Innovation With Purpose — Brooks Running Former CEO Jim Weber

Fred Schonenberg
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the VentureFuel Visionaries. I'm your host, Fred Schonenberg, and I'm thrilled to welcome Jim Weber. Jim is the longtime CEO behind the dramatic turnaround and growth of Brooks Running.

Under Jim's leadership, Brooks went from a near bankruptcy to becoming a beloved performance brand that outpaced giants like Nike and Adidas. Jim's book, Running With Purpose, which you all should go read right away, in that he shares how bold focus, innovation and a deeply authentic culture became the leverage that powered that transformation. 

Today, we're going to dig into how Jim got permission to take those big bets, how he sustained innovation even when times got tough, and the role of external partnerships and how the metaphor, life is short, but run long, shaped his thinking about leadership and legacy.If you are an innovator, an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur, a corporate executive looking for stories and frameworks to make innovation real, this is the conversation for you. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Weber
Fred, thanks for having me, and thanks for that introduction. Topics of building businesses are fun, and it's going to be fun to share some stories today.

Fred Schonenberg
I have to say, when we talked before the show, I mentioned to you that besides my own podcast, the one I listened to was Acquired. And you're like, oh yeah, I was on Acquired. And I had so much fun going back and listening to your episode there, and I kind of want to start there. I loved their intro, because I thought it summed this up so well, and I'm going to quote it a little bit. 

When the CEO, Jim Weber, took the helm in 2002, the company was losing $5 million a year.It was $30 million in debt, and it was a week away from missing payroll. And it was about a $60 million revenue business. So you fast forward, your team grows the company to over a billion in revenue and climbing. And boy, I mean, what a heck of a run, and what a great way to start an episode. So I'm borrowing from those guys here. But can you talk a little bit about those early days and that transformation?

Jim Weber
Well, Brooks was, I think, 90 years old as a brand and a company, Fred, when I joined. And it had been through a lot. It had been through bankruptcies and too many CEOs and too many owners. It actually had been saved in the 90s by Helen Rocky, a former Nike executive. But she had left for another opportunity and kind of went sideways again. 

So I'm on the board, and it was one of those board meetings where the chairman looked down the table and said, you, why aren't you in here running this company? And it was a challenging time because the company had really tried to grow fast, very sales driven, and ended up having some misses and margins were affected, and cash flow was affected, and inventories. 

So in turnarounds, it's never one thing, right? There's no sort of silver bullet to fix it and it was absolutely a financial crisis. And so as boards do during that time period, you start to sort through and model through it. We were private equity owned, J.H. Whitney. And I give them so much credit because they ended up recapitalizing the company to settle the bank down, I would say. But that new capital base, which included a lot of debt, was critical to give the time for the company to sort of reposition and resort. 

I came in as the fourth CEO, Fred, in two years. And there actually was an employee pool on how long I would last as another one in line. So it was a time where there was not a lot of trust and credibility or confidence that this company, frankly, could survive. 

Fred Schonenberg
One of the things that struck me in the book is this moment of the way the entire competitive set and books at the time was operating, was sort of you're all things for all people. You've got running shoes, basketball shoes, tennis shoes, you're selling apparel. And it was sort of I would say like a sea of sameness, right? Everybody's attacking the same market, the same ranges. 

And you describe this moment where you decided to slim the product line by over 50%, go all in on performance running, which I imagine in the midst of a turnaround and needing revenue, maybe shook a few people. I'm curious how you went about that and how you maybe overcome whatever that internal resistance would be for that focus.

Jim Weber
I think we did a lot of analysis and there weren't a lot of our product lines that were being successful in the marketplace. Brooks was one of a dozen full line athletic footwear apparel brands. The largest we all know from Nike and Adidas and on down. But we weren't that good at anything. And the retailers' response to our products reflected that. They weren't selling through that well. So a lot of it wanted to come back. And the category is so large, Fred, and athletic footwear and apparel.

And there's a reason why Nike is one of the greatest, largest, biggest consumer brands ever built. The category is big. And so playing in each one of those segments is a high bar. What happens is you've got premium performance products, which we had a couple of in running, but none in any other sport. And then you have takedown products that are almost family footwear, right? Huge volumes. They're very brand driven. It's casual footwear, fashion footwear, family footwear from $15 price points on up. 

So half of Brooks' business was in $30 shoes. And there were terrible margins. They weren't selling through that well. Our brand wasn't that strong. So we looked at that business. And it was pretty clear that we had cash flow issues. We could reduce our inventories and free up cash by not doing that business. We're trading dollars with it.

In a financial sense, it was an easy decision to make to get out of some of those product lines because we weren't successful at it. We were making no money. But the real opportunity was performance products. And I had been in sporting goods for a while at that point and kind of studied the brands and how they were created. 

Here was the insight, Fred, that every sporting goods brand, whether it's equipment, footwear, what have you, sort of created their authenticity with performance products that enthusiasts or elite athletes found and fell in love with and word of mouth followed. You can trace every brand in sporting goods almost back to a product phenomenon that made a statement with enthusiasts in the category.

So the initial insight was that the frequent runner bought 2.6 pairs a year and they knew they needed the right shoe. They're very loyal to fit, feel and ride, injury prevention. They just never wanted to miss a run. So we didn't have visible technology and all this great marketing, but we could make a very runnable shoe. And we were going for that second pair. That was the test. If you can sell them one pair, but if you can sell them the second pair, runners know at mile 20, say two to three weeks into a shoe, whether they'll ever buy that shoe again. So that was the insight.

We had a couple of shoes that were in niches that were really good for certain types of runners. We had to add a shoe in the stability category to really save the company. And that was the Adrenaline GTS. So in the initial work that we did, it was so clear to me that that's what we had to solve for and we had some assets to do that. 

Fred Schonenberg
One of the things that I think is interesting in hindsight, right, this makes so much sense. And maybe even financially, you said, OK, look, we've got to shed all this, go here for now. Of course, then the pullback to me and later, if I might have been strong. And when you and I were going back and forth on this, one of the things you said is there are no answers. This is about doing the research, the analysis to build conviction and have insights and have a thesis on it and then have the confidence to execute. That's a really dangerous area for most companies, especially large companies struggling with that moment of going all in on something. 

Can you talk about how you got permission and then how you did that? Because I know you also changed which stores you focused on. There were a lot of moves there. I'm just curious about that journey of, hey, we think this is the right play. How do you get everybody off a line to go all in on that?

Jim Weber
Right. I think it's so true, right, in this era of big data and analysis and there's so much analysis you can do. But I often have told my teams there's no answers coming out of this. There's insights that you still have to make judgments on. And I think in the consumer product space, Fred, I love it, right? It's this product brand market channel consumer fit. It's this puzzle to solve. 

And so I've always looked at the shoe wall, digital or in-store as an example, and look for white space in it and where you can put a product, where you can play that you can get credit from the customer for and create some stickiness and a mode around it. So that whole merchant puzzle, I think, is just essential to grow a consumer brand. I often describe my career as in business school and at Pillsbury, I learned how to manage a brand, but I didn't learn how to grow one or build one. And so that's that entrepreneurial mindset where you have to see opportunity and you have to execute so well against it. 

So by the time I got to Brooks, it was the fourth business I would run. I just had a humbleness about answers laying on the floor. You have to create, you have to create outcomes into the future. And it's a different mindset. And not everybody looks at brands that way. So many people look at a brand as an asset or a logo or a product, and that's where the value in the company is. And in categories that aren't winners take all and the consumer is constantly changing. That's not good enough. You have to meet the needs in footwear. The lead times are out, Fred, 18 to 24 months at least. So you have to see it two years in advance.

And I think that's where the insights are so key. You got to know where you're going. Otherwise, you're just constantly reacting and chasing. Though you might be able to hold your own, maybe, but to grow, you really have to come up with something distinctive. So I had learned that by the time I got to Brooks. 

Fred Schonenberg
I think one of the things that I love that you said was, you have to create outcomes to grow. Like that's your taking the insight, your conviction, you're going after it, obviously, with the analysis and the work that goes into that. One of the things we were chatting about ahead of time was this idea of innovation for growth versus the more passive sort of defensive position of like, don't get disrupted. 

And I love the line you said. Disruption is not a strategy. It's an outcome. Can you talk about that? Because I think for our audience, right, they're thinking growth, innovation, but also disruption at the same time. And I thought it was a really interesting nuance.

Jim Weber
Yeah, I think there's so many people that get distracted by competition. Brand versus brand, company versus company. Who's going to disrupt what other competitor? And I think certainly in the broader consumer products world, my experience has been that disruption comes in solving for the customer. You're not exactly disrupting your competition. You're just solving in a more compelling way for this customer out there. 

And if you do that, you're always winning customers and losing customers. Your net new ads are going to accelerate. You're going to gain market share. So I think that customer puzzle, just obsessing over and seeing the customer really well is the competitive advantage, I would say, for growth, because that's how you disrupt. 

There's some industries that are driven by business models. Business models can absolutely be a competitive advantage. But in a consumer world that's fast moving, the solution for customers is kind of the winning metric in a way. So that's how I view disruption. The best defense is avoiding to be disrupted by some of their competitors to be absolutely on the offense with a customer and solving, solving, solving better than anyone else.

And a lot of people say that, but I think wiring the organization to solve for the customer, which is the strategy we used at Brooks. Then season after season, you're going to win some customers. You're going to miss some opportunities and innovation.Over time, I'd bet on that company. And that's the game. That's the engine that we built at Brooks. 

Fred Schonenberg
I just wired for the customer idea. One of the things when I read the book that I got so excited about was it all started with that first insight of the performance running shoe. This is our person. They know at mile 20 and everything fits from within that. You could see each of the steps you guys made in investments, innovation, your brand building, your purpose, right, was all for that customer. And so it all makes sense when you read in the book.

I think one of the things, bringing this conversation to the innovation side, you all invested very early in a biomechanics lab, doing deep research on product innovation, even in times where financially, I'm sure you would have, there were other places you could have put those dollars that maybe would have made the CFO happier. How do you decide when to put the gas down on innovation there and go after those breakthrough leaps, as well as the incremental improvements?

Jim Weber
There's some conviction that I came to in my career, Fred, especially as a CEO and enterprise leader. And it came from seeing what happened at Pillsbury in the 80s, where they under-invested in brands. They'd innovated tremendously across product lines and brands, but they didn't fully invest to establish it in front of the customer, and their businesses all became competitively weak.

I saw it in our industry over time too the CEO, this is one of the things, I'm a student of leadership. And because we grew Brooks from shrunk it to under 50 million, this year they'll do about a billion, six, they've grown 15% compound for 25 years. And it's all at premium prices. But one of the things I learned as a leader, we had to evolve at different our skills at different levels. The CEO owns growth three years out. 

If you want to continuously grow, which is what the most valuable companies do, which is what the most valuable brands do profitably, you've got to build horizon one, horizon two, horizon three, sort of three years, five years, 10 years, you got to have a roadmap. And some of these investments are 10 year investments. When we launched in China, that's a long-term 10 year investment. So I think short-termism is risky. It's very, very risky for your brand and your company to not have growth vehicles feathered in the out years, especially three to five years. 

So that to me was the CEO's responsibility. We created a strong execution. We had great plans and we wanted to hit those plans. So our three-year execution focus was total. But I think we also had a focus on that next horizon. We had to have products in the pipeline that were going to feed growth in years three, four, five.

That to me was, what I saw at Pillsbury in terms of that short-term management, it was almost on the verge of an ethical threat because it felt good in the short-term to hit the quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter. And in three years, you ended up with brands that were all weak and middle, mediocre. It was just sad because they didn't have at that point now they were playing defense and trying to literally recover.

So seeing that early in my career, I just had conviction about it. I think great companies and great brands deliver now, deliver three years from now, deliver five years from now, that's what great companies do. So the conviction we had around that was total. My first board meeting, real board meeting at Brooks in June of 2001, we had 12 initiatives that we had to execute in this turnaround in setting up for growth, 10 or 12, as I recall. And the board, after I presented it, said, Jim, you can't do 12 things. What are the three most important? What are the three most important things? 

I said, you don't actually understand. We have to do all of these things. And half of them, Fred, were growth focused in years two and three. And of course, if we hadn't done those in that first year, we wouldn't have escaped velocity from that turnaround mode.

Fred Schonenberg
I mean, the 10 to 12 things leads to one of my favorite lines from the book that my team is now tired of hearing because I say it all the time, which was your analogy of moving forward a wall of bricks. You couldn't do it one by one, right? You're just, you gotta move each of the 12 forward. I thought that was such a great way to describe when you're trying to build something. It's not like, hey, I'm gonna follow this one and then the others are gonna catch up. Like you actually need to move them all a little bit at a time. 

Jim Weber
I think that a friend of mine said to me early in my career, Jim, great vision, great strategy. I'm very wired around the playbook and how you're gonna actually compete and move the company forward. That's all great. But without execution, Jim, that's hallucination. And she was so right. I think what I've learned is that execution is essential, and execution excellence in a competitive category that's not winner-take-all is really important, in fact, it can be a competitive advantage. 

So we got really focused on that, but the glass half-empty way to say that, Fred, is that I think it's not just true for CEOs and leaders, it's true for investors too, but I think success means you're doing a lot of things right, and the allegory of that is there's a lot of ways to fail. If you don't execute in one critical area, you miss your plan, you don't launch the product on time, you don't really tell the story, you don't execute financially in margin and cash flow.

To do everything well at the top quartile of the industry, and we measured ourselves by every public company in the industry, you got to execute well. So that is what makes business a team sport. Yeah, and that analogy of a wall of bricks, you got to move them all forward, because if some of them are way back here, you're not going to scale, you're not going to execute. 

And it's just, I think it's the reality of a complex business that is trying to create value and grow. There's just a lot of things you have to do well. And I, as a student of great brands that were great companies, they're hard to compete with. Why? They execute so well. And so as we were a young company, I think, creating a visual around what looked like the wall of bricks became part of the metaphor I would use.

Fred Schonenberg
I love it. I also love referring to a 90 year old company at the time as a young company, right? But it was new, it was like a new company at that point.

Jim Weber
Yeah, it's pretty unique in that regard, too, because it was obviously a turnaround and David and Goliath kind of story in its industry. But we really refounded it as a running brand. And we burned the boats on everything else and so that was a new starting point for us. It had always been in running and had some credibility there. But by making it not only our focus, but all we did, it gave us a lot of advantage and focus. 

Fred Schonenberg
So I want to go back, you're talking about sustained conviction, right around the idea and innovation and growth. I wonder if there was a moment you could talk about sustaining that conviction in lean times. And those moments when there may be some challenges and resisting that urge to cut innovation. 

I bring it up, right, because there's always these moments where we've seen it a lot in our work where a CEO gets really excited. They're like, we're going forward innovation, innovation, innovation, hold on, share price took a hit, something happened. We can get to innovation later. We got to come over here and they lost two years focusing on this. And they're like, where's all our new products? It's like, well, you, you stopped. Can you talk about maybe a moment that whether it's a moment of crisis or something that challenged you to maintain that conviction?

Jim Weber
Yeah, I think the one there were several and, and they're fun to talk about because I look back at them and what could we have seen? What did we learn? What assumptions did we make that were right? What was wrong? There were several big ones. A significant one that we've all lived through in the last two decades was the Great Recession of 2008, 2009, and 2010, and all the causes of that; it was global, and the pullback in consumer spending and so on and so forth. Coupled with the barefoot running phenomenon, Fred, there was a great book out, "Born to Run," that was inspiring on a running level, but it also said cushioned shoes ruined people, created injuries, and we should all essentially be running barefoot. 

So that was a big moment for us. Our sales had sort of plateaued, and there were different causes for that. Part of it was our execution. Our product was kind of tired. It was just good. It wasn't great. And, here comes this recession and the categories down and apparel sales are way down. So you get into these situations where the signals are messy. And a lot of them are negative, but here's, here's the other side of that is seeing opportunity, right? We still knew we had a ticket to play this game and run, running was still a huge game. And what we saw in the recession is that yeah, apparel sales were down, but shoe sales were going like this. Running had made the cut.

It was convenient. It was inexpensive, even with unemployment high and stress high. It was an antidote for that, right? You could go out and release some stress and, and do it in a very budget friendly way. So here's what we did: we went to our owner at the time and we said, look, we think we've got a ticket to play this game. Running's going to grow right through this. It isn't recession resistant, but we thought we had insight. We didn't know, Fred, but we had insight that it was going to grow through this. 

And we had some products in the pipeline, but we wanted to double down on the biomechanical insight based on the barefoot conversation. We thought we had credibility and a voice in the science of the biomechanics of running. So we doubled the size of our labs, clinical studies at universities, and more storytelling around our key products. And so from that point in time, we took our profits in half. We convinced our owner to invest. We tripled our business from 2009 to 2014 in the United States. 

And I get to tell the story, Fred, because it worked, but we felt that running was going to make the cut. By that time, we had a ticket to the game. And in this biomechanical world where everybody was confused, you should be running barefoot, cushioning and stability shoes are great. They saved my life. 

Both of those ended up being true, but we said, "We're going to lead research in this area. We need to know because this barefoot conversation basically undermined the whole category. It undermined Nike's air cushioning and heel cushioning, and so out of that came a huge body of work that Brooke did. Brooke's published clinical studies and papers, this whole run signature platform of science, where everybody's body has a unique habitual joint motion that your body wants to operate in. Sometimes when you run, that changes; sometimes it does not."

So we came out with this language of "it's not about the shoe. It's about how you and your body want to run, and then pick the right shoe for you." That all came out of that crisis in 2009. So we leveraged our strengths. I would say, Fred, the other thing we didn't do is try to create some whole new cloth of what Brooks was that we had never been before, but we saw opportunities in the conversation in the marketplace on barefoot to actually bring some expertise forward and get credit for it from a brand point of view.

And it was all anchored in performance, but I think that was not a moment where everybody was saying take your profits down and invest, but here's what we saw. The run category, of course, was huge. It's huge now, but it is going to grow. We saw that. And, because we're only focused on runners, I think we saw it with more clarity than maybe a lot of other brands did.

Fred Schonenberg
I love it. And it's the next question. You answered a little bit in some of the partnership universities that you mentioned. As you know, VentureFuel works with Fortune 500s and similar large enterprises with how they find startups and new technologies? And what's that collaboration? I'm curious if during your tenure, did Brooks explore partnerships, whether it was startups or external innovations that complimented all the internal R&D that you all were doing to give you competitive advantage? 

Jim Weber
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's been a story all throughout. Clearly, on the material science side, Brooks has done some real innovation in material science as it relates to running midsoles. It's kind of the engine drivetrain of a shoe—that whole midsole-outsole structure. From BASF to many other chemical companies, there's some really novel innovation on the material side that Brooks has done.

And then the biomechanics of human motion as it relates to running involves everything from sensors to tracking your gait and your run as you go, trying to do that in real life versus just in the lab. Every company has labs, but Brooks has continual clinically based studies on footwear and running, and how the footwear affects and might help runners as they run, keeping them in their natural, habitual joint motion path.

So all of that body of work is with partners and the major clinical partnerships globally. I have been with sports medicine institutes at the University of Massachusetts, Calgary, and some universities in Cologne, Germany, working with some of the best researchers in the world. Those partnerships are ongoing at Brooks. They have master's and PhD-level staff that work on this. I think other brands do too, but Brooks has been conducting this kind of research on footwear design since the seventies and eighties. So it's kind of who they are.

I think as a major brand, Brooks is the only brand for which every shoe starts with a biomechanical insight into what type of runner the shoe is for. And that's still true today, but that base of science underneath it is just foundational to how Brooks does that.

Fred Schonenberg
I love that. Switching to the title of your book, Running With Purpose, one of the quotes you referenced a couple of times is this idea of purpose and no finish line, which I love, right? Because especially for people who are focused on achievement, you're always like, "Well, as soon as I get here, I win." And it's like, no, the bar just raises, right? And it's like, you've got to enjoy the run. It's not necessarily the end of the race that gets you there. 

Talk about how that purpose served as either a guardrail or a compass as you started to make trade-offs, product development, prioritization, and maybe where you said no to something that seemed flashy and shiny but was misaligned.

Jim Weber
There are so many things we said no to over the years as Brooks was, and you could argue Brooks is still subscale to the major players in the athletic footwear and apparel industry. But I think early on, I'd been around a lot of brands, and I wanted to build a brand. And I knew that premium was critical to be able to fund investment because if you're playing at price points, it's just hard to make money and fund that flywheel of investment and innovation. So we wanted to play at the premium level too. 

We wanted to attract runners who were putting in mileage. We wanted to solve for that sort of alpha customer — the frequent runner who is putting in big miles. And so there's vision, there's mission, there's purpose. Many business folks, Fred, have been around tables where they're debating the vision or the mission or the purpose. We had all three at Brooks, but the purpose was different for me because we wanted to build a brand in this huge global category of running.

And that was going to, if you really looked at that and were going after some sort of leadership in that running space, that's a decades-long pursuit. You don't do that in three years. You can create success in three years, and that's why a mission is kind of a campaign. A vision is kind of a 10-year dream of what you look like and where you want to be, but a purpose can be forever. And I think here the key is the purpose essentially was to inspire everyone to run and be active, to run their path.

What's the key word in there are a few, one is inspire. That means you wake up every day and you're actively trying to engage with a runner. You never get there. There's no there, there on that word inspire. It's an active oriented thing. Then the second thing is your customer is on purpose, everyone runs and is active, the customers in the purpose. So I knew that could be timeless as a purpose because the customer is there. 

And I'll never forget, we had Warren Buffett and Brooks turned 100 in 2014. So we had this global all hands town hall in Seattle when Warren came and he just got what a brand was. Again, it's not an asset. It's not a logo. It's not on your balance sheet. It's not even a product. It's in the mind of your customer. Your brand is in the mind of your customer. And if you can stay there, stay relevant, stay engaged and have them feel something about your products and your brand that is the best or brings out the best in them. That's literally what he said. You're going to be fine.

And that's where the brand is. It's in the mind of your customer. So everything we did was brand building, every communication, every interaction, all the stuff we did in real life — in stores and at events and on fun runs — all of that is brand building in the early days. So we didn't have much marketing to speak of at all. But from day one, we were engaging with runners, trying to get them to fall for our product, maybe fall in love with it. And we were building a relationship with them as a company, as a brand.

And so that's the mindset we had at that time. The purpose was, on top of this one-page strategy we created. It was simple, in a sense. In a way, that strategy is still the strategy that Brooks is executing today. It's complicated to execute. I think many great brands, and perhaps great companies, are that way, Fred, where the essence of the idea is kind of simple, bringing clarity to what they stand for and how they fit into people's lives.

Executing it is not simple. It's hard. Yeah, I think that was powerful for Brooks because, at the time every company we competed with — and it's still kind of true today — is doing a lot of different things in a lot of different categories for a lot of different customer cohorts, at a lot of different price points in a lot of channels of distribution. And I think in running, which has always been 25 to 30% of the entire athletic footwear and apparel world, there's space for, I would say, niche-focused premium brands. And that's where Brooks is fitting today, I think, and still has a lot of opportunity to grow.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, absolutely. I've got a pair of the goods on the way to me right now. So I can speak to the mindset when buying those, right? You think about Brooks differently than other brands, which ties to your purpose, but also the consumer is involved in that, which makes them think of you the next time they buy that second pair, which is pretty powerful.

I want to get you out of here on this. What advice would you have for someone listening to this who maybe is on the corporate side and is grappling with this moment of innovation? How should that be a part of their business? Are there any traps or pitfalls you want to warn them of? Or, on the conviction side, what advice would you have for somebody as they start this journey of thinking about how to take their established business from where it is to where they're hoping to go?

Jim Weber
The way that I've always looked for it is—I call it a gold scene, Fred. I call it a gold scene, looking for segments in the marketplace. Everything's moving, right? Nothing is static, but where customers are moving, where these jet stream trends of technology and everything else are moving things. Doing the homework to understand that playing field and how it's going to evolve in the next three years, and looking for places that you can win and own looking for white space. And I think it's dynamic. So you gotta play some bets. I've had product failures.

I've had plenty of them, but hopefully if you do the analysis well, you're going to find places where you can leverage your strengths, what makes you unique, what you're doing actually better than what other people can offer. As we often said, everybody has the same ingredients; it's about the recipe, right? So what can you bring to bear in that space that can win the customer? And then hopefully build on that and create that true flywheel, excuse me, of repeatability and winning in that space. And I think, gosh, in the consumer world, that's what I've always looked for. And then you build on that, right? Because you're the strongest player there, you get credit for it, and you can invest more against it. 

So I think spaces are winnable spaces is what it's all about. And then, and, and I always wanted to be the best at something, right? And that's what's underneath all of this—spaces where I think, I think today Brooks is building the best high-mileage trainers in the world. There's a lot of other great shoes out there, a lot of other great products, but season after season, they're the best at it. So I look for spots like that, where you can kind of own and win. And that takes analysis; it takes insight, but it's easy. You can bet in a lot of different areas, but what resources can you bring to bear to win that space? Anyway, those are tools that I think, if you can bring them to bear, have served me well.

Fred Schonenberg
I love it. And Jim, first, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts today for everything you're doing that's sparking change. And I have to say for anybody listening, you have to get the book. It's very rare for me to read something and write about it and reach out to the author. It really was, I think, one of the best business books I've read. And I just, I can't thank you enough for sharing that with all of us and your time today.

Jim Weber
I appreciate it, Fred. Thanks for having me.Fred Schonenberg
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the VentureFuel Visionaries. I'm your host, Fred Schonenberg, and I'm thrilled to welcome Jim Weber. Jim is the longtime CEO behind the dramatic turnaround and growth of Brooks Running.

Under Jim's leadership, Brooks went from a near bankruptcy to becoming a beloved performance brand that outpaced giants like Nike and Adidas. Jim's book, Running With Purpose, which you all should go read right away, in that he shares how bold focus, innovation and a deeply authentic culture became the leverage that powered that transformation. 

Today, we're going to dig into how Jim got permission to take those big bets, how he sustained innovation even when times got tough, and the role of external partnerships and how the metaphor, life is short, but run long, shaped his thinking about leadership and legacy.If you are an innovator, an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur, a corporate executive looking for stories and frameworks to make innovation real, this is the conversation for you. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Weber
Fred, thanks for having me, and thanks for that introduction. Topics of building businesses are fun, and it's going to be fun to share some stories today.

Fred Schonenberg
I have to say, when we talked before the show, I mentioned to you that besides my own podcast, the one I listened to was Acquired. And you're like, oh yeah, I was on Acquired. And I had so much fun going back and listening to your episode there, and I kind of want to start there. I loved their intro, because I thought it summed this up so well, and I'm going to quote it a little bit. 

When the CEO, Jim Weber, took the helm in 2002, the company was losing $5 million a year.It was $30 million in debt, and it was a week away from missing payroll. And it was about a $60 million revenue business. So you fast forward, your team grows the company to over a billion in revenue and climbing. And boy, I mean, what a heck of a run, and what a great way to start an episode. So I'm borrowing from those guys here. But can you talk a little bit about those early days and that transformation?

Jim Weber
Well, Brooks was, I think, 90 years old as a brand and a company, Fred, when I joined. And it had been through a lot. It had been through bankruptcies and too many CEOs and too many owners. It actually had been saved in the 90s by Helen Rocky, a former Nike executive. But she had left for another opportunity and kind of went sideways again. 

So I'm on the board, and it was one of those board meetings where the chairman looked down the table and said, you, why aren't you in here running this company? And it was a challenging time because the company had really tried to grow fast, very sales driven, and ended up having some misses and margins were affected, and cash flow was affected, and inventories. 

So in turnarounds, it's never one thing, right? There's no sort of silver bullet to fix it and it was absolutely a financial crisis. And so as boards do during that time period, you start to sort through and model through it. We were private equity owned, J.H. Whitney. And I give them so much credit because they ended up recapitalizing the company to settle the bank down, I would say. But that new capital base, which included a lot of debt, was critical to give the time for the company to sort of reposition and resort. 

I came in as the fourth CEO, Fred, in two years. And there actually was an employee pool on how long I would last as another one in line. So it was a time where there was not a lot of trust and credibility or confidence that this company, frankly, could survive. 

Fred Schonenberg
One of the things that struck me in the book is this moment of the way the entire competitive set and books at the time was operating, was sort of you're all things for all people. You've got running shoes, basketball shoes, tennis shoes, you're selling apparel. And it was sort of I would say like a sea of sameness, right? Everybody's attacking the same market, the same ranges. 

And you describe this moment where you decided to slim the product line by over 50%, go all in on performance running, which I imagine in the midst of a turnaround and needing revenue, maybe shook a few people. I'm curious how you went about that and how you maybe overcome whatever that internal resistance would be for that focus.

Jim Weber
I think we did a lot of analysis and there weren't a lot of our product lines that were being successful in the marketplace. Brooks was one of a dozen full line athletic footwear apparel brands. The largest we all know from Nike and Adidas and on down. But we weren't that good at anything. And the retailers' response to our products reflected that. They weren't selling through that well. So a lot of it wanted to come back. And the category is so large, Fred, and athletic footwear and apparel.

And there's a reason why Nike is one of the greatest, largest, biggest consumer brands ever built. The category is big. And so playing in each one of those segments is a high bar. What happens is you've got premium performance products, which we had a couple of in running, but none in any other sport. And then you have takedown products that are almost family footwear, right? Huge volumes. They're very brand driven. It's casual footwear, fashion footwear, family footwear from $15 price points on up. 

So half of Brooks' business was in $30 shoes. And there were terrible margins. They weren't selling through that well. Our brand wasn't that strong. So we looked at that business. And it was pretty clear that we had cash flow issues. We could reduce our inventories and free up cash by not doing that business. We're trading dollars with it.

In a financial sense, it was an easy decision to make to get out of some of those product lines because we weren't successful at it. We were making no money. But the real opportunity was performance products. And I had been in sporting goods for a while at that point and kind of studied the brands and how they were created. 

Here was the insight, Fred, that every sporting goods brand, whether it's equipment, footwear, what have you, sort of created their authenticity with performance products that enthusiasts or elite athletes found and fell in love with and word of mouth followed. You can trace every brand in sporting goods almost back to a product phenomenon that made a statement with enthusiasts in the category.

So the initial insight was that the frequent runner bought 2.6 pairs a year and they knew they needed the right shoe. They're very loyal to fit, feel and ride, injury prevention. They just never wanted to miss a run. So we didn't have visible technology and all this great marketing, but we could make a very runnable shoe. And we were going for that second pair. That was the test. If you can sell them one pair, but if you can sell them the second pair, runners know at mile 20, say two to three weeks into a shoe, whether they'll ever buy that shoe again. So that was the insight.

We had a couple of shoes that were in niches that were really good for certain types of runners. We had to add a shoe in the stability category to really save the company. And that was the Adrenaline GTS. So in the initial work that we did, it was so clear to me that that's what we had to solve for and we had some assets to do that. 

Fred Schonenberg
One of the things that I think is interesting in hindsight, right, this makes so much sense. And maybe even financially, you said, OK, look, we've got to shed all this, go here for now. Of course, then the pullback to me and later, if I might have been strong. And when you and I were going back and forth on this, one of the things you said is there are no answers. This is about doing the research, the analysis to build conviction and have insights and have a thesis on it and then have the confidence to execute. That's a really dangerous area for most companies, especially large companies struggling with that moment of going all in on something. 

Can you talk about how you got permission and then how you did that? Because I know you also changed which stores you focused on. There were a lot of moves there. I'm just curious about that journey of, hey, we think this is the right play. How do you get everybody off a line to go all in on that?

Jim Weber
Right. I think it's so true, right, in this era of big data and analysis and there's so much analysis you can do. But I often have told my teams there's no answers coming out of this. There's insights that you still have to make judgments on. And I think in the consumer product space, Fred, I love it, right? It's this product brand market channel consumer fit. It's this puzzle to solve. 

And so I've always looked at the shoe wall, digital or in-store as an example, and look for white space in it and where you can put a product, where you can play that you can get credit from the customer for and create some stickiness and a mode around it. So that whole merchant puzzle, I think, is just essential to grow a consumer brand. I often describe my career as in business school and at Pillsbury, I learned how to manage a brand, but I didn't learn how to grow one or build one. And so that's that entrepreneurial mindset where you have to see opportunity and you have to execute so well against it. 

So by the time I got to Brooks, it was the fourth business I would run. I just had a humbleness about answers laying on the floor. You have to create, you have to create outcomes into the future. And it's a different mindset. And not everybody looks at brands that way. So many people look at a brand as an asset or a logo or a product, and that's where the value in the company is. And in categories that aren't winners take all and the consumer is constantly changing. That's not good enough. You have to meet the needs in footwear. The lead times are out, Fred, 18 to 24 months at least. So you have to see it two years in advance.

And I think that's where the insights are so key. You got to know where you're going. Otherwise, you're just constantly reacting and chasing. Though you might be able to hold your own, maybe, but to grow, you really have to come up with something distinctive. So I had learned that by the time I got to Brooks. 

Fred Schonenberg
I think one of the things that I love that you said was, you have to create outcomes to grow. Like that's your taking the insight, your conviction, you're going after it, obviously, with the analysis and the work that goes into that. One of the things we were chatting about ahead of time was this idea of innovation for growth versus the more passive sort of defensive position of like, don't get disrupted. 

And I love the line you said. Disruption is not a strategy. It's an outcome. Can you talk about that? Because I think for our audience, right, they're thinking growth, innovation, but also disruption at the same time. And I thought it was a really interesting nuance.

Jim Weber
Yeah, I think there's so many people that get distracted by competition. Brand versus brand, company versus company. Who's going to disrupt what other competitor? And I think certainly in the broader consumer products world, my experience has been that disruption comes in solving for the customer. You're not exactly disrupting your competition. You're just solving in a more compelling way for this customer out there. 

And if you do that, you're always winning customers and losing customers. Your net new ads are going to accelerate. You're going to gain market share. So I think that customer puzzle, just obsessing over and seeing the customer really well is the competitive advantage, I would say, for growth, because that's how you disrupt. 

There's some industries that are driven by business models. Business models can absolutely be a competitive advantage. But in a consumer world that's fast moving, the solution for customers is kind of the winning metric in a way. So that's how I view disruption. The best defense is avoiding to be disrupted by some of their competitors to be absolutely on the offense with a customer and solving, solving, solving better than anyone else.

And a lot of people say that, but I think wiring the organization to solve for the customer, which is the strategy we used at Brooks. Then season after season, you're going to win some customers. You're going to miss some opportunities and innovation.Over time, I'd bet on that company. And that's the game. That's the engine that we built at Brooks. 

Fred Schonenberg
I just wired for the customer idea. One of the things when I read the book that I got so excited about was it all started with that first insight of the performance running shoe. This is our person. They know at mile 20 and everything fits from within that. You could see each of the steps you guys made in investments, innovation, your brand building, your purpose, right, was all for that customer. And so it all makes sense when you read in the book.

I think one of the things, bringing this conversation to the innovation side, you all invested very early in a biomechanics lab, doing deep research on product innovation, even in times where financially, I'm sure you would have, there were other places you could have put those dollars that maybe would have made the CFO happier. How do you decide when to put the gas down on innovation there and go after those breakthrough leaps, as well as the incremental improvements?

Jim Weber
There's some conviction that I came to in my career, Fred, especially as a CEO and enterprise leader. And it came from seeing what happened at Pillsbury in the 80s, where they under-invested in brands. They'd innovated tremendously across product lines and brands, but they didn't fully invest to establish it in front of the customer, and their businesses all became competitively weak.

I saw it in our industry over time too the CEO, this is one of the things, I'm a student of leadership. And because we grew Brooks from shrunk it to under 50 million, this year they'll do about a billion, six, they've grown 15% compound for 25 years. And it's all at premium prices. But one of the things I learned as a leader, we had to evolve at different our skills at different levels. The CEO owns growth three years out. 

If you want to continuously grow, which is what the most valuable companies do, which is what the most valuable brands do profitably, you've got to build horizon one, horizon two, horizon three, sort of three years, five years, 10 years, you got to have a roadmap. And some of these investments are 10 year investments. When we launched in China, that's a long-term 10 year investment. So I think short-termism is risky. It's very, very risky for your brand and your company to not have growth vehicles feathered in the out years, especially three to five years. 

So that to me was the CEO's responsibility. We created a strong execution. We had great plans and we wanted to hit those plans. So our three-year execution focus was total. But I think we also had a focus on that next horizon. We had to have products in the pipeline that were going to feed growth in years three, four, five.

That to me was, what I saw at Pillsbury in terms of that short-term management, it was almost on the verge of an ethical threat because it felt good in the short-term to hit the quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter. And in three years, you ended up with brands that were all weak and middle, mediocre. It was just sad because they didn't have at that point now they were playing defense and trying to literally recover.

So seeing that early in my career, I just had conviction about it. I think great companies and great brands deliver now, deliver three years from now, deliver five years from now, that's what great companies do. So the conviction we had around that was total. My first board meeting, real board meeting at Brooks in June of 2001, we had 12 initiatives that we had to execute in this turnaround in setting up for growth, 10 or 12, as I recall. And the board, after I presented it, said, Jim, you can't do 12 things. What are the three most important? What are the three most important things? 

I said, you don't actually understand. We have to do all of these things. And half of them, Fred, were growth focused in years two and three. And of course, if we hadn't done those in that first year, we wouldn't have escaped velocity from that turnaround mode.

Fred Schonenberg
I mean, the 10 to 12 things leads to one of my favorite lines from the book that my team is now tired of hearing because I say it all the time, which was your analogy of moving forward a wall of bricks. You couldn't do it one by one, right? You're just, you gotta move each of the 12 forward. I thought that was such a great way to describe when you're trying to build something. It's not like, hey, I'm gonna follow this one and then the others are gonna catch up. Like you actually need to move them all a little bit at a time. 

Jim Weber
I think that a friend of mine said to me early in my career, Jim, great vision, great strategy. I'm very wired around the playbook and how you're gonna actually compete and move the company forward. That's all great. But without execution, Jim, that's hallucination. And she was so right. I think what I've learned is that execution is essential, and execution excellence in a competitive category that's not winner-take-all is really important, in fact, it can be a competitive advantage. 

So we got really focused on that, but the glass half-empty way to say that, Fred, is that I think it's not just true for CEOs and leaders, it's true for investors too, but I think success means you're doing a lot of things right, and the allegory of that is there's a lot of ways to fail. If you don't execute in one critical area, you miss your plan, you don't launch the product on time, you don't really tell the story, you don't execute financially in margin and cash flow.

To do everything well at the top quartile of the industry, and we measured ourselves by every public company in the industry, you got to execute well. So that is what makes business a team sport. Yeah, and that analogy of a wall of bricks, you got to move them all forward, because if some of them are way back here, you're not going to scale, you're not going to execute. 

And it's just, I think it's the reality of a complex business that is trying to create value and grow. There's just a lot of things you have to do well. And I, as a student of great brands that were great companies, they're hard to compete with. Why? They execute so well. And so as we were a young company, I think, creating a visual around what looked like the wall of bricks became part of the metaphor I would use.

Fred Schonenberg
I love it. I also love referring to a 90 year old company at the time as a young company, right? But it was new, it was like a new company at that point.

Jim Weber
Yeah, it's pretty unique in that regard, too, because it was obviously a turnaround and David and Goliath kind of story in its industry. But we really refounded it as a running brand. And we burned the boats on everything else and so that was a new starting point for us. It had always been in running and had some credibility there. But by making it not only our focus, but all we did, it gave us a lot of advantage and focus. 

Fred Schonenberg
So I want to go back, you're talking about sustained conviction, right around the idea and innovation and growth. I wonder if there was a moment you could talk about sustaining that conviction in lean times. And those moments when there may be some challenges and resisting that urge to cut innovation. 

I bring it up, right, because there's always these moments where we've seen it a lot in our work where a CEO gets really excited. They're like, we're going forward innovation, innovation, innovation, hold on, share price took a hit, something happened. We can get to innovation later. We got to come over here and they lost two years focusing on this. And they're like, where's all our new products? It's like, well, you, you stopped. Can you talk about maybe a moment that whether it's a moment of crisis or something that challenged you to maintain that conviction?

Jim Weber
Yeah, I think the one there were several and, and they're fun to talk about because I look back at them and what could we have seen? What did we learn? What assumptions did we make that were right? What was wrong? There were several big ones. A significant one that we've all lived through in the last two decades was the Great Recession of 2008, 2009, and 2010, and all the causes of that; it was global, and the pullback in consumer spending and so on and so forth. Coupled with the barefoot running phenomenon, Fred, there was a great book out, "Born to Run," that was inspiring on a running level, but it also said cushioned shoes ruined people, created injuries, and we should all essentially be running barefoot. 

So that was a big moment for us. Our sales had sort of plateaued, and there were different causes for that. Part of it was our execution. Our product was kind of tired. It was just good. It wasn't great. And, here comes this recession and the categories down and apparel sales are way down. So you get into these situations where the signals are messy. And a lot of them are negative, but here's, here's the other side of that is seeing opportunity, right? We still knew we had a ticket to play this game and run, running was still a huge game. And what we saw in the recession is that yeah, apparel sales were down, but shoe sales were going like this. Running had made the cut.

It was convenient. It was inexpensive, even with unemployment high and stress high. It was an antidote for that, right? You could go out and release some stress and, and do it in a very budget friendly way. So here's what we did: we went to our owner at the time and we said, look, we think we've got a ticket to play this game. Running's going to grow right through this. It isn't recession resistant, but we thought we had insight. We didn't know, Fred, but we had insight that it was going to grow through this. 

And we had some products in the pipeline, but we wanted to double down on the biomechanical insight based on the barefoot conversation. We thought we had credibility and a voice in the science of the biomechanics of running. So we doubled the size of our labs, clinical studies at universities, and more storytelling around our key products. And so from that point in time, we took our profits in half. We convinced our owner to invest. We tripled our business from 2009 to 2014 in the United States. 

And I get to tell the story, Fred, because it worked, but we felt that running was going to make the cut. By that time, we had a ticket to the game. And in this biomechanical world where everybody was confused, you should be running barefoot, cushioning and stability shoes are great. They saved my life. 

Both of those ended up being true, but we said, "We're going to lead research in this area. We need to know because this barefoot conversation basically undermined the whole category. It undermined Nike's air cushioning and heel cushioning, and so out of that came a huge body of work that Brooke did. Brooke's published clinical studies and papers, this whole run signature platform of science, where everybody's body has a unique habitual joint motion that your body wants to operate in. Sometimes when you run, that changes; sometimes it does not."

So we came out with this language of "it's not about the shoe. It's about how you and your body want to run, and then pick the right shoe for you." That all came out of that crisis in 2009. So we leveraged our strengths. I would say, Fred, the other thing we didn't do is try to create some whole new cloth of what Brooks was that we had never been before, but we saw opportunities in the conversation in the marketplace on barefoot to actually bring some expertise forward and get credit for it from a brand point of view.

And it was all anchored in performance, but I think that was not a moment where everybody was saying take your profits down and invest, but here's what we saw. The run category, of course, was huge. It's huge now, but it is going to grow. We saw that. And, because we're only focused on runners, I think we saw it with more clarity than maybe a lot of other brands did.

Fred Schonenberg
I love it. And it's the next question. You answered a little bit in some of the partnership universities that you mentioned. As you know, VentureFuel works with Fortune 500s and similar large enterprises with how they find startups and new technologies? And what's that collaboration? I'm curious if during your tenure, did Brooks explore partnerships, whether it was startups or external innovations that complimented all the internal R&D that you all were doing to give you competitive advantage? 

Jim Weber
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's been a story all throughout. Clearly, on the material science side, Brooks has done some real innovation in material science as it relates to running midsoles. It's kind of the engine drivetrain of a shoe—that whole midsole-outsole structure. From BASF to many other chemical companies, there's some really novel innovation on the material side that Brooks has done.

And then the biomechanics of human motion as it relates to running involves everything from sensors to tracking your gait and your run as you go, trying to do that in real life versus just in the lab. Every company has labs, but Brooks has continual clinically based studies on footwear and running, and how the footwear affects and might help runners as they run, keeping them in their natural, habitual joint motion path.

So all of that body of work is with partners and the major clinical partnerships globally. I have been with sports medicine institutes at the University of Massachusetts, Calgary, and some universities in Cologne, Germany, working with some of the best researchers in the world. Those partnerships are ongoing at Brooks. They have master's and PhD-level staff that work on this. I think other brands do too, but Brooks has been conducting this kind of research on footwear design since the seventies and eighties. So it's kind of who they are.

I think as a major brand, Brooks is the only brand for which every shoe starts with a biomechanical insight into what type of runner the shoe is for. And that's still true today, but that base of science underneath it is just foundational to how Brooks does that.

Fred Schonenberg
I love that. Switching to the title of your book, Running With Purpose, one of the quotes you referenced a couple of times is this idea of purpose and no finish line, which I love, right? Because especially for people who are focused on achievement, you're always like, "Well, as soon as I get here, I win." And it's like, no, the bar just raises, right? And it's like, you've got to enjoy the run. It's not necessarily the end of the race that gets you there. 

Talk about how that purpose served as either a guardrail or a compass as you started to make trade-offs, product development, prioritization, and maybe where you said no to something that seemed flashy and shiny but was misaligned.

Jim Weber
There are so many things we said no to over the years as Brooks was, and you could argue Brooks is still subscale to the major players in the athletic footwear and apparel industry. But I think early on, I'd been around a lot of brands, and I wanted to build a brand. And I knew that premium was critical to be able to fund investment because if you're playing at price points, it's just hard to make money and fund that flywheel of investment and innovation. So we wanted to play at the premium level too. 

We wanted to attract runners who were putting in mileage. We wanted to solve for that sort of alpha customer — the frequent runner who is putting in big miles. And so there's vision, there's mission, there's purpose. Many business folks, Fred, have been around tables where they're debating the vision or the mission or the purpose. We had all three at Brooks, but the purpose was different for me because we wanted to build a brand in this huge global category of running.

And that was going to, if you really looked at that and were going after some sort of leadership in that running space, that's a decades-long pursuit. You don't do that in three years. You can create success in three years, and that's why a mission is kind of a campaign. A vision is kind of a 10-year dream of what you look like and where you want to be, but a purpose can be forever. And I think here the key is the purpose essentially was to inspire everyone to run and be active, to run their path.

What's the key word in there are a few, one is inspire. That means you wake up every day and you're actively trying to engage with a runner. You never get there. There's no there, there on that word inspire. It's an active oriented thing. Then the second thing is your customer is on purpose, everyone runs and is active, the customers in the purpose. So I knew that could be timeless as a purpose because the customer is there. 

And I'll never forget, we had Warren Buffett and Brooks turned 100 in 2014. So we had this global all hands town hall in Seattle when Warren came and he just got what a brand was. Again, it's not an asset. It's not a logo. It's not on your balance sheet. It's not even a product. It's in the mind of your customer. Your brand is in the mind of your customer. And if you can stay there, stay relevant, stay engaged and have them feel something about your products and your brand that is the best or brings out the best in them. That's literally what he said. You're going to be fine.

And that's where the brand is. It's in the mind of your customer. So everything we did was brand building, every communication, every interaction, all the stuff we did in real life — in stores and at events and on fun runs — all of that is brand building in the early days. So we didn't have much marketing to speak of at all. But from day one, we were engaging with runners, trying to get them to fall for our product, maybe fall in love with it. And we were building a relationship with them as a company, as a brand.

And so that's the mindset we had at that time. The purpose was, on top of this one-page strategy we created. It was simple, in a sense. In a way, that strategy is still the strategy that Brooks is executing today. It's complicated to execute. I think many great brands, and perhaps great companies, are that way, Fred, where the essence of the idea is kind of simple, bringing clarity to what they stand for and how they fit into people's lives.

Executing it is not simple. It's hard. Yeah, I think that was powerful for Brooks because, at the time every company we competed with — and it's still kind of true today — is doing a lot of different things in a lot of different categories for a lot of different customer cohorts, at a lot of different price points in a lot of channels of distribution. And I think in running, which has always been 25 to 30% of the entire athletic footwear and apparel world, there's space for, I would say, niche-focused premium brands. And that's where Brooks is fitting today, I think, and still has a lot of opportunity to grow.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, absolutely. I've got a pair of the goods on the way to me right now. So I can speak to the mindset when buying those, right? You think about Brooks differently than other brands, which ties to your purpose, but also the consumer is involved in that, which makes them think of you the next time they buy that second pair, which is pretty powerful.

I want to get you out of here on this. What advice would you have for someone listening to this who maybe is on the corporate side and is grappling with this moment of innovation? How should that be a part of their business? Are there any traps or pitfalls you want to warn them of? Or, on the conviction side, what advice would you have for somebody as they start this journey of thinking about how to take their established business from where it is to where they're hoping to go?

Jim Weber
The way that I've always looked for it is—I call it a gold scene, Fred. I call it a gold scene, looking for segments in the marketplace. Everything's moving, right? Nothing is static, but where customers are moving, where these jet stream trends of technology and everything else are moving things. Doing the homework to understand that playing field and how it's going to evolve in the next three years, and looking for places that you can win and own looking for white space. And I think it's dynamic. So you gotta play some bets. I've had product failures.

I've had plenty of them, but hopefully if you do the analysis well, you're going to find places where you can leverage your strengths, what makes you unique, what you're doing actually better than what other people can offer. As we often said, everybody has the same ingredients; it's about the recipe, right? So what can you bring to bear in that space that can win the customer? And then hopefully build on that and create that true flywheel, excuse me, of repeatability and winning in that space. And I think, gosh, in the consumer world, that's what I've always looked for. And then you build on that, right? Because you're the strongest player there, you get credit for it, and you can invest more against it. 

So I think spaces are winnable spaces is what it's all about. And then, and, and I always wanted to be the best at something, right? And that's what's underneath all of this—spaces where I think, I think today Brooks is building the best high-mileage trainers in the world. There's a lot of other great shoes out there, a lot of other great products, but season after season, they're the best at it. So I look for spots like that, where you can kind of own and win. And that takes analysis; it takes insight, but it's easy. You can bet in a lot of different areas, but what resources can you bring to bear to win that space? Anyway, those are tools that I think, if you can bring them to bear, have served me well.

Fred Schonenberg
I love it. And Jim, first, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts today for everything you're doing that's sparking change. And I have to say for anybody listening, you have to get the book. It's very rare for me to read something and write about it and reach out to the author. It really was, I think, one of the best business books I've read. And I just, I can't thank you enough for sharing that with all of us and your time today.

Jim Weber
I appreciate it, Fred. Thanks for having me.