Tech Talks Business Featuring Laurel Hurd

Thank you, thrilled to be here.

Yeah, I'd love to share. So I grew up in Ohio. I'm a Midwestern girl, born and raised in Ohio. My dad was a hardware salesman, so vacations looked like traveling in the car to a hardware show and helping dad set up the booth. I started in sales very young, selling pliers and things to the hardware community, so that was kind of my growing up. I grew up in sales, that was part of me from day one. Then I went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, so again in the Midwest, cradle of coaches. My first job out of school, I worked for Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners, an old consumer products company, and I learned so much from that job. I started and was managing the West Coast of the country. I had no idea what I was doing. I asked my manager, 'Hey, can I have a job description? I want to do a good job.' He looked at me and said, 'Job description? You want a job description?' He went and picked up everything that was on one person's desk and dumped it on my desk and said, 'There's your job description.' Then he turned around and said, 'Laurel, there's one thing I want to tell you: there's not a single decision that you can make that's going to put this company out of business.' He walked away. My lesson from that is probably the best lesson I ever got: number one, don't worry about a job description, do whatever it takes to get the job done and do right for the company, and then go make decisions. That was my profound moment early on in my career. From there, I grew up in sales, was in consumer products for years in innovation and marketing and brand building across some great brands like Sharpie, Paper Mate, Graco, and Calgon, just great household names. When an opportunity for Interface came forth a couple years ago, I was just like, 'Man, this is an incredible company with such a great foundation and heritage.' I took the leap and joined Interface just a couple years ago.

It's been fantastic. So many of the foundations in business are the same. When you transition industries, you pull from what's the same and you lean into what's different. Great brands, incredible innovation, people and leadership are all the same. General business principles are the same. Our selling system is very different, B2C rather than B2B, so understanding who a customer is, direct selling organization, and a global footprint are certain areas that I've leaned into.

Interface is a $1.3 billion public company, commercial flooring based here in Atlanta in Midtown, and really a global company. We have manufacturing operations in LaGrange, Georgia; in the Netherlands; in Germany; outside of Shanghai; and over in Australia, so a real global footprint. Interface is an incredible company. We've got some of our founder's relatives here in the room today, which is such a gift. Ray Anderson, as you said, was the founder of our company. We just celebrated our 50th anniversary last year, which is incredible. Ray Anderson brought modular flooring to the US and really transformed commercial flooring as we know it today to be carpet tiles. About 30 years ago, this will be his 30th year, Ray had what he would call his 'spear in the chest' moment where a customer came to him and said, 'This is great, Ray, I love your carpet, but what are you doing for the environment?' What I love about Interface is it's an incredibly customer-centric organization. We put the customer at the center of whatever we do. So when a customer asked Ray that question, he said, 'We got to figure this out.' He happened to read 'The Ecology of Commerce' by Paul Hawkins back in literally 30 years ago and came forth and said, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing things that are not good for the planet. My company, while successful and profitable and growing, is not doing right by the planet.' He had an edict to transform our company to do both: to do right for the planet and become a truly restorative enterprise, our ambition, while also being a successful, profitable for-profit company. It's really that beauty that Ray set out on. It's not an 'or,' it's an 'and': how do we be profitable and successful but also do good for the world? What he's done and the legacy we push forward as a company today is still really at the heart of what we do.

How Interface became a leader is really as you said, thinking about sustainability in all aspects from the very beginning: waste and wasting less, to circularity, and how do we have waste from one become food for another. We've created the first ever carbon negative carpet tile, which means it's better for the planet when we make it than when we don't. That's incredible. There's a lot of art and science within that, but we take back recycled carpet, chop it up, and it becomes an ingredient into our carpet tile of the future. That's circularity in action. I think companies, what I love about Interface, we're such a leader. The goal, as Ray said early on, we're just a small company, $1.3 billion in revenue, we can't save the planet on our own, but what we can do is be a beacon of hope and show that we can actually do good for the world, be a profitable enterprise, and show others that it can be done. The fact that others are coming along, the flooring industry is leaps and bounds from where it was so long ago, but there's a lot more to do. The other thing I'd say is we measure everything. We're very authentic and share exactly what we do, and then we publish everything so it's out there and we can share our practices and help others come on the journey with us.

I think it's a great question. Companies are often looking for their purpose. The younger generation wants to work for a company that has a purpose. I've been involved in companies where you're searching for that purpose, why do we exist? Interface is one that has such an authentic purpose. There are so many folks who join our company because they care and they want to make a difference. It's not just what you do, but how you do it, in a way that feels like you're giving back to the community and making the world a better place. People really do care. The built environment is one of the biggest contributors to the carbon challenge that we have. When Ray set out on this journey, people didn't really care about carbon, nobody was talking about it. People care a lot more about carbon than they have in the past, so it's helping that journey.

It's a great question, somewhat controversial. Regulation, people get anxious over that because what does that mean? Our philosophy is, I sort of say bring it on. We're ready for it from a regulation perspective if it will help clarity and make sure that we're all looking at it the same way and transparency. Then I think it's great. I think we're ahead of the curve from that perspective because we've been tracking everything for so long. I think it can only help us.

It's not easy, even state by state sometimes. But you're a CEO, so you know it's different. I think our mission is steadfast. Our ambition is to be a restorative enterprise by 2040 and actually restore, do not only no harm but do good for the planet. Our science-based target initiative is global and very trackable. Our goal is to get halfway there by 2030, and we've already made such great progress. When we look at our global footprint, yes, the regulations are different here or there, but we'll just go for the furthest, the most aggressive, and then we'll track that globally. We may not have to, maybe the US will be a little less stringent than Europe, but we'll just look at it as a global enterprise and track it accordingly. What we care most about is the progress that we're making.

I think the biggest proof point we have is we were able to come up with the first ever carbon negative carpet. If we can make a carpet tile carbon negative, it's about scaling, how we can do that in a more cost-effective way over time. Then it's about innovation. There's a lot happening with biomaterials, using carbon as an ingredient, and thinking about waste from one being food for another. Our scientists around the world are really looking at how that innovation is going to come to be, not only good for our customers but also good for the planet and good for business.

It's a great question. There's tension in that, tension in how do you know will this be more profitable or more sustainable? What we really try to look at, we talk about design a lot at our company, we're a design driven company. We look at all of these things as design challenges. How we think about the 'and'? More often than not, a more sustainable solution is also more profitable, whether customers are willing to pay for more or whether there's less waste or more cost-effective ingredients. We keep going after the design challenge until we find something that is an 'and'.

At the center of everything is the customer. We make sure that our customers are at the center of everything we do because we have to make sure that we're a sustainable, profitable enterprise for the long term. The customers are really at the heart of that. The good news is our customers are looking for more sustainable solutions, so there's a marriage there. We truly believe we can grow our business because our customers care more from a sustainability perspective than they ever have before.

It's a great question. You join a company from the outside, you read everything you can about the company and learn a lot about its heritage and its history, but until you get there you don't really know what it's going to feel like. When you come into Interface, you realize sustainability is in the bones of the business. It's in everything we do, in innovation, marketing, manufacturing, and it's all around the world too. It's a core part of what we do, it's not a function, it's not a team, it's really in the fabric of how we think. Our job is to foster that and to make sure that we continue to drive that forward. We created a Sustainability Council which brings advocates from around the world together. I share it with my lead of sustainability and innovation, and we meet every other month and talk about issues out there that we want to make progress on, whether it's carbon offsets and how do we think about that. We spend a lot of time talking to people who are working on sustainability every day but in different functions around the world, and we pull together to make sure that we continue to push that forth every day.

I'm so proud that there's an accountability. We have such an incredible founder story, Ray Anderson, who attended Georgia Tech, and we've got such a strong connection still. There are so many incredible folks that we have at our company now who came to Georgia Tech. I have a responsibility to move that forward and to keep bringing forward the vision that Ray had. What I'm most proud of is we do it every day. The people at Interface around the world are thinking about the mission that Ray set out. His mission is an 'and': it's not just do good for the world, he was a ferocious competitor who loved to win in the market. It's that competitive spirit with the customer at the center and doing right for the world that is through and through what we do every day. I'm really, really proud.

The first one is really true. Some customers really care about their carbon impact and some don't. I wish they all did. When a customer cares, we win all day long, but not all of them do. We need to make great carpet that looks beautiful and other flooring products that are costed well and high quality every single day. When customers care about sustainability, great, we'll win that argument. We have to win it without too. We need to be great at what we do, the core of what we do, and then we also need to make sure we teach our customers. Sometimes they don't care because they don't know, and we can teach them that they're making a good choice. Everybody wants to make good choices. We can teach them that in addition to giving you a great product, a great value, high quality, you're also making a great choice for the environment. There's education in there. Short-term versus long-term, that's a real tension all day long. At the end, we put our customers in the center, we focus on growth and making sure that we're satisfying our customers. When we look at investments, especially in the long term, I think about our science-based target roadmap, which is an innovation roadmap. They're intertwined. The investments that we're making in our future we believe are going to both help us grow and increase profits and be good for the environment. Making sure that we keep those things equally weighted and not just something that's great for the environment that our customers don't want. We can't make those trade-offs. We have to make sure that the customers want what we create. We're not going to get to our ambition that makes sense.

It's a great question. It's not easy. It sounds easy, 'Hey, we'll take it back and we can make it an ingredient.' It's really hard. If you think about a building going through renovation, we take back our own carpet because then we know what it's created with and we know it can be an ingredient. But there are a lot of steps. The building owner or the people doing the renovation have to know, 'Oh, this is Interface's carpet, so I can send it back to you.' There's an expense associated with getting it back. It's the single hardest part of the circularity story: getting the product back from the customer. I wish our participation were higher. It's low, it's increasing a bit, but it's hard. We use that as an ingredient, so we want to continue to find that flow, but it's a challenge for sure. If we think more broadly about connectivity with others, some of those solutions are going to have to come more broadly. Europe will lead because the regulation in Europe around circularity is increasing more, where there will be a penalty if you don't have an end-of-life solution. When that penalty becomes big enough, customers will care about paying to send it back. The math will work eventually. That'll honestly help drive it more.

It's a great question. I think it comes down to innovation, starting with what the customer wants. There's a lot happening in biomaterial, biobased material, a lot happening with carbon and how you can use that as an ingredient. As we think more about how you can innovate so that what we bring forth to customers and consumers is more sustainable by nature, so that it's not a take something back and recycle it, but give them something that is way more sustainable to begin with. Starting at the answer and pushing it out. It's going to be hard to make consumers or customers care enough to create on their own.

I love it. Like anything, I think it's authenticity more than anything. Coming in being yourself. As a leader, and I'll say as a woman leader sometimes in a CEO role, you're expected to act a certain way or be a certain way, or you think you are. What I've found in my whole career is I just got to be me. The more I am authentic and very kind of approachable, curious like crazy, ask a bunch of questions. You come in as a new CEO and everyone thinks you have the answers. You walk in and everyone stares at you for the answer. The answer is not here. I can draw it out of you, but it's really listening and being curious and making sure that every voice in the room is heard. Being a good listener, but listening with the intent of being influenced, not the intent of how you're going to answer next, which I think is often what you're thinking about. That's what builds trust: being a good listener, being authentic, showing you don't have all the answers, and drawing from all the great expertise in the room.

That's a great question. Like anything, I think there are times. You had nothing, you got a good out there. I think it matters when and what topics. What's going through my mind is you should do what only you can uniquely do, where you can add value, and get out, know when to get out of the way. I don't think it's about how much you work or how hard you work, but making sure you know where you're contributing and where you're getting in the way. Oftentimes, no matter what, as leaders, if you're in the room, people will defer to you or people will not actually do the work that's needed. I'm probably in between the two. I'll roll up my sleeves if there's a problem that needs to be solved. You got to be in the trenches. You don't need to do all the work, but you got to show that you're in the trenches with the team. At the same time, you need to pull yourself out of it and get out of the way once everybody's on the right track, so they can go make it happen.

I think there's a couple things. It goes back a little bit to the job description. Don't get so focused in what you're doing. The folks who are most successful in our company or any company, they just want to make the business better. It's not about them, it's not about their promotion or their career or what they're doing. It's about 'I want to make the business better.' That means jumping in sometimes outside of your boundaries or your role or your job description and just getting in there to figure out how can I help. That mindset is an entrepreneurial mindset. It's as if you were a business owner and you want to say, 'How do I make this business better?' Those folks in the room, you notice them as a leader. You can tell when someone's in there for them or they're in there because they want to make the business better. That is the entrepreneurial spirit: 'I just want to make the business better. How can I help?'

Soak it up. This is such an incredible university with so many resources and so many connections. My first response to that is just soak it up because there's so much opportunity here and so much connectivity. Grab all of it and don't be afraid to grab all of it. Also, follow your heart and that will take you a thousand different places. Where you're good at and where you can add value, but it's got to feel right too. It's not just about a title and a career track. It's about making a difference in the world and making sure that you feel like you're really contributing.

Wonderful.

Awesome, thank you guys.