The old method was to estimate the coming year's sales -- essentially tweaking last year's results -- and schedule the plant in long, uninterrupted runs to produce the necessary inventory: cashews, mixed nuts, candies. Even if orders came in that didn't match expectations. It was convenient for production workers but ultimately costly to the company.
Koeze got the production, sales, and shipping people together and told them to fix the problem. "A huge improvement came by just saying this really matters," he says. In 1998, unsold merchandise was $200,000. "A number I can live with," he says. Also a glimmer of hope that his workers, if asked to, could actually help solve a problem. Radical change, including twice-daily meetings to adjust production to sales results as the holiday season heats up, has now brought unsold merchandise down to less than $150,000, even as sales have almost doubled.
IF YOU'RE NOT CAREFUL, YOUR BUSINESS'S HISTORY WILL BE YOUR DESTINY
Scott Koeze had been forced at age 28 to take over the business when his father died suddenly, and he had had a love-hate relationship with Koeze Co. ever since. He had always made sure Jeff felt absolute freedom in choosing a career. Though the two were vastly different in temperament, they sought each other's company. When he was a kid, Jeff recalls, his father left for work at 5:45 most mornings. "But if I could hold him up until 6, Looney Tunes would come on, and he would watch with me for an hour."
As a youth, Jeff sometimes went to the plant with his father, shoveling peanut skins away from the roaster and into burlap bags, and wedging his slender body into tight spots to inspect for rodent droppings. But Jeff never saw himself running Koeze Co.
And it was peculiarly his father's company. Scott Koeze had made some smart moves. He had sold his biggest product line, private-label peanut butter (a $10 million operation), when he realized the business was about to get squeezed by supermarket consolidation. He had built a business selling Koeze's nuts and candies through community groups doing fundraising. And he had built up the catalog business to spread sales nationally.
But he had a touch of the crazy boss in him. Weeks after being hired as Scott Koeze's assistant 26 years ago, Deborah Owsinski introduced her new boss to her husband. " 'I'm so happy to meet you. I love your wife,' " she recalls Scott saying. "And he turned and planted a big wet kiss on my mouth. That sort of set the tone. He was hilarious. I loved working for Scott. He was not predictable."
Not everyone was laughing. Tom Lakos, who runs Koeze's two retail outlets, both in Grand Rapids, recalls Scott Koeze sneaking up on him "just to catch me not working." More than once, the boss yelled at Lakos so thoroughly, over a variety of matters, that a co-worker dissolved into tears.
Inconsistency led to dysfunction. Scott Koeze was known for asking employees to look into his latest whim. Then he would forget about it and express surprise or lack of interest when workers reported back to him with proposals. So people began ignoring his requests.
Jeff Koeze, unaware of this little drama, was perplexed when, as the new boss, "I'd ask people to do stuff -- and they wouldn't do it." He only later found out why. "As it turns out, it was entirely logical behavior," he says.
Indeed, it took Jeff some time to realize he was having a personality clash -- not with any individual but with the established rituals at Koeze Co. It's a problem that blindsides many who enter a new business at the top. Hyperrational, by his own description, and accustomed to university colleagues who were also wired that way, Jeff expected workers at Koeze Co. to behave similarly.
But they had learned from Scott Koeze. "I never had a plan," Scott says. "I got up in the morning, and I ran like hell." It's easy to believe him. These days, he dresses like a cowboy, a lanky man in hat, boots, and a snap shirt. And he can't seem to sit still in his own house, which perches on a hill overlooking Lake Michigan on the Leelanau Peninsula. When I visit, he drags me out for a buggy ride behind a duo of big Frisian horses across his sprawling property.
Coaxing the horses at every turn, he pleads guilty to micro-managing. "I'd say, 'Move aside and let me do it,' " he says. When he discovered that his workers had compiled a guide to handling customer complaints, he told them, "Burn that file. I want to handle every complaint.
"I had people problems, and I knew it," Scott Koeze says. "And I could not take my business one step further. I'd had a bellyful of that business."
Jeff Koeze initially bought a minority stake from his father, financed over 10 years. About five years into running the company, convinced he wanted to stay on, he persuaded his father to sell his voting control. "You know as well as I do, people have done odd things as they get older," he explained to his father. The note for that part of the sale has five more years to run. Jeff now owns two-thirds of the company, and his parents own the remainder.
PEOPLE RESIST CHANGE
If something sounds like a smart idea to Jeff Koeze, he will generally try it. He has always been that way. He opted to switch high schools his junior year, moving to Cranbrook, a private boarding school in the Detroit suburbs, where he knew he would get more challenging studies. He wasn't afraid of being the new kid. "It's every high schooler's dream, right?" he says. "You get to start over."
Shown the wisdom of change, surely Koeze Co. workers would embrace it. Koeze needed the company to be a place where criticism was shared and accepted. He brought in a North Carolina colleague, organizational psychologist Roger Schwarz, who now runs his own consulting firm. Schwarz advocates a particularly open form of communication between businesspeople. No hidden agendas. No sneak attacks in meetings. His theories can be particularly annoying to powerful people, because he argues that leaders, by communicating poorly (sandwiching criticism between dollops of insincere praise or asking questions about a touchy subject without first explaining why), often cause the very behavior in underlings (failure to hear criticism, refusal to volunteer bad news) that most irks them.
