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HOW I DID IT TRAEGER’S CEO
ON CLEANING UP A TOXIC CULTURE
by Jeremy Andrus
Harvard Business Review
March–April 2019 33
O
ne morning in October of
2014 I pulled into the park-
ing lot at my office to find it
surrounded by fire trucks.
On the previous visit I’d
made a big announcement:
Traeger, the Oregon-based
outdoor cooking company where I had
recently become CEO, would be closing
its warehouse and trucking operations
and outsourcing them to UPS. The
move made strategic sense, and we
had offered generous severance and
outplacement assistance to the several
dozen employees affected. Nonethe-
less, the news hadn’t gone over well.
When I got out of the car, I learned that
one of our big-rig trucks was on fire.
We didn’t know who was responsible,
but it was obviously arson.
I gathered my executive team
inside to talk about how to handle the
incident. Someone’s online news feed
was reporting on an office in Alabama
where just that morning a disgruntled
employee had shot and killed a couple
of coworkers. It made us reflect on
how much worse things could get at
Traeger. An hour or so later a longtime
employee stuck his head in the door
and said, “Rumor has it something
big is going down today.” I knew I
had to stand in front of the company
to address the team, and what might
come next made me nervous. It was
the first time I’d ever felt physically
unsafe at work.
There is no case study for what to
do when employees start burning your
assets, or a potentially mutinous mob
begins to form. Sadly, these incidents
were just extreme examples of a larger
problem: Our company had developed
a toxic culture characterized by lack of
trust, negative attitudes, and a stub-
born refusal to collaborate. As a new
CEO I had spent months trying to figure
out how to solve the problem. The day
of the truck fire represented a turning
point: I knew we needed to dismantle
the existing corporate culture and
build a new one from scratch.
THE LURE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
My route to becoming the CEO of
Traeger was circuitous, to say the
least. Like a lot of other people, I had
a hard time when I was in my twen-
ties figuring out what I wanted to do.
After college I spent three years as a
management consultant, and although
I learned a lot, I didn’t love it. Then I
spent six months day-trading stocks,
which was the most stressful and exhil-
arating job I’ve ever done. I helped a
company build hotels. I enrolled at
Harvard Business School, but when I
graduated, in 2002, in the aftermath
of the dot-com recession, the only
companies interested in me were man-
agement consultancies and real estate
development firms, because that’s the
experience I had on my résumé. I knew
I wanted to do something different.
After a few months of sleeping in
my parents’ basement, I moved to
Dallas and became a partner in a small
frozen-drink company. It was the first
time in my career that everything came
together. One minute I’d be driving
a forklift in the warehouse; the next
I’d be negotiating with a banker; the
next I’d be trying to make a sale to a
distributor. I loved being able to touch
every part of the business, and the
experience convinced me that I’d be
happiest as an entrepreneur.
A few years later someone intro-
duced me to Rick Alden, who’d
founded a company called Skullcandy.
It was still tiny—only $500,000 in
sales. (It was still putting speakers into
snowboarding helmets and hadn’t yet
moved into headphones.) In 2005 I
became Skullcandy’s VP of operations.
We grew so fast that I always felt a step
behind, but I was learning a ton. Rick
struggled to raise funds from outside
investors, so we built the brand on very
little money. I ended up becoming CEO,
staying for eight years, growing the
business to $300 million in revenue,
and taking it public. I eventually
learned that I didn’t particularly like
running a publicly traded company. We
were dealing with a lot of short sellers,
and in retrospect, we were too small
to have gone public. In early 2013 I left
and joined a private equity firm to look
for a smaller company I could buy and
run myself.
SOME MAGIC IN THE BRAND
I looked at 40 or 50 deals and spent
serious time on about 10 of them. I was
most interested in consumer-facing
brands. My dad worked in brand
management while I was growing up,
34 Harvard Business ReviewMarch–April 2019
and I’ve always thought of myself as a
consumer products guy. I enjoy figuring
out how consumers think and building
a brand and a product to address their
needs. One target was an all-natural
candymaker. I came close to buying a
high-end blender company. In every
case I focused on whether I thought I
could significantly grow the business.
Traeger first came across my desk
in the spring of 2013, very early in my
search. It was 26 years old and had cre-
ated and patented something called a
wood pellet grill—but I’d never heard of
the company or the category. Its origins
lie in the 1970s oil crisis, when people
began looking at alternatives to oil heat.
Wood pellet stoves became popular for
home heating, and in the early 1980s
Joe Traeger, who ran an Oregon heating
company, began experimenting with
using the same technology—whereby
an electric motor spins an auger to feed
wood pellets into a burn chamber—for
an outdoor grill. Because they use ther-
mostats to control the heat, pellet grills
are especially good at smoking meat at
steady temperatures. I had a 30-minute
call with the company and decided the
opportunity wasn’t for me. Backyard
grills didn’t seem like a very interesting
industry—it’s a highly commoditized
space, and I didn’t see much competi-
tive advantage in bending and welding
metal. After the call ended, I didn’t give
it another thought.
A few months later the private
equity firm that had brought the
company to my attention called again.
It had since bought a stake in Traeger
and partnered with the existing CEO.
That hadn’t worked out, and the PE
firm was looking for someone new to
lead the company. By then I’d been
searching for a buyout target for 10
months and was getting impatient,
so I listened more carefully. The firm
had done more research on Traeger;
it had new data on the company’s Net
Promoter Scores, which were off the
charts. It turns out that people who
buy a Traeger grill tend to talk it up
to everyone they know, persuading
friends to buy one too. There seemed
to be some magic in the brand that the
current owners hadn’t been able to
turn into scalable growth. That piqued
my interest.
We created a structure in which I
would become a minority shareholder
and the CEO. I went out to Oregon to
visit the headquarters—but as I began
to learn more about the culture there,
I wondered if I’d made a mistake by
ever getting involved.
A BRUISE ON MY CHEST
During my first visit I focused on two
things: the potential to grow sales, and
the quality of the existing management
team. I saw a lot of room for improve-
ment. Until 2010 the company had been
manufacturing the grills itself, which
didn’t make a lot of strategic sense,
but recently it had begun outsourcing
manufacturing to China. In 2013 it was
still operating warehouses and doing
shipping and fulfillment, even though
most competitors outsource that as
well. It even had its own trucks and
drivers on the payroll. About 240 people
worked there—120 in the Oregon head-
quarters, 30 in a sales office in Utah, and
90 commissioned salespeople around
the country. I lived near the Utah office
with my family, so I began traveling
back and forth between the Utah office
and Oregon headquarters.
Pretty quickly I began to sense a
cultural problem. The PE firm and
I each held a minority stake; the
majority owner was a serial entrepre-
neur who lived in Florida. He’d owned
the business for eight years, and I was
the eighth senior executive in that
time; seven had exited. Later on I
learned that employees called me Ocho
(Spanish for “eight”) behind my back,
and they didn’t expect me to last long.
Their behavior reflected that. When I
asked for data, they would ignore me.
Once, when I was visiting headquar-
ters, I asked the CFO if he could meet
with me. Even though I was his boss,
he said he couldn’t find any time in
his schedule. (He eventually found 30
minutes for me on that trip.) I’d ask
people to work together on a project,
and they’d simply refuse.
Although the majority owner had no
operating role, he was talking to people
at all levels of the company, multiple
times a day, so employees acted as if he
were in charge. The owner had created
a culture of fear: Everyone was afraid of
him, and he liked it that way. I recently
reread the e-mails I exchanged with
him during my first 90 days, and I’m
proud of how measured and restrained
I was. He was aggressive and abusive,
and that style rubbed off on other
people in the company.
I needed to bring in a better
management team, so I hired a few
executives I’d been close to at Skull-
candy. That inadvertently made the
cultural problems worse. It became
an us-versus-them situation, with my
Once, when I was visiting headquarters, I asked the CFO
if he could meet with me. Even though I was his boss, he said
he couldn’t find any time in his schedule.
Harvard Business Review
March–April 2019 35
new team and me on one side, and the
majority owner and long-term employ-
ees on the other.
The first step in trying to solve the
cultural problem was to eliminate the
majority owner. So on June 20, 2014,
about five months after I’d come on
board, the PE firm and I bought him
out. It was an important moment—
one we celebrate as a company
holiday every year. We call it Traeger
Independence Day.
Once we’d solved the ownership
problem, we began to recognize other
issues. When I first got involved with
Traeger, it was a $70 million business—
with amazingly unsophisticated con-
trols and processes. Our warehouses
were outdated and undersized; they
couldn’t handle our existing volume,
let alone the growth we wanted to cre-
ate. As we analyzed the financials, we
realized we had a big issue with chan-
nel management. We sold our products
online direct to consumers, but we
also sold them through retailers such
as Ace Hardware and big-box home
improvement chains. It turned out that
most of our direct-to-consumer sales
were at deeply discounted prices—
often less than what our retail partners
paid us for the products. They were
understandably upset by that, since
we were persuading them to stock
our grills and then undercutting them
on pricing. The first time I went to a
trade show, I came home with a bruise
on my chest: Retail customer after
retail customer had poked me hard
for underselling them and providing
horrendous service.
Back at headquarters I spent a
lot of time meeting with the top 30
or 40 people in the company, trying
to get a sense of their willingness to
change. We did a cultural survey to
gather quantitative data and allow
for anonymous feedback. We created
a new mission and five values that
would drive Traeger, but as we began
communicating them, nothing seemed
to happen. Many employees had been
working there for years (some were
even second generation), and they had
little incentive to do things differently.
The fact that I spent 75% of my time
away from headquarters didn’t help;
as soon as I left, people could go back
to operating the way they wanted. For
a while I thought about moving my
family to Oregon, but I wasn’t sure that
would fix the situation.
A CULTURE FROM SCRATCH
In the days after the truck fire, I
resolved that the only way to deal with
the toxic culture was to reboot. We
decided to move the headquarters from
Oregon to Utah. Most of the new exec-
utives and I lived in Utah, and with my
network and reputation there, I knew
I could build a strong team. In leaving
Oregon, we’d leave behind the employ-
ees who were blocking our efforts to
create a more positive and collaborative
culture at Traeger.
We worked on a plan in secret for
about 45 days before we announced it
to everyone. It was a costly move: We
paid severance to the people we let
go, and we paid retention bonuses to
key people to stick around in Oregon
In tandem with its culture shift, Traeger has revitalized its marketing —building a community
of fans and influencers on social media. Above, images from its Instagram feed.
36 Harvard Business ReviewMarch–April 2019
Starting a company from scratch means that you can build the
culture from scratch too. Even though Traeger had been around for
three decades, by relocating we’d be doing a complete reset.
long enough for us to set up the new
headquarters. Although we were happy
to be able to rebuild the culture com-
pletely, we worried a lot about the loss
of institutional memory. Businesses
this size tend to operate on tribal
knowledge: Many things aren’t written
down, and practices are carried around
in people’s heads. It’s hard to transfer
that knowledge—especially when peo-
ple are upset about losing their jobs.
Part of me regretted having to make
such a dramatic move. But the more
I reflected on it, the more I recognized
that the decision resulted from the
near-impossibility of transforming a
legacy culture in which negative atti-
tudes were so deeply ingrained. One of
the advantages of starting a company
from scratch is that you can build the
culture from scratch too. Even though
this company had been around for
three decades, by relocating to Utah
we’d be doing a complete reset.
We spent a lot of time deciding
whom to invite to move to Utah.
By that point, after we’d closed the
warehouse and trucking operations,
we had about 90 employees in Oregon.
We assessed each one on competency
and cultural fit. We graded people as
positive cultural leaders, neutral, or
cultural detractors. If people were
cultural detractors (and many were),
it didn’t matter how competent they
were—we didn’t want them. You’d
think the detractors would be easy to
identify, but that wasn’t always true.
I remember one guy who worked in
finance. I saw him as positive and
upbeat, but when he left the com-
pany and did an exit interview with
an external HR firm, I asked to see
the transcript. I was shocked by how
mean-spirited and negative he was.
If someone was a cultural neutral
and highly skilled in a job that would
be hard to fill, we invited him or her to
move. Only a couple were cultural lead-
ers, and we invited them too. Among
the 90 people were perhaps 12 or 15 we
hoped would come to Utah; of those,
five or six actually made the move. In
general, the people we wanted had
worked at the company for only a few
years. They were ambitious to develop
their skills, hungry to be promoted, and
capable of moving between roles easily.
The longer-tenured employees weren’t
adaptable and had too thoroughly
assimilated to the negative culture. We
thought about this in terms of a quaran-
tine: We needed to be certain we didn’t
bring anyone who could infect the new
culture we were trying to create.
A SPACE TRUE TO THE BRAND
The Utah headquarters officially
opened in September of 2015, and we
said good-bye to the last employee in
Oregon in early 2016. We’ve hired lots
of people since we moved—we’re now
at 450 employees globally—and I spend
time with every candidate before he or
she gets a job offer. I don’t focus on their
résumés. I want to understand how they
think about risk taking and what skills
they want to develop. I try to ensure that
we apply a tight cultural filter to anyone
we hire. We want to find people who are
already living by our values.
Our physical offices play an import-
ant part in the new culture. We worked
with architects to create an environ-
ment that feels true to our brand. It’s
an energetic, outdoorsy space, with
furniture made from reclaimed wood.
The conference rooms are named
for aspects of Traeger’s past. (One is
called the Abbey, because Traeger was
originally launched on land where a
monastery once stood.)
There are many beautiful places to
cook and to sit and eat, since we see our
brand as focusing on cooking and food,
not on the metal or mechanics of the
grill. Every Monday morning we cook
breakfast for the entire company, and we
cook lunch together Tuesday through
Friday. Preparing food for and with
colleagues is a way of showing we care
about one another. The resources we’ve
put into the office design communicate
that as well.
Since I got involved with Traeger,
we’ve done a lot more than try to trans-
form the culture—we’ve overhauled
our strategy, our marketing, and our
product line. We’ve built a community
of fans and influencers on social media
and in real life. I’m convinced that
the cultural shift we’ve achieved is an
important driver of our results, which
have been significant. In just five years
we’ve grown sales from $70 million
to nearly $400 million. The change
isn’t apparent only in our financial
statements and in the mood around
headquarters—our retailing partners
see evidence of it too. That’s important,
because they play a vital role in helping
us educate consumers on the advan-
tages of pellet grills over gas or charcoal.
It all stems from the research that first
got me interested in this company:
Once people try a pellet grill, they
never go back.
HBR Reprint R1902A
Harvard Business Review
March–April 2019 37
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