Brett: One of the things we ought to talk about is the board. And you got a great board and they've really been supportive of you and the team. But with me now, I think we need to figure out how does your board become my board?

Ward: Ever wonder how the kid who swore he'd never sell a thing became the CEO who fires up 3,400 people to out-hustle ABB and draft a blueprint for the next Westinghouse? Meet Brett Cope, ex ABB deal maker turned Powell Industries power broker, who bet big on innovation, ditched customers from hell and made culture his secret weapon.

Hold on. Change is his comfort zone. Let's jump in.

So, Brett, thank you so much for joining us today for the podcast Rethink Change. And we're excited to have you because I know from personal experience with you you've been through a lot of change in your career. And we're gonna talk about some of the strategies you've used some of the stories and where you see the company Powell going forward in the future.

Brett: Great. Thank you for having me.

Matt: For starters, Brett, why don't you give us your CliffsNotes version of kind of your career trajectory and, up to now being CEO of Powell.

Brett: Okay. Well, I came out of college Miami of Ohio in 1990, and I wanted to be the world's best engineer. Of course there's always a family element of this, right? So my dad was, his whole life was in the glass business in Ohio, working with the Detroit Big three. And he was always in the marketing front end sales.

And I swore I would never be a marketing salesperson. So when I came outta Miami, I thought I'd be a great engineer and I joined ABB right outta college. They had just come into the United States, bought up 30 companies, and I started off engineering. And for three years I ran around trying to be the world's best engineer and then woke up one day and decided I wanted to be on the marketing sales side.

So quickly pivoted into sales and front end customers and really building solutions, which is what, being part of ABB, being part of a new chapter of ABB coming into the states, putting a lot of different companies together as Asea Brown Boveri, plus all the companies I had bought in North America. It's quite frankly, for me as a new, relatively new employee, it was fun.

And then moved into management in the late part of the nineties, moved to Oregon, married at this point, where I was a sales manager, kind of everything west of the Mississippi. And was a great, really a great role, just from a business standpoint, because we had all the functional groups out in Oregon. We had project management, engineering, you have product folks, but you were away from the mothership, if you will.

And then we had a little family challenge. So we had to leave Oregon unfortunately and move into new chapter and we moved to Atlanta. But the opportunity opened was ABB was doing a rethink, which I didn't know at the time, of change, about how they focused on clients. And so it, what, long story, but what turned out is they were thinking about we're gonna take, not hundreds of clients around the world, of which they had of course, thousands of clients, tens of thousands. But we're gonna take just 30, 3-0, 30 accounts and we're literally gonna pull 'em out of this big massive of structure, this matrix organization ABB had and said, we're gonna have 30 business people lead our strategy with these accounts across the whole of ABB And we don't know how we're gonna do it.

There's no book on how we're gonna do this, and it's gonna challenge our structure and our process, but we wanna do this on the thought that we can do more with these clients,

So four months later, I they said, look, we want you to take the ExxonMobil account. And I didn't know anything about oil and gas. The Exxon thing was great. So they I got the role. They moved me to Houston and started learning a whole new industry and with a very disciplined customer in Exxon. They had some of their own branding challenges. Of course, people remember the Valdez incident in the eighties, and so this was now 2001.

But a lot of this was a lot of how Exxon was made and how they're going to market and understanding their culture and how to bond ABB to their culture. Not just products, but process systems.

So in 2008/9, ABB was starting to think about maybe bringing me over as an expat into more of the European part of ABB. We talked about a few roles in the Middle East, and Powell called. And I was aware of Powell had competed with them once or twice, but didn't really know them. And they were kind of known as this electrical substation company that built products, but also had more mechanical ability to build a building, if you will, and deliver solutions to the market.

So I, I came and met with what was the first non Powell family member that was running the company, and he had a vision to bring Powell together, albeit a smaller company than ABB. It had some disparate parts of it. And what attracted me to Powell was the fact that they were, their culture was very solutions driven.

And I spent 20 years of my life really not being tied to a product part of ABB, but trying to always do the solutions part as, and that global account role with Exxon was exactly that. So it was a very quick transition in that a Powell's culture was built around something that I aspired to do all my years at ABB and sort of a wake up call that this fit really well.

And so, late, in 16 into 17, I became the CEO of Powell and have been in that role since. So just finished eight years and under my ninth year as the, the band leader here of the company. So.

Matt: So coming into the position of the CEO, I mean, that's a, that's obviously a big shift from your prior roles. What was the biggest challenge that you faced, potentially unexpected challenge in the role?

Brett: Well, my first challenge was just your own personal challenges of the enormity of a role. And I think I told Tom at one point, I said, at the time it isn't just the two thou, at the time we were maybe 2000 people. It's thinking about all the families that you, in the healthcare and the benefits and all the things that a company needs to do to take care of its folks. It was, there's that I might call it sensory overload.

I had this very clean discussion with the board at the time about, succession planning and prepping. And that learning is something we don't want to have happen again at Powell. We wanna make sure we're bringing our people up and training 'em and having 'em, having a, whether it's the CEO spot or any role in Powell that we're doing our best to to bring the team along. And I think that was day one was nobody gives you a rule book, just like that global account role at a BB. There was no rule book, but yet there was an aspiration.

And while there are lots of good case studies and training and and there's all kinds of different CEOs out there, not a lot of thought had been put into the transition here at Powell. And so that was the beginning part. It's whether it was the first hundred days, it was just lining priorities, understanding where Powell was at, and then the formative early steps of what is the strategy for leading the company and ensuring that people understood the message to at least keep, keep the company moving forward for its near term mission, and then start to take the early steps to what now I think we've done a better job over the years and it never ends, but developing a strategy that, that people can really get behind and feel committed to along the culture of the company, but then of course, the how we engage our customers and the business results and the fulfillment financially, but of course emotionally, I think for the teams was it was very daunting when you first start take that role and there's not that already built. So we had a lot of work to do there.

Ward: Changing minds and changing cultures is incredibly difficult and really nobody likes change. How did you address that and how has that worked out?

Brett: What I believe is you, it's very difficult to force change. You can, and there are times you can do it, but there are some messy, there's some messy collateral damage that can go along with that almost every time that you force it.

As I came into Powell and as I experienced with ABB CEO change is it really ripples through the organization. And it's always better in my view, and maybe that's the marketing side that you learn early, is to convince people and to sell them on the change and enroll them into the potential of the outcome.

And that was always missing at Powell. It had been missing at ABB when ABB came into the States. The role, it's well documented by a lot of, McKinsey and Harvard Business about all the different leaders. And every time you change the top it does change tone.

So when I had my turn to lead knowing that, that had, I had the advantage of already being in the company now for five years, well, the first discussion, and a little bit of this came out of that, the coaching this other person I talked about that almost lured me away from Powell he had left ABB and was leading company as a CEO in a very similar situation with a very big family member and name on the company.

And I used a lot of his coaching and reflected on it. And what I could change at time initially was the board. And so you look, it wasn't just run into the management, I wanted to start turning the ship, but the coaching I had received was, you really need to address the board. And so as the CEO and with Tom Powell, I took that advice and I went out and sat with Tom.

I said, one of the things we ought to talk about is the board. And you got a great board and they've really been supportive of you and the team, but. With me now, I think we need to figure out how does your board become my board? And those are the words from my mentor, from an experience he had been through with a similar company.

So we started to work on the board and today we've completely, all with all but one, Chris Craig, has the board's been refreshed with really good folks coming in to help govern, but also to coach me and the management team to engage and to be an asset to where we wanna take the company.

Ward: Early on in your tenure, you were looking at the product, services, maintenance, all the things that could be, and, but there's always reluctance from people on in leadership that no, this is what we are, we sell stuff.

Brett: Yeah.

Ward: And I remember you asked us to go into the marketplace and talk to your clients and what did you find from that?

Brett: Yeah, Paul had never done a lot of voice of customer engagement. I think they've done forums where they brought customers in to talk about, features and functions of products. But in terms of building strategy and really what we're keeping our customers at up at night to solve their, and as we say in our mission about solving their hardest problems, they really hadn't done that independently. So, having the, having, Ward yourself and the wider Pennebaker team help assist in that it gives you a validation of a sort of an independent how they really see you, the good, the bad, the ugly but B, the nuggets of, things that we should be thinking about it to be a good supplier them tomorrow to solve the, so solve their problems.

So I, we found a lot of in, in that voice of customer that, we weren't doing so well. And I think no, nobody likes to hear that, but that's really the feedback we want. We want to hear the parts where we're failing, that's the part that you can really rally around and dissect and go, okay, maybe there's elements of that, that aren't part of our strategy. But there's a lot in there that you need to hear and you can't, honestly, you can't hear that enough.

Failing is it's been well documented. You you learn a lot more out of the hard feedback than you do out of the attaboys. So you can't you just, you can't spend enough time hearing about that. And it can really help an organization sharpen its focus, the more feedback you get in that.

Matt: That, that's exactly right. And the voice of customers, the outward in perception of, what your customers think of you, what you're doing well, what you're not doing well, et cetera. And the Guardrails is the inward out perception of the organization. When you came to us for Guardrails, what challenge were you trying to solve?

Brett: Well, we were really was using it as a tool. Sometimes going out into the third party market I think a lot of people think you can solve that inside the company. Sometimes it's a safe, it's a much better way, process wise, safety wise, to bring in a third party to have those that, things that you recognize maybe as a leader that those are things that aren't working as well.

And when you validate that using a third party and people can sit back and you go around the room and you're sitting there that day and we're writing all over the wall and a mix of, as we noted in that day, we were doing that we have a lot of long tenured folks, but the realization of we're really not as good as we think we are and we really don't know how to get there, that's okay.

But just admitting that. I think bonds the team in a different way. Once you kind of get over that, that we're all aspiring to do good. Everybody shows up at work. At least that's the way I think. Not, maybe not everybody, but you know, 99% of the world shows up to do good. And when you're not it hurts a little bit.

But it doesn't mean you're failing. It just, it creates an opportunity to have a different kind of conversation and and a commitment to each other about what we want to try to do to succeed tomorrow. And I think that's the benefit definitely, of bringing in a trusted partner to help you realize things that might be obvious to certain folks, but then to, to have it all out in front, very transparent and exposed is uncomfortable, but it's it can be very cathartic for teaming.

Ward: What was the reaction at, by the end of that, by your senior leadership?

Brett: If I had to reflect back, we've, some of the team members that have been here a long time started learning and listening differently, and they started embracing change incrementally better. Not everybody and out of the room that day, some went back to old habits, but, we did have some that left and came back and led differently without hard conversations or being told what to do.

The way Powell grew up, you start to see leadership where they're going and they're just thinking differently with their team and customers and now leading, which is a whole lot different than managing.

And sometimes you still need to change folks. We did have better enrollment in that leadership development that we, that I think a lot of companies aspire to have, folks that are enrolling their organization with their clients for a better tomorrow. And it's not, you can say it, but it's just not, it's not so easy.

So there's a big difference, between, and I continue to learn that lesson every day when you talk about leadership versus managing. Yes, we need to manage the P and L, we need to manage the business, but leadership is really what we want in these in these roles. And and we did experience that out out, out of the work we did with the Pennebaker team.

Matt: I think it was 2019 when we went through that. And one of the great things is that the leadership team has real alignment and clarity on who you are and how you're different from the competitors and what your, growth vision is, et cetera. But being such a large publicly traded company, how do you disseminate that alignment down into the organization?

Brett: Well, that after 19 it started with, I'll go back to what we talked at the outset of the day. It was, and again, learning for me the CEO sets, tone and all that, but you need, you've got a team. And so we needed to come together to make sure we got out all of the ideation, disagreement. It's okay to disagree, but at the end of the day, a team has to agree. The strategy is three prongs today at Powell. And for me, the definition of team is we could debate. And you should always healthly have a heavy debate on things like strategy and, and then retouching it.

Are things changing? Should we adjust our strategy? And you may, as an individual have thoughts that you still feel passionate about, but we've explored it to its end degree you felt comfortable to air them. And at the end of the day, these are the strategies and you don't get to leave the room and then, paddle a different way.

So I think that's what we found as we started honing in and going, are you truly committed to what we just discussed? Well, if you're not, should we retouch the strategy or should we maybe make a pivot? Because this is what we all agreed. And so that alignment and the expectation of that alignment throughout the organization and carrying the water all the way, whether you're a new employee or you're a seasoned employee, a tenured employee, it's important that everybody understand the strategy.

We talk about it frequently, and that we're demonstrating our commitment to that strategy every day. And I think that's the big pivot we made after 19.

Ward: So all industries today are facing unbelievable change, particularly with digitalization, with AI, with all of the interactions and integration of technology in every business. And I know that was something that came up in the voice of customer research. What has Powell done to kind of navigate that?

Brett: We're, we've got a long way to go. I mean, digitalization's a hot one for me. It has been for a while, and we're still not really exercising that to the point where you need to be.

I think there's a lot of upside to be unlocked on that yet. And it's hot on my list and the management team's list, and I'd love, I wish we could move faster. What we did do, the critical things, cybersecurity, data protection, the things that somewhat policy driven out of the markets.

We compete in the, in Europe and the UK, and of course, more recently in North America. The GDPR initiative out of the, we had to address structural things quickly. And so we've made really good progress on those types of things, where the data's retained, how it works into the process of a project structure, and of course all of our financial records. We made progress on good things to address the structural thing. I think, like I said, I think on things that you're expected to have in business today with regulation.

And as that's developed, we do a really nice job at Powell better than we've ever had. We can pass a security audit with the top tier one client and get marks that are world class. Yet in the factory environment, I'm personally championing a ML vision opportunity out of one of our line process lines with the university involvement. Let's go get some of the talent of tomorrow to solve these problems and collaborate. So getting Powell to take that next step in that regard and not just solve everything ourselves. So much more opportunity to really take what has been some success at Powell, but maybe even grow faster tomorrow. I think that's the opportunity.

Ward: What do you see, where do you see Powell in five years?

Brett: Well, this might be a bit romantic because I didn't think this five years ago. But a lot of it's the market drop. Let's be real. Let's be honest. There are things going on globally that affect Powell, not just domestically in the markets where we're at with the political regimes that are, in any given year in power. But there is a thing going on.

Remember when I started in the eighties, I came outta school and I joined A BB, well, ABB, and Eaton as a negative word maybe, they pulled apart or ripped apart what was left of Westinghouse. So in five years, why couldn't Powell be to some degree the next Westinghouse within the ANSI market?

We've got a huge footprint here in terms of seven facilities. Majority of our employees are based in the North American ANSI electric standard. And most of our multinational competitors pay corporate taxes in Europe. So, we'll use every tool available to certain, certainly be successful tomorrow.

But I think, go back to that voice of customer and what customers are doing and look at how their organization's changing. Having involvement now in the university environment, going back to my alma mater, looking at the demographics of kids coming in domestically or from overseas for higher education, for masters of doctorate programs, boy that also has been a great learning. And so not just for Powell, but wherever our clients get to get the electrical engineer of the future.

So that brings me back to, I think there's a romantic vision in my head that's bubbling that says, maybe not a 20 or $30 billion company, but certainly some multiple bigger than we are today, where we could rise to that challenge.

We could be, Powell has the potential to be that entity tomorrow in the market for electrical distribution? So I that's where I'm at today.

Matt: So, so you've been really lucky to have a really strong mentor in your life. It sounds like it has been truly impactful in, in your growth. A lot of the audience for this podcast are up and coming leaders, business executives, et cetera. What advice, you've been your CEO of Powell for now eight years. What advice would you give to them based on all the learnings and things that you found out?

Brett: When I have a chance to talk to folks in their career, and it, it's understanding the people that you meet around the world, and it takes a lot more effort 'cause they're not part of your formal network in terms of your company and your role.

But staying engaged with the external through organizations, being involved, it takes a lot of extra time that doesn't happen eight to five. To me that's critical. To understand what's going on in the market, you need lots of input and you need that input to triangulate your day-to-day work.

And then maybe to also serve your aspirations to whatever it is that you hope to achieve in your life. And then when it comes to business, your network is very critical and staying engaged with that network, giving back to the network as much as you might, ask for input also important.

You shouldn't, you should always look to give back 'cause it's amazing what, and I'm still, and I'm learning more of this as I mature in my current role. A it's rewarding. But B the ideas are they come, they, I mean, I made a trip last week to the university where I went and I'm on the advisory board there for College of Engineering. But it was a, what they call friends and family day. They have it every fall. And there were some competitors there, people that I know that had gone to the same school. They're different parts of their career. And we went out to have a beer the one night, and I must have walked away with four ideas, two of which I acted on already around people, around ideas, around things in the market.

So, that's an important part. So you go back to my mentor, one of my mentors, I have a lot of this individual that from a business standpoint and a personal development standpoint, has been great for me in my career. 'Cause he's older and he is, he went through a parallel path. He's a super success, successful executive.

And so I'm, I don't model myself after him, but when I run into challenges he's available there. And so I take, I don't talk to him as much, but I could pick up the phone tomorrow and he would take the call and we would have a, we would have a good chat. And so I think that's a lesson I also, you also need to do for others.

And so, 'cause you never know where the good ideas are gonna come from, but it does take time. And, when you talk about work-life balance, it takes a little bit of sacrifice. And so you've gotta make, you gotta be at peace with that, with yourself and your family, and whatever situation you're at. That's, everybody understands that and they're enrolled in that, or else it would be a burden personally and that maybe isn't for everyone.

Ward: So you've been incredibly successful in your efforts and have made a lot of changes. Are there any changes that you were trying to make that turned out not to be so good, that are really learnings that you could pass on? I thought I could do this. It turned out that's not the thing to do.

Brett: But when you agree as a team that this is the direction we're gonna go, and the process by which you may challenge, that should be also said, toxicity starts the minute that somebody walks outta that room and isn't aligned. And that's not healthy for any organization. And so, if you can't get that course corrected and get the team where it needs to be, then maybe that's an opportunity for a harder conversation.

But it will stop the entire team from achieving its results. It will cause individual challenges that will affect performance, not just for that leader, but throughout the organization.

Matt: What's the biggest challenge that you face today culturally?

Brett: Recognizing that change should happen even faster tomorrow than it did yesterday. We've made a lot of improvements as we've discussed today, and I think people today are much more comfortable with change at Powell. But adapting even quicker to the things that we need to do to competitively differentiate, to address the needs of our customers, to take risks that are calculated within the leadership piece that are maybe even more ambiguous, you want to have a very agile organization that's mature, that's encompassing all these traits and behaviors of good teaming and transparency, really good external engagement with our partners and our customers out in the market, and just driving forward and constantly challenging each other to set intra and long-term goals for the business and solving them.

And and so, so that's the velocity part of that is probably my biggest, I dunno if I want to use the word angst, but if there's something that keeps me up today with the backdrop of the business environment, it's that. It's how can we as a team institutionalize what we think we've accomplished even better for our stakeholders.

Ward: I know years ago we worked on a project where a company that was doing, they had a whole campus within their company where they did R and D and their whole business was coming up with new ideas, right? And they came to us and said, we've not had a commercial idea developed in the last 10 years. And they even had a fund that if you had an idea to develop a new product, they would fund, they would take you off your job and put you in charge of it and pay for it. And nobody had ever taken 'em up on it. And so they said, find a way to do that. And we developed an entire campaign around that. And after the first year, they had five new ideas that were going forward. Because nobody really embraced, yeah, you tell me I can do it. But yeah, really, I got my day job.

Brett: I've been reading these, the concept in, in management consulting around alternate organizations when you're trying to affect culture change within the company. We're seeing, I don't, Mike Metcalf, our CFO, I've been talking about it. We're reading a lot about it. We are trying to add a product strategy to the project strategy, the project capability of Powell. We have a lot of products. But actually at the P and L level, we're trying to develop products that were, are less engineering and more configured. Here's the feature set and velocity dictates this flow.

And the reason we want that, I'm not trying to change Powell in terms of the project cycle, and I talk a lot about that. I, it's, is I'm adding two to Powell. If we can come up with an organization that is different than the last 75 years, because the product strategy has inventory on the shelf, it's velocity and speed based, but you don't get a lot of optionality, which is so rich in our culture.

Oh, Mr. Customer, you want it this way? Great. We'll take an inch out. That's not the strategy. It's doing the research on product management R and D. You develop the product, you may evolve the product in future revisions or versions or different models. But it is this discussion I had before we started today with this product person. And he challenged me, and I challenged him. And so I take away some good thinking about that. But it's got me already thinking, okay, maybe there's more I need to do around the organization over there, to island them a little bit for a period of time so they cannot be influenced by the strength of the project environment in Powell so they truly can evolve discipline around engineering versions of the product so we aren't tweaking everything a minute a salesperson walks in here and goes, I need this blue instead of red. Well, we don't do that. Well, Powell always does that. Well, we do over here, but not over here, and so, we're gonna have to figure that out for this group to be successful.

Ward: This has been so wonderful. What a great engaging conversation. Wanna thank you so much for spending the time to visit with us and I'm hoping we will come back for long and continue our conversation in new areas.

Brett: Sounds good. I appreciate the partnership we've had over the years, Ward, you and the family and the firm and I look forward to the future chats.

Ward: Most definitely. Thank you so much.

Brett: All right, guys. Take care.