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If you've been reading my blog for a while, you probably know all about the Heroic Journey of the leader.
It begins when the Hero/Leader answers the Call to lead their team or organization on the path to positive transformational change and ends when they survive a Supreme Ordeal that teaches everyone involved how to operate on a new higher level that changes the very fabric of the organization for the better.
This is the Heroic Leadership Journey of retail innovator Maxine Clark and how she answered her Call to found Build-A-Bear, the teddy-bear themed retail-entertainment experience.
Prior to Build-A-Bear, Maxine had a long and successful career at the May Company, holding many positions including President of Payless ShoeSource. In 2006, she published her first book, The Bear Necessities of Business: Building a Company with Heart.
The six phases of the Heroic Leadership Journey are: the Call, the Resistance, the Threshold Crossing, the Journey, the Supreme Ordeal, and the Return Home.
For a primer on the phases of the Heroic Leadership Journey, read this.
For the story of Maxine's Heroic Journey, read on!
The Call
What motivated you to make the transition from President of Payless at the May Company to founding Build-A-Bear?
Well, I had such a great career and I loved what I did. I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur starting my own business because the job was incredibly fulfilling. But lots of things were changing. This was 1996.
Dave Farrell, Chairman and CEO of the May Company, had announced that he was going to retire. They were going to spin Payless off as a public company and it just gave me a chance to ask, “Is this what I want to do? I have some choices. Is this what I want to do the rest of my life?” And I knew that it wasn’t.
I loved what I did and it wasn’t that it was bad, it was just, what else could I do?
When I left Payless I had a little bit of time on my hands and it allowed me to go and do some things I hadn’t done in a while. I went to Disney World. I went on a separate vacation with some friends to Florida. I spent more time with my friends’ kids after school. I was relaxed and I was just listening in a different way.
One day I picked up my next-door neighbor’s kids from school. They were into Beanie Babies at the time so we went looking for Beanie Babies. When they couldn’t find one, Katie, the little girl, thought we should go home and make them ourselves. And that’s when the light bulb went off.
I could see it. I could see red, yellow and blue. I could see the stuffing machine. I could see what a fun thing it could be for kids… I was already down the pipe, at least in my head. There was much more work to do!
I started researching companies right away and I kept really getting into this idea, especially at this time when the focus was so much on high tech. High touch seemed like the right thing. Plus children love their stuffed animals and adults and teenagers love stuffed animals. It’s the quintessential gift when you don’t know what else to give somebody. You make them a bear.
It was one of those a-ha moments. You know it’s the perfect timing. I’m a pretty sensitive person to consumer trends and I could see that if kids liked these little beanbags they would like the personality of these stuffed animals that I could create in my head.
The Resistance
Did you ever have any self-doubt? Did you get any pushback from friends, colleagues, or family that made you pause and think again before you really launched into Build-A-Bear?
A little bit but it was pretty normal stuff that people go through. Once I decided on Build-A-Bear I was determined that nothing was going to stop me. But before that, when I was looking at other business opportunities and talking to a lot of investors there were many times that I was discouraged. People didn’t really care about the end product. They only cared about making money. They didn’t care about quality; they just wanted you to get it to market. And remember this is when dot-coms were just starting up and everybody thought anything that was a dot-com was the most brilliant thing in the world.
It was discouraging but I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to keep forging forward and seeing how it could develop.
When people told me no or it was a stupid idea or this will never work it just gave me more fuel to do it because I’m that kind of person.
The Threshold Crossing
It sounds like you just really knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Build-A-Bear was “it.” What were the first steps you took to make Build-A-Bear happen?
The first thing I did was write a business plan. I looked for guides to writing business plans for venture capital and I found a really good book. That’s kind of old school now because so many people come up with ideas and they just do an executive summary without much research. But I really did feel that it was necessary for me to write a plan and convince myself that this was worth putting my time and treasure into. It really helped me formulate the idea more in my head so that I could sell it to my investors and the landlords that were going to give me space.
Once I could truly articulate it, I could make it into something much more meaningful for the people that I needed to bring along with me.
There was no store. Even if I wanted to hire a salesperson I didn’t have anything to show them yet. So I had to have it very clear in my brain so I could make it clear to them.
Then I bounced the plan off of a lot of people because I wanted to get their feedback. A lot of people gave me really good advice and a lot of it was “negative” in that they didn’t see the possibility. But that made me dig in deeper to figure out how to make it possible. I didn’t take it as negative. I trusted their perspectives.
And then I went and looked at real estate. I looked at locations. I hired a brand developer. I hired a designer to help me design the animals. I hired a manufacturer to help me make the animals. But that first step, making the business plan, was the most important part because I was my first investor and I needed to be sure it was something I felt comfortable spending a lot of my life savings on.
The Journey
On your journey to making Build-A-Bear a reality who helped you and what worked in your favor? And then on the negative side, who were the naysayers, what fell flat or didn’t quite work the way you thought it would? How did you overcome these challenges?
We were very fortunate. I was 48 years old when I started Build-A-Bear. I had a lot of experience in retail. At the May Company, we had so many vendors we had strong relationships with over the years. I learned so much about partnerships there. Many of the people that helped me start Build-A-Bear, like our manufacturers and suppliers, came from those connections at the May Company. I didn’t just pull them out of a hat—they wanted me to be successful. They were partners in the truest sense of the word.
My strength is that I know what I don't know and I’m not afraid to ask people for help or get it from the experts.
I was able to bring people on the team who really wanted to help and who knew I needed their expertise. I didn’t have to look over their shoulders—I just had to make sure they were on mission. They were people that knew us and wanted us to be successful. So that was the easy part.
The hard part happened early on. About three weeks into our store opening, the roof of our warehouse in North St. Louis caved in. It was where all of our merchandise was kept and it was all destroyed. We had to really scramble to get merchandise and I had visions of our store being empty for Christmas.
It wasn’t our fault. We didn’t cause the roof to cave in. Luckily, everybody was so excited for the Build-A-Bear business in St. Louis that they were really cheering us on and helping us. It was really scary but our vendors were really partners with us. They said, “Just go and tell us what you need first. We’ll make it and fly it over there.” Without those partners I would not have been able to be as calm as I was during that really tricky time.
It also made me sit down and look at our business and how much we sold. I realized we would have run out of merchandise before Easter anyway.
So it was sort of God’s way of telling me, “You better look at this. This is bigger and better than you even know.
You’re working so hard at the store and waiting on customers and you’re not paying attention.” I was paying attention to the dollar sales but not so specifically to what we were selling. It slowed me down a little bit and made me think and take a deeper view.
The other thing that happened is our business was so much higher than I anticipated that right after Christmas we had to adjust our store design to accommodate the customers. It was a good news story. A lot of times you’re scaling back but we were scaling up. We had some fixtures that were just for comfort like a little couch or some little chairs. We didn’t have any room for that. We had to fill the store up with merchandise and things that the customer wanted to buy.
We learned so much and we were lucky. We had enough money in our coffers to make those changes really quickly. And we were actually modifying our store design all the way up to store fifteen. We were learning and testing and moving to make sure that we were on track.
I don’t look at things that seem like setbacks to other people as setbacks. I think of them as learning.
How do you turn lemons into lemonade? Why not? Why can’t we do that? Who says we can’t do it? That was the way I looked at some of the things that might have been very scary to somebody else. They were slightly scary to me but they also were challenging and I took the positive approach.
The Supreme Ordeal
Did you ever have a moment where you were really worried thinking this might all just not work?
The recession was a tough time but we were very financially strong. I wasn’t worried about running out of cash but I was worried about our staff and the cutbacks that we had to make in order to preserve value for our shareholders.
We worked so much on preservation because we didn’t know how long the recession was going to last. We wanted to make sure that we scaled back the things that were not significant to the consumer and to our associates. Those were hard times. We had to cut back on staff and some of those people had been with me since the beginning. I remember nights I didn’t sleep over it.
It was about a five-year period of really difficult times—for retailing, not just Build-A-Bear. We had to make some decisions about our locations. We had to decide whether we were going to be 300 or 400 stores or 250. We spent 2011 and 2012 revamping our company, looking at where we wanted our stores to be and what we wanted them to look like. We had a significant amount of cash but we had to make really intelligent decisions on how we spent it and invested in the future because we were in it for the long run.
When it was done and we looked back it was a great learning lesson. Almost every person should have to go through that.
You know, there are some things you wish you never had to go through but I think you have to in order to know you can get through it and that you can make really good choices.
The Return Home
You’re in a slightly new phase of your life. How would you describe the gifts that you’re bringing back as the result of this amazing Build-A-Bear experience?
I spend half my time in entrepreneurship and the other half in public education. I just spent the last two days mentoring companies to help them be as successful as Build-A-Bear was.
I didn’t need that mentoring help because I was 48 years old when I founded Build-A-Bear. I already had a lot of years of experience. These are young people who have new ideas, some in areas that have never been tackled before. And the other great thing about it is there’s a connection because they all were raised on Build-A-Bear. They understand Build-A-Bear. They know what it is so I get instant street cred.
The knowledge I contribute is that retailing is about the hope of the consumer. A lot of companies are not really consumer-centric—their consumer is a hospital or a disease or some business service aspect. But when you know the customer as well as I do you can bring a lot of value to a different company and so I do that. Another gift I use is that I’m a tremendously curious person.
I’m getting and giving all of the time. I’m sitting here learning as much as I’m giving back.
I love my work in public education too because it uses a totally different part of my brain but I’m also applying my experience with the consumer—creating great experiences for consumers and associates and the brand and applying that to public education for parents, students and staff. They never thought like that and I’m just insistent that this is the way they have to think. This is how we’re going to change it.
So I’m spreading myself a little thin at the moment. I’m covering a lot of ground but I really love it and it’s given me more energy.
I feel as excited about what I’m doing now as when I started Build-A-Bear.
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Maxine Clark is one of the true innovators in the retail industry. In 2008, Maxine Clark was named one of The 25 Most Influential People in Retailing by Chain Store Age; in 2006, she was inducted into the Junior Achievement National Business Hall of Fame. In June 2013, Maxine stepped down from her Chief Executive Bear role at Build-A-Bear to apply her entrepreneurial skills to her passion for improving K-12 public education and encouraging and investing in women and minority entrepreneurs. Follow Maxine on Twitter @ChiefExecBear.
Dr. Kathy Cramer has written seven best-selling books including Change The Way You See Everything, which started the ABT Global Movement. Her latest book, Lead Positive shows leaders how to increase their effectiveness through her revolutionary yet refreshing simple mindset management process, Asset-Based Thinking. Download her Speaker Kit here.
To read more of Kathy’s thought leadership, visit drkathycramer.com/blog and drkathycramer.com/press. Follow Kathy on Twitter at @drkathycramer.
