesting is this whole idea of, you know, it sounds like your mindset was, we're going to work really hard, we're going to keep trying to solve problems, and then we're just going to see where we're at. Is that almost what happened with this scenario of going from founder to CEO, where you just had to take a step back and look at that and say, okay, I've got to make some changes here in order for us to- in order to be the right leader of this company to the next stage. Walk us through that. What did that look like?

Alex Frommeyer  29:40

Something changes in a business as it perhaps reaches product market fit-ish, where the company is no longer good enough to persist under a founder's tutelage and not a CEO's. And what that means tactically is that a company is not going to be built, in my view, from a founder. A CEO, their job is to build the company, systems processes, repeatability scalability, teams of teams, installed managers that know how to build teams themselves, functional areas, clear roles in the scopes of roles, stuff, that's all obvious from a CEO's vantage point. But a founder is zero-to-one, creation, building a product, solving a problem in a market for a customer, and getting a business or getting that product to the place where a business can be built around it. Those two concepts are often intertwined. I was just with a prominent local founder and CEO earlier this week, actually, and we were talking about this, and he said, something along the lines of, you know, I think it's interesting that, you know, we always talk about our title as being, you know, founder and CEO, or co founder and CEO of our businesses, what does the founder there actually mean? And it really gets at this concept where the founder part of our journey is over pretty soon. Beam's in its tenth year, for example. I don't think I've been the founder, or I don't think I've been doing the founder role, for roughly seven or so of those years now. I've been the CEO for the past seven years. I don't think I've really been doing any, anything that would be considered part of the founder role, but it's always a part of your identity in the business, right? Because of those first three years, there wouldn't be the next seven. Right? So it's a very necessary part of the journey. The CEO transition point, I think it's different for every company, and it's different for every person and personality that's kind of going through this transition. For me, I got pulled aside, in a really epic move that was really on culture, actually. I got pulled aside by two of my lieutenants that were hired from the outside, at Beam. So not my co founders, but executives that I'd hired, two of my direct reports, this is 2018, I think. And they asked me to grab a drink with them at No Soliciting one day after work. I though, this is going to be interesting, I don't think I've ever been asked to like an off site meeting by two of my direct reports. They have something to say. And they did, and what they said was, put differently, but it was basically, hey, Fro, you are still acting like the founder of the business, we need you to be the CEO of the business. And two big observations from that meeting- it was probably a two or three hour meeting, it was incredible. The first observation is, it is incredibly, it was an incredible tactical demonstration of what I think of as a very distinctive cultural axiom, and something I'm, I think, particularly proud of building at Beam, which is that two of my direct reports that I have technical power over, were willing to do that. Because they took meaningful risks in whatever my reaction would be, not going according to whatever their plan was, whatever they had in their head. And they did it because they wanted the business to run differently, and in their opinion, better. And so they were optimizing for what makes the business better, not what makes my boss happy. And so they were willing to give some pretty pointed and tough feedback to their boss, for the betterment of the business. I will always respond positively to that sort of intent. And something I like just enormously respect in anyone, and that's very germane to our culture at Beam. It was a great tactical demonstration of that.

Callan Harrington  34:15

How do you foster that in your culture? What did you need to do for them to be comfortable with doing that? And how do you maintain that as the company grows?

Alex Frommeyer  34:26

Great question. There's two steps. It's extremely simple and very difficult to do well, as all great advice says. Here are the two steps: tell people that it's safe to do something like that. In other words, set expectations. Our culture at Beam is a culture that prizes feedback, and that feedback can be- it's got to be real, and it's got to assume best intent. But that feedback can go in any direction, up or down or across in the business. And it can go to anyone in the business, no matter how powerful or important. And if it is for the purposes of helping the company win, and succeed, and achieve its goals, and to better our customers, and to meet our OKRs and create the best company possible, then you will be safe in giving that feedback. And, in fact, rewarded for- not only will you not be punished, you'll be rewarded for that, step one. Next, step two, which is the harder of the two steps is, then you have to back it up. And what that means is, again, very simple, but very hard to pull off in reality, which is, when that feedback happens, and it comes to your doorstep, and you, like any other human, wants to react to it in an emotional way or a in an ego-based way, instead, you have to exercise the discipline to actualize what you say your culture is about, and actually achieve what you say your culture is about. And you have to find ways to not only not punish, but reward, people for making those- for sharing that feedback and making those overtures about the business. And that often looks like people that end up being leaders, if they aren't leaders, or being promoted and scaling inside the business, because they are the ones that are willing to say what is true in a first principles way, and what is true and what is best for the business, and are willing to do the work to not just point out a problem, but help lead or achieve the solution to those problems. Those are the people that win in the business. And so what we've been able to foster at Beam, without a perfect track record, to be clear, but you know, this is something I think we do exceptionally well, overall, is starting at the top. And starting from very early days of the business when we were building out teams and really starting to scale the business. We have not just said that we like feedback, and we like building from first principles, and hearing the real truth, not what you think people want to hear, but what they actually need to hear. But then when it happens, we thank people for it. And we reward them for it. And we prove that it was safe to do it, because they stay in the business. Nobody removes them or demotes them or moves them out of the way, like nobody gets hurt by how they act, as long as it was done with positive intent and in a way that is truly meant to help the business ultimately succeed. And so in a moment, like the one I'm describing, two of my key lieutenants deliver that sort of feedback directly to me, and then everything was fine. And not only that, but I took that advice and that feedback, and changed my leadership style, pretty fundamentally as a result of it. It then creates a story inside the business, because other people as they hear about it, and learn about it, and they get told about it, they then realize, oh, this is not this is not a bullshit thing that Beam like feedback, this is real. And here's a story to prove it. Those two guys that came in and delivered that feedback to Fro, Fro listened to them. And then he agreed, and changed, and evolved as leader. And so now I know I can do that, and I can do that with Fro, but I can also do it with others in the business as well.

Callan Harrington  38:51

That's interesting. So the key, what I'm hearing here in that second part, is that has to be shared. We have to share those stories where we acted on the feedback that we received. Not hiding from it. Because you could have easily hid from that, right? Like, that's something that you could have said as CEOs, okay, this is good feedback, I appreciate you guys bringing it to me, and then make your changes, do it quietly. But for you, if I'm hearing you, it was important to- this has to be broadcasted, so everybody else knows that this is how we do things here. Is that correct?

Alex Frommeyer  39:24

So correct that, as recently as yesterday, I did this exact thing. We gather all of our leaders at Beam, everybody running a functional area, so directors, VPS, every week and we do a staff meeting. And in this week's, yesterday's, meeting I shared a 360 that I did recently. This is an objectively risky move. Very few people that do 360s share them. I shared it with our team, the five highest ranked people in the business, and then spend an hour talking about my blind spots, areas of opportunity, and the things that came up and resonated with me most by doing the 360. And I shared that very strategically with all of these leaders for the exact same reason that the, you know, our culture builds and gets reinforced by these moments, which is, if I'm one of those twenty-five people in the meeting yesterday, hopefully, I've learned a couple things. One is that our CEO is not some sort of deity that is without fault or weaknesses. And importantly, he knows that too, because he literally just showed me and talked about it for an hour. So he's not perfect. And he doesn't think he's perfect. So he's self aware, great. I would also learn that how we do our work here in this company, is when we have blind spots and areas of opportunity and weaknesses, we aren't afraid to talk about them, we aren't afraid to share, we aren't afraid to point at those things and name them, we aren't afraid to be real, and authentic, and vulnerable. And the final thing I would learn is, the next time I see the weakness or area of vulnerabilities that Fro was sharing, he specifically told me to remind him of it or to point at it and say, hey, you did a 360 review with me, and you told me that if I ever act that way around you or display these behaviors and these characteristics, the things that you want to work on, you told me to let you know, like mention this and point at it and say, hey, this is you doing that thing again. And so now I feel totally comfortable, totally safe doing it. Because I was like literally instructed to do so directly by the CEO. And I love all of those things, I love all of the potential results that come from just this one simple meeting. So I consider it a phenomenal investment of, you know, an hour of my time. Because I also expect a fifth thing to come from that meeting, which is that everything was pointed about my 360. And how people can help me manage and grow and develop with my area of opportunity. But I would now expect some selection of those twenty-five people to also themselves pursue getting a 360 and sharing their 360 with their peers, and maybe their manager and themselves also investing in this, this common language of the 360 and the common, you know, process of self improvement, and also being willing to be vulnerable and authentic, and all those things as well. So, to me, I love these moments, because it's like us as our leaders at our best, is just a very authentic pursuit of getting better every day. And there's, I think, something just very inspirational about that.

Callan Harrington  43:13

I completely agree. For any of our listeners that aren't familiar with the term 360, essentially, a 180 is pretty common, and that's the- to use an easy example, that's a manager giving feedback to a direct report. And a 360 is, the manager has to give that feedback to the direct report, direct report report has to give feedback to the manager, as an example. There's tons of ways you can do this, you can do this with peers or anybody else. But you know, I think that's excellent. And for a big reason why is, and you hit on this a number of times, but one of the things is, it's hard to get feedback the higher up you go. And the bigger the company gets, and the more you are removed from the front lines, it is so difficult to get feedback. And when you put that 360 in place, it's a great way to give feedback up. And now that's all fine and good that you're getting feedback up. If you're not doing what you're talking about, and you're not making everybody comfortable with that, then they're just not going to give you great feedback. And that feedback is going to be useless, and you're not going to be able to use it. So if you don't create that culture, that environment, you know, you're not going to maximize what you want to get out of that. That's essentially what I'm hearing is that right?

Alex Frommeyer  44:28

Yeah. When I was a kid, the kids in my class that sucked up to the teacher, you know, I just always found that like, it was so disingenuous, it was so transparent. And I mean, I'm like a fourth grader or whatever. And I'm like, come on, everybody knows what you're doing. And, you know, I guess my own pet peeve around ever wanting to be seen to be that type of person, or be on the receiving end. In this case, you know, I'm the teacher effectively, at the company, and the idea that someone in the business is going to get rewarded by sucking up to me, telling me what I want to hear, making me feel like it's all okay when it's clearly not, you know, hiding the truth, sweeping the problems under the rug. I sometimes call this the Midas touch, you know, people always, they always seem to be around incredibly successful things, and projects, and people, all the time. And then when I know they're associated with something that's not going well, they just never seem to bring it up. It's the weirdest thing. And those are people who I just don't want to work with, just full stop. And most people find themselves really unsuccessful and beaten, not because they're not great people or, you know, talented, or anything. But stylistically, I deeply resonate with people who say, I screwed that up, I will try harder next time, I learned these three things, I'm going to do these three things differently as a result, will you let me try again? I've never said no to that. Other people that have, you know, chosen a path that frankly, gets rewarded in bigger corporate environments, typically, which is associate yourself with people of power, associate yourself with initiatives and projects that are going well in the business. And then you will be promoted and rewarded for your association and proximity to those things, and find ways to disassociate yourself from things that are not going well, the division that is you know, margins are going down or the one that you know, sales are flat or whatever. Disassociate yourself from that, do not try to fix it. Because if you fix it and fail, then you will be associated with the failure, and you will be punished for that. And so those people get really good, they don't even realize they're doing it, most of the time, they get really good at backing away from the fires. But what our jobs are in growth companies is to run toward the fires. And so I want to reward people for attempting to put the fire out, even if it doesn't work. And it often doesn't right away. There's far more problems than there are, you know, capacity to deal with them all. So we want to make sure that we are allowing people to authentically attempt to put out the fires, and to grow, and develop, and learn, and attach that DNA to their own experience, as well as to the company's aggregate experience. And so you can't punish people for failing, you have to reward them for the attempt, and for being real about what they learned in the attempt.

Callan Harrington  47:32

I think that's excellent. And I've never heard it described as the Midas touch. But that is such a good description, because things like it's impossible to have a perfect track record in a high growth company. You can't do it, things break all the time, it's just the nature of the business. So that's such a good example. Fro, last question I have for you. If you can have a conversation with your younger self, age totally up to you, what advice would you give them?

Alex Frommeyer  48:00

Let's do age twenty. That's like roughly a junior year, undergrad. Me at twenty was pretty rudderless. But I looked quite successful for my age at the time. And what I mean by that is, I was really involved on campus, in student government, I was an RA, in one of the dorms, which was actually really fun. I was a pretty highly visible and pretty popular student, both amongst the like student population, and even with like administrators. So I would have been on the first name basis with, you know, the president of the university, half the board of trustees, the, you know, leaders of student affairs and a lot of the, you know, kind of like administrative staff of the university, just because of how involved I was. You know, I was always doing like, the, whenever they did videos where they had, like students, you know, doing things in the B roll that they would run in commercials and billboards and stuff, I was always in those things. And so I had a lot of social status, if you will, in the context of this, you know, little mini microcosm of society called, you know, the university, and was pretty proud of that. And I was twenty, so, you know, I didn't realize the world's larger than the University of Louisville. And so I'm like, hey, this is very sweet. And yet I was not particularly happy, I guess, in a way, because I was also quite confused and disenfranchised about my career options. I was really succeeding as an engineering student, but I always felt a little bit of an outsider, in that I was solid in in technical skill and thinking, but through my co founders, and then through other classmates of mine, I really understood the difference between their mental capacity for being a phenomenal engineer, and what I was, which was going to be closer to the average. But I also sensed that I had other skills, other things to offer, beyond the the raw technical stuff, and just had no idea what to do with it. And so I think my advice, knowing what I know now, was I was really bothered by this fact where I felt like I was succeeding at things that felt very natural to me, like I used to give campus tours, and I gave one hell of a good tour. For $6.75 an hour, I was crushing my conversion rate to prospective students becoming students. Because it was a really compelling tour, I invested a lot of my time, it was not about the money, obviously, I was investing a lot of my time and really perfecting my tour, because I just took great pride in making the sale. And I didn't realize it until later I was learning incredible public speaking skills, learning how to talk to the parents, and the students, change my sales pitch based on the profile of the students that I was walking campus with that day. So if they were prospective biology students, I'd spend more time on that product campus and go in deeper into that subject matter. If I had more engineers in the group, maybe I was giving a tour to some prospective athletes, I would change the tour. I was learning really good sales skills. But I had no idea. I couldn't name that as a thing that mattered because it didn't show up in my GPA. And it was very indirect, it was very esoteric. And so I was, what I didn't realize is I was actually gaining and learning a lot during that period of time, but I felt unsettled about what I was going to do post grad. And the advice I'd give myself, and frankly, anyone else in a similar situation, is trust the process, fall in love with the process, even better, which is I was loving that specific stuff I was doing, I just didn't know how it was going to show up in my professional career. And I was very ambitious, and I wanted to be successful, and should have been more comfortable just falling in love with the things that I was enjoying doing, and letting them take me to what I was going to be naturally successful at, which came together not that long later anyway, but it's a good reminder that I'm probably doing that right now. I'm probably gaining skills right now that I don't realize how they're going to show up to help me later. But now I just love the process. So I have no problem just continuing to pursue the things that are giving me, that I'm deriving joy from and energy from, and then trusting that later, those skills will add up to you know, help Beam or helping me in my personal life achieve the things that I want to achieve.

Callan Harrington  52:54

I think that's such good advice, because I was very similar throughout my- especially in the early part of my career, just so focused on the outcome. And now I, you know, I lead sales teams and revenue, like I did always carry the bags, like I had to focus on the outcome. But I didn't- it wasn't till later where I really started to say, do you even, are you interested in what gets you to the outcome? And following a lot of that. So I think that is such good advice. And that was a big turn career turning point for me personally. Fro, this has been awesome, man. I loved hearing your story. I had so much fun getting to download. And there's so many good takeaways on here. I appreciate you coming on the show.  Thanks for having me. This was super fun. So appreciate it.  Absolutely. I loved it.  I hope you enjoyed Fro and I's conversation. I loved hearing how he fosters a feedback culture, and I think it is so important. If you want to learn more about Fro, you could find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you can find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I'll see you next week.