CEO at 25: Insight from a Young Business Leader

I’m sitting in my boardroom, surrounded by the members of my senior leadership team, going through the agenda for our weekly management meeting. I have already reviewed our preliminary Q1 results, which will shape much of today’s discussion.

At this point, we are reviewing our strategic initiatives, evaluating the numerous CAPEX opportunities, and locking in our “game plan” for the rest of 2015. This is hardly an uncommon setting or scenario for a YPO business; the main distinction here is that the voice with the final say comes from a 31-year-old.

Make no mistake, this is not a statement of self-promotion; I am the first to point out that fortunate birth was a driver of me being elevated to my role in early 2009.

It was a time when Cain Millwork, and the Chicago construction industry in general, was beginning to feel the disastrous effects of the economic crisis. The business that my family had passively owned for 15 years while seeing revenues grow by 60 times was now in need of new leadership with a more hands-on involvement in affecting the bottom line.

Shake It Off: Old Ways Are Old

After I had spent two years exploring all facets of the company, my father made the decision to elevate his then 25-year-old son, powered by the fearlessness of youth (which some may call naïveté), to shake up the “old way of doing things” and navigate through the recession.

When I first addressed the management team, I was a fresh face with a handful of experiences giving direction to people who had been in this industry since I was in diapers.

Yet while I didn’t have the war stories or the track record to justify my intuition-based decisions, I was not predisposed to the fatal diseases of a management team – “this is how it’s always been done” and “that is just how our industry works.”

After facilitating the exit of those employees, especially managers who didn’t want to break free from the shackles of the old way, we went to work right-sizing the company long before our competitors.

Along the way, I replaced all but one member of my management team with individuals who thrived on continual improvement and had worked in peripheral industries but never millwork specifically.

I obviously couldn’t give myself experience overnight, but I could surround myself with a group of people who collectively would give me the information and insight to make the best possible decisions. One by one, our competitors dropped during the recession, with many of them employing the very people I had previously cut because of their inflexibility to change.

Luck, Timing and a Mindful Cultural Shift

Today, we are on our third consecutive year of top line growth in excess of 20 percent, our state-of-the-art facility is one of the single largest in our industry, and our customers are some of the most recognized general contractors, hotels, restaurants and sports venues in the area.

While I’ll admit there was an element of luck and timing in making it through, a large part of the success of Cain Millwork was because of the cultural shift towards refusing to acquiesce to the status quo.

I use my cultural-shifting example because it emphasizes something that many people recognize but few actually capitalize upon it. In any organization, it’s easy to dismiss youth and ambition and to try to confine these employees to the box labeled “the way it is” because it’s easy and comfortable to do.

As young entrepreneurs, we must be strong willed enough to push back on that mindset, not allowing big ideas to be subdued.

Leadership Mixology

The Forbes list of 40 under 40 began only a few years ago, and a quick look at the companies being featured quickly forms a list of some of the most innovative and forward-thinking companies and organizations in the world.

While some of them might be obvious — Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Uber — it makes perfect sense that Visa, Nike and Fiat are represented with a strong, youthful segment in their senior leadership mix when considering their growth over the past 10 years. To make a relative correlation between some level of corporate success and a youthful leadership mix, I examined the companies seen on the coveted Fortune 100 list in 1999 and have noted none of those corporations currently have executives featured on the recent Forbes List of 40 under 40.

I’m not advocating mandatory retirement by any means; nor do I, as a young leader, believe I have all the answers. However, I place high value in the characteristics inherent in strong, young leaders — those not discouraged or dissuaded by flawed tradition, early adapters of rapidly changing technology while displaying enthusiasm and courage when facing challenges.

Wherever my career takes me, I will always mix in some young leaders around me, because I believe having those qualities leading the management team of Cain Millwork has made all the difference.

(The article is authored by Daniel Levin, A YPO member since 2009, CEO of Cain Millwork)

(Image: Thinkstock)