Smart Leaders

Educated risks

By Mike Cottrill

Ted Stahl
CEO, Stahls’ Transfer Express

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Ted Stahl would like you to forget about any economic woes you might be hearing about and just sit down for a conversation about the opportunities of education and technology.

That’s not Stahl trying to be an eternal optimist; it’s his method of leadership. As CEO of GroupeSTAHL, Stahl has made a living out of growing companies through innovation and education. In Cleveland, Stahls’ Transfer Express, a wholly owned subsidiary of GroupeSTAHL that manufactures custom heat-applied garment transfers, is a living example of that.

Stahls’ Transfer Express employees are constantly being taught to focus on the customer and on technology to adapt to what the market can bring next. As a result, the company continues to grow each year, blossoming to more than 100 employees in less than two decades, and it consistently bumps up the level of technology used in the industry.

Smart Business talked to Stahl about how to refuse complacency and why you need to have a few rebels around the office.

Encourage a few rebels to spark business. There’s a word called educated risks. If you don’t take any, you aren’t going to be growing anywhere. Everybody, and every company, is really in a state of metamorphosis, reinventing itself all the time. It has to be.

But then complacency is probably, if you are successful, a thing that sort of sets in. You hear, ‘We’re doing well, why should we be trying to change this or that?’

But if you’ve got people that are curious about their customers, curious about the world about them, they see the opportunities that are out there; if they have that passion, it becomes infectious.

So you talk about it, you make examples of people and promote people that do take some risks. Any type of a business culture has a tendency to try to homogenize itself, and you’ve got to have a few rebels around, and you have to let people see how much they help.

Be curious about everything. You have to have a curiosity about customers, about technology, about industry — basically you can’t define it right down to one particular interest. It’s more of a curiosity of the world about you and everything that affects it.

You can’t just limit it to just your relevant industry idea; you don’t know what technology is happening in Asia or Germany or here in the United States that might eventually affect your product.

And if you can put it all together, if you’re curious and you’re driven by your customers and you understand what their strengths and weaknesses are, what their needs are, then you can look toward the world of technology and put the two together. It’s sort of like keeping one ear to the customer and one ear to what’s happening in the world to help create products that succeed.