September 25, 2024
John Burke, CEO, Trek Bicycle
How To Recover From Good And Bad Decisions With Lessons From Your Dad, John Burke – CEO Trek Bicycle
Listen on:
Many CEOs parachute in to reboot companies, but today’s guest has had to do it dozens of times. Founded by his father in a Red Barn in Waterloo Wisconsin, John Burke, President and CEO of Trek Bicycle, has been rebooting the company since he started working there as a teenager. A remarkably fun leader and author of three books, John has grown the company into the largest manufacturers of bicycles in the U.S.
Now a $2 Billion global company with thousands of employees selling through a massive network of distributors and 5000 dealers around the globe, Trek is one of the world’s most popular bicycle brands, and Fortune Magazine’s Top 100 Best Companies to Work for that is still owned by its employees and founding family.
Listen in and learn how his honest and blunt approaches to life have helped him reboot the company—and himself—with a focus on products and customers. Great stories here, like responding to good and bad decisions with big and small reboots to stay competitive, lessons learned from his Dad—and the need for civic minded people who can “drain the swamp” and fix our broken political ecosystems.
Staying Competitive In The Poor Man’s Car Business
Trek has stayed competitive over the years through two avenues, one being the same fundamental aspect of retail that you have all heard before but with a more grounded approach. The other is through constantly asking “How can [we] be dramatically different”. The fundamental aspect is having a solid customer service environment, in most companies this means having an outsourced call center, or an AI helper that will inevitably take three weeks before anything is done. At Trek, John is putting his E-mail out for you to contact him directly if the other options are not working. The other way they are being competitive is by being different, which they are by being a lot like Stihl which we talked with recently. Trek “Takes care of you period. Every step along that journey, we’re trying to improve, we’re trying to be different.” This means doing things like having a Repair center for bikes to doing as much as they can in-house to keep the process easy and accessible.
How To Drain A Swamp And Not Just Make Promises
John has 40 years of experience in being a leader, rebooting Trek through times like the economic crash to post-covid bicycle booms. He also has written several books about Leadership and saving America because he is “a very frustrated American Citizen” and as he puts it “I don’t like to sit on the sidelines and complain.” In his book “The Bold Plan” he looked at 14 major issues in a nonpartisan way and provided solutions that are in the best long-term interest of the US. Even in this episode, he mentions one way to actually drain the swamp in a nonpartisan way through a Campaign finance reform.
Lessons From a Father To Son To You
Learning is key in every aspect of life if you want to be successful in it. From running a bike business to riding a bike everything requires you to learn, and part of that is learning how to make good long-term decisions. Decisions that will set you up for success in the coming months or years, and this is something John learned from his father. He mentions “We make the best long-term decisions for the bike company. That’s something my father always did.” He inherited this philosophy and now whenever a change is needed he asks “What is the best decision for the long-term?” and acts accordingly.
