Building A Company To Last

Professional Image Inc. is an industry-leading producer of high-end packaging products for cosmetics, gourmet food, nutraceuticals, and wine and spirits and is located in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“EOS has probably been one of the best things that ever happened to us as a company,” says Cynthia Calvert-Copeland, owner of Professional Image Packaging in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“Implementing EOS has improved our growth, has more than tripled our profitability, and it has helped us build a team that is very healthy, very positive, and very cohesive.”[tweetquote]

And that combination has proven to be irresistible to people looking to join her organization.

“Thanks to EOS, one of our biggest strengths is that we hire and fire by our core values. That when people come to interview for a position at our company, they discover that we believe in open communication where everyone knows where the company is and where it’s going. They see that they’ll be part of a company that values involvement in the direction of the company. They want to be part of that.”

Professional Image Packaging has approximately 70 employees and brings in about $15 million in sales. Even with the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, they’re still on track hit to hit their numbers.

“We’re a very busy company,” Cynthia says. “Like other businesses, we’re dealing with the challenges that Covid presents as well as with regular day-to-day issues. It’s a whole new world and a whole new dynamic that you have to deal with. It has taken time to retrain our brains as to where our attention needs to be while staying focused on the end goal.”

Thankfully, EOS had already been firmly established before the pandemic hit. Level 10 Meetings™ were taking place in every department and the organization was already set up on Microsoft Teams. Managers were able to dial in to hear and get involved with every department’s issues. The effect has been that everyone on the calls always knows the leadership team is engaged.

But things weren’t always that way.

Putting Together A Beautiful Orchestra

Cynthia’s father had started the business and she found herself working there on and off through her college years. At one point, she moved away to another state and then returned to work as a customer service rep in 1991. She had been back less than a year when a tragic event turned her world upside down.

“My father had a stroke one morning. I went to the hospital and my father’s best friend said to me, ‘You know what? You need to go into the plant and you need to tell everybody it’s business as usual and that everything’s going to be fine.’ It was a baptism by fire,” she says.

“We had seven companies in five different states. It was a process of trying to figure out who’s on first what’s on second. Who do I trust and who do I need to remove?”

It often happens that a business owner looks back, wondering how things would have turned out if they had known then what they know now. Cynthia is no exception.

“I only found EOS seven years ago,” she says. If I had found EOS back then, what we could have accomplished. I mean, honestly, what we could have accomplished…”

Enter EOS^®

It was when Cynthia was attending a manufacturers forum group through the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) when one of the people in the group started talking about EOS.

“He told me about this great program they had brought into their company,” she says. “How it had done an excellent job helping him get the right people into the right seats. He was talking about building a team to where they were cohesive and supportive and effective. And so I listened and found myself thinking, ‘This is huge!’”

Cynthia uses a music metaphor to describe what EOS has meant to her organization.

“EOS is like a sheet of music,” she says. “And if we all learn to read and play our instruments from that same sheet of music, we’re going to have a beautiful orchestra. And that’s what happened for us. It’s taken me almost six and a half years to get the right people on the right sheet of music and to get them all working together, respecting one another, and understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses. But if you don’t have that and everybody’s doing their own thing, it’s not going to come together.”

Cynthia credits Certified EOS Implementer^® Rene Boer for having the patience to stand by her during this journey.

“I think Rene must have felt like he was walking through mud for six and a half years with us,” Cynthia says smiling. “But I think you’ve got to wait for people to arrive at their own conclusions because you can only push so hard. And Rene stood by us as we figured it out,” she says.

“There were so many times when someone on our team would wonder why we didn’t just implement EOS by ourselves. That we didn’t need an Implementer. But I think if we had tried to implement EOS on our own, we would never have gotten to where we are today. With Rene, it just gets better and better.”

Cynthia says that when she was introduced to EOS, she saw a system and a process that if put in place, would allow her to be able to walk away at some point.

“I knew we needed something in place that would grow beyond me,” she says. “At the point when I found EOS, I realized that I was the reason why the company wasn’t going where it could because I hadn’t given my people the tools they needed.”

She likens having a business to parenting.

“You want your children to do well after you leave this planet. And that’s what I wanted was to be able to walk away at some point and know that the business was going to be successful without me. There will be a day when they wake up and they’ll find out that the owner of the company isn’t there anymore. It’s a good feeling to know that everything’s not going to fall apart if anything happens to me.”

Making The Most Of the Present

Because of the processes put into place, Cynthia says she gets to spend more time with her family today and not at some point in the future.

“I’m able to travel with my family and go on a week-long vacation with my grandchildren and children,” she says. “I don’t have to worry about whether things are getting done and if meetings are still taking place. Everyone knows what their responsibility is.”

“For me, EOS is a breath of fresh air and it takes a ton of stress off my shoulders.”[tweetquote]

Professional Image Packaging is implementing EOS with the help Certified EOS Implementer® Rene Boer.