FSPN Conversation w/ Steve Spittle: The Middleby Corporation

Well first of all, I just want to say thanks for having me on. It was great to meet you officially in person at the NAFEM Annual Meeting a couple months ago in Arizona. I think I joked with you at the time, I feel like I'm meeting a celebrity. Every time I open my LinkedIn feed or see you on stage or hosting or emceeing an award event, you're everywhere. And I don't know if you're doing selfies and autographs in your booth this weekend, but here's handshakes and hugs, brother. Handshakes and hugs, that's what we do. I will say, just Jason, all joking aside, the platform that you've created with this network through COVID and the ability to connect so many people from the industry and the stories—I told you the other day, as I look back, the people you've had on and just so many great mentors and great industry leaders, just very appreciative of the invitation and looking forward to the time. So, okay, role as a Chief Commercial Officer. Every day is a little bit different, so maybe I'm still trying to figure it out. I will tell you, on paper, a lot of our Middleby commercial food service divisions, I would say more the traditional cooking divisions, report into me in the US and in Europe. And then I'm pretty involved with a lot of our selling activities, again both domestically and in Europe, and that's on chains, dealers, buying groups, your reps. The selling side is really my background in the company. But you're always wearing a different hat every day. Today is maybe a little bit more focused on the financial side of the company, tomorrow could be engaging with reps and dealers on the sales side, the next day after that is who knows what. And that's what I probably love most about the role and about Middleby—literally no day is the same. So when you say, 'Hey, what's Chief Commercial Officer do?' I'm telling you what it's supposed to be, but your hands are kind of in a little bit of everything, and that's what makes it pretty awesome.

Yeah, so it'll be 20 years next year that I've been in the industry, which is hard to believe. Like many people, I found the industry by pure accident. I grew up in Dublin, Ohio, which is a suburb of Columbus. It's where Wendy's is headquartered, if anybody's been to the Wendy's headquarters, obviously been there forever in Dublin. I went to school about an hour west of Columbus at Wittenberg University, just outside of Dayton. I thought pretty early on, I was an economics finance major, I really wanted to go work on Wall Street and work in big boy finance in a big city like New York or Chicago, and that's kind of what I had my past set on from the get-go. Then plugging along and getting my degree, the fall of my junior year is when 9/11 happened. Obviously such a tragic event for our country, and it had a tremendous impact on the job market in general, but especially Wall Street was obviously devastated. There were no jobs anywhere near that, especially for a recent graduate coming out of college. So as I was coming out of my final semester at Wittenberg, I was thinking about what else I could do. You're going to laugh at me for just a moment, but I thought I could be a club golf professional. Rich wasn't lying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I should listen to him. But yeah, I played golf in college, I was okay, good enough to be a club pro. So we belonged to a small club in Columbus, and I went and met with the long-time pro there just about how you get started, what's certification like, the process. A few days later, I get a phone call from a gentleman named Greg Baker. Greg was a member at the club. I knew who he was but I didn't really know him. He said, 'Hey, I understand you're looking for a job. I'm a partner of a manufacturer's rep firm in the commercial food service industry.' I was like, 'Okay, what does a manufacturer's rep in the commercial food service industry do?' So he proceeded to say, 'Hey, we're looking to find a new person to join the company, kind of looking for somebody younger that could come in, learn the role, and eventually join the team and learn the business.' So I met with them. Imagine trying to explain to somebody who has no idea what a rep does in this industry, who dealers are, who consultants are. I knew who Wendy's was, again being in Dublin, I knew who Wasserstrom was because of their yellow superstore signs all over Columbus, but that was it. So I met with Greg and his partner Larry Beretta, who was his partner up in Michigan, and they offered me a job. It was the only job offer I had coming out of college, so I took it. The thinking at the time was, 'Hey, it's a job, it's experience, make a little bit of money,' and I never thought this would be a career. I thought I'd do it for a year or two and then I'm out of here. We were equipment reps, there's no way I'm selling ovens and whatever else the rest of my life. Fast forward a year, Greg was buying Larry out for the territories Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Western PA, which was MAFSI Chapter 7. So I went with Greg and ended up moving to Cincinnati around that time just to better cover the market and cover southwest Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana. That's what I did. I'm sure we'll come back to parts of this a little bit, but the cliff notes version is I stayed as a rep and I really enjoyed it. It was a great way to learn the industry, the people, and the fundamentals of reps, dealers, consultants, end users, the process in which that all takes place. It was a great education, I feel so fortunate to have had it. As I came into 2009, the market was starting to slow down and I was starting to really think about what I like about food service, I like being a rep, but what is my eventual path for my career? Ironically, I was at the MAFSI Conference in the fall of 2009 in Toronto. I run into Paul Angrick at the opening reception. Paul, I knew because when I first started as a rep, he was the president of Wells Manufacturing in Reno, and we rep'd Wells. Wells was the very first factory I ever visited as a rep, and Paul was president, he was one of the first industry people I ever met, and we really hit it off. Those are great memories. So I knew Paul and we had developed a good rapport. There were several times when he was at Wells where he was like, 'Hey, if you ever want to come work for a manufacturer, the door would be open.' I remember telling him, 'There's no flipping way I'm ever going to work for a manufacturer.' Spoken like a true rep—'Those guys are worthless, they're at the pool all the time playing golf or drinking.' Actually, that probably made it sound pretty good. So again, I ran into Paul at the MAFSI conference, he says, 'Hey, you doing anything for dinner tonight?' So we go and have dinner just the two of us at Harbor 60 in downtown Toronto. Great restaurant, right on the water. Paul, Middleby had just acquired Wells, so Paul was in Middleby and he had just been named the president of Pitco. He was moving with his wife Meg to New Hampshire to run Pitco. So at dinner, he was like, 'Hey, if you ever wanted to come to Pitco or Middleby, the door is open.' The timing was right, and I was just like, 'I'm ready for a new challenge.' At the time, it was really just, 'Could I go? Was I good enough? Can I do something different? Can I do it on a more regional or national level for a national company?' You don't get too many opportunities to come into a Middleby, Pitco was frankly at the time, and still is, a flagship brand in Middleby. I'm a little bit biased, but it's a great brand. So I obviously knew Paul, I went and met with Tim Fitzgerald, who at the time was the CFO of Middleby, the first time I met Tim. They offered me a job, and I started in January of 2010 as a regional for Paul, and that was the start of manufacturing life. Wow. So it's funny how things work. We're a great group. When I first joined, in 2010, there were a series of changes from a leadership standpoint. Paul was still there, but the sales leader changed. One of the best things that ever happened to me, I'm going to come back to this, was I'd been there for a couple years and Paul said, 'Hey, you're not ready to be the VP of sales yet. You just don't have enough experience. I'm going to give you the opportunity to do the role without being in the role. I'm going to take you on the buying group stuff, I'm going to introduce you to everybody.' Paul's strength was his unbelievable relationships with all the buying groups, dealers, reps, and all that. Literally for a year, I was right on Paul's coattails the whole time, literally his shadow, going to FIDOS, going to off-season, going to all the buying group stuff. I learned so much and met so many industry leaders. I can tell you, I probably shouldn't do this, but the names I have relationships with because of that—Jonathan Gustafson, Paul Gustafson, I got to know so well because of Paul Angrick and frankly playing golf at FIDA. People like Art Manney from RW Smith, retired a couple years ago. I just go through the list of so many great people I met in that period because Paul gave me that opportunity when again I wasn't ready. Then I became the VP of sales at Pitco at the beginning of 2013. Wow. That was so humbling because at the time, I was 31. It was one of the biggest adventures in Middleby. Why it was so humbling is the sales team we had was very tenured. I will tell you looking back, we had a lot of great sales people in Pitco and Middleby, great people in the industry. That was the best sales team I've ever seen, legitimately an all-star team. For the record, it had nothing to do with me, it was the team that Paul had built, the team that was in place before. I go through that list, some of which are still today, from a regional, national account, international standpoint, it was exceptional. So I felt so fortunate that I'm getting this opportunity to lead this team, but it was like I was learning from that group every day because of the experience they had. That to me was one of the turning points, an unbelievable opportunity, and I owe that a hundred percent to Paul Angrick. There were tons of people more qualified than I was on pure experience. He could have promoted from within or called an industry recruiter, 'Hey, I need a VP of sales at Pitco.' Yet he mentored me for a year and then gave me the opportunity. So that was the turning point. I'm going to come back to this—I left for a period of time because it's too long of a story. I did leave and went to Wasserstrom. I do want to come back to this because it's another turning point, but for the sake of getting through the first question, I'm going to skip it. It is one of the most important things I feel like I did. I left for about five months, came back literally the same role of VP of sales, and I came back in April of 2015. I became the president of Pitco. That was when Paul got moved to a corporate role at Middleby. Dave Brewer, who was our Chief Operating Officer, stepped in to find a new president, and I became the new president at Pitco. Again, common theme, if I think of people up to that point that had such an influence in my life, it was Greg Baker, it was Paul Angrick, and that was Dave Brewer. The opportunity again that Dave and frankly Tim Fitzgerald gave to a young guy who wasn't the most qualified at the time—I was 34—so humbling again. That was Pitco, and then I ended up moving to New Hampshire with my family in that role. From there, I expanded my responsibilities to be a group president in Middleby, which meant I took on additional divisions. The next division I took on was Blodgett, which is another great brand up in Vermont, a couple hours from me, great brand, great people, great culture. Fast forwarding, at the beginning of last year, as Dave stepped away as our Chief Operating Officer, I got promoted to the Chief Commercial Officer along with James Poole, who's my buddy and our Chief Technology Officer, and a number of others like Corey Cole who leads our beverage team. And that's where we are today. I've been incredibly fortunate to think of all those places I've had the opportunity to be in and the number of people that have given me those opportunities. It's been pretty awesome. For a person who never knew what this industry was about, never knew it existed, and thought it was going to be short term when I first started, to think of just everything it's meant to me, it's been really awesome.

That's a great question. I would say two things come to mind. The first one is something I learned from Dave Brewer. If you know Dave, a lot of people know Dave from our industry. Dave can be an intimidating guy, he can be very no-nonsense, in your face, direct, he will challenge you. There's a lot of great things on that side I learned about him. What most people do not know about Dave is Dave's greatest success, and I've told him this, is everything he's done non-business related. Having met his family, his wife Laura and his kids and their spouses and a lot of his grandkids, he has an unbelievable family and he is a deep man of faith. What I learned from Dave in that mentorship is the aha moment of how you find the balance between being a great industry person, being very dedicated, working your butt off for your company, and yet still developing such great humans in your kids and your wife. They're all crazy smart, and sometimes how your kids are shaped is a lot your control, sometimes it's not, but they're all great kids, genuinely kind people. So Dave is the first one I feel like gave me that aha moment of okay, it is very possible to do both. Even though you don't see the personal side with Dave until you really get to know him, I can tell you very much so it's something that I've learned from him and very much admired from him. The second thing I would say is something I've learned from Tim Fitzgerald. Tim is our CEO today, he's been the CEO for the last couple years, a long time CFO of Middleby for really 20 plus years as Middleby's grown as a company. Tim has not been quite visible in the industry. He is without question the smartest person I have ever met in my life. What is fascinating about Tim is, think about this, we all know the stereotype of people that think they're the smartest person in the room, how they act, how they carry themselves. My experience is they're very rarely the smartest person in the room. Tim 99.9% of the time is the smartest guy in the room and he never acts like it. It's very powerful and it's what's so endearing about Tim. The thing I've learned about it is it's always about the team. He never takes credit for anything. All the success Middleby has had, Tim has been such a catalyst for all of that, and he never will take credit, it's always about the team. That's why you love working for him. It goes back to the comment about the culture of the company, it starts with him because we genuinely just want to be around him. Every time I'm with him, I feel like I learn something new, it's like another crash course, like a crash MBA program just being around him. That to me is a perfect example of what great leadership is. You don't learn that in an MBA program, you're not reading a book about that. Tim inherently is that way. So those would be my two things. Great question, Kathy.

It's a great question. I will tell you, I don't give too much of the secret sauce away of Middleby. Joking, not joking. As we've gone bigger as a company, we have a hundred plus brands, a hundred plus divisions around the world, so it becomes harder. What kind of company are you as you grow in complexity, number of people, number of entities? It becomes harder to hit the right culture that you want throughout the company. I will pivot back to it comes back to having great people. If you find, develop, and empower the right people in those local divisions, it takes care of itself. They're the ones ultimately carrying the same message back to whether it's in manufacturing, the shop floor, engineering, the sales team. That team is looking to that leader in their respective division, and they're ultimately a function of the Middleby corporate team. But it comes back to having the right person that one understands it but is totally empowered to affect change in their respective division to carry on that culture. So we talk a lot about even though we become a big company, you still want to act in many ways as small as possible, if that makes sense. That's how I would answer that, just comes back to finding the right people and empowering them to carry that message.

Yeah, great question. Contrary to what Rich O'Brien had to say, I used to play a lot more golf than I do. That was a hobby for a long time. As I'm sure a lot of people can relate to, jobs and kids are not good for your golf handicap, and I can certainly attest to that. I would say, again, probably feels like a cliche answer, but it is genuinely how I feel. I have a great family. My wife Jamie, been married for almost 18 years, and we have three kids: Callie is 15, Ellen nine, Jack my little guy is five. As I've probably gotten older and careers progressed, and I've always traveled a lot like many on the call tonight, the time at home I probably value more than I ever have. I will tell you, it's not a hobby, so I'm not gonna answer the question quite the right way. But I will tell you, I've tried really hard to be intentional about when I'm with them in moments. For example, I'm home and I love taking the kids to school. Our routine, the start times of school, we all load up in the car and we have a great local coffee shop that we go to. I personally love coffee, one of my passions, I came from Tim Fitzgerald for the record. My oldest star now loves it, and the two younger ones get different things—no parent shaming, my son getting a brownie for breakfast. But this morning, we're in the car driving to the coffee shop, music on the radio, and they're singing at the top of their lungs. I'm like, 'This is awesome.' You're not thinking about the Zoom call at nine o'clock, you're not thinking about the 100 things you have to do throughout the day. You're just in that moment. They're so innocent and they're loving what's going on. I gotta be honest, I love stuff like that. The other thing I will share with you is my oldest daughter Callie is big into club soccer. Parents on here with kids in club sports know it's pretty insane, a little crazy how much they're on the go with trainings and traveling. Some of my favorite moments with her specifically are just the time in the car, or a couple trips we've made where you're on a plane just the two of us together. That time again when it's just sometimes the two of you, I have these times with all the kids, but it's been a little bit more recent with her. You're just not thinking about work or some of the stresses or the upcoming stuff, you're just in that moment with them. I know parents that are a little bit older than I am that have kids that are older, and I know those are moments they really cherish. I try to do that as well. So it's maybe not quite a hobby, but that's how I really try to be very intentional not to be on my phone. I don't always succeed quite so much, but I really love that time with them.

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing it up. I apologize in advance, I'll probably get long-winded on this one also. I'm passionate about this. To start, for a couple reasons. One, as long as I've been in the industry, it always gets talked about: 'Oh, this industry is old, there's no young talent coming in.' It's been everybody's been saying for 20 years, and yet we keep saying it because, in my opinion, we've completely failed as an industry. We have failed. There are pockets of success, companies have done better, but by and large, we know it's an issue and yet I don't think holistically we have really addressed it. I'm also passionate about it because I'm not in this industry, I'm not at Middleby, I'm not on this call right now if somebody—you go back to Greg and say, 'Hey, I'm going to take a chance and hire some 22-year-old kid out of college who doesn't know anything, and I'm going to invest, I'm going to take a risk.' Think about what would normally happen if you go back 20 years ago or even today. I'll pick on reps for a second, but you can apply it to anything you want. A rep wants to add another person, even if it's a young person, to their team. I think the things you would do—and I'm generalizing, all these texts from a bunch of reps, can you leave me alone—I think the things you do, you try to go poach another rep. 'Hey, I like that guy over there, see if you can get him to come over.' You poach a DSR, maybe you call the industry recruiter. Those three things you would go to first before you'd hire somebody out of school that you didn't really know. So we have to fundamentally change. That's why I'm passionate about it, because we have to solve it. How do we fix it? How do we get after it? I think I would say three things. One, the trade associations have done some good stuff. I think there's tools they've given us. We've all talked about the Young Executive Group at NAFEM, it's a great organization, we've done good stuff. MAFSI has their group, FEDA has their group. But a trade association is not going to solve this. If you are looking to MAFSI, NAFEM, FEDA, FCSI, etc., to solve this, you are in for a rude awakening. Ultimately, the way we solve this is it's up to you, it's up to me, it's up to everybody on this call, it's up to every company in our industry. You have to think differently and you have to do what Greg did. You have to take a risk on people outside your comfort zone. Stop poaching people. Stop calling the industry recruiter. Nothing against them, but we have enabled those recruiters to have successful careers because we keep doing the same things over and over. We're doing it to ourselves because we don't want to take the risk. We're all too busy, we don't want to—they could come in six months later and they're gone, happens all the time. The job market's crazy right now, why am I going to take a risk? You're gonna hire somebody, they don't want to work that hard. It starts and ends with all of us. There is no other crazy solution, it is that. Then the last thing, and this is the most important thing I would tell you. I was hoping this would come out because I have a little bit of a quick story. When I was a rep, I just moved to Cincinnati, 24, 25. I moved down there and I got really frustrated. I remember calling Greg and I'm like, 'I am making no inroads. It's the good old boys network. I'm the kid at the reception desk, and all the other reps, they're walking back to the dealers and they're walking about consultants and high-fiving and going for beer afterwards, and I'm the guy stuck at the reception desk just trying to get in.' I got really frustrated very early. I'm like, 'I don't understand why it's like this.' Greg's advice was, 'Hey, get over it and go outwork them.' So that was my approach, I'm just going to start showing up more. I started to make inroads, and I started to notice as I was doing that, there's a lot of great reps in Cincinnati by the way, but I started to see one rep more than anybody else. I'm trying to prove myself, going 100 miles an hour trying to break in, and I kept seeing this rep all the time. His name was Barry Wank. Barry was, I was 25, he was probably 50. I really didn't know him at the time when I started to recognize this, but he worked for WB Marketing, his family company. I believe they represented a notice line, kind of present day well-built lines. I just remember being blown away. Here's a rep that is very experienced, he has great lines, and he's working as hard as I am. I admired that from afar. But then what happened is when I would start to see him, he started to engage me. He would go out of his way to talk to me, just 'How's it going?' and talk. Then it kind of led to occasionally having coffee together. It was insightful about the market and the history, and 'Hey, I'm doing this, here's how I worked with this guy.' It was lost on me because I was really just kind of like, 'Hey, this guy's being really nice.' As I think back on that, I still don't have the right words. Reps do not make money buying other reps' coffee. Here is a guy going out of his way to mentor, spend time with a young rep just because he loved the industry. I look at that and I go, I feel like it's unheard of. So we all have great mentors. I talked about Paul, Dave, Tim, those great men, and I've worked for them. But how many of us—and listen, I'm sitting here, I don't feel like I'm preaching because I have not done a good job of this either—how many of us have been mentored by somebody from a competitor, from somebody that's not a direct employee, or vice versa? So to me, how we solve this is stop waiting for a trade association to figure it out. Take it on yourself. Have to think differently. 99% of everybody's time is worrying about your own company, totally the right way to think about it. Find the 1% to go do what Barry Wank did to me. Tragically, Barry got sick and passed away maybe seven or eight years ago now at 60, incredibly sad. I look back at that and I just go, 'I can't believe you did that.' I'm happy you asked me about this. Of all the questions, I hoped you would ask me about this because this is the one I'm most passionate about. We have to be more like him. That's the only way we fix this. My last challenge: this weekend, everybody's in the booth, you're busy. Go literally take an hour, walk out your booth, your booth will be fine, and go walk the show. You should think about who, what does this look like in 10 years? Who are in these booths? Who are the customers? Who are the manufacturers? Who are the reps? Just walk. If you don't come back and be like, 'Oh my gosh, we have to solve this immediately,' I think you'd be crazy.

Good questions. I think, okay, so as usual, I'm going to answer a couple different ways. Professionally, I would say becoming the VP of sales at Pitco I talked about earlier, just what that meant at my age and the team we had. I would be remiss about mentioning that. I know it seems like the obvious one of 'Hey, becoming the Chief Commercial Officer last year,' I mentioned that because that's something also I've learned from Dave Brewer. Whether you're leading a sales team, running a company, running a rep firm, whatever it may be, when you're in a leadership role in the case of Middleby, you're being offered with a company. We have 10,000 or so employees. Something Dave talked a lot about still is when you're in a role like that, good or bad, decisions you make, the way you do things, you affect 10,000 in our case, 10,000 people's lives and their families' lives. When you really think about it like that, you have to think about it every day because it's how not only the decisions you make, but it's the manner in which you conduct yourself because you're always a representation of those employees in the company. We're a little bit bigger company, but it doesn't matter if you have 10 people, 100 people, a thousand people. If you're in a leadership role, you're in a position where you're affecting people's lives. So that was very humbling, being president of Pitco was humbling, this kind of the next step. So that's what I'm very proud of, that I would have the ability to be part of a group that impacted hopefully positively people's lives. I'd be remiss, being part of Tim's team in that role, the fact I get to do that every day with him and James, our Chief Technology Officer, Brian, our CFO, the rest of the team, that's been so rewarding. So those would be my top couple. Personally, again, I feel like it's very cliche, but I have an unbelievable family. What's really cool is when I became president of Pitco, we moved to New Hampshire. You may say, 'Okay, it's easy to accept the job to be the president of Pitco, it's a great career opportunity.' But the personal side of it was you're taking my family of four at the time and leaving family and everything, your community, your church, all the above, and going to a place where you don't know anybody. It was a transition for sure. What I'm proud of to answer your question is about a year ago, I asked the other four members of my immediate family, 'Hey, my job's changed, do you want to move back to Ohio? Do you want to go somewhere else?' They all wanted to stay here. I'm like, 'You know, that's pretty cool.' We did that on our own, and I'm proud of them and I'm proud of the family for doing that.