Entrepreneurial Expansion Taking a Venture to the Next Phase

Anita Brick: Hi. This is Anita Brick. Welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking to Greg Wall, who is an alum of Chicago Booth and has taken an alternative path to entrepreneurship. He did start up his own company, but he's taking all of his leadership and management skills throughout the years in large companies and then in smaller ones to take this entrepreneurial venture to a next level.

So let's listen to Greg. Good morning, Greg.

Greg Wall: Good morning Anita, how are you this morning?

Anita Brick: Good. So tell us a little bit about what are you doing right now?

Greg Wall: Presently, I'm actually the president and COO of an interesting company with the corporate office based in western New York. The company is called New Buffalo. We basically do high-tech training for the apparel industry. What makes our company very interesting is the fact that we have this incredible ability to reproduce photorealistic imagery on fabric and also develop a lot of interesting printing techniques.

So we are kind of the leader in the marketplace and producing these very high-end techniques, and being able to deliver that in a very high volume to a variety of verticals in the marketplace.

Anita Brick: I know you've been interested in being a senior person in an entrepreneurial venture for a long time. Tell us why.

Greg Wall: When I look back to the very beginning of why I decided to get an MBA, I just wanted to play a role in crafting a business and putting a spin on it based on all the experiences I had had. My first exposure to that actually came shortly after graduation, when I went into a senior marketing role in a $250 million division.

We were doing a complete look at our entire marketing strategy within a packaging company that had three principal business segments, and my role was to come in and assess how we would take the business forward from the point it was at—selling a package one time to a customer to place their goods in—and how would we grow this business going forward?

And we took a look at entering the business from more of a service perspective, and had to do a strategic analysis on all three principal parts of the business to determine, you know, how we might put a different spin on the business. What struck me is in the largest business segment, which was a fiber container, they had made a decision to put a mobile recycling operation in place because they thought that what was driving the marketplace was environmental stewardship.

My job was to come in just after graduating from Booth and make a decision as to whether this was a good idea and how we might deal with this aspect of our business for all the product segments. And in the long and short of it is in doing the quantitative analysis on the business, it was very obvious that this was not a sustainable business model.

And further investigation had shown that you couldn't collect enough containers in a day at a price the market would bear for this thing to be profitable. The long and short of it was we divested ourselves of that operation and saved that company a good 600 or $700,000 a year in operating costs. There were other segments where we had containers that lend themselves to reuse.

So the big thing for me was, here was a situation where a company had made a huge investment and didn't really get a sense of what the market really wanted. Never thought about what the value proposition was. So it caused me to do a lot of work and analysis on value propositions, and we ended up ultimately launching a division within another segment, and greenfield at a facility. We worked with a privately held company to get this thing going, and actually took this to a $50 million business over the course of about a three-year period.

We were acquired in the process, had to merge cultures yet again, and did some strategic alliances as a result of that. And that really had the essence of everything that I got excited about getting my MBA for in the first place, although that's not quite the way it started when I went to school. But that was the big revelation for me in terms of what it was like to nurture an idea, give the market what it wanted, and take a business to a whole new level.

Anita Brick: Well, it sounds like you got really high ROI on the education right away.

Greg Wall: It really was, you know, the perfect opportunity. I was in the Weekend Program while I was at Chicago. So I had the opportunity to run a business in Western New York. I was initially accepted into the Full-Time Program, deferred my acceptance for a year and then matriculated into the Weekend Program. So I was getting all this practical experience at the same time while I was going to school and then was really teeing up, this opportunity to take our entire division to a new level. So it was good timing at that time.

Anita Brick: You did all of this and then after a while and economic challenges and all of that, you found yourself in transition. And yet this burning desire to do something entrepreneurial or private equity-ish just kept growing and growing and growing. It's not an easy thing to find. I mean, it's easier to go out and find another marketing job. Two questions. Number one, why did you continue to pursue it and how did you do it successfully?

Greg Wall: Great question. And ironically, that's in fact the time I really got to meet you. I had been working for this company and we grew this division to $50 million. We probably could have taken it to multiples of that, but they—because they were so successful in some other segments and had a reluctance to go further with the decision, I had to make a decision at that point in my life. For me, I felt I was at a dead end because I had put everything I had into growing this business. I enjoyed and loved the people I worked with, but I had to make a decision when a restructure came to move off and do something on my own.

At that point, I decided that I had this burning desire to not be encumbered by …. Not that the corporate world is a bad thing, but being covered by someone else's vision and being able to execute what I thought was the right thing to do. So that compelled me to actually plug back into the university. I began auditing classes at the university and for about, I would say, a good nine- to 10-month period.

I audited a lot of classes in evaluation. I had the pleasure of sitting in classes with Professor Kaplan and things of that nature, which further stoked the fire in terms of what really got me excited about business. Now having an engineering background when I first went to Booth and needing to bolster my basic areas in accounting and finance, I chose to concentrate in marketing and strategy, but realized as I was drawing near to graduation that gosh, there were so many courses in finance that I wish I had the opportunity to take.

So because I had an attractive package at that time, when I chose to leave that company, it afforded me the opportunity to go back and immerse myself in some of these types of classes. And at the same time, I began to network extensively within the community in Atlanta, getting very much involved in the GSB there, helping to run the chapter there, sitting on the board of the Atlanta Business School Alliance and doing things with community consulting.

So it was really beginning to act, not only in the professional sense but in my personal life, in a more entrepreneurial fashion and plugging into and and believing in and starting to to see, gee, how could I play a role in all these things? So that all worked out very well. I had a number of different opportunities come to my attention, and I did meet with a lot of private equity funds at that time in venture funds.

But timing is everything. And at the time I was looking, there were not a lot of deals floating. I also learned that, gee, it's typically senior guys that have that tremendous depth of knowledge in a given vertical branch who are in a CEO's role, for whom a lot of these positions are reserved. So long and short of it was an opportunity came up here in Western New York to do a turnaround for a French company, for a division that had an operation here and also in Massachusetts.

And we were responsible for delivering and production products to the Americas and took that because as you said earlier, it's not the easiest thing in the world to break into the private equity or venture world. I thought, well, here's an opportunity to do another type of turnaround. I had done one similar earlier in my career—did that, we were successful with it, but after about two years, the person who was my boss in Paris, he left, the new person came in and essentially brought his own team in across many of the locations globally.

And so that left me in a position again of saying, OK, here we go through another transition. During this period, my desire to be involved in a situation where I would have more latitude to do the kind of things I wanted to, and in a very bright and general management sense, which had been the common vein throughout my career, that continued to be a strong theme.

I had an opportunity to take a senior marketing role with a rollup out in the Midwest somewhere, which was about a 3 or $400 million division. But I turned it down because it wasn't in the sweet spot of what I wanted. Now, that was a bit risky financially at that point, but here again, I felt very compelled to find what I wanted.

After some period of time, and tremendous networking within the community here, which was very supportive. I met a guy by the name of Andy Shaevel, and he ran a company called Bobalew Ventures, a firm—he was best known for starting RSA, a very successful firm in Buffalo, New York, and became a multimillionaire in his late 30s and employed about 2,000 people here with that business.

When he left that firm, he went and started Bobalew, and I worked with him to investigate, kind of in a boutique bank, investment banking business, a lot of different opportunities. I kept my networking alive, meeting new people that were influential in the community and having opportunities run by me. Andy was very much aware that we were both working in a situation where we never knew what was going to pop, so if something came up, we had a mutual understanding that we would go, or I would at least go my way and follow that.

And after a great deal of persistence, I met a man by the name of Jon Weiss who started New Buffalo, many decades ago. Three decades ago, a business that was nothing more than an embroidery business that his grandfather started with a sewing machine he brought from Poland. And he had this—Jon, at a very young age, had this passion and this tremendous talent for screen printing.

And he grew this business to the, at that time, $20 million-plus business, point that it was extremely successful in supplying three, brands like Disney, Universal Studios, and through music merchandisers, the majority of the major rock bands in the world, all this wonderful product and had associated himself with a lot of key creative people, went through some hard times when Disney outsourced the operation of their store, and they lost some of those accounts.

And he really was at a point in his career, as described by the person who recruited me for Jon, as having a lot of growing pains and not knowing where to go next with his business. So he needed to bring someone in that had an appreciation for all of the different operational areas of a business, but kind of an ability to put all the pieces of the puzzle together and an appreciation for not only the marketing side, but the financial side as well.

Anita Brick: And I know that it wasn't a straight line. It sounds a little the way you described it—although, you know, it took courage to step in and say, this is what I want and this is what I don't want. And the persistence to keep going. It doesn't sound like you hit many speed bumps. Did you have any—I mean, I'm assuming you had challenges because I think it's hard to keep going when there are challenges. What sort of challenges did you face as you were in transition or even now?

Greg Wall: I think the biggest challenge, and I've heard other people who are at a much higher altitude in doing this kind of thing than I, you encounter something called cash flow. I mean, it would be nice to, you know, ad infinitum, go on and on, and explore all these interesting possibilities. But that does come a day when you finally have to go to work.

I think I hit one of those speed bumps when I couldn't break into them, and I had a lot of help from a lot of people, a lot of fellow alums. But when I couldn't break into the venture world and, like, not settle, but took the opportunity to go into the corporate world again with the French company and work on the turnaround, that was a realization that, look, OK, we've done some amazing things. I've been able to go back and I took classes; have been able to immerse myself in the community and reattach myself to the university and do a lot of great things. But it was really kind of roll up my sleeves and go back to work.

Well, you know, who knows, you take something like that and you think, well, maybe this is just what I was meant to do for the next, you know, 10, 20, whatever years. Although in today's environment, that's really—I don't think anyone really thinks that. But it lasted two years. It was rewarding, and it opened the door to something I would have never imagined myself doing. And here I am working in a business that produces principally T-shirts and sweat gear. And we're looking at developing our own brand and leveraging the intellectual capital that is such a unique part of this business. And, particularly trying to penetrate the college licensing market and continue all our fine work with theme parks and all of those things.

So that was a bump of sorts. I mean, to think, OK, here we go again, and we're going to, you know, take this job with the French company and all of a sudden things happen. In the business world today, things are constantly being restructured. So there I am off again looking and asking myself, I know what my passion is, my job—will I ever find that fit? And I think this is as close as it can come.

The ideal would be to do it on your own and start something like Jon. Did you know it took a long time for him to evolve that? So I think we all have this realistic side to us as well. You know, having had the education we have, sometimes we get lucky enough to roll the dice and have something of our own that we were able to grow. But at other times we have to glom on to some other opportunity and to do our thing, maybe with someone else's help.

Anita Brick: Well, and it's interesting because you talk about there were a few ends. There was the end after the company got sold in Atlanta. There was the end when the French company restructured. And I think it was really admirable. I mean, you actually flew up for classes. You weren't in Chicago. You were striving a lot.

But what is it within you that allows you to see these ends? You know, the end after you kind of restructured things in Atlanta, the end of the French company as a beginning, because it sounds like that's what you've done. But what in you allows you to do that?

Greg Wall: That's an excellent question. And I think two themes emerge from that. I believe the first time we went through a transition was early in my career with Bethlehem Steel, and at that time, I had an opportunity to go to a high-level planning position at the corporate office there and continue to work in …. The division had been acquired after having been in steel nine years, and this was the early ’90s, late ’80s, it was obvious that steel wasn't the place to be.

I had to make a decision. I made that decision: I was going to go to grad school and move on. Then when I went through the transition at Sonoco after we were acquired, I began to really ask myself, what are my strengths? And that sounds like such a fundamental question, but it's a question that's so elusive, I think to many and for most of us, which is why I believe writing a CV or a resume is such a difficult task because it’s supposed to be an expression of what your strengths are and and putting a spin on it so people can clearly see what you're good at.

I spent a lot of time drilling down in those areas and trying to understand. I think the book by Marcus Buckingham, Now, Discover Your Strengths, was a big help to me. That had been recommended by a friend of mine at Chick-Fil-A, who had been at his seminar, and it really caused me to go to the arduous task of saying, what am I good at? What drives me? And through different opportunities, you know, taking different types of testing as well, I could see that perhaps one of my strengths or abilities was to put the pieces of the puzzle together, to look at something—my wife kind of calls it thinking backward: seeing the solution, and then putting the all the reasons together that support why you feel the way you do about things.

And maybe for me, it was just that ability to to put those pieces of the puzzle together, combined with the passion I have based on being a disciplined person. Focusing on exercise and all that has been a very big part of my life to compete in bodybuilding when I was younger. So having that kind of focus, combined with maybe just being able to identify what kind of makes me tick, enabled me to keep piecing the puzzle together.

Because you're right, there were really for … when I look back, in retrospect, it was the Bethlehem acquisition which I chose to leave. I made a decision because I felt it was a dead end going further relative to what I wanted to do in a broader sense. There was a Sunoco thing when we were acquired and I had to do the startup, you know, and decide whether I was going to stay.

In that case, I said, here's a chance to stay and grow this to another level. I'm not just going to leave. So I did that, and we did grow it. But at some point, despite putting together strategic alliances in multiple facilities, there came a point where they too were no longer going to take that business any further, you know, and they haven't since I left six, five, six years ago. So I know I made a good decision because they weren't about to invest further in that business, even though they still have it and it's successful.

But so that was a decision. The French situation happened. It was a bit of a surprise, but again, forced me to kind of go back to those basic things that drive you to say, hey, where do I go from here? Some of the best advice I've ever been given. My favorite author of all time is Ralph Waldo Emerson, and not in a sense meant to be self-aggrandizing. One of my favorite quotes of his is “To be great is a thing misunderstood.”

I think that's very meaningful because what it means, to me, is sometimes you need to be persistent, and you need to really sell your ideas and have a high degree of conviction if you feel you're just running over speed bumps, as you put it, as opposed to dead ends. Because if you truly have something unique to offer in a situation, and you see this in your day-to-day encounters with managers or I myself with Jon, the entrepreneur who runs the business, you might say something that's a really great idea or something very insightful, but they don't get it the first time.

You have to have the conviction to hang in there and understand. And sometimes, and this doesn't happen very often when you really do have something hot, something that's great, not everyone's going to get it the first time it comes out there. So I think that's time to be persistent and take myself with a grain of salt. It's been a helpful insight to me.

Anita Brick: So what do you see as both the challenges and opportunities ahead at New Buffalo?

Greg Wall: Quite a few. I mean, a big part of my job has been restructuring the organization, putting a process in place in many areas, putting a process in place on our creative side. I mean, we have amongst three of the top printing crews in the industry. We have all three of these guys. And Jon made a decision to put an R&D lab together in the Carolinas.

Why the Carolinas? Because part of the people he was wooing live down there; they were going to help run Honduras or any Central America facility. And so he plunked a lab down there. And the whole sole purpose was probably just to do things serendipitously and see what type of new techniques they could develop. Well, as with any new business, as you're going to restructure in one division domestically and a turnaround and a startup, cash flow becomes paramount.

You begin to look at all these operations and say, why do we need this? Well, there was a knee-jerk reaction that said, let's take this business in the Carolinas and just consolidate it somewhere else. We just need to save money. Well, it caused a lot of friction between the partners and everyone involved. And in the long and short of it, I lost a lot of sleep one night. Came in the next morning and said, hey, let's step back here. Companies make decisions with regard to their R&D budget. They decide on the basis of what they have to offer, how much they should invest to leverage that. And I basically made the statement that between the four partners we had that were key, or three partners we had in the creative sense that if we didn't feel that $15,000 or whatever a month investment in R&D was worth leveraging that, then we really had nothing special to offer, and that I firmly believe that we did.

The decision to keep that lab open needed to be made on the basis of creating it as a profit center, not looking at it as a cost center, and tracking what the cost of developing the products were and what the success rate of that was, and making a decision on that. Should we just do it on an interim basis for two months?

And I'm like, no, we just need to say we're going to make a commitment to those. And if we feel we can afford that amount of money, we need to go forward and measure the results. We're not going to know the answer to that in two months, because in a lot of cases, when you're dealing with the retail market, some of these things are seasonal and you're working now to produce product for next fall.

You know, on the creative side, we've done that. We've put a whole strategic selling effort in place. Jon did a lot of the selling himself. We've since aligned ourselves with the former CEO of a big sports athletic company, who was working for us as a manufacturer's rep, helping us penetrate new verticals. We're using an entirely different and structured yet entrepreneurial and robust means of going after sales.

So whether it's operations, whether it's our whole new approach to it, we're putting in place process structure to enable us to accelerate our whole initiative and get results more quickly. So the biggest challenge in that is doing it within an entrepreneurial organization that's been used to doing things kind of randomly, right down to the production floor.

So that's been the biggest challenge, right. And for us going forward, I think we have a tremendous opportunity based on underutilized intellectual capital, undervalued intellectual capital that presents a very strong value proposition. And going into verticals that we haven't gone into before, we're using a very intelligent means of doing that with people that have the right connections. And things are really starting to happen for us.

I mean, it's not like we haven't dealt with some huge brands in our history: Disney, Universal Studios, and any rock band you can think of to the music merchandisers working with Live Nation, companies like that. So all of that is what got me excited about being here, and I think there's a tremendous potential to take this business to a whole other level in a very, very fragmented industry.

The print industry just on the apparel side is like, I believe, 5 billion. And there are like 5,000 players and only like five that have $40 million in sales. So it's extremely fragmented because there's a lot of regional markets. It's teams playing for high schools and stuff. But again, a tremendous opportunity that could be a very attractive venture for an investor at some point, if we go down the road of shooting for a liquidity event and maybe rolling up the industry a little bit.

Anita Brick: You sound very excited. I don't know that I've ever heard you sound this excited before, but it also shows that you are a courageous leader, too, because some people right now are scaling back, scaling back, scaling back, not making investments and not making investments for the future. And to be pushing, especially an entrepreneur who may be even more skittish about making investments at this time. It shows really just the level of bravery as a leader.

Greg Wall: Maybe bravery is one way one might look at my courage, or I can choose to call it something else.

Anita Brick: All right, well, you know, it's all in the eye of the beholder, as they say. So just one final question if you have, like, three more minutes.

Greg Wall: Yes.

Anita Brick: OK, so you really followed a dream. Granted, you planned for it. You weren't frivolous or crazy in terms of how you approached this process. You did it in a logical, rational, but bold way. What advice would you give someone who has these dreams and they're caught between, “Should I just do what seems right in front of me?” Or “How do I not lose my dream?”

Greg Wall: I think sometimes you have to do what you need to do to keep your dream alive. And there were times in my career when I was doing something that I didn't consider ideal. I don't know that we considered it an ideal move for our family, especially from my wife, who's from Austin, has lived all over the world, never further north in Atlanta, to move to Western New York and run a business.

But you can find pieces of something in what's necessary to keep your dream alive that still apply to your dream. And, you know, life is unpredictable. I believe as long as you keep actively networking and don't go into a cocoon, utilize the tremendous advantage the university gives you, and immerse yourself in the community. Meet others, others from other schools.

I mean, in Atlanta when I was on the board of the Atlanta Business School Alliance, which represented the top 15 business schools in the world, it was a great way to meet business leaders in every aspect who are still friends still today, and they've given and shared insight that in some way was meaningful.

And you're never really giving up your dream just because you might take a little detour to sustain yourself. There’s this thing I mentioned earlier, called cash flow, that we need to be mindful of. So it's, you know, keep the faith and just keep leveraging. Just keep looking for a way to get to your end game.

And doors open and close. And just when you least expect that something will pop. But don't feel as though just because you're taking something that at the moment might seem unrelated directly to your dream, look for in that opportunity. What is it about that opportunity that further makes you better equipped to achieve your ultimate?

Anita Brick: And well, obviously you are a testament to that. So thank you. Really thank you for taking the time. And I would guess that New Buffalo will continue to grow and thrive.

Greg Wall: Thank you. And I'm so appreciative of what you've done to help me personally in the university. I think one of the great things about Chicago Booth, as it has evolved, is in the tremendous amount of support it has given to people. If there's one reason why Chicago's ranking, I think, has been elevated in recent years—not that it isn't always the great university it was. It's this tremendous second effort the university has given to support its graduates.

Anita Brick: Great. Thank you. Thanks so much, Greg.

Greg Wall: Thank you.

Anita Brick: So sometimes entrepreneurship can take a slightly different route. Instead of starting up a company, maybe your path like Greg's is in managing one and taking all the things that you've learned in the companies that you've worked for, and helping an entrepreneurial venture go to the next level. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.