Episode Description
As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “There is nothing permanent except change.” It’s an adage that applies in business, especially for organizations celebrating their 50th birthday.
In this episode, host Chris Fredericks, CEO of Empowered Ventures, reconnects with Tad Calahan, President of TVF, to explore how TVF has evolved after 50 successful years in business.
They discuss TVF’s recent CRM and ERP system implementations, the lessons learned along the way, and the importance of balancing innovation with legacy. Tad shares how the team’s resilience and collaboration have driven progress while keeping their focus on providing exceptional service and a purpose-driven workplace.
From celebrating TVF’s 50th anniversary to achieving ambitious goals ahead of schedule, this episode offers an honest look at the rewards and complexities of growth.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Building a Legacy of Innovation: TVF focuses on evolving workplace culture and creating a meaningful environment for employees to thrive, ensuring growth for the next 50 years.
- Balancing Standardization and Customization: TVF approaches system updates by evaluating the need for efficiency while maintaining flexibility for unique business processes.
- The Role of Change Management in Success: Tad emphasizes the importance of clear communication and collaboration in overcoming resistance and fostering adoption during organizational transformations.
- Navigating Large-Scale System Changes: Tad shares insights from TVF’s transition to Dynamics 365, highlighting the complexities and rewards of CRM and ERP implementations.
Jump into the conversation:
(00:00) Introduction to Tad Calahan
(01:40) Reflecting on TVF’s 50th anniversary
(02:28) Overview of TVF’s supply chain challenges and internal system upgrades
(07:23) Challenges and lessons from ERP and CRM implementation projects
(08:54) Changes in management strategies and overcoming resistance to system upgrades
(10:38) Standardizing processes for efficiency during system transitions
(13:30) Balancing customization and standardization in new systems
(14:14) Communicating the “why” in change management and driving alignment
(19:03) Tad’s vision for TVF’s future: growth, evolution, and community impact
How to Listen or Watch
Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Watch below or @Empowered_Ventures on YouTube.
Read the full transcript below the media links.
Episode Transcript
Chris Fredericks: Welcome to Empowered Owners, the podcast that takes you inside Empowered Ventures. I’m your host, Chris Fredericks. In each episode, I’ll have a discussion with one of our employees to discover and highlight their distinct personalities, perspectives and skills, while also keeping you in the loop with exclusive news, updates on company performance and a glimpse into the future plans of Empowered Ventures. This is an opportunity for me to learn more about our amazing employee-owners and an opportunity for you to hear regularly from me and others from within Empowered Ventures. Welcome to another episode of Empowered Owners, the community-building podcast about and for the employee-owners of Empowered Ventures. My name is Chris Fredericks and on today’s episode I’m talking with Tad Calahan president of TVF, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. This is Tad’s second time on the podcast and in this episode he provides an update on what’s been going on at TVF since the last time we spoke. I found this to be a really honest and insightful conversation about the opportunities and challenges all companies go through when implementing new systems and technology.
Chris Fredericks: TVF is full of people like Tad who care deeply about the business, and I’m super proud of Tad and the team for their perseverance and their desire to keep improving TVF so its next 50 years are even more successful than its first 50. With that, let’s get to my conversation with Tad. Tad, welcome back to Empowered Owners.
Tad Calahan: Yeah, thanks Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Fredericks: Appreciate you coming on again. Really excited to have you back. You know, we’ve got a lot of great companies in EVs portfolio, TVF included, and being the foundational business, you know, for what we’re doing here. So excited to dig in with you a little bit to what’s been going on at TVF and things that are on your mind and things you’re thinking about for the future. Maybe you could give us a little bit of an update on how you’ve been doing, how TVF has been navigating the last couple years and just what’s been going on at TVF.
Tad Calahan: Yeah. Thanks Chris. Happy to do so. TVF’s been doing great. Obviously things have calmed down from some of the supply chain crisis and things that we challenged maybe a couple of years ago. And so it gave us a little bit of an opportunity to pivot and kind of look internally and think about systems. And we had been on our past ERP for a long time. I think it’s around 12 years. And we’re always aspiring to launch a CRM and start to really lean into systems a little bit better to understand our customer base, provide a better customer experience and just really make the business better. And so we did that over the last year and a half. We went through obviously an implementation process and went live in April. And you know, I think with, with any business that’s went through this type of a journey, it’s challenging. There’s a lot of things that you go through, but really our team has done a great job being resilient, working through the challenges together and we still got some work to do, but things are going relatively well. We’re serving our customers and we’re evolving the business, which I think is a great thing.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, that’s awesome. Some folks might be curious just about technicalities. So just what system were you on before from an ERP perspective? What did the team decide to go forward with with ERP and then CRM? This is the first kind of full company-scale CRM implementation TVF’s ever been through. So what system did the team end up going with there?
Tad Calahan: Yeah, so we implemented Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 back in 2012. So we were on that until this year and we chose to stick with the Dynamics platform and just migrate to the Dynamics 365 ecosystem. So it’s more cloud-based, less heavy-duty infrastructure and things, more on the prem side of things and the same thing for the CRM. So I think they call it CE Customer Experience and Dynamics, but basically it’s their CRM module of that entire platform. So it stuck with what’s familiar from a data structure, process and familiarity standpoint. We felt like in the end of the day we looked at some other options and just felt like there was a lot of inherent knowledge and build up. And when we went to AX 2012 12 years ago, it was so incredibly different and new and you know, there’s just a lot of hindsight you gain through the time and the years of having a new system when it’s so new and different. So as we looked at other systems and other options, it just felt like they were all pretty much the same and we felt like we’d be leaving a lot at the table if we didn’t stick with something that from a familiar standpoint allowed us to through implementations. A lot of times you have to rely on a partner. We felt like we could bring more to the table and control our own destiny a little bit more effectively. Sticking with something that was more familiar.
Chris Fredericks: And just for those two that maybe aren’t super familiar. What is an ERP system and what is a CRM system?
Tad Calahan: Yeah, so CRM, Customer Relationship Management. CRM is primarily to track your sales process, make sure you’re gathering all the right information around your customer, customer interactions, activities, all the things that you want to track and understand about your customer base, your markets, and then more intimately providing the right intel internally and externally for the business. And so that’s just a new skill and behavior that we think is going to help us really grow and evolve. ERP is enterprise resource planning and it’s really more of your back office a lot of times. Obviously it can be used for a lot of different things, but it’s typically more of your finance and operations. So for instance, Dynamics has re-branded that aspect of their module to F&O which is for finance and operations. And so it’s more of your purchasing, your inventory, your product management. If you’re in services, it does all the other stuff that’s not really more customer external focused, it’s more of an internal-focused systems and programs.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah. So zooming way out just from a systems perspective, an ERP is that this is the kind of system that allows the warehouse to do things like barcoding and find efficiencies like that versus kind of manual type processes. Is that right?
Tad Calahan: Correct. Yeah. If you think about ERP and CRM, CRM is more external facing in the sense of the information in the tactical approach. And then your ERP is more for internal execution for your business.
Chris Fredericks: So it’s a huge win to pull off. I think any implementation of an ERP or a CRM. It’s. Those are both heavy lift-type projects. And I know you and I both and many of others have heard of other companies going through true nightmare scenarios with ERP and CRM implementations. So they are never easy, sometimes quite challenging for a business. I mean, how would you describe what TVF’s experience has been this time around on each of those projects and maybe just coming out of that too? Second question would be what are the learnings? What are the opportunities you’re still really excited about with those like how has the process gone and how are you seeing things going forward?
Tad Calahan: Yeah, I think first, just to tackle these implementations are a big deal, and they’re very challenging, very complex, and can be very frustrating. And so, you know, I’ve obviously heard a lot of stories around these projects really having an impact on businesses, both in a great positive way, but also in a very negative way. And a lot of it goes to the planning and your ability to maneuver those systems and have all the right discussions. And so on the ERP side, we’ve been through this before, thankfully for TVF. We had a lot of people that were here for the last one that had experience, that understood what it takes and what we need to do on more of the ERP side of things. And so that went pretty well. I think the CRM is also very challenging, and from what I understand is actually increasingly or exponentially harder than ERP systems because of the fact that it’s not necessarily the execution aspect inside the business. And it’s always typically something that you don’t do with your first ERP. Like ERPs probably have been in a business for a much longer period of time. The CRM typically is, I guess, relatively a new concept, let’s say, over the last maybe 20, 25 years. And so it’s just a different animal, and it takes a longer time to adopt and really get that right, I think, a lot of times. And so that’s been our experience, too. It’s new, it’s different. There’s a lot of things that you have to tackle and understand. And it’s also maybe not as templated. I guess, in a sense it’s more open, more gray to understand, you know, every company’s sales process and what they want to get out of a CRM could look different depending on your business and how you operate. Whereas more on the ERP side, execution of how you bring inventory in, how you pay your bills, how you send things out, those can certainly be different, but relatively within some, a little bit more narrow scope of how those things get done. So I think that just kind of speaks to the challenges of both systems. And certainly for us, we’re not any different. The CRM has been a bit more challenging. It’s new. It’s our first time going through this relative to kind of how we were 12 years ago when we did ERP for the first time. And so internally, we’re working through some things. We didn’t get everything right. You know, we’re not perfect. But I’m really proud of our team and how they’re working together, how they’re learning to work through challenges together and help us understand what we got right, what’s working, what’s not, and how do we really tackle those together in a meaningful way to make sure as time goes forward, we’re continuing to evolve the system and make it the best we can make it so we get the best return on that investment.
Chris Fredericks: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’m remembering something from the past that is, I think, maybe a funny and insightful story with all this. So back in 2012, when you led the AX implementation with a broader team of folks from within TVF, and I was in TVF at the time in my full-time role, I’m remembering that TVF did a lot of things that you would think are standard but without a standard approach. So for example, accounts payable, how we paid bills, things like that that most companies might take for granted. That’s like there’s one way to do that. TVF had over the years, kind of previous to this process implementation, created its own unique, special way to do accounts payable. And I remember you and I talking about like, okay, with this implementation of ax, it’s our opportunity. I think you brought it up. You said it’s our opportunity to actually get away from doing some of these weird, unnecessary. You didn’t say weird, but you know.
Tad Calahan: You might have been implied it. But yeah.
Chris Fredericks: And even for me, I’m thinking about how change management can be so difficult. I think at that moment I had some resistance, like, well, why wouldn’t we just make it kind of do what we always do? And we had a really healthy conversation and this is just accounts payable. To your point about like, accounts payable should be a relatively easy thing to kind of adopt a standard system for. And I remember feeling like, oh, I don’t know if we should do that. And you were 100% right, we did it. You know, and generally speaking, back in that implementation, you and the team, the implementation team, chose to try to standardize as much as possible. And I think the company has benefited greatly from those choices, even though we had to adapt to that change. And I wonder if there’s some echo or, you know, similarity with any implementation. It’s, there’s always going to be some amount of resistance. And that doesn’t mean it’s always the right answer right off the bat either that sometimes it takes time to, to really figure out how to use these systems to fit the company the best too, is that, does that resonate for you too?
Tad Calahan: Yeah, absolutely. I think the AP one is a great one because I think I can speak for most people. The AP process that’s in most ERP systems is pretty much the same and it’s a best practice, it’s straightforward. But when you’ve created your own thought process, you know, it’s hard to get away from that when you’ve been doing it for decades. And so it helped move the business forward. But I think also it was a good opportunity for change management because I know our AP person was like, wait, this is totally different, I don’t know if I like it, whatever. And it’s just like, trust us, this is how it comes out of the box and it’s going to be better and we never look back. And I think for people like me, when I first came to TVF learning that that’s how we did our pay, it was just like, why? Like this seems so crazy, so manual, so burdensome. Why would we have done that? But it had been in place for 20 some years so it just felt natural to the people here. But when you look outside the walls, it was actually very unique to what most AP processes look like. So it’s just one example of many that we went through that time period. And you’re right Chris, doing that and have done that with this most recent implementation we’ve created a charter for the project and making sure because when you get in these projects and you get in the weeds and you kind of can very quickly lose your way and your direction of what you’re trying to accomplish. So we thought it was really smart on the front end to create a charter to understand what it is that we’re trying to achieve. And one of those key components was standardize. We had a AX 2012 for 12 years and we did a lot of customization for what we felt we needed. And we felt like going to a cloud-based system. There’s a lot of overhead and debt of having to always check those developments every time a new release came out. So we wanted to be smart about determining what customizations really needed to be there and what didn’t to help make sure the long-term effort to maintain a system was proper. And quite honestly in that process, I think maybe we went a little bit too standard. And we’re finding now in the first year there’s some things that we, we really do need that the standard processes aren’t providing the benefit that we thought they were. So we’re working through some of those. But to your point, change management is certainly difficult, especially for a company like TVF that’s been around for 50 years. We do things in a way that have been successful. And I think, you know, you talk about change management, and one of the things that’s always stuck with me, we did a workshop on change management. And typically for change management to go well, it has to really be one of two things. Either you’re running away from something that’s damaged, broken. They call it like a burning bridge, right? So you have to run away for something and you really don’t have a choice. You have to fix it and change to either survive or reach the goals you want, or there’s some really exciting future that you’re running towards that is better than where you’re at, that helps you propel the business forward. And I think sometimes if you’re not able to communicate clearly which one of those, and you’re having enough success, but you really want to do more and you don’t make that super clear, then you can kind of get caught in the middle where people are straddling that fence and not really seeing the value and just really want the creature comforts. We’re all humans and like our comforts and our habits. So getting out of that and stretching always takes communicating and understanding the why behind some of these changes. And that’s, to me, the crux of change management and why it’s so difficult to do, because not everyone can always see which piece of that is. Either you’re running away from something or you’re running towards something. And in our particular case, we weren’t running away from anything. The business was operating fine. It was just wanting to continue to evolve, make sure we’re on systems that are supported, and really try to move the business forward in a positive way. But helping people see that future is really challenging if it’s different than what you’ve had, right? Like back to the AP to bring this full circle, saying, wow, why would we do this? Like the AP process we have, and it broke and it’s like, well, it’s maybe not broken. We are paying our bills on time, but it’s also taken inordinately amount of time that we’re spending for someone to do that process, even though it’s not broken, where they could repurpose that time for something that’s more beneficial, that’s going to move the business forward, help our customers, help our vendors, help our people internally and make TV better. So a lot of times, I think that’s what it boils down to. And we’re dealing with it again this time around. But continue to just be open-minded to how can we do things better for ourselves and for our customer and make sure that we’re standardizing and having those conversations as much as we can, I think is always going to make the business better in the end.
Chris Fredericks: Sounds like you’ve had a lot of people involved in these projects that have put a lot of time and effort into them too. And I hope they’re all proud of, you know, the progress that has been made. I know there’s things, it sounds like there’s still things to work through and really figure out. And yet, you know, there’s probably a lot to celebrate too. Just a lot of people that put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into these implementations that deserve a lot of credit, I think too. Is that how you feel about that too?
Tad Calahan: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I’ve been to these before. They’re not easy. And the team that we have that went through these spent a lot of time and effort and it’s incredibly challenging and it’s not their full-time job. Right. They do other things for TVF and they’re doing this out of the love and the interest to make TVF better. And so I really do want to applaud all the folks that were part of this. They really helped move TVF forward in a pretty big way and are still involved. Right. So while we converted and we’re live and we’re off and running, there’s perpetually more things to do. Like it’s never perfect. Right. So we’ll continue to kind of evolve that. And we’ve got a great team of people that have been here a long time. So they have the perspective of either previous implementations or the way that things have gone. So we have that context and we also have a lot of new individuals that bring new perspective to TVF that maybe have only been here for some number of years and don’t really understand what we’ve done and why we do things and are challenging that status quo, which I think is super healthy for an organization like ours, that while we’ve been around a long time, we still aspire to be the best company we can be and continue to grow and evolve and provide better service to our customers. So it’s a really healthy balance of people that are really smart, driven and motivated to make TVF the best version I can and I couldn’t be happier for the team that we have here and how we go about our business.
Chris Fredericks: That’s great. Anything else I mean, you mentioned something earlier though, that maybe deposit. You mentioned TVF’s 50th anniversary this year. It’s kind of a big deal too, huh?
Tad Calahan: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a big deal. We’ve done a lot of outreach. Our marketing team’s been great about promoting our 50th. It’s been a fun time. We had a TVF-together company party in July of this year. It was only the second time that we’ve brought the company together. We did this back in the summer of 2019 when we hit a share price goal and ironically enough for us, the new share price goal that we were looking to achieve by 2025, we met that a year early. So it was kind of cool. We were not only celebrating our 50th year in business, but also we got a chance to celebrate the fact that we met a share price goal a year early. So it ended up being a really fun time to get people together here in Carmel, Indiana and spend some time together. And it came at a great time for us too. We were going through a lot of the system changes and all that. So it gave us a chance to break some bread, pivot away from work for a couple of days and really get to enjoy each other’s company.
Chris Fredericks: And what else is on your mind for TVF for the future? Like, what excites you when you think about future and you know, where the business goes from here?
Tad Calahan: Yeah, good question. I think for me, excited to build on the foundation that we’ve had now through 50 years. And what can we do to make TVF even better in the next 50? You know, we are a leader in our space and so how can we leverage our position in the marketplace to continue to support our customers and support the textile industry in whatever shape we can. If that’s through know new products, new markets, also just internally, how do we continue to evolve the workplace and provide just a really meaningful and fulfilling place to, you know, have your career, support your family, enjoy life, and doing all that together I think is a recipe for success that’s really exciting. And just look forward to working alongside everyone here at TVF to figure out what that looks like. And how do we continue to have a lot of success in the future and enjoy doing it. Work should be not all difficult and rough. It should be fun and enjoyable and get a chance to celebrate along the way.
Chris Fredericks: Well, Tad, I just want to thank you again for coming on. This has been a fun quick update on tvf and thank you for all your effort to support the team and excited to hear how the CRM and ERP implementation process goes in the coming years. Thanks so much for coming back on.
Tad Calahan: Yeah, absolutely. Chris, thanks for having me. Enjoyed it.
Chris Fredericks: I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Tad Calahan. Empowered Owners is a podcast by and for the employee-owners of Empowered Ventures. Special thanks to ShareYour Genius for producing. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at empowered.ventures. Full video episodes are on YouTube @Empowered_Ventures. If you have a question for us about EV, our companies or employee ownership, contact us at [email protected]. You can also text or leave a voicemail at 317-643-2383.
