← Embracing Digital Transformation
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And my life transformed dramatically over the time at Turtle, but also the company and all of our employees have had to adapt and change over a century.
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Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process, policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host on this episode, Rising from how culture fuels Transformation with special guest CEO of Turtle, Jane Millard. Jane, welcome to the show.
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A
Thank you. It's great to be here.
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B
Hey, I'm really excited about this. When I first interviewed you and we talked about your background and everything, I said we've got to have Jane on the show because the story is incredible. But before we drop into what we're going to talk about today, which is digital transformation and things like that, everyone knows on my show I only have superheroes on the show. And every superhero has a background story. And you've got an incredible background story. So, Jane, what's your background story?
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Okay. Well, I think I. First of all, I'm humbled by the term superhero. But I was very fortunate at an early age to work and be mentored by a superhero. That was Martha Graham. So I came from a family business background. I was the fourth generation kid in a family business that had gone through a lot of turmoil, let's say in the. In the third generation. So my mom was. Owned it and my mom and dad ran it and built it through the 60s and 70s and 80s. I was a high school student and a dancer and choreographer. Never had any plans for entering the family business, and my parents honestly never really encouraged it. They wanted me to pursue my creative outlet, which is such a blessing. So I had every intention of, of being a dancer and lived in the New York City area, so had exposure to Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham and all the beautiful ballet companies here in New York. And, and that was my world. And I lived in it until I got injured and, and then I had to actually go figure out how to get a job when I graduated college and briefly worked for an investment bank, decided, nope, I'm going back to performing arts. I got a job with Martha and I had the opportunity to work and run her company with her and a number of other incredibly talented people through the 80s. So when I look back on my role now as CEO and chairman of the family business, because, yes, I did finally get sucked in and am honored and honored to be a custodian of a 100-year-old family business.
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It's incredible.
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Yeah. So Turtle is an electrical distribution business. We were founded in Lower Manhattan in 1923, by my great grandfather who thought, hey, this electricity thing, there's got to be some business opportunity here. So we started, you know, at the dawn of electricity when. And there was no regulation, there was no standardization. We sold every manufacturer, every part that came off, you know, whatever, inventor du jour. And. But ultimately we transformed with. With the industry over a hundred years, through four wars, got into industrial automation, provided a lot of the parts for all the factories that were born in New York City during the war. And now we're global and we have businesses and power, distribution, utility, any infrastructure project here in New York, we're there doing power distribution, lighting all the airports, tunnels, bridges. And I, as a female, when I started as a leader in the business, you know, worked from the ground up, warehouse, all had every job at Turtle. It was, it was a little humbling being one of the only women in the business.
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Oh, I bet, I bet.
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Yeah. And it's a very.
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And I love how you started at the bottom. Yeah, I think that's wonderful because you get to see how your company. Because this is your legacy.
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Yes.
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Right. And you got to see how your every aspect of your company works instead of just sliding in at the top. And. And I bet you gained a lot of respect from, from your employees by doing that.
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Yeah, And I was somewhat of a. And always have been a little bit of a reluctant leader, which I think helps because, you know, when you're in a family business, employees actually want you to stick around. They don't want the family to sell to some, you know, conglomerate or private equity or whatever. No offense to private equity. So, yeah, it was, it was a wonderful experience. And, and, but honestly, it's a very male dominated. The construction industry is very male dominated, so is my business. And having the background of working for a warrior like Martha Graham, who is fearless and taught me to be brave, and the most important thing she taught me was that change is inevitable and that change is constant. And my life transformed dramatically over the time at Turtle, but also the company and all of our employees have had to adapt and change over a century.
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B
Well, I want to talk about that a little bit, because your great grandfather, he was all about digital transformation. Yeah, but it wasn't called digital transformation back then. It was transformation. Right. Because he was at the forefront of electric distribution. He was driving new technology, and he found a niche on where he could do that. How do you sustain that? And I'm guessing your company didn't sustain that for 100 years. It probably ebb and flowed quite a Bit when? Be my guess.
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Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, I think when it comes to transformation and change, the most important thing you need to realize is that you have to find comfort in the discomfort because it's constant, you know, and, and transformation is a part of our lives no matter what. So how do we harness that discomfort and, and channel it into a creative energy that, that can build a business, that can build a product that can, that can empower teams to work together as individuals collectively coming together to do something incredible. It's all about adapting to change, but finding it as almost a life force, because it is, it is. When you look at, when you look at AI and what's happening, it's, it's fantastic. The amount of transportation transformation that AI is bringing, particularly to our business, which is so urgent. You know, energy management, energy savings.
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Absolutely.
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You know, optimizing energy for ev, for data centers, it's all critical. And especially with the supply chain issues we're having where there's a three year wait on a turbine and data centers build is just like exponential at the moment. All of it's crazy, all of it's chaos. But I'm finding that the more chaos, the more that, you know, humanity is really relying on trust and relationships to harness and cooperate and collaborate to make all this work. It's a really interesting time in our industry.
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Yeah, that's really interesting because I've heard people mention something like that before that AI is actually helping us become more human.
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Yeah, well, I mean.
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Right. Because we have to build those relationships of trust even more so now than we have in the past.
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You know, I kind of see AI as a manifestation of our humanity and it needs to serve our humanity. And I think it can allow us to be more intuitive as human beings. The more we add that layer of AI as a accelerator, bringing us the information we need at a, you know, in three seconds versus three months. And. Yeah, and it's, I think it's really going to if, if we do this. Right.
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B
That's the big if sometime, right?
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No, I just, I just came from this, this panel where we talking about AI and, and there was a wonderful gentleman from SAP on the panel and, and he talked about the importance of ethical AI and integrity in AI and that's, that's why we all need to stay human. It's like the most urgent need right now. And particularly in this rapid rate of transformation we're going under.
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Well, and that brings up. I totally agree with that. And I was just thinking this week, especially with all the big, huge announcements on AI and building data centers and electricity. We have taken for granted that I turn the light switch and it comes on. So I hate to say it, but your industry has become invisible to most people because I just expect it.
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Right.
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But with the explosion of data centers and the power consumption that we're talking about, all of a sudden your industry now becomes highly relevant. People are looking at it more now. How do you absorb all that new found attention that maybe you don't want. Right. Maybe it's great to have a company. I'm doing really well, but I don't have all of the pressure that I've had that I haven't had to deal with.
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Right.
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Are you feeling that any of that pressure, Jane, or.
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Yeah, but I mean, we don't really look at it as pressure. We look at it as opportunity because, you know, our, our imperative is to serve the customer. And one of the terms we have at Turtle is radical collaboration. And I have to say our company represents about a thousand manufacturers. They all are in your home or in your workplace or both. And they're silently providing, you know, the power, the infrastructure, the cybersecurity, the networking, everything you need to be safe and lit and warm and, and, and yes, there is this, there's, there's the confluence of, you know, the, the data center build out which is extraordinary. It's, it's, it's the most rapid build out of, of power. Both private where like companies like Google and Amazon are.
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Yeah, they're building nuclear, they're buying nuclear power plants. That's crazy.
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Let's buy a nuclear power plant. 38, 38 gigawatts. So you know, that'll, that'll help. I think that'll help. But they're also looking at modular nuclear and yeah, they're looking wherever they can to find the equipment they need to build data centers. And so, so how do we do that and do it sustainably so it's good for the planet. You know, the most, the most valuable electron is the one that you save. So, so efficiency and the efficiencies that AI is driving through energy management is imperative. Number one at Turbo, like do you have the right energy management software to make sure you're optimizing the energy you're producing? And then AI can also be a tool for creating a digital twin of your energy system to detect faults and leaks and preemptively fix those problems. It's all efficientizing and what I like the most, saving energy. Because before we start producing more, let's get right what we're doing now because that's going to be what's best for the planet. So we see it as an opportunity. It's also a lot of, you know, telling your customer who's building a terminal in LaGuardia that that switchgear package is going to be six months late and it's going to delay the opening of six gates. And I can't tell you how much that's going to cost. Oh yeah, it's, it's a lot of those conversations too. So it's, you know, it's having the right relationships and again, building trust and sticking, sticking to what's most important about humanity.
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I love that. All right, I'm going to switch gears just a little bit because I'm really fascinated in how you keep a hundred year old company relevant because I'm sure that when you joined you had to put your own stamp on it and you had to make some changes to a company probably with a very rich deep culture. How do you help a company through a transformation? Because I'm sure you had to take them through a transformation. How do you do that? And then I have a follow on question on how do you continue to do that transformation? But how did you, when you came in, how did you say, all right, we got to move from what we've been doing to where I see our vision. How do you make that big change, especially when you've got such an ingrained deep culture. I'm assuming you probably have workers there that are generational workers.
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Oh yeah, we have ready. We have second generations working for us. It's all amazing. So when I got there, Turtle was a very fiercely entrepreneurial and it was driven by a lot of very talented, very individual tribes in the organization. So pockets and very competitive with each other, which is wonderful. You want that, you, you love, I love.
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Yeah, but you want to compete with your competition.
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Correct. So, so it was very tribal, very protective of information and relationships and, and, and, but we, we did have a lot of respect because we were also considered a very, you know, we always did the right thing. We were very ethical. But, but again, breaking down silos, I think in the, in the 90s and early 2000s was one of the most challenging things in organizations and Turtle is no exception. So when I showed up, it was, I actually also had about five years into my leadership, I had the opportunity to work with Raj Sisodia on conscious capitalism. So as I was trying to break down silos and, and kind of even out the level, you know, the the power pockets in the company so that everyone had a voice. I was also spreading, spreading the word of conscious capitalism where, you know, our business needs to be in business for the good of everyone, not just the profits we deliver to the, to the company. And, and, and we also, you know, as a community and a family of employees, we need to support each other and we need to make sure all boats rise at the same time. So it took a couple of years, but everyone, you know, became more collaborative, more trusting, more, you know, able to cooperate on, you know, CRMs and building data lakes and actually, you know, all marching in the same line towards, you know, best practices in technology, which is a, it's a heavy lift for many organizations. So we're really proud to be where we are now. And when I introduce new technologists into the company and they complain about how, you know, people complain about them or they're, you know, they're taking too many arrows, I'm like, just wait, just wait. It takes about 18 months, but they're going to love you eventually. You'll be, you'll be.
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It sounds like a family.
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Yes.
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I mean, the most critical of, of my critics are my brothers and my sisters.
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Yeah, right.
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And the reason why is they want me to be better than I, than I am.
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Yes. And that's a gift. Honestly, I think it's a gift you give someone raising the bar on what you think they're capable of.
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Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So how did you, how did you break down those silos? Because I. Did you do this sounds kind of crazy. Did you do, like, company picnics? Did you do. I mean, there's a lot of soft skills involved in there. That, that. Because I, I imagine those tribes were fierce, Right. Because I've seen that in, in companies all, all the time. How do you break down those, those tribal barriers that get established?
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It's mostly just by wearing people down. But I love. When I first started, I introduced myself as the poster child for nepotism. So I, I got it right out there on the table.
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I love it.
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Well, it's kind of a ploy.
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I'm here because I'm the daughter of.
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Right, exactly.
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Like I should be clear. Everyone knows that.
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Right. And, and mom and dad are just waiting to see if I screw up. But there's, you know, it, it creates this. Oh, no, you're not. Just that. You're actually, you know, give yourself some credit. You've done some good things. And I'm like, oh, well, that's only because of you. It's only because of, you know, what you've done to the, for the company for so many years that you eventually wear them down. And, and, and you have to show the vision. You've got to give them the North Star to align to. You got to keep hammering it over their heads every day. And of course culture and values are critical. So our culture is the most valuable thing we have in our company.
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I can tell just by talking to you, it sounds like a big family.
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It is, yeah. It's a multi generational human act of becoming and we're all just so excited to see what's around the corner. What's the next decade? Everyone knows the family would never consider selling the company, you know, because it's like, well, this is, this is our, this is our duty.
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B
The, the next big question I have is to you. Are you starting to groom the next CEO?
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Yes. So I have, you know, we, when I took over we were about 300 million and we're, we're, we're over a billion now. So it's, it's bigger, it's a lot more complicated. I'm not going to say it's less fun, but it's less fun. It's a lot of work and it's a lot of work. $300 million company is a very different series CEO of a billion. And then how do we get to two and how do we get to five? And of course, and I found myself, you know, I've been, I've been doing this for a while. I love my job, but I also love innovation and I love creativity and I love harnessing what's Next. So about two years ago when we turned 100, we started an incubator. And what we do is either incubate new business models or new go to market strategies or we micro invest in green tech that we've come across along the way. So we're spending a lot of time helping young entrepreneurs commercialize because we're closest to the market. So I'm having so much fun doing that is taking away from my CEO duties. So I currently have a co CEO who is Louis Vols. He's, I call him El Jefe because he's Cuban and he's phenomenal leader. He's doing an incredible job and we're really good at tag teaming the role. I can focus on innovation and what's next and the overall strategy for the family of businesses we have. And then he, he just gets the job done. He's an animal. So, so what's next for Turtle? We have a really, really strong bench. I'm a firm, firm believer of growing within and, and nurturing the talent you have because everyone's a, you know, incredible leader waiting to happen. And so, you know, the next leader is at Turtle and it's just a matter of developing them.
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B
So I, I love that approach because if you push that down into your whole leadership team, then every one of your leaders should be finding their replacement.
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Yes, yes. And we actually, so we have an independent board. I'm, I'm the only family member who sits on the board. And our stock is consolidated in one trust for the family. So it's, I'm, I'm like the one shareholder vote too. So it keeps all nonsense out of the family business. And, but my daughter is an Observer. She's our 5th gen. She's our director of sustainability and social impact. And, and so the board is really, their job is to make sure the right leadership is in place if something happens to me. And so they insist that every one of our senior leaders, every divisional president has a session once a year where they go to the board and they say, okay, if I win the lottery tomorrow, this is who I have to replace me and this is who would, I would pick in five years. And it's a really great exercise and it keeps everyone, you know, full transparency, full visibility into the organization.
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B
I really love this. It reminds me of companies in Japan in a lot of respects. They have a 50 year plan and they have, you know, this long vision which you guys have that vision too, which I think a lot of companies are missing out on. They're looking and maybe it's because of Wall street where everything has to be quarter, quarter to quarter. You get the opportunity to look really long term. 10 years, 15, 30 years out.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Which is incredible.
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It's fun. It's, it's where the family put. Yeah. The jewel is the business. It's not, you know, having an equity event or, you know, a private plane. Although some days I do think that might be nice.
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B
I want one of those too because I just got back late last night.
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Because the delay, you know, horrible. But yes, we, we look for the long term. And you know, I think as, as we think about what's most important about the company, it's the trust we build in, in the people we have and, and giving them the, the security blanket of knowing that, you know, they're not going to get a new ownership or new, new boss that's going to change the rules of the game. And that's how we keep people for 40, 50 years.
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B
That's, that's incredible. I, because I, I love, I love that you use the term trust because in corporate America today, we rarely see that. Yeah, it, it really is sad, especially in high tech. I'm in high tech. There's, there's absolutely no guarantees in high tech anymore. No one's going to work for the same company their whole career. There's layoffs all the time because CEOs grow too quickly, too fast, and then short term, short term gain, short term, short term thinking. I envy you, Jane. I envy you because that's so unique what you have. I hope you understand how unique it is and it's such a blessing because it's pretty incredible to see.
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Well, you know, when you say unique, I think about Martha Graham because she really, she believed that, you know, every person is their own unique life force. And if you, if you bury that, then you'll, you'll, you know, the world will be less for it. And I think to really be able to express that life force, you need trust. You need to have an environment where you can trust people, you can trust your teammates, you can trust your boss.
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B
No, I, I, I think the title of our podcast is Digital Transformation with Trust or something like that. Because, I mean, I, I, I get that from you. That, that is so important. If people want to build this, what you have built, how do they get started?
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Yeah. Oh my gosh. And I meet.
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B
So would you encourage someone to start a family business and to, to make it roll? Because I know it's difficult. I, you know, especially those Thanksgiving dinners when Uncle Charlie got fired at work and you have to meet him at Thanksgiving dinner because he was taking advantage of the family business. I'm sure that happens, right?
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A
I mean, sure, absolutely. I mean, we all have our stories and it is kind of family business in America is kind of a cult, you know, because once you get to like the 4th gen or, you know, start at the 1st gen, there are entrepreneurs who don't want to sell and they believe they've built a legacy for either themselves, their family and their employees, and they can't let it go. So it goes to the next gen. And, and you need rules, you need agreed upon rules in the family for how to, how the family should interact with the business, what the expectations are, you know, your role in, in, in continuing the legacy. And, and all my kids understand this. They're, they understand, you know, they're like, we don't want to be you and.
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B
But we love just like you didn't want to be your parents.
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Right, right.
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You. You didn't want anything to do with the family business.
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A
Right. And look at me now, you know, sneak up on you. But I think in general, if you have, you know, transparency and, and first of all, talk about growth, you know, if it's explosive growth, that's great. But in general, conservative, slow, steady growth, underline conservative. And, and, and, and don't make big bets if it's going to mean you're betting the farm. Make big bets, Big smart bets. And, and, and hire, hire, hire slow. Get the right people and fire fast if they're not and align them to your core values. Oh, no, but it's. It. I mean, everyone. Turtle is an extension of my family. And, and, and it's, it's such a gift and a blessing for my kids, my, my, my extended family. Yeah, it's our duty, really, because my mother raised us saying the most important thing is, is the employees and the business. And we were like, so what are we chop liver? But we kind of understood. We knew how much she loved us. But when we're making business decisions, business comes first.
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B
No, that's, that's incredible. Jay, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today. I've learned so much. It's got me really energized. So I appreciate, I appreciate that. I know our, our listeners will appreciate this as well.
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A
Well, it's been a joy talking to you and sharing my story, and I have to say, I love your podcast and it's really an honor to be on.
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B
Thanks for listening to Embracing Digital Transformation. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us five stars on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube. It really helps others discover the show. If you want to go deeper, join our exclusive community@patreon.com embracingdigital where we share bonus content. And you can always connect with other change makers like yourself. You can always find more resources@embracingdigital.org until next time, keep embracing the digital transformation.