Latest / Small Biz Florida / Ep 420 | Running with Purpose: Leadership Lessons from Brooks’ Jim Weber

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Ep 420 | Running with Purpose: Leadership Lessons from Brooks’ Jim Weber · Small Biz Florida

• 0:00
  Welcome to Small Biz Florida, your go-to podcast for all things small business in the Sunshine State.
• 0:08
  This podcast is sponsored by Florida First Capital, your trusted partner for financing and support.
• 0:13
  Here, you'll discover the latest news, trends, and invaluable resources to help you grow and succeed.
• 0:19
  From startup strategies to scaling your business, we've got you covered.
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  Join us as we explore the vibrant Florida small business ecosystem
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  and connect you with the experts who can make a real difference.
• 0:31
  And now, please welcome your host, Tom Kindred,
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  Regional Director of the Small Business Development Center at Indian River State College.
• 0:39
  This is Small Biz Florida, the podcast and broadcast that's all things business across the state of Florida.
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  And if you've been tuning in lately, you know Small Biz Florida is on the road again.
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  We are working, attending, covering the 2026 Small Business Success Summit.
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  All the actions taking place here at the Sunseeker Resort in beautiful Charlotte Harbor, Florida.
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  Ballrooms chock-a-block full of small business owners, entrepreneurs,
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  all here to take advantage of the breakout sessions, the trainings, the speakers.
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  Incredible content here.
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  Lobbies absolutely full of exhibitors sharing their wares and their resources, tools that are all available to help the small business community here in the state of Florida.
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  This whole thing is brought to you by the Florida SBDC Network.
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  It is a huge honor and privilege right now to introduce our next guest here on Small Biz Florida.
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  It is Jim Weber, who is the former CEO of Brooks Running Company.
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  He is now, of course, an author, presenter, and he was today's keynote speaker.
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  And I was there, and it was incredible.
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  Welcome, Jim Weber, to Small Biz Florida.
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  Tom, it is great to be with you this morning.
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  It's good to be in Florida.
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  And the energy here is palpable.
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  I really mean that because the funnest part of business is solving puzzles with other people.
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  And, boy, is that happening here.
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  It's fun.
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  I know.
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  Love it.
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  And we're going to get to your presentation, but let's start because not everyone was in the room today.
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  Just a little bit of your background pathway to becoming the CEO of Brooks Running Company.
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  Yeah.
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  So I feel really lucky at a young age.
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  I wanted to run a business.
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  Can't explain why, but I did.
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  So I thought I had to go to business school, get an MBA.
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  I started off as a banker, which I learned so much on in lending money to small businesses.
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  Ended up in consumer products at Pillsbury.
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  Then the Coleman Company.
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  And I ran a couple of divisions within Coleman.
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  And I just loved leading a team and running a business.
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  And so that led to me being president of O'Brien Water Sports, a snowboard company called Sim Sports.
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  And then my dream job, I became CEO at Brooks in 2001.
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  Wow.
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  So I got to throw in a couple things here.
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  When you talked about O'Brien, I grew up in Florida, of course.
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  I grew up skiing.
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  You know, gosh, man, I thought I had hit the big time when I got my first O'Brien slalom ski.
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  So that brought back some great memories when you talked about O'Brien.
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  So you told an incredible story about a turnaround at Brooks Running Company.
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  And I want to talk about you hit on three points, which I love it.
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  And we'll talk about those in a minute.
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  But just a couple of quick items before we get into the meat of your presentation.
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  You said a couple of things I want you to comment on.
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  I think your very first slide said cash flow is life.
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  Talk about that.
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  Just touch on that for a minute.
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  You know, I think what's universal now is challenge and change and disruption and all the things that are coming at people.
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  Headwinds galore.
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  Sometimes tailwinds.
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  But when you're in a struggle like that, it's hard to know where to focus.
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  And in my early career as a banker, I quickly figured out it's not just the income statement and trying to make money.
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  You've got to manage your cash flow.
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  And of course, that's for many businesses, inventory and receivables.
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  And so it's a way to fail fast.
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  And you've got to stay in the game to win.
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  So, yeah.
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  Well, I bring that up because I just thought it was interesting that that was slide one.
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  And we stress all the time to small business owners and entrepreneurs.
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  It's about cash flow.
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  Yeah.
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  So you also the other thing I want to touch on real quickly is I really appreciated the fact that early on in your presentation, in fact, in your introduction, you talked about you recognized how powerful and incredible Florida's small business entrepreneur ecosystem was.
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  Touch on that.
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  You know, my gosh.
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  So I've been here for a day and the amount of resources and the duration.
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  You guys have been doing this for a while that you bring to small business in this community.
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  I think when you're in a small business, you're so by yourself, right?
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  It's a small company, not many employees.
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  And you're alone.
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  And the problems are not small.
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  So to have these resources around, it's just so impressive to me, the ecosystem you've created in the state of Florida.
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  And I saw the benefit of it from our small retailers, our customers at Brooks got hit hard in COVID.
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  And so the support they were able to get from the small business organizations was critical for them.
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  So I see the value of it.
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  Really impressed.
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  Yeah.
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  Well, I was impressed that you recognize that.
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  So thank you for that.
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  All right.
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  So those are two things I wanted to hear from you again.
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  So let's talk about your presentation.
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  You broke this pathway down in your work in turning around Brooks and turning it into a profitable, successful organization.
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  You broke it down into three categories.
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  And I'll summarize these and then I'm going to let you run with it.
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  Customer focus, pushing through the wall, and then putting in the miles.
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  So take me through those three concepts and how can we use that and leverage that knowledge in our small businesses?
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  Yeah.
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  So I think for most of us as businesses, we're not the dominant category leader.
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  We're not the big player in the space.
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  We're playing in a niche.
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  We're a challenger brand.
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  And the power there is if you can obsess over the customers that you need to win, that there's profitability there with them if you can win them and the products, services, et cetera, that it'll take.
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  If you obsess over that, you've got a good shot at winning and offering the best picture for them to choose you as a partner.
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  And so that's why, you know, for me, success in some of these turnarounds has been really dialing in on the customers we're focused on and we're going to win with them.
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  That focus is so powerful and it is for our whole team.
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  And so the athletic footwear and apparel business is huge globally.
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  We focus only on run and then only on premium performance running first trainers, everyday trainers.
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  And we tried to get those products to a point where we could win the space.
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  And so I'm just a believer in focus and especially as it comes to customers because the competition is never getting less.
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  It's getting more and more in every category.
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  Do you think I had a young man tell me one time on this podcast, he said, your niches are your riches.
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  I'll always remember that.
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  So your customer focus concept, is it about niches?
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  Is it about really understanding where my niches are?
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  Yeah.
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  To me, I've always created a virtual shoe wall where you're putting your literally yourself in the shoes of the customer, looking at all the offerings in your category.
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  And now where is their white space?
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  Where can you play?
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  Where can you create an offering that maybe is a little bit different, a little bit elevated, but you can win that space.
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  And I call them gold seams.
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  You've got to find spaces where there's margin because you're going to work so hard to win it.
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  If there's no profit in it, that's tough.
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  So that whole algorithm of finding white space in the marketplace that you can go after and get credit from the customer for and that it has profit in it, that's the key.
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  I love it.
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  All right.
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  So number two, pushing through the wall.
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  Well, you know, I think right now, and it's not just challenge and disruption, it's also opportunity, right?
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  When you're stalled, when you're declining, when you've got headwinds and you're in a tough situation in business, you've got to persevere.
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  You've got to figure out how to navigate through it.
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  And I think it's really hard.
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  It's stressful because no one will give you the answer, right?
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  There's always ambiguity.
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  There's always uncertainty, especially when you're making bets on customers that you can win.
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  You don't know for sure.
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  But you've got to create some growth vectors and some areas of focus that hopefully are going to prove, you know, to be the right decision two or three years from now.
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  And I think for us at Brooks, always keeping an eye on that customer solve was key for us because we had turnaround issues.
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  We had cost cutting to do.
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  We had to redo our supply chains.
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  We had all these challenges to overcome that were super important.
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  But after you worked so hard for 12 to 24 months, you've got to succeed with the customer, too.
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  And I think that customer focus through those hard times was key for us because we had a step function in growth after every one of those.
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  And not necessarily would you have bet on us at the beginning because it was hard.
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  So, again, an element of perseverance.
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  Yep.
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  Stay the course.
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  You know, push yourself through the tough times.
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  And is there a little bit of an element there, too, of focus on that which we can control?
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  There's so much of this we can't.
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  We can't control all that.
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  So, we've got to just keep sticking to the game plan?
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  You know, I think for any leader, situational awareness is critical.
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  And so, even if you can't control it, you have to be aware of it.
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  You have to assess it.
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  So, we challenged all of our assumptions.
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  We decided to play on our strengths that we could do well on.
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  And we hoped that we would get credit for it down the road.
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  And it all worked out.
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  But, yeah, I think the awareness of everything that's going on is important.
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  I'd be a student and an analyst on all of it.
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  But, ultimately, then you've got to pick a path and execute on what you can control.
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  Okay.
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  Yep.
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  Putting in the miles, you also had a subtitle to this, Vision Without Execution is Hallucination.
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  So, I've been humbled over my career more than once.
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  I love strategy and vision, and especially with brands and products, really defining who we are
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  and how we present that to the customer consistently and really, you know, over time, communicating well to get credit for it.
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  But, it's all about execution.
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  Those ideas are great.
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  How do you manifest that in your management of the business?
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  And it's not just brand and product.
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  It's your business model and executing for the customer well, executing your business well.
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  And so, you know, my learning there was, A, you've got to get into a high-resolution plans and check all the boxes on what it means to have the strategy that you have.
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  And then, B, it's about people.
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  It is all about people.
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  So, we ended up really investing in leadership and management development, defining our culture, not just the values on a page, but what that meant in our behaviors and how we interacted with each other, how we treated each other.
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  At high standards, right?
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  We wanted to perform.
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  So, everybody has high standards.
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  But it's not just what we do.
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  It's how we do it.
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  Right.
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  And in the end, culture is behavior.
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  It's not words on a page.
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  It's your behavior.
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  So, really proud of that.
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  I think right now, Brooks is a phenomenal leadership team.
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  They're competing with culture, and it's fun to watch.
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  Right.
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  You did, one of the things I wrote down in my note-taking, you did talk about business as a team sport.
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  I think that's quite insightful.
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  Yeah, and it's who I am, and we're in the sports business, so it's kind of easy to say that, although running is often just an individual sport.
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  It's not always.
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  But I believe that to be true because everybody has to do their job well if we're going to execute well.
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  And so, that team dynamic is something I think is a truth, and we've really worked hard on that to engage everybody and draw everybody in.
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  Nice.
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  You talked about a book.
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  Talk to us about your book.
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  Where can folks find it?
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  How can they get it?
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  And it kind of brings all of this together that we've summarized here in a couple of minutes.
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  That's right.
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  Where do you find your book?
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  So, it's called Running With Purpose, and it's really the Brooks Challenger Brand story.
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  About four years ago, Warren Buffett told me, Jim, Brooks is a good story.
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  You should write a book.
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  And so, I did.
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  It's a David and Goliath story, a turnaround story, a Challenger Brand story.
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  And it's my leadership learnings along the way.
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  So, it's available everywhere books are sold, Barnes & Noble, of course, Amazon, and places like that.
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  Where can people find some more information on you and all that you're doing and maybe follow you?
• 13:34
  Yeah.
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  And how do they find all that?
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  I'm on LinkedIn.
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  And that's the place I tend to live because my business focus.
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  And so, everybody can find me on LinkedIn.
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  Okay.
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  It is Jim Weber, who is the former CEO of the Brooks Running Company.
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  He is currently now an author.
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  He's presenting, as he did today, sharing his experience to help others, you know, start, grow, and succeed in business.
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  Jim, thank you certainly for your time here on Small Biz Florida.
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  Thank you for making the long trip to Florida to present here at the Small Business Success Summit.
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  Really standout presentation.
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  Room was packed.
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  Excellent advice.
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  Thank you.
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  Thanks, Tom.
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  It was a great day.
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  I appreciate it.
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  Meeting everyone.
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  It's fun.
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  Absolutely.
• 14:24
  This is Small Biz Florida.
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  I am Tom Kinninger, your host.
• 14:28
  It is all about small business here at the 2026 Small Business Success Summit,
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  all taking place here at the beautiful Sunseeker Resort in Charlotte Harbor, Florida.
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  You can see incredible speakers, incredible information, incredible networking and sharing here at the summit.
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  Stay tuned.
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  Whole lot more to come.
• 14:50
  This is Small Biz Florida.
• 14:51
  That's all for this episode of Small Biz Florida.
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  We hope you found valuable insights and inspiration to fuel your entrepreneurial journey.
• 15:00
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• 15:10
  So follow us for exclusive content and connect with fellow Florida small business owners.
• 15:16
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• 15:23
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• 15:27
  Until then, keep innovating and keep growing.
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  Thanks for listening.
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  We'll see you next time.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  Bye.
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  you
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  you
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  you
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  you
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  Thank you.