#214: Carey Jaros (GOJO — Makers of PURELL®) — 80 Years of Ohio Legacy and Well-Being Solutions

Carey Jaros [00:00:00]:
The Purell brand. I just was looking at a bunch of the metrics around brand health equity and it is substantially stronger than it was in 2019 and there are places where it actually is continuing to increase, which is a little counterintuitive coming out of the pandemic. And then our consumer business, our share in consumer has more than doubled since before the pandemic and the market is substantially larger. You know, we're continuing to innovate there and tell our story. We launched hand sanitizing spray in the last year which people love and we really feel like it's our, you know, in some ways it's our golden hour. I mean the business is doing better than any of us could have even imagined.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:41]:
Welcome to the Lay of the Land.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:43]:
Podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host Jeffrey Stern and today I had the real pleasure of speaking with Kerry Jarrows, CEO of Gojo Industries, the makers of Purell and many other products under the umbrella of their purpose of saving lives and lives better.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:04]:
Through well being solutions.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:06]:
Kerry joined Gojo in 2014, originally as a board member and then held executive roles as Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Operating Officer before becoming President and CEO in January of 2020. Our conversation today covers Carrie's call to lead, shaped by a lifelong passion for solving problems and telling stories, her reflections on leadership and decision making, the extraordinary legacy and the ongoing innovation at gojo. We discuss Gojo's ORIG Engines, founded by Goldie and Jerry Lippman in 1946 to address the real human problem of safely cleaning workers hands in Akron's rubber factories. Carrie shares how GoJo has evolved from its roots to become a global leader in hygiene, skincare and well being, driven by their unwavering commitment to safety, efficacy and sustainability. We also delve into the critical moments Carrie faced stepping into her role at the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, the bold strategic investments Gojo made during this unprecedented time, and how the company balances legacy with innovation. Carrie provides insights on the importance of culture, rigorous debate and continuous learning as cornerstones of her approach to leadership. As an operator, investor and board member, Carrie has worked on and in more than 50 organizations over her career. Prior to Gojo, Carrie was the president of Walnut Ridge Strategic Management Company and was a vice president at Dealer Tire, a large privately held tire distributor here in Cleveland, Ohio.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:37]:
She spent the first 12 years of her career career as a management consultant at Bain and Company. Today, Carrie is a board director of Grocery Outlet, a publicly traded Nasdaq Corporation and advisory and board member of venture backed menstrual products startup OnFlow. She also serves on the boards of the Cleveland Foundation, University Hospitals and the Laurel School. Carrie is an awesome storyteller and this conversation is filled with wonderful anecdotes and practical wisdom on business and entrepreneurship. So please enjoy it. Lave the Land is brought to you and is proudly sponsored by Roundstone Insurance, headquartered in Rocky River, Ohio. Roundstone shares Lay of the Land's same passion for bold ideas and lasting impact from our community's entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders. Since 2005, Roundstone has pioneered a self funded captive health insurance model that delivers robust savings for small and medium sized businesses.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:32]:
They are part of the solution to rising healthcare costs, helping employers offer affordable, high quality care while driving job creation and economic growth throughout Northeast Ohio. Like many of the voices featured on Lay of the Land, including Roundstone's founder and CEO Mike Schroeder, Roundstone believes entrepreneurship, innovation and community to be the cornerstones of progress. To learn more about how Roundstone is transforming employee health benefits by empowering employers to save thousands in per employee per year healthcare costs, please visit roundstoneinsurance.com Roundstone Insurance built for entrepreneurs, backed by innovation.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:10]:
Committed to Cleveland so I am a fan of reflecting on your career from the perspective of decision trees is how I think about them. Kind of like Robert Frost's the Road Not Traveled poem where looking forward, there are many forks in the road, they branch infinitely in all kinds of directions, and it's ultimately dependent on which paths.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:34]:
You decide to walk.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:35]:
But when you look back in reflection, the infinite branches from the past converge into the path that you've actually taken where you can piece together all those decisions into really, you know, one thread that, that ties your career together. And so I would like to start there. And if you took us back to, you know, when you were younger, what did you care about? Where were you, what were you passionate about? And ultimately, you know, did you imagine that, that you'd be doing, you know, this kind of work when you grew up and running what today is one of the largest hygiene and skincare companies in the world?

Carey Jaros [00:05:11]:
Sure. So definitely I did not imagine that I would be running a skincare company. But if I go way, way, way back. So I grew up in Cleveland. My favorite sort of subjects were always math and English. And I think that paired with sort of what I was most interested in, which was solving problems and telling stories. And those are the things I love the most. And they're still the things I love the most, I love when I can tell a story and there's actually evidence for my story.

Carey Jaros [00:05:44]:
So I grew up with two attorneys as parents and I now have, my brother's also an attorney. So I'm the only non attorney in my family. So this idea of sort of making your case with good data and evidence was definitely also a part of my life. And so I would say sort of the math, the English and the what I'll call sort of the, the argument were all really important. And you know, in terms of sort of how so that sort of interests. Right. In terms of behaviors. I think from a really young age I just felt, I felt called to lead.

Carey Jaros [00:06:16]:
So, you know, we all have, we're all different. Whenever I'm in a situation where there's a problem and a bunch of people standing there, my first inclination is to help that group of people get organized to solve the problem. And I've been like that for as long as I can remember.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:33]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:34]:
Called to lead.

Carey Jaros [00:06:35]:
Called to lead. Yeah. It's the combination of feeling, you know, I feel like I have been given so many things and I feel a responsibility to use, to use the opportunities and experiences that I have to make things better.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:51]:
Yeah. So help us understand your, your path to Gojo.

Carey Jaros [00:06:56]:
So like I said, I grew up in Cleveland Heights and then in Shaker, and I ended up going off to Brown University for college. My dad had gone to Brown. I didn't really have a better reason than that. I liked it. I liked my dad. Seemed like a cool place. I was pretty achievement oriented and worked hard. And I like to sort of set stretch goals for myself.

Carey Jaros [00:07:18]:
And so going to Brown was a stretch goal and I ended up there. While I was at Brown, I had no idea what I wanted to study. Like I said, my whole family, lots and lots of attorneys and business people and I was at this liberal arts school where there wasn't pre law or business. And so my first year I just took, I took like one of everything. You know, I took freshman psychology, freshman economics, sociology, like I, you know, one of everything, statistics. And the class that I loved the most my freshman year was public policy. It was a course that was really designed against solving problems through policy. And so it was very practical.

Carey Jaros [00:08:01]:
It was not a theoretical course. We looked at issues like, okay, if there have been, you know, if motorcycle deaths are causing both a negative impact on society and also costing lots and lots of money, what are all the different tools that policymakers could use to improve outcomes? And so we would look at lots and Lots of different possibilities. We would evaluate all of those different approaches. We would try to understand them in terms of their impact on human life. Both the life of the people for whom injury would be prevented, but also liberty and people who enjoy riding motorcycles and people who are in cars and have motorcycles around them. And we would also look at things like the economic impact, both the cost of these programs and then their economic impact. And I just fell in love. It was, like, perfect.

Carey Jaros [00:08:46]:
It was a combination of math and storytelling and negotiation because you had to get people to get on board with your programs. And so I ended up majoring at Brown. They call it concentrating in public policy. It was a degree that was at Brown's. Kind of funny. So there aren't, like, pure majors. So public policy was a combination of political science, economics, sociology, statistics, philosophy. So I ended up at Bain, frankly, because I just didn't know what I wanted to do.

Carey Jaros [00:09:17]:
And they came on campus to recruit. And when I went to their presentation, essentially what they said is, we do the same stuff you're doing in your public policy program, but we do it for companies. So we have a hard problem. Nobody knows what to do about it. We've got data, we've got resources to go learn things, but nobody knows the answer. And that's the work. And so, you know, whether it was, you know, I helped the Talbots business decide what they should do about their Men's and kids stores. And J.

Carey Jaros [00:09:47]:
Jill, I worked on direct store distribution for Nabisco after they were bought by Kraft. So, you know, should they continue to do that? Should they stock the shelves themselves or let other people do it? Really interesting problems. And I loved this combination of trying to understand why they were doing the things they were doing, why they thought it wasn't working, and then coming up with many alternatives, assessing them and picking a path forward. Like, I just.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:14]:
It really applied. It's quite aligned with the solving problems and telling stories.

Carey Jaros [00:10:19]:
Yeah. And I love the people. I think an important lesson from my Bain time was that culture really matters a lot. You know, the work you're doing is incredibly important, but the people you're doing it with and around all day, every day ultimately has just as big an impact on. At least on my satisfaction. And I loved the culture at Bain. It was a work hard, play hard culture. People had a good sense of humor.

Carey Jaros [00:10:44]:
They didn't take themselves too seriously. Even though we all took the work we were doing seriously. I think it was very high integrity. So my first week we talked about the Sunshine Test. We do not do things that we would not be comfortable having on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. That really resonated with me. That's how I've tried to lead my whole life. And so being in a professional context where I knew that I could be really honest about how I felt about things and speak up if I was concerned was really important to me.

Carey Jaros [00:11:16]:
And so it was just a great fit all around. And I felt like Bain really, you know, really invested in my development and growth and gave me incredible opportunities.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:27]:
I imagine, from Bain, you know, kind of the world is your oyster. What ultimately was exciting to you about Gojo and, you know, how did you kind of navigate a transition to. Within the company?

Carey Jaros [00:11:37]:
Yeah, so a couple steps from Bain. So I was in my, I guess in my. My. Bain sent me back to business school. So I went and got an MBA and then came back to Bain and worked for Bain in London, Amsterdam, and then back in Boston. I got to see lots and lots and lots of businesses. Increasingly, as much as I love the firm and the work, that part of me that wants to be a leader and make change was like screaming like, I want to do it. I don't just want to advise on it.

Carey Jaros [00:12:06]:
And so I was starting to feel like I wanted to run something or at least be on a path to running something. And so in 2010, my husband and I had our first kid, Francis, who's now 15, and we were living in Boston and I was working for Bain and I was having these feelings about like, wanting to sort of be. Go out and be more of a leader, more of an executive, more of a direct impact kind of person, Honestly, really. My husband Brett was the one who said, like, let's try Cleveland. He loved it. He's not from Cleveland, but he had spent a lot of time in Cleveland with my family. My family is. We're actually 8th generation Clevelanders on my dad's side.

Carey Jaros [00:12:49]:
So we have a long history in this town. And my parents have always been very involved, have always encouraged us to be very involved. You know, we're the family. When the out of town boyfriend visits, you have to go to the art museum every time just to appreciate how awesome University Circle is and, you know.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:07]:
Which it is, which it is.

Carey Jaros [00:13:09]:
And so he really loved Cleveland and he said that it's a place where we can go and have a real impact in a way that we probably can't in Boston and we can raise our daughter around my family. And also his mom is close. And so we made the Move. So we moved back here in 2010 right after we had Frances. And I stayed with Bain during the transition, but I knew I wanted to do something else. And so I did this very thorough job search in Cleveland. Anyone who asks me, which is lots of people, how you look for a job in Cleveland, the answer is, you meet with lots and lots of people. You do that over breakfast, lunch and dinner until the people you meet with recommend you meet with people you've already met with.

Carey Jaros [00:13:51]:
That's when you know you're done, right? When every recommendation and introduction you get, you've already had. So I went through that process and ended up with an incredible opportunity to join Dealer Tire. So Scott and Dean Mueller had built this amazing business, sort of, you know, which was the foundations of which were actually their grandfather and father's business. But they had really taken this business and scaled it. I think when I joined, the revenues were around $600 million and they'd only been at it for 10 years. And so I had the opportunity to join that business and work directly for Scott at the beginning, sort of running strategy and then. But our deal was that if I came on board, he would find a way to get me P and L responsibility, which is the thing I knew I needed to ultimately be a CEO. And so he said, yep, I promise.

Carey Jaros [00:14:40]:
And he was, he was good, good for his word. About a year in, he first they gave me finance, so I learned how to run FP&A, and I ran the budget process and I got a bunch of sort of line experience that way. And then they ultimately gave me responsibility for about half the business through managing the car company relationships there. And it was my first real kind of P and L responsibility. It was high stakes because I had responsibility for these contracts that renewed annually that were really large. So like the Mercedes contract or the BMW contract, back then we didn't have a ton of customers and each customer was really, really important. And so that was just an incredible experience. And so I did that for a couple years and then I ultimately ended up moving over to run the family office for the family who owns Gojo today, the Camper family.

Carey Jaros [00:15:35]:
And they had set up the family office to oversee their investments in non Gojo and Non Gojo assets. So they had about at the time, 15 direct control investments in startups and then Gojo. And so again, I said, okay, I'll come do this, but if I'm going to be responsible for these 15 sort of startup investments, I also need to have, I need to understand Gojo because I need to think like you think. I can't be divorced from sort of the, you know, the core business. And so they put me on the Gojo board and gave me responsibility for the startup portfolio. And so that was 2014. And I did that for a couple of years. And together we made the decision that there was so much opportunity at Gojo that I should come in house and work here instead.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:28]:
That's an amazing journey.

Carey Jaros [00:16:30]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:33]:
How would you describe what Gojo is?

Carey Jaros [00:16:37]:
So what we say sort of on paper is we're the largest B2B skin care company in the world. We, you know, our business before the pandemic was about 2/3 soap and only one third sanitizer. And it was 90% B2B and only 10% consumer. So people might have thought, okay, this Purol business is a consumer sanitizer business. We were actually a B2B soap business first. And, you know, I could go through the whole Gojos founding story and it's so I'm happy to talk about it. But at its heart, we really started. The business was really started by Jerry and Goldie Lippman.

Carey Jaros [00:17:17]:
And it was started on this concept of making dirty hands clean and solving a real human problem. And that's really what we still do today. We solve real human problems. We are obsessed with the combination of safety and efficacy. So we want to give people no trade off protection from, you know, from dirt and germs, both on their skin and on the surfaces they touch. And we're not satisfied. We don't launch a technology until it has both safety and efficacy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:51]:
Yeah. Well, I would take you up on the time machine journey if you'll indulge a little detour, you know. But I always think it's fascinating to understand the origins if we're going back to the 1940s in Akron and we're in the context of World War II, the conditions that are true that unlocked this opportunity, especially in the history of Ohio with just rubber manufacturing and the second order effects of that, which I don't think are necessarily obvious if you're just to think about it, that this place, being the global leader in the manufacturing of this kind of material, creates that kind of opportunity. It's really fascinating. So I would love to hear how it came to be.

Carey Jaros [00:18:34]:
Yeah, I'm happy to tell the story. And I think it is, you know, as a girl who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and really believed in sort of the American dream, I think the Gojo founding story is like a perfect example of, you know, when I was Growing up, what I imagined that to be. So Goldie and Jerry lived in Akron, Ohio, and they. It was 1946, and Jerry had been. He was a cookie salesman. He had a 10th grade education. And he was just. From all accounts, I did not know Jerry, but from all accounts, he was just a great guy.

Carey Jaros [00:19:11]:
Friendly, funny, you know, interested in things, interested in people. You know, he's the kind of guy. One of his. The ways he interviewed people for jobs is he would leave a broom on the floor near the door, and if you came in for your job interview and stepped over the broom, he would just nicely dismiss you. Like he wanted the person who picked the broom up. Like, he just was a good guy. A good guy with great values and a lot of ambition and energy. And so Goldie was working in a rubber factory.

Carey Jaros [00:19:43]:
She had gotten that job, sort of as many women did at the time, you know, right after World War II, there weren't a lot. A lot of the men weren't around to work in those factories. And so Rosie the Riveter style, she ended up in a rubber factory. And in the factory where she worked, at the end of a long day, her hands and the hands of all of her colleagues were covered in carbon black and grease. And so what the men had done for years and what they taught these women to do was dip their hands in either benzene or kerosene and then use a rag to rub off the carbon black and grease. And, you know, Goldie felt like this was just a bad idea. It felt bad. It seemed like it was not maybe that safe.

Carey Jaros [00:20:23]:
And it was really damaging her skin and many other women's skin. And, you know, having nice hands at the time was important. And so they were not excited about this. And so she came home and, you know, was chatting with Jerry and telling him about this, and she said, there's just gotta be a better way. And so Jerry, who was a cookie salesman, said, you're probably right, Goldie, there's gotta be a better way. But I don't know what it is, but let's go find out. And so one of Jerry's long held beliefs was that he would say, everything I know I learned from someone else. Like, he just, he believed that you go out in the world and find the answers.

Carey Jaros [00:20:59]:
It's not important that you're the smartest person in the room. What's important is that when there's a question and you don't know the answer, you go look and you ask lots of people. And so he went to Kent State University which was nearby. The man had not gone to college himself, did not have a college degree, but he had the courage to just walk in there and walk the halls and ask around. And he ended up finding a guy named Clarence Cook, who was a professor. He was a chemistry professor. And fortunately, Clarence Cook, by chance, had done a lot of work looking at how to remove lanolin from wool as part of trying to figure out how to make uniforms during World War II less hot, right? So they had to figure out how to get lanolin out of the wool for the production of uniforms. And so he knew a lot about emollients and oil.

Carey Jaros [00:21:48]:
And so using that knowledge and his knowledge of chemistry and Jerry's knowledge of the problem, the real human problem, the two of them set to developing the first formula. And it became our Gojo Original Cream. And it's a product we made literally until just a couple years ago. And it was a product that they mixed in the basement at Jerry's mom's house. So he used her old washing machine, and we have it here in the building. It's a crank, crank washing machine. And they would mix up the formula in the basement. And then it was, you know, right after World War II, there was no tin available for cans.

Carey Jaros [00:22:23]:
And so he would drive around on his old cookie route and go see all the old delis and places that he delivered cookies, and he would pick up their used pickle jars. And so he picked up all these used pickle jars, he would take it home out, and they would pack the original cream in these cookie jars, and then they sold it. And Goldie was the bookkeeper and ultimately had played a really important role in both pricing and in financing. And there's some cool stories about how she sort of saved the business in that way. And Jerry was the salesman, so he'd go out in the street and sell the product. And it was right at the time when service stations. Cars were becoming ubiquitous, and service stations were popping up on every corner. And so he went to all these service stations, and the way he sold the product is he would put a scoop of the cream cleaner on his hand.

Carey Jaros [00:23:13]:
He would sort of hide it. He'd walk in and ask for the head mechanic. Head mechanic would come out. He would put his hand out to shake the guy's hand, and they'd shake hands, and then the mechanic would look and be like, ew, what did you put on my hand? And he would. Jerry said that typically the guy would wipe his hand off, preparing to hit Jerry in the face. And when he Wiped his hand off. He would notice that the grime that had been on his hands was gone and he had a clean streak on his hand. And so right before he hit Jerry, he'd say, how does this stuff work? And so Jerry said 9 out of 10 times he'd get the sale and 1 out of 10 times he'd get punched in the nose.

Carey Jaros [00:23:49]:
So that was his sort of original approach to selling. And he was tremendously successful very quickly because there was a real human problem and this product solved it squarely in a no frills way. And so the business started to grow. They were manufacturing. They brought in their first employee, this woman, Eleanor Morris. She ate lunch in their kitchen, you know, in the kitchen of their house. And to this day we still have peanut butter and jelly and popcorn every day for our team as sort of a tribute to those early days when the three of them broke bread together. And, you know, the business, the business grew a ton in those early days.

Carey Jaros [00:24:26]:
And then I can tell you the story if you want, but basically, as the business was becoming more and more successful, the cost of the product started creating new problems. And so that inspired Jerry to continue to innovate.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:41]:
Yeah. What a legendary founding entrepreneurial journey. That's incredible.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:48]:
Wow.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:48]:
So many different directions we could go from here. I guess one thing you mentioned that I always find really interesting to explore in the context of a business like Gojo is this multi generational, you know, component to it and how, you know, you mentioned the kind of the sunsetting of the original product when you consider Gojo as a third generation family enterprise now, this tension between how to best honor the legacy and pay homage to the history and you know, you mentioned the values, the founding principles, you know, so that foundation while simultaneously innovating and all the chapters that Gojo has evolved through, you know, since then.

Carey Jaros [00:25:31]:
Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, I, I'm sure lots of people you would interview in businesses like this would say that's really hard. And that, that's a, you know, that that's a tension that they manage. I will be honest, there are some things about our culture and about the way that Jerry and Goldie started the business and, and just their system of beliefs and values from early on that have made that actually the opposite of hard for us. Like we are, we are geared to be, to always evolve and we see that as a good thing, but what always stays the same. So we have a purpose which is saving lives and making life better through wellbeing solutions. It's Really a long way of saying we solve real human problems and then we have values and guiding principles which have really been the same for 80 years. Those are things like better together.

Carey Jaros [00:26:25]:
We really believe that more people around the table with different competencies are going to come up with better solutions. We have uncompromising integrity. And that is not just about the individual decisions people make and making high integrity individual decisions. It's about the responsibility we all have to talk straight to speak up. When you're in a meeting, no matter what your title is or how long you've been at Gojo, if you hear something that sounds wrong or stupid or silly or misaligned to our values, the expectation is that you'll raise your hand and speak up. Always learning is one of our values. And I think when you have a value that is always learning and guiding principles that include things like we experiment and keep what works, you're geared to be an organization that is predisposed to change. Because if you're not changing, you're not really learning and growing.

Carey Jaros [00:27:21]:
And we want to learn and grow. It's who we are. And then lastly, one of our values is bold leadership. And one of the guiding principles under bold leadership is we courage, courageously take on challenges no one else will and inspire others. You can't believe that that's who you are. And also resist taking in new information from the outside world and evolving. So it's actually in some ways been the easiest thing in the world to keep evolving as a business and to be a market making innovator, because we have those values and guiding principles that we've had for 80 years.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:57]:
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, with at least two of those in mind, this kind of always learning and bold leadership, I mean, I would feel I would be remiss to not ask you about the pandemic a little bit.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:12]:
So you had exposure to the business.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:13]:
For 10 years, a decade, and you assumed the role of CEO in the very beginning of 2020, just like weeks before this pandemic rolls out, when I think Ojo is already on a world stage, but now the spotlight quite obviously focused and centered on exactly the set of problems that you've positioned yourself to solve. What, what was it like stepping into leadership of the whole organization at a time? And we don't have to rehash the whole pandemic here, but in the face of infinite overnight demand for your product, how that crisis experience shaped the way that you lead and plan, and how you carry those values and principles with you through a very Adverse period of time.

Carey Jaros [00:29:08]:
Yeah. So, first of all, thank you for not making me relive the whole pandemic.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:12]:
I don't want to either.

Carey Jaros [00:29:13]:
It was a special time. I would say that not a day goes by that I am not grateful that Gojo was the Gojo it was when I came into my role, and also that I was who I was. I feel like it was the right combination for that moment. And what I really mean is, you have this organization that at the time was 75 years old that had this incredible purpose, this sense of purpose, and every person in the organization had that sense of purpose. It had been there for decades and decades, and you had these values where we really articulated what we do and why we do it, how we behave and why. And then I was in the role as a new leader. And as we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, like, I'm wired in that moment not to step up and be and direct. The way I'm wired is to figure out how I.

Carey Jaros [00:30:17]:
What is my. The unique role I can play to unlock the capability and capacity of the group of people who are. Who are with me. And, like, that's the way I feel called to lead. I don't feel called to lead, to stand up on a table and tell people what to do. The pull I feel is to play my role in the group, to help the group figure out how to be as successful as possible and conquer whatever challenge we have. And so, especially at a time when there was no playbook, it was an unprecedented situation. And there were people who had experience with pieces of what happened, right? There were people at Gojo who had been through H1N1 or SARS or Ebola.

Carey Jaros [00:31:03]:
And so there was experience and expertise that was really important. And it was also a novel application. Like, that's the moment that you. I think that you. That my particular style of leadership was best suited for, which is, let's all sit around the table. I want everybody here to tell everybody else here, not me, but everybody else here, what you think we should do and why, and then let's have a really robust debate. And then if we reach consensus, great. And if we don't, I'm going to do my job and make a decision.

Carey Jaros [00:31:37]:
But that decision is going to be informed by everybody else here offering their very best point of view and us having a discussion. And I'm really comfortable doing that. Some people aren't right, but I'm also comfortable changing my mind the next day. If we learn something new and we had to do a Lot of that, too. And so I think Gojo's culture, the incredible people we had, with all the experience they had and all the heart they had for our purpose and my style of leadership were a really good combination.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:10]:
I mean, it certainly sounds like it quite emblematic of bold leadership meeting the moment. When you're in that moment, outside of that, you know, rigorous debate that you're having internally, how are you weighing kind of the long term thinking and what Gojo, the plans that you had for not next month as the crisis kind of transpires, but where you wanted to take the organization in years and how to balance the plans that you had in place and the strategies around that relative to this moment in time.

Carey Jaros [00:32:49]:
So, you know, there's the cliche, if you want to go fast, go alone, and if you want to go far, go together. And I think that was true in our day to day, in our day to day response, which we just talked about with my leadership team. I think it was also true in terms of our mid and longer term planning with the owners of the business and the gentleman who had just retired as president. So Joe Camper, Marcella Camper Rollnick, who's executive chair now and was executive chair during the pandemic, and then Mark Lerner, who had just retired as president. The four of us sort of were an unofficial leadership molecule for the business. You know, we were, we formally had a board, and the board was useful too. But the four of us, day to day were sort of processing a lot of what was happening and doing a lot of sort of, I would say, sort of strategic work and strategic planning together. It was really nice because Joe and Mark had really run the business together for 30 years.

Carey Jaros [00:33:46]:
Marcela had been around for much of that time in increasing roles of leadership. And then I was new in my role, but had worked with also that group now for about five years. And so the four of us were able to do some healthy dividing and conquering. And so that group did some mid and longer term planning that ended up becoming extraordinarily important, not just to our response to the pandemic, but to what has happened since then over the last five years. And I'll just give you one example. You know, we, we made a decision as a group to invest about $400 million, which was more than the excess profit that came in during 2020, back into the business to do two things. First of all, to ensure that we would have capacity to respond to future surges. So imagine making that decision when you're in the middle of that pandemic, taking that money and investing for the next pandemic, which could be a year away or 20 years away.

Carey Jaros [00:34:47]:
So that was the first thing. And then the second thing that that did for us is it gave us supply security, it allowed us to onshore and vertically integrate in a bunch of places where we felt like there was supply chain risk. We had observ in that moment. And today as tariffs, you know, the tariff environment is very uncertain. A lot of those decisions that we made are paying off in ways that some ways we anticipated and some ways we didn't.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:17]:
How would you describe where Gojo is today and what are you excited about looking forward, having made those investments and you know how it's evolved since.

Carey Jaros [00:35:27]:
Yeah, so it has been a really complicated five year period. You know, we thought there were. We believe that demand that actually came in in terms of orders was at about 16x for most of 2020. And really it was infinite because if, you know, if people could have submitted more orders, they would have 21, you know, was soft in the back half. And because you really didn't have people back in public spaces, you had the Delta and then and the Omicron variants, you know, people weren't really fully back out in public. 22 people started to be back out in public, but there was a bunch of bad product out there sort of taking up space. By 23, things were starting to normalize at the end. But, you know, we had to do all kinds of things that, you know, we tried to be really public and transparent about to get our business back in a healthy place.

Carey Jaros [00:36:17]:
I'm delighted to say that 24 is the. Was the second best year in the company's history after 2020. So we are back and better than we were in 2019, both in terms of the amount of people who we are impacting, which is all about our purpose, the number of sort of doses of hand hygiene and surface hygiene we're putting out in the world. But also in terms of our financial strength and stability, we are, we're really firing on all cylinders. We had an amazing 24, 25 is off to a really strong start. The Purell brand, I just was looking at a bunch of the metrics around brand health equity and it is substantially stronger than it was in 2019. And there are places where it actually is continuing to increase, which is a little counterintuitive coming out of the pandemic. And then our consumer business, our share in consumer has more than doubled since before the pandemic.

Carey Jaros [00:37:12]:
And the market is Substantially larger. We're continuing to innovate there and tell our story. We launched hand sanitizing spray in the last year, which people love. And we really feel like it's our, you know, in some ways it's our golden hour. I mean, the business is doing better than any of us could have even imagined.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:32]:
Yeah. What is your philosophy on brand? Purella is obviously such a strong brand and has become that much stronger, you know, in the aftermath of all of this. How do you think about what brand is and you know, where you would like to take it ultimately?

Carey Jaros [00:37:49]:
Yeah. So there's a gentleman here named Dave Brownlee who is our. He sort of has, you know, leadership responsibility for the Purell brand and he would give you a much better answer. What I will tell you is the way I think of the brand as the CEO is that our brand is a promise. That's what a brand is. It's a promise. And so when somebody picks up a product that is a Purell product, there are a set of things that they believe are going to be true about that product and that experience. And it's our job every time to meet or exceed that set of expectations.

Carey Jaros [00:38:22]:
And when we do that, the strength of the brand grows. And when we don't do that, the strength of the brand diminishes. And for us, the things that that product needs to do to be a Purell product is first and foremost, it needs to deliver on the safety and the efficacy that are at the standard that we hold ourselves to. It also has to deliver on what we call good for you, which is beyond safety and efficacy for the person using it. It's about the way that that product affects the world. And so good4u means that the product is, it is the most sustainable solution we can offer today based on the technology that's available. It means that it's not just good for you, the person using it, but it's protecting the people you're trying to protect. So if you're a new nurse using the product, I can make it safe and effective for you.

Carey Jaros [00:39:11]:
There are tons of ways every day that we have to, tons of decisions we have to make every day that get at this issue of like, am I reinforcing the things about the brand and strengthening it or am I weakening it? And there are temptations every day in a business to do things that weaken your brand. And so we have lots of healthy debate and dialogue. So it's a, it's a, it's a moving target. And I think it's also not that complicated at its core, right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:38]:
Well, and it channels the values. Always learning, this willingness to change your mind, conviction where you have it, but then course correcting capabilities along the way. It's really interesting, kind of longer term, higher level, up in the air stuff. How do you think about what success means ultimately?

Carey Jaros [00:40:01]:
So, you know, I. One of the great things about having a purpose in a business is you always have a yardstick. And so with the purpose of saving lives and making life better through wellbeing solutions, we can ask ourselves every day, are we doing more of that today than we did yesterday? Are we saving more lives and making more lives better? There was a time when we sort of set a bhag for ourselves of delivering health and wellbeing to a billion people a day. And so that's one measure that is a bhag. It's a bhag. You know, right after we set that goal, Coca Cola came out and said they wanted to serve beverages to a billion people a day. And we're like, ooh, if that's something that's actually like a big stretch goal for them, maybe it's a really big stretch goal for us. It's like a moment of humility, right? But we did measure ourselves on that for many, many years.

Carey Jaros [00:40:51]:
And at the peak of the pandemic, we, in 2020, we made 140 billion doses of Purell. So you're getting close. You're getting in the 300 to 400 million people a day kind of territory. And we're still around. We're in that range today with all the products that we make. We challenge ourselves constantly on how we take the incredible strategic assets we have in this business, which is really a platform. We have a management team, a broader gojo team and a set of assets that probably could do what we do in a business that's three or four times as big as we are. How do we keep finding those new places where there are real human problems, there are jobs to be done that we have a right to do that makes sense for us to do? Then how do we use our innovation process, our relationships with our distributor partners and customers, our brand and our other strategic assets to just continue to expand our impact?

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:58]:
How do you personally think about success?

Carey Jaros [00:42:01]:
I would love to be someone who has a great long term plan that's, you know, that's, you know, that I'm executing against. I am so strategic in business. I think personally I've been less strategic. You know, I have, I have a family, so certainly some part of my success is that I'm making their lives better. Like that I'm a net positive contributor, the most net positive contributor I can be to my family's lives. And that's not just my kids and my husband, but my parents and my brother and his family. Right. I want to be a good human and enrich those relationships.

Carey Jaros [00:42:40]:
Outside of my direct professional work, I mentor and coach tons of people. I think one of the ways that. That we can rise to the responsibility that matches what we've been given and when we're in roles like mine is to be very generous with our network and with our. It's hard to be generous with your time because you don't have that much of it, but I can be very generous with my network and with connections. And so I try. Like, I was driving in this morning and I had a half hour in the car, and I used that half hour to talk to an entrepreneur who's scaling her business, who had a challenging thing that she's working through, and we talk through it, and I, you know, I'm always quick to say, have you thought about this? You should talk to this person. Let me make a connection. So I do a lot of that, and that feels like success to me.

Carey Jaros [00:43:25]:
That's part of success professionally. I am deeply connected to success for the people in my business. Like, I don't. I. I don't have a job. My job is. Only. Only exists because this business exists, and the people who are here exist.

Carey Jaros [00:43:42]:
And so getting a lot of sort of professional success and accomplishments is way less meaningful to me than us together accomplishing the things we want to accomplish. And I admire that in other people. And I aspire to be that kind of person myself.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:59]:
Yeah, I share that aspiration. I really feel success comes from other people's success in a lot of ways. And, yeah, the. The whole generosity of. Of giving of yourself and kind of giving first is also quite reflective of the whole spirit of this podcast, too. So that also resonates a lot.

Carey Jaros [00:44:22]:
For sure. Yeah. Which is why I'm so excited you're doing it, because it's the. It's the kind of work. You know, I remember when I took macroeconomics for the first time. And I'll be honest, I'm more of a microeconomics person.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:32]:
Like, I am as well.

Carey Jaros [00:44:34]:
Macro still. I'm not sure I get it, but one thing I do get is that is the multiplier effect. And if you're not moving relationships and information and opportunities around, you are losing an opportunity to multiply them dramatically. And we all need more. More is better. So in terms of those things. So I think we all have a role to play in that. And it's actually not that hard and it's kind of fun.

Carey Jaros [00:44:59]:
So I encourage everybody I know to. To do that more.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:03]:
Yeah, awesome.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:07]:
What, what, what other earned wisdom do you feel that you've picked up on this journey that is particularly, you know, salient to.

Carey Jaros [00:45:14]:
To.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:14]:
To you?

Carey Jaros [00:45:15]:
You know, I don't have a ton of wisdom. A couple of things I'll mention that we haven't talked about just because I, you know, I think they're important. The first is just sort of mental and physical health. So I am obsessed with getting enough sleep. It's really hard. I have a bunch of kids and a crazy job and do a bunch of other things. I travel all the time. But I really believe that getting like seven to eight hours of sleep a night versus six or five has an outsized impact on my effectiveness and also the pleasantness of interacting with me to my effectiveness.

Carey Jaros [00:45:53]:
So I like, I preach sleep, like, and I don't think we get enough of it. I also think having something in your life, whether it's, you know, a hobby or whether it's exercise or whether it's meditation, having. Having some things in your life that help you maintain perspective, calm down, get quiet, that has been tremendously helpful for me. I'm a. I've been practicing yoga for more than 20 years. I teach yoga and I practice still many times a week. I practice in hotel rooms in every country I've ever been in and in airports and offices and in a world that often feels very out of control, having some practices that are portable that you can carry with you and do anywhere that ground you, I think I highly recommend it. So those are the two things that we didn't really talk about about.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:48]:
Well, those certainly resonate. I'll pull on that thread. Actually, in the context of health and.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:55]:
Wellness.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:58]:
The business is tangentially related to those things. What do you wish more people understood about hygiene and wellbeing and these sets of things that Gojo participates in and in our space?

Carey Jaros [00:47:12]:
If I look at cleaning and hygiene, there's a lot of common sense that we can all apply that helps us keep both ourselves and the people around us healthy and well? So I'll just give you an example. So, you know, I don't tell people they should sanitize their hands 500 times a day. When they ask me, I say, hey, if you're going to touch a surface that is likely to have a bunch of germs on it, which is typically a common surface. Then right after you do that would be a great time to sanitize your hands. If you're going to eat food or touch your eyes or prepare food for someone else or touch someone else's face, like your kid or, you know, that would be a great time to sanitize before you do that thing right? So, and if I look at the products that are out there on the market, most people don't read the labels. You know, they don't read the labels on common products. So most of the wipes that are in kids schools, if you actually read the label, it says you should be wearing PPE and you should wash the surface with water after you apply the product. Like, people don't do that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:17]:
And so people do not do that.

Carey Jaros [00:48:19]:
We do not do that. Now, our product, our Purell wipes and our Purell spray, the standard for us to come out with a product that was going to wipe surfaces that people touch with their hands and that kids eat food on was that it has to be no rinse food, contact safe, and you can't have to wear PPE to apply it. And so our products do that. I wish people read the packages and the labels and that they cared about their own health and wellbeing as much as I do, because I think we'd have a healthier, happier society. But I can't do that. What I can do is make products available that meet that standard and continue to educate where we can.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:53]:
What do you think would surprise Jerry and Goldie were they here to observe the state of it today about how the business has evolved and just where it is?

Carey Jaros [00:49:05]:
So this is where I would tap Joe or Marcella, who could speak much more eloquently about their aunt and great aunt and uncle and great uncle. My sense, from what I know of Jerry and Goldie, is they would be incredibly proud of the number of lives that this business has impacted. Not just out in the world with our products, though, that would be tremendously satisfying. But, you know, I think they would be really proud of the lives of all the families and the communities that they've touched. Building a really, you know, high integrity business in Akron, I think that would be meaningful to them. I got a note from a team member last night who is going through some health challenges. And she sent me the note that the subject was gratitude. And I read the note and she was sending the note to tell me about the ways that her supervisor has shown up for her through these health challenges and what that has meant to her and her family, and to recognize that supervisor, and then also to thank Gojo for creating a culture that rewards people and promotes people who have that set of values and a context where that person can behave that way and treat this team member the way that she has.

Carey Jaros [00:50:24]:
And, you know, I teared up reading this last night at 10 o' clock that the person had taken the time to send the note, that her supervisor had made such a difference in her life, and that Gojo had created a context where everyone could be their best self in a really hard moment. And I think Goldie and Jerry, from what I know of them, that's exactly the kind of company that they would want Gojo to be.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:50]:
That's amazing. So I was catching up recently with a friend who's a founder, who's also been on the show before, and he mentioned to me that an alternative tagline of sorts for this podcast could be the biggest, most interesting, most successful things in Northeast Ohio that way more people should know about that. Maybe they don't. And I feel Gojo is kind of emblematic of the sentiment very much as such an iconic Northeast Ohio story kind of woven into the fabric, I mean.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:27]:
Geographically, of this place of Akron, of.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:29]:
Northeast Ohio for 80 years now. How do you think about the place that we are, you know, Northeast Ohio, and what being part of this community, both for you personally and for the company, has meant?

Carey Jaros [00:51:45]:
Yeah, I love this question. So, like, I'm a Cleveland girl through and through. You know, I. I love where I'm from, but I. I love even more living here. You know, I think there's a lot of people who are from Cleveland, who I grew up with, who love Cleveland. They love where they're from, but they live somewhere else now. I get both.

Carey Jaros [00:52:03]:
I get to be from here, which I'll talk about in a minute, has a lot of, I think, has a lot of things that come with it. And I get to live here, which has a bunch of benefits. So I think when you're from this area, you know, you grew up in a place that wasn't necessarily cool or hip. Like when I was growing up here in the 80s, like, Cleveland was the punchline of lots of jokes. You know, we had. We were going through our own industrial transformation as a city, trying to figure out who we were going to be as heavy industry sort of declined here. And so that made me scrappy and tough in a way that I appreciate. The people I grew up with here didn't.

Carey Jaros [00:52:46]:
Nothing was sort of Handed to us, it was like, you make your own luck. You work hard, you have good values, you work with good people, you do good things. And that doesn't guarantee you anything, but it's certainly a condition for success. Right. The opposite doesn't work, I think. You know, I think also growing up here, my sense of the place is that we talked a lot more about what was the same than what was different between us. That could be good or it could be bad. But for me, what it.

Carey Jaros [00:53:17]:
What it did, is it like I grew up not feeling like I needed. Like, I know how to be around a lot of really different people and to appreciate them and to also respect that we're different and not. You know, we talk a lot at Gojo about the fact that this is a place where you don't have to talk about stuff from outside work unless you want to. Like, it's a place where we come together to do common work, and that's what we talk about together. And there's so much that we have in common. There's so much that. There's so much that's the same about us that. That it's really rewarding to show up and be a team and focus on this, on common work.

Carey Jaros [00:54:01]:
And I feel like that was what it was like growing up here, and that just seems different than other people's experiences. And so what's it like to live here now? Well, part of why we moved our kids back here or moved back here to raise our kids was that we felt like it was a place where they could grow up with those same values that I grew up with. They could grow up with. They could grow up feeling both responsibility for their community and for making things better. And also, you know, some appreciation for all the. For all the things that, you know, that. That they have here in a way that, frankly, for me, today would be a little tougher in some other environments. So I love being from Northeast Ohio.

Carey Jaros [00:54:45]:
I think the humility and the grittiness and the sense of responsibility and the sense of community makes me both happier and better as a person.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:58]:
I think the one thing, because it's just kind of in my mind, and you mentioned it a few times, this idea of rigorous debate. How do you hold the space for the most effective way to have vigorous debate where people can be very disagreeable, but the tactics, a bit of, like, how do you have those kinds of arguments and have them be productive?

Carey Jaros [00:55:21]:
Yeah. So I'll talk about both the process and structure, because I think that's important and helpful and I'll also just talk about sort of values and I'll start with values first. So I demand that we are polite to each other and kind to each other. Like, I have no patience for people being nasty or rude or dismissive or yelling or like all that stuff is just not. I don't think that's. I don't think it helps any. Anything get done better or faster. So.

Carey Jaros [00:56:00]:
And so. And I get, like I said, there's not a lot of things I do as a leader where I'm like dictatorial, but that's, that's one. And I think our culture in general, it's not like I have to enforce that against people's will. I think our culture in general is a culture of mutual respect and civil discourse and discussion. But also I think process and structure really help. And we have since the 90s, we've had an approach to how we do work that is just very different. It's custom. It's sort of like something that Joe and his contemporaries created in the 90s.

Carey Jaros [00:56:39]:
And part of it is that we have this venue structure. So we set up, we essentially have time in the week where people show up who have been invited to be there, but it's a placeholder for topics to come in. And we have a pretty rigorous, robust process where topics can get themselves scheduled into these buckets of time in front of these groups of people. And so, for example, here on Mondays we have a couple of hours that we call operations venue. And any operational topics that need discussion, enrichment or decision making, schedule themselves into that time period. And they know they have the right set of people in the room to hear out the topic, discuss, debate it and make a decision. The same thing is true on Friday mornings on commercial topics. The same thing is true on Wednesday afternoons with innovation related topics.

Carey Jaros [00:57:30]:
And so by creating these spaces that are set up for somebody to bring in a topic, bring in good information, there's like standards for how you show up for that environment. But you've got people there who are coming prepared to discuss, debate and decide. My experience has been that those good practices actually facilitate really good discussion and decision making. It's very different than in other organizations where you might set up an ad hoc meeting to make a decision on a topic and invite people and they sort of come, the people are coming into the room ready for a fight. Like you have people coming in who have one position and people have another position. And it's really adversarial. Like, we don't do that. We're all running the Business together.

Carey Jaros [00:58:12]:
We have these places. We show up to adjudicate issues that apply, and we all show up to do that work together as a team. It's very team based and we come up with the right decisions. And if it's the wrong decision, that topic's gonna show up again next week and the week after. So we'll get another run at it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:30]:
Yeah, that's cool. Appreciate you sharing that. All right, so we can ground it out here. I'll ask our traditional closing question, unless you have any other kind of parting thoughts, but it's for a hidden gem in the area, for something that other people should know about that perhaps they don't.

Carey Jaros [00:58:50]:
So I'm going to have to go with. I'm going to have to go with University Circle. You know, I didn't tell you this story, but my mom, when I was little, was a professor. She was a law professor at Case and then worked at Case. And so she would bring my. My brother and I would go down there sometimes on weekends when she was working, and we would crawl around in the closets of the law school, which are all connected, which is. I don't know if they still are, but it was pretty cool. But before and after, we would, you know, do work at her office while she worked.

Carey Jaros [00:59:20]:
We would go to the Natural History Museum and see Steggy, or we would go to the Cleveland Museum of. You know, from a very young age, my parents would say, these pieces of art will become your old friends, and you can always come see them. Like, it's a place where you can always come back to. The Cleveland Museum of Art is free and open to the public every day for all of time. And you can always go visit your friends at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Your favorite pieces. Right. We would go on Thursday nights when I was a little girl, my dad would take me to see the orchestra at Severance, and we'd have dinner before at nighttime.

Carey Jaros [00:59:53]:
So the magic of University Circle for me is something that was supersized when I was a little kid. I couldn't believe that this place existed that had all these incredible treasures. And I still feel exactly that same way today about University Circle. So that's my hidden gem.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:09]:
Yeah, it is magic. And I love that framing of art as friends. I'm going to use that. Well, Kerry, I just want to thank you for coming on, for sharing your story. It's really incredible what you're working on and that it's here. So thank you.

Carey Jaros [01:00:28]:
Thank you for having me and thanks for doing the work you're doing to multiply all of the wonderful things about our amazing area.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:37]:
Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:38]:
If people had anything they wanted to follow up about or learn more about Gojo or otherwise, where would you direct them?

Carey Jaros [01:00:47]:
So if they want to learn about the company, a lot of our history is on our website and obviously they could follow us on social media where we talk a lot about what's going on today. And then if they're curious about how they could become a hand sanitizer, soap or surface products customer, they could certainly reach out and we would be happy to get them into our wonderful, safe and effective solutions.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:15]:
Awesome. Well, thank you again, Kerry.

Carey Jaros [01:01:16]:
Yep, thanks for having me.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:20]:
That's all for this week.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:22]:
Thank you for listening.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:23]:
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Jeffrey Stern [01:01:33]:
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Jeffrey Stern [01:01:45]:
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Jeffrey Stern [01:01:47]:
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Jeffrey Stern [01:01:52]:
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Jeffrey Stern [01:01:54]:
We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the UpCompany LLC at the time of this recording. Unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening and we'll talk.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:26]:
To you next week.