“The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your physical and mental energies to the problem at hand without growing weary.”
—Thomas Edison
When you want to get better it’s human nature to reach beyond your natural abilities, but true success comes when you make the most of what you’ve got rather than trying to be someone you’re not.
When you’re a coach, you’re constantly trying to get the most out of your players. The challenge is getting all fifteen guys to be the best versions of themselves for an entire season. That’s what wins championships—every guy on the team having his best season.
Sometimes, though, you can push a guy in the wrong direction, by not working within his skill set. I had Tyson Chandler playing for me in New Orleans, and he was the best center I’ve coached. He was terrific and a leader on the team, and he very badly wanted to be an all-star. He had the numbers in his first season with the team—averaging ten points, twelve rebounds, and a couple of blocked shots per game. Those numbers are all-star-worthy for a center, but he wasn’t getting that call.
He came to me one day and said, “Coach, I want to be an all-star next season. How do I get there?”
“Maybe we have to throw the ball to you a little bit more, maybe you have to score a little bit more,” I said. “Or maybe it’s because it’s the first year that you’ve had this type of season. Maybe you have to duplicate your results next year to gain that stature.”
I liked him a lot, so I really wanted him to get there. We came to the conclusion that over the summer he’d work on his post game, and the next season I’d try to feature him more on offense.
The next season, the 2007–08 season, we threw him the ball a lot more than we had in the previous year. But we were getting away from our plan, and I knew it was probably a mistake. I just wanted it so badly for him.
To his credit, the guy knew who he was. He came to me about twenty-five games into the season with a change of plans.
“You know what, Coach,” he said. “That’s not me, I’m a defender, I’m a rebounder, and I’m a shot blocker. I’m a defensive player. I’m not a post-up guy. I just gotta be me.”
I actually felt relieved that he’d said it first. When a guy works hard and is such a strong player, you want the best for him, but the team comes first and he knew it. That’s what made him special. I might have gone until the all-star break playing a style of basketball that saw Tyson getting the ball more on offense in order to see if he could make it. That would have been a bad coaching move on my part. Instead he knew himself, he knew the team, and he made the call to put the organization first.
When we switched back to his comfort zone, he played that role to a T with our team. He was our best communicator on the defensive end, and he erased a whole lot of defensive mistakes that other players made. And you know what, five years later, being himself paid off when he made the all-star team as a member of the New York Knicks. His numbers were even a few points lower than in those first two seasons in New Orleans, but he was Tyson Chandler, a dominant center for thirteen years at that point, and he deserved it.
When you try to change what works in hopes of hitting it big, odds are it will be a misstep. Normally I bet on the jockey and not the horse, but when I was introduced to the Piloti group through another investor I thought the concept was really intriguing, so I went against my usual investing approach.
The concept behind this company, which made shoes for race car drivers and race car enthusiasts, was exciting because it targeted a huge market. The product line went from serious shoes for race car drivers all the way down to casual, sporty shoes for fans of NASCAR, Indy racing, and the like. Even the ones for fans had a rounded heel that made it easier to switch between gas and brake.
I loved the concept and invested in the company even though the couple who’d started it had no experience running a business. The husband had been a designer of shoes in that industry and his wife worked side by side with him, but neither of them had ever run anything.
The shoes were great quality and I felt there was certainly a market for such a product, but the problem was that the husband was not an experienced leader. His focus was too spread out and we never got traction in any segment of that field. He was trying to be everything to everybody. He was participating in tent shows and he was trying to get into the Nordstroms of the world and the mass shoe outlets, so we were not successful in any of those areas because we weren’t uniquely focused on one.
The founder burned through a lot of money far too quickly, and by the time we realized we had to find a replacement, we had lost too much money to reinvest. We couldn’t hire a top-notch person without having commitments to fund the company, and I thought we were going to throw good money after bad, so we decided to essentially shut the company down.
I fell in love with the concept and went against my rule. That was my mistake. The founder did not have a track record of successfully running anything, but I thought that I could mentor him and show him how to apply more focus in his direction and leadership. It got to a point where I just exploded in a board meeting and told them I was done. Looking back, that was an embarrassing moment. That’s when we shut down. We stopped funding.
It was my worst personal effort as well as my worst investment. But it was a lesson learned. Sometimes you actually can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Sometimes you can’t teach a dog of any age much of anything. As a leader you have to try to bring out the best in people, but know their limits and work with the skills they have. As an investor, it’s best to stick to your plan and not try to force someone into a role they are not comfortable in.
As a coach you dream of landing a job where you are coaching a superstar surrounded by a few all-stars and other players who know exactly who they are and what their role is. That perfect combination is a big part of success, but often if a team is looking for a new coach they don’t have any of those things.
After my time with New Orleans was up, the next opportunity presented to me was with the Cleveland Cavaliers. They had fired Mike Brown after a season in which LeBron James won the MVP but the team underachieved and lost to the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
LeBron was about to become a free agent and there were rumors that he might leave. With him I had a legitimate shot at coaching a team to a championship. Without him I’d be starting over.
I thought about the job at hand and decided that it was a win-win situation for me. If LeBron came back we were in great shape, and if he didn’t I would have the opportunity to rebuild this team into something great. I pride myself on being able to mold young players and help them achieve greatness, and after what I was able to do in New Orleans I was confident I could do it in Cleveland.
Going into it, ownership really didn’t think LeBron was going to leave. Part of the reason they wanted to hire me may have been my relationship with Chris Paul. They were trying to lure him over to the Cavs to join forces with LeBron, and since I had coached Paul in New Orleans, they saw me as a perfect fit to coach the team.
That’s what they were thinking. I was thinking, Either way I’m good.
On July 1, the same day LeBron James officially became an unrestricted free agent, I officially accepted the job as head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. After I took the job I was sitting with Chris Grant, general manager of the Cavs at the time, and we were planning for the upcoming season and talking about LeBron.
“You know what?” I said. “Let me call one of my guys who knows him well and find out if he’s coming back or not.”
This was about four days before “the Decision,” and I called up a very good friend of LeBron’s and he said, “Coach, let me get back to you.” Ten minutes later he called me back and broke the news.
“He’s gone.”
I told Chris Grant that my sources had told me he was leaving, but Grant didn’t believe it. No one in the organization wanted to believe it. No one in the state of Ohio wanted to believe it. They really felt that he wouldn’t leave, so they weren’t prepared for it.
The night of the Decision,—July 8, 2010—we had just finished working out a group of guys for our Summer League team. I was in my office ranking the twenty or so guys that we’d invited in to work out to see if we would take any of them to Las Vegas for the Summer League. Like everyone else in America, I turned on ESPN to watch the big show, and LeBron came on and said the famous words, “I’m taking my talents to South Beach.”
OK, I guess my guy was right, I thought as I turned the TV off, and I went back to ranking the rest of the guys. Then I got in my car and forgot all about it. That’s just how my mind works. There’s no need to dwell on bad news.
At that particular time, I was staying at the Ritz-Carlton downtown, and as I was driving back to my hotel all hell was breaking loose. People were burning jerseys. The big “Witness” photo on the side of a downtown Cleveland office building was already halfway down. It was madness.
Even though I had been prepared for the news, it was still tough. One day management is telling me that I might be coaching LeBron and Chris Paul, and the next day the whole city is crushed. As the head coach, I tried to keep an even keel as much as possible, but internally I’d been tossing and turning because I knew I had an opportunity. When it fell through, I knew right away that I was going to be starting from the bottom.
Once LeBron left I had to change my perspective on what the season was going to look like and on what our roster would look like. I had to work with what I had. The philosophy and work ethic stayed the same, but now I was building from the ground up, so the timetable for success changed.
I remained positive throughout, but owner Dan Gilbert did not. His letter publicly bashing LeBron was tough for me to read because it showed a different side of Dan Gilbert from what I’d seen in the meetings that led up to the night of the Decision. It was a personal attack on LeBron, who for the record had every right to leave. That’s why they call it free agency. I thought the way he had done it was wrong, but that didn’t change the outcome. That didn’t change the fact that he was no longer on the team.
Gilbert’s letter set my tenure with the Cavs off to a bad start. It wasn’t the attitude I had hoped for. I didn’t want to look back. I wanted to have a positive attitude and move forward. Once LeBron left we had to move on. We wanted to be successful, and in order for that to happen, we had to turn the men on the roster into winners. The easiest way to win is to make sure tomorrow is better than today, and after those first few weeks in the summer, it was obvious that there was nowhere to go but up.
Just as when LeBron left Cleveland, we were missing that leadership presence on the executive board at Piloti. Finding the next man up can be tough, especially when you look around and can’t find someone who has been there before.
After Clorox bought Deer Park, I put in my allotted time and made the decision to move to McKesson. Before we parted ways, the company asked me to recommend my replacement. There was a fellow who had been in the bottled water industry for many, many years. He was an accountant by training and had run a large home and office water business on the East Coast. Late in his career he had come to work with us, and he was well liked among his peers.
There was also an up-and-coming guy running our marketing who was a traditional consumer packaged goods marketer. He was young and aggressive, but maybe a bit immature at that point, I thought.
Thinking more in terms of who would get along better with the management at Clorox, I recommended the older fellow. I just thought that the younger person needed a little more seasoning, and the guy with more years under his belt would be a better transition person for the job. I thought more about keeping things calm and status quo for the next few years, instead of focusing on innovation and taking the company to the next level. I thought this guy could carry the torch and then maybe the young marketing wiz could take over a few years down the line.
What I missed in the whole process was the politics at Clorox. As it turned out, there was a change in senior leadership at the company, and they didn’t feel that the water business was the place to be. The guy I recommended was not the right guy to be selling top executives on why the company was going to be successful. In hindsight they would’ve gotten much more forward thinking from the younger person, and it might just have influenced them to keep the business.
Maturity comes in different ways. It’s one thing to give a person more responsibility and let them make their mistakes. It’s another thing to have that person become the head coach when they are still on a steep learning curve. The question becomes, Do you take a less experienced person and have him run the whole company, or hire someone who has a lot more experience? That’s a real trade-off.
In this case, since senior management decided it wasn’t a business they wanted to be in, in retrospect I should have taken the risk of promoting the younger guy for the job. If I had been wise about it, I would have rolled the dice and taken the risk, because in reality I had been that guy ten years earlier. He had the skill set and the drive to do the job, but I just thought he needed some more tread on the tires. When the talent is there, though, you should use it as soon as possible.
One of the guys I had in Cleveland was Tristan Thompson, who we knew would be a real workhorse. He’d do all the dirty work and would be a pivotal team player. He didn’t have the talent to be an all-star-type player, but he had the desire to be exactly what we needed for that team—a hell of a defender, a rebounder, and a shot blocker. Those are the kind of things that lead to long careers in the NBA, and any player should be proud of them.
Most of these guys, when they get in the league, the first two years they probably still think they can be an all-star. They always think they’re better than they are. Tristan was drafted fourth overall, so expectations were high, but the quicker a player like him can realize what he needs to do to be successful in this league, the better off he will be. It’s better for the team too. He figured it out quickly, and I think he’s going to be a very good player in this league for a long time.
Tristan’s problem was that he was a terrible free throw shooter with no post moves. If he got the ball under the basket and he was going up for a dunk, everybody fouled him. He was a little bit like Dwight Howard; you can kill Dwight’s game by putting him on the free throw line.
But we found a way to fix it. In the middle of his rookie season we discovered that Tristan was really more of a right-hand player. He shot his free throws with his left hand, but everything else he did was right-hand dominant.
With thirty games left in the season, I made a choice to try to get him to be a right-hand shooter. In practice we had him shoot free throws with his left hand and with his right hand. The free throws with his right hand were so much more fluid. Then we gave him a football; he could barely throw the ball with his left hand, while with his right he threw a tight spiral.
The whole coaching staff looked at each other in amazement. How had he been shooting lefty all those years?
What made him successful was that he was willing to make changes in his game to be a better basketball player. When I talk about working within your skill set, I should say the key component is knowing your skill set. A guy like Tyson Chandler was trying to do too much and stepping out of his element in an attempt to score more points. That wasn’t good. But a guy like Tristan Thompson needed that change to discover his true skills. It works both ways, but once you have it figured out, you have to be the best version of yourself night in and night out in order to win ball games.
When I invested in Freshpet and took on the role of chairman of the board, I brought all these past scenarios with me. The concept of working with what you have definitely rings true when you are dealing with a start-up, but regardless of what prior business knowledge you bring to the table, you’ll inevitably have to deal with shortcomings.
When we started out at Freshpet we had a much smaller team than we all probably would have liked, but that’s what the finances dictated. It forced us to all become jacks-of-all-trades, but in the process we made some big, expensive errors.
As an organization we made a decision that we were going to be a pet food company and not a refrigeration company. We wanted to make great pet food, but we did not want to own the refrigerators. A year and a half in, we started to realize that if we didn’t buy the refrigerators, very few of the retailers were going to buy them for us. We had this great pet food but no way to get it to consumers, so we had to bite the bullet and buy the fridges.
We were a bunch of guys who knew how to make pet food, market it, sell it, and operate a pet food company, but we didn’t know anything about refrigerators. We put one of the team members in charge of the refrigerators, but he didn’t know any more about it than any of us. Before we knew it we had about a hundred fridges out there that weren’t holding temperature. When that happens, the food goes bad.
When we fixed that problem they started leaking and causing a potential hazard because customers could fall on the wet floors. Eventually the refrigerators started breaking down altogether at an alarming rate. When the refrigerators were leaking, that was really bad. When they started breaking down, it could easily have been game over.
Picture what these fridges looked like when the lights started going out and they became just big dark boxes in the stores that didn’t even keep the food at the proper temperature. At the time it felt like a disaster.
At first, to fix this problem and keep these stores selling our product, we went out into the field and rebuilt these fridges one by one. In the early stages of a company you don’t have the resources to work with a big refrigeration company or hire a consultant to figure this out, so you just go and do it. We all learned way more about the inner workings of the grocery store refrigerator than we’d ever expected to learn.
We were able to keep it together, and eventually we ended up hiring outside people to get the job done. But in the beginning it was just us going from store to store trying to fix these things.
It gave all of us an appreciation for the difficulty of this aspect of the company. It taught us a lesson about the respect that we needed to have and the skill we needed to bring into the organization to handle the refrigeration part of the business. We couldn’t just take a sales and marketing guy and give him the responsibility of running a portion of the business he had never run before. We needed to develop some competency in refrigeration first, and then make decisions.
A company like Pepsi or Coca-Cola has a whole department dedicated to refrigerators and has been doing it for many years. We just knew we needed refrigerators, so we went out and bought some. The reality is that not all fridges are created equal, and in some regards we did the equivalent of putting household units into retail stores.
Mistakes will get made, and I like to think I was able to keep the team calm in the face of adversity. This was in the early stages of the company’s growth, so we were able to survive. Had it been in a later stage it would have been a large and expensive mistake that might have done irreversible damage to the company. If it had been a thousand-store rollout with Walmart or Target, they would have told us to get the refrigerators out of there as soon as they weren’t holding temperature. If people were slipping and falling there could have been tons of lawsuits.
But we lucked out in a sense and were able to right the ship. We all became a little smarter on the subject, and, most importantly, we didn’t forget the lesson learned. As a leader you have to make sure to build these lessons into the DNA of the company, especially at a place like Freshpet, where we didn’t have the time or money to make the same mistakes twice.