82. Jim Sliker – Central States Manufacturing - Strategies for Scaling an ESOP

Jim Sliker:

... try to look at the value stream, how can we improve the efficiency of the value stream holistically, which benefits both parts? Reducing inventory across the board for both parties. How much is at your location, how much is at our location? So we're regularly trying to do those things together to help both sides of the business, win-win. It's all about the win-win.

Robert Wagner:

From HoganTaylor CPAs and advisors, I'm Robert Wagner and this is How That Happened, a business and innovation success podcast. Each episode of the show, we sit down with the business and community leaders behind thriving organizations to learn how business and innovation success actually happens.

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Our guest today is Jim Sliker. Jim is the chief executive officer of Central States Manufacturing, based in the Rogers, Arkansas area. Central States produces metal roofing and siding for a variety of structures, such as industrial complexes, agricultural buildings, metal roofs, garages, and many other applications. Jim earned a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Kettering University, and an MBA from the University of Michigan. He serves on the Make-a-Wish South Board of Directors and the Northwest Arkansas Children's Shelter Board of Directors. Jim, welcome to the How That Happened podcast.

Jim Sliker:

Hi. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you today.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. I'm really looking forward to our conversation, and as I mentioned before we started recording, I really enjoyed learning about your company and anxious for you to share the Central States story with us. So one of the main things about Central States is that it's 100% employee-owned company, and so we want to spend some time on that. But before we get there, Jim, just give us an overview of what Central States does, your products and customer base, and what that looks like.

Jim Sliker:

So we sell, manufacturer, and distribute metal building components in packages. And components could be, essentially, a metal roof for a residential home. We can do all the way up to full packages of storage-unit complexes, or pre-engineered metal buildings, or post-frame barns, things of this nature. We don't put anything up. We're not on the erection side of the business, but we do manufacture all of those components and distribute them. We primarily sell to distributors and contractors. We have a little bit of sales directly to end users, but more times than not, end users are not in a position where they can do DIY with our type of projects, so it's mostly contractors and distributors.

Robert Wagner:

Right. Very good. Just your answer there sparked a question that I had set up for later, but I want to address it now. And that's just around the materials that you make. Again, thinking as an end user and this guy who, I didn't build my own pole barn, but I bought one, I bought a kit and bought a service to install it. It has a metal roof and metal sides, and all that. Just trying to understand the various qualities of that was really difficult for me. And just looking at your website, I mean, there was a whole section there, it's fascinating to me, about panels. And there was a statement in there like 29 gauge panels can have a big difference in dent capabilities. So what do you do to help educate, I guess you would be mainly educating your distributor base on those products? I would just imagine that's a huge part of your business.

Jim Sliker:

It is. It's probably one of our most challenging parts of the business. And that's the reality. Most people that are using whatever it is that they're, whatever project they have that they would have metal building components on, don't really understand that not metal is all the same. And that is the case. And we go to market, we position ourself in the market as more of a quality entity as opposed to a low cost type of skill by specification. And we really have a concept for Central States of a good, better, best type construct. And when you're looking at steel, what really you're looking for is the specification of the base metal, everything from how thick it is for dent resistance to the structural properties of how well it'll bend and other things.

But also the paint system. The paint system is another big aspect on how you develop and specify that paint system, so that it will last throughout the elements and weather appropriately. Our industry, if you look back many, many years, has somewhat developed a bad reputation that when you drive by a metal building you would see what they call a chalk and faded roof, where a black roof starts to turn to a gray or a chalky color. And that's an example where not all metal is the same, not all paint systems are the same. And it's really about us making sure we're trying to explain down market through distributors and contractors, trying to get it all the way to the end user of what are some of the differences, what are the watch-outs and what do you need to be concerned about when you're either identifying what type of steel you want to use for your project or what contractor or distributor you're buying it from. It's a key challenge. Really hard to do. Really hard to do.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, I just think that's really key to understanding your business because it just struck me as that would be a huge hurdle for you. So I appreciate you explaining that. Kind of tied into that is a concept that was very clear on your website, it's talked about several times. And that is a strategy, and I think this even maybe predates you, I'm not sure, but it goes back to 2003, it says, "Right on time, every time." So that's a mantra and a standard that you guys have set for yourselves. Tell us what that means in your world and how you go about accomplishing it.

Jim Sliker:

Yeah. I would say foundation, if I back up one step, our brand promise is to make raving fans out of our customers. That's really our commitment. And in a day and age where a lot of companies, and companies I've been part of in the past, where we say, "Hey, we are all trying to satisfy the customer, we're customer first." I'll tell you, society in general is losing some of that concept over the last few years. It's an unfortunate reality. But for us inside this company, we want to be hyper focused and passionate on making raving fans out of our customers. And how do we do that? First, it's being easy to do business with. And the second thing is what you mentioned, which is being right on time every time. It's this idea of high quality, high reliability. We're using quality products, we're using things systemically as we manufacture and distribute them to make sure the quality is maintained for specification. Meaning whatever the customer ordered they got and it matches the specification that was intended.

That's the right side of our business. Now what do we do to try to make that happen? It's a lot about systemic quality. Everything from having clear processes and quality checks throughout the process, all the way from the initial quote from the customer, or to the customer, through ultimate delivery at their location. We have over 500 quality checks throughout that process. And it's really trying to execute those systemic checks, so that if we have issues, we try to detect them inside of our house as opposed to them getting to the customer, them getting to the customer. I'll give you a small example of a quality check. On the sales side, when we are taking an order from a customer, salesperson will take the order, they will key the order, we actually have another salesperson, we call it double key, so they will key the order again. And what our system then does is check the two orders that have been keyed to make sure they match. If they don't match, that means something is wrong. Then we can start diagnosing potential quality issue and fix that.

So we have those kind of checks throughout not only sales, but manufacturing, logistics and delivery to make sure we're detecting, as best as possible, quality issues and mitigating them before they get to the customer. On the reliability side, that's all around doing what we say we're going to do. And that comes the biggest form customers feel that is being on time. You wanted it, you get it, what you ordered, when you wanted it, when we committed. We measure on time delivery as a key metric and fulfillment rate. If our trucks are one minute late to the customer from the delivery time that we committed, it's considered a late truck for us. And that's the standard we try to hold ourselves to. Even though the customers may say, "Listen, if you're within a couple hours, it's fine," it's not the level that we're trying to pursue.

And the way we do that is just through our route managements and our operational planning and operations working with our drivers for a big piece of that equation, and trying to do that very, very well so that we can hit that high level of reliability our customers should expect, should expect.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, that is fascinating.

Jim Sliker:

[Inaudible 00:10:25] perfect. Yeah, we're not perfect by any means, [inaudible 00:10:29]. Our quality metric, our right metric, we measure how many lines get ordered, basically number of parts get ordered, versus get there correct. We run right around 99.73% right. And our on-time delivery is just under 98% to the minutes.

Robert Wagner:

Wow, that's very impressive. I've never heard of the process of double entering the order. And I'm a huge believer in the order management part of a business, because you're shooting the arrow, and so if you don't shoot the arrow, if you don't aim and shoot the arrow correctly, you're going to be way off at the end, so I love that. Absolutely love that. So that was a good segue, and there's a conversation in the materials that I read about being data driven. And you've given us a couple of great examples already of things that you measure. What's something, and again, you've already given us a couple of good examples of this, but what's something that you measure that a lot of companies think they can't measure?

Jim Sliker:

What immediately came to mind when you asked that question, what we think our special sauce and the company is, I'd love to tell you we're the smartest company on the planet. I'd love to tell you we have highly engineered parts and processes. We have a portfolio of intellectual property. We're a pretty simple business. And our goal of running a simple business is to do it really well for our customers. What is our special sauce? What is our special sauce is our culture. And one thing we do, we actually have data, we measure our culture. [Inaudible 00:12:22], we measure it, we have a score at each of our locations of culture. And I think that's something companies probably aren't doing [inaudible 00:12:29] normal course.

I have grown up my whole career with KPIs in other places that I've worked, very professional companies. I worked my whole career before here in the auto industry, which is data process, KPI driven, but the idea of measuring culture was nothing that I have ever experienced or heard of, but it's something I put in place here because if that's what's important for us, if that's what makes us perform the way we do, we better make sure we're monitoring, measuring it, have a clear standard expectation of what it looks like.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, that is great. Very good stuff. So I think you're in 11 locations in 10 states right now, from south Texas to South Dakota to Pennsylvania and the north, northeast. What's the strategy behind this strategy, I guess, of having multiple locations, being, I'm sensing close to the customers is kind of where we're headed here?

Jim Sliker:

Yeah, when I first got here... We're a company who wants to grow, as part of a way to achieve our purpose very, very well. And our target is to grow five to 8% on a volume basis year over... And when I got here, after a couple years, we really started getting to the point that, "Hey, we've got to make some decisions here." We're starting to have success in sales and we really could go two directions. We could either say we want to build bigger plants; bigger plants, better overhead absorption, probably a better financial return on investment, et cetera; or we build more of them. If I simplify the strategic discussions. And it didn't take us long, quite frankly, to decide, "Hey, we're going to, what we call geographically saturate, we're going to build smaller plants in more plants."

And let me tell you the why. What we said is it was driven for two primary reasons. One, we want more of them so we can be closer to the customer. Closer to the customer, where we can reduce our reach, which means one, we can be fast, we can be more intimate with the geographic territory that our customers are selling it. We can be more nimble and agile to our customer needs. The second thing we said is, I come back to our special sauce, we think we can maintain our culture better in smaller plants. Less people, more family type environments. We're in relationship with our people, that entrepreneurial spirit, we thought we can maintain that better.

So for those two reasons, we said, "Okay, our strategy, a big pillar of our strategy is geographic saturation, and we're going to start building plants." We have a sweet spot size that we want to build those plants, not only in sales but in headcount and proximity to the territory, the reach that the territory... So that's what started this evolution of popping in plants. When I got here, we had six plants and we now have 11. We had just launched actually the sixth plant a year after I got here. And now we've got 11 plants in one [inaudible 00:15:58] say corporate office.

Robert Wagner:

So just the challenge of managing quality 11 places, that's overwhelmed by the strategy of, like you said, being family, being culture-based and being close to customers. It's a very interesting approach.

Jim Sliker:

Yeah. There's two things that we... With that decision, there were two challenges we ultimately took on. One is what you mentioned, this idea of quality and consistency for our customers. It forced us, it aligned with our strategy to get more systemic in the business. One of the things that my predecessor and the board decided when they hired me and brought me from where I was working, what they were looking for is somebody to come in and run the business more systemically. So we were already on a roadmap to say, "Okay, we know we've got to put in standards and processes and KPIs and data to run the business and set up a system where we call it our pillars of excellence, that we check those things across every location to make sure that they're all doing it the same way." So we had to bring those things to the forefront, otherwise our strategy to geographically saturate wouldn't be that effective.

They had to go in harmony. The other thing we walked away that we knew be it challenge is from a financial aspect, financially it's more efficient to be build fewer, bigger plants. And we just chose, "Hey, we're going to prioritize the customer in customer service side of the business, and we assume the financials will take care of themselves." If we're taking care of customers well and we're growing the business well, the rest will take care of itself.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. Very good. So there's another strategic move that you've made that really fascinated me, and that was around just the approach to, I guess you would say procurement or relationship with your supply chain and talking about the normal approach is to shop around, look for the best price, go to the steel distributors and suppliers and negotiate a price. And in your business you would do the same with paint. You talked about it in interview that you did with, I think it was CEO Magazine, going directly to those suppliers, going and visiting them and just developing a really deep relationship and a loyal relationship where you're working hand in hand. You understand what's important in their business, what's going to help what they need to help be successful. And I'm sure you shared the same for yourself and for Central States and created these longer term relationships, at least it sounded like they were longer term relationships. Can you talk about that, additionally?

Jim Sliker:

Yeah. When I jumped into this industry, it was fairly common, including at Central States, that every month you'd basically send out to the steel mills, they'd give you updated pricing for the next month, then you place your orders and you would ask a bunch of vendors to give your quotes, and then you would maybe consider who has better quality. But price was a huge deal, so you were shopping every month. And what, for me, I was more accustomed to doing is... Listen, we are extended enterprise partners ourselves and our suppliers are extended enterprise partners, we both have businesses, but the reality is our partnership is what's going to win for both parties. And I hate to admit this, but our business, we're in a commodity industry, so our suppliers are even more important on that account. So we said, "All right, I do not want to be an opportunistic buyer."

I want us to be a strategic partners with the supply base. So we started meeting with our key suppliers and certainly they were open to the idea. And it was now just a matter of sharing information, communicating together well. Like you say, what's important for their business, what's important for our business? Letting everybody's guard down. The concept was, "Well, we can't share that information or we can't develop that kind of loyalty because then they're going to take advantage of [inaudible 00:20:31] side." I'm like, "No, we can use data and other things to make sure we're all keeping each other in check, but we still want to reap the benefits of those partnerships." So we started certain things. For example, every year we share our strategic plan for the upcoming year in our budget with our vendors, our key vendors. We share, we're open with them, how much we plan to buy, how much we plan to buy from them, what our key initiatives are, what are some new things we're planning. We share that.We look for that same information coming back from their side. We share a three month rolling forecast with them so they can plan their operations. That's something that was never been done previously. And then we'll share that so that they can start planning operations. We can make sure we have better service and reliability, no surprises on their side. So we do that. We have projects, we'll take strategic initiatives with each other to try to look at the value stream. How can we improve the efficiency, the value stream holistically, which benefits both parts, reducing inventory across the board for both parties. How much is at your location, how much is at our location? So we're regularly trying to do those things together to help both sides of the business. Win-win, it's all about the win-win. The other thing we have done is we've set up scorecards, scorecards with data with our supply base, so they can see how we look at them in terms of their performance.

And we can talk openly about that data and what's working, what's not working, what opportunities do we have to prove. And I will tell you, I also encourage our vendors to give us feedback, kind of a scorecard on how well of a customer we'd be, so that we can be the best partner on our side as well. And I think that's worked. I think that's worked. We are certainly, now, one that is not shopping every month. We've got a clear vendor strategy. Our vendors know where they stand. We share with them where we're going, they share with us where they're going. And I'll tell you, if I speak over the recent years, when we got into 2020 and 2021, had we not had that type of relationship with our vendors, when steel got short and supply was really difficult, we would've had significant issues. The people that didn't have that kind of philosophy had significant issues. And I'm thankful for our partners and how they helped us manage 2020 and 2021.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, I love that. I love all of that. Just the iron sharpens iron aspect of it and the openness of it, I think, is fantastic. And to your point about when you get to a rough spot, like a 2020, people are going to do business with the people that they're closest to and they have the highest level of trust with.

Jim Sliker:

That's right.

Robert Wagner:

That's awesome. Well, let's switch our attention to the fact that Central States is a ESOP company. It's a hundred percent employee owned company. The ESOP was established, I believe in 1991, so it's a very mature ESOP in the world of ESOPs. So during your tenure there, how has being employee owned mattered to your leadership and to the company as a whole?

Jim Sliker:

Yeah, it's interesting. Like you said, Carl Carpenter who founded the business, he believed early on that this idea of giving people skin in the game and a stake in the outcome, not only would it help them personally, but it would help them serve customers better, help them be a better performer in the business. So he started this concept of a partial ESOP back in '91, like you mentioned. At the end of 2011, the founders, the Carpenter family, sold the business a hundred percent to the employees, so we became a hundred percent employee owned business, really starting 2012. I had known nothing of ESOPs, to be honest with you. I knew nothing of it when I got this one line email, if I was interested in this small company in Arkansas. And I did research and kind of understood the concept and I saw the potential value, but I'll tell you until I got here and really experienced it, it's really something special.

And I would say if I take, I'll break down in two ways. Let's ignore the business side of it first. What I really like about it is our company's purpose is to provide wellbeing and financial freedom for our people. Our ESOP, being a hundred percent ESOP is our primary vehicle for this idea of financial freedom for our employee owners and their families. And this idea that, "Hey, every year we're going to give every employee stock in the company," and if we all work well together in harmony at our individual jobs and collectively as teams and departments in company, we're going to try to drive our performance of the share price up. And then that's going to bring wealth to everybody inside the organization. In this idea that in ESOP, how you gain that financial freedom, it's got nothing to do with your job time. It's got nothing to do with it, nothing to do with it. It's all about you committing to the company with tenure.

If you commit to the company and stay committed to the company and perform well, and you do that for a long time, you're going to develop significant wealth. If it's a healthy ESOP. Now we've been blessed as our ESOP to have good performance ever since we went a hundred percent. We have had solid year over year share price appreciation. And the reality is, if you've got tenure in our company of, let's call it 15, 16 years or more, you're sitting on a million dollars in stock, whether you are a production person, a driver, a salesperson. Doesn't matter about your job, it's more about how long you've been with the company. And I love that, I love-

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, it's very powerful.

Jim Sliker:

Super powerful. Now, you mentioned how did it affect me as a leader, how I behaved, and how does it affect the business? If I'm being really honest, I don't know as a leader it affected me too much. I've always believed that people are our biggest asset. I've always believed in being relational in the business. And I always have believed of being very transparent and open book management with all people in the organization. In my last role, I was probably a little cross-cultural, company-cultural in that regard, but I've always believed in that. I've always been passionate about trying to, whatever we do, as best we can do it for the betterment of customers and employees. But it does change the business.

I mean, in our company, one of the things I love is we've created a culture where every employee in this company has a voice, and they know they have a voice, and they can use their voice. I love it when I'll get a call or an email from a production tech, I'll get a call from a driver, and they may be passionate, I'll use those words, they'll be passionate, "Hey, why are we spending money on this? I don't like that." Or, "Why did you make this decision?" I love that. I love we've got an environment where people feel they have a voice, they feel they can use their voice, and they know that we will listen. We will listen. Now, we may not always give them what is being asked for, because we're employee owned, you can't be employee run. Everything can't be a democracy.

But I would say is we all are owners. We all have our individual jobs that we're responsible to each other for. Our jobs are different, but at a minimum, we should challenge. I love that, all of us can challenge each other. We have to listen, and we have to be very open with what's going on, why it's happening, explain all the issues, be very transparent with the data, financials, and all of those things. And I think that's the culture you find here, and that's how it impacts our business.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. I want to dive deeper into the open book concept here, but I have one more question about the ownership and the employee attitude piece. I come from a public company background, and we gave restricted stock, stock options, all these equity-based awards with the hope that we could get people to act like owners in the business. And often, the leadership and the board was disappointed in the response that we got. We weren't alone in that. What do you think the difference is? The one thing I see that you mentioned is the mindset of longevity, like this is a journey. This isn't a we hit the numbers next quarter and everybody gets rich kind of thing, but any thoughts about that, how it's worked to create the ownership idea?

Jim Sliker:

Yeah. Yeah. I will tell you, one thing you said, and I think it's for sure right, we... And I, like you, I came out of a large global publicly company, like you mentioned, and everything was about the quarter, and it was very shortsighted. Even long term thinking was maybe next year, next year thinking. What we try to do here is we're really talking about the vision of, first, always keeping our clarity and then talking about a vision of where we're going. And we share that vision, which is really a, I'll call it a high level, a long term strategic plan, and then a five year plan, and then a next year plan. So we really are keeping all of those things in front of our people. For example, every year we have a shareholder's meeting. Every single employee in the company, every single employee at the company, we sit down and talk to, we explain to them, remind them where we are in our vision and the roadmap of our vision.

We talk about our strategic plan over the next three to five years, what projects, what's the status, what's happening. And then we certainly talk about the annual plan for the upcoming year. So we're really trying to keep everybody in line with the vision, in line where we're going, communicating where their role is in that process so they can start owning that, whether that's a division, a site, a department, a person. We're trying to connect the dots and stay aligned throughout the whole organization, and always keeping everything, I'll say harmonized with that clarity, who we are, how we behave, and what our purpose is. So we start with that. No, I'll be honest with you, every month we're meeting with everybody and we're reviewing the KPIs and we're reviewing how the business is going, and we're reviewing how we're doing against the plans, and we're celebrating the wins.

We're working on continuous improvement and the areas of opportunity. And we meet with every person in the company every month, and we go through that type of stuff, that type of stuff every month. We do that in every location. So that communication, alignment, make sure people understand what's happening in the company, how we're performing in the company is a big priority. And I do want to come back to what you said. I'd be kidding if I said that, hey, all 1,200 of our people we're like these, "Yes, we're all in," employee owned, et cetera. The reality is that employee ownership, once you get past three years, it gets a lot more sticky factor. And why do I say that? Is because after three years, you can now go every year when you get your stock certificate, you go, "Wow, there's real money in that. There's real money in that."

And given a share price performance we have, you start seeing the power of compounding. You go, "Wow, this is pretty good," and you start cheering, now that we have bigger and bigger retirement classes. Like last year we retired about 10 people, which for our company's pretty big, given the not such longevity of the company itself. Those people telling their stories and telling why they're retiring early and what they're going to do next with the money they've gotten out of the ESOP and that financial freedom, what it's going to cause for them. Between those stories and getting across the three year tenure, once they get those certificates and seeing that power, and then just trying to keep them plugged into the business and where we're going and how we're doing and celebrating the wins, that's what we're trying to achieve.

Now, I would tell you it's not perfect. We have places in the business where the ESOP is strong, it's great, and the culture's great, but there's certainly people in the business that don't view this as any different job than any others. It's the reality. It's the reality.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, it's a great, great story. I just love the power of that. I do want to just touch on this open book thing, and you've mentioned several examples, but maybe tell us one thing that would really maybe surprise other business leaders that you're sharing with your employees, that you think's really important.

Jim Sliker:

Yeah, I can tell you from personal experience, my previous world, even though I did it, it was very uncomfortable for my own company that I was doing it. And certainly, I think other companies can be skidish of it. We share our strategic plan. We share our strategic projects that are new, that we would never want getting out to the market, business we're pursuing, products we're developing, technology advancements. We share that with the people. The only thing we don't share with the people, because you're legally bound, you can't, is if we're working on an acquisition. We may tell them we're working on acquisitions in a certain space, but we can't tell them who, if we're in any sort of due diligence mode.

The other thing we share is we share all lines of the P&L. We share it with everybody. Anybody can access our full financial statements, full financial statements. Those are the two things that people always say, that you're really showing that level of, aren't you worried about confidentiality? Aren't you worried that people are going to say that, "Hey, we're making this amount of profit. Why don't we get more raises?" I get that question all the time, "Why don't we get more raises?" But we do. We share all those things. And it really comes down to, first, they're owners, they should know. Secondly, the better educated they are, the more they're going to be able to impact the business, the more they're going to be able to impact the business, and the more we all stay aligned on what we're doing, why it's important where we're going.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. All right. Well, Jim, it's been fascinating conversation and I love all these things you've talked about around just the culture of the company and the way people are treated. There's such respect and trust that you obviously have built with folks in building the business, so congratulations on that. So before we end our time together, we do have five questions that we ask every guest. Are you ready?

Jim Sliker:

We'll see.

Robert Wagner:

All right. So Jim, what was the first way you made money?

Jim Sliker:

I was 10 years old. I rode my bike every day. In planting pumpkins and working on a fruit and vegetable farm.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. And is this in Michigan or is this, where is this?

Jim Sliker:

It was in western New York, is where I grew up.

Robert Wagner:

Western New York. Okay. All right. Planting-

Jim Sliker:

I started there and I worked on a farm really along with other jobs, and I worked on a farm until I graduated high school.

Robert Wagner:

Wow. Awesome. Okay. If you were not the CEO of Central States, what do you think you would be doing?

Jim Sliker:

I always thought my dream job would be to be a school teacher and coach, a school teacher and coach. I love working with kids. I love, I'm a big sports guy and I like to coach and teach, and I just love the idea of having influence over children in a positive way.

Robert Wagner:

Nice. Very good. Maybe you'll get a shot to do that.

Jim Sliker:

It's definitely on the retirement plan concept, I think.

Robert Wagner:

Okay, good. All right. So third question is, what would you tell your 20 year old self?

Jim Sliker:

To be patient with big decisions. Be patient with big decisions,. Big decisions, make sure you're taking a lot of thoughts. Try to balance head and heart's intuition and I'll say facts and data and outcomes. But be patient. I've got two daughters, a 20 and 18 year old, and everybody's got, "I want it here, I want it now." And I fell into that trap in some places in my life when I was that age. Just be patient and work hard, do the right things always. The rest will take care of itself.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. So what will the title of your book be?

Jim Sliker:

Oh, my goodness. Title of my book. Title of a book. I'm going to just say what comes to mind. The first thing that came to mind when you said that would be love big. Just love big. I don't know why I said that, but it's what I believe to... It's one of our values is that we all try to act in love every day. And personally, I think that's something that, in all the chaos and everything else, just look at people and try to love other people big. And that works in business, it works outside of business, and it has tremendous short term and long term rewards.

Robert Wagner:

That's great. That is great. Okay. So last question is, what is the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Jim Sliker:

It's going to be kind of a... I don't want it to be a cop-out, but I think the advice I have been given or told or what I've watched and lived my mantra around is really just be a high integrity guy, love others. That love word not being a feeling in your belly, is being how you treat people, patience and kindness and respectfulness and all those things. So that at the end of the day and the end of your career, at the end of your life, you could say, "Well done." And that's how it will be defined. That's a terrible answer. These are the hardest questions you've had for me the whole time. I don't even know I like that answer. I mean, it's a fact, but I was trying to think, looking for this person told me one time that I need to do this. I'm having a hard time with the book question and this one, to be honest.

Robert Wagner:

No, that's very good. Clearly you have had people in your life who have influenced you in that direction to do the right thing and to love big. I love the love big. That's awesome.

Jim Sliker:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm struggling. I was looking for professional, and I'm churning what's the best professional advice I've ever gotten?

Robert Wagner:

That's all good. That's all good. So thanks so much for joining us today. I love this story. I love what you've brought to Central States and what you've created there. So thanks again, appreciate your time today.

Jim Sliker:

Hey, thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Robert Wagner:

Take care.

Jim Sliker:

Sure.

Robert Wagner:

Thanks, Jim.

Robert Wagner:

That's all for this episode of How That Happened. Thank you for listening. Be sure to visit howthathappened.com for show notes and additional episodes. You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher. Thanks again for listening. This content is for information purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Copyright 2022, HoganTaylor LLP. All rights reserved. To view the HoganTaylor general terms and conditions, visit hogantaylor.com.