Rising a $5 Billion Company Starts With ‘Doing the Honest Thing for Your Employees’ Per This CEO
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Our travels for The CEO Sequence dangle introduced us to companies of all sizes and scopes, and for this episode, we went to 1 which is appropriate extensive. Zebra Technologies is one in every of the most dynamic B2B skills companies on the planet. They digitize and automate workflows for companies, dangle roughly 10, 000 workers and attain about $5 billion in earnings. I had the risk to sit down with CEO Bill Burns to learn the procedure he leads such an immense operation.
Beneath are some highlights of our insightful dialog, which dangle been edited for measurement and readability. Deem about the fat video above.
Global reach
“You look our firm Zebra in on a regular foundation existence. We’re a digital resolution provider that enables agencies to intelligently join recordsdata, resources, and other folks. You look us in a level-of-sale checkout at a grocery store, when a postal worker is handing over a parcel to your house, and in so many varied locations. Corporations exercise our cell devices to scan the equipment, gather signatures, and things take care of that. The total finest stores across the arena — 86 p.c of the Fortune 500 companies — are our customers this day. We accept as true with of it as retail, transportation, logistics, manufacturing and warehousing, health care and authorities.”
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The NFL Connection
“As a firm, we give a have interaction to the NFL. We exercise the identical forms of tags that might perchance be inclined in retail or transportation logistics to examine parcels or stock to examine every cleat, every shoulder pad, every helmet veteran by a player. The NFL’s preliminary exercise case used to be for fan engagement and to enhance the printed. After which the most original exercise cases are truly spherical maintaining the health and safety of the avid gamers.”
The CEO’s Trail
“I started my profession in gross sales, in a immense telco gross sales into other folks take care of Verizon and others. After which I took a role main Europe, the Center East, and Africa from a gross sales facet and expanded into marketing and services and products and varied areas. After which I joined Zebra about 9 years previously to lead the acquisition piece. Zebra used to be a thousand million-buck distinctiveness printing alternate. They sold two and a half of billion bucks in earnings from Motorola to the project alternate and so extra or much less in a single day a $1 billion alternate turned into a $3.5 billion alternate.”
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Management accountability
“There’s three legs of the stool, fair appropriate? That’s how I glimpse the alternate: our customers, our workers and our traders. Indirectly we’re in alternate to proceed to develop and to originate money. Nonetheless you’ve got acquired to attain the coolest things first. You might perchance perchance dangle acquired so that you just can reward and entice and admire the appropriate workers across the arena. If you attain that, then you definately’ll relief your customers finest. If you relief your customers finest, you will develop your topline earnings and your profitability and your stock will poke up and also you will procure care of your traders.”
Leading via annoying cases
“I accept as true with that set a question to for our services and products skyrocketed for the length of COVID, and then in 2023, set a question to reset support to 2019 stages. So we dangle been set in a popularity where we had to attain the conventional things that the bulk agencies would attain. Deem about at your true estate and your shuttle charges and all this stuff internally. We moreover did things take care of voluntary retirement programs. We diagram about increasing unique opportunities for folk for the length of the organization. It labored out mighty, nonetheless it be constantly grand to gather smaller. It is constantly grand extra fun to develop. Nonetheless you’ve got acquired to originate these annoying alternate decisions at cases.”
Career advice to future leaders
“No one else cares as grand about your profession as you attain, nonetheless moreover wait and see since it would now not happen in a single day. And for these who are at a super firm and also you’ve got opportunities there, there’s nowhere else that you just are extra revered than interior that firm. They know you are willing, so wait and see.”
Take a look at out extra profiles of progressive and impactful leaders by visiting The CEO Sequence archives.
