Follow The Brand Podcast with Host Grant McGaugh

Leadership Through Listening: How Paul Young is changing Retail Operations and Customer Loyalty at Best Buy

• Grant McGaugh CEO 5 STAR BDM • Season 3 • Episode 29

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What does it take to rise from hourly employee to respected corporate analyst at a retail giant like Best Buy? Paul Young's remarkable 24-year journey reveals powerful leadership lessons that transcend retail and apply to any organization navigating today's complex business landscape.

Born in Jamaica and immigrating to the United States to attend the University of North Carolina, Paul's path to leadership began with a simple but profound observation from an early mentor who recognized that Paul's integrity in personal relationships would translate beautifully to business leadership. This moment of recognition changed everything, setting Paul on a trajectory that would eventually position him as a trusted guide during Best Buy's most challenging periods.

When the pandemic devastated supply chains and disrupted retail operations, Paul brought something invaluable to his analytics role – actual store experience and a deep appreciation for human relationships in business. While data-focused colleagues exhausted digital contact methods, Paul understood the powerful connections between salespeople and long-term customers. His approach revealed a cornerstone of his leadership philosophy: complete transparency. "Just tell the truth," he emphasizes. "I don't care how bad things are."

The conversation takes fascinating turns as Paul reveals his methodology for training new employees and implementing organizational change. Rather than using cookie-cutter approaches, he treats each person as unique, studying what motivates them individually. "You have to be a pseudo-psychologist," he notes, explaining how he gets people talking and then listens actively to understand their perspectives and concerns.

Perhaps most powerfully, Paul reflects on the value of occasionally pausing to evaluate one's professional journey. After decades of "tunnel vision" moving from project to project, his recent self-reflection allowed him to see the path he created and recognize the value of his accumulated wisdom. For anyone feeling stuck in day-to-day work without seeing their broader trajectory, this conversation offers a compelling reason to step back and take inventory of your journey.

Ready to transform your approach to leadership? Listen now and discover why human connection remains the ultimate competitive advantage in business.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest marketing trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates from us, be sure to follow us at 5starbdm.com. See you next time on Follow The Brand!

Speaker 1:

Welcome everybody to the Final Brand Podcast. This is your host, grant McGaugh, and I am in Miami, florida. We're going to go all the way to North Carolina. We're going to interview Paul Young. I'll tell you just a little bit about Paul.

Speaker 1:

How I met Paul was through one of my friends that I've known in the Miami area for about 25-plus years, richard Thompson. I did not know that they were like best friends I mean like super best friends, growing up from grade school all the way through high school, and Paul happened to see one of my episodes that I did with Richard down at Atlantis University about LinkedIn, about LinkedIn optimization, how you can begin to digitize your presence to kind of move forward. He took a real good liking to that and we became good friends over this last month in which he went through my brand blueprint strategy together. I want to showcase his story because it is impactful and I think it affects a lot of people that are in his journey today as they begin to look like where do I go from here? Where am I at now in my? I call the fourth quarter of where we're at in our lives or how we want to live going forward. So, paul, would you yourself?

Speaker 2:

Well, yes, my name is Paul Young. I was born in Kingston, Jamaica. I immigrated to the United States in 1980 to attend the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. That's where I met my wife, but it was years after we met, uh, before she became my wife. Uh, after leaving UNC Charlotte, I joined the army and, uh, her and I circled back to each other Um, later in life, as it were. I've been married ever since two um, young adult, uh, children, uh, great people, people, very proud of them, and that's, you know, that's what I'm most proud of. My family love my wife, love my kids. And the kids just come over now as young adults. They come over when they find out dad's cooking on the grill. You know they'll always find their way over. But that's it.

Speaker 2:

Started working for Best Buy, my goodness, right after 9-11. Everybody can remember when you know where they were on 9-11. This was just after the birth of my daughter. So she was my second child, Son was first, and then her, and then went to work for Best Buy, Started out as an hourly employee and later promoted to a supervisor and then to manager and so on and so forth, and just kind of progressed up the ranks Until now, I'm an analyst with Best Buy. What do I analyze? I analyze the things that go wrong and find out how to make them more efficient. In a nutshell, that's what I do how to make them more efficient. In a nutshell, that's what I do, but that's the short. That's the abridged version of Paul Young, and here we are today.

Speaker 1:

Man, great journey, great story Makes you want to come over. Now. We're in the springtime, you know Paul's going to be grilling. I might have to make a stop there, to North Carolina for sure. I want to ask you this because this is important and during our discussions this became even more apparent and what I was interested in in that a lot of people they see Best Buy, they know where it's at, but they don't know from the corporate world and how it looks from a national lens corporate world and how it looks from a national lens. I want to know in your 24 years of working at Best Buy, would you say you had a defining moment, that one moment that you really realized that you could help others with your coaching and your leadership skills.

Speaker 2:

Yes, it was. Everybody has or should have or should be fortunate to have what I'd call a champion or a mentor or some guide in their career. And I was fortunate to have that earlier on in my career A gentleman by the name of David David Massey name of David David Massey. He was at the time an operations manager and I was just an hourly employee and he said something to me that kind of stimulated the thinking, as it were, and, you know, had me thinking about where I could go with my best by career.

Speaker 2:

And one of the things he asked me he said how long have you been married? And at the time I think it was like seven years or something like that. And he says I can tell you have a great marriage. He said that would translate well into business. Why? Because you have to be in integrity in your relationship. And he said that, believe it or not, that makes a good leader. When you can be completely transparent and honest with people and do that with integrity, you can lead people. He says I can tell that about you and I had never thought about until that point making Best Buy a career. But he saw something in me that I wasn't aware that I had seen in myself at the time, but that was the genesis. That's where I started thinking about being a leader within Best Buy.

Speaker 1:

That is a defining moment. A lot of times when I've talked to a lot of different people and it's one of those moments that it passes through time. You're not really thinking about it, but years later you kind of go back because it changed your mindset. It started changing the way you saw yourself in what you're doing from a career standpoint. Now you shared with me some of the and I thought this was incredible as far as the operational challenges, like during the pandemic, in a story you know, in a business like Best Buy. Now, can you share a specific moment where your leadership made a measurable impact and what did you learn from that particular experience you could share with us?

Speaker 2:

Oh goodness, when the pandemic started I was still physically in the stores. It was near the end of the pandemic where I transitioned into my role as an analyst. But by then the supply chain had been so disrupted that there was a whole cadre of leaders that had to move the company and move the company forward. Severe interruptions in supply chains. Orders that should have taken to be fulfilled a month now took three months, six months, and you can imagine what that did to sales and client experience. So on and so forth.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that I brought to the team when I transitioned out of the store was my store experience. A lot of people who were working in my role had never worked in the store. They were for the lack of a better word they were operational minded. They came from the operation side of the business, even other businesses who are operationally sound. They analyzed data very well. They could tell you you know why things happened. But they were not necessarily the best at translating what you see in retail to how that manifests itself in the work we do. I'll give you a specific example. Oftentimes, as an analyst, we're trying to move orders forward. As an analyst, we're trying to move orders forward and we're looking at data that gives us client information phone number, email address, so on and so forth and, believe it or not, when I came onto the team, the relationship of the salesperson with the customer was not valued. In other words, we had all this data at our fingertips phone number, email address and we would exhaust these contact methods but never reach out to the store, because we didn't really understand the relationship that our salespeople had with the stores.

Speaker 2:

Just this weekend, grant, I was in my local Best Buy. And why was I there? My goodness, I was there, for I was picking up a new light for my hue system. And on the way out I saw a couple that had been lifelong Best Buy customers, the Funderburgs and I stopped and I spoke with them and they were so interested to find out how I was doing, grant, these have been customers for, oh goodness, more than a decade at this local Best Buy, but their joy in seeing me, finding out how well I was doing, and so on and so forth. When you have that type of relationship with your clients, it makes things like managing supply chain interruptions much easier, and oftentimes the best people to explain what's going on are those who are closest to the clients who have that type of relationship. What's going on are those who are closest to the clients who have that type of relationship. I think that's what I brought to the team, that understanding of not negating that client employee experience and how to leverage that. That's what I brought to the team.

Speaker 1:

I think what you just said. I want our audience to truly dig in what you're talking about. We're in an age now of artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, a lot of interaction on the digital world and there's a lot of buffers between that human to human interaction to human interaction. And I believe we devalue that because the technological point I've been in information technology 25 years, you know, and I love going to the Best Buy, see all the widgets all over the place and whatnot but that is to it should be to enable you to communicate better. It shouldn't be a buffer between me and myself, grant talking to Paul, and I've seen a lot of organizations. They put a lot of other things in between that and they devalue that.

Speaker 1:

And then people went to your point. Everyone knows there's all kinds of challenges that come up in life and to present an image that, oh, everything's perfect, like in life. And to present an image that, oh, you know, everything's perfect, like well, we know it's not, but if you can explain things in a certain way to certain people, they understand. Maybe your widget won't be there on Monday because they're Friday, but here's why. But if that's done only through a technology, so to speak, that just says, hey, you're shipping us to late, to Friday, and that's it. There's just no. You know, you just lose the spirit and the soul of the situation that's taking place. And you know, when someone wants to make another decision about, hey, do I go to Best Buy, do I do this online at Amazon, do I go down the street to Walmart? You know they can make that decision easily because there's no emotional connection, and I think that's something that we really need to understand.

Speaker 1:

Now. You've talked about during our conversations, about a lot of inefficiencies in operations I wanted you to talk about. First of all, I want you to bring this one back up, because this one's kind of struck me when you said during the you know, during the pandemic, that for the first time, you had a lot of orders that were ordered by individuals but they had passed away, and this is on a large level. What do you do with all that inventory? How do you even think about it? Just talk about some of those things that come up that you didn't really understand and some of the common mistakes that you see leaders make when these things happen in business performance, and then how can you correct it let's talk about.

Speaker 2:

Let's take the last part first some of the common mistakes. Some of the common mistakes I see are making assumptions and not taking a deep dive into things, asking questions, why, why? Right near the end of the pandemic, as things were starting to open up and people were returning to offices and businesses were opening again, and so on and so forth. What was really missed by, I think, the general public was what happened to those orders and product that were in the pipeline. You, grant, may have made a purchase, you know, 90 days ago. You know his inability to get supplies to complete the project. Or, you know, maybe having employees who were ill. He was behind, so it leaves you behind. You've got thousands of dollars worth of appliances sitting in our warehouse, of dollars worth of appliances sitting in our warehouse. That's not moving. How do you get all that back on track? You can make a lot of assumptions as a leader when you're looking at situations like that. You've really got to ask the questions. You've got to get in, you've got to talk to the contractors, you've got to talk to the builders, you've got to talk to the clients and oftentimes what I found was that these things weren't happening in isolation Contractors knew exactly the challenges that you faced in supply chain because they were facing it themselves. The clients knew exactly what was going on with supply chain because they had reflections of that happening in their own businesses.

Speaker 2:

The only thing that people required was integrity. You know, I understand it's bad, don't you know? Just give it to me. You know, just tell me. Give it to me the good, the bad and the ugly. Don't sugarcoat it for me, just be completely transparent. And I think that went a long way. That was my realization that, no matter how bad things get and they were bad during the pandemic I think integrity is a cornerstone of making things right with people, whether that be business leaders that you deal with, clients that you deal with and definitely with the employees that you deal with. Just tell the truth. One of the first lessons I learned from my father as a young man. He said to me you know, just always be honest with me. I don't care how bad things are, because I might have to go to bat for you, but give me the truth, tell me the truth. And that was my first leadership lesson, as it were, and I learned that from from my dad. It served me definitely during the time of the pandemic. Just tell the truth.

Speaker 1:

I love that. Tell the truth, as I remember saying that we say, especially in the Midwest. You know, tell the truth and shame the devil. You know that seems to be a common phrase, but it can't shed light on a dark situation. There's no doubt about it. You're shedding a little bit of your light. Your methodology, how you project your leadership skills, your knowledge, your mindset, how you do things, I think is important. You share with me that you have read a ton of books and that you're invited into a lot of different circles within the Best Buy community to share leadership and training. Do you have like a methodology that you use to get real business results, like what is the Paul Young secret sauce?

Speaker 2:

real business results. Like what is the Paul Young secret sauce? Not a secret sauce. Grant Success leaves clues right. The most successful people that I have met inside of Best Buy and outside of Best Buy are willing to tell their story. They're willing to share their journey. I mean, who doesn't want to? You know, shout from the mountaintop. You know the wins that they've had.

Speaker 2:

I think the challenge for a lot of us and when I say us, the people who you know are in business, in leadership or aspire to lead people is to oftentimes just shut up and listen. Success is out there. You can network with people through books. My goodness, you mentioned the number of books that I've read. One of the books that I read that really jarred me and really focused my attention on what was asked of me as a business leader was the book. It was called Execution, larry Boyd Bossy Bodicey I'll get the name correct but one of the authors of that book, the Execution, and it just reminded me that the business leader's first objective was to execute, to get it done, find a way to get it done. In fact, the subtitle of the book the Discipline of Getting Things Done. Fact that the subtitle of the book the Discipline of Getting Things Done.

Speaker 2:

Everyone has opinions on how to create the you know the next best gadget, and so on and so forth. But you don't really have a leg to stand on until you execute based on what the company has asked you to do. And how do you do that? You find people who are winning and get them to talk, share what has made them successful and guess what? Oftentimes, when you duplicate it right, you can share in some of the same success. I've never been one to reinvent the wheel. Uh, as it were. I've. I seek out people who are winning, uh, and ask them to share with me. You know their winning strategy and uh, and put it to work for myself. And, like I said, that can be done by reaching out to um a person or uh through a book, um, even through uh, even through a movie. You know, you've got to be careful there. But, yes, no secret sauce, grant. Find the winners and find out what they're doing and duplicate.

Speaker 1:

I love that. You know that's very pragmatic. It's the I call the blocking and tackling of success. When you look at some of the greater I call the blocking and tackling of success. When you look at some of the greater teams in the sports I like sports analogies and you look at how they got to where they are, it's usually the most disciplined team at the skill, not only just what you call the skill positions like let's take football, for example. Say you've got a great quarterback, running back receivers, but actually it's that offensive line that has to be able to enable those plays to happen, just like on defense and things like that.

Speaker 1:

And you're teaching those things that hey, if you don't do your job, if you're not doing what you need to do, the rest of the team, we can't get to the result. That's another thing I love about your analogies. Like we're here to achieve this result. That's another thing I love about your analogies. Like we're here to achieve this result. How do we get there? Let's not talk about the ways we didn't get there. Let's not, you know, all the things that we throw out there like well, we're not there. That's like being on a ship right, or a boat. You're trying to get to the other side, where there's land. Well, just arguing between ourselves is not going to get us there. What is an agreed upon plan that we have? Hey, grant, you take this or I'll take this, or we're going to row in this direction together and then we're going to see progress as we get to that other side. By working together, you seem to be a person that can bring that real life experience to people where they can see their role and what they need to do.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to ask you when people think about you know Paul Young outside of yourself, right, and they say you know what? This is a Paul Young situation. We need to bring Paul in here to help us. Maybe it's with training Some of the people that haven't been. They've only got a couple of years in Best Buy. Maybe they're that new hourly employee, like you were years ago and didn't really understand. You know some of the skills that they have, some of the things they bring to the table. What kind of advice would you give to those people?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Wow, that's a heavy lift. That's a heavy lift. That's not easy to do. A new procedure or a new business direction, and I'm called upon frequently in my role now and previous roles I've been called upon to do that and I think some of the skills that I lean on were the skills that I learned as just a salesperson and I say just a salesperson. The art of selling is just that an art, and oftentimes I think that that's especially these days with all the technology right, that's lost on a lot of people.

Speaker 2:

But in a nutshell, if I could distill it down into its core, you can't treat everyone the same. Grant is different than Richard. Richard is different than Sherry. Communicating to my wife is definitely different. Communicating a direction of action I have to take a different tack with my wife than I do with my daughter, and understanding that you can't treat everyone the same I think is one of the first things that you have to understand.

Speaker 2:

You got to study people. Nobody told me when I was getting into this business you had to be a pseudo psychologist, but you have to study people. You have to understand what motivates people. The same things that give you energy, grant, may not be the same things that give me energy. There is no cookie cutter and that's the first realization that you have to have.

Speaker 2:

Not a lot of leaders grasp that. There's a new business directive that comes out and there is one message that goes out to everyone and the way that that message is received is not managed right. You could hear as an individual, you could hear something that says, hey, you know what, this is the right direction for the company going. Or another individual could hear you know what, man, that makes me apprehensive about my role within the organization and how I fit in into this new business strategy. But understanding where everyone is in, hearing that message that was given to everyone, I think is key to getting people to buy into the strategy or the direction or so on and so forth.

Speaker 2:

And that really came out of years of getting to know people through sales. You know they always said that you know if you are talking, you are not in charge of that sale. Getting your clients talking right, getting your customer speaking, allows you to be in control of that sale. So I get people talking to me. Grant, tell me, what about this direction of the company? What do you see in it for you? What things give you energy, what things make you apprehensive, and just shut up and listen and people will tell you oftentimes how to for the lack of a better word sell to them, how to get them to buy into what it is that you're doing. But the art of selling is a dying art, but it's been extremely helpful for me and it's why I'm called upon again and again. I think to myself oftentimes why me? Am I the best messenger? Not really. I just try to get people talking to me to understand where they're coming from. I hope that answered your question.

Speaker 1:

No, it did. It did Because, again, I love your principles. You're a man of principle. I like that and I would figure if I were in a board meeting and needed to get across a great message, I would probably look to a person like yourself because people know you, they like you right and they trust you and your approach allows them, you know, to share. You know you don't want to be that, you know, in the organization. Some of these organizations are like just a bunch of yes men. I mean everything's yes, no matter what. There's no pushback, there's no gathering of new intel of how this is really going to work.

Speaker 1:

And, being a person like myself, I've been in information technology again for a long time and we've seen a lot of projects fail, not because of the technology of itself, but of the adoption of the technology. Right, you know, it sounded great, but when you put it out into the field, as I said, you put it out into action, you put it out into the wild, really, how this was going to work, and you say, wow, this did not go like we thought it was going to go and it might fail completely miserably. And a lot of times you say, oh, that's poor tech. No, it's poor leadership. It's poor leadership because you didn't anticipate this and you made assumptions expensive assumptions of how this was really going to roll out.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to challenge you right now. I want you to write the Paul Young book. You've got 24 years of retail experience, understanding how the retail business actually works, even from a supply chain area to a training and leadership area, to a training and leadership area. The retail business is probably in the trillions of dollars as far as in this country. But leadership in this world is like how do you pick this up? As you even stated 24, 25 years ago, you're coming into this business. How do you learn this retail business, not just your particular role, but understanding the world of retail from a lens that I can actually appreciate and want to participate in even more. I think you've got a best-selling book in you. We want to know when it's coming out.

Speaker 2:

You, we want to know when it's coming up. It's interesting that you should say that Over the years I've thought about doing it and it's how do I put it? It's not necessarily a book about ins and outs of business, success and so on and so forth. Granted, it's a people book. It's a book about people, the people that I've met along the journey that I would be hard-pressed to think that I'd meet. These people have these experiences outside of retail.

Speaker 2:

You know, quick story I was working for an organization. This was before Best Buy, so I'm going back even before the Army. Goodness, I'm going back several years. But long story short. I started helping a client and found out that he was Scottish. Started helping a client and found out that he was Scottish and we were talking back and forth and so on and so forth, and he asked me about my heritage and where I was from. And Grant, my father, was a World War II veteran and he did his service in England for the Royal Air Force. Well, come to find out, this gentleman that I was speaking to was in the same unit in World War II as my father and he was writing a book right about his experiences in World War II. And you know I was able to get him and my father to connect. My father is now past the ripe age of 97. But before he did he had tons of stories and you know he actually made a contribution to this book. I would have never met this person.

Speaker 2:

I am amazed at the depth of people that I meet in retail. That was just one story. I don't know if you know the coach, larry Brown. He was instrumental in bringing a lot of teams along and his relationship with player Allen Iverson is legendary. You know you've seen that interview with Iverson talking about practice. Are we going to talk about practice, practice, not the game.

Speaker 2:

But Larry Brown was his coach at the time and what Larry Brown was trying to communicate was a level of professionalism. Right, you are the leader, you are the franchise player. You know there's a certain level of leadership. I got a chance to meet Larry Brown. So if I were to write a book about retail, the thing that inspired me, that kept me going, that gave me energy, were the people that I met, the stories that I learned and that real, genuine love of people, the ability to connect with people, so on and so forth. You know they say, if you're really enjoying the things that you're doing. It's not really considered work and I've really had a lot of fun meeting the people that I've met and it's amazing. I'm amazed that there are people in this world who would rather work with computers and that's fine, just work with technology and numbers and digits and so on and so forth. But there are people that are energized by working with other people.

Speaker 1:

When you find those people in your organization, turn them loose, just set them on the path and get out of the way and you know that's what the book would be about understanding kind of back to some ground roots, about people and the beauty of humanity. That's a beautiful story you just talked about, because you don't know who you're interacting with until you get deep with them and really have a conversation. Then, all of a sudden, you start tying together those realities. Someone said there's like six degrees of separation between each human being. We need to find out what that six degrees is by talking to each other. I want, before we conclude we worked together for the last month or so I want you to share the audience like did you enjoy this experience? Did you find this helpful for you? Is this something that you would share with others?

Speaker 2:

It's definitely something that I would share with others. In my particular case and I would think that many people in my role find themselves in the same track, as it were. You have your head down and you're working day to day, month to month, year to year. You are participating in a business, you're growing a business, you're raising your family, you're paying your bills, you get tunnel vision, and then one day somebody asks you to just kind of slow down for a moment and take a look and see what your journey has been, and I think that's what this process has done for me. This is the first time in you know, two decades that I've actually slowed down, turned around and saw the path that I have created, and saw the path that I have created right and started to take inventory of the things that got me from there to here over the two decades. Until I started taking inventory, I didn't realize how all these pieces fit together, and to be able to articulate how the pieces fit together, to understand what value that has in the marketplace and to monetize that value is something that I had not given a lot of thought to.

Speaker 2:

Tunnel vision head down, day in, day out, week in, week out, project, from this project to the next project and just waiting for the next project to begin and to be called in again and to bring my skills to bear on, you know, the next directive to be assigned to the next mission, that's. You know, that's been my life over the 20 years. But just stopping for a moment, turning around and says, oh my goodness, look at that, that's a path there, right, that's a path there, right. That's been the most eye-opening, one of the most eye-opening things to me about this experience and I definitely recommend it to my friends, colleagues, so on and so forth, Because oftentimes you don't think you have time to slow down. You go, go, go, go, especially in the corporate world. You know, it's not what have you done for me, it's what have you done for me lately, you know, go, go, go, slow down for a moment and take inventory. So thank you for for allowing me to do that.

Speaker 1:

Now, well, thank you for sharing your story, sharing what is, I think, a very good skill set that you possess, and that you're sharing that now with my audience, and they can really take stock to what you just said. Just stop for a minute, take a look, and it's very hard to see yourself without another person helping you along the way, and that is what I do as a guide to get you to your next level in life. This has been wonderful talking with you today, paul. Let the people know how to contact you on LinkedIn and then we'll'll wrap up and we will see you again the next time.

Speaker 2:

All right, you can find me at LinkedIn, Paul Young at Best Buy on LinkedIn and Grant. We will see you the next time. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:

Oh well, thank you, and I invite your entire audience and the entire Best Buy family to tune in to all the episodes of Follow Brand at 5. That's number 5. Star S-T-A-R B-D-M. That's B for brand, d for development, infomasterscom. This has been wonderful. Thanks again, paul, for being on the show.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, take care. Bye-bye.