Darren [00:00:01]:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of One of One. I’m your host, Darren Gold, CEO of the Trium Group. Every so often, the show gives me a chance to sit down with someone who’s been an important figure in my own journey. Today is one of those conversations. I first met Jeff Cohen more than two decades ago when I was a young investor trying to recruit him to a CEO role in Buffalo, New York. He passed on that opportunity, but. But over the years, Jeff has become both a mentor and a dear friend. Jeff’s career has been extraordinary. He spent over 20 years in senior roles at American Express, GE and Home Depot, what he calls a masterclass in brand process and culture. Later, he ran multiple mid cap businesses, including Larson Jewel, a Berkshire Hathaway company, where I had the privilege of serving on his advisory board with UPS CEO Carol Tomei and former Home Depot CEO Frank Blake, a testament to Jeff’s ability to attract incredible people. And today, as part of Berkshire Hathaway, he chairs six companies and is CEO of three of them, including Fruit of the Loom. This is a conversation about leadership, transformation and legacy told by someone who has quietly and consistently built extraordinary results while staying true to timeless principles. Please enjoy my wonderful conversation with Jeff Cohen. 

 

Jeff, it’s so good to see you. Thanks for being here. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. I’m delighted we’re having it.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:01:26]:

Me as well. Good to see you.

 

Darren [00:01:27]:

Yeah, good to see you too. And one of the great things about doing this show is I, from time to time get to have a conversation with somebody I’ve known for a while. And that’s certainly true for you and me. I think we met in 2003, so 22 years ago. And I thought we might start there maybe a little bit before there. I know you had some experience, but you were in this formative role as president of the services division at Home Depot, and I was desperately trying to find a CEO to run one of our companies that we were invested in. I was a young private equity investor and I was trying to convince you to take a job in Buffalo, New York. So with that as our setting, take us back because I’d love for listeners to understand your background before we get into what you’re doing today. And so we could start there. It’d be great.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:02:19]:

Well, I’ll wind back a couple chapters. Before I went to graduate school at USC in Southern Cal and had actually a 22 year corporate career, functionally originally in marketing in BD and then later on more in sort of GM run the business Type jobs. But I was very fortuitous in the way it worked out. Certainly unplanned, but in succession I worked for American Express and then GE and then Home Depot. We which was just terrific from the standpoint of each company having really a special set of skills and experiences. Amex being a great services marketing company, a wonderful brand, really built a wonderful brand around exclusivity and affinity and a great sort of services company. GE of course was a masterclass of management development, process improvement. Got my Six Sigma brown belt, black belt there and. And certainly a company that invested very much in its talent and had the processes and mechanisms. Really great learning background. Home Depot Darren was a masterclass in culture. The founders were still running the company. So I had an opportunity to work for both Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank who on paper probably should have failed 50 times on their way to their first hundred billion dollars in sales, but just had invented or reinvented a category in terms of big box retail where you could get great prices and great selection and service. And it really hadn’t been done before. I was an experiment of Arthur Blank’s. I was in a group of one of the first outside people to come in at a senior level. And I will tell you now that the over under on the betting was six months that I would last for six months and I was there for six years. So I covered the bet. But Arthur had the prescience to believe that as successful as they’ve been, they had to start to incorporate new sets of experiences and talents they wanted to grow in direct marketing businesses and commercial supply. I was asked to head up the first online initiative and I said Arthur, what’s our strategy? He said we need to do the Internet. I said okay. It was 1998 and I said well what’s the strategy? He goes we need to do the Internet. So I realized we were at the beginning of that journey. So virtually, I mean I was one of I guess six or seven senior officers reporting to Arthur, but was really the group president of all other anything that didn’t fit neatly into store merchandising. And one of those areas was the business they now call at home services. And that’s where we came connected around the installation and service business. A lot of retailers, the idea of running a services type business where there’s follow on and project management and so forth is a new muscle, you know, to build. And I was very involved in that. So wonderful cultural education. When I joined, by the way, they sent me out to work in the stores for three months. And I was a group president. I thought, they’re kidding, right? Because I’ve got a job to do. And I was anxious to get to it. And Arthur said, no, you’re not really going to be able to add value until you really understand what our associates go through when they’re working with customers on the floor of the store.

 

Darren [00:05:10]:

That’s amazing.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:05:11]:

And you need to do that in every division of the company. And so for three months and working in the store meant Darren putting on an orange apron and walking in and helping customers in the aisle. People that knew me already knew that I was not the most handy person in the world and they thought that was uproariously funny. But I would stand in the electrical aisle and some guy would come in and say, I need the thing that this fits into. And I said, I don’t even know what that is, let alone what it fits into. So gradually I learned to go stand in the garden aisle where I just help little old ladies carry mulch to their cars.

 

Darren [00:05:42]:

Smart.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:05:44]:

That was my core competency there.

 

Darren [00:05:46]:

I knew this about your background, but what I’m reminded of is you had the opportunity early in your career to work early and mid in your career to work with sort of three generational iconic companies. And before we get beyond that, I, I’d love to mine those experiences a little bit because I imagine there are people listening to this right now, maybe some that are founders and CEOs of their, their own companies that didn’t really get the experience of growing up in an era of American Express, GE and Home Depot. And they’re still obviously important companies. But you’ve started on Home Depot and maybe dig a little deeper there. This idea of a masterclass in culture and even like the distinctive practice of having a group president spend his first three months with an orange apron on the floor. What else was it about Home Depot that you took away as being formative?

 

Jeff Cohen [00:06:41]:

Yeah, I think the whole concept of servant leadership, Darren, from beginning to end, any characteristic that you could come through, I think they role modeled rather beautifully at the time, including the humility of saying, we’re not ever going to be smarter than our customer. We’re not ever going to conceive of products or services or, or benefits without going out and visiting and working with our associates on the floor of the store. And that was pretty special. I had not seen that in action before, where you really were with humility, putting yourself in a vulnerable situation in order just to learn and be able to support the associates. Bernie Marcus had an expression that when he was asked about the stock price, he said, listen, just take great care of our associates and they will take great care of our customers and the stock price will take care of itself. And really lived by that. They were also, I think, pretty forward in some practices, including compensation. So they pushed stock ownership of the company very far down into the company, at least as far as the store manager level. And there were 1200 of them by the time I got there. And here were guys and gals probably with high school educations that were made millionaires, but they would run through walls for Bernie and Arthur because of that culture, because of how they portray themselves, because of their incentives being aligned beautifully with the company incentives. And that was pretty special. I’d never seen that before or heard of it before. And we go to store manager meetings with four or five hundred people. It was like a revival. It’s more rock concert than it was business meeting. And you had these two iconic guys, but they were certainly planning for the next generation. They brought in ahead of international as they were looking for opportunities for international growth. There was an expo design center at the point, so they brought in a guy that was senior in Macy’s that really knew about the sort of high end fashion business and how to do those things. So it was just a, it was a very special time with a very special group of people. And of course there I had a chance to meet a younger Carol Tomei at the time who was the VP of finance when I joined. And then Frank Blake joined later. And those of course are two very important people in the history of Home Depot as well. But immense amount of talent, mostly homegrown and man as far as instinctive skills and living on your wits and knowing how to make money, but most of all knowing how to serve customers. And I think that in some way, shape or form, I carry that with me probably every week and maybe even every day of those things. We talk about servant leadership, we can also talk about integrity. Arthur Blank was a rocket smart, financial oriented CEO, but he, in my life is mostly my role model for integrity, for always taking the high road, even when people around him might be on a lower road. He was just a high road sort of a guy, which I really appreciated about him. So there was transparency, there was humility, there was integrity, high emphasis on communication and being out on the floor of the store. That culture, as much as I had seen to date, but have seen since, really reflected, I think, servant leadership in a beautiful way.

 

Darren [00:09:47]:

Yeah, there’s so much we could pull on from that Example, probably take our whole conversation. I want to also talk about GE and American Express, maybe in that order. Just sort of working backwards. You run into senior executives that were trained in the early part of their career at ge and it’s. They always point to that training as being, you know, one of the most impactful experiences. And for those that aren’t familiar with the lore around the professional development and leadership training from ge, can you bring that to life through your own experience?

 

Jeff Cohen [00:10:19]:

Sure. I mean, it was a company that clearly invested in it. And that is where I heard the phrase, you know, when you go to run your own business, have your CFO and your head of HR on either side of your office, there’s nothing you won’t deal with every day that isn’t talent or money or both. You know, related. And they invested heavily in HR talent and in the process, process management of talent development, there was a greater concentration in talent there maybe than any other place I’ve ever seen. There was a. A commitment to invest in those things. And they had. If you remember Crotonville University, it actually had a management development campus staff full time with people who. And you could literally take somebody on your staff that needed to polish up in a certain area and they made those facilities available for that process improvement company. Wonderful. The Six Sigma process of just sort of the whole DMAIC process. I don’t know that I follow it literally, but some part of my brain works in that fashion, really seeking to understand and to measure, to test and roll out and then control and perfect and take it to the next level. There was an awful lot good there. Jack Welch was iconic. I think it was the kind of company where they would write articles in Fortune magazine and we would read them and laugh and go, if we were half this good, we’d really be rocking. But he was sprinkling pixie dust over the whole thing and really made that whole. A difficult conglomerate, varied set of businesses work. I was on the GE capital side, and that was a big profit engine back in the time I was in the retail credit card division, you know, so we had customers. And the other thing about GE that I think was wonderful and I was able to take advantage of was they pushed the idea of running a P and L all the way down to the client level. So at a very early stage in your career, much earlier than most, you had an opportunity to run a true pl, not just an ascribed one, but, you know, and it was in a matrix sort of format. So I went literally from being the SVP of Marketing in Stanford, Connecticut with a team of maybe 25 people to running Macy’s Credit Services. It was a billion and a half business with 950 associates in Cincinnati. And it was a big step, but it was the seminal big step for me. And of course, someone has to put some money on you in that situation. You’ve never done it before, but they see qualities, whether strategic or leading people or communication that would believe them to have confidence in that movement. And it really worked. Now it was a matrix, right? So finance people were related to finance people and risk managers and so forth for some policies and procedures, some best practices. But in a very real sense, When I was 33, I was running a whole business there with a large frontline workforce of customer service and collections people. And in career dog years, may have gotten 10 years out of that three year experience. And then the Home Depot opportunity, when it came up seemed very, very special because that was more of a being able to work off a blank page. It was really a palette where they were looking to grow and looking to do so many things that would augment the company. And of course I knew them by reputation. So GE was a very big company. Home Depot was a very big company that felt very much like a much smaller company. So one was greater in sophistication, the other was just more about grit and customer focus and culture. So hopefully I pulled a little bit from each one. But as I look back, I was an extremely lucky individual to have those opportunities and experiences.

 

Darren [00:13:43]:

Well, they were lucky to have you as well. And yes, I can’t even. And you also had American Express. So like the fortune was extensive. So tell us a little bit about American Express. It’s still a dominant company today, but you were at the company at a really important part of its growth and evolution.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:14:03]:

Yeah, so we were in the year of our Lord 1984. So it was a while back, but it was New York City financial district in the go go 80s, full on barbarians at the gate era. So we shared an office with Shearson. They walk around with big cigars and it was just that kind of vitality and vibrant environment. But they had an excellent program where they would hire you off the MBA campus and you would start in your job day one. But you were also brought together as a cohort where they would give you some additional training with, with that group, with that MBA class where you heard presentations from Jim Robinson and Lou Gerstner, who were leading the company at that time. Both excellent leaders, by the way, in their own right. And Lou Went on from there, obviously to IBM and onward and Kraft and onward from there. So, yeah, it was a marketing machine. I mean, you think about it, they were selling for $55 what the bank cards are giving away for free. But we’re selling exclusivity and affiliation. And they figured out early on that mistakes are inevitable. But how you recover from those mistakes really engender loyalty as much as anything else that you do. And I’ve carried with me that for forever, where people will tolerate a billing error. But if you can step in and say, I own your problem, I understand how you feel, you’re empathetic. Let’s get this figured out and fixed for you. Your blood pressure comes down and then when you execute and follow through on that, the research was clear. Card members that had had an error that was then fixed actually had a higher level of loyalty than ones that never had one in the first place. So in all of my service and I worked in a lot of product and service businesses since, including on the mid cap private equity and in Berkshire Hathaway. And I preach service recovery today for that reason. To say that is the moment of truth. If we can wow the customer right at that point when the chips are down and step in, it will engender discounting, only engenders more discounting. But service recovery engenders loyalty is what I learned from originally at amex.

 

Darren [00:16:08]:

Such a good point. It’s been my experience as well. Some of the most enduring client relationships come out of how you recover from early stumbles.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:16:15]:

Right.

 

Darren [00:16:16]:

So I’m so glad we had the chance to do this because I think everybody points to the Amazons and the Netflixes of today, and for good and understandable reasons, as companies that have really invested in creating distinctive cultures and unique management practices. But there are these generational companies one generation ago that really defined what it was to be excellent. And so you had a masterclass in three of them and a great synthesis over the last 15 minutes.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:16:47]:

But.

 

Darren [00:16:47]:

But I wanted to bring us now forward to the. You’re coming towards the end of your Home Depot experience. You’ve got all this experience behind you. You and I met at that time. Take us now from that point on to maybe the remainder of your career to where you are today.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:17:05]:

Sure. I lived through the transition at Home Depot, where Arthur Blank exited. New CEO came in. The new CEO was from ge, so that was a known quantity. And without delving too much into that story, I was not in the corner office, but I had full line of sight to what the Public company CEO was all about and I wasn’t sure it was for me. I knew I was ready to run a business. I didn’t think I wanted to be at Home Depot or in a public company that former didn’t seem to be was not going to be available to me at any period of time that I could see and I was just ready. It’s just like career wise Darren, those bells go off in your head. It’s just an instinctive thing like it is time to do something new and I wasn’t that acquainted. I had suppliers and so forth that were mid cap companies that were private equity owned and I thought there may be just some gems of opportunity and you need a little humility in that because you’re going to drop a lot of zeros off your P and L when you make that move to a company. My first Berkshire company you would know is Larson Jewellery. Larson Jewel is an Atlanta based company. I lived in Atlanta for 20 years and I’d never heard of them before because it was a B2B brand and so forth. But that’s what I did and that’s in the context of what me on the, on the front end of my 10 years or 10, 11 years running companies. And of course I didn’t do it on an exclusive basis with any investor, more on a deal by deal basis but learned a ton augmenting the corporate side with managing a business for cash including when there wasn’t very much of it being very gritty, playing the eternal game if you don’t mind of who do you trust and who are you aligned with and who you can build with. But those different companies, different shapes, mainly service services and product companies and mainly ones that were not low cost producers, ones for which quality and service were part of the sustainable competitive advantage and angle and brand identity which are the ones that I tended to gravitate toward. I thought those were more natural for me and did take a pass on the Buffalo opportunity. But I knew instinctively that you and I were going to get a chance to work together. And you will remember my introducing you at Larson Jewell when you joined the advisory board there. And I said I got to tell you about this Guy, Law School, McKinsey Private Equity but not a shred of arrogance. That’s how I describe you. But I worked with people that I would trust my kids with and I worked with people that I wouldn’t trust anything with and everything kind of in between. It was just that kind of experience but added a little bit of grittiness A little bit of sort of hardcore company takes a dividend, cash is swept out, you’re on the edge, what are you going to do? I mean literally, sort of. We would never. Somebody was watching the cash at Home Depot, probably Carol. It certainly wasn’t me and I never was concerned we were running out of it. But this was when they get to heaven and they work and they click. It could also be a terrific thing and satisfying in all sorts of ways. But that game was, if I could summarize it, Darren was taking a lot of that corporate learning, applying it, synthesizing it, but applying it but in a dosage that would work in that company. Because you can’t take a GE scaled process. You would crush any mid sized company if you tried to take all of those processes and build them. But there is a lot of teaching and bringing people along for the ride and bringing in continuous improvement is a constant part of what we’re going to do, as well as innovation as well as talent development. So all of my companies today within Berkshire have a talent development process as well as a strategic process that links together. Because that’s never failed me. The key of having great talent and cultivating talent as part of the success quotient. And then so five or six, six companies as CEO in that stint and that.

 

Darren [00:20:54]:

Can I inject one thing because I don’t want to skip over, at least for me, a very formative moment, which was my first role stepping into a CEO position from private equity investor. And I found myself trying to lead a pretty gnarly turnaround, 3,000 employees in the for profit education space. And I realized this was almost 15 years ago, that I had some innate talents and skills, but I needed somebody that had some real operating experience to partner with me. And so that was the moment I called you and we reconnected, although we had stayed quite connected and had a good almost year long run of, of partnering very closely together on this very difficult, challenging transformation, which I think in retrospect turned out to be quite a successful turnaround. But it’s actually maybe for the first time really truly realizing how much I benefited just given that we’re in this conversation together by how much experience you had, how much I needed it and how important that partnership was. So I just wanted to, I know I’ve thanked you before, but I actually wanted to do it in, in this conversation and thank you for that partnership. It was a really meaningful one to me.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:22:13]:

Well, if I can add this to it, that role was the first one I took on in Seven years. That was not a CEO role.

 

Darren [00:22:19]:

I know.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:22:20]:

And I had another CEO role kind of in the offer that I was doing some diligence on. And I thought, and this, you know, I had to explain this to my wife. It wasn’t entirely clear. She says, you’re going to go into this business, you’re going to commute up to Virginia beach and Darren’s a CEO, not you, so what are you going to do? And I said, I’m not going to miss this opportunity. Opportunity. And maybe there’s a little bit of humility that goes with all that, but it’s that the experiences, it’s an opportunism point. Right. Like when was that ever going to happen again really where we would have the confluence of that. And it mattered not to me if you were reporting to me or I was reporting. It didn’t matter. We said we had a chance to collaborate.

 

Darren [00:22:55]:

Yeah, agreed.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:22:55]:

And did a lot of good things. And you know, circumstances were not, you know, sort of long term playing in favor for all sorts of reasons. But we did good stuff and I enjoyed it thoroughly. So it was, for me, it was, I look back, I look back pretty fondly on all that. So up to you want me to bring you up to the. Up to the present 10 years and I’ll do it quickly. I was ready in my mid-50s to take one more good swing at the plate. I wanted one company, but something more enduring than a private equity backed deal. Because I wanted to be able to transform a company where I felt like was bringing something that was really needed to the business, the ability to transform a company that needed to do it. But in doing so, setting the strategy, achieving things, building the team, coming up against yourself with numbers of success and then succeeding above that. And that was going to be my legacy business. I was going to drive that golf cart all the way into the clubhouse at that point. And you know, life is what happens when you’re making other plans, as the song goes. And that’s what happened. But you know, Larson Jewell was the company custom picture frame, very larger fish in a very, very small pond, but a global business and had lost its way a little bit, to be honest, over the years. And it was a mature market company in a sluggish economy, but they were still trying to grow in all sorts of ways outside their core. Some kind of poor diversification bets let their core business slide, including the reputation of service and quality. And that company is the leader in that, in that thing, in an otherwise fairly commoditized industry. And it looked like it had my name all over, was just one that I thought would be terrific to run. But it was a transformation. And I make a distinction between a transformation and a turnaround. Because it wasn’t just like trying to keep it afloat, sell the assets. And we know people who do turnarounds and are very good at it. A transformation to me is it is profitable, but there’s a line of sight to make it a lot more profitable. And there are assets, assets to work with. So you have some combination of a strong brand and selling proposition, a talented team that wants to win. Right. There’s a path and importantly, enough cash, enough fuel to fly the plane if you have to make certain investments to get you to the next level. So I think compared to most of your guests, I traffic very much in unsexy old economy businesses. But in mature markets, the game is set up a little differently. I mean, the epiphany of decision that I think got that company tracking in the proper direction is that we could in fact be a little bit smaller, but a lot more profitable if we focused on our core. If we left a commodity business to the bottom dwellers, if we stopped trying to. It’s like looking for love in all the wrong places. We were trying to expand into wall decor and things that we had no license or acumen to actually do. So we refocused on the core business. We which as it turned out was quite profitable because those are proprietary designs that you’re selling and there’s no price transparency at retail. I mean, it really is a craftsman business. And we went back to the core. In addition, I thought the overhead was fairly bloated. We had an organization that was really fit for a billion dollar company, except we were only 200 million. And a lot of that was built out in anticipation for future growth. So there was a cultural and business model transformation that went on. It took years. Right. So this was not a quick fix sort of thing. Certainly needing to have the right people on the team and you know, the right direction. I’ve set strategy with the team. So they are very much co authors in that it’s not a arcane five year timeframe. It’s really two years of extended business planning. Let’s describe the company that we want to be in two years. What does it look like? Who are we serving? Crucially, how are we winning? How are we differentiating in the market and how are we winning? And then what are the people, process systems metrics that we need? So of course there’s a lot More commitment endemic to including the whole team. But we needed now this was a very tenured group that knew everything about the business, was having a hard time getting out, thinking right to left and sort of getting out of the box that had been built. Then came the pandemic and everything had to go faster. So when I started there were 140 people in our headquarters operation. We got it down to 50 and at 50 it was running better than it was at 140. We were more agile, we had fewer layers, we were making decisions faster. All of that works if you are surrounding yourself now with your A players really that can broaden out and expand and so forth. So we, you know, modestly, I’ll tell you that it was a very good size success, a break even business got to 15% globally and close to 20% in the U.S. berkshire said that probably was not going to be possible, but we covered that. And the other piece of going there was joining Berkshire. I knew of them by reputation and certainly read Warren Buffett’s philosophies about investing. But the reputation turned out to be the reality for CEOs and senior teams which there’s a very long term view which is so unique it’s neither private equity nor, nor is it a public company. When you’re on the 90 day call with the analysts, what they really wanted to know was that their businesses had a plan to be viable and vibrant and successful five to ten years from now. And I had never seen that before. A lot of Autonomy given to CEOs and senior teams that came originally from Warren because he was not an operator and his view was I’m the investor, you guys know how to run your company. So a lot of autonomy and they didn’t tend to flip companies. So you didn’t have that sort of in the back of your head and ran their businesses for profitability and cash. In the end you wanted to deliver a rate of profitability that was accretive and generate excess cash which was shared back with the mothership because that was their fund to make direct investments and public company stock buys as well. And so that’s how the game worked. And it was a fit with my personality. Just love the fact of to be able to be more strategic, to be able to build something over time. And it just worked. I was asked along the way to chair a company called Star Furniture, which is a high end furniture retailer in Houston. Set of circumstances, the CEO was ill, was not be able to come back. So I jumped in there as CEO.

 

Darren [00:29:17]:

That’s A Berkshire portfolio company as well.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:29:19]:

Yeah, it is, yeah. And so I split, shifted commuter between Houston and Atlanta. At that point, the Larson Jewel business had gotten to a point of some decent stability. And you’re never done with the transformation. We’ll work on it forever. But I had really good people that knew how to run that business. And one thing just sort of tipped into another. I work very closely with Greg Abel, who will be the incoming CEO this January. But he was overseeing the non insurance portfolio company. So he was my partner. And today I have six companies that I chair. Three as CEO, although really full time with Fruit of the Loom in Bowling Green, Kentucky is really my full time preoccupation. The other two CEO companies, including Larson Jewell, we have strong presidents who run the day to day. And I participate more as a chairman, I would say, with that and the other. So I have a couple of younger presidents and CEOs who I mentor. That’s a good reason to form that combination and partnership. But get involved in strategy setting and capital allocation and helping develop their talent and helping them make key decisions around that. And it’s been a joy. It’s not what I sought and it sort of came to me, but in the end, I love the variety. I love the, you know, on the one hand, they’re very different businesses. On the other hand, about 85% of what makes them tick is pretty common. And so a lot of those experiences traveled pretty well.

 

Darren [00:30:42]:

Yeah. So there’s a few things I want to. One thing I want to say and then a couple questions to ask you and some threads to pull on. You were kind enough to ask me to join your advisory board, as you mentioned earlier, at Larson Jewel. And not only was it wonderful having a front seat to the story you just told, but as you said, Carol Tomei and Frank Blake were on that board. So the current CEO of UPS and Frank Blake, sort of legendary CEO of Home Depot later in his career. And I think all three of us, if we were on this, in this conversation and if asked honestly, is Jeff gonna pull this off, it was not a clear shot, as much respect and regard we have for you. So I just wanted to also underscore not only the success you had there, but the difficulty of pulling that off. And it was just amazing to watch close at first and then from a little bit of a distance. The two things I wanted to ask you were, one is this point around Berkshire Hathaway and the oftentimes overlooked importance of corporate governance and capital structure. And I just really like, I Just want to double down on that for a moment as the freedom that I imagine that’s given you, gave you in the Larson Jewell business and these businesses to actually be more long term oriented is an enormous, enormous asset. And then the second thing we have to talk about is, because you just skimmed over it, chairman of six companies, CEO of three of them, and that uniqueness, there are very few people that could actually point to that as their day job. And I’d love to just talk about that unique role that you have.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:32:25]:

Sure. Well, the first piece is just a tried and true Warren Buffett. I mean, truly, the man is the company and the company is the man. And that’s been the philosophy forever. A lot of the portfolio companies, Warren did actually put down the ask price on a napkin and push it across the dinner table and that’s how the deal was done. And they shook hands and his words were typically, I’ll never interfere in your company. I hope to never have to sell it. We’ll never interfere in your company. Go build a moat. Go build sustainable competitive advantage. And he would send them off. I think the new era will be a little bit more performance based. You have an operator at the top. And I don’t think it’s overly intrusive to say we’re going to have a little bit of line of sight as to the performance and recommendations. That advisory board to me was golden, by the way. And I broke a bunch of rules at Larson Jewell because they said, don’t bring in your friends. And I brought in three of my friends because they were three of the smartest people that I knew. So why wouldn’t I do that? But the autonomy is wonderful. But it’s also perilous within Berkshire. If somebody gives you a very long rope and you put it in, fashion it into a noose and stick your head in it, nobody’s really there to pull you out of it, you know, at that time. And that’s, you know, that’s the way that it’s been. When I got there, we owed Berkshire a lot of money and they wanted it back. So there was an immediate need to course correct and do things in the short term that were going to be consistent with a long term strategy. Right. But still additive, but still doing what we needed to do in the short term and achieve in the long term. So hopefully we did that. But as a group, it’s not a group of CEOs that seek notoriety very much. We’re very much sort of behind the scenes. You don’t tend to get trotted out much at the shareholders meeting and that sort of thing. I think it’s for people who really love doing the content of the job and don’t need the creature comforts of other things. But with some of that visibility also comes grinding calls with analysts and months long budget meetings and so forth. So I think it’s really for people that are just wired a little bit more, you know, that way. But it changed. So there’ll be a little, you know, a little bit more oversight, a little bit more, you know, there, there are, I mean, if you conceptually, everything’s a performance improvement situation. Right. We’re humans, we’re fallible. There’s another 10% somewhere. But for companies that are needing an outside perspective, there has to be a way to, to sort of help them along, you know, with the goal of them continuing to operate very autonomously and, and, and so forth. But there are some terrific businesses and some really smart people running them. They just don’t get a lot of visibility.

 

Darren [00:35:01]:

Yeah. Talk about this role that you’re in today and how do you do that? Because it sounds like a lot, and I know you have a lot of capacity, but describe what that role looks like.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:35:15]:

Well, it sounds pretty chaotic when you say it out loud. It is mildly chaotic. But I think, well, first of all, if you have great people, you’re halfway to the house of being able to do that really. The role, except for the role of Fruit, because I’m the only operating senior executive, I’m the only general manager there. So I took over for the CEO a couple of years ago. I spend two to two and a half weeks a month in Bowling Green, Kentucky and a lot more time outside of there working on the business as well. And a transformation in its own right of 180-year-old brand, iconic brand. Yeah, Fruit is the Fruit of the Loom brand. Vanity Fair, women’s lingerie brand, Russell Athletic and Spalding. That’s all under the Fruit of the Loom. So just a diversity of businesses within, you know, within the company apparel. And of course, Spalding today is basically a basketball business. So, you know, and that takes 6,14,000 employees. Global Business takes a lot of, to do that. On the other side, it really is an advisory sort of role. We’ve put into place, strategy, processes in each of the companies. So there’s some uniformity and we don’t try and change something that’s been done, but just sort of, you know, making sure that those things are in place. I’ve always been a big believer Darren, if, if, if, you know, if you don’t have a destination, any road will get you there. That’s the. But. But if you don’t have a strategy, your strategy is the sum total of all your tactics. You just point to this and this and this and say, this is what we’re after. But it may not be a compelling roadmap to win long term. So we make sure those are in place. We facilitate. When I say we, it’s me and Tracy. Tracy’s my strategy partner. She was my ea. Here’s a talent story. She was my ea. When I got to Larson Jewell, oh.

 

Darren [00:37:01]:

A week, I did not know this. Okay.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:37:03]:

A week later, I realized she had the best strategic headset in the company, including everybody on my leadership team.

 

Darren [00:37:09]:

Yeah.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:37:09]:

And today. So she’s, she’s the one person I pulled along with me from Larson Jewel who, who imparts these processes, who takes the team through. But she’s my strategy partner. She’s my marketing strategy person. She knows an awful lot about talent intuitively and talent processes and runs nine box programs with all the companies and so forth. And so there’s a little bit of structure that’s built, but in the best keeping of Berkshire. I don’t want to be overbearing. Just make sure the basic mechanisms are in place. And it’s very incumbent upon me to add value and demonstrate value. You don’t want to be. I’m your chairman from corporate and I’m here to help. You want to be somebody that’s really bringing something to the party. That’ll be attitude. And all the CEOs are not created equal. Some have been in their positions for 15 years, some have been in their positions for a year. Those two people need something a little bit different. So my whole perspective and strategy, I guess, is to do what I’ve always done is find the intersection between what the company needs and what I can bring that will be helpful. But a lot of it does come to making sure that you’ve got the organization structured correctly and the right level of talent to win. It’s still a bit of an underserved strategy goal in a lot of companies. A lot of these businesses that have been owned for many years have basically the same group. There’s a lot of tenure that can be terrific, but risk taking can be a little bit lower and new processes and new procedures, new ways of doing things. So it’s hopefully at its highest level, it’s an inspiring kind of role, but helping with strategy, talent, and yes, making big investments, acquisitions and so forth. I would work with them as well. They didn’t invent any more hours in the day, so somehow you got to squeeze it all in. But I love it. I mean, it gives me. It’s an enormous source of energy in my life and at a nature a lot of people will be thinking about the path to retirement. This could be a really good one, actually. I think I do this at some stage being a day. The CEO positions, as you know, they’re all consuming. Like, you have to be ready to put your whole self into it, whatever that takes. That’s the part that’ll probably augment over the next couple of years where it’ll be more of a chairman role and an advisory role. And that’ll be welcome too, at the time. But we are in the midst of a transformation of Fruit of the Loom, and it has some characteristics that the Larson Jewell Challenge did as well. It’s strategy, people, process, systems, improving the business, focusing on what’s profitable, making some tough decisions about businesses that were not only not accretive, they were unprofitable and genticing them. Today, Fruit of the loom from two years ago, fruit of the loom is about 20% smaller and about 50% more profitable just by focusing the business. So that’s the world that I live in. That’s the mature market, market approach. You have to manufacture profit. There’s no tailwind, you know, pushing it along, but you’re relying upon, you know, and maybe in the. I know you and I are both fans of the stoic philosophy and. And I have to tell you, Darren, when I read that for the first time, it’s the first time I ever read a bit on philosophy where I stood up from where I was sitting. I go, that’s me. That’s that, that’s me. And it’s also the person I would aspire to be up at the, you know, up to the next level. But the idea of, you know, taking the world as it gets presented to you, not fixating on the thing, but channeling your emotions and your thinking and your strategy into what you’re going to do about it, like, how are you going to react to it? I’ve been that. And that’s different than being a stoic person. A stoic person is just emotionless. And, you know, that has a particular connotation. But this was like, don’t listen to what people say. Watch what they do. It will always come out in the actions and everything about wisdom and courage and justice and discipline and all of those tenets just resonated with me off the charts. So I think as much as anything, probably along with servant leadership, I think that forms the philosophical basis of everything I’ve tried to do.

 

Darren [00:41:09]:

Okay. We’ve talked briefly at moments in time around this, but it wasn’t until just now that I’m realizing how central both these philosophies sound like they are in your leadership. And so I’m curious, is there anything more to say on that? So, look, you’ve servant leadership, I think people understand you just gave a nice description of stoicism. But I want to take maybe one click more on the integration of those two things. And if imagine you’re talking to a new CEO, somebody you know in the CEO for the first time, like, what would, how would you describe the integration of those things and how it shows up for you?

 

Jeff Cohen [00:41:52]:

Yeah, first of all, there’s, there’s a certain amount of equanimity that I think is, is, is covering in both.

 

Darren [00:41:58]:

Yeah.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:41:59]:

And look, there’s a, there’s a point where you have to be, you have to serve your people, but be the calm person in the storm. We certainly had that through during the pandemic in in spades. I realized in the form of situational leadership. I realized that was the time to grab the wheel because that’s what had to happen. It was, how do I. The challenge was how do I minimize the outward noise and distractions, which is just consuming all of our hours? And we were becoming paralyzed. How do I keep those to the outside and focus within for answers and be with them at the table? I mean, in a true servant leadership way, be with them at the table and say, we’re going to work, work on, work on these things together. I think for me, the philosophies too are how do you take them up a level? Integration is one thing, but how do you take, how are you going to role model transparency and integrity and humility up a level? So I’ll give you an example. To most CEOs, if you said describe something and at the time when you were transparent, they may say something like, well, I was in town, town meeting and somebody asked me a question and I gave them the truth and I said it in a very forthright way. Well, without much spin on the ball, well, that’s good and that’s worthy. But to me, there’s this idea of proactive transparency. What should you be telling your people? Not waiting for them to ask, what should you be bringing out to them that will help fulfill their life Give them context, give them the why behind we’re making decisions, letting them know how the company is performing. So that just gives everything, just more meaning to people. So I am a very reluctant video person, but I do videos. I’ve done monthly videos for years in my different companies. And one is just the monthly results. Like, here’s the goal, it’s typically a profitability goal. Here’s how we’re tracking, so you all know, and here’s what we’re doing well, here’s what we’re doing less well, here’s what we’re going to work on, here’s what we’ve decided, and here’s the reason why. Totally good news, bad news. It all just sort of comes across in a global organization that’s particularly useful, right, because it connects people. I understand what it does as far as my personal connection with people and letting people hear that and feel that. But to me, the word is context. If people have context, if you set the strategy, if you tell them the why, and if you tell them how you’re performing, it is easier for people to see how what they do every day connects with how, how the company is being successful and where we need to go. Everybody should be able to. If you have six pillars in your strategy, everybody should be able to connect to at least one and say, I get it. I. I understand. Humility, I think, is a subject that, you know, a lot of executives struggle with a little bit. If I can say that, you know, particularly maybe the male of the species, because we were not. Humility was not something I was taught in the 1980s when I started my, started my career in the corporate world, you know, was. It was. Look, you look it up in the dictionary, it’ll say, you know, without pride or arrogance, something like that. Look at the synonyms for humility and you might get diffidence or being meek or docile. That’s not what. There’s no executive that wants to be that person. I think that’s the struggle. But I think servant leadership unlocked a little bit by saying, you have to be really strong to be humble. It is a strength, but you have to demonstrate it. When was the last time you stood up in front of your employees and said, I’m sorry, I was wrong, I made a mistake. Here’s what I’m going to do to fix it? I’m sorry. I think it’s just not a natural muscle for a lot of people. But putting yourself in that vulnerable spot, carrying yourself with that kind of humility, I think is useful. Also to make the know, make that connection. Integrity is the 100% standard. Right. So that should be, you know. But I’ve come to believe that, you know, the absence of the truth is also a lie. Right. It’s not just I told the truth when I was asked. It’s that if I’m in a negotiation or if I’m in a recruiting situation or something and I don’t tell the whole truth, that does not live up to the 100% standard of integrity either. So I think it’s. I look at these things, I look at how do you take them and push them up to the next level. The piece about the Stoic philosophy is the. I think it’s centered in the wisdom, but also courage because it connotes action, it connotes you’re going to take all this information, but when it comes time to make that hard decision, which is going to be fact based and coalescing to your team and to your strategy, I think that’s it. And there’s also. You treat people all the same. Your title and how much you make is of no importance at all in the Stoic philosophy. But I think it’s the. What I like about them both is that I finally landed on it and it took me 10 minutes. They’re both behavior based. You know it when you see it. Servant leadership is how you behave. It’s not what you say. It’s all about your actions. And that is the sum of it. And I think the Stoic philosophy is the same in that you internalize and synthesize everything, but in the end you look within, you act. And when you act, you act with conviction and courage. Doing transformations is about 10% smarts and 90% conviction in my world. In my experience, it’s the current. You set the path, you align the organization and then you don’t blink. Because the first time you blink and you chase a commodity order that you said you weren’t going to do, or now you’re starting to pull it apart a little bit. So I think having the courage of your convictions probably crosses over both in a meaningful way.

 

Darren [00:47:38]:

Yeah. There’s two things that are being evoked for me as I listen to you. One is this degree of discipline and self mastery. I think it was Epictetus who said, no man is free who is not master of himself. That’s coming across in just the way you’re being and the way you’re speaking. And I think the all time best leadership book ever written was Marcus Aurelius Meditations. And I imagine you know, I actually had this picture of Marcus Aurelius. You talk about somebody who was dealt a tough hand, you know, and he was like war and suffering and disease, and his ability to self regulate and be. To have equanimity in the moment was extraordinary. So such a really wonderful way to bring your leadership to life and very, very compelling. So thanks for sharing that.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:48:30]:

Epictetus also said, if some regard you as important, distrust yourself, which sounds so relevant. And he wrote that 2,400 years ago.

 

Darren [00:48:40]:

Yeah.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:48:40]:

I mean, just astounding. Astounding that something from that long ago can be so relevant. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Darren [00:48:46]:

We’ve covered so much territory. You’ve had such an illustrious career, and there have been so many threads that maybe we have another conversation at some point that we can pull on more. Before we wrap, anything that’s coming up for you that you’d want to add, whether it’s about your experience, your leadership, how you think about the role of CEO or something that we covered that you wanted to put a finer point on before we wrap?

 

Jeff Cohen [00:49:13]:

No, I would just close in saying you do reach an age where you start to think a little bit about legacy and. And so forth. And to me, it’s all. All about people. You know, it’s not about notoriety or awards or anything like that. It’s the. It’s the really fine people that you meet along the way. And if you’ve touched them even a little bit and have been touched by them, you know, in a positive way, I mean, that’s what you play for. I love the mentoring aspect of my role, and it is a terrific feeling when you bump into somebody in the airport and 20 years later and they say, hey, you know, I learned a lot from you, and so forth. But no, these kind of. I mean, it’s really what makes it all worthwhile and proud to say you were one of those fine people that I’ve had a chance to interact and learn from, and I think us each to each other. So this was fun, and I would love to come back and do it a little bit more.

 

Darren [00:50:05]:

Yeah. Well, I think this conversation is evidence of exactly what you just said. The fact that we’ve stayed connected and are in this conversation today. And I consider you a dear friend and mentor. So much gratitude to you, to our friendship, for our friendship, and for you being in this conversation, I’ve had a blast.

 

Jeff Cohen [00:50:23]:

Thanks, Jeff. Awesome. Appreciate it. Great to see you, Darren.

 

Darren [00:50:26]:

You too. What a wonderful conversation. What stands out most to me about Jeff isn’t just the scope of his experience, but the philosophy that God guides him. He embodies servant leadership, putting people first, leading with humility and integrity, and pairs it with a stoic mindset that prizes equanimity, discipline, and courage in the face of challenge. I look forward to being with you on the next episode of one of one. And until then, I hope you live and lead with courage, wisdom, and above all, with love.