You have a strategic plan. It's in a deck somewhere. Your team nodded at it in January, and by March everyone was quietly back to running their own version of the company. That gap between a plan on paper and a company actually aligned behind one is why I'm pulling this conversation back to the front of the feed. We just crossed 500 episodes, and Kim and I are mid-stream teaching the strategic plan and predictable revenue material right now, so before we jump back in I want you to hear what a real one looks like when it has teeth.
Gary Kusin co-founded GameStop, built Laura Mercier, then walked into Kinko's bleeding $11M of EBITDA and walked out three years later at $240M and a $2.4B sale to Fred Smith at FedEx. He didn't start with the plan. He started by listening at 2am town halls across 42 districts before changing a single thing. Then he put one plan in front of 150 leaders and said: align in 30 days or I will personally help you find your next job. This originally aired as episode 413. It's worth every minute twice.
TOP TEN TAKEAWAYS:
The moment you sell, you don't own it anymore. Pay your nickel, do your dance. Your ego doesn't make the company better.
Your customers carry your DNA forward whether you're there or not. The GameStop fans who took on Wall Street were proof.
The moment you sell, you don't own it anymore. Pay your nickel, do your dance. Your ego doesn't make the company better.
Command-and-control and entrepreneurial cultures are different organisms. Drop the wrong heart in and the body rejects it.
Before you change anything, go look. Run town halls on every shift in every district. The front line already knows what's wrong.
Accountability without authority is failure. Spell out what you need, then hand over the hiring, firing, and capex to deliver it.
Build a one-page dashboard with the metrics that actually matter. Manage to it monthly. Everything else is pablum.
Nobody should ever be fired and surprised. Miss the plan once, we talk. Miss it twice, we both already know what's next.
Hire only people who say they want your job. Then make it your job to get them there.
Toxic culture is a math problem. The store with the closed blinds and the screamer manager is the store losing money.
Build the principles you wish your old bosses had. Honesty, integrity, and respect aren't soft. They're the operating floor.
Gary Kusin is the co-founder of GameStop (originally Babbage's), the founder of Laura Mercier Cosmetics, the former CEO of Kinko's, and a longtime senior advisor in private equity. He's mentored hundreds of executives and is the author of Always Learning: Lessons on Leveling Up from GameStop to Laura Mercier and Beyond. His career spans the full arc most middle-market owners are trying to understand: founding, scaling, professionalizing, selling, and integrating into a strategic acquirer. Mentored early by Ross Perot, with quarterly business reviews under Jack Welch and an eventual sale to Fred Smith at FedEx, Gary has seen how the people at the top either make the company or break it. This conversation originally aired as Ep. 413 in 2024 and is re-released as the bridge back into our strategic plan teaching series.
Chapters:
(00:00) Gary Kusin shares his leadership principles and mentoring approach, his journey from Texarkana to GameStop
(05:00) Harvard Business School, unexpected career path, co-founding GameStop
(13:00) Early days of GameStop, educating customers about video games, loyal fanbase, Wall Street challenges, maintaining relat...
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