Ep. 431 — Heather Braimbridge-Cox & Bill Mills: Turning Crisis Into a Scalable ESOP

7 min read

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Episode Summary

You inherit a CFO seat thinking it’s your last stop before retirement. Six months in, the board lays off the entire executive team, hands you the keys, and tells you nine of the top ten customers are about to walk. That’s where Heather Braimbridge-Cox started at Windings in New Ulm, Minnesota, an employee-owned manufacturer building custom motors for Mars rovers, Formula 1 energy recovery systems, and the 737. I brought her on with Bill Mills because what she did next is the playbook most owner-operators never get to see. She didn’t just stabilize the business. She built a social strategy as strong as her growth strategy, and the numbers followed. Productivity from 77% to 99.8%. Turnover from 20% to under 5%. Engagement scores doubled. Bottom line up 300%. We got into why private equity’s “fix the EBITDA in 36 months” model destroys the culture that produces the EBITDA, why most leadership development fails (barely 10% transfers back into behavior), and the specific monthly cadence that lets a CEO step out of the operations and into &A. The kicker: Windings generated enough cash from this work to buy two companies, with a third in motion. That’s what compounding looks like when the flywheel is actually built.

Top 10 Takeaways

  1. Your ownership structure dictates the timeline. Your timeline dictates the version of capitalism you’re actually playing.
  2. Private equity injects growth hormones. ESOPs let the cow grow up. Both produce different cash, on different clocks, with different costs.
  3. Your financials are a rear-view mirror. By the time the numbers turn, the culture turned 12 months ago.
  4. Entitlement is what employee ownership becomes when nobody educates the team on what ownership actually means.
  5. If your team can’t punish someone for making the right call for the customer, you have a process problem, not a people problem.
  6. Open-book transparency only works if you also teach your team what EBITDA, multiples, and cash flow actually do.
  7. Vulnerability from the top is the price of admission for a culture turnaround. The CEO has to name the problem first.
  8. Cross-functional learning cohorts break the power dynamic and the silos in the same hour, once a month.
  9. Kill the annual performance review. Replace it with weekly 3-15s (three questions, 15 minutes) and quarterly bonus conversations.
  10. Extracting yourself from operations is not a personality trait. It’s a process that lets average leaders run a great company.

Sound Bites

“100% of the companies on the planet that I’ve ever met are underpriced. We sold more shit at lower margins… we’re not just blindly being excited about this year compared to last year.” (@TBD) — Ryan Tansom

“If you’re not measuring it, then you’re not managing it. If you don’t have a way of tracking that success, then how do you know that you’re succeeding?” (@TBD) — Heather Braimbridge-Cox

“Over time we were so proud of being employee owned and the message that kept coming to everyone was, you are great. And very soon the customer was no longer the focus. The focus became employees.” (@TBD) — Heather Braimbridge-Cox

“There’s over 57,000 books on Amazon with leadership in the title. So it can’t be that maybe 100,000 books won’t get there. There’s a design flaw, and barely 10% of traditional leadership development training actually transfers back into behavior.” (@TBD) — Bill Mills

“If you put a phenomenal human being up against a bad process, I’m going to bet against the human. If you put just an average person with a great process, that’s what we’re trying to help people understand.” (@TBD) — Bill Mills

“The process surfaces who can and who cannot. The process is helping you identify where you have gaps. The process is helping you identify people that need to be elevated.” (@TBD) — Heather Braimbridge-Cox

About This Episode

Heather Braimbridge-Cox is the CEO of Windings, an employee-owned manufacturer in New Ulm, Minnesota, that designs custom electric motors and components for mission-critical applications (Mars rovers, Formula 1, military and commercial aerospace, satellite communications). Originally from Jamaica with an MBA from Oxford and a Chartered Certified Accountant designation, Heather spent her early career as the operating CFO/CEO/CAO inside private equity portfolio companies before joining Windings in late 2015. She was promoted to CEO within six months of arriving. Bill Mills is the founder of Executive Group and creator of The Leadership Process, a behavioral system for building high-performing teams that Heather used to lead the Windings culture transformation. This is Bill’s return appearance on the show, and his first joint conversation with one of the CEOs who has actually run the process inside her company.

Resources Mentioned

  • The Leadership Process by Bill Mills — The behavioral framework Heather used at Windings.
  • Windings, Inc. — Heather’s company, an employee-owned custom motor manufacturer in New Ulm, MN.
  • Gallup Q12 — Engagement survey Windings used to set the baseline and track culture change.
  • Great Game of Business — Open-book management approach referenced for “management by the numbers.”
  • EOS / Traction by Gino Wickman — The operating system Windings layered on for quarterly cadence.
  • The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham — Referenced for the “merry-go-round” analogy on business sustainability.
  • Finish Big by Bo Burlingham — Referenced on why exhausted owners hit the eject button.
  • Daniel Goldstein on the iBD Podcast — Earlier episode on ESOPs as the purest form of capitalism.

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