"Leading Explosive Growth" with Dan Bane, Retired President and CEO of Trader Joe's

[Music] Welcome to the Leadership LICYM, the CEO's virtual mentor. Now, here's your host, Tom Linquist. Glad to have you back in the Leadership LICYM where we bring you direct access to top CEOs and directors of boards. In an interview format, the provides insight on situational issues that confront CEOs every day. It is a CEO's virtual mentor. Welcome to episode 28, season 9 of a CEO's virtual mentor. I'm joined in the program by Dan Bain, the retired CEO of Trader Joe's, who led the company through one of the most remarkable periods of growth in modern retail. Under his leadership from 2001 to 2023, Trader Joe's expanded from 150 stores to an incredible 547, all while staying true to its unique identity and core values. This episode is not just a conversation about Dan Bain's remarkable leadership at Trader Joe's. It's also an exploration of how his approach aligns with the framework laid out in Stephen Bragg's seminal book, "Managing Explosive Corporate Growth." Bragg's framework emphasizes the critical balance of strategy, culture, and operational efficiency during periods of rapid expansion, an equilibrium that Dan exemplified throughout his tenure. As we juxtapose Dan's real-world decisions with Bragg's theoretical insights will delve into how Trader Joe's navigated the complexities of geographic expansion, product development, and cultural preservation to achieve extraordinary growth. This discussion offers a unique perspective for leaders seeking to manage and thrive amidst the challenges of explosive corporate growth. The program is divided into five parts. Part one, a brief history of Trader Joe's, Part two, Dan Bain's experience leading to Trader Joe's, Part three, explosive growth and key management considerations, Part four, becoming CEO and the Trader Joe's seven core values formation, and Part five, managing explosive growth reprised, lessons learned, and parting thoughts. Before we join the conversation with Mr. Bain, I want to express our special thanks to the clients of Lyceum Leadership Consulting that have enabled us to bring you this podcast, NTU, ladies and gentlemen, our devoted listenership, for your continued encouragement and programming suggestions. And let me mention that we cannot improve without your feedback and suggestions. Please take a moment and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favorite podcast platform, and rate us with your feedback. We'll join our conversation right after this. I have the great pleasure to be in Atlanta with Mr. Dan Bain, retired CEO of Trader Joe's, a company that he led through arguably one of the most extraordinary periods of growth in modern retail. Under his leadership as CEO from 2001 to 2023, Trader Joe's grew from 150 stores to 547. Dan Hale's originally, from Orange County, California, with a childhood filled with surfing and baseball. He attended the University of Southern California on an academic scholarship that was also influenced by baseball, and played under coaching legend and mentor, Rod Dato. He graduated from SC in 1969 with a BS in Accounting and Joint Public Accounting firm, Pete Marwick Mitchell, in the era of still the big eight accounting firms. He had the dramatic experience as CFO of Standard Brands Paint Company, and leading it through bankruptcy in the early 90s that ultimately resulted in a sale of the company. He joined certified grocers of California in 1994 as CFO, and was attracted to Trader Joe's in 1998 as regional president of the Western region, and then became CEO in 2001. Although Dan's educational and professional foundations and upbringing were in Accounting and Finance, Dan's experience goes beyond the numbers. Dan's leadership is actuated by values, culture, and vision that was tested through two dramatic corporate situations in his career, leading through the bankruptcy of Standard Brands Paint Company as CFO, and leading the explosive growth of Trader Joe's as CEO. Welcome to a CEO's Virtual Mentor Podcast, Dan. Ikuton, glad to be here. Let's begin with the history of Trader Joe's. Sure, Trader Joe's started with Joe, Joe Colom, who was a classic entrepreneur, and Joe had the idea that first he wanted to start with convenience stores. It was a great idea to have customers be able to buy things that they were just thinking about, and they could stop by, and he therefore called the company Pronto Markets. Joe Colom founded Pronto Markets in 1958, inspired by the rising trend of convenience shopping. It was a promising concept that tapped into the needs of busy customers, but Colom was a nimble forward thinker. When he visited Texas and saw the dominance of 7/11, he immediately recognized the looming threat. And he said, "Oh goodness, I've got a company that's going to be eaten alive by 7/11." And so he tried to rethink his thought process about retailing, and Joe was a very thoughtful, brilliant Stanford grad, and he was aware that customers were going to be traveling. And he saw the 747 taking people to Europe, and he thought customers would want the kinds of products they saw when they were traveling in Europe. And so he had this idea of for Trader Joe's, which he started in 1967, the first store on a royal boulevard in Pasadena, California. Still there today, the same exact store. And I've got, at home, a great picture of that store. Two weeks before it opened, the parking lot's not even got anything on, no asphalt in the parking lot at all. And the sign says Trader Joe's market, "Lickers." And so what Joe had was an idea to marry a liquor store with a health food store. And it was a store where he could buy clothes out, wines up in Napa, or in France, and bring them in for customers at great values. And it was very popular, but it took some time and some effort to get customers in. There's a classic story of one of the managers of that store at that time who ultimately became the president of the company when I ran it as CEO who was out in the middle of a royal boulevard in a guerrilla suit, and a sign that says, "Stop to Trader Joe's." Fortunately, these days we don't have to do that anymore because it's a very popular store. But it started off as Joe, great entrepreneur, classic thinker wanting to have a store that was popular with people of the time, travelers of the time who wanted to find new things. By the late 1970s, Trader Joe's had grown to 26 stores all located in Southern California. While Colombe had cultivated a passionate team and a loyal customer base, he seemed reluctant to expand beyond the region. Perhaps the growth at the time was limited by Joe Colombe's preferences. The interesting thing was Joe as a classic entrepreneur sort of liked to keep the major decisions to himself. He viewed it as his company. He had 26 stores and he was sort of stuck. If you look back at what was going on, I think Joe as a classic entrepreneur had developed this cadre of people who were disciples of his, mesmerized by the guy, wanted to follow him. A number of them became wine connoisseurs, things like that, following Joe's footsteps. But Joe, as that entrepreneur, was convinced that the company wouldn't work out of Southern California. He was very paranoid about going to certain other regions. If he follows some of the things Joe said after he sold the company, which he did in 1979, he said, "You know, I really wasn't looking for a big opportunity." And my review of that as a classic entrepreneur, Joe, was, is I don't think he really wanted it to travel that much. He didn't want to drive to stores in other states or even Northern California. And so he convinced himself that it wouldn't work outside of San Diego, LA, Santa Barbara. There was a line that you couldn't cross. In the context of growth, it reveals a classic impediment to growth, that is the CEO themselves. In 1979, Joe Cologne sold Trader Joe's to Theo Albrecht, owner of Aldi Nord. This marked a turning point in the company's history. Under the new ownership, Trader Joe's gained the financial stability and strategic vision needed for broader expansion. Cologne's original vision, providing high quality unique products at great value, remained intact, but the company was now poised to grow beyond its Southern California roots. That brings us up to the inflection point in the growth of Trader Joe's. Let's take a break and we'll return for part two and provide context for Dan Baines leadership through his career leading up to joining Trader Joe's and becoming CEO of Trader Joe's in 2001. Stay tuned. We're back for part two to provide context for Dan Baines leadership through his career leading up to joining Trader Joe's and becoming CEO of Trader Joe's in 2001. Here's Dan Baines. I was at Standard Brands Paint and I started off at Public Accounting at Pete Marwick Mitchell, which became KPMG. One of my clients was Standard Brands Paint Company and they had gone through a debt borrowing situation under Michael Milken at the time, was trying to make the company purchase proof so that they could have a sort of a way to keep people from buying the company. We had a lot of assets, real estate assets and stores and as I came in the front door, as the CEO, I was hired to try to help them manage the debt that they had taken on and figure things out. I did an analysis and discovered that we had about five years to turn the operations of the company so that we could pay the debt or else we'd have to start selling assets and that's about what happened. So the company ended up having to go into a chapter 11 process. The positive of that was that the creditors committee and the people ended up hiring me to run the company for that year and it was a really exciting time to change the company back from a home decorating focus to a paint company focus and I got very interested in retail at the time. The one thing that I learned out of that is I wanted to be in retail where customers came often and when I translated that all back it turned out into the best thing I could be in was grocery because you saw customers weekly if you were good. So I wanted to get in the grocery business and the next stop was that I got hired by certified grocers, a major wholesaler in California, Southern California primarily to independent grocers. So I got to know all the independent grocers. I was sort of their consultant at the time, help them grow, help them figure out what kind of systems they needed, help them understand where they were going and I was also the CFO of the wholesaler. That let me know the different people in the grocery business and received a call from John Shields about what I'd be interested in talking about Trader Joe's and I said yes. John Shields was the successor CEO to Joe Colombe. After selling Trader Joe's to Theo Albrecht in 1979, Colombe remained with the company to continue leading it as CEO for several more years. Colombe eventually stepped down as CEO in 1988 passing the leadership to John Shields who began the company's national expansion. And why did you say yes at that time? Why was that not? Well, I knew Trader Joe's for a long time. We had known Joe. My wife was the auditor for Trader Joe's. She was at KPMG at the time. She was the auditor for Trader Joe's. So I knew Joe and I knew John. Joe lived about what I used to say was a drive in a nine iron. It's now two drives away from my house in Pasadena. So we knew both of them for a long time. And I loved the company. It was a real friend of Trader Joe's at the time. So it was a real opportunity that I was excited about. You came in as president of the Western region. What was John looking for when you recruited Dan? When John hired me, he said, "You know, I'm going to retire in two years and I want you to come in and compete with one other guy who was running the East Coast region. And one of these is going to become the CEO. So I knew it was a competition coming in the door. And it was one that was interesting for me because I was running the biggest region. So I took the job and started to act like I was going to be the new guy." I see. Did the person running the Eastern region also have a finance background or was that unique and was that something that John saw as an advantage or had questions about? From my standpoint, you know, having the finance background was really good because it let me figure things out pretty quickly. I could look at information and understand it. I could look at the store P&L and understand what was going on in that store. But I had to see it as well. But coming in, the guy who was running the East Coast had grown up in a merchandising background. It was really a good guy. He was the person that John hired or didn't hire. He was there and John had him go to the East Coast and just jumped to Boston and tried to start basically Trader Joe's as almost a new company in the East Coast, which was an idea that I probably I wouldn't have agreed with, but it worked. Let's take a break. We'll be right back after this with part three, "Explosive Growth and Key Management Considerations." We're back with part three, "Explosive Growth and Key Management Considerations." It's instructive throughout this part three of the program to provide a framework for leading in an explosive growth environment. This framework is from the excellent book written by Stephen M. Bragg in 1998 called "Managing Explosive Corporate Growth." Bragg provides practical guidance on navigating periods of rapid expansion and implementing effective management strategies across various functional areas of the company. It's fascinating to see how seamlessly Dan Baines leadership at Trader Joe's aligns with the principles. Bragg emphasizes the importance of balancing strategy, culture, and operational efficiency during periods of rapid expansion, a balance that Dan not only achieved, but exemplified. Of three possible growth strategies, acquisition, geographic expansion, product development-based growth, Dan pursued two of three, geographic expansion, and product development-based growth. But interestingly, some would posit that geographic expansion is only effective when based on a branded and reputable product or service. Adding in the criticality of its product to Trader Joe's geographic growth almost trebles the challenge because the entire company must figure out how to develop, acquire, and distribute new products, and an extraordinarily fast clip. In part three, we'll delve deeper into Dan's approach. The geographic expansion required meticulous planning to ensure that Trader Joe's experience remain consistent across diverse regions, while product development demanded innovation at every level, from sourcing and branding to distribution and customer engagement. We rejoined Dan as he picks up on John Shield's recruitment as the successor CEO to Joe Calome in 1988. The new owners were very into growth, and so they encouraged Joe to hire a friend of his, a guy who was a Stanford classmate named John Shields, and John had grown up in Macy's and Mervans primarily from the buying side. But John, very intelligent guy, again a Stanford MBA type guy. So John analyzed the company and came up with ideas about how to grow. And John's principal concept was to have growth be able to happen by decentralizing a lot of decisions. Applying Bragg's framework, the need to balance two competing requirements in successful geographic expansion is key. On one side is delegating and decentralizing to manage rapid transitions required across new stores and products and to reduce bottlenecks. On the other side is keeping span of control somewhat tight, to provide adequate and experienced supervision to give newly hired personnel guidance and training, whereas releasing span of control to allow decentralized and localized decision making is a delicate process. So John executed the idea of the captain who is the store manager runs the ship. So the captain could make decisions about what types of products we had in the store, how to order all of the hiring decisions were made at the store. So the store became easy to grow in other parts of the state or other parts of the U.S. if you had a qualified captain to run the store. So that decentralization, which Joe was unwilling to do, John decided that was the way to go. The owners like that and they said, John, you're the new CEO. And so John became the CEO and in my mind it was the perfect two CEOs. I was the third. Joe is the entrepreneur with the ideas about how to develop trader Joe's and John gave us the classic ability to grow the company by decentralizing. And John also was the author of a training process. We ended up calling Trader Joe's University, TJU. And what we did was we decided training was critical because we had to have that captain able to run the ship. And so we couldn't grow any faster than we had captains that were ready to go and were willing to go to those places to run those new stores. Yeah, that's interesting. You say that, and it seems like John was focused on span of control in that growth. And that is a company expanding into a number of stores or territories or regions. They have to keep the span of control quite small because personnel requires that training. It seems like under John's leadership the focus was there to train and develop personnel and give them authority on a local store level. Absolutely. So as a captain in the store, you had a lot of control. You couldn't change the name of the store. You couldn't change the color motif. It's red and white. You know, those types of things. But almost all the things about running this store, it was like it was your own franchise. And even to the point of the compensation, there was a sizable bonus for a very successful captain running a store. So that gave captains the idea that they needed, if they wanted to make more money, they were incentive to go to run a bigger store, make it a higher volume store, keep growing, and for themselves, their own bonus, their own compensation would grow because they were paid a percentage, not a precise percentage, but they made money if the store made more money. And you mentioned another thing there. It's both span of control and then the delegation further down the chain of command is sometimes the CEO and their decision making, wanting all decisions to flow through them. They end up potentially being the biggest bottleneck and it sounds like John resolved that, but one interesting story about John. I joined the company I did a very good analysis of what I thought in the Western region, which was the older stores and more profitable stores. I did an analysis of what I thought should be looked at and worked at and I produced about a 12-page paper for John and I sent it to him and I didn't hear anything back from him for weeks. And I figured, Cully, he probably lost the paper. So I brought another copy and I went in and sat down with him and I said, John, I produced this paper and I wonder whether you saw it. He said, why did you send that to me? You're supposed to do the job. And that's the kind of guy John was. He was sort of a loose tight guy. He would very carefully identify what was important about your job and how you fit into your job, but he wanted you to do your job. And he would have touch points in the future about how he would tell if you had met your goals, what you should be redoing, what you should be thinking about differently. But on the flow of the job, it was up to you. And he would not metal. That concludes part three. But the framework for managing explosive growth will continue as we get into part four and Dan's becoming the CEO and the seven core values that he formulated as he was preparing to take the reins. Those values align very well to the requirements of effective leadership in an explosive growth setting. We'll be right back after this break. [Music] We're back with part four of the program with becoming the CEO and the core values formation. You said in an interview that you had really scripted and written those seven values and a vacation just before you became CEO. It was announced that I would be the new CEO when John retired in the middle of 2001. And so regular vacation, sitting on the beach in Hawaii, I said, "Well, you know, it's really important to me from my background and understanding things that the person leading a company needs to tell everybody in the company what's important, where we're going and how we're going to do it." And I wanted to do that in a way that could be sent to everybody in the company and understood by everybody in the company. So I wrote about a five-page analysis of the seven core values that was very concise, but I think spoke to people all the way throughout the company in stores, in the office, in the warehouses, things like that of where we were going, how we're going to go about doing it and why we're doing it. Excellent. Do you want to go through them? Sure. The first one is integrity. And I'm absolutely sure that Bernie Madoff had a sign about integrity, but we had a different way of looking at it. Integrity for us was defined as sort of golden rule. It was treating everybody like you would like to be treated. And it sounds really simple, but the magic of it was that it was self-determining. So if you're sitting there and you're thinking about, "Well, how do I act with integrity?" You have to think about how would I want somebody to treat me? And therefore, you didn't have to go to a book and figure out what integrity was. You can do it internally. And that became certainly important. I can still remember when I announced the seven core values I got to integrity. And I described that a good example of integrity is if you have a problem with sexual harassment, which we had a lot of. And before I announced integrity, if there was a sexual harassment situation, because we had guys and gals working together at all kinds of hours and everything. So it's probably not uncommon that you have problems with that. And we did. And what we would do typically is if we thought there were some problem and we didn't investigate all of that. And we'd try to maybe say, "Okay, you're at fault and we're going to cut half of your bonus or something like that." And everything would keep going on. So when I announced it, I said, "You know, if we think you have a sexual harassment problem, that's an integrity violation and you can't be here, you're fired." And I can remember looking out at the audience of about 500 people and seeing the mouth drop. And after that, our sexual harassment problem dropped significantly. So integrity was really important to us. It got into all sorts of things. The way we treated vendors, we paid on time. We didn't take deductions like normal people in the grocery business did. And that's because we wanted to treat people like we'd like to be treated, even vendors. And you know, if we discovered that a vendor maybe cut corners in the product that they were supplying us, we wouldn't challenge them for, you know, "Hey, you need to do better. We just get rid of them." And vendors became knowledgeable about that. And they understood our integrity, situation, and how it applied to them on the good side and the potential bad side for them. It was very important to us. Integrity also was important during the pandemic. We taught our people integrity. We told them, "You know, this is a different time." And our customers let us know that they really appreciated being treated like they'd like to be treated during the pandemic. And we got, I got letters all the time about during the pandemic, your store was where we wanted to come to feel some bit of connection to people. And it was still there even during the pandemic. And I think it was because of integrity. Integrity is critical to the sustainability of any business. But this core value of Trader Joe's aligns well with the framework component of building a scalable culture. Integrity is part of the glue that keeps the company culture intact as the company expands rapidly. The next two values are what Dan refers to as operational values. These are product-driven company and wow customer experience. The next one is where product-driven company. And I wrote that and it was the first what I call the operational values. But product was really important because I knew that as a retailer you had to have great products. You could have wonderful service in the store, but if you started with a bad product it's really tough. So we had to have top line great value products and it was really important. And a lot of people would say well of course you're a retailer. You need great products. But I would submit there's a lot of retailers that are really good retailers where product is not their top important thing. I think Walmart for example is a sort of a logistics first company. But they're not focused on great products. They have all kinds of products. And they're focused really on logistics and getting the products to their stores to their customers the best way best ways they can't. For us we wanted we have a limited number of items stock keeping units skews. So we have about 3600 compared to a normal grocery store that would have over 55,000 and we had to have the exact right products. So we'd have people searching for those products all over the world finding great products in Italy, in Vietnam, in India, all kinds of places. And for us our R&D was travel. So it was a really interesting job for people because if you were a foodie and you got hired by Trader Joe's to be a buyer you were challenged to go find the best products in your category wherever they are in the world. So you were beyond a plane traveling and a lot of people like that for a short period of time but I only had a few that were really good at traveling and enjoyed the travel and the hunt for great products. But finding those products was really important and once those products are found they had to be brought back into a tasting panel where the tasting panel would give a green light or a red light to the buyer on the product. You got a green light if the product tasted great and if the retail price that you needed to charge was considered to be a good value. or great value for the customer. Then you get a green light to buy the product, try it, and if it passed the customer votes in a very democratic, small-d environment, we looked at votes from customers on a weekly basis. So if it passed and it deserved the space it had on the shelf, we kept buying it. Product was really important for us, and I think we needed the best products we could find in all those categories. About 85% of them were private label, or products that had only sold in-trader Joe's, which became a really important factor for us. Interestingly on product, and maybe I'll point this in a direction with product in two types of growth for a company. One geographic expansion, the other product growth, the requisites, they would say, for the geographic expansion is it only works with a branded and reputable product or service. Your only is good in that expansion, as you are with the service you provide, that's the strength of the ability to expand, and you talk about the product in that respect. And then another is product growth as its own type of growth, and they would say that with that of the three possible growth strategies, acquisition, geographic expansion, or a product development-based growth strategy, it's the product growth that causes the most internal disruption, because the entire company must figure out how to develop, finance, acquire, and distribute new products at an extraordinarily predictable and probably fast pace. So it's interesting that that is one of the seven, and that at least in this academic view, it cuts across two modes of growth, and supports two modes of growth. It did, and part of our growth, we had a lot of new stores that we added, and we'll get into that, and some of the other things we're talking about. But what we also wanted, we wanted every store to have a comp store growth, and we were very successful in that comp store growth, or comparable store growth, refers to the revenue generated by a retail location in the most recent accounting period, relative to the revenue it generated in a similar period in the past. We had comp store growth for virtually every year of significant amounts for all stores, except during the pandemic, when we were limited in a number of people that could come into the stores. You were challenged as a buyer that not only did you have a limitation on the number of scoos and the space you had in the store, but you were challenged to have that space that you had in the number of scoos produce better and better sales in that area that you owned. And give a sense of how difficult and significant that is, Dan, to have that growth in that way. It was a major challenge for everybody to be able to have that comp store sales growth happen in the store compounded every year. I mean, if you think about it, that starting store that we had on a Royal, the footprint never changed. It's still the same store right now, but that store started off selling wine and cheese and liquor and nuts. And now it's a grocery store. It's selling produce, it's selling flowers, it's selling all kinds of different categories that it never had. And the sales volume in that store has probably gone up 1,000%. And that's not from the prices going up. It's from selling more and more items. We're still in part four, and we're talking about the seven core values that Trader Joe's with Dan Bay and retired CEO of Trader Joe's. Let's take an intermediate break still in part four. We've covered integrity. We've covered product, one of two operational values. And when we return, we'll cover the second operational value. Wow, customer service. We'll be right back. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) We're back after that immediate break still in part four, covering the seven core values of Trader Joe's. I took us on a little tangent there just to put the product aspect in the focus on product orientation and product driven as actually being foundational to the growth from a geographic perspective and obviously growth from a product growth perspective. I think the substance and support for those very two things are customer service. The next operational value was that we wanted to have wow customer experience. The wow came from one of our annual meetings. We had a guy that said, you know, wouldn't be great if your customers walked out of your store and you could see them mouth the word wow. And so that became target of ours. And what we did is we tried to teach the people that the customer experience had to be looked at on a fairly thorough basis. So the customer experience really started when the customer parked in the parking lot. When they looked at the store, did they see something different? We hated, for example, what a lot of grocers have item price signs. So if you pull up in the parking lot and they say, you know, get a pork rose for 1199, a pound or something like that, I hated that. We told people don't put item price signs because customers think, oh gee, they've got two or three things I need to buy and then I'm done. We wanted the store to look inviting to customers as a place to come in and shop. We also wanted that customer to be able to stop in the parking lot and not see a whole bunch of carts littered around because customers translate that into, gee, they don't care that I'm safe. I might run into those shopping carts. So we collected shopping carts aggressively. We wanted to make that happen. The shopping experience was somewhat scripted. The merchandising was really important. Did you have the things you wanted to have at the right level for the customer? Were you maintaining eye contact with the customer? You didn't have to like go into a sales spiel or anything like that because that's not what we were trying to do. I would spend a lot of time in stores and what I would typically try to do is to be a cheerleader for the people in the store, always positive, but I'd notice things and write things down when I got back to my car that I would translate to the regional manager for them to really take into the store. And I'd be looking at it in the way a customer would look at it. I would try to see where the items stacked too hot. So I always had like a five foot rule. If you were five feet tall, much like my wife. If you were five feet tall, could you reach the item to buy it? What we found is that customers like to come in to the store, land, take a deep breath, they got in the store and turn to the right. So when customers go to the right, we wanted what we called power things. So we wanted a display of something fresh, bananas, produce, flowers, something colorful and fresh. And then they typically go around the perimeter of the store. Customers and grocery stores think the perimeter is where I need to shop. So we need great stuff on the parameters and we need stuff that attracts them to the aisles. Our frozen section, for example, was a very attractive section and probably the best frozen products in the industry. And so we would have an ability for customers to come down the frozen section. If you look at our stores, the frozen section is probably wider aisle because customers tend to shop like submarines. They go from one side to the next and they look at products and they read the products and they read everything about them and they'll buy one. And then they'll go to this other side and buy another. So we charted the way customers shop for the customer behavior. And we tried to have the things they needed and we teach our people about what customers are doing and how to watch for customers. Interesting story on teaching people how to watch for customers is what I call my banana story. So I was watching a customer over in one of our Phoenix area stores and it was a store that was near an elderly folks area. And I was watching this one elderly lady shop and she was looking at these packages of bananas. Everybody sells bananas by weight and we did too. We packaged up but we didn't have scales. So we packaged up the bananas in the warehouse in the different packages and put the so much weight and here's what the whole package of bananas costs. I watched this customer pick up several packages and I noticed she didn't buy any. And so she's walking over and I went over to her and I said, "Mandy, and if I ask you a question, no." I said, "I noticed you were looking at some bananas but you didn't buy any." And she said, "Well, sunny." You know, it was a few years ago. She said, "Well, sunny, I picked up packages of bananas and the least number of bananas you had in one of those packages was five and I might not live to that fifth banana." And a light went on and I said, "Why don't we sell them individually?" The next week we came out with bananas priced at 19 cents per banana and that was probably. 20 years before I retired. And we sold them for all those 20 years at 19 cents of banana. And when you think about it, it's pretty logical because we didn't have to do the expenses of packaging the bananas in the warehouse. We sent the bananas out individually. They just got unboxed and sold. And the bananas have a great little package. You know, might as well use it. Yeah, and it turned out great. So we ended up selling a lot of produce individually per piece. And it worked. Customers loved it. And it all came from just watching customers and being attuned to the way the shopping experience was going. One of the other things about customer experiences, we thought there was internal customer experience and that gets into how does the customer feel about their shopping experience. So we wanted people to our people in the store to let customers know we cared that they were there. So one of the basic things we did was have a great conversation at checkout because that's the one place you're assured of having a connection with the customer. I still marvel at some grocery companies trying to reinforce self checkout. You know, I just go nuts and really I'm happy when they do that because they're passing on that ability to have that great conversation. And our people did a great job of connecting with the customer. Just conversation. How are you doing? How's your day going? Talk about the weather. Do whatever you want. Oh boy, I tried that frozen item. It's great. You know, or cooking ideas, different things. And our customers, I think for the most part, loved all of that. So that connection was really important. But just telling the customer that you're happy they're there was so unusual. You know, in the grocery business, if you go to a chain store or something, you'd be lucky to have anybody say they're happy they're there. We tried to teach our people to say, Hey, we're really glad you shopped with us today. Can't wait for you to come back. And that just had some magic to it. Help a customer to the car, particularly during a rainy day. Wouldn't that be something great that the customer would experience? And it gets a customer for life. So those types of things we were really keyed into. But the other parts of customer experience could be the signage. One of the things that we did that was pretty unusual in the grocery business. Every sign in the store was hand done. One of the things that I saw and the way I got to that idea was that walking down Main Street in Disneyland, there's a section where you can buy some fruit. Not very big. Signs there, look hand done. They're not because it's Disney. But they look like their hand done signs in an old-like type grocery business. And I said, wouldn't that be great to have hand done signs? And I also noticed that in a couple stores, we had some artists that were really good and they did some murals in the store. So it looked like in the Pasadena store, for example, there'd be a mural of the Rose Bowl with cows munching on things in front of the dairy section. And I thought, oh, that's cute. And so we ended up having a session at our captain's meeting that said, think about hiring people that are crew members, but they are also able to do art. And that turned a lot of things around. So we ended up getting some really creative things done by the stores that were part of the customer experience. You'd have Mona Lisa, you know, pouring some Charles Shaw wine or something like that. And it looked just like Mona Lisa. But you know, it was fun. Or you'd have the American Gothic picture with the people with the pitchfork standing there. Only they've got some Trader Joe's products in their hands. It was a great way to do things and it helped our people feel creative. We also did the channel signs, the item price signs were all done by hand. It was really differentiating for us and customers would tell me all the time that they really viewed that as part of a great customer experience. We're still in part four, and we're still talking about the seven core values. We'll be right back. Oh, yes. We have no bananas. We have no bananas today. We've got string beans and onions and big juicy lemons and all kinds of fruit and say we've got an old fashion tomato. How long I'll end for title. Oh, yes. We have no bananas. We're back after that immediate break. Still in part four covering the seven core values of Trader Joe's. We've covered integrity and the two operational values product driven and wow customer service. We're back with number four, no bureaucracy, which is consistent with the explosive growth framework components of span of control, delegation of authority, building a scalable culture. No bureaucracy also has a significant effect on accelerating pacing and transition, which is a critical component of managing explosive growth. The single most important feature that separates an explosive growth company from a typical company is the ability to manage transitions. If the management team cannot run an ongoing transition process, then explosive growth will remain a wish, not a reality. The company must place itself in a constant transition mode, where it brings a continuous stream of new products and stores to market in an orderly and predictable flow. Let's rejoin, Dan Bain. The next one was that we had no bureaucracy. It was something that really came from my experience in other places. I swore to myself today I forgot chance to run a company. I was going to try to get rid of bureaucracy. I hated that. We gave everybody an equal right, equal responsibility to kill off bureaucracy wherever they saw it. Translating that, we didn't like meetings. We used to have a meeting on a Friday morning where everybody, all the regionals around the country would call in. It was a meeting to prove that we didn't need meetings. It ended up lasting about 10 minutes. I said, "You know, we just proved it on need this meeting too." We quit that meeting. We encouraged people, if they had a problem, to go get the people that they needed to get and solve the problem. That's the way we operated. The offices were both offices had cubicles, so people worked together. The buying team all worked together. It took a while for me to get used to that, coming from a more corporate type office situation. Being in a cubicle as the president of the West Coast, I had to learn how to tune out phone calls that I didn't want to hear and all those types of things. It turned into magic when we were talking about solving problems, getting people together and getting things done. Bureaucracy was something that we hated. It also translated into our organizational structure. We didn't have an org chart. We had people that reported to each other for figuring out reviews and compensation and things like that. But if you look at the way we really operated, it was an inverted pyramid. So if you picture the inverted pyramid, the people at the base of the pyramid, which was now at the top, were the most important people. Those were the crew members who took care of customers in the stores. Those people needed our help all the way throughout the company within the pyramid, whether it was the buyers, whether it was the warehouse people, all the people. If they didn't have the right product and the right information, they couldn't do their job. So that was the job of the rest of us. I viewed my job as the conductor of an orchestra. I was at the bottom of the pyramid, miking sure all the people in the pyramid got everything done so that there could be a good customer reaction at the store level by those people. And that inverted pyramid became very powerful for us. And linked that to a component or a challenge of managing explosive growth, it's the pacing. And I also refer to it as transition just in a constant state of transition in terms of something new, something different, moving things forward. You've got to be in a constant state of transition. If you're continuing to grow year on year growth in terms of the store, and I just wondered how you think about that in terms of what that did for pacing to have the inverted pyramid. The inverted pyramid was really important. And part of my job was to be observant about how was it working and how did we need to adapt. One of the things we had was a challenge in the way we would buy and warehouse things for the two different companies that we had when I became CEO. So we had a company on the East Coast who had a totally separate buying function. It was similar, but it wasn't exactly the same. And the West Coast was a different buying function. So what we found was sort of a terrible flaw when we had people from Chicago who were covered by the East Coast buying function would come to Arizona, which was covered by the West Coast buying function for their snowbird season. They'd come down and they'd shop at the stores in Arizona and they'd say, I want that product that I had in Chicago. Yeah. And it was different. And so I said, that's not good because people move and they transfer and we need products that are the same or at least very close to being same. So we ended up changing the way we would cover part of that pyramid with the buying functions so that an individual buyer who was in charge of a category would cover that category for the entire country. They may have different vendors in different parts of the country depending upon what the vendor could do. But they were responsible for bread, for example, for that entire country, for all the stores. So that a customer wouldn't find different things in Chicago versus Arizona. And the company was more homogeneous about what the product was like. So those were the types of things that we'd have to adapt the inverted pyramid for so that the store people didn't get inundated with things like, oh, I want that loaf of bread that I have in Chicago. Why don't you have the pumpernickel in Arizona? We don't know pumpernickel in Arizona. The other thing that we did about no bureaucracy is that we sort of adapted a concept that I got from my son going to Texas A&N. I went to a football game down there and I saw the twelfth man. And I had a really interesting idea, concept about that. I liked the idea of, you know, we're going to come into the football game if you need us. We're all ready to go. So we did the same thing in the offices. I said, everybody that's in the office needs to be ready to go to the stores. We went to where Hawaiian shirts, name tags, all of that. And we were ready to go. Often when we turned stores, if we went in and there was a line and they weren't being customers were bottled up trying to check out, we wouldn't tour the store. We would just manage the line. We'd bag groceries, make sure every register was open, get the lines down, and then we'd turn the store. Moving to the fifth of seven core values. In the context of the Explosive Growth Framework, it's critical for a company and explosive growth to continuously improve and re-engineer processes as the company grows. Here's Dan Bain. The next one is Kaizen, which was an existing Japanese management term. But I take it all the way back to when I played high school football. My high school football coach used to have us always get together. Whenever the team got together or whatever we were doing, we'd all say the same chant. And the chant was every day and every way we get a little better. And I didn't know it at the time, but that was Kaizen. So Kaizen is continuous improvement where everybody owes everybody else a better job every day, every month, every year, in what they're doing. So we're all in this together, but we have a requirement that everybody tries to do a little better all the time. And even though I'm a recovering accountant, that was one of the reasons we didn't do budgeting. Classical budgeting always left me feeling like it was a waste of time. And other jobs, we'd spend three months trying to do a budget from the bottom up and it would end up, you know, the people on the bottom didn't want a budget really aggressively because they knew they'd be held at that situation. So I just said, "Gee, that's a waste of time." So why don't we just, with a Kaizen mentality, say, "Okay, from a store standpoint, what's your sales growth going to be? What's your sales per person hour, which is a real key measurement for us? We wanted it to be within a range so that customers would be taken care of efficiently. And what your managerial profit percentage would be, so that things that you control, like maintenance costs and clean ups and different costs that you control, what would that be?" And when we had that, we could produce our expectations of the store profitability. And we could also use it to have a conversation during the year about how the store was doing when we visited the store. Your sales are down, you target at 9% growth and you're only at 5%. So what are you going to do to try to get back all the different steps that you might do? Notice this, maybe you could do that, that type of thing. So it gave us a great way to have a conversation. We did have controls of our major expenditures, capital expenditures. If we're going to buy a new system, we'd have control over that to plan and then compare the plan with what we were spending. And we had controls over headcount in the offices. If you wanted to add a new person in the office at any department, you had to come talk to me. People hated coming to talk to me because they'd have to justify that on some kind of basis. And as a result, our overhead costs were, in the office, were very low. People compared to any of our competitors. The sixth core value is a national chain of neighborhood grocery stores. And although they are a very large chain, they maintain a local community centered feel in each store. This fits well with the framework of an explosive growth company, needing to build a scalable culture and in Trader Joe's case, ensure that the unique, unconventional cult following stayed intact as the company expanded rapidly. When I drafted these up, I didn't really realize the power of it. But I said, "We want to be a national chain of neighborhood grocery stores." And it became really important because at the time we weren't a grocery store. We were that store that was represented by the sign I talked about before. It sold wine, cheese, and nuts. And we were sort of a party store. So I had a consulting company come in and really analyze and talk with our customers and give us some feedback about what customers were doing. And we discovered that the customer was shopping with us about once a month, that they were buying a certain amount of things. And that they had this vision that they really wanted us to do more. And from my background in the grocery wholesale business and knowing the grocery business, and being astute because I had gone to USC and become an accounting bachelor's degree and accounting, I said, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if we had customers come more often and buy more stuff?" And boy, wasn't that a brilliant idea? And so I said, "The way to do that is sell stuff where they need to come back more often." So I said, "We need to sell more perishables." And if you come in that way and if you're a grocery customer, we're selling perishables, so you're selling produce, you're selling bread. We did sell bread at the time, but it wasn't something customers were really excited about because they didn't come in that often. But we started selling more and more things that a regular grocery store would sell. And we got pretty good at it. And our people were amazing because they found room in that store that didn't change its size for a real grocery store. At this time, produce is by far the leading category. Whereas in 2001, if we sold an item of produce, it was typically a basket of apples from Washington or something like that. And it was listed under noblesy. I say. But changing it and coming out with that guideline or that values guide of where national change in neighborhood grocery stores was something I wanted the company to become. It wasn't what we were. And I'm happy to say that it did become that. And that was one of the reasons our growth both in the store and in opening new stores was so successful because people viewed us as a grocery store. The national part, we were a big company. We grew from when I got to the company, we had just celebrated having sales over a billion dollars. When I left sales, we were over 20 billion dollars. We grew substantially. We were a sizable entity. I was always happy to get letters from customers who said, who would send me a letter saying, I want you to quit screwing up my store. And I was happy to get that letter responded to that letter. I'm going to try not to screw up your store because I'm going to do this. And customers really viewed it as their neighborhood store. We'd have things in the store that were tuned to that neighborhood, whether it be the murals or the way people celebrated different things. It was a store for that area, for that neighborhood. And we even had like six stores in Pasadena, California. Every one of them had a different look or a different feel for that area of the store. One store is near Caltech. It caters to the Caltech people. One store is on a royal boulevard and it goes towards the Rose Bowl on things like that. So it was very important for the stores to reflect the neighborhood in a way that a lot of our competitors couldn't and wouldn't. And does that link into the store as the brand as a store? The store is the brand is sort of the culminating value. I see. The seventh core value is the store is the brand. It's another one where I didn't really realize the power of it. But the store is the brand was important for me to say, you know, it's not really Charles Shaw wine. It's not really this product or any other. Everything, the store is the brand. Because I wanted the people in the store, the crew members in the store, to feel like every day when they came in, every day when the door opened at eight, that they were executing the brand. They were in charge of making the brand work and the responsibility for that brand. So we tried to teach them that they were sort of like actors on the stage. And when the curtain went up at eight, they needed to play the parts that they needed to play. And they were in charge of the brand. That's the responsibility they had. And it worked. Brand was really, really important. It also let us make decisions on things. For example, when I developed these, we used to sell container loads of chips and salsa to a company in Japan. And they would sell chips and salsa at their retail store in Japan from Trader Joe's. We used to sell some products on the internet, but only in Europe. And those were easy sales. And I stopped all of those because I didn't want, if you say the store is the brand, you can't sell those products anywhere else. We had a lot of pressure at different times to try to sell products on the internet. And it would have been an easy sale, but we did several different examples of what the profitability for those types of things could be, the difficulty in doing it. And we found that if we open three more stores, we could probably make more money. So we said, no, we're not going to do that. Store is the brand. We're going to stick with stores. We're going to be a bricks and mortar type place. We're going to sell the products in our store, only available in our stores. And we stuck to that. We've been a lot of pressure in the pandemic to have people come to the store and not come in and all that. And we resisted that. People waited in lines. We tried to be nice to them and take them water and give them umbrellas if it was raining and help them out, but they couldn't come in because of the health guidelines. But we stayed true to that for a number of reasons. But, you know, including those people that let others come in and shop for people and deliver it at home, we were just too busy to be able to do that. Oh, interesting. So not even that. So we had to stick with stores the brand. And I think ultimately our customers like that and our people like that. That's fascinating. I wouldn't have interpreted it in that many ways that you discover. And you, it sounds like didn't envision that many ways when you didn't. I didn't. I mean, the store is the brand. When I was thinking about it, I was thinking, I knew about those chips and salsa things and things like that. And I wanted to be able to stress to the stores that I wanted them to take ownership of the brand. That, you know, some amorphous traitor Joe's person in the office wasn't in charge of the brand they were. And so the only way to do that is to really say to them, listen, you guys are the brand. So do it. Yeah. And that sort of fits in with the inverted pyramid as well. Fascinating. That concludes part four. Let's take a break and come back with the fifth and final part of the program. Managing explosive growth reprised, lessons learned and parting thoughts after this. We're back for the fifth and final part of the program where we reprise some of the aspects of explosive growth that we touched on, cover lessons learned and dance parting thoughts. We've talked about the brag framework of managing explosive growth. A key area we discussed is span of control and not letting the span of control out to wide at first because of the talent development being the limiting factor. We revisit the constraints on growth resulting from limitations of talent development. Here's Dan Bain. Growth is really limited by the ability to develop people. So we were never limited about with capital. We were never limited with customers wanting us. I remember getting letters from customers saying, "You have no right to keep me from shopping at Trader Joe's." And this was a guy in Fresno. And I said, "You're right." So we opened up a Fresno. I see. Not because of the letter, but we were going there. And so I think people wanted us to come. But we were limited about our ability to develop people. That was one of the reasons we developed Trader Joe's University as a really good training process, not in how to do grocery, but how to manage people, how to lead teams, how to be a leader, all of those things, because that was what was important, not the grocery business. That was learned on the job. But every year we would target the number of stores we thought we could open based on the development of the people. So we'd analyze the people that were likely to be ready to be able to run a store. And given those numbers, I would chart out in the annual goals how many stores we wanted to try to open for the next year and how many we wanted in the hopper for the following year. Lisa's signed that type of thing. Trader Joe's University was developed by John Shields in its starting point. And one of the things that I wanted it to do was sort of branch out more and cover more people. So we ended up, anybody who was a mate or a buff went to organized classes, week-long classes, and you might go to a class this year and one next year and one the following year that covered different topics. And you'd come in with a group of people that all around the country and share ideas and things that you were having in your store and all that. It really made people feel they were part of a bigger deal. And they could go back to their store and talk about things they were doing and things they learned. But it would be focused on situational leadership and how you can do things and motivate people that way. How you could get involved in doing different things. How to do evaluations of people that you worked with. How to deliver those evaluations. How to solve problems, those types of things. All focused really on leadership and development things in the store. And those people would use those abilities to grow faster in the development chain and become better candidates to be a captain. I say, in a growth mode, it takes a lot of cash to support the growth. You've done that very well. Talk about just the cash to fuel the company and keep things going and the focus on that and maybe your finance background and how that worked in that regard. The company was very successful and I looked at it not so much in terms of cash but inventory terms. And I looked at what was going on in a store and I looked at a few metrics on a weekly basis. I looked at the cash balance but mostly on a graph and every week I would try to figure where based on what I knew about the sales and where things were going, where I thought the cash balance would go. And if I was right on the graph, I was done. If I was wrong on the graph, I tried to figure out what happened. I was seldom wrong. What I would look at were weekly store sales and inventory turns in the stores. And our turns were very high. Record high probably for most any business. We had stores that would turn their inventory two times a week. That's amazing. And so our biggest challenge was to be able to get the product to those stores when they needed to be. And within the brag explosive growth framework, this gets it pacing and transition in order to bring a continuous stream of products to market. When I first joined the company, for example, I can remember one of the things we always did was anybody knew how to go work in stores for three weeks. And my second week I was in a store and I was just bagging groceries and talking to customers and helping to organize the store and get ready to open. And I was getting ready to open this store and I looked up and there was not a loaf of bread on the bread section. And we opened the doors at eight, customers came flying in and I went over to the bread section and I said, I'm sorry, you know, the bread hasn't arrived yet and the customers said, oh, no, it's my fault. I know you don't get bread on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I shouldn't have been here. And light went on in my head and I said, why don't we ship bread on Tuesdays and Thursdays? And so we did. And sales shot up in bread for an amazing reason. And so part of my job was to make sure the product got there. We didn't need it to be and it turned out that we had a guideline that said, okay, every store ought to be able to order any product and get it the next day at the latest, which took a lot. Yeah, that's right. So we developed probably the most efficient, most amazing warehouse and delivery process. that I think any company I've seen has. Same was true in New York City. If you can imagine delivering stores in New York City that are selling their product twice every week, twice a week, which means the stuff that's really selling move in every day. And getting stuff to New York City is tough. So we developed a process to do that. Smaller trucks, drop-offs at places, things like that. And it worked out great. People did amazing jobs. They were magicians in what they would do. Yeah. Looking back on all this from where you are now, Dan. And it's asking you to talk about your lessons learned from all this. I'm a major fan of retail. I'm a little chagrin that it's so easy to order a pair of shoes or a sweater or something like that. And have it show up and be able to send it back if it doesn't work. I love the idea of going into a store and shop. I'm a shopper at heart. My wife's a shopper at heart. We love to do that. But it's sort of-- it's bothersome to go to a store. And what I do is I sort of project what I'm looking at the same way I did at Trader Joe's. So I go in and I think, do they really care that I'm here? Yeah. And it's very unusual to get the feeling like they give a damn. That bothers me. And sometimes my wife would go back to our car and I go, can you believe what they did? Oh no. All kinds of things like that. I go in and if I see a grocery store, we go into a grocery store because we're getting some things that TJs doesn't have or something like that, I'll say, they're locking up everything. I hate it when they lock up everything. If we had a product that the store people said, "Dolgy, they're stealing this Petron." I would say, well, then either don't sell it or do sell it, but you can't lock it up because that tells the customer you don't trust them. And I hate that. I was in a store the other day and they were locking up razor blades. So I said, OK, I can figure that out. So I now order them online. They lost that sale. Yeah. Those types of things, I just get crazy about in retailing. One of the things I tried to do was really understand the business at the basic level. When I first got there, I spent probably 90% of my time in stores, touring stores, visiting stores in depth. So I'd spend a whole entire day in a store traveling around with regional vice presidents who had 20 stores that they managed. Going with them to their stores, talking to the people in the stores, I wanted to know the business really well. I then tried to figure out where I wanted the business to go. And then it was my job to be a boundary person, I thought. So I wanted to make sure that if a store was getting outside the boundary or some function was getting outside the boundary, I would make it go back into the boundary. I was the orchestra conductor making sure things worked through the inverted pyramid. And I was also an idea guy. So I would come up with different ideas. And wherever I went, the example in Disneyland, I used to love to go to Disneyland to get different ideas. And I always got something good. One good example was that if you go to California Adventure at Disneyland in Southern California, when you walk through the gates, the music is very California. You hear beach boys, you hear all this stuff. And about 30 feet inside that, it starts to turn to adventure. And you hear music from some movies that are star-tricky and things like that. And the light went on with me about, gee, we need to really change our music because music was sort of elevator music. And people didn't really notice it or deal with it much. So we had a session at our captains meeting and we introduced the idea that music could be important to the captains. And all of a sudden we started noticing that the music outside the store, they had put speakers outside the store. And as a customer, you come up to the store and you'd hear this music. And it was sort of inviting music to come into the store. And then in the store, you'd hear something different depending upon what time of the day it was. So you'd have different music for the morning shoppers compared to the afternoon shoppers depending upon what kind of people were shopping at the time. And it worked. And I'd go into the store and I'd just go into a corner and watch customers. And they'd be kind of tapping their feet to the music. And we went from elevator music trying to not have anybody listen to it, to music that sort of got people moving and shopping and having more fun. - Yeah. - From an idea from Disneyland. And that was part of my job was being able to have the company adapt quickly to ideas. Some of them work, some of them didn't, and we got rid of them. But some of them worked and got indoctrinated into the company. - Yeah. - I mean, we're experiencing the experience with all five of our senses. Another example, thinking about it, was when I first got to Trader Joe's, they used to have contracted demos so that you'd have a vendor could buy the ability to come in and demonstrate their product in the store. And so you'd get a little gray-haired lady with a hair met on in the middle of the store with a little kiosk and she'd be trying to help this vendor sell their product. So you'd come by and be like something. I don't know, anything. And you'd come up and then she'd hand you one of these products and then you'd ask her a question, she goes, I don't know. And the worst thing of all is if you asked her a question about where something else was, which was the most often asked question, where's this type of thing? She would say, I don't know, I'm just the demo lady. And so I said, well, what we need is a demo department. And so we created a whole part of the store that would have our people, people that were employed by Trader Joe's to provide a sample product every day. All hours at the store was open. So a customer could experience some type of product that we thought was interesting enough and unique enough to Trader Joe's that you needed as it tasted. Yeah. And it was very expensive. It was the most expensive marketing we had, but it worked. And when you say expensive in terms of just your time of your employees being on the product, we didn't charge any of the product back to the vendor. Oh, I see. Part of our contract with the vendor, we bought the product. We didn't take deductions for demos, we didn't take deductions for a spoil product or anything like that, I say. Well, in terms of what the customer sees, it's probably a lot easier to educate your folks on that product than it is educating those demo folks on your store and your brand. Yeah. And they wouldn't, I mean, they were there for two days and just screw things up. So we said, there's got to be a better way. Yeah. And it turned out very effective. That's really interesting. Because going into stores, there's the demo people. I always wonder like, where are these people coming from? The normal grocery people, some of my friends back from the old wholesaler days corner me and when I see them and I say, I saw your demo thing. What are you doing? Because you can have the vendor pay for that and you can have the vendor demonstrate the product. You don't need to do that. You've got to be cautioned you're bundled on money. They have no idea that it's sort of like a hidden thing. Does Dan leave a legacy at Trader Joe's? My legacy is not around Trader Joe's. My legacy is around my grandkids and being a great husband, great father, good grandpa, things like that, being a good Christian, things like that. That's where my legacy is. I'm very proud of what I did at Trader Joe's. But Trader Joe's was a great company before I got there. I changed it. It's a great company when I was there, when I loved. And it'll be a great company in the future. I think it's a unique company that customers love and I'm sure it will be in the future. So it's not my legacy. I don't think it's John's legacy or Joe's legacy. It's its own legacy. The store is the brand. Yeah. We hope you enjoyed this episode 28 with Mr. Dan Bane, the retired CEO of Trader Joe's, who led the company through one of the most remarkable periods of growth in modern retail. Dan's leadership not only expanded Trader Joe's footprint from a regional chain to a national phenomenon, but also preserved its unique culture and unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction. As we explored in this episode, his ability to align strategy, operational efficiency, and an innovative approach to product development provides a blueprint for navigating the complexities of explosive growth. We hope his insights juxtaposed with the leadership framework from Stephen Bragg's managing explosive corporate growth offered you valuable takeaways on how to lead and thrive during transformative times. If you're looking for a deeper conversation on leadership and growth strategies, we invite you to join the Lyseum Circle of Leaders, our exclusive community of executives and board members dedicated to progress through shared intelligence. Connect with peers, exchange ideas, and gain access to unique insights like those shared in today's episode. Thank you for listening, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with colleagues or friends who might find inspiration in Dan's incredible journey. I'd like to express our special thanks to the clients of Lyseum Leadership Consulting that enable us to bring you this podcast. I hope you'll join me for our next episode. Until then, it's goodbye for now. Leadership Lyseum, a CEO's virtual mentor, has been a production of the Leadership Lyseum Council. [BLANK_AUDIO]