Ranjay Gulati:
Like so many entrepreneurs before her, Susan Tynan started a business to solve a problem.

Susan Tynan:
So it's a classic entrepreneurial story that I had a personal experience and I believed I could do it better. So I took four National Parks posters to a local frame store and I had a really bad experience. They cost $400 each to be framed. They took several weeks. The man working at the store was rude to me. This was not fine art, and I had taken the posters in because the posters had a lot of sentimental value to me. I had gone on hiking trips with my sister and collected the posters over the years and I thought, why would it cost so much? Why would it be such an unpleasant experience? And more importantly, I'm never going to do that again.

Ranjay Gulati:
And she didn't. Instead, in 2014, Susan Tynan started Framebridge. It's a custom framing business she started online. Framebridge now also has 19 brick and mortar locations on the East Coast and in the Chicago area. As a serial entrepreneur, Susan Tynan says it is critical for startup leaders to develop a clear sense of what they're good at, to move fast, learn from mistakes, and prepare for a hard but potentially rewarding journey.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Deep Purpose, a podcast about courage and commitment in turbulent times. I'm Ranjay Gulati, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Susan Tynan grew up in Cleveland where her father ran a tugboat company. She earned a BA in English at the University of Virginia and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Over the course of her career, Susan worked at the consulting firm Accenture. She was a performance and management advisor in the Obama administration and she held a variety of jobs in several tech startups. I began my conversation with Susan by asking how she arrived at the role that seemed to suit her best: serial entrepreneur.

Susan Tynan:
I'm an action-oriented person. I believe you can always find a way. I want to get moving on something immediately, and I think I felt too constrained in other environments. If it was going to be someone's problem, I think I would rather it were my problem.

Ranjay Gulati:
Could you say something about linking it back to your family and your childhood? Because you did grow up in a family business.

Susan Tynan:
I did. My dad was the president of a tugboat company, and so it was a really, obviously a heavily operational business and he was very devoted to his work, and I grew up really respecting that, understanding that to be a leader was not glamorous. It was always on, and my dad really was a great role model in terms of, he was a leader who really felt responsible for the welfare of his team.

Ranjay Gulati:
Could you think of any moments, any specific moments, that ring in your head from the time you were growing up when you saw him having to do something that...?

Susan Tynan:
We joke a little bit, my mom used to joke, we learned swear words early on because we had an answering machine. And so if something goes wrong in the tug business, you certainly hear about it, you hear about it with colorful language. So I remember some of those crises, but what I remember more is the stories of my dad really investing in team members, just believing in people. I remember a young man who took over the business, who's now not a young man anymore, coming over to the house and my dad was so excited about him, and I remember when he established a welding scholarship at a local community college in order to have a pipeline of talent come to the tugboat business. So I really remember he seemed most proud of the accomplishments of the people who worked for him.

Ranjay Gulati:
One thing about entrepreneurship is risk, and risk comes with fear. It's a very emotional thing. Risk is not for everybody. How do you think about risk and fear and courage, all these things that are inherently part of what entrepreneurs have to do?

Susan Tynan:
Yes, I think my relationship with risk has evolved, but you certainly have to be able to contain it or manage through it at all parts of the entrepreneurial journey. When I was first dreaming up Framebridge and making the decision to start that venture, I just forced myself to put a box around the risk, and I could get very comfortable with two things: I wasn't going to be unethical, and I wasn't going to be negligent. And I said, well, I can control those things. I'm never going to be unethical and I'm never going to be negligent. So I can take investor money, I can try this, and if I fail, so be it. One of the most wonderful things about the United States is if you fail as an entrepreneur, you're not permanently penalized for it. And I thought, I can control those things and I can also give myself a time horizon. And so that's how I got my arms comfortably around risk before I started the business.

Ranjay Gulati:
Are there any particular moments when you felt like, oh my God, I'm over my head over here. This is like crazy risk?

Susan Tynan:
Yes, and I think there were snapshots throughout the past nine years building this business. I remember a moment sitting in our first warehouse, the first delivery was custom boxes for our finished product. Our finished product is we make custom frames, but we hadn't made any at the time, we didn't even have the equipment or the team. I thought it was very important we had branded boxes, and the boxes took up nearly the entire workspace. And I thought, "Oh no. What have I gotten myself into, and what kind of audacity did I have to start a business with a large manufacturing component when this is not where I've come from?" And so it's funny, but I remember truly sitting on a red folding chair I had bought from a target near the warehouse, because there was nothing to sit on, waiting for the delivery and then seeing that the boxes took up the whole warehouse and thinking, "I'm going to drown under these boxes of frames nobody bought."

Ranjay Gulati:
The willingness to take risks is an essential character trait in leaders of all kinds. And so is the capacity to manage the personal hesitation or sense of fear that comes with taking risks. Prudent business leaders develop personal and professional ways to manage fear, and even convert fear into an asset. I asked Susan Tynan how she deals with the fear that comes with risk. Does she look to others? Does she look within?

Susan Tynan:
I have very supportive people in my family. My spouse, who I met at HBS, he's been wonderful. But the truth is there is no one external, I think, who can help you in those situations. It has to come from yourself. And so I deeply believed in the idea for Framebridge. I believed someone should reinvent custom picture framing, and I believed that people had wonderful things that they wanted to commemorate, and they'd do it more if framing were easy. So I have to go back to that idea, and I had to in the early days and I have to today to say, this should exist and I can do it.

And so if I can go back to why it exists and then just make forward progress against the problem, I just immediately start, what are our options? What do we do next? Leading the way out, I get through it. And I think it's really just been really a deep belief that the business should exist, and why shouldn't I be the person to start it? And now that we're so conclusively on our way, I definitely should be the person to keep pushing it. And so I think that has been enough. But there have been many, I mean probably every 18 months with this business, there has been something extremely challenging.

Ranjay Gulati:
Can you describe any moments of extreme fear? You gave one example where you had all the boxes show up and you're like, what am I doing in this business? I don't even know anything about this business.

Susan Tynan:
There are a couple. We've had two periods where we got into extreme operational backlog. So people had placed orders with us, and in many cases given us their art, and we felt behind in production. And so we went from being able to deliver to customers in days, to weeks. And in a business like ours where you can't scale up quickly, you have to train people, it can get bad quickly. And so those periods were really challenging because not only I had to lead through them knowing we would perform poorly financially during that period, those cohorts of customers would not perform the same way that other cohorts of customers were, because we were under-delivering to them. And then I think just because my pride generally carries me forward, it was hard to know that we were under-delivering so badly to people. I think the downside of knowing what you do is important is knowing if you let people down, it's important too.

Ranjay Gulati:
And how did you make this so personal that you are going to use this as a way to inspire yourself through difficult times?

Susan Tynan:
Yes. So I have truly fallen more in love with the business over time. I was really inspired by the fact that this was a dusty industry nobody was looking at, and I had worked in other industries, some industries everyone was competing in, and I thought, "No, I found an industry. I went to Harvard Business School, I'd like to tackle something interesting, but there's an industry I'm interested in that I think can do better for customers that has a value chain with a lot of pieces in it that should be removed. I bet I can tackle it."

So that was really the initial excitement, but truly over time, but not even much time, as soon as items started coming in to us, I saw how special they were. And so now it's just not hard at all to tie back the importance of what we do to our team. Truly, every day we frame thousands of items that are either the pinnacle of someone's career, or something just deeply, deeply memorable. It's things like a dog collar from a dog who's passed away, or the last time I was in one of our factories, I saw a certificate for the thoracic surgeon of the year. I thought, well, I think a lot of study and hard work over years went into that and what a privilege that we get to be the ones to commemorate it.

Ranjay Gulati:
Do you think people in your organization realize that what they're doing in some way is commemorating people's highlights in their lives? We don't just frame anything, we frame things that really matter.

Susan Tynan:
Yes, I think people do understand it. I think it is why most people work for Framebridge. I think it's my duty to tell those stories more so that people understand. It's really through the specific stories that team members feel the connection. I think that's why most people work for Framebridge. I truly think if anyone doesn't feel that connection, they probably shouldn't work for us.

Ranjay Gulati:
So let's talk about, you said fear, adversity, that the idea just propelled you through. There were moments where even your sister told you this is a bad idea. Even the investor who originally encouraged you to develop this idea, once you developed it said, "In hindsight, I think it's a bad idea. It's not a good idea at all."

Susan Tynan:
Yes, yes.

Ranjay Gulati:
How did you keep going...?

Susan Tynan:
And then I think certainly investors along the way were loyal to us, but some along the way said, "Well, this is more of a capital-intensive endeavor than probably I signed up for." It is a tough business, and so in some ways I've reframed it over the years to say, the answer to why hasn't anyone done this before is not that the customer doesn't want it, the customer wants it very much. And so the reason no one's done it before is because it's hard. And so that drives me. I think, oh, okay, the fact that my team and I are going to do this, we're going to do it. We've assembled the right people to do it. That's the reason it doesn't exist before because nobody else assembled this team. Because you had to be good at manufacturing, technology, design, now retail. It's hard to pull it all together. And so we've assembled that team.

Ranjay Gulati:
Susan Tynan has worked at a variety of consumer technology startups over the course of her career. One was Taxi Magic, an early ride hailing company. Another was Living Social, an online marketplace that was eventually acquired by Groupon. I asked Susan what sorts of dos and don'ts she learned on her journey.

Susan Tynan:
I really credit other people's startups, all of the other startups I worked for, in understanding the value of speed. And I think now that we recruit some really terrific executives who come from larger companies, they have to adapt. With the exception of our picture frames that have to be perfect, everything else should ship a little faster. I learned that most of all; that speed mattered more than perfection. And then I did learn though that when you take your eye off the customer, eventually you're going to pay for it. There are ways to make money diminishing the customer experience, and you can probably make a few of those choices in the interest of margin, but one of those choices will be the unraveling. I really think the long-term best interest of the business is the long-term best interest of the customer. One of our company values is build to last, and we created that value when we first started, which for a venture-backed company is almost a radical thing to say.

Ranjay Gulati:
As you got into this, I'm sure there were other heroic leaders that you encountered, leaders you thought were bold, decisive, courageous, purposeful. Could you describe some of them to us and what you may have learned from them that helped you develop as a leader?

Susan Tynan:
Yes. Well, it's interesting, because I am a consumer person, and so many of the leaders I admire are consumer people too. And so you have, on your podcast, you handle really big impact issues and how leaders solve them. But I think I've always admired people who bring joy to people in different ways. And so I think Howard Schultz was audacious to say everybody should enjoy European espresso, people that drank coffee in their homes and didn't really care about how good coffee was. I think that is amazing, and I think it's a contribution to society to say, why shouldn't everybody enjoy this thing that I enjoyed in Europe, and why don't I expand this brand? And obviously the job creation story that came with it as well, but it's truly leaders like that that inspire me.

Ranjay Gulati:
Now, this is a speculative question because neither one of us is talking to Howard right now. Even he had lots of skeptics, and lots of naysayers along the way that he was going to scale this thing up like he did. What do you think energizes people to persevere in the face of adversity and naysayers and lack of validation and patience and you're not making money and your investors are asking for you to turn a corner, your customers are clamoring, you don't have the right employees sometimes? It's a lot to take on in those early years for an entrepreneur. Is it the idea that propels them, or what?

Susan Tynan:
When you ask that question, it sounds like the answer is obstinance, and maybe a little bit, but I think it's vision. I really think it's vision. I think it's the ability to look beyond the pain, the short-term pain, because you believe in what you're building. I do think throughout the entrepreneurial journey you get through things. I've had critical leaders leave and you think, how am I going to get past this? And then you do, and then you gain the confidence, all right, you can get past that. And I think once you build up a few of those, you certainly don't feel invincible, but you do feel like you have a toolkit to handle adversity.

And so I think that's it. I would say the other thing, I forgot, that inspires me a lot lot about Howard Schultz and consumer leaders like that is the attention to detail. I read an exchange where when they were first bringing... When skim milk, non-fat milk, was the trend, they agonized over whether to bring it to Starbucks because it didn't froth as well. And we agonize about a lot of details like that, and I enjoy reading stories, obviously Steve Jobs being the king of this, but reading stories about leaders who do sweat the detail.

Ranjay Gulati:
Could you give me an example of one where you really sweat the detail on something in your business?

Susan Tynan:
Yes. So we use different hardware on the back of different frames by the size of the frame. And for some frames we have wire on the back, and we use a wire that is coated. And it's coated so that it doesn't leave a black mark on your wall. And so I made that decision when we started the company, and every time we get a new member of operations or procurement, or someone says, "That coated wire is hard to work with. Any sort of automated tool to use, it doesn't work with the coated wire, costs more than the regular wire, does the customer care about the coated wire?" And every time I say, "Don't touch the coated wire." And so I think holding the standard is another aspect of my job. Again, I think there are always pressures that conspire to erode the standard. I have another leader I admire.

Ranjay Gulati:
Please tell me.

Susan Tynan:
Danny Meyer, the restaurateur who runs Shake Shack, but he's a famous restaurateur and he wrote a book called Setting the Table, and he has an anecdote in that that has been very inspiring to me. I talked to him and he signed the page, and of course I framed it, because I really appreciate this anecdote. It's about reframing your position, and it's an anecdote about how in the restaurant business, if you want the salt and pepper shaker to be in a certain place on the table, you want it to be in the center of the table. You can train the team, it goes in the center of the table. And every time you walk by they're not in the center and you move them back, customers move them, and then you move them back. And you can think, what have I done wrong in the training or the tools, the hiring, that these don't go in the center of the table every time, even though I've set that standard? Or you could reframe it and say, my job is to show people where the center of the table is.

Ranjay Gulati:
As you think about advice you give to entrepreneurs, for those who are contemplating entrepreneurship as a career, what advice would you give them?

Susan Tynan:
The biggest benefit of entrepreneurship, I think, is the learning journey. I do not believe there is another path I could have learned so much. I just don't. So that's wonderful. So I would do it if you are interested in the learning journey. I would also certainly caution students, or anyone interested in entrepreneurship, it is a long path and it is a grueling one. It has been all consuming to me for now nearly a decade, and I don't think I knew that going in. I don't think there are many ways to do it without allowing it to be that consuming. I think there are very few stories, we hear them, but I think there are very few true stories about a quick business with a quick flip and a great financial outcome for the founder without a lot of toil.

Ranjay Gulati:
What does consuming mean to you, when you say consuming?

Susan Tynan:
The better part of every day I think about this business.

Ranjay Gulati:
What is the most difficult decision you've had to make as a CEO? If you think about your career, can you think of one or two really hard decisions?

Susan Tynan:
We had to close down a factory, our original factory in Maryland. We were consolidating into one of the facilities we have now in Kentucky and we were going to focus... We needed a consolidated facility because we were going to invest more heavily in automation, actually, but we had to close a facility. And doing that, these were original team members who helped us build the very first frames, and that was really hard. It was really hard. And I remember actually one of my investors bumping into him, I won't say his name, but he said, "Why are you taking this so hard?" I thought, "Oh, well, have you ever stood in front of a factory of people who worked hard for you and believed in you and tell them for some economic reason, you're shutting it down?" It was hard.

Ranjay Gulati:
A key strength that many successful business leaders possess is the ability to tell stories, and the stories that effective leaders tell go beyond narrow feel good narratives. They convey the larger purpose of the enterprise. Susan Tynan says this is one of the key lessons she learned in her two decades as an entrepreneur, and it came to her over time.

Susan Tynan:
I undervalued my role in storytelling, in making sure people understood the importance of our values or the connection of what they do to what we deliver for customers. That seemed almost like a trope. It seemed like just a sweet founder role rather than the chief executive. But it's the same role and it's critical. And if I'm not constantly reinforcing that, no one is. I learned probably the first third of my Framebridge journey that if I didn't bring up our net promoter score, anytime I brought up another metric, it was going to slip, and it did. And so my role always has to include the voice of the customer.

Ranjay Gulati:
What do you think are some of the biggest mistakes founder entrepreneurs make as they scale the organization? Sometimes people like to say it's time for founders to even leave.

Susan Tynan:
I know, I know. Some people write about this. I do think you have to know what you're good at and what you're not good at, and you have to be honest with yourself. The good thing about this path, again, is you test yourself in a lot of areas, so you do get to know things that come naturally to you and things that don't. But something that I've evolved in my thinking of is, there are some functions of the business where the leader has to be more of my surrogate. This is how we bring the brand to life. This is how we treat the team. And there are some areas of the business are operating leaders who are really talented, who run retail and customer service and operations. Thank goodness they have a skillset I don't have, and so I need to seek them out and respect their complementary strengths. And so really understanding across the company how much I should be seeking people who are amplifying the vision, and also respecting the functions that really do have a concrete set of skills that may be different than my own.

Ranjay Gulati:
I'm not a big fan of the term "work-life balance". It implies that the work we do is somehow in opposition or in competition with the rest of our time. Instead, I encourage leaders to develop a well-articulated life purpose, one they pursue only partially through work; a purpose that is broad and profound. For Susan Tynan, work must be meaningful if it requires her to be away from home.

Susan Tynan:
I have two daughters. I had a baby at a time when I had a very exciting job working in the budget office for the White House, and I remember thinking, well, I can leave my baby because what I'm doing is important. And so it was almost the opposite of people saying, I'm going to ease into a role because I have a lot going on. It truly was the opposite. It was like, no, if I take a big job, and I feel a passion there, I won't feel that it was a bad decision. So that was what got me started on this journey. But I think I do believe if you are satisfied with what you're doing, and I think certainly if you're someone who has an entrepreneurial pang or an idea and you want to pursue it, you're going to be satisfied if you actually pursue it.

If you're satisfied with what you're doing, I do think you're a better partner and parent. I do view one of the reasons I'm building the business I'm building is to represent not only female leaders, but I think female leaders in this stage of life. So I started Frame Ridge with a baby and a toddler. Maybe that's not advisable, but it has all come together and I think the experience my children have had watching me build a business that's very concrete to them, right? This is not ethereal, this is really concrete. We build picture frames for people and mom's never home during the Christmas season. Those things make sense. Maybe a secondary or tertiary reason I do this is to show other women that they can, that they don't have to in any way tamper, I think, their dreams. And then to show my daughters.

Ranjay Gulati:
What advice would you give your daughters about career and finding something meaningful to do? How do you think one goes about doing that? Because my mother gave me that same advice as well: do something that doesn't feel like work, and I never understood what she meant back then, but now I do. How does one do that? Where does one look?

Susan Tynan:
I will encourage my daughters to work, but to experiment. I don't think it's reasonable to know where you'll end up. It would not be reasonable for me to think that I wanted to disrupt custom picture framing. That isn't something someone thinks of at a young age. So I think every step in your career is building, but I think every step in your career is also figuring out what you like and don't like. And I found my way to entrepreneurship, and I found my way to consumer businesses, and I think every step makes sense in hindsight. So I think just encouraging them not to think that they're going to take a misstep, but to know that that step is going to be more learning and more refining of what they ultimately want to do.

Ranjay Gulati:
On the idea of entrepreneurship and risk, why do you think most of us in the world are risk averse? Why do we struggle with doing courageous things?

Susan Tynan:
Well, failure does not feel good. It's very hard to fail without it being a reflection of some personal failing. And so I think every setback or challenge we've had at Framebridge over the years, I understand the hand I had in it, and some things are a global pandemic, or some things are the funding environment change, but I think most things can be shaped by you. And so I don't think people want a mirror into their own shortcomings.

Ranjay Gulati:
Have there been any crucible moments in your life that you can look back and say, those are one or two defining moments, whether you were playing a sport or in high school or college or whatever, with your father, that kind of thing. Not all of us have them, but if you have one or two that you can think of?

Susan Tynan:
I had a pretty... "Idyllic" might be too shiny, but a pretty good upbringing. And so truly the moments I remember are things like being middle school president, things like that where it was like, I like this. I know it's a little nerdy, but I like being in this position, and I like the feeling of attaining it. And so I think there were moments like that that gave me early confidence. And then I always enjoyed work. I worked at The Gap all through high school and college, and I loved that. I felt a tremendous sense of pride knowing what jeans would fit what customers. I just loved that. I was really good at it. I knew if you walked in, I knew what jeans would fit you and you'd walk out feeling great.

Ranjay Gulati:
As listeners of the podcast know, I've written extensively about how important a well articulated sense of purpose is for businesses, and for the leaders who run them. Purpose can become an existential intention, one that informs every decision, practice and process. Purpose has a vital animating force. Susan Tynan says her purpose is to build a fundamentally good business.

Susan Tynan:
And I think we're on our way, and there's more work to do. And so we're fundamentally good because what we provide to customers is good. They think it's an excellent service, they like the end product, but we behave in ways we think are good. We provide good training and compensation and benefits, and our team members feel like the part of their career spent at Framebridge was an important part of their career. And so I think that's my purpose, to build on lessons I learned earlier in my career and just build a good business where millions of customers are happy and thousands of employees are fulfilled.

Ranjay Gulati:
What do you hope people after you would say about you as a leader? The people who worked for you, what do you hope they might say about you?

Susan Tynan:
I would hope people said, I helped them figure out a way. I think that's the most authentic thing I can say is that I never left them out there alone, and that together we figured it out, and that through that process, they learned something.

Ranjay Gulati:
You've talked about the word "resilience", and I'd love to close out the conversation with resilience and how do you think about that word?

Susan Tynan:
I think resilience is powerful because anyone can have it. It's intrinsic. Or you can prove you're resilient by putting one other foot in front of the other. It can develop within you. I just said it was intrinsic, but I guess it can develop within you, and it is not reliant on external factors. In fact, it's only proven when the external environment is challenging.

Ranjay Gulati:
Susan Tynan is the founder and CEO of the custom framing company Framebridge. For more of my conversations with leaders in the business world navigating the 21st century business environment, visit my Deep Purpose website. While you're there, you can also find out about my book titled Deep Purpose. Companies that are serious about establishing and working towards a deep purpose, find that it delivers game changing results for the workers, the shareholders, and the larger society. So visit with me at deeppurpose.net. This podcast is produced by David Shin and Steven Smith, with help from Jen Daniels and Craig McDonald. The theme music is by Gary Meister. I'm Ranjay Gulati, thanks for listening.