157: Charlie Cole - "The Self-Aware Leader"

Charlie Cole of FTD

How This Optimist Found His Breaking Point.

"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT

Episode 157: Charlie Cole

Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business. To help them succeed where leadership lives - at the intersection of strategy and humanity.

This is Season 3 - “Leading The Future.” These next few months - as we begin to emerge from the pandemic - are going to be chaotic. Industries are being reformed, culture is being redefined. New rules are being written and rewritten. It’s happening already. Decisions are being made today, literally today, about how to compete for talent and relevance in this new world. So, how should leaders lead as we meet a world of new possibilities and expectations?

There are many, many ways to describe your leadership philosophy. One description that’s gained traction over the last eighteen months is ‘servant leadership.’

Is servant leadership a helpful description? It depends. Which is a nice way of saying no.

If you listened to what someone described as my ‘meditation on leadership’ a couple of weeks ago, you will have heard my definition of leadership. “The desire and ability to unlock the potential of others.”

Sounds like servant leadership should be an ideal description of how to best achieve that.

Except for this. Leaders are people too.

For all of the strength they project, they worry about covering up their weaknesses. For all of the confidence they show, they wrestle with hiding their uncertainty.

They do not have limitless supplies of energy, or clarity, or certainty. And while they often have an extra supply of resilience, they can run out of even that.

When a leader attaches the label of ‘servant leadership’ to themselves, the expectations they create in themselves can become unsustainable. They can think it means everyone comes first. That what others need and want matters more. That everyone is important. And everyone is more important than they are.

And when leaders place all that weight on themselves, they crack. Then throw the chaos of the emergence from a pandemic on top and the cracks show up faster and become deeper..

This week’s guest is Charlie Cole, the CEO of FTD. As you’re about to hear, Charlie is a high energy leader. Relentlessly positive, endlessly optimistic. He took over a bankrupt company in the early days of a pandemic. He put together an executive team that only now, a year later can he spend any time with in person.

Charlie discovered something brand new about himself in the middle of all of that.

“That I have a breaking point…. I went from being a guy that never really found his breaking point to a guy that found it monthly, like every other month. And that's another kind of humbling experience.”

Every leader does. And thinking of yourself as a servant will shorten the time it takes for you to discover yours.

Are you in service? Yes. To the change you want to create in the world, and to providing the business with what it needs to reach that goal.

But you are not a servant. You have agency and free will.

Oh, and you have one other thing. Access to the levers of power. When a servant pulls the levers of power, it’s called a revolution. When a leader pulls them, it’s called a decision.

Here’s Charlie Cole.

Charles: (03:27)

Charlie, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Charlie Cole: (03:30)

Thanks, Charles. Stoked to be here.

Charles: (03:33)

When did creativity first show up in your life? When were you first conscious of creativity as a concept or a construct?

Charlie Cole: (03:41)

So when I was young, probably six, seven, eight years old, I was in Cub Scouts. I had a moment where my mom was my Den Leader. When you graduated, when I went from bear to wolf, I think it was, I know wolf is right, I don't know if bear is right, but wolf is for sure right, I got a little plaster wolf on a diamond, right? And that was the thing we did for the coronation ceremony, if you will, is we have to paint it. And so, I was painting the wolf and my mom came up behind me and she's like, "Oh, Charlie, that's a very interesting colorful wolf." I looked at her with the indignant nature of a six-year-old or whatever what it was I was, like, "What are you talking about, mom? It's gray." And it was seafoam green. That was the moment I found out I was color blind.

And so, at a very young age, I learned through osmosis that how I was going to approach creativity was literally going to be different than most of the world. I didn't understand, obviously at that moment, I just wanted to paint my damn wolf, but I didn't understand that how prophetic that moment truly was, because I immediately have a different view of the world from a color perspective. I think all of us would agree, color is a fundamental building block of creativity, and my version of it was warped, to a certain extent. And so, that for me, Charles, is when the concept of creativity started to evolve because I was basically put in a different lane than you or any other normal "color-seeking person”. I think that has framed my version of creativity far more than I ever could have been aware of as an indignant six-year-old.

Charles: (05:24)

Yeah, it must have completely rewired your brain, I would imagine actually, on so many different levels.

Charlie Cole: (05:29)

Well, you can get really deep on it, right? Is that why I went into numbers? I don't know. Did I have a natural gravitational pull towards the mathematics before that moment, after that moment? I think that's a far out question and I don't pretend to know the answer. But I would also say just if you asked me for one moment, I'm going to give you one more, the other moment was when I was 26 years old and I realized I really sucked at working with creative people because I was so analytically wired. I think that if you fall into the world of digital marketing and e-commerce, it's super easy to lose sight of creativity. I was an analyst by trade and then an e-commerce operator after being a digital marketer, and I didn't really appreciate how important creativity is to the world of selling things online and that was a humbling moment.

I think ever since then, I've almost over-compensated the other way, because I truly believe that the creative generative arts are the only ways to differentiate a brand in the year 2021. Because in a strange way, mathematics have become commoditized, because any computer on Earth can do anything that I learned in college far faster and better, more accurate than I ever could, but generative creativity is the lifeblood of a brand today. If you try to out-iterate the next guy, you're always ended up losing to Amazon, right? I think that's the reality of 2021. So those two moments, both on a meta perspective and a micro perspective have shaped not only my own world view, but my world view as a manager.

Charles: (07:04)

How did you flip the switch on that? That's not an easy thing to do. The recognition is extraordinary in and of itself, but how did you actively flip the switch?

Charlie Cole: (07:11)

I think that the answer to that question lies in another seemingly tangential, but I think completely related topic of diversity. For me, I'll give you my tactical answer to your question. I tried to surround myself with people that didn't think like me, because it's so easy when you're building a team to just go and grab other minds that you view as intelligent. Generally, if you think of yourself as an intelligent person, that means you'll go and find a bunch of people like yourself, right? So if you're a computer engineer and you're building a team, you're like, "We need a bunch of computer engineers." That's just human nature, right? We all think that way. But for me, when I came to that realization, to your point, Charles, the first way to solve a problem is to realize you have one.

So, you're right. I was very fortunate to have a manager that basically shoved my face in it and he was right. His name was Dave DeMattei, by the way, of Lucky Brand Jeans. I'll give him credit for that. I tried to surround myself with people that didn't think like me. One of my first mentors, a gentleman by the name of Tarang Amin, who's now the CEO at E.L.F. Cosmetics, he really taught me the value of a diverse team, and that is how I tried to really go after it, is when you look at the leadership team here at FTD, my first few hires were Annelies De Rouck as our Creative Director. What she was doing before this is she created a swimwear brand, right? I'm never going to create a swimwear brand. She thinks about the world and a worldview that I never could.

I think that's the key, Charles, to any great team, is no one's going to have it all. And so, you need to surround yourself with not only great minds, but different minds and different backgrounds, because with someone that grew up in rural Belgium, like Annelies, they're going to think very different than someone that grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, which my CMO, Taryn, did, right? I think that's the key to solving any problem, is get various types of minds in the room to help you.

Charles: (09:04)

The natural human instinct, to your point, is to put people who think like we do around us, right? That's the most comforting context and frame of reference. Where do you think you gained the self-confidence to work against that, to actually want be around people who were willing to challenge you and bring different kinds of thinking to you?

Charlie Cole: (09:23)

So I think foundationally, my mom was just this remarkable force of, what's the word for it, involvement. She could just bring people into the world and into whatever you were doing in the most thoughtful and elegant way that it never felt forced. I think all of us have lived through forced conversations at a dinner party back when we could leave our damn houses. I think my mom just... I didn't appreciate it when she was alive, but thinking about it now, there was never a moment where anyone was ever turned away and there was never a moment where someone felt like they were imposing when my mom was involved.

My favorite moment is this. When I was in college, our fraternity added a new chapter in Alberta and they drove all the way to Seattle. On their way out of town, my mom has invited them over for dinner. What do you feed 14 kids from Alberta? You feed them cheeseburgers and french fries, right? No, my mom made prime rib and Yorkshire pudding, because she bet they never had them. That was my mom's talent. On the foundation side, it was certainly my mom. On the leadership side, it was definitely Tarang. I give him all the credit in the world for teaching me. So the first thing Tarang ever said to me, ever in my entire life, during my interview was, "Look, Charlie, I don't know anything about digital and you don't know anything about consumer packaged goods. If we work together, we're unstoppable." It was the first thing he ever said to me, which is basically, Charles, a testament to your question, right?

This guy was the global head of Clorox and I'm a 27-year-old e-commerce operator, and he's telling me he can learn from me. It was just for me, I got that question, and honestly, I was deciding between that job and another job at that moment, and that was the moment I was like, "I got to work for this dude," because I realized that he has that level of humility than I had a heck of a lot to learn as an arrogant 27-year-old.

Charles: (11:16)

Where you a risk taker growing up?

Charlie Cole: (11:18)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's not much question there. My brother is three and a quarter years older than me. So he's April 5, '79. I'm June 30, '82. And so, I think when you have someone like that to chase around, you're always going to be a little bit more of a risk taker. We moved to Seattle in 1991, and 1991 is arguably one of the more foundational years of music and history. Pearl Jam Ten, Nirvana Nevermind, Soundgarden Badmotorfinger. Basically, the grunge movement hit supernova in 1991.

And so, my poor older brother was dragging along an 11 and 12-year-old to these concerts that are now pantheon moments in Seattle history, like seeing Pearl Jam and Nirvana in a 500-person venue and my poor brother is holding me around by the hand. You can look at that as an 11-year-old being willing to take a risk, but you can also look that as I had some rocket fuel behind me in the form of a brother to chase.

Charles: (12:20)

Is there anything you were afraid of?

Charlie Cole: (12:23)

I have a real problem and fear of doing enough. I never ever feel like I'm secure. I never really feel like I've done enough. And so, I mentioned, when we were chitchatting before we started this, I mentioned that we're in the throes of our peak season. Even if all of our numbers are perfect, I'm always looking for the boogeyman. I think, for me, that fear... Ultimately, it's a fear of failure, Charles. I think as you get more secure with yourself, it wanes, but it never disappears.

Charles: (13:00)

How do you define success?

Charlie Cole: (13:04)

Once you get past the ones and zeros of bank accounts and resume lines, I think it's really how people see me as a friend and parent and mate. The thing that I am most proud of in my entire career, I actually mentioned this before, but it's like in baseball, there's the concept of the farm system, right? There's minor league teams and you're bringing people up and eventually these kids grow up to be the best baseball players in the world. It's very rare that you don't spend time in the farm system as major league baseball player, all the players you think of. I define my success as the success of my farm system, right? And so, when I think of Taryn Rayment, Taryn is my CMO, I met Taryn six, seven years ago and she was a junior marketing coordinator, and now she's one of the best digital marketing minds on the face of this Earth. I don't take credit for that, but I'm really proud of it. And so, to me, that's how I define success, is how I'm elevating people around me, both friends, family and peers.

Charles: (14:09)

So, you took over this job last year as the pandemic was hitting. How have you been able to bring your attention, your focus, your leadership ability to be able to create that reference point, to create that definition of success?

Charlie Cole: (14:29)

So, never more in my lifetime is this more true than now, but I think the first thing you have to answer that question with is the concept of work-life balance, because at the start of the pandemic, my son was four months old and my daughter was 22 months old. And so, the first place to make sure you're being a good leader is to make sure that you, yourself, are centered in a perfect way. Let's be honest, Charles, none of us were centered on March 23rd of 2020. We were all one step behind, at least wondering what is going on. It was just this crescendo moment in all of our lifetimes that now it feels like kind of a non-event just because we're so used to it. But at the moment, we were all knocked off balance. For me, my wife, Alyssa, and our kids, I had to make sure that we had a rhythm first and that allowed me to be vulnerable and approachable to our team.

But then as it pertains to FTD, I made more effort in my life to have intentional communication than I ever have in my entire life. So my first eight weeks or so, I just spent three hours a day chitchatting with people, just setting up forced communication, right? I go back to my mom, so my mom would've hated it, but these are... I was trying to replace, Charles, all the collisions that happen on a day-to-day basis because they weren't happening. I never parked my car next to an employee and walked into the office with them. We never walked into a break room and got a coffee at the same time. We never washed our hands in the bathroom next to each other at the same time. All these little moments that you use to be able to lead and get to know each other through osmosis, they're gone. They're gone.

And so, for me, the first step in being these folks' leader, which sounds a little self-referential, but let's just be honest, that's what I was there to do, was getting to know them at a more basic level. And so, three hours a day, 12, 15-minute meetings just to meet everybody in the company I could. And then I set up our, what we called ‘coffee talks’, where I was like, "We can talk about anything you want." Right? We'd send about 10 people. I remember one in particular, a guy named John Oakley basically hijacked the conversation. All we did was talk about food. We talked about cooking and food for an hour and it was awesome. You know what I mean? So, I think whenever you're talking about driving to a result and ensuring success and lifting people up, it actually starts in a far more personal versus tactical way, and that's how I tried to attack it back up back when the world felt like it was falling apart in March.

Charles: (16:59)

And is there anything about that approach that you haven’t been able to replicate or satisfy the needs of? You're a high touch person. Is there anything about the way you had to go about doing that, that has left you feeling like there's still this part that's missing?

Charlie Cole: (17:14)

Absolutely. Yes. I am not ashamed to answer your question. Yes. I was asked once what the dream work culture you wanted. It's actually before the pandemic and I was asked like, "What would be Charlie Cole's dream scenario? It's frictionless universe, right? Don't worry about money. Don't worry about anything. Come up with your most existential idealistic view of work-life culture." And I answered very quickly.

I answered, I want our work life to be intense and focused, and I want our personal lives to be about reverence and about enjoying each other's company. And that last part, Charles, the concept of you and I meeting each other and sharing body language and sharing eye contact and sharing all these things, it's like a hole going straight through me with our team. I get really excited about just being able to sit across the table from these people in the most basic way possible. It makes me a little emotional to be honest, but I can't wait. So that's a missing piece.

Charles: (18:24)

You've been involved in a number of turnarounds. This is obviously extraordinarily different to everything else you've ever done. How do you go about understanding the business well enough from a remote standpoint so that you can actually get to the heart of what is it that needs to be turned around?

Charlie Cole: (18:41)

The ones and zeros are the easy part. I'm not saying they're easy. I'm just saying they're the easy part. The key to this industry, right? I'm going to call this industry gifting. I think it's super easy and frankly, almost reckless not to associate FTD with flowers, but I view us as the best place to drive gifts that matter. If we agree that that's what I'm doing and if we agree that that's what we're focused on is gifting, it starts with the people who are preparing the gifts, our florists. And so, once I felt like I had my hands around the ones and zeros, which were super complicated, right? It was more complicated than any business I've ever been in, because most of my other businesses are traditional retail, Charles. You take inventory. You sell through enough at full price. You sell through the rest of the discount, blah, blah. This is far more nuanced.

But I then spent a ton of time with florists via Zoom. I now probably talk to 25 to 30 florists a week, but it goes back to your previous question. I've never actually met all but one of them. I met one. Her name's Lisa at Nielsen Florist here in Seattle, because during Valentine's Day, we had an ice storm and I went help her deliver flowers. But I met her. I had a mask on. She had a mask on. We stayed six feet away from each other and it was freaking weird. You know what I mean? It's just weird. It's not normal. And so, I think the key to understanding the turnaround is its people. The weird part about this turnaround is the people are not our people. I need to understand the FTD employees, but I really need to understand the lifeblood of gifting, which is the local purveyors, the bakeries, the coffee shops, and in our case, we over-index in florist.

Charles: (20:27)

Transformation, turnaround are fundamentally about solving problems. Problem solving in the business world is always described through the lens of innovation, which the people are always talking about is the most overused word. We should find a different word, and yet we keep coming back to it. What does innovation mean to you? How do you define innovation?

Charlie Cole: (20:46)

So I think it's long-term growth. It's goals that are more than a reporting cycle away. The reason I frame it that way, Charles, is because where I feel like people screw up innovation is they get caught up in iteration. They get caught up on reaching next month's forecast or hitting this quarterly earnings. Every person that's worked at a company has been in a room and had this conversation. The conversation ends something like that. "Well, it'd be great if we can push that to next month because we need it for next month's comp." That conversation is the death of innovation, right? By definition, it is de-innovative. It's anti-innovative. And so, to me, innovation is continuing to evolve on a one-plus year mindset.

So the thing that I'm most excited to do right now is get through this peak season, our fiscal year ends June 30th, and put together a three-year plan with various views of the universe, right? This is our moonshot plan. This is our iterative plan. This is our innovation plan. This is higher risk. This is lower risk. I would define innovation as the willingness to take near-term risks based on the hope of a long-term result. To me, that is the key, is having that long-term worldview. Otherwise, you will never be innovative.

Charles: (22:10)

How do you create a culture of innovation?

Charlie Cole: (22:16)

So, I think you have to be willing to look at compensation. So that's a very tactical answer after giving you a very profound answer, I hope, but I think about my CMO, Taryn. I'll give you a conversation I had with her last week. I would love for her to have five million, $10 million that didn't hurt her team's bonus plans, right? If you spend this $5 million and it doesn't hit average order value, conversion rate, traffic metrics, whatever the concept of acceptable is, it doesn't matter, right? And so, I think you have to give people safety. And that's really what I just talked about, is everybody needs to feel safe to take risks, knowing they won't pay off. Because go back to my definition, it's near-term things that may not lead to long-term yields. All the greatest innovations in life, it doesn't come with guarantees.

I think about the people right now doing carbon capture. Carbon capture you could argue is one of the largest struggles in the human world right now. If it's pulled off, it might literally mean cleaner air for my kids, and yet it might yield nothing. So whoever's working on that stuff, I hope they feel safe and I hope they feel like they can drive towards a long-term resolve. I think that's the key, is you need to have a system where everybody feels like they're a part of it and that they feel safe to take risks, even though they might not succeed.

Charles: (23:39)

So, dealing with the turnaround, obviously you've got an extreme version of one here, a company declared bankruptcy, I think in 2019. How do you attract, and obviously, you brought in a lot of new talent, how do you attract talent into a situation like that? What's the vision you're presenting them with? What's the opportunity you're offering them?

Charlie Cole: (23:59)

We can save local business and we can do it in the most thoughtful and emotional moments in the human life cycle. Let's just talk about just flowers for a second. If you think about flowers, they celebrate the best and worst moments. And so, they recognize the birth of a child and the death of a loved one. The emotional pantheon that we live in is overwhelming if you actually stop and think about it. And so, if you were given the opportunity to creatively address the most emotional moments on Earth, I think it's the ultimate challenge. When I'm ultimately talking about is gifting, right? Gifting spans every emotion there is. So that's the first thing.

But one of our competitors said on an earnings call sometime ago that, “I want to be the Amazon of gifting.” I remember, Charles, recoiling in horror. I was like, "That's the opposite of what I want to be." Because if I'm sending you a gift, wherever you are in New York City, I can send you flowers ‘And’. I mean, would you rather have like a frozen pizza or would you rather have the best Bleecker Street Pizza, right? Some of that actually shows that I care. And so, we have a chance to actually harness the best of the internet, which is connectivity, that's the best part of the internet, and replace the worst of the internet, which is basically the dehumanization that happens. To me, the lifeblood of commerce needs to be local. At our core, we are a collective of local florists. I think we can take that same love of local and expand it across the entire gifting ecosystem.

Charles: (25:49)

That kind of capability, that kind of thinking comes best when you empower people. How do you empower people?

Charlie Cole: (25:56)

So I say something all the time, which is, I say this internally, which is, “You know if I'm worried if I start talking to you a lot, right?” If I start getting up in your business, that's my way of saying, "I'm worried about what you're doing." And so, the reciprocal of that is empowerment comes from autonomy and empowerment comes from letting people drive to results the way we want it. Because let's go back to one of the first things we said, Charles, which is I want diverse people. And so, diverse people means that not everybody's version of empowerment is going to be the same, right?

To me, empowerment is, "Give me a challenge and I'll go get it." That's how I like to work. Not everybody's wired that way. Everybody else might be like, "I just want to feel like I'm part of a great team." Somebody else may feel like, "I want to feel like I have control of my work-life balance." The concept of empowerment is diverse by nature. But to me, I like to hire people that want to work at their own pace and autonomously and be judged on their results. If that's the kind of culture you want, then I think empowerment speaks for itself.

Charles: (27:02)

Diversity is clearly one of the big topics coming out of 2020 that hopefully will have resonance and lasting impact. What else do you think might come out of the last 12, 15 months that you think is going to be an improvement over where we were before?

Charlie Cole: (27:17)

I think we took human connection for granted. I actually last night saw two friends in person for the first time in 13 months, and just sitting there at an outdoor pub and having a beer…. I think we took humans for granted, Charles. That sounds really silly, but I hope that we're going to be that much more thoughtful to one another moving forward, because now we know what we missed. The tragedy of that is when you look around us and you see the George Floyd case and you see the violence happening to Asian-Americans, I think that the narrative is actually the opposite of that, but maybe I'm a wide-eyed idealist. I have hope that one of the absolute bright sides coming out of this pandemic is going to be the love for one another and lifting up human beings together again, because it was stripped away from us for darn near a year.

Charles: (28:21)

What have you learned about yourself over the last 12, 15 months that surprised you?

Charlie Cole: (28:26)

That I have a breaking point. I've been one of those people that whether it was education, athletics, work, I never felt like I was going to fall apart. For me, the balancing of maintaining a relationship with my wife, maintaining a connection with my kids, maintaining FTD, maintaining friendships, being able to see my dad who was basically a hermit for six months because he smoked most of his life and he was scared for his life, all of those things got to the point where I went from being a guy that never really found his breaking point to a guy that found it monthly, like every other month. And that's another kind of humbling experience.

But I think, Charles, if someone out there has ever reached their breaking point, if you can be conscious of it and realize the support you need, whether it's individual, whether it's from your family, whether it's from your friends, you do come out a stronger person on the other side. I know that sounds a little cliché, but I think for me, that's been my biggest learning, and frankly, where I think I'll have the most improvement more moving forward, particularly as a father and husband.

Charles: (29:40)

Any regrets as you look back, over the last year or so?

Charlie Cole: (29:43)

Oh God, yes. For me, I think my biggest regret was all that intentional communication that I mentioned in my first two months, three months, four months. I really wish I had kept it going and actually had maintained that same level of intensity. It seems unfathomable to work at a company for 13 months and spend three hours a day just chitchatting with people, but I kind of wish I did. This moment actually came where our general counsel, Scott, came to me and he was like, "Hey, why'd you stop writing your blog?" And I'm like, "I don't know. I'm really not a writer. I never thought I should." He pulled me aside. He's like, "Charlie, these people want to know what's going on in your head. The fact of the matter is all those collisions I mentioned before aren't happening so it's the best way for them to get a glimpse.” And so, I've kept blogging weekly. That's good, Charles, but it's not good enough. And so, I kind of wished that I had maintained a higher intensity level of intentional communication on a non-work basis. I tried to catch up there, but that was a miss on my part, I think.

Charles: (30:52)

As you guys start to come back together, what are you going to prioritize, you personally?

Charlie Cole: (30:59)

I think that feeling of safety and vulnerability that we talked about before is the thing that's the hardest to do right now. I mentioned body language, right? I mentioned all those things. The craziest part of the FTD story is in 13 months, we have accomplished more than I would've ever thought was possible even pre-pandemic. When I was interviewing for this job in January, February, the vision I had for my first 365 days, we are well past it, and yet, if this is a 10-step process, we're on step two and a half.

And so, if that is all true, then the most important part is people feeling like they're invested up to step 10, that they can see step 10, even if step 10 is three years away. The best way to maintain that innovative level of future state thinking is to make people feel safe and be vulnerable with them. So the thing I'm most excited about, Charles, is on those Thursday nights when we can go out to dinner with people, is letting my guard down and hoping other people let theirs down, because that, to me, is the level of safety that's needed to accomplish our long-term goals.

Charles: (32:12)

How are you going to look back on 2020? How do you think you'll see it as you move forward?

Charlie Cole: (32:21)

Personally, I've learned more about myself than probably any other year besides the year my mom passed away. I've always said that that year was my year of personal reinvention. I think this year has been a year of personal reinvention for me at that same level of intensity. Right now, I'm really frustrated that we don't have our data infrastructure right where it was, and my CTO, who I'm also very blessed to say is one of my best friends on Earth, my CTO will be quick to say, he's like, "You realize we were bankrupt 18 months ago, right?" You know what I mean? So I think that 2020 for me is a year of personal reinvention and professional. We're laying the track. We should be so proud of what we've done and we should be just ruthlessly excited about the future. For me, 2020 is going to be foundational, both professionally and personally.

Charles: (33:12)

What comes next, both personally and from a business standpoint? What will the office look like, first of all?

Charlie Cole: (33:19)

So, I have a board meeting tomorrow where I can officially answer this question because I need to get board blessing, but we're leaning towards a fairly hybrid structure, where some in the office, some out of the office, instead of some folks I think are talking about doing…. You'll hear people saying these things like three-two, two-three, or three days in the office, two days out. We're thinking more on a week by week basis, right? I think that continuity is a real thing, right? So if you know you're going to be in the office four days straight, that changes your perspective versus you might have Tuesday off, you might have Monday off. I think routine is something that humans actually quite like, even though we probably resist them sometimes.

So I think we're in going to a hybrid group. We were talking last night about when our return to work is. We're leaning towards September. The variants are making us a little nervous as everybody is. We actually have adapted in India, and boy, it's really tragic. And so, India is an open question for us. But I think for us, we were talking yesterday about a return to work and we're like, "So what band are we even come get played?" You know what I mean? That's, I think, the most important part, is making these human context more about like, "Hey, we have conference rooms again." Don't worry about that stuff. Worry more about lessening that human connection that we've all missed, especially for these folks that I've bled on the battlefield with, albeit it’s been more like video games than actual battlefields. You know what I mean? So I get really excited about those moments in particular.

Charles: (34:43)

Last two questions for you, how do you lead?

Charlie Cole: (34:49)

I like to think by example, but I'm going to say by attitude. I think that by example in particularly is very hard to be your tent-pole when you're virtual. I mean, the reality is, Charles, when we get off this Zoom call, I have no idea what you're going to do next and you have no idea what I'm going to do next. We could email each other, we can text each other, but for all you know, I scheduled those emails last night. So, by example is very hard, but by attitude is really important. I am not perfect. I actually had an attitude yesterday that I wasn't proud of and stuff like that, but I do think that relentless positivity is rarely a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if it becomes inauthentic, but I truly believe that FTD can and will change local commerce for good forever. I believe that, and I plan on trying to exude that through my pores 24/7 when we're a team through a positive mindset.

Charles: (35:50)

What are you afraid of?

Charlie Cole: (35:53)

I'm afraid of letting our team down. I think that's the thing that makes me the most nervous, because I say it all the time, especially to my peers, that the coolest part about this job is that if we fail, we're going to have no one to blame but ourselves. And that's a real compliment, by the way, to our investors. It's a compliment to our board of directors. It's a compliment to each other. We have a structure that allows us to do what we want and drive this business how we want, but with that comes a remarkable pressure. And that pressure, I think, lands squarely on my shoulders, because if we fail, it's ultimately a failure on my part.

That's, I think, what scares me the most, not because of the failure itself, because I don't want to let my partners down. I view everybody in this company, customer service agents, board of directors, I don't care, I don't want to let everybody down and I certainly don't want to let our florists down. That's the thing that scares me the most. Because small business in America is under siege, and if we fail, then we've failed small business and that's something I'm not sure I could live with.

Charles: (36:58)

Yeah, I think that's so well said. I really want to thank you for coming on today. I live in a small community and small business makes such an enormous contribution to the quality of life that we have up here and to the very fabric of the way that this community works. So I very much hope that you guys are successful. Thanks for taking the time today.

Charlie Cole: (37:14)

Thanks, Charles. I really enjoyed it. It was awesome.

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