#409 - Jason McCann - CEO @ Vari - How a Simple Product Became a Global Brand

Chris Powers: All right, you ready? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, let's roll. 

Chris Powers: All right. I said it when you came in. I feel like this has been long overdue. We've been watching each other online for quite a while now. 

Jason McCann: This is awesome. So glad to connect. 

Chris Powers: There's a lot I want to get out of today's conversation, especially around culture and company building. But I think it would be best to start with just the foundation of how Vari even came to be. 

Jason McCann: Yeah, I was blessed to be president of my good friend's company. And Dan had founded a company called Gemmy Industries back in 1985, fresh out of college and selling Christmas and Halloween product. He and I met in 1999, and it was in the Dot Com days. Fast forward and Dan's got back pain and turns into a cardboard box idea. And the journey of Varidesk began. And so, you connect those dots and it was quite an amazing kickoff to that. When I was... I'd walk into Dan's office and Dan's standing at a cardboard box and you're friends with somebody, and you're like, what's going on? He's like, I've got back pain and this is turning into something I got to do. And he went he went and saw his doctor, she said, well, if you feel better standing up, then you should just stand up more. And Dan is a product guy. He had created all those inflatables you see in people's yards for Halloween and Christmas and that crazy singing big mouth Billy bass fish on the wall. And he's really good at product ideas. And so, Rosemary, our assistant at the time, was going online and tracking down Google, trying to get him a standing desk. And these contraptions would show up, and Dan would show them to me. We're just... And he one day walks in and he goes, I got an idea for a product. And something happened as he was just talking. And so, I grabbed our industrial designer. I said, hey, let's just talk. And it started to- It was almost like a conductor pulling this idea out of his head. He said, what if it could just like slide out of a box and go on the desk and not attach to anything and be a real simple thing? And I was talking motors and contraptions. He's like, no, no, even simpler. And really the idea for what became Varidesk was born in that little two or three hour conversation. And we were working on Christmas and Halloween product, about to launch it for Walmart and Lowe's, and we're on a plane flying to Asia together. And Dan and I jokingly never really flew together, never really sat next to each other on a plane, but we happened to be sitting next to each other on the same flight. And it's 24 hours to get over to Asia. And we know our prototype’s being built of the standing desk. And we're sitting there with the Wall Street Journal passing it back and forth on the airplane. And in it, the Mayo Clinic Dr. James Levine says, sitting is the new smoking. And we're like, aha, it's like a sign from God, there's something here. We got off the plane, and we review our Christmas and Halloween product for the upcoming season. And we're like, do you have the standing desk ready? Is it ready? And the prototype came out, and I kind of joke it was almost like a newborn. So it's beautiful to us, like, oh, this is cute. But it's pretty ugly if you looked at it. It just kind of functioned. It wasn't really sexy, but it worked. And so, we built some prototypes and tested them and got them in our office. And we liked it. Dan's like, oh, I'm starting to feel better. I'm standing up. And I'm like, yeah, this is nice. Kind of weird, I hadn't stood up all day the way outside of the restaurant industry when I was in that. And we gave some to our employees and they're like, oh, I feel good. We could kind of move them around. We'd take it from one and give it to another person. And one of the employees said, well, I'm a little tired now. Can I get back the standing desk? And it was almost like that echo chamber that happens when you're with your team and they're saying, oh, I love it. This is a great idea. And you're kind of like, I need it to really hit the battlefield of commerce. We got to show it to some people outside these four walls. Because it's one thing when we love it, but it's another thing if you got to show your kid to somebody else. So we were like, who has like a place with a lot of people sitting down? And someone knew somebody. We said like a call center. Somebody knew somebody that got us connected to Pedro Correra. He was the president of Verizon's call center in Irving, had just been promoted. Said, I can get you a meeting. So, we said, great. And it was like, it'll be next Tuesday at 11 or something. And so Monday night, I'm laying there, and I'm like, oh, my goodness. I've got like a meeting tomorrow. I don't even- What am I going to say? And as I'm laying there, it just came to me. I said, I'm going to help them create a happier, healthier, more productive workspace. So we had our Wall Street Journal. We got our prototype of the standing desk. We're sitting inside the lobby with this big cardboard box, lugged it out of my Tahoe. Dan shows up at the last minute, right before the meeting, and he's like, what are we going to say? And I gave him my pitch. He's like, all right, let's roll with that in typical entrepreneur style. And we walked in, and we get to show it out, pull it out, standing desk. And we hold up our Wall Street Journal – sitting is the new smoking. And he's like, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about, but let me get my ergonomist and let me get my head of people into the room. And I'm like, what's an ergonomist? I didn't know. And they gave us great feedback. They said that back pain was the number one reason that people miss work. And the ergonomist gave us great feedback on the product. So, we kind of shifted into growth mindset. And they asked the magic words, and they said, how much are they? And suddenly, we were off and running with our first order. 

Chris Powers: Okay, I want to go back real quick. You had the luxury, because you were already inside of a company, of just having an industrial designer kind of come in. Help me out for a second. I think every entrepreneur that hasn't actually created a physical product deep down inside has that idea of something to create. How would I even go create something right now? Because I know you do this now within your business, but if you had to tell me, hey, if you have an idea, here's how I would go get a prototype made? 

Jason McCann: Yeah. So today, even when I'm dreaming of product, I've got the pro version of Chat GPT and AI and some visualizer tools. And you can literally go in and start typing in ideas and blends out there today. And you as sort of thinking about something can do that. Because you're right, everybody doesn't have just an industrial design team or prototype shop in their office space today. That's literally what I'm seeing happen here in the last six months that wasn't even possible two years ago. Two or three years ago, when people asked me, how do I get a prototype made, I'd say, well, there are design people in town and they're all out there available for hire. And there's project people always looking for that. And there's sourcing with Alibaba and sourcing at the time, this would be sort of pre all the tariff disruption that happened in the world, you can get prototypes produced. You can start to figure out factories if you need to make it from a global supply chain through the internet search. But you're getting those initial prototypes made. But you get down to the down and dirty of proving anything, all these great ideas, you look at the way that Sarah built Spanx, and she's taking pantyhose and cutting the ends off, and those are the first prototypes. That's how prototypes are made. You're taking Styrofoam and you're kind of gluing some stuff together and showing it to people just to see if that idea even has merit. But AI today, those visualizing tools and that and Nano Banana and all that is incredible. 

Chris Powers: And will it just create like a 3D model rendering for you that you can kind of view from different angles? Or is it a 2D thing? 

Jason McCann: 2D stuff but then there's other tools now that people are pulling into 3D render. It is... those tools are right out there. So for the layman, I was working on some soft seating ideas and I was just playing around in Chat GPT trying to figure out some stuff. And this was the early days. I was like, oh my goodness, we've got designers working on new lines and I'm like, what about this? It's incredible what's happening out there for product ideation. 

Chris Powers: We're getting into what we'll talk about, but let's just continue going on that thread and then we're going to get back to the story in a second. So, AI, it’s so funny, I had my YPO forum meeting yesterday and we have it once a month. I would say in the last two months, it went from everybody talking about AI stuff and kind of testing and playing with stuff, to now, each meeting, everybody is bringing very specific light bulb moments that now it feels like it's starting to happen just around the table. How else are y'all using it at Vari right now? 

Jason McCann: So we're in working with clients. So, it started off working through process improvements. The simple models of saying, hey, how do we improve some processes? We've got a bunch of spreadsheets, even though we have SAP, S/4 Hana and Salesforce, and we're still pulling stuff out in Excel. Is there AI tools that can simplify some of that? Oh, that's working. Okay. That’s simplified, inventory reports and some of those things. Then we said, oh, well, we're taking forecasting models and our teams are thinking about what's going on in the future. And then Claude started layering in new Excel files and said, oh, how do we do this? And all of a sudden, it's building out forecasting models. You also start taking visualization tools. So, we're using Revit and the team's got CAD files and we will create over 10,000 designs for clients for workspaces this year, we're going to install a thousand offices. And how do we take all that data into something, individualization tools? Because a lot of clients can't look at a 2D rendering and they want to see it visually, how's my space going to interact? All those visualization tools are now happening. The product ideation process is now starting to happen. All of that, I would agree with you, has literally been in the last 12 months, then six months, then two months. And so, we're in there pushing the envelope on it every single day. I had some questions on even having Claude teach me some of the NOI stuff on these buildings as I'm continuing to grow in my real estate knowledge with experts like you guys. But when our team at Cushman brings in something, I can just kind of double check, or if I've got a question, or people are pitching us business ideas, you can pop that Excel into Claude and ask Claude questions about the model you're looking at, and it'll poke holes in it for you. So I think all those little checks are happening across, our team has been, they're literally rolling out visualization tools for clients to help take the look of their space and how do we transform it into something that we can monetize and turn into products? And then people talk about future proofing their space. So, they say, hey, today we want a cool sound studio and tomorrow it may be offices. What could it look like in a future state? Oh, my goodness, we're about to shoot a TV commercial here in the next three weeks. And we were renting space to put product, and we're like, what's it going to look like? Literally layering in all the visualization tools, versus us lugging in all the samples and going, oh shit, it doesn't fit. It doesn't look right. Why is this- this leather doesn't match with that rug we picked. Instead, it's all done pre shoot visualized with AI. That would have taken thousands of dollars. So instead of a $400,000 commercial that we shot 12 years ago, I can do it for 25 grand. Like the game's changing overnight. So, I think we're early in it, and I'm trying to keep up, and really as an entrepreneur, with a medium sized business, how do you lean into it and not be afraid of it? 

Chris Powers: How did you approach it as CEO? Because I can imagine every CEO was put on notice a couple years ago – AI or die. Like just put AI in your company. I don't even think- I still don't think most CEOs even know what that even means. But the directive is do it. How many employees do you have? 

Jason McCann: About 150. 

Chris Powers: Okay, so how did you think about delivering this message into the company? Was it, go start tinkering with stuff, everybody start tinkering? Was there a deliberate strategy, or like how have you let it kind of manifest within the company? Because I think what we'll see is some companies’ existing cultures will learn to adopt it, some won't. And the other category will just be AI native. You'll just start companies with AI embedded at the beginning. It sounds like you're having success bringing it into an existing culture. How did you think about bringing it into the team? 

Jason McCann: I think the team started to- Individuals started to pop up and use it. And I think Chat GPT was probably the first thing I personally started to play with. I said- I think it was 18 months ago or something. My wife and I took a road trip. And I hadn't taken a trip in a while. We took like a nine day road trip from San Francisco up the coast. And I just wanted to see the redwoods. I was like, I just want to for some reason touch nature. And all we had booked was the car, and we had... and the flight, on the return flight. And as soon as I landed, my wife wanted to drive. So I just got on ChatGPT and planned the trip. And my team had been talking about it. Early people had been saying it's going to happen, all these things. And when I used it and I said, what's the best thing I should do for the next two hours while we're riding and where should we stop and where should we eat and we want something healthy and we want to hug a tree and all these things, and it was so fast, how it planned out our entire nine day road trip. That was the moment, the aha moment 18 months ago or whatever that date was. My team started pushing it in the technology area first and saying, hey. And there were leaders, key leaders in my team, my COO, my head of technology, there's something here. LLM, the language learning models, we gotta be here. And me, again, it's like we're not big enough to be like bleeding edge, but I also recognize you either build companies that are disruptive, you build cultures that can withstand disruptions, and disruptions are going to happen. And I kind of looked at it like, okay, we're constantly building, we're trying to build this disruptive business. This is the next thing. And it reminded me of the Dot Com thing when it happened. And we're all wondering like, why didn't we buy all those URLs when they were for sale for $9? Like why didn't we buy realestate.com, homes.com, why didn't we? And so, I looked at it like this is one of those moments. And for the next generation of entrepreneurs, this is the thing. And so, I sort of treated it like, y'all pitch me some stuff, like let's try a bunch of things. And they have done an incredible job. And you see the team members that leaned into it and sat in their homes at night and worked a bunch of stuff out just like a startup does. And I give it to my team for driving it forward and for me just giving them the freedom to try a bunch of stuff. And now the guardrails have started to come up. We started to figure out the framework. They also were very good about saying, let's open this up to key members of the team and see who naturally has a gift for it because it's not in everybody's DNA to do it. And so different people in different departments from product, our internet, our team in Taiwan, the finance team, in forecasting, some of the salespeople, like give it to individuals, and they started playing in it with subsets of the model built in, all protected inside our database. And so, we've kind of got it all locked up because we've done a good job with that. And it's like working. And now we're seeing the cream rise to the top. So now how do we monetize these things? And that's literally, they're rolling out stuff today, and yesterday they were rolling out modules for our team to try. And we're hitting the battlefield of commerce, and some of it's going to work. I'm probably going to skid on my face a few times and make a bunch of mistakes, but I realized this is where you got to try. And so, I'm just pushing it out, embracing it. We've got two young people in there really messing with some edgy code. We're rolling out how to find leads online and all these things, the tools. And we're kind of going up against even what you've got Salesforce has got recommendations, SAP's got recommendations. But our team's creating some stuff that I think is going to work really, really well. And so, we're in a growth mindset with it. I'm not afraid of it. I'm trying to embrace it and go with it. And that would be my direction as I think about it. 

Chris Powers: Will you expand a little further on maybe, unless it's private, like what modules you're really leaning on? Like you said, we're going to bring some stuff. 

Jason McCann: Yeah, I mean, the baseline stuff, there's a lot of the new- as Claude and as the Nano Banana, the visualizing tools on workspaces is starting roll out right now for our clients. So you walk into our showroom today and we've got a 42,000 square foot headquarters where we're based in Coppell. And then of that, 4,000 square feet is product all set up. Well, then we've also taken those products and put them into visualization tools. So, you can actually see it all into spaces. And it's not just like ten spaces, it's hundreds of spaces in different applications for the product. So a studio set up, a boardroom setup, all with the same 400 products that we brought to life today. So now you're seeing those products come to life visually as clients are talking about product ideas, and hey, we're trying to create this, we're instantly within minutes coming back and saying, is this what you're talking about? So those visualization tools are already rolling out. That's hitting the battlefield today. And so, the team's being trained on it. How do we use it? And then we will react to how do we monetize it? Does it help us serve our clients better? And I think the more and more visualization tools that keep coming out, that's going to help. On the internal process side, the way Claude and Excel and all that stuff works, I'm just seeing incredible process simplification. And so, all of that has already been rolling out. You can see the teams being freed up of this like, wow, I've just freed up eight hours a week. And so, we're already seeing those benefits there. On the chat side talking to clients, instead of it's always a human talking to them, it's always an email that's going out from the salespeople, all those interactions are already starting to roll out this week and next week and in the upcoming months literally with technology there and leveraging AI. And so, all those pieces are being built inhouse that we're rolling out. 

Chris Powers: It's kind of, I can already feel like the offices are just going to get better themselves, one, because people can iterate so many more times on what they want at a cost that's, one, quick but not expensive. I feel like a lot of times when you're designing something, you just tap out eventually. You're like, we'll just do it this way, even though you kind of know there's something. But it just excites me to think like the way spaces will be planned going forward will be so much more detailed because people will get through the rep- You can go through ten iterations in a day now instead of ten iterations in a month or something. 

Jason McCann: And I think, too, everybody reacts to a space differently. I was touring clients today and they walk into an empty 20,000 foot floor plan and they're like, what am I looking at? So to have that and to say, hey, today we're going to be at 25 people, but we're going to be at 50, and we might be at 40, and we might... to sort of design future proofing space and give those iterations and map it out, the what if scenarios in a visualization tool I think will help a lot of people. And then to hit the button and know what the cost side is going to be. And ultimately, on the building GC side, when all those dots connect very quickly, that's going to help. And I'm sure these big developers are laying out entire neighborhoods and figuring out the best ones and all that. So, yeah, I think it's only going to help us all get better. It's going to be a little choppy and a little ugly. But if we're in the cell phone phase where it's a big block and it's a buck a minute and... it lasts for 15 minutes before it dies, like, okay, just imagine 10 years from now what it's really going to be like. It's going to be incredible. So I think we just... and we're here, and we get to be a part of it. I'm a little later in my career, but... we're here. So it's awesome to see and be a part of it. 

Chris Powers: Okay, so you pitch the call center. He asks you what it costs. I don't know how many prototypes you had, but you're probably already thinking like, we got to go make some more of these things. Did anything change from those first conversations over those first few weeks of messing with it... Did you iterate on the prototype or just go order what you had and start installing them? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, we started- They asked for about 10 of them, and they asked how much they cost. And we did the classic- We didn't quite know. We said, well, what would you be willing to invest in your people? And they said about 500 bucks. We're like, oh, I think we can make that work. And so we came up, and it all worked out. We had some prototypes come in, and so we got those over there. I think ten of them. And the Container Store was the second person we showed the product to. And they're right down the street from us in Coppell. And Dan knew Kip, and I met him one time, and so we kind of got in the door. And I figured they would give us very good feedback on the design of it. And I'd never done furniture. And as a product person, even as a software developer, somebody said this to me a long time ago, if you can find a small group of people to love something, a lot of people can like it. Like, that could be a really big idea. But if a small group of people like the idea, it's just okay, it's probably not that big of an idea. And we weren't really sure what we had yet, so I wanted to double check it. So it's like, okay, Verizon, we're one for one. So, we went down the street, same thing. I was like, oh, my God, this is the top place to work. This is 13 years ago. This is a great culture. I walk in, there's like a restaurant inside. I'm like, oh, my God, these people are amazing. There's people running around everywhere. And I've got my big box. I'm lugging this sample. And I didn't realize when they had bought Elfa, they already made their own office furniture. I just didn't know it. And so I'm walking around and they've got standing desks in their offices. And I was like, shit, I guess the fad's over. Like, I guess it's a fad. Like, we missed it. And I'd been busted a few times on fads, so I was a little nervous that it was over. And we walked into a room and they had about 25 people in kind of a boardroom type thing, and they're all sitting on like folding tables and stuff. And she said, the challenge is we have these standing desks, but then if anybody walks in there with different shoes on or we move somebody around, it takes hours to adjust this thing. It doesn't adjust. Well, ours just popped right up and down. And they said, and we're expanding and we have all these desks. Actually, this makes a lot of sense, what you're showing us, this Varidesk. And it just goes right on top, and it adjusts to any height. How much are they? We'll try some and we'll take about ten. It was literally like 10 and 10. And that was our- Those were our first two customers. And it told me we had something there for the product idea. But over time, we iterated it we figured 22 times until the final product. As we learned, getting feedback, we adjusted it. The first ones, I didn't know anything about the office furniture industry, and Dan and I knew retail, but this giant box, we said, well, we're not going to sell this. We showed it to like Home Depot, and they're like, what are we going to do with this Varidesk thing? And Walmart wasn't the right customer. And I wasn't sure about Office Depot and Staples. And I was like, oh, I guess we're going to have to sell it online or do something. They said, oh, there's a big trade show. It's NeoCon. It's up in Chicago where all the furniture people go. We’re like, oh, my goodness, when is it? It's in June. And this is like May. We're like, oh, my God, can we get a booth? And I don't like trade shows. And I'm like, can we get a booth? And like, oh, we've got these booths. And I was like, oh, we'll take the one- Those two that are right across from each other in the aisle. And we'll look like we're a really big company. And so, we print some Varidesk T-shirts and we got our jeans on and we show up at the trade show, and it's all union, so you got to wait for them to come set everything up. We're like, okay, so we're... It's toolless. You don't need any tools. So the union left us alone. We put the stuff together and we were across the aisle. So, we just stood in the middle of the aisle. And then everybody's like in a suit, in a black suit. And I'm like, oh, my God. It's all architects and designers. And I'm like, oh, my goodness... I'm in like apples and oranges here a little bit. But we won Contract Magazine and Building Magazine's hottest new item of the year. People were literally like, oh, my God, I've never seen anything like it. And they said, what's the list and discount on the furniture? And I was like, what do you- What are you talking about? We were, at the time, this is 2013, we're 350 bucks and $50 shipping and handling. So that was our price. We're like, it's $400 delivered. And we were- This is kind of pre Amazon selling every- free shipping. We were learning. We had turned on our little- We had a $99 website selling Varidesks. And we're standing in the aisle, we got our T-shirts on, and nobody's like in a logo T-shirt. We're literally those people. And it just dawned on me. They said we’ve got to double the price, and then you discount it off that. That's how the furniture industry works. And then you’ve got to have rebates for the dealer salespeople. And this is how the game works. You just don't understand the game. And I'm like, oh. So, I drove to some dealers and we showed them the product and we tried to sell through the dealer network, and they were all great, but they were selling like one a week. And I'm like bringing donuts to the sales meeting. And so, I'm 43, probably back then, I'm 56 now. So, I'm like, I'm not doing this. Like this is not a business. And we're still running this beautiful Christmas and Halloween company. So we're like, okay, there's got to be a better way. So the dealers weren't really going to sell it. They said you got to sell it for 800 and then really sell it for 400... 

Chris Powers: Real quick, why weren't they successful selling it? 

Jason McCann: They just had other products to sell. 

Chris Powers: And you just weren't-? 

Jason McCann: We just weren’t high on the priority list, and they were selling Herman Miller Steelcase and these brands, and I didn't know any of the furniture brands either. And everybody I talked to that was normal, like me, I was like, hey, what kind of furniture, office furniture do you have? And they're like, I don't know. Office Depot, Ikea, nobody knows. But everybody in the NeoCon was like, oh, they had all the brands and they knew. But everybody normal, outside the 50,000 people in that world, had no idea what brand of furniture they use. So, it was just kind of dawning on us. We're like, okay. And so, we put a nice big Varidesk on the side .com and put it on there. And nobody was putting their name on any of the furniture except Sean at Lovesack. And we're like, okay, well, we're going to put our name on our furniture. And all of a sudden, we were selling them online. We're like, okay. And I'd gone bust in the Dot Com business. I was really nervous about doing an online business again. And so, we're like, okay, $10 bet on Google and we didn't sell any. And we did a hundred dollar bet on Google Ads and we sold one. We're like, okay, this may work. And one day, we sold three. Dan and I were like, oh, my God, it's a thousand bucks. We're like high fiving down the hall. We're just like, oh, this is so cool. And then we're sitting there during one of these crazy ice storms in an airplane for like four hours on a tarmac at DFW, and we're stuck. Nothing's moving. We're all just sitting there, kind of waiting on a bunch of stuff to happen. And this is 2013, no Wi-Fi. So, we're flipping through a SkyMall magazine over and over and over. And we're like, wouldn't it be funny as hell if we did an ad in SkyMall where somebody was standing? Because we're all sitting. So we'll do somebody standing in SkyMall at a Varidesk. And so, we called SkyMall in Arizona and we're like, hey, how does this work? How do you do an ad? And they're like, it's 30,000 bucks and you can be in for three months. And we're like, okay, let's go for it. So, not every entrepreneur will go for it. We're like, ah, what's worst case? What's going to happen? We do the ad in SkyMall. They're like, we've got a remnant page... they're closing the deal. We got a remnant page, but you got to pay today. I was like, we're like putting it on a credit card or something. We get this ad placed, and we quickly do an ad, standing desk, write some copy. Somebody standing in like the- there was a woman standing in this photo. And it goes to print, and we overnight become the number one selling item in SkyMall's history. It was like lightning in a bottle. And what you realized and it's logical today, you go, well, business travelers were sitting. There wasn't really WiFi on airplanes. Everybody would flip through those magazines. You flip through and it was like that crazy pillow that you reclined or that giant gorilla or whatever it was, like they had all these weird things in SkyMall. And then we did a full page ad because it was a remnant and there's somebody standing. And everybody had kind of read that sitting is the new smoking, runners recognized if you sat all day after you ran, it negated your run. So, we hit lightning in a bottle at that particular moment. People were tearing the page out and saying, hey, my boss asked me to order it. We had one salesperson who was just taking orders, like sitting in a cube in front of me. So we've got this Christmas and Halloween business we're running. We're selling inflatables at Home Depot and Lowe's. And then we've got this little tiny business, and we've got it in Coppell there. And so the giant container would show up, and I think there were 600 Varidesks on a container. And we would go out in the warehouse, and the guys are just unloading it, putting a FedEx label on and walking it to the FedEx trailer. And then they would drive it to the drop off every night. And all of a sudden, FedEx was dropping off an entire trailer every day for us... It was just every day, we're like, oh, my God, we sold- Now we're just producing Varidesks. And when we were at NeoCon, the first ones we called the single and the dual because it held a single monitor and a dual monitor. And we thought that was really clever. And then all the people are like, well, are y'all from Texas? Like, dual, ha-ha-ha. We're like, okay, that's- So we're sitting there like, what do we- We can't call it the single and the dual at some point. And so, somebody said, well, maybe it's just like the professional or something. Like, oh, yeah, I guess we just call it the Pro. And then one was 36 inches and one was 30. And so, we're like, okay, we'll call it the Varidesk Pro Plus 36 and the Pro Plus 30. And that was literally our branding strategy. And you go on Google now. We sold millions of these things. But it was those little ideas and listening to the customers, the Verizon feedback on back pain, their ergonomist giving us tweaks on how to do where the keyboard should be and us not knowing what an ergonomist was but asking questions, for the Container Store here in town to give us feedback, for us to roll the dice at SkyMall or stand there in that trade show aisle, it was like all those things as an entrepreneur, those listening moments, you're just gathering feedback and getting your products and your idea right. And you're honing it in, making all those little changes. When we were shipping in all these FedEx boxes, our stuff was breaking. Because I personally had never shipped that many FedEx boxes. And these things are 50 pounds. We didn't have it quite packaged right. So, we would open them, adjust the cardboard and ship out another one and try to see until all of a sudden, we got it right. So again, making changes to the packaging. And then if you listen to your customers, so all of a sudden, we're getting calls like, oh, I need a Varidesk. And then they would go, hey, do you have like a standing mat or something? An anti-fatigue mat? I'm like, what are they asking for? Anti fatigue mat. What's an anti-fatigue mat? So we had turned up, we were selling some on Amazon. So, I did what everybody does. This is R&D. So we go on Amazon and I was like, okay, look up anti fatigue mats. And all these mats show up. We just ordered them all. There's like 50 of them. We just started ordering everybody's, all these mats. And we got them all. We unpackaged them and like, god, this one smells funny, it looks funny. And like, what are we going to do in the mat business? And Gemmy makes all the pumpkins that you see at Michael's craft store. And that's the same factories that make the soles of running shoes. So, we said, well, let's just create an anti fatigue mat. We know what we want. We want it to be a little bit like this one, a little bit like this one. But we don't love any of them. It's like baby bear. So, we just kind of created our own and got it just right. And this is how the packaging will be. And overnight, we're shipping in mats and become the number one selling mat on Amazon. And I think those moments of listening to your customer as entrepreneurs and throughout life are just so important as you're going through these product ideation processes. But that's how it happens, especially in the beginning and I guess the whole journey. 

Chris Powers: Oh, this is one of the best stories ever. And like one of the through lines is every time you and your partner get to sit on a commercial plane for an extended period of time, great things happen. Y'all weren't manufacturing these yourselves. So I'm assuming there had to be a point when that Sharper Image order came in where you broke the system. Like were you already set up for the capacity to be able to manufacture those as quickly as possible? And where was manufacture? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, so at the time, we leveraged the same factories that were making the Christmas and Halloween product for Gemmy. 

Chris Powers: Which were where? 

Jason McCann: In China and all over. But primarily in the beginning, it was in southern China and then as factories and production in China, this is again in the 2013, 2014, 2015 timeframe, moved throughout China, we were sort of following that... The people that would help us build those products were the same people. We said, hey, find us a factory to make this. And the factories in Asia are very good, especially if you only want to make one thing, they can make a lot of it very, very fast. They're very efficient at production. And so, we were able to lean on them. Today, a lot of our products are actually made in Taiwan. But we were able to lean on those partners. And so, yeah, it was a little bit of like, wow, you're out of stock in the beginning. But I think, I always say that growing pains are much more fun than shrinking pains. And so those were good problems to have. It was like, okay, we've got all these orders. What do we do? How do we keep up with it? At first we were shipping them out with our sample warehouse team. We were just hiring some temps and we're all back there. And on the weekends, we were just kind of loading up and we had the printers going and we just got FedEx in there and everybody just figured it out. And that's kind of how you grind through it. That's not a strategy. That's like a- but it's fun. And then in Coppell, because there's so many third party logistics companies, a lot of warehouses, one of our team members just reached out and said, hey. And they just started calling them and said, yeah, we got some capacity. Yeah, we can ship for you. We're like, sure. So, we just got a bunch- We had printers and we would just print the FedEx labels. And it was a little weird because I walked outside one day with my envelope and there's like 50 FedEx labels. And it looked like an Uber driver at the time. I mean, it was just a kid pulled up in his car and he's like, hey, I'm here to pick up some labels. And I just hand it to this guy and he drives off. And I was like, where's he going? In my mind, I'm like, what am I doing here? And so I went over and saw the warehouse, and all of a sudden, you sort of recognize you got like, we have containers flowing of these things and there's stacks and people's... And we had like five different 3PLs in Coppell going, just shipping out these products. We had emails coming in from people, from our fans now that were saying, hey, do you have- They were showing us how they were jerry rigging monitors to our product. And nobody liked monitor arms or they wanted monitor arms, but they were jerry rigging how they were attached. We're like, oh, we could come up and we got some good patents around how to attach a monitor arm really easy so you could attach it to a desk. And then we leveraged the same factory that makes the monitor arms for 3M had some patents there. So we just took their idea, licensed that, and then we designed a new contraption of it so that you and I could just easily hook on monitor arms. And all of a sudden, we're in the monitor arm business selling millions of dollars and again just started shipping them out, figuring out with all these 3PLs. As we scaled it, we had to get a little more mature and put some guardrails on. We had the company inside of Gemmy Industries. So we've got now this beautiful Christmas and Halloween business that Dan founded back in 1985 and then this little startup. And the beauty of that is you can leverage the internal infrastructure to a point. And then at some point, like you got too many people in the building, the bathrooms, the shower, all the stuff. And you have two different, a little bit, cultures going on there. And so we said, okay, we're going to have to move the team. And so, as the team grew, I think to about 60 employees pretty fast, we moved it across the street. I was like, okay, we're going to sign a lease. We reached out to Lucy over there in Cypress Waters and said, hey, you got any space? And she was like, I looked at your financials. I don't know. You're a startup. I think I'm going to take a Toyota lease versus you guys. So, we got a little tech building across the street, an old Michael's planogram center or something. So we walked in there and just kind of had the vision of just rip out the ceiling, open it to the decks. It's like 20 foot ceiling building, polish, had polished concrete floors. Once we ripped up the concrete, we're like, oh, it looks pretty good. They just kind of glazed over it for a buck a square foot. And we didn't have walls in it. And we had, at Gemmy, had built sort of this modular walls, and it was similar to the way walls are done in factories in China because a factory in China at the time is just a giant concrete box. And when they need an office, they would just, almost think of Legos, build an office out of Legos. And then when they didn't need it because they're going to change the production line, they just moved the Legos. So, we shipped a few of those over. Well, the labor on that is just a beat down. It would take you like 20 hours to build this Lego office. So, we said, hey, why don't we build some of our own walls that could move? So, we built walls that moved. We did the first phone booths that looked like London phone booths. Like, yeah, if you got to call mom in an open plan, and we built these giant London phone booths, metal, heavy, 1500 pounds. Said, yeah, we're going to do that. We wanted standing meeting tables because we do standing meetings. So in the prototype shop, they're just building furniture for us. And we said, okay, if you want- And people say, hey, do you have an office? Or just can I see the Varidesk, the product? They would walk into the office across the street over there on Denton Tap. It's now the Dave and Buster's headquarters. They'd walk in our office and we've got music playing, coffee in the front. Because I've got like a hospitality background. So, the energy is incredible. And they're like, well, I want this. And they weren't describing the desk anymore. They were describing the energy of the space. And I said, we're no longer in the standing desk business. We are literally now monetizing the transformation of culture through workspace design. Like, this is what we're selling – the energy, the culture, the people. This is what we're doing. This is the business that we're entering now. This is our new phase. Because they would walk in and they would literally just kind of whip their hands around and go, I want this. And it was the feel of the space. And this is the early days of WeWork and people trying to figure out what's these amenities, amenity rich environments. And I was not at all from the office space industry or anything like that. I just knew culture and people and building businesses. And we were just building it for us. But it resonated with other companies, and that started to get us into this other journey. So we made full standing desks. Like, hey, can we just buy full desks from you? So, we built, the initial ones were manual. You would lift them up because we're like electric desks are too slow and too expensive. And these manual ones are great. The market had a different opinion and said, no, no, no, we want electric desks. And so, with the electric desk category, we kind of did what Steve Jobs did. He didn't create the MP3 player. So other people were already making electric desks as you think about them today. And so, we bought them and we took them apart, and they would take 45 minutes to assemble, and some took like six hours. We said, could we create an electric standing desk, a height adjustable table that you and I could build in five minutes? Just like a consumer. We always joke that like IKEA is the worst Saturday of your life. Like, I just want to get out of here, and it's too hard to build everything. And we got patents on the assembly of the electric desk, of the ease of it. And then we said, just like a consumer, so the way that Steve Jobs did the iPhone, it just opens, and it's just this beautiful thing, it's like we just mirrored our idea after that. So, our box comes, and it's like a giant pizza box, and you just open it up. And we watched people build it. And we learned over time, it's like, oh, ship it with the top already down. Now I bring in the legs, and they easily attach, and they click right in. It's got a real simple tool that we included. Nobody would include tools then. Now it's common. Include it and a professional would just pop it together, and then you and I just flip it over and you're done. And it's like, oh, this is great. And so now we're selling full electric desks to clients. And suddenly the business just continues to grow in a positive way. And we had corporate clients like Southwest Airlines. We knew somebody over there, and they were like, hey, we're looking at redoing some space. Do you guys want to show us some of... We heard you got some desks, and they had their steel case desks and these other desks, and we shipped in our product into the room, and they said, you guys got to come assemble it and put it together. And I said, I literally said it. I was like, well, you have facilities people. It takes five minutes. You guys build it. Like, no, no, no. What's the design? The workspace design? I was like, what do you mean? You just put them in a row? Like, this is pure ignorance on my part. And you assemble it. And they said, no, no, no, you do it. I was like, okay, we need a workspace designer. Like, who's going to- Somebody needs to do the design. So, we hired a kid out of Texas Tech. Just like somebody knew somebody whose son was like, hey, you're an architect. Okay... So he did a layout and then we went over and assembled the desks. That was like our, quote, installation service. Like, yeah, we install furniture, wearing black T-shirts with the Varidesk logo and we build the desk. We set them up, like six of them. And I was like, okay, so in a corporate environment, we're going to have to do design services and we're going to have to do installation. And these were just us going through this process of, oh, we're like growing up now. We're going to be a different type of company. We're not just going to ship you a desk. Now we're starting to do B2B, and it's a little bit different than where we started our journey. That kind of got us to some other challenges out there. 

Chris Powers: So the common thread is that you didn't- And again, we haven't gone through the entire story, but it seems like the products and the services kind of just kept coming to you, meaning like you just, like you said, we just listened to customers and it became the obvious next thing. As you're scaling that quickly, how would you make it clear to the team that this is going to be a new thing that we do? Was it already, because you were kind of already doing it and hearing it from customers that it didn't require a lot, or would you go into an exec meeting on Monday and say, we are now building clamps to hold monitors, we are now in the selling of culture, we are now in the installing of...? How does that happen when you're constantly being- these light bulbs are going off like this is the natural next step? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, I think in the days when you're... This is probably a period where we're 50 to 100 employees and we're scaling from zero to tens of millions to a hundred million dollar business like in years, like it just happened very, very fast. 

Chris Powers: It was the fastest growing business in Dallas at one point. 

Jason McCann: Yeah, we won SMU's fastest growing, yeah, I think in 2016, 2017 right in that time period. And won, like shocking. We get to the stage there and they keep counting down the numbers. All these people ringing cowbells. I'd never been to the event, and I'm like, oh my God. And we're still up, and all of a sudden, they ring, they keep ringing the bells and go, we need the top 10 to come up on stage, and they hadn't called us yet. So, we go up there, and as I'm walking up there, I lean over to my CFO and Dan and to Craig and Dan. I was like, I'm going to call an audible. And Craig goes, what? I was like, I'm going to call an audible. And he's like, he has no idea. And I don't even know what I'm going to do. I'm just like, God, if we win, though, I'm going to go crazy. And we get up there, and we're standing there, and they count down, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. And I'm standing there with [?] Golf. And we're standing on stage, and Blake, who I just met on stage, and we both say something funny and inappropriate to each other, I think, because we're just like, what are we doing up here? This is ridiculous. And all of a sudden, we win, and I give a very emotional like, oh, my God speech to it. And I said, if you have a business card and you're here tonight, we're going to give you a free Varidesk. And the whole crowd jumps up and runs to my team at their table, and people have their backpacks open and handbags, and they're just giving us business cards. And that Oprah moment right there, I think we gave out 800 desks. We got 800 cards. We drove around DFW, met all these great companies, gave away a whole bunch of furniture, and I recruited people from it and all these things, like that crazy moment when we won. But you're right, those are incredible moments as an entrepreneur. And then it's another thing to get into Monday morning's meeting and try to execute all these different things, because the plays start moving really, really fast. Suddenly you're putting out a whole bunch of cash on bets. You're starting to make shipments out to people. You're getting fraud attacks on your website. You're like, which channel are we going to pick? And so, there's a moment where, as an entrepreneur, you're firing on all cylinders. And so, I think we hit 100 plus in revenue, 120 employees. And all of a sudden, we're having meetings, and like we're having HR challenges, and we're firing people and hiring people, and I don't know everybody's name. And it's a very scary moment. Like, as I'm standing, I'm like, oh, my God, am I about to come off the rails, personally, professionally? Like, am I in the right seat? Can I even do this thing anymore? And so struggling with that. My CFO was amazing. He was like, we got to get like Varidesk University going. Like, we got to hire some leaders, we got to teach people to have a one on one conversation. I’m like, what are you talking about? Just work harder. Sell desks. Like I was- Put the monitor arms on... It's like I was not going to be successful. And so, I was reaching out and I was like, does anybody know anybody that knows like a chief people officer? I'd read all these books... And I'm just like, I don't know if I can do this. Like, we're struggling in the people department. It was probably- we called it people, but it was HR for older companies. And I was like, we're really struggling in it. I was like, does anybody know a real chief people officer? And somebody knew somebody. Again, you reach out to your network and God works in mysterious ways. And they're like, oh, the former chief people officer of Southwest Airlines lives in Coppell. And he said he'd pop in for coffee. And we did tours all the time. And at the same time, my marketing team was like, we need to define our values and... I was like, it's work hard. I was like... Why do we need to worry about it? I mean, you read it in business books and Good to Great and all that stuff, but I'm like, no, we just need to ship today and make sure the money's in the bank. And we're still on like QuickBooks and NetSuite. And we're just like- I mean, it's crazy. And I was like, okay. And so, Karine, who is a consultant who was great helping us create our leadership training program and how to have onboarding, how to have tough conversations. She said, I can help you with your values. And I said, how are you going to do it? She said, just give me a list of people. And I gave her a list of 17 names, and she interviewed all of them and six core values came to the top. And she was going over these words with me, and it was embrace change, and it was raise the bar and create lifelong fans and these words. And I was like, oh my gosh, it's great. And then like, hey, your chief people officer's at the front for a coffee tour. And I was like, okay. So I hit the print on the printer, and I print the thing and run up to the front, and I meet Jeff Lamb, and he was the former chief people officer of Southwest Airlines. And, hey, Jason, he had a country accent, little twang, a great guy. And he comes on a tour, and I do the same thing. We go to the coffee bar, and the music's playing, and he's looking around, and I'm talking about people and culture and shared kind of the journey. And he's asking all these great questions, and he's walking around with me. And I said, hey, I just got a question for you. Like, at Southwest Airlines, I think y'all, I Googled, you have like 70,000 employees. Like, how did they maintain the culture? Because I'm like- we're talking about culture and people, and I'm like coming off the rails here. And we've only met each other. We've been together for 40 minutes now. We're like one cup of coffee in. And I think I just hit the vulnerability message pretty early on with Jeff, because he's just a very humble, trusting person. And he probably recognized I need a little bit of help. And he was just- And he goes, well, at Southwest Airlines, it's all based on your values. And if you hire and fire and celebrate to your values and use that as the filter, the culture is ultimately the DNA that's created from that, from all those people based upon having the same values. I said, Jeff, I've got my values on the printer that Karine just helped us do with the 17 people. And I go, would you just take a look at them? And we sat down, and he's got a meeting or whatever coming up, and we're wrapping up, and I'm going for the hard close and trying to- And he's reading them. He's like, these are good. Like, this is good. And he goes, you're on it. You're on the right track. And so he goes, I live down the street. I'll come back by. I was like, thank you. Come by. And he said... really good coffee. I was like, yeah, coffee's free. Just come on by. So he came by a few more times, and really, we talked about culture and people, and he said, have you heard of Patrick Lencioni? And I was like, no. And I'm literally texting the name L E N C I O N I. And he said, have you- And I said, I've read Good to Great and Zappos and all these books on people and culture. He's said, you need to read his book, Hungry, Humble, Smart, and the Ideal Team Player and building an ideal team or building teams and having meetings, like Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I'm like, oh my God. So I literally read all these books that he gave me before I saw him. And he comes back and I'm talking about Lencioni and he's like, okay, I've done my homework. And he said, do you need some help around here? I was like, oh yeah, do you know anybody? He goes, well, what about me? And I said, I can't afford you. He's like, I’ll come, I'll help you. Let's do this. So he joined as COO and ultimately became president and was really just, along with Craig and Dan, just added foundation and some discipline to the business and the culture and helped us solidify a lot of things in that and to help us sort of navigate. And so, it was just a great chapter. I think Jeff was with me for about six years before he was called to go run Lionheart, which breaks my heart, but I'm excited for them. But it was just great. You start to recognize if you get the right people in the boat and you're all rowing in the same direction and it starts to work, like a lot of great things can happen. And so that kind of got us into buildings.

Chris Powers: Before we get into buildings, so do you remember, he shows up his first day on the job. Were there things that he came with that were like, we are going to stop doing these things immediately? How did he integrate himself into the process to create that change? Like, what do you remember from those first weeks, months, year of him taking that role? 

Jason McCann: Well, I think, there's a natural thing that happens because you've got a team, somewhat of a team in place. And so now you're saying, hey, we're going to split up some of the roles here. And so, I think that's a human nature for each of us as leaders to give up something that you think you're doing a good job at and driving to kind of say, hey, we're going to allow this person to help run some of these other areas. And so, there were conversations around that that weren't easy to have. But Jeff's humble and I think kind of came in and I think like great leaders listening and asking questions and trying to understand what's working and what's not. And I know he was on one of your earlier podcasts, and so to hear his story of how he worked for some of the greats out there, like real CEOs. I'm a CEO, but he's like he worked for some greats, alongside them. And so, to go in and really help the team start to think about putting the boulders in. I described it as I was like shoveling sand, and growing up in Galveston, you shovel sand. But Jeff kind of came in and put some big boulders in place. And so, we were able to start thinking about, okay, let's look at the ERP system and maybe there are some bigger- there's maybe another step that we could do with our infrastructure. And the team had done, he and Craig had done some incredible work around operations and just solidifying how are we going to do that and re-looking at those things. And so, I think coming in and listening and then starting to put some big boulders in place, helping make some personnel changes and upgrading some of the talent and kind of making some of those harder calls. Because there's certain people that kind of get you to here, and then there's another group that kind of gets you to there. And so, I think coming in and starting to think about departments and a couple things on the process side that I was probably not going to get to and it's not the way my brain works. So I've never been a part of a giant company. I mean, we've done hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of sales, but I've never ran a multi billion dollar company with all these things. So a few of those foundational pieces in the org structure to get right and to kind of challenge like let's talk about a monthly strategic meeting and how to have it versus I'm just- I think I'm like in days, I'm in hours like the way my brain works, and he's talking okay, over the next year, over the next three years and starts to help roadmap some of those conversations out, where to your point in the beginning, I'm like reacting, responding to the market needs and demands like a trader almost and flipping a trade and doing a deal. So it sort of helps build a longer term vision for the business. 

Chris Powers: How did he work specifically with you?

Jason McCann: In my mind, I couldn't believe he was working with me because he was so good and so smart and so it's kind of one of those, he's only a little bit older than me, but way wiser. And so, but never- he was as Lencioni talks about vulnerability based trust and humility and leaning into that, because he's got so much of that, there's an immediate trust factor that's built. And so, there's no ego, political, all that, there's none of that stuff. So that's the Radical Candor if you've read that book, like that's how it is with him. And so, he was able to just say it like it was and to call me out and that iron sharpens iron and just sometimes it was hard, but just to say it like it was. And it also helped sort of challenge my thinking of how do we do it so it'll last beyond this year. Like how will it be in five years or ten years? Some of those bigger thinking moments. So, we literally sat across from each other like 15ft away. I'd see him every single day. And so, we had a regular interaction. There was yin and yang and all that stuff and with Craig and my other leaders too. But it was great. Where Dan as chairman is running another company and he's got other stuff and we were doing creative ideation on product ideas every couple weeks or whatever and dreaming, in that dream state, Jeff's got that tenacity, discernment type stuff and to get stuff done and drive it through. 

Chris Powers: Well, you hear this storyline in very- companies that do really well. Like maybe the most notable in our generation is like Zuckerberg when Cheryl came on. How does it work when you're the CEO, self admittedly you're kind of like, I need a ton of help, a wise sage comes in that reports to you, how does that dynamic work? Obviously you're the leader, but I would imagine in some ways you look up to your COO. So how does the communication work in a relationship like that? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, I think... Well, I think being completely honest all the time and being very comfortable calling it out and saying what you're struggling with and what your ideas are in a space where you can put it out there, I think is very healthy. And I don't know that you realize that, just like your relationship with your spouse, if you can have that relationship of total comfort and vulnerability, and hey, here's what I'm dealing with and here's what I'm thinking about. And you start to go through the natural dance of I know when I'm in the creative flow state, I know when I'm in the heads down state, I need to just focus. I also know when I'm personally very stressed. And I think you start to realize that with people that you build relationships with, with your senior leaders, that they can start to feed off of you and recognize during those conversations, like, hey, you're not- we're not ready to talk about this, or we need to talk about this. And so, I think that's how I would describe the relationship, and it evolves over time. And so, there are moments when it's really good, and we got hit with COVID in the early part of our relationship or in the first third of it, and it's hard. And how do you deal with the stresses that hit the business and you personally and all the stuff that's going on, and then we're also all dealing with life, parents and other things that are going on. And to be able to also have those kinds of conversations with people that you work with, I think ultimately is part of life's journey and helps us all get through the good times and the bad. 

Chris Powers: We'll get to Covid in a second. So, you now have 300 products. So how do you think about- I'm assuming at this point not all 300 are just continuous customer insights, maybe they are. How do you think about innovation versus just making one product a little bit better or just leaving some stuff alone? With 300 products, there's got to be a lot going on there. So how do you think about your product line? What stays, what needs to be innovated on? And how much time do we need to spend developing new things? 

Jason McCann: Yeah. You hit these maturation cycles, and you could call it the innovator's dilemma, if you're the book fan out there, where you do hit pockets of like, okay, you've got- I mentally operate under the mindset of we got to innovate or die. That's just how the game works. Got to continue that. But to have 300 products, but know that 80 to 100 of them drive the majority of the revenue. Because now you're talking about, oh, you have a soft seating collection because it needs to round out the portfolio because we're going to install a thousand projects this year. But if I was just a soft seating company, I would be broke. Like, there's not enough margin and profit, and it's not big enough for us. Us to continue to know that we are the innovators in sit stand height adjustable, but then everybody started to come to us and talk about seating. And the innovator part, Dan and I kind of joked, well, you shouldn't sit down. So our first chair was like a really hard stool. It was just a metal stool. And then people complained about it and said, this is the worst chair. But Chip and Joanna thought it was great. That's kind of one of those metal stools. So, we added a pad to it that would magnetize and then ultimately a back. But now, recognizing that we're a part of the office conversations, like how do we curate and create a seating line? And so, we've kind of got a broad seating line. But my ideation team, Hannah and her group, are now, what is the next sit stand chairs that we can come out with? What's the next thing in height adjustment? They're like literally coming up with items inside these categories. Our desks, we had clients come in, and so we've got our core product that we sell a lot of, just like black T-shirts or whatever, kind of your basic core line. But then we've had clients ask for it and our team come up with other products. And so, the latest big desk, we launched the big L desks that wrap around your entire space. Because we had a lot of people say, I want my whole thing to go up and down. Well, the team cracked the code on that. And so, we were doing so many projects. We've done about $50 million plus worth of projects in the last couple, few years here. I'm sorry, almost $500 million worth of the projects, because we'll do over a thousand this year. But as we're doing all these projects and people were coming back to the office post Covid, they started to ask, could we have- We want cubes. And we don't sell an office cube. But that listening point right there, you start to do the research. Now you say, that's a $2 billion industry plus. So, my team went out. We're like, we're going to innovate that category. So now taking categories that we can reinvent and attack those, and then we start to retire ones. So now you take AI and the data tools and you're like, you shouldn't be in this category anymore. It's not profitable. So, there's some that we're just going to either exit or partner with other companies or we'll sell their product, which is a little bit different. But it's just part of our maturation of the brand, of the journey that we're on. And so, we're innovating where we think we can win. We're partnering where it might make more business sense now, which is different than the way I would have operated back in the mat days and trying to look at the business and go, okay, what does it look like in the future? We still sell primarily direct. And so that's got its blessings and its curses out there. In some aspects, it's amazing. In some, it's very challenging. 

Chris Powers: Why? 

Jason McCann: Well, you think about, there's an entire- It's just like the automotive industry and Elon. So we're just like Tesla. So, we're as... We're not quite that big. But back in 2013, think about it, his model, he said, hey, I'm not going to have auto dealerships. I'm going to sell direct. Well, Texas has rules against that, and other states have got rules against dealers or you have to have a dealer network. And because we couldn't get- We weren't successful in that vertical, we said, well, we're just going to have to be scrappy, just like Elon. We're going to be like Elon. He's obviously been a little more successful than us, but we're both here in Texas. But we're still huge. And so, we said, we're going to sell direct. And so, as we started to go through that process, we actually, in 2018, 2019, said we're going to open up dealers, or I'm sorry, we're going to open up showrooms across the country, similar to what Elon was doing. And we built out a strategy. We're going to rebrand the company from Varidesk to Vari. We're going to like go for it. And we just said that way we are going to be right with the customer. We're going to be in their markets and be closer to them, and that would allow us to compete so that you have a relationship with us and you can touch and feel the product. Again, this is 2018, 2019. And as we entered that model and we realized that would be a competitive strategy for us, we thought that that would be very good. And then obviously Covid hit and changed it. But the idea that you can have a direct relationship with a customer base is very important. I think that's why the dealers are successful. But I think the world's continuing to change and Amazon's disrupting a lot of things and Wayfair and others, and at Vari, we're trying to do that as well. 

Chris Powers: I'll pick on the product just because you mentioned cubes. When I think, when I just hear that on the surface, I'm like, how innovative can you get? It's a cube. And maybe it's different for each product. But can you walk me through just a little bit how you identify a legacy product that's been around forever and you say, we're going to do that and we're going to innovate on it and do it better? And also maybe at the end say like how long that process would take. Like, what is the process a Vari team would go through to get to something that you approve of and say, okay, we're good to go?

Jason McCann: Yeah. So the team, we started to work with other companies selling their cubes. And so, they went out and we said, hey, we've got clients that are asking for cubes. And so we worked with them and we installed them in projects. And then when we sat down and talked to these cube manufacturers, they were like, well, there's 1800 parts and it takes six weeks to train. It's going to take a 14 week lead time, and which color? And it was just, oh my goodness. Like, well, it's space division. The top selling height is 52 inches for seated privacy. Okay, let's simplify this down to its core. If you own an office building, you've got a bunch of cubes in it, and you say, hey, move them. Oh my. Everybody that's owned an office building or a company is like, it's a 500 to a 1000 to 1500 bucks. Everybody in the dealer world loves it when you want to move your cubes because they're going to charge you a fortune. And we said, what if we created a product that you could move? Any install crew could come in. Could it be less than 10 parts total? Could it just be in a simple size? Could it allow power and data to go through it? And we walked in and just attacked it, simplified it, stripped it down to its core and launched QuickFlex Cubes and said, okay. And everybody calls it systems furniture, but we said, we're just going to try it, just see what happens. And we got it down to seven parts and you and I can build anything in minutes. Like, it's simple and it clicks together. And we got some patents on it. Clicks together. And then the latest in power integration, once your electrician attaches the whip, there's just a quick connect system that just clips them all together and they run the- And you just pop the little panel. It's so simple. And so, we just start showing it. We've sold millions of dollars’ worth of these, and it's starting. And so, it's not a billion dollar category for us yet, but I'd love for it to be 100 million. You need a big order of them. Come on. We're bringing it. But we're installing them and it's working and it's been simple. And then what happens is it future proofs space. Because sometimes you're like, hey, we need to expand it, we need to change it. We need to... It's simple. It's 36 inches or 30 inches or 42. You just order more. We'll come in and just adjust the space for you, put soft seating at the end. Think of it as like just creating space division and creating spaces with partitions. Cubes is what normal people would call it, but that's what it is. Same thing with the walls. Our walls are seven and a half feet tall. What we were trying to do was just say everybody talks about demountable walls, but then they all kind of wink and go, but you can't actually move them. It costs so much money for the contractor to come back in and move these things. We said, well, what if we could create a wall that you and I could move? Now you’ve got to be a little bit taller, but you just pop the panel off. It's got clicks. There's no tools required. They're in 36 inch lengths. Got a door. Now, it doesn't address the ceiling. And if you need a soundproof room, that's sheetrock and you spend 250 grand or 20,000 a room, like that's a different product. But we've created for 70% of spaces products that work. And we don't need to be 100% of everything is how I think about things and our team does. But that's how we innovate it. Our big challenge now is can we get the word out? If we had 200 dealers across the country, they'd all start selling our cubes and overnight we'd be Hayworth or Steelcase. But that's the challenge of us selling it direct. We've got to go to our current fan base, build awareness that we've launched this new product, do our best to earn their trust and come install it in their space. And if they love it and they go, oh, this is great, and now we're the standard and they start using us with all their spaces. So that's the nature of being a small or medium business. I guess we’re a medium sized business... Big would be a billion. We're not quite there... we're hundreds of... we're going to get there. 

Chris Powers: We can talk about COVID and I think it's... 

Jason McCann: We don't have to. 

Chris Powers: Well, I think it's obvious that being told don't go to work and never go to the office again, we can gloss over. That was probably not the greatest messaging. Well, a few questions. We are in 2026 now. What is the future of work right now? I think we're kind of past the like, is work going to happen? How's it going to happen? How is it really shaken out? Where do we stand right now? 

Jason McCann: So most clients that we do business with are three to five days a week in the office with a lot more flexibility and change. On our office portfolio, they want much longer term leases than they did just a couple years ago. We're talking seven to 12 year leases versus two to three year leases. And we're not really sure what we're going to want. We were doing spaces that were 5,000 square feet, 7,000 square feet. We are now touring and talking to clients about 35,000 square foot spaces on 10 year deals. And the market is shifting very, very quickly back to sort of we recognize the benefits of having people together for some period of time. We need spaces for collaboration, for connection, for culture, for communication. But we also need spaces for concentration. And so how do we create those spaces? AI will disrupt things and how does it- But I think the idea of a space being flexible, that if builders and designers can limit the amount of TI dollars, tenant improvement dollars that go into a space, how much of the space can be the actual bones of a space versus can be flexible for teams. How do we incorporate all the hospitality stuff that's happening out there and all the benefits of event type space, of food and catering and entertainment, all inside the ecosystems and the walkability factors and the fit well certification, like all of those things, health and wellness in the workspace, both mental and physical, I think are all continuing to move in a very positive direction. And so we see it as furniture people, you kind of go, wow, we just doubled our total addressable market. Because when you're at home now, you don't want to be crunched over your laptop on the kitchen table, although that's an option. But you do have to kind of have an ergonomic setup if you're going to make people have some days at home. And then when they're in the office, they got to, hey, these are the areas we're going to be together. These are the quiet zones. This is heads down space. Like all of that's going to happen. So, I think all that churn in the marketplace is actually good for the innovators. It's probably not great for the people that are afraid of disruption and change, but for brands like Vari and products and developers like Kali and all these people that are like cracking the code and what John's doing in Fort Worth, all those spaces that they're creating, they get it and they're really leaning into it in a big way. And these developers that are coming in and saying, okay, we have an opportunity to really be a part of the future of the transformation of cultures and communities, and work is a piece of that. And so, the idea that we're working to be productive, that things are happening, but also that human interaction happens. And I think a lot of that research came out and said, hey, the place that you meet somebody different than you, that speaks another language, that may make more money than you, they can teach you or you can help bring up, may be at a university, may be at your church, it's probably at work, where you meet your significant other. Like, these are the moments. So we as entrepreneurs and developers and all the- we're creating those spaces for humans to interact and serve each other and help each other. And I think that's what's happening right now versus everybody staring at their phone and being at home and in PJs. Like that whole movement back is definitely happening. Now, DFW, you know this better than I do, I mean, we're benefiting from that. We are the tip of the spear as far as that's going. Our team at Cushman's, like the leashing activity, I mean, I just came out of our leashing here. It's amazing. I wish I owned another building, and maybe we will. But the idea of that I think is all very healthy and to walk around. I was in our building at South Lake today and I'm just walking around, people having lunch, some people are just chilling on their phone. People are talking. It's like the energy is incredible. And so, if you get that right, I think that's just good for society. And so I think the people that are creating buildings like that and spaces like that and environments like that, whether it's repurposing class B to class A or the big risk takers that are tearing down stuff and building some incredible things in the future, like that's what it's going to be. I think that's all going to be positive.

Chris Powers: Moving laterally real quick, you manufacture a lot. You said tariffs earlier. The narrative is reindustrialization of America. Is that really like from a manufacturer's standpoint, how much of that is lip service versus you can actually really see a world where America becomes a major manufacturing hub again? 

Jason McCann: Pre-Covid, if you were to tour the factories that produce furniture, everywhere, it was very manually driven. Post Covid, I was over in Asia touring factories literally right after Covid. I've never seen so many robots in my life. Instead of a production line having 400 workers on it building furniture for everybody that you know of, all the brands in the US, they would have 40 workers and robots everywhere. And they said they have an issue where people don't want to work in the old factories, the old type. So, your stereotypical of what you think is a factory is probably closer to what you see pictures of what Elon's doing. It's got to be closer to that with robotics and people building things, then it's possible. It's not going to be people making a low wage that are doing a repetitive task over and over and over again. That's not what the future of it is. If you go down to Mexico and you see the factories that are down there, they're actually all Chinese and Taiwanese owned. It's just a very different thing because they know production very, very well and they know how to build production lines. But it's all German engineering, robotics and Japanese robotics and US robotic firms. Like it's going to be those things. The tariffs were very disruptive. I always say, it's companies like us that are importing products that pay the tariffs. And it's millions and millions of dollars that overnight everybody's paying. So you can't- We went around, I went to all the factories in the US, and they couldn't find workers to assemble furniture, struggling with it, and they're competing with Amazon delivery wages in these factories. But they were too- They weren't automated enough. And it's expensive for robots. But it's coming. Like the robots are coming. 

Chris Powers: So it's coming to America? 

Jason McCann: It'll just be very different. And I think it'll- But I think we benefit from a global supply chain versus we have to make everything. Because it's got to be different. But it is. Elements of it are coming. 

Chris Powers: There's a guy named John Arnold that did a podcast on Patrick's Invest like the Best the other day and basically similar story to what you said. He had just gotten back from a tour throughout China, and he just- He was just highlighting how unbelievable manufacturing actually is over there. Like as Americans, I think he was just really driving the point home, I certainly took it home, he goes, it's almost a miracle. 

Jason McCann: I've never seen so many robots. I've never seen so many. And they're little tiny ones like the size of this mic boom. Like little tiny ones welding and tacking. And the humans are just quality control. 

Chris Powers: Well, and their ability to spin up a factory and get it in production quickly. 

Jason McCann: So I'm optimistic there are companies, but I think it's going to have to be joint ventures and stuff with global entrepreneurs too that have expertise. It can't be in isolation. We've got to have global partners to produce different things or to bring in the automation and to learn from each other. And I think that'll be healthy for the world. But there's going to be some downside. And we're navigating through a lot of the challenges there. 

Chris Powers: Okay. The thing I'm very interested to know, and really from paying attention from the outside, some of the research, I think Covid kind of spawned this. But you have a unique leadership style, it appears, and I wanted to just kind of pick that apart a little bit. I think we can start with what did Covid instill in you and require you to become that you weren't prior to Covid? We'll start there.

Jason McCann: I think, I went into Covid and... when everybody went home and there was probably 10 of us in the office, the people that didn't want to work at home or just felt like we needed to be together, and we took that moment and I was literally up every night at 2:00am and I just hired 50 people, just opened up 12 showrooms across the country, just put $15 million in a TV bet for our rebranding campaign that we're going to deliver furniture to your office in less than 30 days. And Varidesk is now Vari. And we're on Bloomberg and we've got all these offices. And I was like, I'm going to go broke again. And it was a very dark period. And at 2am every night my wife finally said to me, well, if you're afraid, I can only imagine how your people feel. And at that moment, that crisis creates clarity moment happened. And I realized that as an introvert, because it's in my head constantly spinning, oh, I just run multiple plays and best case scenario, worst case scenario, I'm literally running. I was like, I’ve got to talk to my people. Lencioni today would call it the chief reminding officer. And I didn't know that term back then, but it was like I started daily emails to the team and I started talking about here's our revenue number and here's what we're trying to get to. And this is... I would never talk about that stuff. I was just like, sell more. We're going to be- put the thermometer up, 100% temperature. Let's- fever's good. And now I'm like, oh my goodness. And I started all hands Zoom meetings every week. And I'm like, what am I going to tell everybody? Like, I'm looking around the room and I'm like, oh, they're looking at me. I gotta actually talk. 

Chris Powers: The thermometer bit's not going to work anymore. 

Jason McCann: Yeah, hey, everything's great. SkyMall, rip the page out. Like at that moment. So in a 48 hour period, we pivoted our TV ads and said, hey, we're no longer- we just said we're your work from home partner and we did our first discounts online because I was just not a big couponing discount person. And I was like, we got to do something. We’ve got to survive. Like you’ve got to survive first. At that moment, I realized there's hundreds of families counting on the decisions I make, and you don't take that lightly. And so, I just started sharing stories and you would call those rallying cries today. But one of the stories, what my dear friend was going through SARS or H1N1 in Hong Kong years ago and he told me a story and I shared it with the team. And I said we've got to keep rowing until the wind catches our sails. And that became our thing, like keep rowing, and I'd say, keep rolling. And you weren't fist bumping or anything, you weren't touching anybody. And Edmund was like holding his hand over his heart when he'd walked down the hall, and I was like, oh my God, we're like human again. And people started bringing in oars to the office and it was like hashtag keep rowing, and we're signing them and it was like okay, we're going to get through it. And so I think as a leader, the first thing I did was you got to do something and you got to communicate it to the team. And I think I just leaned into forcing myself to over communicate, and I'm not perfect at it, but I try. And so that was probably the first thing that happened. We also said, well, if Asia's 12 weeks ahead of us on the COVID curve, what are they doing? This was back when nobody- 2 meter distance based design. I was like, well, all of our walls move and all of our desks move, like got power drops from the ceiling. Shit, we just- I told our architect, our Texas Tech grad, I was like, hey, our space planner, I was like lay it out. And the team started laying out a new layout, and then I was just talking about it on LinkedIn, and I wasn't really on LinkedIn back then. So I was like everybody kept asking me the same thing, are you wearing masks? Are you doing a vaccine? What are you guys doing? I was like God, if they're all thinking this, then everybody's thinking. So I just started putting it out there. It's like, hey, just put it into the world, whatever... just do my best and good things will happen. And so, I shared it, and I was like hey, we spread out everybody and now we can all come back. And it turned into other CEOs like oh, we can come back now. And it we started to monetize pain. You start to turn that into a business solution. So, I think as a leader, I over communicated, as a leader, I leaned into like trying to stay in growth mindset of okay, as dark as it is, it's going to be okay and get us through and let's just figure out another way. And so those were the things that I sort of started with and worked myself through. 

Chris Powers: How did you make the decision to wear all black? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, I think in the- When I was in my I would call it late 30s, I was struggling with a lot of stuff, and so I would go into the closet and for some reason have like anxiety in the closet. And I don't know why, but I would just be like, oh, what am I going to wear today? And you kind of- back then, you're like, okay, whatever was at Costco probably, mustard pants and a black shirt was like my favorite outfit. But then you can't wear it every day. And so then I would mix it. It was causing me stress. And one day I started kind of wearing it on Monday and Friday. I was like, I'm going to wear the same outfit twice in a week and see if people notice. Like it was an anxiety thing. I was like self conscious of it. And I realized I just felt like this was my uniform. Like when I put on this all black outfit, it was just like I was, one, comfortable. If I spilled coffee on it, I wasn't- if I was sweating, I wasn't worried about it. Like I just- like, oh, I can just wear this, so I can do anything. And I started wearing it all the time. And... I said I got to simplify my life. I was drinking too much... And I was traveling back and forth to Asia all the time and going off the rails I think in my mind. And it was just too much jet lag and too much pressure. And I just said, you know what, I'm just going to simplify my life. So I started wearing all black. Right after I turned 40, literally, I tried to quit when I turned 40 and I didn't. But my birthday's end of September, but November the 13th, on a Friday the 13th in ’09, I quit drinking. And I just felt like by simplifying my life and wearing all black, it took out all the decisions in the morning and I have no anxiety in that. Like my biggest stress, like today I was like, am I wearing a T-shirt on his podcast or the collar? That was literally the only stressful thing. I was like, [?] long sleeve, short sleeve or the collar? I was like, I'm going to wear a collar for him, for his podcast here today. And I said, and the jeans fit. And I got five pair of page jeans and I got a couple different- Like it's a pretty simple layout and it works and it drives my wife crazy that I can pack in five minutes. And then when I quit drinking, I lost like 20 pounds in a month or maybe two months. But it was like- And I didn't change anything. I just quit drinking and I quit snoring at night and I slept better. And then I realized... And you start reading and I hadn't- Craig, my CFO, turned me onto the stoic readings and all these things. And I was like, once you start getting into the simplification of things and you realize other people have been through these journeys and you start to simplify and really focus on what matters, your relationship with your spouse is better, your kids are better, your friends, you're a better leader, you're a more present CEO. And so I think this just helps me. I'm like, game on, ready. And then I read like Steve Jobs. I was like, oh yeah, Steve Jobs did it, I can do it. It was like it validated at the beginning, but now this is just me. So it just works. 

Chris Powers: What does a week look like for you? Because, and maybe this was something Jeff said, I'm trying to remember, but you're a very- you're like a people first CEO. When you think about a week, how do you know maybe a week, a month, a day, how do you know you've done your job? Irrespective of the numbers are the numbers and we're growing, we're doing that, how do you think and approach the company each day? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, I do the management by walking around the [?] I think was like... And I don't know if that was like in my MBA class or my undergrad or I read it in Good To Great or something. But just watching my mom in her hair salon and working for her. But I always- There was something about walking around and engaging with people. Even as an introvert, I can feel energy of people and I can feel when I think you're having a good day or a bad day. I can feel their energy. I just can feel it. And what I realized is I think I'm helping people when I talk to them. And maybe it was like when my mom was doing people's hair and they just felt better when they left her chair. And so, I think for me, I want to walk around and take care of people and help them. And so, to walk around every day and several times a day and do the energy and talk to them... there's a tour of a building and one of the CEOs is going to be there and I don't know who he or she is and they may want to lease a space from us, I love to be there and just feed off the energy and talk to them about what they're trying to do and accomplish and see if I can help. And so, to be a part of helping my team be successful and take out, I think my job as a CEO is to knock down all the silos, to reduce all the friction points. If I get people and strategy right, oh my God, then I've done my job. And some days I haven't done my job, but I'm doing the best I can. In my mind, I’m like, can we navigate in a very challenging market? Can we continue to, on the battlefield of commerce, just like every CEO battles in different ways and the highs and lows of that. And then on the people side, am I recruiting great talent? Am I growing great talent? Am I doing my part to help them build the lives of their dreams, and what are their dreams? And to get to know them and do what I can. And I try to email them on their birthday, because you don't get to see everybody. And so, I send them a note, or hey, happy Vari-versary on your third year. And just via email. I used to write notes, but that's too much. 

Chris Powers: Do you have like a CRM or you have something that lets you know who's... 

Jason McCann: It's in my calendar. I've got everybody's birthdays in there. And so, yeah, it's on there. Poor Pam, my director, she's got it all in there. We pull it from the HR. But I've got everybody in there. And so Edmond’s was today, I think, and I sent him an email. 

Chris Powers: Is the walk random? Do you know where you're going to walk around that day? 

Jason McCann: Well, in our building, it's 42000 square feet. So it's my one- I've got some loops there. Yeah, but I kind of- it's random, it's throughout. And I kind of just feel when I need it. I think if you've read the Creative Act by Rick Rubin, he talks about getting in the flow state. And so I know when I'm in my flow state and I need to just be heads down working on something. I'm in this moment of I'm trying to grind through a project there. And for me it's early in the morning. Sometimes I get up early. This morning was at 4:15, and I had this painting in my head. I was doing some just kind of- I'm starting out a painting to raise a little money and so just trying to work on that. And then I was just like in this, sort of working through some financials and Craig and I were working through the numbers and I was like, okay, I'm in this really cool state here this morning. And then I popped out. I knew we had a big tour. So you're in that. But I haven't talked to my team yet. Like I haven't actually got to walk. But then just, so I'll get to see them later today and tomorrow morning, and just I'll be able to walk through. Most of my team is physically in the building Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, sales is in Monday, Friday's a little light. It is what it is in today's world, but I like it. And I talk to people and some are random, and some are a fist bump, some are just quiet... And so, you just, you feed off the energy of the people. And we've also, we're in a multi tenant building now because we own- in Coppell. And so I'm down there at the coffee bar. So, we intentionally put collision points. So, we have a coffee bar in the lobby. And so, the Gap team's rolling in and QXOs rolling down and you just kind of bump into some of the people and just see what's going on in the marketplace today. And the CEO from the Gap, actually I didn't get to meet him, but he stopped in yesterday to rally his team, and I'm like, okay, so he's doing it, I'm doing it. So I think as leaders, people feed off the energy of you and you have that choice. And so you can be heads down, walk the same stairwell, buzz to your office, heads down all day. I kind of think of it as you've got to lead from the front. You're on the battlefield in the arena with your team, you're back to back with everybody, and you're fighting like mad to grow. And they see that. And as an introvert, I also know I've got to have moments to recharge. And so, if I need quiet time, I'm fairly close to my house. I can like chill out. I don't have a lot of busy meeting lunches. And I try to have enough, just I might have lunch with my wife and just chill for a few minutes or meditate or something. But those are my sort of moments to recharge. 

Chris Powers: Do you have a weekly meeting, like an exec meeting? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, so I have an 8:45 with my executive leadership team every day for 5 to 15 minutes just a quick touch base. And that's the Lencioni model of just, hey, just a quick little, hey, anybody... so there's no bullshit email that's been flying around that, hey, don't forget, we got a big tour. Like, it's a little quick touch point. We have a staff meeting for about 90 minutes on Tuesdays. It's kind of our sort of deeper dive. A monthly strategy meeting. That's kind of our rhythm for my leadership team. And I'm coaching up some others, so others are coming into certain meetings now. And so, we're going through that process there. And so we're coaching them through some other means. But that's kind of my big three. 

Chris Powers: It's a five to 15 minute? 

Jason McCann: 8:45 every morning. 

Chris Powers: Is that structured or is it kind of just go around the room...? 

Jason McCann: Just go around the room... Yeah, real quick. I think it was part of the Table Group did some work with us. And it's just the way that Lencioni kind of rolls out meetings. And it was like, okay. And it's almost like when I waited tables at Papa Dough or Chili's back in the day, it was like the red book. And you'd sit with the GM, the shift change. And you're in there when I used to own a restaurant, nightclub back in the day. And there's a shift change between the two. And the cooks are coming in and leaving. And don't forget we're running low on shrimp and tonight's special is whatever. And you’ve got to sell that Papa Dough’s special and hit your quota and maybe get the $25 gift card. I'm like, come on, man, let's get this. I'm going to sell that lobster at lunch. And so you did the shift change, and it's kind of like that. And I think something happens in the meeting, so we'll- and during Covid, we learned how to do it with Teams, with Zoom there for a little bit. Now it's on Microsoft Teams. So like this morning, I'm at South Lake, four or five of my team, Craig and everybody in the crew, Pam and everybody's in the boardroom and a couple other people are patching in. But five or six of us jump on, double check, okay, don't forget, bye. And if you're not in town, you're not on. But that's a quick way, a quick touch base. Anything major. And hey, we need to talk about something, we can get five minutes together, and rarely it lasts 15. 

Chris Powers: And then you have a monthly 90 minute meeting? 

Jason McCann: Oh, we have a- So a weekly staff meeting for 90 minutes every Tuesday. That's the exec team only. Every once in a while, there might be a- but we might have a, hey, we've got 30 minutes. We want to deep dive on something. There may be some guests in there. And then the strategy meeting, so we kick off in the morning with a big group on our financial forecasting. Kind of there's a big rev meeting in the morning, kind of rolls into sort of a deeper revenue team. There's a little bit more smaller group. And then we roll into an ELT strategy meeting. So it's kind of almost a full day of that once a month. And we're working through. I'm still working through how to make that better. 

Chris Powers: What's an ELT? 

Jason McCann: The Executive Leadership team. And I actually didn't know what that acronym was, so thank you. Way back when, they're like, oh, you're part of the ELT. And I'm like, what is ELT? I think big companies say it. 

Chris Powers: They’re like, you're supposed to know this. 

Jason McCann: Yeah, I didn't know. I actually didn't. So hopefully that's not just our acronym. 

Chris Powers: Do you have a way that you run your 90 minute meeting? Does it run the same way every time? 

Jason McCann: So, now some models will say you roll in and there's no agenda. And what are the top three things you're working on? We worked that one for a while; that one didn't quite work for us. There's other models we've tested. We're in a model right now going through sort of here's our key, the boulders, the big projects that we're working through right now and there may be a couple updates there on the big two or three things for this quarter, those initiatives. What are some of the key performance indicators, those KPIs that we just need to double check on. Are we in line? And some weeks, it's a lot of red, and some, there's a lot of green and just kind of double checking, is there anything in here we need to dive into, and then we've got some free flow in there in that 90 minute session there. 

Chris Powers: Are you a big goal setter like for the company? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, it's been a little tricky, I would say, the last couple years just with a couple shifts and tariffs and a couple things sort of beyond your control but trying to really lay out sort of here's the big thing we want to knock out this year and next year. And I'm working through sort of a three year with my team right now, redoing it. It's curveballs, but it's okay. 

Chris Powers: Are the three boulders that you are working on, are they always like pretty obvious at this point? 

Jason McCann: No, no, I think AI was a big one that wasn't even on the radar...a year ago, it was just kind of penciling in. So we just had it yesterday, a big update there this week on our monthly and it was just to see. And that was not in... that was not obvious. You have sort of product key strategy things, if we can innovate these categories and something. And then on the people side, some stuff we're working through. And so, to kind of go through those probably three or the three that we're working through this sort of quarter here and we're working on some other ones for the year. Just like you were asking about the future of work and navigating it for all of us in real estate and office space and office furniture and global supply chain, there are way more moving parts than I thought there would be this year and the last year. So, it's been a pretty interesting dynamic to see the pendulum swing back and forth. Because about half our business is online and about half of that goes to people's homes, we have a real sense of what the consumer's feeling. Now, we're an upper end product, but you can feel it when you have daily revenue coming in and daily product reviews. And I still get the weekly summary, so I do read them all. So, we got 4.54 stars and I got them yesterday for last week and I'm flipping through and I'm looking at the ones just to see where we screwed up on if there's something in there that we have- But AI can now summarize all that for me and I'm still kind of- I'm still in there peeking at that stuff just to see if there's some crazy idea. But yeah, we're all sort of navigating a lot of moving parts there. And so even in my all hands, I've got an all hands email that now goes out of every Friday. So I was writing it in your parking lot earlier. I was drafting it, some of my thoughts while I was driving over here. But to lay out the thoughts, here's where we're at for the quarter we're about to wrap up, surging hard. We're right now in a big accelerate piece. We're all around automotive racing right now is a rallying cry theme for us. And so, the team is rallied around some of those, really those initiatives but then also reminding people, hey, there's a lot going on in the world and to remind us what we can control versus what we can't control. And I talked about six months ago, I said hey, we have an employee assistance hotline, just like a lot of companies do. It's free. And I told the team, I said hey, I actually used it, I called it about something and shared that story with the team. And I said hey, I was just kind of like I need to ask somebody something that I don't want to ask Chat GPT and I just wanted... And I'd never called it before. And so, I called it and I'm talking to somebody in Omaha, and I'm from Omaha. So that was kind of a nice surprise. But it was just, it was incredible. It sort of helped me think about something a little bit differently as I was dealing with some kid issues, some adult kid issues. And it was just like a cool thing, and I shared it. And then you get a couple one off nudges from an employee when you're walking around a week later, it's like, hey, thank you. I was dealing with something... And so there's so much going on in the world, and you don't know what everybody's going through. But we're all battling it. So to look at our business and I can see what's going on online, I can watch our project business. I'm watching our leases. I'm hearing what our friends in the industry are doing and learning from them about how their businesses are and realizing, hey, we're all doing the best we can and sharing that with the team, and I think that helps us build a better business and with other CEOs that we do business with or that are competitors of ours and frenemies, just to get in there and know that we're all helping create jobs to do some good in the world, to give back, to raise some money for nonprofits. We donate furniture to nonprofits. All those things kind of raises everybody. It's good for the world. 

Chris Powers: Is the market generally good right now? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, I think it's good. Yeah, I think the market is good. I've been pleasantly surprised by the growth in the project business [?] plan last year, which I didn't expect because I was just like, I don't know. That's been a pleasant surprise. And the leasing activity in the market from DFW has been unbelievable. So that's incredible. I think the consumer's been a little shell shocked with the amount of layoffs. And so you can see we have a portion of our business that's on Amazon, but a lot of the Amazon stuff is very low price point now. If you go on Amazon, they got $2 items... We're not in anything inexpensive. So it's just interesting to watch the dynamics that's going on in that piece of the business. But our Vari.com business is great. 

Chris Powers: Do y'all do any resale? Like if somebody wants to get rid of their desk or they just go sell it on eBay on their own? 

Jason McCann: Yeah, we don't actually, we don't transact with it. We've helped clients donate a lot. We've donated a little over $8 million worth of furniture to non profits here, a lot in this area. And that's been a great area. If somebody's exiting old furniture and we're replacing, it's like, help them do it, there's third parties that are great about that. We might have a scratch dent or we're exiting a category, and that's been a fun way for us to blend it and kind of give back. But, yeah, we don't- We haven't created a market. There's so many other options out there for people to do those things. 

Chris Powers: All right, man. This has been awesome. 

Jason McCann: You're great. This is so fun. I'm so glad we got to- I watch your podcast, I read all your stuff, and I'm like, this is so good. So it's fun. Like, I felt like I knew you when I walked in here. I was like, I know this guy. 

Chris Powers: This has been in the making for years. 

Jason McCann: So thank you so much for making this happen... And you do amazing work. I was talking to Zach Bean today. He's like, dude, I listen to him every- That guy, I love him. And I was like, because you're doing his- I was like, yeah, I don't know how I got in the room, but... You're awesome. 

Chris Powers: It's been great. 

Jason McCann: You're great. Thank you.