Aggie Legends Podcast S1E3: Dan Tinker ’96

DAN TINKER:
As long as you have respect and humility, you can lead anybody in the world, even if they’re 60 years old and you’re 22.

BEN WIGGINS:
Welcome to Aggie Legends, where we talk with founders, CEOs, and other successful Aggies about the lessons in leadership they have experienced throughout their careers. I’m Ben Wiggins, Mays MBA Class of 2018, and today we are talking with Dan Tinker, an outstanding alumnus of the Texas A&M College of Engineering. Dan is a graduate of Texas A&M’s Industrial Distribution Program and has become one of the most successful leaders in the industry. He is the co-founder, president, and CEO of SRS Distribution, a building supply distribution company with more than 1,200 locations around the country. In 2024, Home Depot acquired SRS for $18.25 billion with a B.

Dan, thank you for joining the show.

DAN TINKER:
Absolutely. Happy to be here, honored to be here.

BEN WIGGINS:
It is our pleasure to have you. Your career has been marked by some incredible turnaround stories that we’ll talk more about shortly, but you experienced a big turnaround of your own in college here at Texas A&M. Can you tell us about that?

DAN TINKER:
Of course. So, I did start… It was funny. I went to my dad and said, hey, what degree do you think I should pursue? I really wanted to pursue business. He says, well… At that time, college business degrees weren’t being hired as much as engineers. So he said, you should do engineering. I didn’t know anything about engineering. So I picked electrical engineering. I started down that for a semester — did not enjoy the content, didn’t feel engaged. Also, I probably spent more time on a sand volleyball court and having too much fun than in classes. Luckily, two things happened to me after Christmas break. I came back and I started dating my now wife, who was a freshman at A&M, as well, and because I wanted to protect her and walk her to every class, and I figured, well, now that I’m on campus, I might as well go to my classes. So I started going to my classes. It’s amazing how much better I did. I was I was probably this close to failing out after Christmas break.

BEN WIGGINS:
You just need the right motivation, Ags!

DAN TINKER:
Absolutely, and so thank God I took a risk. Asked her out when — she was dating her high school sweetheart the first semester, she broke up with him over the Christmas break — and then, yeah, I was the first one to ask her out. And we’ve been together ever since, over 30 years.

BEN WIGGINS:
Congratulations.

DAN TINKER:
And obviously, one of the most important decisions you can ever make is marrying a person that can be very supportive of your career and certainly my education. And she went on to get her Ph.D. from A&M. I went on to get a grad degree later from Rice. But it was super motivating and it certainly turned everything around for me.

I literally was, I think I hid the letter that came to my parents’ house saying I was on academic probation. And three and a half years later, I graduated on time and number two in my class from the College of Engineering in the ID program. So super, super happy about that turn of events, and that turnaround.

BEN WIGGINS:
Absolutely. And after graduation, your career took off reasonably quickly. What was that progression like?

DAN TINKER:
Yeah, I was very fortunate. I got to go work for a CEO that did not have any A&M recruits in the company at that time, but he was also somebody that was very visionary. He said, hey, if you come work for me, I’ll put you through a rotational MIT, management training rotational program, here at the corporate campus. I’ll teach you how to buy companies, I’ll teach you how to run a company. And he literally told me this when I was 22, right out of college, he said, ‘You’ll be my replacement as the next CEO of this company.’ And that really stuck with me. And we were a fast-paced, high-growth company at the time. And so the rest was kind of history.

I started in the corporate campus. I was kind of just in a cube and doing the things I could, finding mentors, learning as much as I could. I bought my first company nine months out of college. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a great mentor teach me how to value a company, how to make the offer to the owner, fly up there and negotiate the whole deal. 

And then I soon realized, the people in the field, the people that were running the business, the operators kind of didn’t have a lot of respect for the corporate staff. They really had a lot of respect for people that made money out in the field. So I really had an appetite to go get my own P&L and get my own business to run for the company, and we didn’t have a single branch manager under the age of 40 at that time. We had 165 locations around the country. And this is not at SRS, this is a previous company. And they were like, no, no, no, there’s no way you don’t have enough experience. There’s no way. We don’t have anybody under 40.

But I was anxious, eager, I was confident, and I was hungry, and I was able to convince my mentor. I said, ‘Just give me the worst branch in the company.’ So they sent me to Little Rock, Arkansas, which was about the last place on Earth I wanted to go, but I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And it was dead last. And I got there, and within one year, I took the branch from dead last to dead first in the company. And so we went from worst to first in one year.

And that kind of solidified my career, got it launched. Within another year, I was a district manager, running six, seven, eight branches. And then I was a vice president by the time I was 26. So it just, again, taking a risk, being willing to go, be aggressive, be assertive in my career, tell the executives, my mentors, that I wanted to do it. I felt confident to do it. And it all panned out great.

BEN WIGGINS:
That’s a really compelling turnaround, obviously. But what values or personal goals were driving you? What did you want out of that and what was pushing you forward?

DAN TINKER:
You know, I just, look, I came from a great high school education and obviously great undergrad education here at A&M, but those values of taking care of people, I just knew I could lead and motivate people if I was just given a chance. And I wasn’t afraid to manage people twice my age. I mean, that’s to me, I tell our young people at our company all the time, right out of college, you know, as long as you have respect and humility, you can lead anybody in the world, even if they’re 60 years old and you’re 22. You just have to treat them with respect and have humility.

And then also paint a big, bold vision. I love the saying, ‘small goals don’t stir people’s souls.’ Nobody gets out of bed every morning saying, I want to come work for a branch or a company or a division that’s 22nd in the company. Everybody can get rallied around we want to be number one. We want to be number one in the industry. We want to be the number one location. We want to be the number one territory. We want to be the best. When you can get people thinking that way and it’s actually plausible and realistic, it’s amazing what people will do. They’ll run through a wall for you.

So I’ve been very much a benefactor of hiring amazing people, paint a huge, bold, audacious goal, but show them how you can actually make it happen, and then give them every resource. I call myself the chief excuse eradication officer. So, I’m like whatever you need. You just tell me what you need. You need more salespeople. You need more product. You need more inventory. You need more trucks. You need a bigger facility. You tell me what you need to compete in the market. I’ll give it to you all. But I expect you to do awesome things and then have great results. So that’s been a hallmark of my whole career, my operating philosophy, my culture.

But again, I think it starts with being a servant leader and saying, I’m here to help all of you win. I work for you. You don’t work for me. I’ve always felt like I was at the bottom of the company. My job is to get the front line employees that talk to our customers and serve our customers to be focused on them and have everything they need to win. And let me take care of that back office stuff and anything that could potentially prevent us from winning. Let me run interference for all that and provide you the resources and let you run. And give people a lot of creativity, like a lot of flexibility.

If you just mandate down from a corporate office how you need every single location to run, you take the fun out of the business. And business is meant to be fun. It’s meant to be a sport. It’s meant to be like — I call it war without the blood. You are competing every day in the trenches against competition. You should make it fun and it should be fun.

But it starts with engagement. Talent’s not worth anything if it’s not engaged. We all know in today’s world, there’s a lot of talented people out there at all levels of their career that just don’t believe in their company, don’t love what they’re doing, don’t love their boss. And I’m a big fan of you deserve, you not only have the right, you have an obligation to go find the right environment for you. And I always tell young people, too, when I give career advice: never stay with a bad boss and never stay with a bad job and never stay with a bad company. There’s too many great companies out there. Go find one that fits you, fits your culture, fits your values, it’s purpose led, and they’re going to share the wealth, and let you guys all make some money along with not just the executives and the investors, but all the employees.

One of the things I’m most proud of at Home Depot. When they bought us, we have 9,000 employees that all got to share in that payout. So we created over 500 millionaires in the company. And life changing, even people that were just hourly employees that never made over 18, 19 bucks an hour, literally getting a check for like $3 million and in tears coming up to hug me and saying, you changed my life, my kids’ life, my grandkids’ life. You know, I now have a second home I paid all my kids’ student debt off, all this stuff that I never would have been able to do working in a warehouse. And so it’s just very gratifying to do good things.

I’m a believer that, you know, in today’s world, the media only kind of talks about corporations in a negative light and that there’s bad actors, but we’ve always tried to be a company that people could say, I’m proud to be associated with that company. They have integrity. They give back. They share the wealth with their employees. And they won without anybody losing. They won because their customers won. They won because their suppliers won. They won because their employees won and their investors won. Some people think it’s a zero sum game, but it’s not.

BEN WIGGINS:
What was the moment where it was hardest to make that happen? Where you were like, man, I don’t know how we’re going to win without anybody losing in this situation.

DAN TINKER:
You know, as we were growing the company, I think just we had transition steps. When you start a small company and we did — we founded the company with really four people in a room with an idea to go build the best building products distribution company that the world had ever seen. And again, fast forward, 145 acquisitions later and 250 startups later, and going from three or four employees in a room to now, I think we have 18,000 employees in 1,200 locations. There are steps where you grow and you have to make a realization. Your executive team was built to run a $0.5 billion company or $1 billion company, but it wasn’t built to run a $2 billion company or five. And so I would say, what got us here won’t get us there.

Sometimes you have to make tough decisions, which means throughout my entire career, I was always trying to staff the business for doubling the company. So whatever team we had today on the field had to be able to handle a company twice our current size, or we probably would limit our ability to grow. So and that means saying goodbye to some people or moving people in that or above people. So you have to reward talent over tenure sometimes.

And some people don’t want to be in a big environment. They love the small company, entrepreneurial right out of the gates. But then when it gets bigger, you know, you can’t say, no bureaucracy doesn’t creep in or you know, you can’t have — I’d love to have a meeting-free corporate office. I did abolish Zoom calls for a whole month one time. I said, I’ve been on too many Zoom calls this month. I think I suspended our subscription to Zoom because I said, people need to get up and go talk to people face to face and get on the phone with people and not meet over Zoom. Also, I always tell our board of directors this, too. I said, You can only do two things with your time. You can either make money or talk about making money. When you’re talking about it, you’re not making it. And when you’re in a meeting, you’re usually talking about it, you’re not making it. So I want our employees to be motivated to go spend time with customers, suppliers, recruiting new employees, value-added things that drive the business forward and grow. And again, the hard part is…

BEN WIGGINS:
Get out of the building guys!

DAN TINKER:
Yes. Well, we joke that everybody loves the company so much that they get speeding tickets on the way to work, not on the way home. But that’s all about culture. And I’m a big people leader. You know, to me, most executives are either a process leader or people leader. And I’m certainly a people leader because to me, I can work 30 hours extra. I could work 70-hour weeks every week and make a 30 hour impact of productivity. But if I can motivate 18,000 employees to all want to work one more hour a week. I just created 18,000 hours of productivity for the company. Not because they had to, because they want to. They love the company. They believe in the mission. They’re all in it together. And so there’s just power in that.

So to me, culture is important. Being a servant leader, having talent. And I always joke there’s only two types of people that don’t fit our culture. You’re either a jerk or you’re lazy. If you’re lazy, we’ll walk you out the front door and hope you go work for our competition, but if you’re a jerk, somebody will probably throw you out the second floor window. It won’t be me, but somebody will probably get you. There’s just no need for it in business. I can’t stand people that berate other people, intimidate people, manage by fear. There’s just no place for that today. We believe in always being positive, always being supportive. And if we failed, the company failed, the person didn’t fail. So let’s that means we didn’t put enough support network around them, enough mentoring, enough help. I mean, now you will have people that just aren’t there, they aren’t engaged or they’re not getting it done. And you have to make those tough decisions because you owe it to all your top performers to surround them with more top performers. But generally speaking, you just gotta treat people with respect like I started with earlier. You know, respect and humility are the keys to good leadership.

BEN WIGGINS:
How has all of this shifted as you’ve gone from being a leader at a very young age, to now having a little bit more of the experience? How have you evolved from a leadership styles perspective?

DAN TINKER:
Yeah. I mean, that’s a great question. I’d say I’ve always been hyper aggressive. You don’t take the risks, jump around from company to company and get involved in a startup, invest your personal money alongside private equity, you don’t do that if you’re not comfortable taking risks. But I think as you get older, as you get more experience, you get a little more patient and you get a little bit more like everything doesn’t have to happen today and everything doesn’t have to be perfect. You’re not solving for perfection in business. You’re solving for being really good and advancing. 

If you solve for perfection, what you’ll do is you’ll have people start being risk averse because if they fail and they get chastised for it, they won’t take any risks. I push my leaders to open new locations, hire new people try new product lines, think outside the box, but if you beat them up every time, they’re wrong. 

I had a great boss. I bought a company one time that turned out terrible. Yeah, and I thought he was gonna… I spent 2 or $3 million on it, small company. It didn’t go well. And, the CEO at the time that was my boss said, don’t buy it. I think you’re making a mistake. I did it anyway. And then it didn’t go well. And I said, are you going to fire me? He says, heck no, I just spent $2-3 million on your education. So now you’re a much better executive. You’ll never make that mistake again. 

I feel the same way about my people. I’ve got to give them freedom to try things. We call it failing forward, if they’re trying something and it doesn’t work, we now have something we know we don’t have to try again. So we can pivot and we’re eventually going to get it right if people just stay focused, stay positive.

BEN WIGGINS:
In terms of the failures, what are your rules in terms of, here’s how we’re going to go fail. Do you have any guidelines or any bumpers you try to put on that process?

DAN TINKER:
Yeah, it’s a good question, too. I’d say the main thing we do is we do our… Risk is an interesting word. A lot of people take risk the wrong way. When I say risk, it’s more of like being aggressive, but being calculated risk. So you’re doing your diligence upfront. And, you know, the nice thing is we’re not making big bets. I’m not buying a company that’s twice our size and betting the farm on something where if it fails, it’s going to bankrupt the company. 

So what I’ve empowered the team to do is make thousands of risks, basically in daily interactions, that none of them in singularity are going to hurt the company in any meaningful way. So I think once you liberate a company, and a 10,000 plus employee base, to be able to make daily risks, they know that nothing they’re going to do, I mean, we have controls in place. They’re not going to again make massive commitments. We’re not building some new space X rocket that we hope, you know, flies or anything crazy like that. We’re just selling building products for more than we paid for it. It’s all we really do. We just do it really well and we deliver to, you know, 15,000 job sites a day now.

So it’s repeatable what we do and we just want to scale it and get good and get better but with incremental gains. But we’re you know, as long as you mitigate risk by saying we’re doing it in bite-sized chunks and nothing’s going to be catastrophic, and we’re going to learn from everyone, you can really take all the risk out of it.

BEN WIGGINS:
Before SRS, you took a risk in, you know, resigning from a company, knowing you had a year of a non-compete to deal with. How did you think about that decision? What were the key moments that led to doing that and then immediately rolled out of it?

DAN TINKER:
So I was spoiled because of the first boss I mentioned earlier, that I came out of A&M to work for was such a good leader, such a servant leader and a great mentor. And he kind of spoiled me. I saw what great CEO leadership was right out of the gate. Once you work for a great CEO, you don’t ever want to tolerate working for a bad one.

So then we got sold at that company to another company, and the CEO was a process guy. And, anyway, I knew it was probably not likely that we were going to see eye to eye. And I was working directly for, obviously, a brand new boss. I respected him, I knew he had some things I could learn from the process side, so I kept an open mind.

I spent 18 months there, but after about that time, we had a couple clashes over things I was fighting for my people on. And, he actually made the big mistake to say, ‘Dan, you care too much about your people. I believe that if we have enough processes and enough checklists in place, we could fire every employee in the company tomorrow, hire all new ones from Walmart or wherever, train them, and they can just follow our checklist.’ I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘I couldn’t disagree with you more. And today’s my last day.’ And he goes, ‘Where are you going? You must have another job. There’s no way. You’re a senior executive. You’re not leaving without another job.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. I just don’t need it. I don’t believe in you. I don’t believe the company anymore. And I certainly don’t believe in that philosophy.’ I can’t. I work too hard, and I sell the company every day to our customers, to our employees, to our suppliers, and to acquisition candidates that we want to acquire. If I don’t believe in it, I’m a fraud and I’m not going to stay here and do that.

I knew it was marketable. I knew I could tolerate sitting out for a year if I needed to, but within two weeks, I had four job offers to work for suppliers, to work for private equity. And I ended up going to work for private equity for one year to kind of burn off my non-compete year. And that was the most fortuitous thing I ever could have done, which it led me to the opportunity to team up with my previous team that I came out of college with. And we put the band back together one more time, and we founded SRS in ’08.

BEN WIGGINS:
Yeah, the “one more time” brought us here.

DAN TINKER:
“One more time” brought us here. That was life changing and game changing. We really have built a company, again, very proud of, but, that everybody on Wall Street says has never done. There’s never been a brick and mortar company, a physical asset, not a tech company, excluding tech or maybe big pharma. There’s never been a brick and mortar manufacturer, distributor, industrial company in the United States that’s gone from $0 to $10 billion in sales as fast as we did. So I’m very proud of that. 

BEN WIGGINS:
As you should be.

DAN TINKER:
And we’re not done.

BEN WIGGINS:
Yeah, of course, of course. So the private equity transition then, going from that job into private equity, what surprised you the most? What were the biggest changes that you had to make?

DAN TINKER:
Well, I love working for private equity. Nothing against my current employer. Home Depot is awesome, too as a big public Fortune 20 company. But my first few companies were public, but they had DNA in private equity before. We had private equity board members and all that. So we really were very familiar with private equity, and that’s kind of why I went back to it in that interim phase, that one year I needed to burn off the non-compete. Because I did like the way private equity, because their deal guys, they’re M&A guys, they think about the world similarly the way I do, very strategic.

I’ve worked for six different private equity firms in my career. I’ve been fortunate to work for mostly really good ones, but they’re not all created equal. And everybody asked me, well aren’t they very micromanaging? Aren’t they very demanding? Aren’t they only caring about their returns on investment and money? 

BEN WIGGINS:
You hear stories. 

DAN TINKER:
Yeah. Right. And there are some that are sharp elbowed. You don’t feel like they care about the team or the management team. But there are very good ones that do care about having a symbiotic relationship. Being generous, sharing sweat equity with the management team like they had with us, in our last SRS runs. We had three different private equity firms that backed us for five years, five years, and then the last six years before Depot. So very fortunate to fall in line with some amazing partners.

But I’ll tell you, there’s no secret to private equity. If you make your numbers, they leave you alone. If you miss your numbers, you get a hell of a lot of help. So if you want to be left alone and have a lot of freedom, beat your budget. If you miss your budget, you’re going to get a lot of help. You’re going to get people flying in, sitting in an office next to you, attending all your meetings, second guessing all your decisions, and once you’ve been doing business a while, it’s not fun to be micromanaged like that. But if you can just produce and we call it, under-promise over-deliver, that’s the key to private equity. As long as you hit their numbers for them and you’re on trajectory to make them their return, they will trust that you’re an operator that knows what they’re doing.

BEN WIGGINS:
Fair enough. You joined SRS as COO in 2008 and became president in 2015, CEO in 2017. Company had massive growth in that time, and then Home Depot acquired in 2024. What was different then about that journey and the values that you felt really became your beacons during that part of the process?

DAN TINKER:
Yeah. Well, I think I moved as a younger leader, I was so competitive, driven to deliver awesome financial results. I think as I got more mature and experienced and sophisticated in my leadership evolution, I got way more in touch with this concept around high morale culture leads to amazing customer service, which leads to amazing success in business, which then leads to great financial results.

So I really pivoted. So instead of EBITDA growth as my north star Employee Net Promoter Score became my north star. Like how many of our employees love the company? Literally like how many of our employees love the company? They’re all in. And so we started doing eNPS surveys and culture index scores. And I learned a ton. And what I learned is, even though we had amazing success in those first, like decade, as we were growing the company and having a couple liquidity events, we were unintendingly causing a consequence of we have the haves and the have nots because we had all the executives and the middle managers making significant life-changing wealth events in those early years, but if you didn’t have money to put in, to put skin in the game, you couldn’t write a check for $10,000 and buy stock in the company because you’re an hourly employee or front-line worker, you weren’t benefiting as much as the people in middle management or above.

And so I went to the board and I said, can I give $30 million of equity away to all of our hourly employees? And they said that’s the most brilliant idea we’ve ever heard of. In fact, we think you should give more than $30 million away. And it’s diluting me and all the executives and shareholders. It’s diluting all of our investors, the private equity firms. But they believed in the concept. I convinced them that we were going to get so much more engagement, so much more motivation. Our turnover would plummet, our safety scores would increase, our customer service and customer experience would skyrocket, which it did. All of those things happened.

Because every employee went home with pride and told their children, told their spouse, Daddy’s not just or Mommy’s not just an employee, I’m a co-owner of the company now. It’s my company and I’m sharing in the upside. We actually published the stock price internally quarterly so they could actually have a statement and see that every quarter it was growing and growing and growing. If you think about retention… Obviously if they left the company, they lost all of that. So it was a huge retention tool, but it was also an engagement tool to get them to be like we’re all in it together.

And then we went through COVID. And so COVID hit and because I was lucky enough to put that in place before COVID, I have this business that I don’t know if it’s gonna be essential or not, and we’re so scared and everybody so cares more about the company than their own individual compensation. My 400 top executives of the company all gave up 100% of their salary during the first three months of COVID. They said, we want to protect the company at all costs. Until we know we’re going to be an industry that’s gonna be allowed to continue to operate in the U.S., we’re going to give up all of our compensation. I mean, literally 400 — and these are executives making a lot of money — say we’ll give it all up back to the company.

Luckily, obviously building products boomed after COVID. We got, you know, back open back up because everybody went home and said, wow, my wife’s telling me to paint that room, add on to this house, redo the backyard, whatever. And all those products were bought from us. And so we took off and because of our employees being so selfless, we were able to pay them back everything they gave up and then some. And then we had ridiculous growth. We went from $3 billion to about $7 or 8 billion in those two and a half, three early COVID years. But that speaks to the culture of the company. Kind of that ‘one family, one fight.’ No individual is more important than the team.

BEN WIGGINS:
So the SRS mission statement: Make money, have fun, give back. Let’s talk about having fun. How do you apply that in your own work and ensure that your team also does?

DAN TINKER:
Oh, we have a ton of fun. If you came to our corporate campus in McKinney, you would see a keg on tap. You’d see a shuffleboard table, pool table. I mean, we’re not crazy Silicon Valley, like slides and beanbags and all that kind of stuff. But for a Texas company, we’re pretty progressive and pretty fun. But we sponsor athletes. We sponsor Texas A&M football, I’m sure everybody on this will love to hear that. We sponsor other college sports. We sponsor the Duke-North Carolina basketball rivalry. We have extreme tailgating vehicles that go all around the country and entertain our customers, our employees…

BEN WIGGINS:
Tailgating? What is this tailgating thing you speak of?

DAN TINKER:
We have these big buses that look like tour buses painted with all our logos on them, and they go all around the country. We actually use them for recruiting at college campuses. We use them for customer events during the week. On every Saturday and Sunday in the fall, they’re at a college game and a pro game, and in the spring they could be at the Kentucky Derby, they could be at the Masters, they could be at a soccer or World Cup soccer event.

So we’re in a relationship business. We’re selling to home builders and contractors and blue collar workers, and they want to buy from people they like. Yeah. So we treat our customers like family. And one way you get a great relationship is you share social time with them, whether that’s take them to lunch or dinner, take them hunting, fishing, golfing, take them to a sporting event, whatever it is. So we do a lot of that and we’ve been, you know, we’ve pushed the envelope probably on some of it, we’ve tried everything like NASCAR and everything, whatever works and whatever customers want to do, we’re up for it and open to it. And we obviously have partnerships with our suppliers to kind of, you know, continue that and extend it further. But it’s been a big part of who we are. It’s a people business like I said at the outset, and we think it’s okay to be friends with your customers. It’s all right.

BEN WIGGINS:
All of this emphasis on culture and fun and all of this stuff. Was there a moment that brought you around to understanding, ‘No, this is the key to the whole game.’ Where did it come from?

DAN TINKER:
It came from early in my career, after we had the first five-six year run with my original boss who had such a good culture. We all were personal friends. Most leaders do either err on the side of: you have to keep an arm’s length professional relationship with all your direct reports. I can’t cross the line with friendship because I have to be objective. My first CEO is, no, you’re like family; we’ll do anything for you. We’re, you know, we’re going out. Like when I used to travel in the early years, I didn’t stay in hotels. I stayed at our branch managers’ houses. They were like, no, no, you’re not staying in a hotel. You’re family. You’re going to stay with me. We’re gonna sit on the back deck and talk about the business. And look, I knew every employee’s name, every spouse’s name, every child’s name, every dog’s name when we were small.

Now that’s the one disadvantage when you get big, you can’t do that. You can do that with 100 employees or 200 employees or even 500 employees. I used to get to every branch in the company once a quarter, probably for the first few years. But now that we have 1,200 of them, literally if I went to one a week, it would take me, you know, what would that be? It’d be 24 years to get to all of them. So you can’t really get everywhere anymore.

But the answer to your question, the second boss I had, he was not that leader. He was very much ‘keep it professional.’ Not as much fun culture, not as relationship, certainly not a family feel. And when you see the stark differences of I treat people like a number and I treat people as an asset or a liability, but not as a human and as a family and as somebody that I care deeply about and I’m investing in, you just don’t want any part of it. You want to run from it.

So I knew when I saw two different opposing styles of leadership — one that cared only about the bottom line. People were a number. People were replaceable at every turn. And it’s loyalty and I believed in loyalty. I believed in how much the power of motivating somebody that’s engaged and loves and knows that you have their back as a leader. And then once you can do that, you just outperform, you out hustle your competition. Even if you do the exact same thing, you don’t have any proprietary advantage, no competitive advantage.

I mean, we are in very much a simple business. All we do is buy full truckloads of material from manufacturers, we take them to distribution centers, then we deliver to the jobsite exactly what our customers need, when they want it, when they need it. We have many competitors that can do the same thing. The reason we’ve been more successful than the others and growing faster than them is because of the people and the engagement, and the fact, they care more and that comes from they know you care more about that. And that really is that was the unlock for me was just realizing, like, you have to treat people a different way. And so you have to have it’s not just servant leadership. It’s like everything about the culture is have fun. Want to be here? You should have like think of it as I never could fathom working anywhere else because I would be so sad not to work at this company. And I think we’ve been able to perpetuate that even at scale, which is not easy to do. This culture is hard to scale.

BEN WIGGINS:
Yeah. That’s that sounds like exactly the right, exactly the right way to do it. They don’t care about what you know until they know how much you care.

DAN TINKER:
Absolutely, it’s so true I mean when I had bosses throughout my career that I knew didn’t really genuinely care about me or had my back,I certainly wasn’t as engaged. I was already starting to look for another career opportunity. So that’s why I always tell people never, ever, ever work for a bad boss. You owe it to yourself to move on. If you’re in the shower in the morning and you’re like, I’m dreading going to work today, you’ve already you’ve already stayed one day too long. Like, literally, you should have already. You should have already been managing your career enough to where you had outlets and you can offer and and that’s why you never know who’s going to be your next boss. It could be the person that could be your customer, the supplier, a coworker. It could be an investor, it could be anybody. It’s not you never know. So everybody that comes in my door, I treat them like they’re the CEO of the most important company that I might want to go work for someday.

If you act that way to everybody, you’re going to build your own personal brand. And then when you do get in a situation where maybe you had a great boss, but he gets moved or she gets moved on somewhere else and now you’re left with somebody you don’t get along with as well. You don’t think that they have your back you need to have. And sometimes you can just pivot inside the company and go to work for a different, better boss. Sometimes you do need to be willing to just take the risk and jump and find another opportunity.

I’m not promoting that people should leave companies quickly or not give companies a chance either. That’s not my point, because I do think people should be loyal and give them a chance. But if they do know they’re in a bad situation, you owe it to yourself to go find. I mean, life’s too short not to work at places that you love and you’re thriving and they’re investing in you, and you’re happy every day. You should come home happy. That your work is enhancing your life. Not just something you’re drudging and you have to do. Because I just need to put food on the table or be a provider for my family should ever be for that decision.

BEN WIGGINS:
I’m constantly surprised by how many people, even in 2025, still seem to dislike their jobs.

DAN TINKER: 
Trust is an important thing. Like, you know, with our initiatives to do AI and lead with AI. And, you know, I committed to the company. I said, we’re going to we’re going to make everybody’s job, twice as efficient with AI over the next five years, which means you will be able to do five days of work in two and a half days because all of the money we’re going to spend on AI. But I’m promising you all. None of you are going to get replaced by AI. None of your jobs are going away. Our company is going to grow so fast, but you’re going to be able to do in the two and a half days I freed up for you because you’re not doing the monotonous work that AI can do, You’re going to do more fun, value added stuff that you’re going to love your job a lot more because I think most employees that don’t love their job, they’re doing monotonous work that doesn’t really seem fun, engaging or creative. And so that’s kind of the way I think about the future of work, but you’ve got to trust me that I’m going to live up to that.

BEN WIGGINS:
How do you manage that part of it, though? I mean, there’s certain elements of the work that has to be done. And aside from automating it, either having a machine do it, having AI do it or whatever, like how do you manage that part of that? Well, somebody has to do this. Like how do you get around that piece of it?

DAN TINKER:
I mean, honestly, the technology is advancing so fast. And we we’ve taken things like accounts payable and payable credit releases and, and, lots of things to document imaging with, all the AI tools and robotic process automation, there is a lot of stuff you can take off and then and then you’re only using the human side to do exceptions or again higher touched stuff. So again, it’s more creative. It’s more humanistic. It’s less monotonous. So yes, there’s still work that’s got to be churned through in a day’s work in a day, but you can make it more fun, you can make it more creative, you can make it interactive and you can vary up people’s roles and jobs to where maybe they’re not stuck doing the monotonous work as much, and they’re mixing it up with other people and cross-pollinating from other departments. We’ve had success there too.

But to be fair, there are people that actually — it sounds to be misery to me — but there are people that actually they don’t want to be put in a leadership position. They don’t want to manage other people. They really do want to sit in the cube and do just work with their computer, but they’re headphones on and listen to their favorite, Aggie podcast and, and crank out work. And that’s okay. We need those people to remember there’s a place for everybody on the team, but it’s just that, yeah, most people are not wired that they really want to sit in, cube and crank out, like, monotonous work, for, 45 or 50 hours a week.

BEN WIGGINS:
All right. The a-ha, the lessons in leadership. Give us the surprises, the stuff that you feel like you’ve really, you know, has really done it for you.

DAN TINKER:
Yeah I think I’ve hit on most of them. I think love taking a risk is a big one. I think I, I see more talented executives not reach their full potential because they’re just not realizing those moments in their careers, that they can take a big risk forward. That really changes their trajectory, whether it’s their career trajectory, their wealth trajectory, their impact trajectory. So I think risk the big one.

My philosophy has always been surround yourself with the best people. The reason I got promoted up to CEO by the time I was in my early 40s and I was a VP at 26, and my boss would have told you this, it wasn’t because I was the most qualified for each of those promotions. I had the best successor ready to take my current job. I didn’t weaken the organization by promoted up, because I wasn’t insecure and worried at my younger career that hey, if I hire somebody better than me, then they’re going to get rid of me and put him or her in my chair. I was always confident that the better people I hired would make me look better, get me noticed and promoted, but also I had my succession plan. So sometimes that’s counter-intuitive, folks, that actually they think like, no, I can’t hire a rock star because the rock star will end up passing me and my career I want.

I sent a CEO excellence book to all 12 of my direct reports two years ago and I said, I expect all 12 of you that want to be CEOs to become so. Yet even though only one of you is going to probably succeed me, the rest of you all have the ability to go beyond, be CEOs somewhere else. Sure, I’m going to help you do that if I can. Surround yourself with amazing talent. You know, and not to mention, I shouldn’t mention Nick Saban, but Nick Saban had a famous quote that said in his early years of being a coach at Michigan State, he thought he was the best coach in the country and that was the only way to win was just being the best X’s and O’s play calling coach. And then he realized that he got you got whooped by several teams that had a better talented roster than him, and he realized the only way to win a national championship is to have the most talented roster. Period. He even said I can’t, I can’t coach shitty football players, is what he said. So I need that. It doesn’t matter how good my playcalling is, He said I spent more energy recruiting, almost no time coaching, obviously surround himself with the team as well. And so I’m a big fan of talent.

But once you get talent on board, super important to engage them. And that’s where culture comes in. You can’t mobilize and monetize talent unless it’s they’re all engaged in having a blast and pushing for a common, amazing, bold goal that really fires people up.

So dream big, be bold, take risk, hire amazing people. Give them everything they need to succeed, and then get out of their way and let them do it their way. Don’t make them a pawn on the chessboard. Make them be the king and queen of their market, or their department or their area and let them run. Run. You tell them what the goals are, and then you let them be creative, because people are so much happier when they get to have a say in how they execute and how they win. If they feel like corporate just throws some blueprint down and says, follow the checklist, it takes all the fun, and then you just kind of just go through the motions and that’s what you get.

BEN WIGGINS: 
And have fun doing it.

DAN TINKER:
And have a lot of fun doing it. Yeah. Celebrate every win. I used tom when I first started that branch I took from worst to first, I literally went to, like, a hardware store, and I bought an old, like, bell and I hung it in the, in the, in the entry or the transom over the doorway from our inside sales counter. And every time we got a sale over $5,000, whoever got the sale would get up and ring the bell. And it was just it was just to remind people like, hey, we’re all competing for wins. Everybody would hear somebody else do it and say, now I gotta get a sale. They jump on a phone or they grab a customer in the showroom and they try to get a sale. So they mean stuff like that sounds corny or crazy, but human beings are motivated by emotion and momentum and competitive tension, which can be very healthy. And winners want to be around winners and winning teams want to be surrounded by winning and talented people. So make it fun. Have a lot of fun. I was the first guy to say, hey, let’s go out and celebrate after work today because we had a great month, or we just went from the worst branch to the second worst branch to that we’re in the middle of pack and now we’re number one.

And then treat people, like I said at the beginning with respect, never. Even if somebody is not failing, you’re not doing a good job. Don’t ever berate somebody in public. If you need to coach somebody, bring them in private. Don’t embarrass them in front of their peers. Talk to them one on one, but then lift them all up in public, lift everybody up in public. And people will  run through a wall for you. And that’s really, that’s my story. It’s been about how to motivate, a lot of different varied people from three times my age to people my age and now 22-year-olds starting this week with the company and and keeping them all fired up.

When we have management trainees come in from A&M or wherever. The first time I get to speak from day one, I start talking about the company, the culture and the vision. But the first thing I say to get their attention, I said, I want you to get out a piece of paper and a pen, and I want you to write down two numbers and then put this in your purse or your wallet. The first number is the age you want to become a millionaire, and the next is the age you want to retire. And these are all usually 22-year-old college recruits. You think that got their attention? I got their attention. The CEO is not talking about my job, the company, he’s talking about he’s trying to make all of us millionaires. He’s. In fact, I tell him, you have to try not to become a millionaire working for us. Because I can teach you how to max your 401K, how to get promoted, how to max your bonus, how to invest in the company stock. Over time, if you do the things we teach you, coach you and give you the financial literacy to do, you literally can be millionaires before you’re 40 years old, all of them. And it is a zero sum game. All of you can do it together. There’s not like, well, two of you are going to do it and the other 38 in this classroom are not because those two like took all the money. It’s every one of you can do it. You got to work hard. You gotta get promoted maybe once or twice. You got to be willing to maybe move for the company once or twice. You don’t have to do any of that, but that just accelerates. It may make it happen faster, but that’s all about just getting to somebody’s attention.

And I know not everybody’s money-motivated. Or as money motivated as maybe I am. But I always tell people like, even if you’re not money motivated, don’t you have an obligation to your family to make as much money as you can in, or even if it’s if you’re faith based or whatever charitable based, to make money to give it away. You can have a great impact even if you personally don’t need any different, you know, a bigger house or fancier car. You can still make more money. I feel like you owe it to yourself and entrepreneurship to make as much.

We live in the only country in the world where you can change your socioeconomic status in 10 years or five years because of the capitalist market system in the US. Nowhere else in the world you can do that. Why not take advantage of that? But you can’t do it sitting in a cube playing it safe and hoping nobody notices you there at work. You have to do it by being aggressive, having a career plan, seeking out mentors and leaning in and playing to win.

BEN WIGGINS:
Playing small does not serve anything. Well Dan, thank you so much. We appreciate the time and appreciate you sharing your lessons in leadership with us here on Aggie Legends.

DAN TINKER:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

BEN WIGGINS:
On behalf of Mays Business School I’m Ben Wiggins. We hope you’ll like and subscribe. Leave a comment if you, if you have the time to do so. Every little bit helps in terms of helping others discover the show and have a chance to benefit from these lessons as well. Here at Mays Business School, we’re building a better future through business and we thank you for being a part of it.