In this episode, I talk with Owen Miller, CEO of 360Pack, a food and beverage packaging distribution business headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Owen joined 360Pack in its first year of operations through the Shore Capital CXO Fellows Program and, in less than five years, moved from CXO to VP of Supply Chain and Operations to COO and now to the CEO seat. He shares what it took to grow into each of those roles, including learning alongside founders with decades of industry experience and what the CEO seat has taught him that he couldn't have learned anywhere else. Owen also explains why the ambiguity of the CXO role is exactly the point: it demands intellectual curiosity, humility, and a willingness to run toward the messiest parts of the business while building influence without formal authority. Finally, he offers some straight talk for anyone considering the program: if you're looking for a cushy, kick-your-feet-up kind of role, this is not for you; if you're looking to be pushed and to grow like never before, there is no better place to be.

Key Takeaways:

• Run toward the messiest parts of the business, because intellectual curiosity and a bias for the hardest problems are what turn an ambiguous role into an indispensable one
• Own your lane as the least experienced person in the room by speaking as the expert on what only you know, whether that's the data, the systems, or what the market is telling you, and cover the rest with preparation and hard work
• Build credibility stakeholder by stakeholder: for the board, know your numbers and deliver what you said you would; for your team, show them you care about their future and convert what they tell you into action
• Set the plan and get people behind it without formal authority, then own the results, because leading through influence is the skill the CEO seat demands most

Chapters:

1. 00:00 – Introduction
2. 02:20 – From CXO to CEO in Five Years
3. 06:15 – Why the CXO Program
4. 11:50 – The Least Experienced in the Room
5. 13:55 – What Makes a Good CXO
6. 18:15 – Do You Hate Losing or Love Winning More?
7. 21:25 – Advice for Future CXOs

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https://www.shorecp.university/podcasts

You’ll also find other Bigger. Stronger. Faster. episodes, alongside our Microcap Moments and Everyday Heroes series—highlighting the people and stories that make the microcap space unique.

Other ways to connect:

Blog: https://www.shorecp.university/blog

Shore University: https://www.shorecp.university/

Shore Capital Partners: https://www.shorecp.com/

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This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, or a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the “Terms of Use” page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.

# SHORE\_Bigger Stronger Faster\_Ep54\_For Review\_v1 [48k-24b]

He shares why the ambiguity of the CXO role is exactly the point. It's a role that demands intellectual curiosity, humility, and running toward the messiest parts of the business, all while building influence and credibility, typically without much formal authority. Finally, Owen offers some straight talk for anyone considering the CXO program.

If you're looking for a cushy, kick-your-feet-up kind of leadership opportunity, the CXO program is definitely not for you. If you're looking to be pushed and to grow like never before, there is no better place to be.

To get us started, will you just give us your name, tell us what you do, and where you do it?

Wide range of SKUs, and we service the heck out of our customers, delivering just in time and take the complexity of, "What do I put my product in, and how do I make sure it shows up here when I need it?" and make sure it's delivered on time for them every time.

Now you're the CEO of 360pack. Can you just kind of run us down that journey, how you got placed with 360pack and how you've played a number of roles, but in a relatively short period of time, you've gone from CXO to CEO. Can you just give us a snapshot?

We were one location up in Portland, Oregon. And I came in, and my background is heavily in finance and with a stint at another operating company as well, so analytics, finance, and operations. And that's really where my passion lay and wanted to dig into a company and work with a company and help them on that side of the business.

Through my team, I learned a lot, and I think that's what set me up with the tools to step into each of those progressive roles and continue supporting my team to take on those challenges.

It's another thing to be able to, one, seize it and then succeed in it. So I'm just curious about your own growth and what that's looked like.

So doing functional growth, how do I go roll out and improve our ordering cadence so we have the right level of inventory on the floor, to how do our customers think about their markets, and a lot of that comes through speaking with the customers as well as spending time with the individuals who started this business and have spent 20, 30-plus years in the business.

There's no way that I'm gonna catch up to their level of industry experience, but I can certainly learn from them and ride along with them and take them into the conversation and leverage their experience to accelerate my learning and then work closely with them to move the business forward.

And sitting in the seat, you have to really rely on others to be a part of that development journey of the plan, the strategy, 'cause you need the whole team in order to execute it. So I think that's definitely stood out to me, and we have a lot of really strong folks on our team and a lot of amazing ideas and knowledge.

Now, it's challenging to wrestle all of those ideas into a concrete plan, but I think that's the biggest thing I've learned and have appreciated, is coming to see what the plan is through those different perspectives and leverage those different ideas to get to a really strong plan ultimately. And that plan's gonna change. Markets change, opinions change, and being dynamic with the plan but also sticking to the heart of it is really important as well.

You've achieved that, and I'm curious when you joined the CXO program, what were you looking for? What made that the right opportunity? Obviously, it's worked out in hindsight and pretty rapidly for you, but for somebody listening who may be considering this kind of an opportunity, take us back to your mindset and what that looked like when you just first started the CXO program.

And through that, I saw the CXO program as a path to keep my learning curve steep so that I could move towards that CEO role someday and contribute back to my employees, my company, and broader community from that seat.

And those companies from where they came from, they do some things very well. But are they designed at that point in time to triple, quadruple, five, ten X in size and support that? Often not, and certainly we had some growing pains to go through as well at 360pak. So the CXO program is putting you smack in the middle of that with a new management team that's feeling each other out, feeling how we're gonna tackle these problems, and it's an opportunity to roll your sleeves up, get to work, and start to build trust and build capabilities with the rest of the executive team, ultimately supporting the CEO to become successful, grow, and go from there.

Say a little bit about why it's important for you to be here.

So I'm here to share things I've seen in my five years through the program and help them along in their journeys because I've gotten a ton out of this as well, and I've learned a ton from my peers in this program as well.

Say more about that experience and, when you think about a room full of thirty-five CXOs, what that operator conversation looks and sounds like — a bit that you just couldn't know unless you experienced it.

Be like, "Oh, the path is very clear to making this company way better." And then when you're actually sitting in the seat, there are dynamics, there are long lists of priorities that need to happen right now that pop up, and you have to manage all of those things and balance those in order to keep your team focused, executing, and ultimately be successful to do what is thought of as hard to write down on the paper.

But that's actually, in many ways, the easy part because the operator, you have to develop the plan and then go execute the plan and own the results of that plan as well.

How have you approached being a young executive and stepping into, as you've described, some businesses that are family-owned, sometimes 10, 20, 30, even more years, deep industry expertise, founder dynamics, other executives, investment team. Shore, you do have a lot of stakeholders, and I'm just curious your approach in the midst of all of that, acknowledging, in many cases, you may have on paper the least experience in the room.

In many cases, I'm more knowledgeable about the ERP implementation that I was doing or the data of our company or what I'm seeing in a certain market segment through the data and through feedback from our sales reps and team than the board is in their long, long years of experience. And so through that, I can speak as an expert on that specific topic.

My other perspective through all this is in a position where I need to leverage the experience and knowledge of the other folks around the table, and I also need to make up for deficits in knowledge and experience through hard work, showing up and being prepared and showing value that way to counterbalance for that lack of years and years and years of knowledge.

So leveraging that horsepower through intellectual curiosity and going after the areas of the business that are the messiest, running towards the fire and helping make things better than they were. I think in these businesses that Shore gets involved in, and certainly in my business, 360pak, we're not looking to build the Taj Mahal of certain processes.

But looking for ways to incrementally make things better, be a part of that journey and bring other people along on that journey is critical as a CXO.

And so, the CXO's a challenging role from the perspective of it's ambiguous itself. It's not clearly defined. You have to kind of grab responsibilities and define it yourself and work with your CEO to define those. You generally don't have direct authority over certain areas, so you need to set the plan and get the team to motivate behind that plan without actually being the one in charge of those people and then owning the results that come from that.

There's a lot more of building your influence and your credibility than there is to implementing your authority or anything like that. There's a real art to stepping into this environment the way you have.

What you need to do to build credibility with Shore and the board is one thing, like, "Do you know your numbers? Are you hitting metrics? Are you getting done what you said you were gonna get done?" And then with some of your team, it's, "Do they feel like you care about their future?"

I do wanna come back to something you said before. You mentioned the word motivation, not just for the team, but for yourself. How, given the ambiguity, given the complexity, given the putting out fires — I suspect that, having talked to other CXOs, you may be facing failure a little more often than you have historically in your career, because of the nature of the environment.

So I've been drawn to the private equity space for a long time because of how incentives are aligned between the company, your investor, and there's no sitting still. There's certainly no boring days in the operator role. But what that comes with is the stress of change, the stress of pressure, but I find that motivating because the resolution of that is very motivating to me. Bill Clendenen's our lead independent director. He always loves to ask, and I still remember in the interviews he asked me, "Do you hate losing or love winning more?" And I still don't know my answer to that, but I suspect I hate losing. And so a bad day is almost a bigger motivator to go fix that tomorrow and get in a room with the team and figure out how we fix that tomorrow.

And so I think that motivates me as well.

When you get into an operating role, it's a roll your sleeves up, get to work type of deal, and leave any chips on your shoulder at the door and get ready to work harder than everyone else there 'cause you better not be there for the glamour. You're there to get a job done and get other people excited about that same job.

And so when you're working on the plan, spreadsheets and the numbers are the core of the decision for me, and the context matters and all that. But turning those into stories and then executing on that plan as a story becomes really powerful, and that's a way that you can bring people along in the journey, and I like that.

I think about that a lot and how I can embrace that more with my team every day.

It's certainly not for everyone. It does take a tremendous amount of commitment, but it's also very rewarding. The steep learning curve that I've found here has been tremendous. The amazing people at Shore. I've worked with a number of private equity groups, and just awesome people that are also highly intelligent.

And then you find people — my team is fantastic. The knowledge and experience that they bring and how they challenge me every day, I love that. But if you're looking for a cushy, kick your feet up type of role, CXO is not for you. CXO program's gonna push you, and if you're looking to be pushed, this is an awesome spot to be.

Special thanks to Owen Miller. This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the terms of use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.