Sam Donaghey
Welcome to the fast slow motion podcast where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghey. And today we’ve got something very special

Joining me for today’s episode is John Burdett, founder and CEO of fast slow motion. And our guest today is Mike Beckham, co-founder and CEO of simple modern and co-host of the operators podcast. Now Mike has built one of the fastest growing

consumer goods companies in the country and his perspective on business leadership and values make him an incredible guest.

John and Mike, this is your first conversation, but I think our audience will quickly see that you share a lot of common ground. So Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Beckham
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

John Burdett
Mike, yeah, thank you so much for joining us and I love your story. I’ve been doing some research on you and just blown away by not only the business you’ve created, but how you’ve done it, which is just so special for those in our audience who haven’t heard your story. You have a really kind of unique background becoming an entrepreneur and business owner. Can you kind of give us a backstory of like, how did you get to starting Simple Modern and how you got to that point?

Mike Beckham
Yeah, I took a super atypical path to get to entrepreneurship. I was a finance major in college when I found finance, it just clicked. knew this is what I was put on earth to do. ⁓ And I thought I developed a real passion around giving, know, college was a huge time for me spiritually. And so I thought I’m going to use my abilities in finance. I’m going to make some money. I’m going to give it away. And that was really a motivating kind of vision for my life. And then

I met my wife while I was still in undergrad and we got married the weekend after I graduated. She was still going to be at OU getting her master’s degree the first year that I was graduated. And so I got this kind of gap year where I didn’t really know what to do with it. ⁓ You know, contrary to public opinion, Norman, Oklahoma is not the finance capital of the world. And so I just, I had kind of an available year to invest in some way. And I ended up saying yes to an opportunity to work in nonprofit.

ministry and even to this day I’m a little bit surprised I said yes to it because it kind of came out of left field the opportunity and me saying yes to it but anyway I did and I ended up loving it and so one year turned into two and then two years turned into ten I spent my entire 20s basically doing the I don’t know if it’s the exact opposite of working in the finance world but it’s pretty different which is full-time ministry where I was raising my salary

pretty far cry from making a lot of money and giving it away. I was asking people for money. And so I got to 30 and even though I still felt like I had business skills, like I still invested in the market on the side and things like that, I realized that nobody was going to view a business degree that I got eight years ago is that big of an asset. And I really had come to peace with the idea that I just was going to go a different path than I thought when I graduated. And then it was right around that point in time.

when my younger brother first approached me with a business idea and it led to me helping him start a business on the side. And that business got very big, very quick and a series of events that led to me eventually starting Simple Modern started. But ⁓ my entrepreneurial career really followed 10 years in the nonprofit world. So,

I have a very unique blend of experiences that have really shaped the way that I think about culture and team building and purpose and what do want to get out of life? What do want to do with my life? How do I want to invest my time? And I would say that the overriding principle that is so interesting to me about my journey is that it would seem that I spent eight years that basically did not build any skills that would be helpful as an entrepreneur in the nonprofit world.

But what I have found is it’s exactly the opposite. That all of those years working in a field that seems very different than entrepreneurship, I was building the muscles that have helped make Simple Modern successful. And I think more importantly helped me build the type of company and the type of life that I wanted to live.

John Burdett
Yeah, that’s awesome to, I love your intentionality and focus on purpose. Cause I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of miss that they’re focused on making money or whatever, you know, the product they’re making, whatever they’re doing, instead of understanding the wow about what they’re doing and focusing on that purpose as being your North star for your business. If I recall correctly from one of your previous interviews that you’ve done before,

When you started Simple Modern, you knew your purpose and the why behind what you were going to do, but you actually didn’t know what or how you were going to do it. Did I, did I understand that correctly?

Mike Beckham
Yeah, that’s

it’s absolutely correct. I get asked all the time, how did you come up with the idea to do water bottles? And the answer is really like, we didn’t, that isn’t how we started. And there isn’t some dramatic clouds parting, you know, ⁓ inspirational story about how we came to selling insulated drinkware.

We really, it was a group of three friends. had worked together. We loved working together. We really respected each other’s character. We enjoyed time with each other. And I would say the entire company was built on two premises. The first is that working with people you really enjoy is one of the easiest ways to have high quality of life. I’ll pause here and just make a larger point. What everybody is really after, I’m convinced is quality of life and that

There are a lot of proxies for quality of life, things that we think if we aim at, they will in turn produce quality of life. think ⁓ salary and resources would be one of those things, meaning and purpose, titles or ⁓ organizational stature, ⁓ being able to work on things that other people think are cool, whatever it is, there’s a lot of different vectors that we aim at. But what we’re really aiming at behind those things is

quality of life. And the discovery that I made fairly early on in my career was that when I was around the right people, there were so many different things I could do and enjoy. Like, you know, if you need me to lay railroad tracks, if I’m doing it with the right people, I could do it with a smile on my face. And then there are other, you know, groups of people that, man, you could put me in as good a situation as possible and I could be making great money and I’d be miserable. So when I realized that,

I really had come to value these couple of guys that I had known and I had worked with. And one lunch, we were at Chick-fil-A and they just said, hey, would you ever consider doing something with us? And I was in a place where I was really open to the idea. Now we did not think it would become this. We thought this would be like a little side hustle that we would do together. But even that was an attractive idea to me because it just meant spending more time with them. So the first idea and

that we built the company on is like who you work with and the relational connection that you have with people you work with is a big part of your quality of life. And I think that that today has proven to be true in my life that the satisfaction I have from who I spend my day around at work and the satisfaction I have from the relationships I have with my family when I come home are the two biggest drivers of life satisfaction. And it’s one of the reasons why I’m quite content.

The other thing that I was really committed to, and this is a through line that goes all the way back to my time as a college student is if we were going to do a for-profit company, I really wanted to be about giving and generosity. But I think that it was in those early days that I started to have vision for how generosity was really so much more than just writing checks. It was the ability to share in a variety of ways.

with all the different people that you come into contact with when you run a company. I mean, you’ve got employees, you’ve got partners that you work with, you have a community that you’re planted in, you have customers. And so I like to say that Simple Modern was an experiment of what would happen if you built a for-profit company that was really obsessed with sharing, which it seems like a great way to build a company that would go bankrupt. But what we have found is that it’s exactly the opposite, that the more that we have leaned into generosity,

the more that has created trust, the more that has created strong relationships, the more that has created more resources and more opportunities to give. And if there’s one remarkable thing about the Simple Modern story, I think that is the single thing I’m the proudest of is that we have continued to lean in for 10 years into this idea of generosity. And that at least so far, we just celebrated our 10 year birthday. We have found that

the more we lean in, the more there is to give. And as a result, we’ve been able to impact way more people’s lives than we ever anticipated. One of the really simple ways to put this is last fall, we sold our 50 millionth cup. ⁓ We’re probably almost at 60 million now. And so the idea that we’ve impacted 50, 60 million people’s lives is really remarkable. And that’s just on the customer side. Before you get into the lives that we’ve been able to impact through giving with our nonprofit partners or

the people that work at the company or our manufacturing partners. There’s so many different people that in some way come into contact with the company and we have found a way to express generosity towards. And so that was the central idea. What happens if you build that company? Then, and I do like to tease this apart because I think it’s important for people to hear. I understand that everything I’m saying sounds A, sounds great, B, sounds really, you

idealistic and almost unrealistic. And the reason why it’s worked is because we have paired it with a pragmatic excellence of execution. So yeah, it’s great to have those ideas. I I talked to lots of college students, ⁓ like our company is very popular with college students. They love the idea of like, that we give money back and that we were about these things. But what I really emphasize to them is actually I emphasize, I don’t have to emphasize the giving piece. I have to emphasize you have to earn the right.

to be idealistic, you have to be excellent. And so once we had the idea of why the company would exist, then we had to get pretty practical about, ⁓ how are we gonna fund this thing? How are we going to make salaries at it? And that inevitably led us to Insulated Drinkware. Now we sell a variety of products. But the way that I like to think about the company is that the company is really about generosity. And the way that we fund that mission is by selling

water bottles and tumblers and backpacks and things like

John Burdett
It’s so awesome on so many levels and just want to call out a few things that you mentioned that just to highlight it as first and foremost, you started with people and people are all that matter at the end of the day. And if you can’t do life and do work with people you love and you care about, it’s not worth it. There’s no amount of money you can make and everything like that. The other thing is that call out on excellence. And if that bar

It’s non-negotiable. You have to be excellent and good at what you do. If you want to be able to fulfill your mission, there’s no shortcuts there. You’ve got to be excellent at business to be excellent at giving. And I love how you tie all those things together because I’ve learned that as well. It’s, used to think all these things were oars. You know, I could build, I could be great at business and make a lot of money, but I couldn’t be a good dad, a good father. couldn’t be a good friend. couldn’t give a lot of money, whatever. Right? You can be excellent at all of these things.

If you’re intentional about it, if you do it with purpose and you double and triple down on these core values when times get difficult. ⁓ and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of difficult times along the way, but you’ve been very intentional from day one about this is who we are. You were generous from day one. Now it’s easier to be generous because you have so much, you know, you have so much abundance. People don’t realize that that started at the very beginning when you had no abundance and you bake that into your culture.

And I love how you were so intentional about doing that. And now everybody sees that and they’re attracted to it, but they didn’t see it at the very beginning when you were getting started and you had no idea that you’d be selling this many tumblers ⁓ in the marketplace.

Mike Beckham
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one connection that maybe I hadn’t seen originally, but I’ve come to appreciate as we’ve gone on, is that you can’t even do things like generosity without excellence, practically, because you can’t fund it. But even more specifically, like if you’re going to give money away, it turns out that you can give money in ways that are very destructive and that reinforce, that do more harm than they do good. And

John Burdett
That’s right.

Mike Beckham
so that you have to have a standard of excellence behind good intentions for them to not end up doing more damage than help. And so I think that that’s been helpful for me to understand is that excellence when paired with good intentions and benevolence like actually can make a huge difference, but they have to be paired together. And that’s the way that I like to think about the culture that we’ve tried to create. Some of the best people you’ve ever met who are

deeply dedicated to doing a really, really excellent job at their work, that’s what we’ve kind of found that combination that works for us.

John Burdett
Yeah, I’m interested in your take on this. I’ve always talked with, I got some sage advice from mentors and stuff around generosity and giving. And they were like, go deep, be very focused. And you just like most important things in life. And I would say almost anything it’s, it’s way more important about what you say no to than what you say yes to. And I think a lot of times with generosity and stuff, we kind of relate that to, you know, rounding up at Taco Bell when they’re asking you to donate to something that you have no idea what it is. I’m always telling, I tell everybody, I was like, I’m the guy that never rounds up because I have

no idea what I’m donating to. I’d much rather, even if it’s 50 cents, give that to the ministries, the nonprofits, the thing that I care about so I can go deep with four or five specific things, be involved in more ways than just money and ⁓ focusing on being good at that, do for one what you wish you could do for everyone with those places. And ⁓ it really multiplies the impact. And it also gives you freedom to not be compelled to give in scenarios where you’re not.

you know, maybe you’re just emotional about it or they’re, you know, they’re pulling on your heartstrings, that kind of thing. I’m curious. It sounds like you guys are also very intentional about the way you give and how you give and all that kind of stuff. I’d love to kind of unpack that a little bit more.

Mike Beckham
Well, we’ve been forced to be because when you start saying, we exist to give generously, like people will come and ask, you know, not surprisingly, they should fundraiser should come and ask. And very quickly it became obvious that even though the company had become more successful than we expected, that there was no way we were going to fund all of the requests. I I have learned that the amount of need in the world will always outstrip my ability ⁓ by a ton.

And that for me to make any kind of impact, what I need to do is I need to focus. And so that’s what we’ve been forced to do. So a few things about the way that we handle giving, we take 10 % of our profitability every year, at least 10%. And we give it through the company. That’s an addition to any giving that happens. And there is quite a bit that happens from the ownership group outside of the company. That money’s donated to a donor advised fund. And so we…

Every year we get the money out of the company. And one of the reasons why we do that is it is very tempting. If you don’t really hold yourself to that cadence, it’s very tempting. Like, I mean, this year there was a trade war and it’s like, just took like a $10 million, you know, swipe out of our profitability. And so it’s just very easy to talk yourself into why this year’s different or, know, whatever. Even early on we were bootstrapped and that first year it was very painful to cut any size check, but doing it.

helped to build the muscle so that as the company grew and the responsibility grew, we were able to bear the weight of that. And we had really built the generosity muscle. So we got in this cadence and then very quickly the question was, well, what are we going to give towards? And one of the big forks in the road was, this, I’m not the only shareholder. I own around half the company, but I’ve tried to be really intentional in making a pathway for

other people who’ve helped build the company to own part of the company. So even still, I’m the CEO, I’m the co-founder, I’m the biggest shareholder. The question in front of us was, is this basically going to be what does Mike want to give to, or are we going to use a different path? And I felt pretty strongly that it should not be just what does Mike want to give to. And another question that we had was like, okay, know, Mike, your Christian, giving to Christian causes is very important. that, should that be the lead foot here?

Again, my stance was like, I don’t think we should have a bias against giving to charities that are doing good work that have a Christian background. But ⁓ at the same time, we serve all kinds of different customers. We certainly wouldn’t want it to be a turnoff to anybody, the charitable work that we’re doing. And so I don’t think we want that to be our lead foot or the main, if owners want to give that way, that’s great, but not at the company level.

And so what we did is we created a structure where we have a giving committee inside of the company. And ⁓ every year we have people submit ⁓ and the entire company is able to hear from a variety of nonprofits and then is able to make their voice known. And this committee makes allocation decisions. I’m on the committee. I very rarely say much. I really want it to be company led. And with the help of the committee, we, we formed five giving areas of focus. ⁓ and five might actually be even too many, but

We definitely felt like we can’t do more than five. So we picked five areas, things like clean drinking water and human trafficking, ⁓ marginalized communities, homelessness, education. Those were our five that we wanted to focus on. And we created this really ⁓ pretty deliberate process of listening to and vetting different organizations that we thought could be a good fit. ⁓ I think that over time, one of the things that we’ve learned is that

the funding has tended to be more and more local. We have some great international partners, but we have more and more of our funding focused locally. And I think it’s because you just, you come to feel like we have a responsibility to, you know, our fellow man, but more than anything else, we have a responsibility to the community that we’re a part of. And then the other thing that we do that I really…

enjoy is we take a portion of our giving budget every year and we just divide it up equally with every single employee in the company, regardless of position, and then they get to allocate it. So the person working in our manufacturing facility is going to have the exact same share that I will there. And the thing that I love about that is that, you know, that can be several thousand dollars ⁓ as much as I, maybe we’ve gotten up to five, six, $7,000 ⁓ in this individually allocated piece of the giving. That’s not.

I mean, even somebody on a $70,000 salary that’s giving 10%, that’s $7,000 that might equal their annual giving. So it really gives everybody in the company an opportunity to directly voice what they want to be giving towards and to make an impact in something that really matters personally to them. ⁓ it’s atypical. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody that has quite the structure that we do.

but we’ve been intentional in it. I think there’s a good point to say that we do not have any, I think, illusions that we do things best or the quote unquote right way. I think we’ve been intentional about how we’ve chosen the way that we do things. And I think that we’ve done it long enough that we understand the trade-offs that come with some of the ways that we’ve chosen to do things. But…

Even in that, there are times that we make mistakes or we don’t quite live up to the standard that we want to hold ourselves to. And so the way that I like to describe what I think is the ethos of the company and the posture of the company is that we are not a perfect company, but we are a sincere company. that the things that I’ve been talking about, even already on the podcast, these are things that we really care about and that we’re really intentional about trying to design the way that we run the company.

to lean into those things. Now, I’ve been talking a lot about financial giving, but in some ways, the most interesting and compelling things that the company does are the non-financial pieces of it. I mean, we give, I don’t even know how much product away, which is giving product away is a fantastic way to be able to really open up how many nonprofits, charities, worthy causes that we can kind of get behind. And then there are a…

multitude of ways that we found ways to contribute skills and time, ⁓ influence to help worthy causes. So ⁓ we try to take what we call a capital G approach to generosity, where we don’t think about it as just writing checks, but we think about it as being open-handed with whatever we have been entrusted with. And as a result, there’s quite a diverse number of ways that the company has been able to find to be generous.

John Burdett
That’s awesome. love the awesome authenticity behind it and also the consistency behind it. And that’s got to be extremely attractive to your teammates and stuff like that. Cause like you said, not all of them are probably Christian, not all of the people you’re interacting are Christian, even though that’s your background and that’s your faith. And you’re applying these Christian principles inside your business. But nobody can argue with the benefits of what you’re doing because you know,

let’s face it, God’s ways work, even if you believe in God or not, they’re gonna work. And these are things that people get behind no matter what they believe

Mike Beckham
get asked a lot about like, does your faith intersect with running a company? And I think that the most simple way to answer this is that my faith really compels me and motivates me to treat people in a way ⁓ that I think almost everybody could agree with, you know? And that my particular motivation for generosity

can be different than somebody else’s, but they can still look at it and be like, that is great. That is great that this is a for-profit company that actually cares about the lives of the people in the community around it. They care about the lives of the people that work for them. They care about the lives of the people that they work with in other companies. This is the way I would hope companies would work. And so I’m always happy to share my motivation, like what I feel like God’s done in my life. But it’s also like,

I think it’s a great unifier. Generosity is one of those few things where it’s it’s very rare you meet somebody that’s like, no, we should not share, you know, we should not in any way try and help others, especially like, it’s very difficult to imagine the person that’s like, yes, Mike, somebody in your position should not be generous and try and hoard as much as they can for themselves. And so I think it’s given me, number one, a great opportunity to in some ways spotlight my faith and how it’s impacted my life, but also,

and not in a way that divides but unifies where it’s like, we can, regardless of where you’re coming from, I think that we can all get behind the idea that wouldn’t the world be better if companies work like this and thought like this.

Sam Donaghey
Mike, has the pressure grown as you’ve scaled the business to compromise on your values at all? Like growing a business to this scale.

Mike Beckham
Yeah, I think in some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. So on the no side of it, I used to have this concept that ⁓ culture always degrades and weakens as organizations get larger. And I think in general, that is probably accurate, that there is a cultural gravity that exists that as an organization grows, becomes easier and easier for the core, you know, to develop entropy when it comes to the core values.

And one of the reasons is quite simple, and that is that ⁓ as organizations grow, my observation is that they tend to think more and more about what are the skills we need to run the business, and less and less about cultural fit and values. And so you’ve got a company, just as an illustration of this, you have a company and it’s growing very rapidly, and this year it looks like your revenue’s gonna double.

and your team is 10 people, but you’re going to have to add 10 more people in order to keep up with the revenue growth. And you’re just desperate to get people in the door and to serve customers. And so ⁓ you have to hire quickly and you have to have a little bit lower bar on ⁓ the hiring process than you might other times because you’ve got to get somebody in the door and you need 10 people. So you need to double the size of your team. Well, what tends to happen if you do that is that

fast forward a year and it’s like, well, who is setting the culture in the organization? It’s just as likely to be the new 10 people that came in the door, ⁓ who you were not necessarily intentional about saying, Hey, well, they really champion the values of the company and what we set out to be, or were they just hired because they were somebody who could do the job that you needed to do to serve the customers. so like one example of how we pushed back against that idea is that we just said, we’re never going to grow our head count.

and our team size by more than X percent of the base. So if we have 50 people, we’re not hiring more than 15 this year. We’re just, maybe we could grow faster than that if we did, but we’re just not going to do it. And as a result, we never had a point where we saw degradation of the culture from that perspective. So I used to think that just you’ve got this gravity as you grow, it’s just going to get worse. It’s going to degrade. ⁓ And I think the other reason why that tends to be true.

is because most organizations, the values are kind of cast by the founder. A lot of times there’s like this kind of charismatic, let’s go take that hill that fires people up and maybe that’s my personality. But then as the organization gets more and more people, like the impact of that one person gets less and less. What I have found to my delight in the last couple of years is that as organizations get bigger,

It is actually possible for culture to get stronger. And we know this to be true. We have seen this ⁓ with historical movements that as they grow in size, they also grow in fervor that ⁓ actually things can get stronger and can create kind of a momentum of their own as they get bigger. But the key is that they have to be owned by everybody. And so what we did with the organization, like when we hire a new person,

their first day, I’ll sit down with them and I will walk through our mission vision values with them. And I give them an hour to an hour and a half of like, here is what we are aiming for. Here is what we are about. Here’s who we’re trying to be. And none of this is a surprise to them because they’ve heard it during the hiring process, but we’re really reinforcing it. And then at the end of that conversation, there’s a variety of kind of things I say to them and challenges, but the biggest challenge is that I need you to lead with me.

that culture is like a garden, that it only thrives if everybody picks the weeds, everybody waters the plants, everybody fertilizes the soil. You have to lead with me or this will not be the thing that you joined ⁓ hoping it would be. And that if you can get people to co-own the culture with you, then every time you add a person, the culture gets a little bit stronger. There’s one more person that is looking out for and to some extent policing that

the company and the culture is continuing to be what you want it to be. And that as you get to a critical mass of this, your body kind of behaves just like a human body when it gets ⁓ a foreign body in it, your body just repels it. This is a lot of times why you have to take certain medication if you have a transplant of an organ, because your body’s like, no, that’s not from here, that doesn’t belong here, get that out. And great culture kind of works the same way. It’s owned by everybody, and then everybody is like, no, we’re just literally not gonna allow.

something that runs against what we’re trying to be here. So great culture really starts with this interesting balance between two ideas. You are trying to find an absolute monoculture around mission and a few shared values, while simultaneously having a lot of diversity around skill set and approach. so the people that are like, the most important thing is diversity, get it wrong.

It’s not in a vacuum by itself, diversity alone won’t get you anywhere. Just like a lack of diversity ⁓ by itself, know, and everybody being the same and having the same interests won’t get you anywhere by itself. Like a basketball team where everybody is a seven foot center that can only shoot from five feet, you know, away from the basket is going nowhere. ⁓ You have to have, just like a basketball team where some of the players are not as committed to excellence as others is going nowhere.

You have to have this interesting mix of shared mission and shared values and then a lot of diversity around skill sets and approach and background and all the other stuff.

John Burdett
Yeah, I love so much what you said. I don’t know who said this, but it’s a great quote around culture is your culture is basically what you tolerate. And as you grow in skeletal organization, the more you tolerate deviations from your culture, the more your culture deviates from where you want it to be.

And it’s kind of like a slow boil. You know, you’re not recognizing it’s happening and you wake up one day. ⁓ our, our BHAG, I’m sure you’re a Jim Collins fan is to be a blessing at scale because I’ve seen so few companies grow bigger and get better.

Mike Beckham
Yeah.

John Burdett
and stay true to what they, who they are and why they do what they do. And that’s just an awesome, massive problem I want to be able to solve one day is, you know, I want somebody to say, you know, as, as Fast Slow Motion is 10 times the size it is today that, you know, the soul of who we are, the culture that we have is way better than it was when we were one X of that 10 X. And that’s an amazing challenge. And I love, you know, your practical advice on empowering your team members, like you own the culture.

Mike Beckham
Yeah.

John Burdett
⁓ because I experienced that every day, just like you do is like, it doesn’t matter what I say anymore, because I’m not living out the culture every day doing the work. And you have to empower your teammates to say, you own the culture and this company is going to become what you tolerate around that culture. So if somebody is not living up to the standard, if somebody is not adhering to our core values, you’ve got to coach them up or coach them out because eventually that’s going to become the standard. If you don’t, if you don’t allow.

you if you don’t, you don’t deal with it directly. So I love, I love how you describe that and really empowering your team members to own the culture going forward. ⁓ because once again, it’s, it’s no way to scale that any other way, I think. And I think that’s where a lot of people, you know, miss the mark on that. One other comment I think is really important. You’ve kind talked about diversity and I’ve experienced this myself. We have an extremely diverse team here, which I’m so proud of.

but we all have the same core values. We hire to our mission who we are, why, but the backgrounds of people, the personality profiles of people in the same role doing the same thing, totally different, but they’re executing the job at the same standard and doing such, know, they’re adding their secret sauce to it and their personality to it, but we’re all adhering to that same mission and we all have the same goals around our why. And it’s just awesome to see.

how well we execute on that with the diversity of backgrounds and the diversity of thought and the diversity of accomplishing problems different ways, but not compromising on any of our standards around either our culture or our excellent standards that you’ve mentioned. Have you experienced that as well? I assume the answer is yes, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

Mike Beckham
Yeah, no, I think you said it very well that the willingness to have high standards ⁓ is an absolute prerequisite. And there will always be things that tempt you to compromise. Sometimes. So I’ll give two examples of this. One is that all of us have a person that we aspire to be. And there are days that we wake up and the sun is shining.

and we slept well at night and we’re our best self. And we show up and we’re ready to be that person. And there are other days that we do not. And there are certainly days I wake up where I have a scarcity mindset where I am like, I need to get more for myself. you know, where I need to be less gracious here, you know, whatever. Like you take the things that where it’s okay if I cut a couple corners, like I’m a human person.

⁓ We all have those days. And what I have found the powerful thing that culture can do is I am not convinced that culture transforms people. It’s kind of like ⁓ the idea that alcohol just makes you like kind of a heightened version of who you already are. at times, I think culture, what it does is it makes it easier for you to be the person that you want to be at its best. So with Simple Modern,

the best thing our culture can be is the days that I show up where I don’t want to be generous. I’m surrounded by people that are having a good day and do want to be generous. And then I see that and I come to my senses and I’m motivated to be the person I want to be. And then on other days, I’m that for them because they’re going to have the same days. And that when you have a community of people like that,

I can guarantee you maybe five, maybe 10 % of the company is going to show up every day and they’re not going to want to be their best self. They’re not going to really want to chase the person that they want to become. And, they’re going to have a coworker and, and that, that says something to them or through their example that brings them to their senses. And they’re like, yeah, that’s, that’s what I want to be. Thank you, you, Micah for showing me that today. Like that’s, that’s actually that, that was exactly what I needed. So if you think about culture like that, that it’s not necessarily

transformative to who people are, but that it influences in that range of who they can become, what they pursue. I think that that’s really true. The other way, so you don’t want to compromise on culture and as an individual, we don’t want to compromise on the people that we want to be. It is so much easier when you’re surrounded by people that are also committed to the same things. ⁓ It’s so much easier for me to compromise. If I’m having a day where I don’t feel particularly generous and I’m surrounded by people that are

not generous people, it is very easy to lean into that feeling. The other way that you can compromise, I think, is that you just get somebody very talented at doing a thing who does not buy in. And every organization has had this problem. And I continue to be convinced it’s just, in the end, it’s not worth it. That you really will try to justify it. And you’ll drag it out.

and then you ultimately end up in the place of it’s just not worth it for us to have somebody who is very good at performing on one of our dimensions but is ultimately not aligned.

Sam Donaghey
do you know if you find a good cultural fit when you’re hiring at Simple Modern?

Mike Beckham
It’s a great question. mean, think the first thing, obviously some of this is discernment. And so like one of the things that I think we got good at was we got good at putting people that we felt like had very good discernment in the hiring roles. And what we have found is that actual like previous skillset mattered far less than growth mindset and value mission fit for us.

So we have a very big Amazon business, for example, but I think not a single person that works on our Amazon business today had ever done anything in e-commerce, let alone Amazon before they came to the company. And we were able to train those people because they were the right type of people. I mean, there were certain things like, if we were building rockets, you know, like maybe like there’s 20 propulsion experts in the world and you got to hire one of those people. But even still, ⁓

I’m convinced that the vast majority of jobs, nobody is so skilled that it outweighs the values in the mission piece. And let me give you a simple illustration of this. There was recently a study done on NFL quarterbacks where they looked at where you were taken in the draft and your performance. ⁓ And they said, obviously somebody who’s taken in the first pick is in a different situation than somebody taken with the 29th pick.

because the person who’s taken with first picks coming into a team that’s, you know, worst in the league and somebody take them with the 29th pick, kind of like an Aaron Rodgers was, they’re coming into a place where it’s a pretty good situation. You know, like they’re not expected to be person right off the bat. It’s a very good team. What they found is once you adjust for the quality of teammates that the quarterback is surrounded by and coaching and system and all of that stuff.

that basically there’s no difference between first round picks and six round picks. Anybody who is picked in the first six rounds of the NFL draft is about the same likelihood to succeed once you adjust for who they’re surrounded by and they’re fit with who they’re surrounded by. Okay, so if we believe that to be true in football, which is one of the more performance oriented, you know, dog eat dog kind of ⁓ professions that you could be a part of,

then why would it be any different in our company? That people talk all the time about getting A players. And it’s like, my point would be no one can be an A player unless they fit with the other pieces around them. Right? It doesn’t matter if you have the fastest wide receiver in the world, if your quarterback can’t get him the ball, or if he doesn’t fit with your, if everything else on your team is built to be a running team, then it doesn’t matter. And so being an A player, I think is a combination

of aptitude and fit. So this is what, if I was on a soapbox, I would say most hiring managers get wrong is that they just don’t think about fit and ⁓ culture and values nearly enough. And let’s like take it a step further. Let’s say you do find somebody who’s just that good. Their skill set, their productivity is just that good kind of.

regardless of how well they get along with coworkers, which is almost never, almost never works. But let’s just say that it was for a second. If they’re not bought into your mission and your values, then their likelihood to churn and go somewhere else goes way up. And there is no way that you get the same kind of productivity out of somebody in their first year as you get from somebody who’s in their third year or their fifth year or their 10th year. It’s just not how it works. And so I think that we have come to look at it as

fit is at least 50%. And that comes down to, you bought into the mission? Are you bought into the values? Are you going to work well with the people that you’re going to be surrounded with? ⁓ And then do you have enough intelligence, ⁓ aptitude, curiosity, growth mindset to develop the skillset? And if so, then you’re very likely going to be successful. And as a result, we really just have not had situations where we had to let people go or people didn’t work out. We haven’t had the churn. ⁓

because I think we were just very slow to hire and discerning about who we hired. And then we’ve also found some good questions. I a ⁓ couple of examples here. Excellence is one of our values. So I want to see excellence in your life in some way. I don’t even care where it is. I don’t need to see excellence with water bottles. What’s something you were excellent at? Let me, show me a time that you, an area of your life where you’ve really demonstrated just a willingness to push yourself to the absolute

maximum of what you’re capable of. I love giving this example. One of our team members, ⁓ she was coming from PR. We were hiring for a Amazon e-commerce role. She had no experience. However, she had been a part of the St. Louis Ballet. And you know what? Ballet is hardcore. Like you have to really be committed to excellence to do something like ballet at that.

level. And so that showed me this is a person that gets excellence and not surprisingly, she’s come in and did she have a lot to learn? Yes. But did she end up being excellent in the role? Yeah, absolutely. Because she understood what excellence costs. So that’s one thing we’ll ask. We’ll ask about curiosity and examples of that. ⁓ One other thing that we do and like this is probably an advantage of an in-person work environment versus remote. It is.

I am sure there’s an exception to this and I know there probably are one or two, but to get hired at our company, you almost always have to have a personal referral from somebody already in the company. And we want to hire people where we already know their character, right? And that, mean, obviously we can, people can change, but the best predictor of the person that you’re gonna be is the person that you have been. And so,

We are looking for people that we know like we’re not trying to hire people but when I started the company the first 15 hires 14 out of the 15 people I’d known for a decade or more and Part of the reasoning was I didn’t want to just hire people that said they were excited about generosity for example I wanted to hire people that I knew were generous and There’s there’s a very easy way to do that. It’s that that’s higher people that you’ve already seen demonstrate generosity

in your life and that you’ve had personal experience with it. maybe that’s not as scalable to a company of like 5,000 people, but you know I’m not running a company of 5,000.

John Burdett
Honestly, I think it is. think it’s the only way to do it. And I think so many people take shortcuts on the HR side, ⁓ both recruiting side and also developing their people, letting people go that need to let be let go that there’s a better opportunity out there for them. And I love so much about what you said. We’re, big Pat Lencioni fans here and use the humble hungry smart model a lot. And we often teach is like,

The only thing we can help you with is the smart side. Like if you’re not humble and if you’re not hungry, those are non-negotiable for us. Now we measure their capability. They’ve got to have a base level of capability, but we can, we can get you where you want to be and where you need to be, but you got to come in with that hunger and that attitude and that work ethic and you better.

be humble about it because you won’t last very long around here. And so often in our, like in our interview process, Sam runs that for us and we have a very defined process just like you. I’m the last step and I talk to every final candidate and Mike, I spend my whole time trying to convince them not to come work here.

You know, I’m like, here’s our value. Here’s who we are. Here’s who we’re not. Here’s how hard it’s going to be. You know, here’s especially the first six months are going to be hellish. You know, you think, you know what you’re doing right now. You’re going to come in here. You’re going be very humbled because you’ll be around people that know how to do things way better than you. You’re new to everything. And if you’re not willing to kind of go through that grind and, and, and earn the trust of your teammates and be a good teammate and learn how it works around here, you’re going to hate it.

And, I love so much of how you, talked to that because I fully believe, yeah, you hire for fit first and you can develop the capabilities and, never hire just based on capabilities alone, because I’ve never had it work out either. I don’t, I don’t know if anybody that actually has to be honest with you.

Mike Beckham
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you’re really kind of, we’re just articulating kind of a count the cost. It’s interesting when you’re in sales that you think so much of the goal is getting to yes. One of the things that maybe is a little bit counterintuitive that I have learned that is pretty powerful is that one of the best times to set expectations is when somebody is committing to something and that as a result,

slow playing getting them to yes is often very effective because then later when difficulties come, when challenge comes, you can reference back on that conversation and they will have a very different reaction to it. So like you said, if it’s like, you you should really think twice before accepting this because you’re going to have a couple of times where you feel like you’re drowning and you feel like you’re over challenged.

John Burdett
Mm-hmm.

Mike Beckham
or where I give you some feedback and it’s just hard to hear and you need to say yes knowing that that’s going to be true. And then if and when they say yes, then three months from now when you’re like, Hey, you know, when I said I was going to give you hard feedback, this is one of those times they’re not going to go into a shell. They’re going to be like, yeah, he, told me it was going to come. like, here it is. And it’s just amazing how differently people respond when you set a prior expectation. We,

we really can get so insecure that we’re going to get to yes, that we’re hesitant to tell people the downsides or to tell people like the challenges that might lie ahead. I think it’s much better to just get that all out on the table because you’re gonna find that they’re much more resilient when those things happen.

John Burdett
That’s right. Yeah. I’ve had so many employees come back out to me. was like, you’re exactly right. And then, you know, we talked through it and like you said, they were prepared for it. I was like, we’re going to drop you in the deep end of the pool. We’re going to give you some swimmies and a lifeguard and you’re going to make it, but you got to be able to learn how to tread water and make it through these difficult things to become the person you want to become within our organization and maximize the impact that you’re going to have for our clients and for your teammates and those kinds of things. So.

I love all that. Let’s transition to one more topic and then we can wrap things up. saw recently that you guys, I think you’re now in ESOP. ⁓ I’d love to kind of hear, which I love by the way, I’d love to kind of hear that story because I imagine a lot of business owners have either looked at it or thought about it ⁓ if they haven’t become one already.

Mike Beckham
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we made the decision to become an ESOP where ⁓ I can’t remember what the term is for it, but we basically fund shares into it every year. Sometimes ESOPs are kind of a combination of employees becoming owners by buying out a large chunk of the current ownership group. And sometimes it’s contributory model, I think is what we are, which is like every year you add shares to the kind of group corporate holdings.

and they’re allocated to team members. I think that it starts with an idea of, you feel like people are helping to build value? And if so, you want them to participate in the upside. I mean, this is, again, this is like abundance mindset versus scarcity mindset. Do you believe if you help people to recognize some of the value they help to create, that there’s going to be more value or less value that accrues? so…

There were two things. One, I think I had the mindset of even if it meant less for me, I would feel good about this and I would feel like this is the right thing to do. But I think also, I think it probably leads to better outcomes over time. Let’s go back to the retention thing. Like you want to build long-term thinking into people. And we live in a culture where people are more transitory than ever when it comes to their jobs. I was doing some research last night about the role that trust plays with teams.

And what the research says, and it’s quite robust at this point through quite a few studies, meta-analysis ⁓ that have been done that basically like psychological safety ties to outperformance of teams more than any other variable. How do you create psychological safety? How do you create long-term thinking? And it’s by aligned incentives and ⁓ creating a culture where people feel like you’re in it for the long run.

with them, with their families. And so that’s what we’ve tried to do. There are times where we’ve been ESOP for about two years and I think there’ve been some parts where it’s like, this is like, there’s some trade-offs here. Like this is kind of restrictive in some ways. ⁓ You know, like this year because of the trade war, like our valuation on paper will definitely go down. And so, you know, the team will see that, but it’s also like,

That’s good. You know, they’re owners just like I am. feel the pain, they feel the pain with me. And when the company thrives and the stock appreciates, they’re going to see the benefit of that also. So I think that it has been helpful and really for myself as a leader, we can go back to this culture thing. I want to create structures and incentives for me to behave like the person that I want to be. And the person I want to be is more than anything else.

I want for anybody who ever worked with me or for me or did business adjacent to me to say it was the best thing I ever did. And that matters more to me than the amount of money that I’ve got in my bank account at the end of my career. I’m going to have enough. I know that. Barring me doing something really stupid. But it’s not a given that that’s going to be the way that people respond about working with me unless I continue.

to lean into the person that I want to be. And I think that one of the observations I’ve made about people as ⁓ they get more money is that even people that are willing to take risks, they just tend to get more risk averse and they tend to get more like, I got to hold onto it. And I don’t know why that is. Like I’ve seen people that were like, I’m not worried about losing money and all up until they had some money. And then it was like, they’re very fearful about losing it.

so I, I love it as a mechanism. mean, it’s the government incentivizes it. So it’s like, ⁓ there there’s even more reason to do it financially. It’s advantageous to do it. There’s literally less money that goes into taxes and that money goes directly into the pockets of my, my teammates. So like, you know, of course I love that. it, provides, I think a viable way that

potentially the company could be owned by somebody other than me without selling it to private equity or something down the line. There’s just a lot of benefits. ⁓ I’ve told the story before, but the day we announced it to the company, my favorite response was from the person who runs our custom laser production, Megan, and she comes from a very poor background. She said, basically, my family’s been poor for generations, but for the first time, I really do see a path that’s different for me and my kids. It’s possible.

And you hear stuff like that and that does make you very proud and it makes you very excited that you have the chance to really transform people’s lives by making them a part of the equity that’s being created.

John Burdett
I love it. It’s it’s winning at the right scoreboard. Right? love that ⁓ deal. Dwight Moody quote. says, ⁓ your greatest fear should not be a failure, but it’s succeeding at something that really doesn’t matter. And I love how you’ve, you’ve been intentional about that with your company or your, your, your teammates and your clients and everybody involved. So thank you so much for modeling that and giving us all a great example of how we can do things the right way.

Mike Beckham
Yeah.

Absolutely. Well, I love talking about it and I’ll kind of end with a thought, which is that most company building is like building an ATM machine. And what I’ve always told our company is that I don’t think we’re building an ATM machine. I think we’re trying to build more of a microphone because the company at its highest form in my mind is not a money producing machine, but it’s actually an influence machine that allows us to transform the way that people think about what is possible in a company. And that that’s actually like.

that would be the best day for Simple Modern. And so I want to continue to lean into that. I love it when people see what we’ve done with the company and if they’re inspired in some way, you know, like there’ll never be a company exactly like Simple Modern, but I think that what there will be is hopefully a lot of companies that were in at least some small part inspired by the way that we approach things. And if that’s the legacy, I’ll be very proud of

Sam Donaghey
So Mike, this has been a really truly inspiring conversation. Before we close, we always like to ask our guests to leave us with a quote or a piece of advice that’s been meaningful to them. So what comes to mind for you?

Mike Beckham
Yeah, I’ll do my best. ⁓ I’ve shared this quote several occasions, ⁓ it’s a, I tell you what, actually, I will read it so that I don’t get this wrong. ⁓ But it’s the man in the arena. And the reason why I love the quote is because I think it encapsulates that there really is no ability to do anything significant without, you know,

imperfection and without difficulty and without struggle, but that the standard can never be perfection. That the standard that we’re really after ⁓ is authenticity and chasing after the good. And so ⁓ it’s the reason why I’ve always loved this quote and it’s been an impact, it’s made an impact in my life since I was in college.

And what Roosevelt said, as he said, is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or how the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit rather belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes up short again and again, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, at least he fails.

while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Sam Donaghey
Mike, thank you so much for being with us today.

Mike Beckham
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Sam Donaghey
Well, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of the Fast Slow Motion podcast. This has been such a rich conversation. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. For our listeners who want to learn more about Mike and his work, you can check out Simple Modern at simplemodern.com and you can make sure to listen to Mike on the Operators podcast and we’re going to drop links to those in the show notes. And as always, you can catch past episodes at fastslowmotion.com slash podcast, or you can subscribe on your favorite

podcast platform and if you’ve got a question or a topic that you’d like us to cover, you can drop us a note at fastslowmotion.com slash podcastfeedback.