Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome to the Clear Impact podcast brought to you by PGTI University. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Sherri Connor, and I am your host.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Good morning. We are here on the Clear Impact podcast, and we are meeting the executive team from Mitre. And today in studio, we have Joe Persson. Welcome, Joe.
[00:00:35] Speaker C: Thank you so much, Sherry, and good morning to everyone. Really looking forward to spending some time with you all today.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Yeah, this is great. So it's Joe Person, not persons.
[00:00:44] Speaker C: Correct. I get a lot of questions on that. You know, if I have a credit card down and people are. Is that really your last name? And it always turns into a conversation or a joke, and so I've gotten used to it over the years.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Yeah. What's your craziest answer?
[00:00:56] Speaker C: I'm a people person, is what I like to say.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: I like that.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: My wife's heard that joke a million times, though. She's had enough of my jokes.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: So, mister Person. Yeah. It's kind of like a John Doe. It is kind of thing.
[00:01:09] Speaker C: It is. And I was a naval intelligence officer years ago, so some of my friends think I'm with my name in the CIA or something.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: I was gonna say witness protection program.
[00:01:20] Speaker C: Exactly.
Unfortunately, I hate to tell everyone, but it's not that interesting.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Not that interesting. Well, you can make up all kinds of stories, though. That's fun.
[00:01:28] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Nice. So tell us a little bit about you. This series is really just like, who are the people who are large and in charge, if you will? Our previous executive team was pretty visible, and we did a number of episodes with them just to kind of introduce them. And so we want to meet you guys. And so tell us a little bit about your history.
I don't know where you grew up, where you went to school, like, what your hobbies are, as much detail as you care to give in the time that we have, and then your career path at Mitre.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: Sure. Well, I'll start with the important part, and then, obviously, it's family. I have three little daughters. My youngest is three, and she's kind of the ruler of the roost here.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:05] Speaker C: And bossing us all around. But I have a seven year old and a nine year old as well.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Wow, that's fun.
[00:02:11] Speaker C: Yeah, it is fun. And my wife and I grew up together, went to grade school together. So it's been a lot of fun and makes. We're from the Philadelphia area originally, and so our family's being located there. Makes it really easy to get back. And that's about a two hour drive from Harrisburg. Offices in Pa. Nice. Yeah. So more about my family. I was one of seven kids. I'm the youngest boy, but my poor little sister, she had six older brothers and she made it through.
But it was a lot of fun growing up, grew up sort of in a sports background, had a few older brothers that actually all my older brothers played football in college and my oldest brother decided to attend the naval academy. So I was, we have about eleven year spread between us. So I grew up going to all his football games and then I had a chance to watch him serve in the military and, you know, I was hooked from day one and seeing him in uniform and his commitment to service and, you know, I was actually fortunate to be the fourth in my family to go to the naval Academy and play football. An incredible experience. The camaraderie, the friendship, the lessons learned in the naval Academy itself, I think prepped me for a short career in the military. Did about five years of service as a naval intelligence officer. My father used to say that was an oxymoron.
Ok, so in naval intelligence, very similar to what I do at Mitre brands in the sense that, you know, analyzing sort of datasets and then building relationships with senior leaders and delivering recommendations and strategies. So totally different data set, but very similar approaches in the work. So I took that, when I got out of the military, I took that skill set and got into commercial banking. And commercial banking led me to one of my larger clients was a building materials distributor in Pennsylvania, about 45 minutes from minor brands, similar customer base, and came on board as their CFO, went from a lender to the CFO and did that for about eight years and a company was acquired and there was an opportunity to work at Mitre Brands. And in my lending days, I had always heard about Mi Windows was the name at the time, and just always heard great family, which is very true if you ever had a chance to spend some time with the DeSoto's, which I'm sure you will here shortly, but commitment and integrity is what I heard back a decade ago. So when I had the opportunity to join, everything played out the way I thought it would in terms of the culture, the commitment to our customers, the commitment to our team members, and creating a fun atmosphere to work. And it's been two years now and I've enjoyed every moment of it.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: And so your role as CFO, so you have a large team underneath you. And right now, obviously, we're still in the merging factor, so that's a lot. Right? You're at different accounts and different practices. Is it what you thought it would be? Is it harder, easier? Like, how are you feeling about the merging?
[00:04:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, like everyone, this is obviously a big business now, but I think we want to continue to maintain the culture that has made mitrebrands so successful. And it starts with people, you know, if we can build trust with our team members, obviously create an atmosphere for our customers that they'll want to do business with us, and that's what we're going to try to do. But our vision is very simple, and that's become the most valued window and door brand in America. I think the challenge is that's a simple statement, but very hard to execute. But if we can do day in and day out, deliver quality products to our customer base on time and complete, which is also a key pillar of what we do, I think we can achieve that goal and continue to progress towards it.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: And so what are you most excited about, like, other than getting to make some trips to Florida in the hottest time of the year?
[00:05:34] Speaker C: I'm most excited about some of those trips in the wintertime, get a chance to spend some time with customers. But obviously I'm excited about the people. I've had a chance to meet some of our customers, incredible folks that have built great dealer relationships throughout servicing Florida and also out there, western and island. Everyone that I met has been incredible, and we're excited to continue to deliver that value prop to our customer.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: It really is true that the people are the best. And I heard that when I interviewed and I asked people, you know, when I first got hired, and that was three and a half years ago, what do you like most about working here? And they were like, the people, the people, the people. And that is so true. It's absolutely true. So one last question, and I love asking leaders this because I learn from it, and I think our audience does, too. What is a favorite piece of advice that you've received?
[00:06:21] Speaker C: That's a great, great question. And I was thinking about this, and we have introduced Mitre DNA, which there's some sort of key pillars within that that we're sort of working through with the team. And I think one of them is listen twice as much as you talk. And I think that's a challenge for me. I like to talk, but I think what we'll do with our customers is, especially in this early phase, is we just need to listen. We need to listen to hear things that we can improve on, you know, what products the customers would like, you know, and I think that's what we're doing right now. So we just appreciate your patience. We'll continue to listen, and then hopefully you, you know, continue to deliver exciting things to the PGTI customer base.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Yeah, we're excited, too. As we were chatting on our way over, you know, fresh eyes is always a good thing. You know, sometimes it's like, how come that thing is sitting over there? I don't know. I forgot it was there. I've been looking at it for six months now. I didn't even notice it anymore. So it's good to have fresh eyes, and it's good to just evaluate and make sure that we're doing the right things for the right reasons and doing our best to serve the people that we serve.
[00:07:17] Speaker C: I completely agree. And, you know, I just kind of close that. We, Matt and I just did our quarterly earnings call, and we always say, you always finish the earnings call with, you know, we're proud to be our customer supplier of choice, and we got to earn that every day and everywhere. So that'll be the goal. It's going to be a daily goal that we'll just continue to work towards every day.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Well, I appreciate your time. I know as an employee we've had some communication and some visibility and, you know, here's a video with an update, and here's this and here's that. And so I think, you know, this is just helping with that. Having podcast conversations with the leadership to just like, hey, who are you? I told a bad joke on my episode with Brock. So it feels like we all just got married, but we don't know who the in laws are yet.
[00:07:54] Speaker C: So that is great.
It sums it up really well.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, who is this other side of the family that we don't know yet? So I appreciate the chance to get to chat with you more and look forward to more in the future.
[00:08:05] Speaker C: Thank you so much, Sheri.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: All right, thanks, Joe. Have a great day.
[00:08:07] Speaker C: You, too.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: All right, bye.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: The Clear Impact podcast is brought to you by PGTI University. We are a part of Mitre Brands, a family of leading window and door brands united by our passion for quality and relentless pursuit of 100%. One of the missions of mitre brands is to unite and deliver the finest customer experience possible across the nation. Our window indoor brands deliver regionalized expertise and products backed by a national company. PGTI University is here to educate you, our listener, so that you can be a more informed consumer of window indoor products.
