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Meet Trailblazer Beth A. Smith

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Beth A. Smith.

Beth, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in a family that valued hard work and I was around many people who were entrepreneurs, even though that wasn’t a thing when I was a kid. My grandfather was an iconic figure for me, he was a self-made person who built personal wealth as the owner of a county general store, livestock trader, property owner, auctioneer and was a pillar in a small-town community in West Virginia. My dad was also a big influence on me throughout my life. He would often say, it’s good to get an education, but always know how to do something with your hands. He was a minister and a welder, so you could say he lived his values. His entrepreneurial spirit was expressed through his religious beliefs which led him to start a church with a small group of people. My mom was a school teacher and a homemaker. She had a big impact on me around my value on environmental aesthetics, being organized and placing a high value on learning. When I was young, I didn’t know exactly what I would do as a vocation, but I knew I was fascinated and good with people and that I was good at “work.”

As soon as I was old enough to push a lawn mower and do household chores, I helped around our house. It wasn’t long until I was able to use my skills to “hire out” and work for other people to make money. Since around ten-years-old, I’ve always had cash in my pocket. My dad helped me get my first real job when I was 16 years old at a local county airport, he knew the General Manager. I worked two summers alongside two other guys around my age, fueling airplanes, mowing the grass along the runway, sweeping hangers, taxing and parking small airplanes. It was a lot of fun. While working at the airport, I started two side businesses to make extra money. There was no taxi service available at the airport, so I used my mom’s four-door Pontiac LeMans as a taxi. I also worked in the evenings cleaning private owner’s airplanes. There were weeks when I made as much money from my side businesses as I did at my hourly position at the airport.

While I was in college, I worked part-time temporary jobs through the university to make some spending money. Then, something big happened, I got a part-time job with United Parcel Service (UPS) loading tracker-trailers at night. Given my upbringing and work ethic, I thought I was up for the task. I can say now, I’ve never physically worked harder than the two years that I loaded UPS trailers. I stayed at UPS for thirteen years in a variety of roles; Operations Supervisor, Account Executive, and Call Center Manager. During those years, I fell in love with business management, training, and leadership. And of course, UPS provided excellent training and support both on the job and at training and schools run by UPS. In the end, I took the first Management Buyout UPS offered back in the ’90s. There was a lot that went into my decision to leave a 13-year career, but the short way to explain it is that I knew there was something else beyond UPS. This was a pretty big shift, as I was a true UPS’er that “bleed brown” during my tenure. Some of my colleagues thought I was crazy to give up on my dream to retire at 45 years old with a pension and no financial worries. After leaving, I took a cross country trip alone pulling a 1979 Fleetwood travel trailer for three months and worked all sorts of odd jobs to extend my early retirement for 2 ½ years.

I returned back to the transportation industry at Overnite Transportation (now UPS Freight) as the Director of Customer Service/National Call Center. While at Overnite, I completed a Masters degree in Organizational and Human Learning at The George Washington University. This program catalyzed my beliefs in a people-first and results through relationships approach to business. Also, learning in a cohort exposed me to my fellow student’s companies and their experiences as leaders within different organizational structures, cultures, and industries. These two years in graduate school opened my thinking and expanded my sense of what is possible as a business leader. After 6 ½ years at Overnite, I reached again for what was next and made a significant shift in my professional aspirations. This decision was informed through my intense study with mindful awareness and meditation teacher.

I moved to Boulder CO to attend Naropa University, the only Buddhist inspired university in North America, in a one-of-a-kind 3 year Masters program in Contemplative Psychotherapy/Counseling Psychology. My fascination with people and psychology germinated early in my life watching my Dad deal with interpersonal dynamics among his congregation in the small church he started. So, I left another great job in pursuit of a dream and a sense of possibility. Again, plenty of my friends and family were skeptical about my choice. After completing my second Master’s degree, I set up private practice as a Psychotherapist and also worked part-time in public health addiction treatment programs and in mental health as a Psychiatric Crisis Clinician. After a few years, I was painfully aware that I missed the action and challenges of the business world, and closed my practice.

Over the next 10 years, I worked in small and large companies such as; A time-critical transportation frmr were I headed up a call center consolidation project to streamline their processes, improve the customer experience and significantly reduce costs, an entrepreneurial uniform and decorated apparel company featuring eco/sustainable fabrics were I lead the customer experience team and oversaw warehouse operations for the first time, and at a technology company in the public safety sector where I implemented Agile methods within operational teams, led process improvements that enabled 95% increase in workload and worked with product teams designing greenfield opportunities. I’ve been laid off twice and been one of the last two people to assist with the closure of a company that failed.

Today, I’m the Chief Operating Officer at StickerGiant a leading manufacturer of custom promotional stickers and product labels with a 24-hour turnaround timeframe. We are a $22M company with 30+% yoy growth and 65 Giants (employees). I joined StickerGiant 2 years ago, and run the company on behalf of our Founder/Owner/Visionary, John Fischer. We use a system called the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) as the infrastructure for our company. Within this system, there is a framework called Rocket Fuel, which outlines my role as the Integrator and John’s role as the Visionary. We also utilize Open Book Management (OBM) from the Great Game of Business as our means to practice transparent financials and a gain-share bonus when the company achieves our financial goals. Over the years in my career, I’ve been fortunate to learn and gain experience in all aspects of running a mid-sized rapid growth organization: Operations and Process Improvement, Customer Experience, Product and Project Management, Financial Planning and P&L, Human Resources, Technology, Marketing, and most importantly, Leadership from a servant leader perspective.

I am grateful every day that I have the honor, yes and the responsibility, to be a part of an amazing team of Giants working together to make our company a good place to work and deliver amazing products to our customers, products that help them tell their stories.

Here’s a video that sums all of this up into a few minutes – It’s my “Sticker Story” something that we do at StickerGiant with all of our Giants: https://www.stickergiant.com/blog/meet-beth-chief-operating-officer-and-business-geek/

Has it been a smooth road?
Well, I wouldn’t express my career journey as a smooth road, nor would I describe it as rough. I would be more inclined to say mine has been a winding road. I chose many of the twists and turns in my career, but not all. And, honestly, the ones that I didn’t choose likely provided the most valuable learning opportunities and pointed to new possibilities. In many ways, having the opportunity to work in a number of different industries and in several different types of leadership roles over my career is exactly what prepared me to be effective as COO at StickerGiant. On any given day at StickerGiant, I’m involved in our long term strategy and top priority tactical decisions that keep our company moving forward. This means that I draw on the depth and breadth of my experience often, even as I’m continually learning about the unique nature of the print industry and the even more unique attributes of StickerGiant’s approach within a $45B traditional label industry.

Certainly, being a female-bodied person and a member of the LGBTQ community has presented challenges given the traditionally male-dominated industries I’ve worked in: Transportation/Trucking, Technology, and Manufacturing. And with that said, I’ve been fortunate to have many more positive experiences than negative. I believe that making the choice to be out at work, and truly be who I am, has been an affirming experience for me, although I’m also aware that this is not always the case for women and LGBTQ people. I’m also grateful to have experienced wonderful support by many mentors, bosses, peers, colleagues, direct reports and team members that have helped me learn, grow and contribute value through my work endeavors.

We’d love to hear more about StickerGiant.
StickerGiant is celebrating 19 years in business this month (September 2019). John Fischer started StickerGiant with one political bumper sticker and ran the company from his basement in the early days. John is the embodiment of an entrepreneur and StickerGiant’s success is an entrepreneur’s dream come true. We are located in Longmont, CO and are a vital part of our local community. I often say we are a local company with a broad reach as an e-Commerce business. We serve companies all over the US and Canada just like us; Local, mid-sized and small, values-driven and often with a fun aspect in their cultures.

John’s original vision for StickerGiant is one that he has iterated on over the years, making pivots with the business at critical times that have kept the company alive and growing. At the heart of StickerGiant’s origin and continuing today, is our belief in personal expression. And of course, this is front and center with our brand: “Every sticker has a story. What’s yours?” I love how our brand tagline is a question, and an invitation to start a conversation not about our brand, but about yours. Our purpose is to help our customers tell their stories – stories about their brand, product, art, passion, cause, belief, identity, and so on. For me, I see stories as a narrative form of personal expression. At StickerGiant we take a lot of pride in making stickers and labels, because our customers have entrusted us with their brand, their story, and we want to make their story shine.

I don’t claim to be a Marketing expert, however, I am a self-professed geek on many topics, with Marketing being one of my many passions/obsessions. I mentioned being a mindful awareness and meditation practitioner, and there’s a tie in here. The style of meditation that I practice is to pay attention primarily to your breath – simply allowing the body to breathe naturally. Scientific research is now advocating for the many health benefits of meditation AKA breathing naturally and paying attention to the breath. I often use breathing as a way to illustrate a concept or idea. So, how does breathing and health tie into StickerGiant’s brand? Well, I believe what has made our StickerGiant brand interesting and successful is how we allow the brand to “breathe” naturally and we pay attention to what is happening. In doing this, we have an inheritance trust that our customers, our Giants, our community and the general public will interact with our brand. And, it works! I’ve worked for big brand name companies, remember “bleeding brown” – now that some brand commitment, but I’ve never worked at a company where employees are as company brand loyal as our Giants. We often have guests at StickerGiant and we love to show people what we do, and we have a factory tour every Friday at 2 pm. Recently, we had a business consultant in for a meeting and afterward, he and I took the tour. At the end of our time together, he said: “Beth, there is something magic here.” It’s true, and it’s not something that is easy to share without experiencing it for yourself. And the reason is simple, when we have guests tour our facility, the magic happens when our Giant’s stop for a few minutes and share what part of the business they are expert in. And often, there is conversation and interaction between the guest and our Giants – yep, that’s where our brand shines, when our Giants talk about what they do every day to make our company successful and create a product that tells our customers stories.

Okay, so, StickerGiant has brand guidelines both for print/web content and for customer and social media interactions. The keyword is guidelines. When we add our belief in personal expression and our brand guidelines together, what we are in essence doing is allowing these two elements room to breathe … together. And, this is where I get to see the magic happen again in small and big ways every day at StickerGiant. Here’s an example. We have a lot of talented and creative Giants at StickerGiant. Two of our wonderful Giants on our Customer Success Team took on an initiative to document our processes and put together a new hire training approach. Okay, lots of companies do this, right, to ensure that customers have the same experience each time no matter whom they speak to. But these two Giant’s took this to a whole new level. They built a Google Site and used our brand guidelines to frame the Customer Success “how-to documentation.” I can say that what they built was a living expression of our brand. And, no one was there saying anything about “branding” the documentation … we let the brand breathe, and something amazing happened.

What am I most proud of? I’m proud to work at a company where our brand is more of a conversation and a collaboration than a logo or a brand guideline booklet. And, I’m proud to be able to share my stories/conversations on Facebook posts like this one:
So, here’s a quick recap of a 30-minute window in my life from earlier this evening, that makes me love where I live, love working at SG and love my life.

After work today, I needed to run a few quick errands in Boulder – all of the stores I needed to stop at are in one location, so one-stop. I dashed into Pharmica to pick up a few things. At the checkout counter the person at the register says, oh, StickerGiant, do you work there. Forgetting that I had on my SG hat and t-shirt, I said, oh yes I do… as my mind caught up with the conversation – she knows where you work because of your hat! We chatted for a moment, and she said that she has friends that went to college with John, our Founder/CEO. That’s cool, I say, and thank her for chatting.

I walk to the next store, Pekoe, to pick up some tea for our house. While I’m waiting for my order to be filled – three 6oz bags of bulk tea – we are frequent and good customers – I chat with the person at the register about where they get their labels for their bulk tea bags and offer my SG business card with a discount code to pass on to their owner.

I walk to the next stop which is our new favorite restaurant, Santo. Lisa called in our order, so I was just there to pick up our takeout dinner. While waiting, the manager walks right up to me and says – StickerGiant – and grabs my hand and shakes it like we know each other. I’m a bit more tuned into this encounter thinking, ah yes, the hat. The manager complimented our stickers that they use to seal the tops of their take-out orders and we had a friendly exchange before he went off to check on our order. He returned beaming and said he had added a few extra items … you know, because we are good friends at this point.

Life is so good – do what you love and love the one you’re with… yep, the ones you work with too.

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We have been provided the rights to the photographs from Built In Colorado

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