The art of letting go
When you hire good people, train them well, create a good culture and then stay out of their way, that’s a recipe for success, Sheetz says.
And it can certainly be a challenge for someone who has built his or her own company to let go, he says, calling it more art than science.
“We’ve had good role models, starting with the founder of the company deciding that it was probably a good time to step aside when he was 48 years old,” he says.
“That set the stage for people to say, ‘We don’t want people hanging on until they are 80 trying to run this company.’ It should be pretty much run by younger people with the advice of other generations still around.”
Takeaways:
- Ownership and leadership need to be separate.
- Promote the right people, while giving them a sense of ownership.
- A positive culture has many components that need continual monitoring.
The Sheetz File:
Name: Joe Sheetz
Title: President and CEO
Company: Sheetz Inc.
Born: Altoona, Pa.
Education: Bachelor’s in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
What was your first job and what did you learn from it? When I was little, there were two businesses. There was a dairy and there was this Sheetz business. My grandfather owned the dairy, which is where the store came from, but at one point my dad and two of his brothers ran the dairy and my uncle and two of his brothers ran the stores.
My first job, I was probably 12, was in the summers at the dairy doing a lot of busywork — pushing a broom around, filling in for guys on vacation, just moving boxes and that kind of stuff.
As healthy as the family interaction has been at Sheetz, it wasn’t always that healthy at the dairy.
The dairy was not quite the well-oiled machine that the stores eventually became.
I think that’s one of the reasons that we do well. Everyone watched their father and their brothers at that dairy and what wasn’t good and what was good.
I was pretty young, so I can’t say I got it all. But you just get it by being around the feel — that culture wasn’t as healthy.
What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received? Listen more than you talk. And in our case: Listen to your customers and listen to your employees. We’ve built our business basically doing those two things.
No matter how smart you think you are, you don’t have all the answers. And I think it’s good that we’ve created this culture of research and communication, where we want to talk to our employees, and we want to talk to our customers at get their advice.
Is there anything about you that would surprise people? What surprises people about all of us Sheetz is that we’re pretty normal people. Most of us still live in the same hometown that the business was born in.
While we’ve gotten big, we’ve tried not to be this large impersonal company with formal executives that nobody can ever talk to. That’s not us. You will see us out and about.
What’s your favorite thing to buy at Sheetz? I would say coffee. It’s absolutely food, but it’s not like one food item because I work my way around the menu. But the one thing you will know I do every day is stop and get coffee — more than once.
