Bob Chapman | The CEO Who Grew Barry-Wehmiller from $20 Million In Revenue In 1975 to Over $3.5 Billion Today + Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

(Speaker 2)
All right, ladies and gentlemen, on today’s edition of the Thrive Time Show, we are interviewing the CEO, Bob Chapman, who successfully grew his company from $20 million in revenue in 1975 to $3 .5 billion of revenue as of 2025. From $20 million to $3 .5 billion. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the CEO of Barry Wehmiller. What? This is the CEO of Barry Wehmiller.

(Speaker 3)
His name is Bob Chapman. He’s going to teach you Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi -million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use, because they believe in you and they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom. Now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show, starring the former U .

(Speaker 3)
S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist bunny, Dr. Robert Zunich. Two men, eight kids, co -created by two different women.

(Speaker 1)
13 multi -million dollar businesses.

(Speaker 15)
I’m really looking forward to this exchange.

(Speaker 2)
Thanks for your interest.

(Speaker 1)
Now, Bob, obviously we just played an introduction for our wonderful audience, but if you were to describe you to somebody who met you in an elevator or somebody who got stuck in that elevator with you for several minutes, how would you describe how you got from where you started to where you are today? Probably describe you as the most fortunate person you have ever met in your life. In terms of my life, my work, my passion, the time I’m going to start IM, you met the most fortunate person you have ever met in terms of my role, my message, my life.

(Speaker 2)
So I live an amazing life that has been beyond my imagination. Now, you are the CEO of a multi -billion dollar company. If I’m getting this right here, I believe your company right now is a $3 .6 billion manufacturing and professional services business.

(Speaker 1)
Does that blow your mind? Yes, because I started with a broken, 100 -year -old, $20 million business and tried to keep it alive and eventually was able, through business model design and 150 adoptions, some people call them acquisitions, I call them adoptions, to create this global enterprise that operates from China to India, primarily making machinery for people like Coca -Cola, Procter & Gamble. International Paper, machinery that allows them to produce their products.

(Speaker 2)
So it’s been an amazing journey massively beyond my wildest expectations. Now, before we get into why I’m going to interview you on today’s show, I just want to ask you as far as the background, how did you gain traction or when did you feel like you started to gain traction?

(Speaker 1)
Like at what age did you start to go, you know what, perhaps what I’m doing is actually working and perhaps I may not end my career at the bottom. You know, I didn’t have any expectations. Just for your background, I have an accounting degree from Indiana, an MBA from Michigan. I was two years with Pricewaterhouse and I joined an $18 million family company with no expectations. I just did it. I was doing well in public accounting, never considered joining this family company.

(Speaker 1)
It was pretty broken that my dad had invested in. It was been a journey. And from day one, I was the beauty to your audiences that I stepped into the company with the title somebody my dad could trust. It was so bad that my dad was opening every piece of mail with the secretary every morning to see if somebody was trying to cheat him. So that’s kind of the environment. And so I never had expectations.

(Speaker 1)
I just wanted I took on the challenge with no expectations other than to play my best game.

(Speaker 2)
So I massively exceeded my wildest expectations. Now, you’ve put together a new book, this new book here. I’ll put a link to it and I’ll put it on the show notes so people can see it here. But you’ve put together a new book called Everybody Matters, The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, which may seem very counterintuitive for people out there in the world of business or for people that come from a dysfunctional family.

(Speaker 14)
Maybe they don’t want to treat their employees like family.

(Speaker 2)
I don’t know. What’s your thought?

(Speaker 1)
Why did you decide to title your book Everybody Matters, The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family? You know, my great question. My educational background prepared me to see people in the organization as functions for my success. They were labor. They were union members. They were machinists.

(Speaker 1)
They were receptionists. I described the people as functions. I was a nice guy. We had a nice company. But the lens through which I was educated and I experienced in the world, I saw people as a function. I had a revelation midway in my career, 25 years into my career, about 1997 to around 2000.

(Speaker 1)
I had three revelations. The lens through which I saw people was reversed because I realized that all the people, the 12 ,000 people in our organization around the world were not labor machinists, assemblers, et cetera. They were somebody’s precious child that had been placed in my care for 40 hours a week and the impact I could make on them by treating with respect and dignity and giving them a sense of a grounded sense of hope for the future would make a profound impact on them. So in effect that when you see everybody somebody’s precious child. you basically said, everybody matters. It’s not just a senior executive.

(Speaker 1)
It’s not just a C -suite. In our organization, everybody is created equal. Everybody brings their gifts. And so it was very easy to come up with that title, Everybody Matters. Extraordinary power of caring for people like family. Where did we come up with the word family?

(Speaker 1)
Because some people say, well, you know, that’s different. I say, what’s different? When we bring children into this world through a marriage, adoption, or second, a marriage, we treat them with respect and dignity. Very important. Well, leadership is exactly like parenting. It is the stewardship of the lives you have the privilege to be a part of.

(Speaker 1)
And so elevating leadership is a privilege, not as a job. And you look at the people in your organization, because the way you see people, we’ve learned, affects the way you treat people. If you see that person when you get into a cab as a cab driver, you probably will treat them like a cab driver. If you see them as somebody’s son, you’ll treat them differently. So the lens through which we saw people profoundly changed the way we treated people.

(Speaker 1)
And we felt it was a blessing. We honestly felt, because I’m an accountant.

(Speaker 2)
and this is way outside my pay grade, but basically we feel some higher power is using us to show the world the way he intended it to be, where people know they matter. Now, I don’t want to come across like I’m a jerk here on this question, so I’ll just try to. My question is, you said you have an epiphany, and I don’t mean this as some sort of backhanded compliment or question. When you had an epiphany, I mean, did you hit your head on a toilet seat? Were you out camping? Did you burn yourself with a coffee?

(Speaker 2)
Did somebody whisper something in your ear? Were you reading the Bible? I mean, when you had this epiphany, where were you?

(Speaker 13)
What was that epiphany or that revelation, I guess, is the word you used?

(Speaker 1)
Well, yeah. The revelation was three of them. First of all, it was 1997 during March Madness, just adopted a company, acquired a company in South Carolina, very significant acquisition. I went down there to be there the first day that I was the new owner of that company, having a cup of coffee in the lunchroom. And nobody knew who I was. I didn’t know who they were.

(Speaker 12)
So they were talking about which basketball teams were in the final four, how much money the office pool they were making.

(Speaker 1)
They were having fun. The closer it got to eight o ‘clock, you could just see the fun go out of their bodies. So I had my first revelation. All of a sudden I said, why can’t business be fun? When do people express their gifts? So I started implementing some ideas where I aligned having fun to creating value.

(Speaker 1)
And we saw significant growth and we saw a phenomenal change in joy. And so I said, there’s something going on here. So we were really profoundly impacted by it. Second was in church when the director of my church was my mentor. And I looked at my wife after the service and I said, Cynthia, Ed has only got us for one hour a week.

(Speaker 1)
We have people for 40 hours a week. We are 40 times more powerful that affect people’s lives in our church. And the final one, the one people remember the most is at a wedding. as a friend of mine was walking his daughter down the aisle to be wed to this nice young man. And everybody thought the couple was so precious. The wedding was so beautiful.

(Speaker 1)
And my mind went to our 12 ,000 team members. And all of a sudden I said, wait a second, all 12 ,000 of our team members around the world are somebody’s precious child who simply wants to know they matter. And we have them in our care for 40 hours a week. We need to be good stewards of those lives. So I went from using people for my success to caring for people for our success, our mutual success. So those three, but and again, I didn’t read a book, nobody said something to me, it just these thoughts occurred to me.

(Speaker 1)
And the way they built over about a two year period of time was profound. And it created a culture that people started coming in from McKinsey, Harvard wrote a case study, Simon Sinek came in, everybody said, I have never seen anything like this. And I said, How is it possible this simple kid from North St. Louis running a kind of a global manufacturing company would create somebody nobody else had seen?

(Speaker 2)
Because somebody is using us to show the world the way it was intended to be, where people are our purpose. Now, somebody watching this thinks, well, you know, it’s easy for you to say, Bob.

(Speaker 11)
I mean, you’ve got a, one, your name is great.

(Speaker 2)
You can spell it. forward or backwards. It’s you can’t get your name wrong. You got you scored that you’ve got this company that’s making millions of dollars. And so I was watching this and are going, you know, I have a dysfunctional janitorial company. I have a home remodeling company that’s losing money.

(Speaker 2)
I have a auto repair shop that’s not making money. So again, could you share with the listeners out there about the core products or services that your company provides and just a little bit of texture on that just to give it some, because I know you come from a place where you manage people that actually deliver real products and real services. You do have a profit and loss you have to look at.

(Speaker 1)
Tell us about your company. First of all, we don’t manage anybody. We lead, we mentor, we coach. Nobody likes to be managed, nobody can be managed. I’m going to start by there. Again, where I started when I walked into this company, we made machinery that was designed in the early 1900s for the brewing industry to wash returnable bottles.

(Speaker 1)
Not many people are taking bottles back to be reused at the grocery store anymore. The technology was old and the use of it was fading. I stepped into a company and it was very weak financially. It was just, it was, it was alive, but barely. So we didn’t have any gimme’s and I didn’t have any money. The company, there was no wealth outside the company.

(Speaker 1)
So I had to start with kind of a broken model. And I tried some things to grow and I ran into some challenges, but I survived the things I did wrong. I learned by it. And eventually, and this is what’s important. Eventually, I said, you know, I just need to design a business model, whether you’re in car repair or, you know, something else, losing money. If you have a company that is not well designed, good people can’t make it work, okay?

(Speaker 1)
You got to design a business model as you invite people into it, but they feel it have a sense of the future. So the business model design is my primary responsibility. And then the culture is the fuel that activates that business model and allows it to perform. So we were doing well before this in transforming the business. And I did it through 150 acquisitions, people call them, I call them adoption, around the world, where we bring value to those companies, and we put them all together.

(Speaker 1)
So we have a very diversified company today. We are diversified in markets, customers, and technology. So since something changed, we’re not a Polaroid camera, we’re not NCR cash registers. We make centrifuges for cell harvesting. We make tissue equipment for toilet paper. So very diversified.

(Speaker 2)
The business model is the foundation of my stewardship. You know, now I know who I need to call if I need a centrifuge. That’s Bob right there, folks. So, Bob, I got to ask you, though, this is profound stuff here. You’re saying that good people can’t make a bad business model work. Now, I want to get into your book in just a moment, but I want to ask you about that for a second, because I know there’s people out there that are both extremes.

(Speaker 2)
I know people that have a very, I mean, I can think of very specific people in my mind right now that I’ve met through our conferences that have a very dysfunctional business model. and they spend their whole day trying to get their good people to make it work. And then I also know people that have a great business model, but they have dysfunctional people that work there, and the thing can’t work. So can you maybe help us balance that out real quick for somebody who’s trying to balance the good model, good people?

(Speaker 1)
Help somebody out there, sir. Well, again, when I began, we had old technology, very dependent upon a narrow industry. The brewing industry was consolidating. Philip Morris was buying Miller Brewing Company and Slits and so a lot of consolidation, but it was our historic business. So our business model was broken. I didn’t think of business model.

(Speaker 1)
Our product offering was very limited and very weak with a future. So again, my initial initiatives were to try to acquire companies that had products that had a better future. than the history. As I said, I’m proud of our history, but our history didn’t give us the future. You got to be able to do that. If you have a business model that is not performing, you cannot be good to the people you invite into that company, any more than if you don’t provide a good

(Speaker 1)
income to your family, you can’t be good stewards of your family. So the business model design is, and I don’t hear many business executives talk about a business model design. I tell them that they’re products, they’re services, they’re market, but not them. So our business model is very intentional. And I think you’re obviously, I focused on, because in capital goods, big machinery, it goes up and down with the economy and interest rates and various other market factors. And somebody told me years ago, you need to find a way to level those heels out so you can, and when things are down, you can do fine.

(Speaker 1)
And when things are up, you can do well. So of our 3 .6 billion in revenue, 1 .2 billion is recurring revenue, spare parts, field service, and upgrades to our equipment, 1 .2 billion. And that’s as predictable as the sunrise. And then on top of that is consulting, which is 1 .2 billion, which is daily revenue. If you will, the cyclicality of new equipment is mitigated by two very predictable pieces.

(Speaker 2)
So that’s our business model. You know, one thing that’s incredible about you, so many things blow my mind about you, but I love that you’re practical, but you’re also thinking about high level stuff. I mean, I’m just saying, there’s a lot of people that come on a show like this, right? And they want to talk about theories, but then they’re short on the application. You’re applying all day, and you have this great proven strategy. And in your book, your new book, I’m telling folks again, folks, the new book is Everybody Matters, The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family.

(Speaker 2)
You’ve got a lot of concepts in this book, but there’s three key points I wanted to dive into with the limited time we have there, sir. The first is exceptional employee morale. Now, I see this all the time. I see it, Bob, because entrepreneurs will say, can I bring my secretary, Clay, to your conference? Can I bring my office manager? And I can tell right away if there’s any tension, because the secretary doesn’t want to go.

(Speaker 2)
The business manager doesn’t want to go. or vice versa. Sometimes people are dragging their employees with them to the conference, dragging the employee with them. Talk to the listeners out there.

(Speaker 1)
If they don’t have exceptional employee morale, how can a business owner turn it around and create a culture of exceptional employee morale? Well, listen, if I can do it, I have a very average intelligence, OK, very average intelligence. But what I am is I have good common sense, creativity and a positive attitude. If you blend those together, that explains our journey because I’ve been able to see value where other people don’t. But if you want to embrace culture, if you first have to change the lens, you shouldn’t describe people as headcount, labor, workforce. You should describe them as team members and treat them with respect and dignity.

(Speaker 1)
And in doing so, you have to develop skills that you don’t have, which I call human skills. But again, the foundation of your stewardship is a good business model so your people are safe. And then the culture is the premium fuel that activates that business model and what you have to do. Again, you can’t ask people to care about their team members, OK? Whether they invite them to a conference or not, it doesn’t show that they care. We’re not taught to care.

(Speaker 1)
In our business schools and in the real world, we’re taught to use people to achieve your goals and then you discard them when you don’t need them anymore. So we’re taught to use people. We are not taught to care for people. So again, That’s what my book is about. We felt blessed with a totally different way of looking at the people we have the privilege of leading, those in our span of care. And we shared the skills we give our team members to actually learn to care, not to use, but to care.

(Speaker 1)
And the results have been our share price, which we’ve got a market simulated share price has gone up over 12 % a year for 25 years. So we’ve outperformed at almost every index for a long period of time because we have a robust business model and a culture

(Speaker 2)
that activates that business model to perform and attract incredible talent. What are the other products that you make? You make centrifuges.

(Speaker 1)
What else do you make there, Bob? We make machines that do heart stent crimping machines and medical devices. We make machines that put labels on bottles. We make machines that print labels for your packaging product. We make fillers that fill product. So if you think of 150 adoptions acquisitions, we make a lot of different things around the world from, again, We have a large plant in Serbia, many plants in Italy.

(Speaker 1)
So we make a lot of different products, mainly machinery sold to people, again, like Procter & Gamble and International Paper, Georgia Pacific, people like that, who buy our equipment to make their product, but very diversified. So again, if something changes, And again, if you design your business model, this is something I want to, if Ford designs a new F -150, they drive it out in the worst terrain they can find to see how it holds up. If you design your business model, drive it into the 08, 09 downturn when General Electric and others fell apart. Our business, we let nobody, our orders dropped by 30 percent, but we let nobody go. We got through it by shared sacrifice and came out of it even stronger.

(Speaker 2)
So our business model has been tested in the worst economic conditions and it has been robust in every one of those. I’m going to pull up your website here so people can check out your website here. Now, for anybody out there that is betting right now with their husband, their wife, they’re kind of debating how we pronounce the name of the company here. It’s Barry Waymiller.

(Speaker 1)
Is that correct there, Bob?

(Speaker 2)
Yes, yes, that’s right. thing, but you have a real company. It’s a $3 .6 billion business, and you’re still implementing these systems. Sustainable growth. In your book, you talk about sustainable growth. What does that mean?

(Speaker 1)
Why is sustainable growth important there, Bob?

(Speaker 10)
Well, it’s a sign of vitality.

(Speaker 1)
I saw it in business school. Growth is vitality. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, okay? And so to give your team members, your stakeholders a good future, you need to grow. And we’ve been growing both organically and through adoptions acquisitions. Again, 150 of those around the world.

(Speaker 1)
And again, in terms of the audience, in terms of the believability of what I’m saying, I’m not a theorist. I’m sharing what we’ve been blessed with, that we’re actually doing. And the results are very clear. But again, our book that you talked about that was written, first edition 10 years ago, a good business book sells 5 to 15 ,000. We sold 110 ,000 copies in seven languages around the world. And the reason we did the new edition that you mentioned is because in the last 10 years, we have learned so much.

(Speaker 1)
We owed it to the public to share the impact of what we have learned. And again, Harvard wrote a case study on the company you’re talking about, our culture, and it’s now one of their better selling cases. So I would say to you, our business model, what I’m sharing with you, And I gave 300 speeches in the last five years around the world to various in all sectors of the economy. Nobody has ever debated what I just said to you. They just were never taught to care. They’re not rewarded to care.

(Speaker 1)
They’re rewarded for results. And we need to change that because, I mean, this is a big point.

(Speaker 2)
Tom Friedman said, more than a poverty of money, we have a poverty of dignity because people don’t feel value, they feel used.

(Speaker 1)
I believe that when you took over the company, you’re at $20 million of revenue in 1975, and now you’re at $3 .5 billion -ish? Our orders were virtually $4 billion, and our shipments were about $3 .8 billion. We had a record year, and we’re entering our year into September. and we’re now in our 26th year, and we have a record year upcoming.

(Speaker 2)
So again, great financial track record, but more importantly, a model of caring what business could be for the world, which is a force for good. Now, Bob, at the risk of you not liking these questions, and I’ll know if you don’t like it when you just hang up.

(Speaker 7)
That’ll be my code.

(Speaker 2)
I’ll know. I’ve got five rapid fire questions for I wanted to ask you with the limited time. We have five rapid fire. So it’s like 60 seconds on the clock per question. Here we go. 1975, you’re organizing your day.

(Speaker 2)
1985, you’re organizing your day. 1995, you’re organizing your day. How do you organize your day?

(Speaker 1)
Like, how do you spend the first hour of every day? Well, I would say to you, I look forward to going into our operations around the world every day. I love people. I love the intellectual challenge. So I go in with an open heart and creative mind to, if you will, constantly try to improve our business. So my job really is to constantly create a vision.

(Speaker 1)
So I prepare myself every day. I have my attitude, a positive attitude and a love for people and a passion to create human and economic value and harmony.

(Speaker 2)
That’s every single day, seven days a week. Question number two, what’s your relationship with to -do lists like?

(Speaker 1)
How would you describe your relationship with to -do lists? We got divorced years ago. I don’t have a to -do list. To me, I respond to life. Again, my greatest gift is common sense, and I have a vision for where I’m going. I know what I’m doing today, where it’s going.

(Speaker 1)
Most people I meet react to day -to -day events. They go into work, things happen, they react to them, but they don’t really know where they’re going in the long -term. The greatest thing we can do as leaders is know where you’re going and why you want to go there, and when you get there, why will you have taken the time? to a better place that is my aspiration every single day to constantly think about where we’re going and how we’re going to get their customer 3. What do you like most about what you do every day, it fills my heart with joy, it gives me the most meaningful life if you heard what I hear every day the feedback from our team members and they feel cared for you would come to tears. It is I never knew in my education that the way I’d run this company would affect the way people would go home and treat their spouse and the children.

(Speaker 1)
But when we embraced truly human leadership and started teaching our team members how to care for each other, in fact, to convert them from a manager to a leader, 95 % of the feedback is how it affected their marriage and their relationship with the children.

(Speaker 2)
So that filled my heart with unbelievable joy that we actually were blessed with a message that could heal the world. Question number four, you could have moved on to be a professional beach dweller many years ago, but you’ve chosen to continue growing the business. We just interviewed the founder of Hobby Lobby on the show a couple of weeks back. He is excited about the growth of the company, David Green there. You seem very excited about the company. Why are you not on a beach somewhere sipping Mai Tais, thinking about your next Mai Tai?

(Speaker 1)
Why are you continuing to drive this company? The way I see it is it’s a really easy softball question. You can retire from a job. but you cannot retire from a calling. I’m sure your audience will appreciate this, but when you feel as I do through these revelations that we were blessed with a vision of what business could be in the world, if we knew how to care for our people, that we could heal the poverty of dignity in this country, you can’t retire from a calling. Would I rather be on a golf course or would I rather be talking to you?

(Speaker 1)
I’d rather be talking to thoughtful people like you, spreading our message around the world.

(Speaker 2)
So in the time I have left on this earth, I make sure that this blessing lives well beyond my time, that it does not die with me. Folks, I’ll tell you just back what Bob just said. The word vocation means calling. The word vacation means to retreat from. So think about that for a second. Vocation means calling.

(Speaker 2)
Vacation means to retreat from. Bob, you’ve done a lot of interviews. I’m sure this is in the bottom 4 % of all the interviews you’ve done. If you could communicate a message to our listeners out there, you say, man, the guy didn’t even ask me this question or that question. What’s the one question maybe you wish I would have asked on today’s show? What’s the thing you said, man, Clay, I wish you would have asked me this.

(Speaker 2)
I want to give you the floor there, sir.

(Speaker 1)
What question would you wish that I would have asked you on today’s show? Well, I think the question that I would want you to ask is, how would you embrace the vision? How would you articulate to our listeners the vision you have that guides you? And what we have is we have what’s called the guiding principles of leadership. It’s our constitution of the way we are called to treat the people we have the privilege of leading, treating them with respect and dignity, sending them home knowing they matter. And the word that we use that I want to say is, we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.

(Speaker 1)
We touch our team members, we touch our suppliers, we touch our bankers. We need to think about in everything we do, how we impact people’s lives. And that is the most powerful thing that I could share to you. Leadership is a privilege, is a profound responsibility to treat those whose lives you touch, with profound care, and we could heal these issues we’re all seeing in business. I mean, remember 2025 is one of the largest periods of times in layoff we’ve had in years.

(Speaker 9)
Despite the stock market being at record levels, good economy, we’re seeing a lot of people hurt right now because people are being used to achieve financial results instead of

(Speaker 1)
for. And so to me, my goal again, and my joy every day is bringing a message that for all from hospitals to nonprofit, the military, the United Nations, everywhere I speak, I get the same reaction. I just The way we lead impacts the way people live. And for all of your listeners to think, how do they lead? How do they send people home each night knowing they matter?

(Speaker 2)
We could heal and create the world that we all want to be a part of. Bob, thank you so much for your time today, sir. I really do appreciate you. And again, it means the world to us. You carved out time for our listeners.

(Speaker 1)
Thank you very much.

(Speaker 8)
Thank you.

(Speaker 3)
I appreciate the opportunity.

(Speaker 5)
But Clay Clark, man, he is one character. That’s a good word for him, character.

(Speaker 4)
Yeah, that is it. He’s good, driven, smart, and I’ve never met a guy who was so hyper all the time. He’s doing so much good. And then I met his mother, and she just says, she just lets him be Clay Clark. I mean, so, you know, he’s endorsed by his mother, and he’s doing magnificent work. So it was great meeting you out there and all the people that he surrounds himself with.

(Speaker 5)
Clay Clark starts his days at 5 o ‘clock in the morning. Oh, it’s incredible. Yeah.

(Speaker 4)
He’s he’s like, he’s he’s a machine.

(Speaker 6)
He’s a machine.

(Speaker 4)
But his, you know, I could I have problems with my company starting at nine o ‘clock.

(Speaker 7)
Yes.

(Speaker 4)
Hundreds of people showing up at five a . m. in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Man, he’s a leader of a leader.

(Speaker 5)
He’s fantastic. Yeah, man.

(Speaker 6)
No, he is. He is.

Transcribed with Cockatoo