Seasoned Leadership in Action™ – An Interview with Stephen Beard, VP at Flexe!

Stephen Beard
Unchaining Change Leadership

At Supply Chain Game Changer we believe in sharing experiences and expertise from people in every industry and from across the globe.  As such we have introduced our “Seasoned Leadership in Action™” Interview series at Supply Chain Game Changer. This interview is with Stephen Beard, VP of Network Development at Flexe.

I had the opportunity of working with Stephen Beard while we were at ModusLink. Stephen always demonstrated tremendous command of customers, the business and the market at large. His vast expertise in Supply Chain and Logistics and Business development was readily apparent and I knew that he was someone that you would always want to listen to. His leadership and presence was undeniable.

Stephen Beard
Stephen Beard, VP Network Development, Flexe

We have the great opportunity here of presenting to you the reflections, thoughts and advice of a great Industry leader, Stephen Beard.

Stephen, thank you for your support of Supply Chain Game Changer and participating so as to share your expertise with our readers.

Tell our readers a little about your background and experience.

My career in supply chain and logistics began by accident. I was going to college with the intention of getting into real estate investment and playing football. I needed a job that didn’t conflict with my games on Saturdays or my afternoon practices. A buddy told me UPS was hiring to load package cars in the wee hours of the morning, and I thought, “I could do that for a couple of years.” That was how I began my 15 years at UPS and 30+ years in this industry. 

My time at UPS was incredibly valuable and served as the foundation for my entire career. I ended up doing a little bit of everything in my time there, from delivery driver to operations management, training team, industrial engineering, sales, and eventually moved over to the Supply Chain Solutions group. I spent 5 years in warehouse solutions and got a deep dive into import / export. It was a tremendous time of learning for me.  

I eventually moved on to Kuehne + Nagel where initially managed the largest client in the company’s portfolio of 3PL clients. Eventually I was tapped to lead the Western Region and managed all of the warehouse sites west of the Rockies. This was one of my favorite roles in my career and I’m proud to say in my time there, we transformed the Western Region from the smallest in the US into the largest with showpiece facilities, while moving from a loss to profit. We assembled a great team there and accomplished a lot. 

I’ve done a few years of freelance consulting, largely facility optimization and 3PL partner selection, and spent 6 years at ModusLink, where I got a crash course in kitting and packaging. Design for distribution is an often overlooked piece of the Supply Chain and my time with ModusLink taught me how integral this can be to overall cost and performance.  

I crossed the desk so to speak in 2017 and began managing fulfillment and logistics for shippers. The time I spent at Tile was fantastic and allowed me to apply a lot of what I’ve learned in the 3PL world for a consumer electronics firm. In my time heading up logistics and fulfillment at Tile, our team opened Australia and UK DCs, upgraded the US operation significantly, and changed out all of our carriers (import and outbound parcel) to reduce cost and improve service levels.

Applying what I learned at ModusLink in design for distribution helped us reduce carbon footprint and saved over $1M a year in packaging reduction alone.  

I joined FLEXE early in 2020, and am excited about the challenges ahead. We’re building the world’s first on demand warehousing marketplace with the ostentatious goal of transforming the logistics industry. Big goals are the only ones worth having, right? 

What are some of your greatest achievements in Business?

I’m happy to say that as I look back on my career, I’ve had an impact everywhere I’ve been and am proud of what I’ve achieved. But by far the thing I value more than anything is the impact I’ve had on the people I’ve worked with. There are several former peers and employees who tell me that my influence on their careers helped shape their career path. I can’t think of anything more rewarding or lasting than that.

Sometimes it has been peer interactions, sometimes its been working to either motivate or challenge employees who weren’t performing to an optimal level, and getting more out of them. Sometimes its been mentoring and encouraging someone who didn’t know what they could do if they just accepted their own potential. In all cases its been special to me.

In one example, I had a Logistics Manager at Tile that was one of the first employees in the company. She was very diligent and great with data management, but she lacked the industry knowledge needed to be more successful. I spent a lot of time teaching her what she needed to know to get more out of our warehouse and carrier partners. She did a fantastic job and soaked up any knowledge I could impart to her. 

Eventually I told her that her next move should be outside the company. She had been there so long, people remembered her as a very junior person and in some cases struggling in her role. There were some in other departments that just couldn’t and wouldn’t see her for who she had grown into. That can happen to any of us when we are trying to bloom where we were planted. I think she was shocked that I made this suggestion.

Eventually she left for a bigger role with a bigger company and now runs North American Fulfillment for a fortune 500 company. We still talk frequently and when she calls me, she still greets me with her customary, “Hey boss!” It’s a real thrill for me to feel a small part of her success story. Those are the things that will have lasting value when I hang it up, the people. I love how many former colleagues I’m still connected to and consider friends.  

How has Business and Supply Chain changed over the course of your career?

That’s a great question. The short answer is, its changed a lot and for the better. When I started at UPS in 1989, it was an almost entirely a male industry and I think the few women I did work with felt a tremendous pressure to be just like men.

A colleague of mine back in those early days at UPS told me she had to be the toughest person in the room. Any weakness would discredit her, so she focused on being tough at all times. I felt that was so sad, to feel the need to reshape your mindset and personality just to survive at work. Worse yet, I’m sure she was right. At that time and in that industry, we were very militaristic and the organization’s leadership was almost 100% male. 

Fast forward to today and UPS has a female CEO. Across the industry it’s common to see women in Supply Chain. My entire team at Tile at one point was female. My boss, our EVP of Operations at FLEXE is a woman and not the only woman in our executive team.  

And it’s not just a numbers game. Culture in Supply Chain Management has changed as a result, in my opinion. There’s a lot more collaboration in decision making in today’s climate than there seemed to be when I was growing up in this industry.

Decision making tended to be a lot more top down than it is today. I think organizations I’ve been a part of in recent years do a much better job listening and leveraging the best ideas from all levels of the org chart than I saw 15-20 years ago.  

What are some of the lessons you learned in your career that you would like to share for others to learn from?

The most important question you can ask is, “Why?” Why do we do it that way? Why does the client need X? Why can’t we ship orders the day they arrive? 

In my MBA coursework, I studied at Santa Clara University under the then Dean of the Business School, Barry Posner. He wrote a book called “The Leadership Challenge”. I highly recommend it. In that book he broke down the essential elements to leadership. Asking why falls under what Doctor Posner would call, “Challenging the Process”. You can build an entire career path around challenging the process. It’s one of the things I’ve learned to do best. 

People who challenge the process push the organization. They elevate themselves from caretakers of the current process to improvers of the process and are much more valuable to the organization. So many times, the reason things are done a certain way are vestiges of things that are not only no longer true, but in some cases never were. 

As an example, I remember years ago when I began running the region for Kuehne + Nagel and I visited one of my new sites in LA. I noticed that central dispatch, the location where pickers go to retrieve their next pick wave dozens of times a day, was at one extreme end of the building.

This seemed to be driving a lot of unnecessary walk time to a picker’s day. I asked, “Why?” After a lot of hemming and hawing from the General Manager, one of his Operations Managers spoke up. She remembered why.

Ten years prior, the demising wall between our space and the neighbor’s space wasn’t there and we had both warehouses in one contiguous space. Central dispatch was once actually central to the space and now was in one extreme corner. For 10 years, pickers had been walking needless steps, hundreds of thousands of needless steps a year, because no one had asked why central dispatch wasn’t central to the site. 

Of all the things I’ve learned to do in my career, learning to get to the why and then making it better has been the best skill I’ve developed.  

What challenges facing the world are important to you?

Poverty, but not the poverty people in developed nations think about. When most of us think of poverty, we picture someone who drives a beat-up old car and lives in an apartment on the bad side of town. The reality is, on a global level, anyone who drives a car, lives indoors, and has access to electricity and running water is affluent.

Pretty much everyone, no matter how poor, living in a developed nation is in the top 50th percentile of income and standard of living globally. Most of us are in the top 1% (Per the World Bank, it takes $34,000 of annual income to rank in the top 1% of global earners, compared to median household income in the US of nearly $70,000).

At the extreme end of the spectrum of poverty lies the water crisis. Today, with all of our wealth and technological advances, nearly 800 billion people, nearly 1 in 8 of us, live without access to a clean safe drinking water.

This leads directly to the death of 3.5 million people a year from easily preventable water borne illnesses. To put that in perspective it’s about twice the global death rate from Covid. But unlike Covid, the water crisis claims its victims every year. Yet very few of us know this crisis even exists. 

Lack of basic necessities like water disproportionately impacts women and young girls who are often relegated to a life of domestic chores, primary of which is carrying water from a local (fouled) watering hole to their village and returning for more. Imagine hand carrying all the water your family uses daily for drinking, food preparation, and bathing.

Young girls having their day tied up with carrying water is one of the reasons so few girls in 3rd world countries get any kind of basic education, which only continues the cycle of extreme poverty. It’s tragic that amidst our modern excesses so many live in subhuman conditions and so much avoidable illness and death is allowed to continue.  

What is the role of Business, Supply Chain, and Change Leadership in addressing these challenges?

We have the resources to solve this problem. Many other worthy causes (Alzheimer’s, cancer, ALS) are worth pursuing as well, but the solution lies beyond our current technological grasp.

Not true of the water crisis. We could commit the resources to digging a well in every village in the world and teaching safe water handling and well maintenance to every village leader for about 10% what we spend collectively on Christmas every year. Ten cents on the dollar from one holiday in one year would solve this problem forever. It’s a big problem and one we have no moral excuse for ignoring.

Who better to address lack of basic needs than business leaders, and Supply Chain specialists specifically? 

What are you working on these days?

At FLEXE, we provide on demand warehousing to our clients (without all those 3 and 5 year commitments and or startup costs of traditional 3PLs) by selling into idle capacity in partner warehouses (3PLs and first party networks). I spent 2020 asking, “Why?” and helping the team rethink and reshape the way we engage our partner warehouses.

We put our partner managers in the strategic markets we serve (previously we managed all of these relationships remotely in our Seattle headquarters) and put a proactive sourcing process in place to vet partners prior to client needs being identified in order to speed up our process without sacrificing quality.

I’ve recently been working on transportation partnerships in same-day courier space and small parcel as we turn the page to 2021 to help us bring more options to market for our clients.

What advice would you give to people who have a career in, or who are considering joining, Business and/or Supply Chain?

Ask a lot of questions. I probably learned more in the course of my career from picking the brains of the best subject matter experts in my company than I did in business school. Wherever you are, there’s a wealth of knowledge around you. Make it your mission to find it.

Most people with experience are all too happy to share with those who express a desire to learn. Maybe you’ll get lucky, like I did, and find leaders that are willing to impart more than just subject matter knowledge and become your mentor. 

Don’t expect to be taught or trained. You might think your career development is your company’s responsibility. It isn’t. No one is going to take more interest in your development than you, so make it a priority. Always make it your side hustle to be learning and not just doing. Volunteer for stretch assignments.

Ask a lot of questions of a lot of people. Interview people about their recent successes (and failures for that matter). What did they learn? How did they do it? What would they do differently? How can you help next time? 

Lastly, play the long game. Some of the best (and admittedly most difficult) decisions I’ve made in my career were choices to maximize my learning opportunities and expansion of my resume over my short-term earnings. This takes a lot of soul searching and a personal inventory of your priorities, for certain. In looking back, those choices put me on a direct path to where I am now…in the best role of my career.  

How can people contact Stephen Beard?

[email protected]

Originally published on January 19, 2021.