Podcast: Kyle Chapman, Carrying the Torch

Chad Harris: This is the first interview since your father passed, so I'd like to just give you a chance to just share your thoughts from where you are right now. There's been an outpouring of support from people all over the world. I want to give you an opportunity to talk to that.  

Kyle Chapman: Absolutely. I appreciate that. When you lose your mentor, business partner, best friend and dad all at one time, it can leave a pretty big hole in your heart. The good news is, I've had a wonderful life with him, and I was so lucky to have so much time, my entire life and the last 20 years working together. Really, in particular, the last 16 months when we've been battling the leukemia together. As you all know, he had a lot of opinions and likes to talk a lot, despite his pursuit of listening. Nothing was left unsaid. It’s obviously a very sad time, for me personally, for my family, for the organization, for the millions of people that my dad impacted.  

What I feel like today, as I've done town halls across the business, is a sense of energy. My dad loved to say there is hope. He would sign Everybody Matters, “There is hope.” And I have a sense of energy to take the torch he lit and make sure the legacy endures many more decades.  

And our Truly Human Leadership message impacts millions of more people. Fifteen years ago, when dad talked to Brian Wellinghoff and was asked the question, what's your biggest fear? It was that his legacy would die with him. Today, he didn't have that. When he passed, he was comforted that his legacy was going to go on for many years and was going to reach its level of potential because of the talent in the organization and how the message was spreading and gaining momentum. He left super comforted, with where we are going and that Barry-Wehmiller was in a better place than it's ever been.  

Chad: That's kind of a big mantle to wear.  

Kyle: Indeed, big shoes, big mantle, long shadow, all of those things. We've been working intensely together with me and my President role over the last five years. This is a shared message. It's not his message being passed to me. It's a message that we've developed together, very intentionally, over the last five, seven, eight, 10 years.  

People ask, has the torch has been passed? I think we've been co-carrying the torch together and both could speak at different places and take that same message out to the world. It’s a huge mantle. But it's not just on me; it's on everyone that's been touched by him.  

That's what he wanted. That was his intention — that we would each take a little bit of his message and spread it around the world, and as that gains momentum, the impact is going to be even bigger.  

Chad: What did he understand about leadership that so many leaders don't understand now?   

Kyle: I'd like to just say he recognized that there's no difference in caring for your family and caring for the folks that come into your stewardship as a leader. A lot of times people feel like they have to leave their family life behind them and walk in this professional environment and have a different face and treat people differently than they would and then go back home and transform back into their family.  

He realized that there was, through those series of epiphanies that he wrote about in Everybody Matters, so much more to leadership. But unfortunately, the way we teach it, the way we talk about it, the way we reward it is broken. He despised everything in terms of how we talked about management.  

He created the glossary of what it means to be a leader, heart count over headcount. We don't talk about the floor of assembly. We talk about team members versus employees, and words matter. Words matter a lot. He's super intentional about it and would not let anybody say he's my boss or my manager. Not once would somebody be able to say that. He would say, that's your leader. He was pretty passionate about that.  

Chad: Was there a moment at home that made it real? Was there a time that happened? Was there a moment that made you feel that this is the new chapter or anything like that?  

Kyle: I would love to say that I had similar epiphanies as my dad, but I would say my evolution into carrying this leadership philosophy with me and making it my own just kind of happened in a smaller series of events and time, and there's no aha moment. There are certain times I was at a previous employer where we had just done an acquisition, and it was great.  

The equity providers said you need to pay us a $500,000 fee. I thought, fine, that's the agreement that we had. And then a couple months later they'd say, oh, you're not quite hitting the numbers. You need to find about $500,000 of cost savings, which means get rid of some people. At that point in time, I thought, oh man, that those folks are really disconnected to what's going on underneath here.  

And that was before I came back to Barry-Wehmiller to start Forsyth Partners. You sense that, and you realize leadership and business is more about just making returns and financials. It's about the people underlying that are making this happen and their livelihoods are coming from this work. They're passionate about what they do.  

And if you’re so disconnected that you just treat it like a transaction, or an elimination of a number decimal point, that dehumanizes business. It makes it seem like a transaction or a financial report. And so, I saw some of that happening. And I was fortunate, or unfortunate, to join in the ‘08-‘09 downturn.   

When you're launching a new investment firm, launching in a downturn is not a great idea. But we did OK. And we were able to observe how Barry-Wehmiller handled it. I was in the rooms the team was making all these decisions. How do we handle this like family? Not like all of our competitors, how they were handling it. And the way we made decisions based on our culture at the time was so compelling.  

It was nerve wracking, though. We weren't doing conventional things. And then you heard about the stories of people sharing vacation times with each other during furloughs where some people couldn't afford to take two weeks off unpaid. You hear people agreeing to suspend their 401(k)'s, and then us coming back and paying it back in subsequent periods.  

And you start to see how the business responded. We didn't do it for how the business was going to respond: growth, attracting better talent, all these things. But all that happened as a result of doing the right thing in the time of crisis. That stuck with me, obviously.   

When we launched BW Forsyth Partners, and it was a distinctly different model. We were trying to blend the best of Barry-Wehmiller as a strategic acquirer with the private equity world, which is more transactional and financials and numbers. And we tried to bring the best of both worlds together. And we found our message resonated. We hadn't even owned a company yet, and people were drawn to, oh, you're not doing this for short term. You're going to inject culture into our organization? Wait, you're buying and building this thing forever? Wow. That's different. And so, all of these little things kept happening.   

Recently, over the last five or six years, one of our team members who came in from the outside said, Kyle, you don't know what it was like in my previous employer to go home on Thanksgiving, a wonderful period of time, to be with family. And by the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I was already dreading going back to work because it was their earning season or their review season, and it was going to be filled with yelling and cutting costs and firing people. And just the downsides of being a public company. In his first year with us, he said, I came into the office on that Monday after Thanksgiving engaged and fulfilled.   

I was able to be present with my family, and I'm so excited to be back on Monday. When you think about my dad’s silly saying of people's always say, Thank God It's Friday. We should be saying, Thank God It's Monday, I get to go back to work. That was an example. I didn't ask for him to share that. He shared it because he felt compelled that our culture and our philosophies drew that out of him, and he can't ever imagine going back to what he became so accustomed to.  

Chad: You covered realizing it wasn't just your dad's philosophy, but that you were part of it, and everybody, all of us, are part of it. When you first came along as President, people would ask, is Kyle going to be different? No, it's the same thing. He believes it too. You'll see.   

Kyle: People saw me as more economic-focused. In 2016, when I started having more interest in Barry-Wehmiller being a light on a hill, about what this means. People could come, and people did, talk about our culture.  

We wrote a book on it. But if they had peeked under the covers at our performance, they would have recognized that we can't do that as a public company, as a private company, etc. There was a time of need where the organization probably heard me as more economic-driven because I was filling a void that existed, and that was not me.  

It was me, but that was not my only thing. We were covered on the people side. Trust me, we were covered. And I just had to hammer, no, it's people and performance. Otherwise, our message won't spread. We won't have the same influence out in the world that I think that we could have when you blend it together.  

Chad: We talk about performance. Does performance weaken the people message?  

Kyle: Not at all. In fact, it fuels the people message. I'm going to take a step back. When I came in as CFO, one of the things that I wanted to focus on was, how do we really make sure our culture is doing everything it needed to? At the time, we weren't doing leadership reviews, succession planning, talent development programs.  

If our culture is doing the best, we should attract, retain and develop the best talent in the world. But we aren't doing some of these things, so we're going to struggle to do that. But if we do that, results will follow, and results will attract talent, and talent will drive results.  

It's a flywheel. It's not a seesaw where you do people in performance, one or the other. Performance, which is the entire reason my dad built the balanced business model he had that we can perform in all markets, in all economic environments, war time, tariff time, Covid time. This business was built to perform so that we can always stay true to our culture.  

That should drive performance. Our view is that, people in performance, in fact, have to work in harmony. Otherwise, both will be short lived. If you just focus on performance and then shift to people and then back to performance, it doesn't work and you'll have one-time blips in performance or great cultural scores, but it won't be sustained and it won't be enduring. What we're trying to do is to be enduring for decades.  

Chad: Your dad was this visionary with it, and you would talk to him, and sometimes we would even ask questions like, OK, Bob, what is the key? He goes care. We've got to care. What do we do to care? He goes, you just care, to simplify it.   

Kyle: You can't care about a basketball team and whether you win or lose or. Oh, neat, I didn't know what the score was, but I cared. There's this element of metrics and data that are supportive evidence of care allow us to take that and, sadly, convince other people how caring is impacting the organization. Dad needed to go hard in caring because nobody talked about caring in the business world. He always loved to say, how do you monetize care or how do you measure care?   

Recently, in a podcast we did, he asked how do you measure care? How do you measure love? I said, the problem is people can measure not caring and the impact it has. People can measure what a layoff announced in a news release does to a public stock.  

You released 10,000 people. Boom. Your share price goes up. That's measuring; not caring. For us to be able to get this message of care out in the world, it's all about operating with people and performance in harmony and measuring the impact of care. Care means feeling engaged, feeling cared for, feeling visible, being able to show up as yourself.  

All those things are measures of care. Wanting your family members and friends to come work for us. That's a measurable metric. Those are things that we need to be doing at a higher level to gain full support. Dad's message was spot on by leaning heavily into saying, you just got to care. For it to achieve its maximum potential, and for his legacy to endure and for caring to impact the millions of people that should inside the business world, we need to be able to demonstrate its impact on performance and on people and on long-term growth.  

Chad: Will this idea of people and performance in harmony and the way we do it here and having classes to be better listeners and telling people to care, but then also the performance side, is this just a unique thing that Barry-Wehmiller gets to do?  

Kyle: If you think about it, Barry-Wehmiller is a microcosm of the broader business world. Does caring work in a blue-collar manufacturing environment? Yes, it does. Look at what we did in early days and packaging. Well, we're also in a professional services engineering business that we've grown from one employee to nearly 2,000 professionals.  

Does it work there? Yeah, it works there. That's not unique to Barry-Wehmiller. Well, there's many other businesses that operate in that market. As we started Forsyth Partners, can you take that model into investing and perform like other private equity firms or hedge funds, etc. in terms of generating returns? We've proven time and time again through all our investments at Forsyth.   

Yes, you can actually take this message and go apply it while it's inside Barry-Wehmiller's four walls because we're the quote unquote investor. These businesses could be owned by anybody. So no, it's not unique to us. That's why we're so bold on our purpose to build a better world through business. We're not talking about building a better Barry-Wehmiller through business.  

We're not talking about redefining success in business to be just for Barry-Wehmiller. Our bold vision is to take this out to the world through Chapman & Co., through our educational programs, through Barry-Wehmiller University, and doing it internally with our team members. This is not a message that we intend to keep to ourselves, which makes it harder, by the way.  

This is not an easy thing to go do, but we are trying to be an influence in the world, and that's why it's so imperative that we continue to grow. Growing is a proof point that what we're doing is working. Growth amplifies our message. Growth will make our impact bigger. That is why we are so intentional about it.  

We want people to ascribe human and economic vibrancy to Barry-Wehmiller, and we want my dad's book to be a prescribed reading in every business education class there ever was.  

I want people to talk about my dad, the book, the legacy, Barry-Wehmiller's philosophy as a way to do business that endures decades. It produces all the same, or better, economic vibrancy results that you would look for while keeping human vibrancy at the highest level as well.  

Chad: I want to talk about your site visits. You've gone to a few different places. You can share specifics, if you want, but do you want to give more of a general overview?  

Kyle: Routinely, we go on site visits to meet with the people in the organization and try to help connect their individual work to our broader strategies and to our broader purpose at Barry-Wehmiller. Specifically, when we did our last Every Voice Matters, there were two things people called out. One, they didn't understand how their work mattered overall. Two, they didn't know what Barry-Wehmiller was doing outside of its four walls.  

It seemed like there's some little things here and there. While that was frustrating to me because we talk about this all the time. We wrote a book, Everybody Matters. How can you not know your work matters? It just struck me that we hadn't done enough to connect how somebody can contribute on a daily basis to their division, to their platform, to Barry-Wehmiller and to building a better world.  

When you see us talk about Change the Game, when you hear us, when you engage with the materials, the goal is to understand what I'm working on today, how that contributes to the transformation plays and how that contributes to redefining success in business and building a better world through business. That's the goal of the site visit.  

We go out and we do a town hall meeting. We do operating reviews and see where people are making incredible progress and either continuous improvement initiatives or new innovations, etc. It's very energizing to be out with everyone. And then we'll do a town hall where we intentionally talk about the broader vision, the broader purpose for Barry-Wehmiller, its vision, the strategies we're doing and how that site now specifically is contributing to our overall business.  

We've gotten some good feedback. For instance, some of our smaller divisions, which, in a nearly $4 billion organization, a $35 million division feels like, who cares? That is so far from the truth. We talked to a couple of our smaller divisions. We want you to grow two, three, four times.  

In fact, your growth is truly helping us achieve our Change the Game strategic plan. We really want disproportionate growth out of you. We're going to look at more acquisitions. They felt energized and more connected. They felt like they matter. The work they’re working on matters. It's important. It's contributing. You could get a sense of the energy created from that connection.  

Lots of site visits. Very importantly is at each site visit I addressed the passing of my dad because you can just whether you're in a 20 person site or a 300 person site, you can see the emotion, people's faces, the connectivity he had with them, how his message resonated at just the deepest level in their souls.  

So many people came up and just were sorry. They missed him and how great of a man he was. They hung on to that one time he spent an extra two minutes on a site tour asking how they felt. How are things going? He was so engaging and fun and funny and goofy and all those things at the same time.  

He was really disarming to so many people, and they never felt like they were talking to the CEO or the owner. They felt like they were talking about somebody who genuinely cared for them and wanted them to do great things. That was reassuring as we did all these site visits. It's not surprising to see this outpouring of support for my dad, both internally and externally.  

It's comforting to see it because he spent his life refining this message, doing stuff to provide a safe place for these people. To see them visibly impacted by his passing, by his message, by how he made them feel was really healing for me.  

Chad: When you were at the site visits, you mentioned you were heading towards vibrancy and thriving. Are there some examples that you can think of that just like really clicked?   

Kyle: Our site visits are all marked by people doing things exceptionally well. Are they doing everything great at each site all the time? No, but everybody's got a piece of something we could take and show as an example to others. A week ago, I was in one of our UK facilities and the amount of continuous improvement they pushed throughout the organization in a facility that used to not be a place you would want to go visit. In terms of the cleanliness, it looks like a Formula 1 racing engineering department.  

You could eat off the floors. It is gorgeous, and it's reflective of those leaders’ view of being an engineering company and behaving like engineers. So, that's phenomenal. When we're meeting with folks doing innovation and you're seeing the amount of innovation that we are putting out into the market, and you see transformation of product lines that have existed for 20 years that haven't had a touch of innovation look like a brand new piece of technology that's intuitive and safe and clean and sleek and you're like, whoa, this is a different Barry-Wehmiller, this is a different organization. Not different in a bad way that we had that we threw out the old, but it's evolving. It's redefining itself. It's flexing new muscles.  

There is vibrancy, innovation, talent. Probably the biggest thing that you see is the amount of talent our organization that continues to get better on a daily basis.  

I said it three years ago. I said it last year. I'll say it again. I'll say it again this year. We have the best talent we've ever had in the history of the organization, and we're being so intentional about it going forward and how we're bringing people on and setting people up for success, that it'll just get better and better and better and contribute to that vibrancy we're hoping for as an organization.  

Chad: We talk about people and performance in harmony. Economic growth and human vibrancy are other terms that we use for sort of the same thing. If I'm five years old, explain that to me. What do those mean to you?  

Kyle: Just like in anything, and I'll try to explain it to a five-year-old, but business is alive. When I think about a business being alive, it's innovating at the highest level. It's got customer intimacy and partnerships at the highest level. It's growing organically, which means it's just naturally growing in the market, combined with attracting acquisitions because people want to be a part of your organization.  

You're doing things efficiently and in a productive way. Thus, it's producing earnings that you can invest back in the organization. I mean, it's this wonderful vibrancy. You're shipping things to team members on time. You're delivering on projects, on costs. It's this whole thing when you just being your best self.  

As a five-year-old, just imagine you had a great day at recess, and you gained ten new friends and your snacks were good. It's like that best day that you could have, but inside of a business.   

Economic vibrancy to me is easy to measure because we've talked about that for so long. Human vibrancy is well-studied. But nobody talks about the business standpoint. How do people feel engaged and cared for and visible? How do people know that they can walk in and have the psychological safety to take a risk? Try something new? How do we make sure people are recommending us to their friends and family? How do we know we're developing people so that they feel like they have their hands on the wheel for their professional or personal development?  

How do we make sure we're listening to folks and taking that feedback and evolving the organization for the better? And so, we talk about wanting to measure success by the way we touch the lives of people. There are lots of ways to do that. We need to be better at it inside of our four walls. How do people feel?  

Are we sending them home fulfilled? Are we creating frustration or not for them? I hope not. Are we removing obstacles? Outside of our four walls, how many people are we teaching to listen? How many universities have we partnered with to transform? How leadership is taught so that we're putting great leaders out in the world, and we're not having to retrain them when we hire them.  

We've been doing a lot of this on the human vibrancy side and touching the lives of people, but we haven't done a great job of measuring it. I think if we get a little bit better about how people are feeling, how we're measuring things, we'll be able to expand on it. It'll grow. It'll have a life of its own.  

We'll probably be one of the first to have a full suite of human vibrancy measurements. Again, economic vibrancy we can get. But the human vibrancy is something that we need to develop the muscle on. We're going to.  

It's just being more intentional about what we're trying to do inside of our four walls. But then as we contribute to redefining success in business, where human and economic vibrancy can exist in harmony, that's a message we're taking also outside of our four walls, in our pursuit of building a better world through business.  

How do we impact our communities? How are we changing the landscape of education? We're talking about doing more research-based evidence of what human vibrancy can do that impacts people's lives outside of our four walls. How are we taking our message to other companies? That is all now encompassed in our Change the Game strategic plan? It all comes together.  

It's all Barry-Wehmiller. It's not Design Group does this and Barry-Wehmiller Companies does that and Chapman Foundation for Caring Communities does that. Now, we are all aligned to the same purpose of building a better world through business and all of our activities inside and outside of our four walls should be redefining what success looks like in business.  

Chad: What does that mean for the for the leaders that are here now? That's kind of a different thing. That's a different ask. What does this require from leaders that's different than before?  

Kyle: I would say the requirement from leaders isn't any different. The ability of our leaders now have the ability to understand this. When I think about what's different, everybody needs to be connected to this. We have to make sure we spend we put this message out to our teams and to the world as a collective unit.  

This isn't Bob's message or Kyle's message or the board's message. This is our team's message. Honestly, what we need our team members to do, our leaders to do, is engage with the materials, engage with their teams and educate them on everything we're trying to do. I can tell people what their work matters to the broader thing.  

But unless it's reinforced in all levels of our organization, the connective tissue won't build. That's what we're really focused on. What do leaders need to do differently? We're not a totally decentralized organization anymore, where you've got all these Presidents across the world and all these different functions across the world, and everybody can do their own little flavor.  

We are not totally centralized either where you must do this and thou shalt. But what leaders need to do now is collaborate more with each other. We're solving a lot of the same problems over and over again, and we don't need to do that. Our next ten years of growth should be far less, painful than our last ten years of growth.  

Chad: I think you've sort of answered this, but what would it mean for Barry-Wehmiller to truly redefine success in business? What would that mean?  

Kyle: That would mean that we are well on to achieving our Change the Game strategic plan. And what that would mean is that customers, suppliers, markets, everyone are voting with their dollars. They're trying to see us succeed. We'll be operating a top decile, top 10% performance metrics, top 10% culture metrics. The world is going to want to know exactly what we're doing and how we're doing it.  

Given our vision is to share that, we have an awesome opportunity for people to come learn. As we grow, as we change the game, as we redefine with success in business, we're going to attract more talent, do more acquisitions, develop more leaders, have more influence. People are going to want to adopt our methodology. We’ll change the language of leadership. We’ll change business education. We will build a better world through business. We'll be a proof point of what it could look like.  

In 2016, we've done amazing things, amazing things, but people would look under the covers and be like, well, I can't do that as a public company. Now, when we change the game and we redefine success in business, public companies, private equity companies, family held companies, people are going to want to come and see, and we'll share with them.  

Chad: In the past few months, you've had quite a bit of a shift in things. I mean, you've seen some things. You've been doing this for five years, but it's got to be a little different. There's got to be a level of difficulty that that office is empty that adjoins your office.  

Kyle: I think about the last month and three days, and what will be for the rest of my life. I have the great fortune of being able to see and hear my dad and everything that we'll do.  

Again, best friend, mentor, dad, business partner. His podcasts will pop up randomly on LinkedIn and you read tributes. It is difficult not having him here and I miss him dearly. But as he said, he hopes that I'll always carry him in my heart and there's no way that that won't happen. He's so inner weaved into what I believe. This company, my family, my broader family, the Barry-Wehmiller family, people I didn't know, that stories will pop up about him.  

A podcast will pop up about him. I'll watch a silly movie he liked to watch, and he'll be alive. I've been in this role without title for five years. The running of the organization is similar to what it's felt like before. There's not this big aha, this big change, this big knee jerk. Not being able to go in his office and tell him about a cool customer or order a new acquisition or a story about how somebody was impacted by our leadership model.  

I miss that. I go to my texts a lot to go text him something. He's still the first face on my texts. I used to call him every day on the way into work and just recap what went on. Focus on the day. Not being able to share that with him creates a bit of a void that I have to figure out how to fill in other ways, but he'll live on. He'll live on forever. We're all fortunate for that.  

Barry-Wehmiller may be in the best place it's ever been. I know that personally, validated by my dad. Fifteen years ago, he was worried his legacy would die with him. He was able to pass understanding that we've had the best talent, the best outlook, and that it's going to thrive whether he's here or not.  

That gave him incredible comfort. It gives me great comfort. As I think about where we are and where we're going, we couldn't be in a better place. I talk about Barry-Wehmiller as a $4 billion startup. We have so much opportunity ahead of us. It is an awesome organization to work for. I know I'm biased, but that's OK.  

We are developing centrifuges for novel cell and gene therapies that could cure diabetes. We are making toilet paper. I know, not exciting, but touches people's lives daily. We are building organizations that were once forgotten. We’re innovating at higher levels. The talent is so brilliant that are coming to us. I love the stories of developing someone that may or may not have thought they had a chance, and now they're running a site. It's a super exciting place to be. I'm really pumped. We'll have a record year this year. The prior year was a record. Things are looking OK. The good news is we're not letting short term positive results or negative results slow us down. We're focused on building for the next three decades.