As Dan Sheridan Takes the Rein at Brooks, Jim Weber Opens Up About Highs and Lows During His 23-Year Run as CEO
Brooks announced in March that it would soon have a leadership transition, with longtime chief executive officer Jim Weber stepping down and company veteran Dan Sheridan assuming the role.
That leadership transition is now in effect.
Weber led Brooks for 23 years — taking a company that was close to going bankrupt in 2001, narrowing its focus to running and transforming it into a billion-dollar brand. (It hit the milestone in 2021.)
The executive documented his journey in his book, “Running With Purpose: How Brooks Outpaced Goliath Competitors to Lead the Pack,” which released in April 2022.
Below, Weber discusses the highs and lows he experienced leading Brooks for 23 years with FN and reveals why the company is in good hands with Sheridan.
Why is now the time to walk away?
“In the primary sense, it’s my personal health. I joined the cancer club about six years ago and I’m fortunate to be here, I’m grateful for everything I have. But it’s taken bandwidth out of me, the surgeries and the like. The opportunities at Brooks are exciting, but the job is getting bigger. We’re a small global company, and with travel and the commitments to do this job in the way I’ve done it, it was clear to me that to stay healthy I needed to step down a notch. As hard as that is — because I have always felt I had my dream job — I knew I had to. For the last year, we’ve been working on this transition and have been methodical about it. I have no plans to ever do another CEO job because I had the best one that one could have. I don’t plan to ‘retire’ either. I want to stay active and make an impact, and some of that I hope will be with Brooks, rooting on the brand and supporting the team here when I can.”
You don’t strike me as someone who is going to sit back with his feet up.
“Or golf every day. The whole idea of that scares me (laughs). I’m looking forward to being as healthy as I can every day. I’m on the board at my alma mater, University of Minnesota Carlson School [of Management]. I love to be around students and campuses and discussing business puzzles and business strategies. That’s why I want to stay engaged, because this is what I know — but it won’t be at the helm. It’ll be hopefully advising and coaching and mentoring and helping other people solve business puzzles, which is so much fun.”
What gives you confidence that Brooks is in good hands with Dan Sheridan?
“He came up through our field marketing program and sales teams, but all the way along championed our investment in digital to engage with runners. He championed the development of our e-commerce business, and was the architect of our multichannel brand strategy, which we believe is essential to win with runners because they shop everywhere. He was promoted to president and COO in the last few years, he’s continued to help us evolve, hitting a billion dollars. Scaling a business is really hard. What gives me confidence is he leads customer first and people first. It’s all about execution, it really is, especially with the disruption we’ve had. And execution is all about people. Connecting our team, integrating and aligning our teams globally to execute season after season. Dan’s led that. Transitions are hard on each person — including me — but for Brooks, this is as good as it gets.”
Looking back, how anxious were you to take the helm when Brooks was close to bankruptcy?
“I was on the board for two years as an independent board member before I came inside. In late 2000, we were private equity owned, we had way too much debt, the company started to lose millions of dollars. We had couple emergency board meetings on Friday afternoons where the bank wasn’t going to fund the payroll. The private equity partner ended up writing a check and putting more money into the company. During that time as a board member, we were just reviewing the business and looking for a success path. I came in pretty knowledgeable about all the challenges. We had a couple of good shoes that runners and running retailers respected — the Beast and the Addiction — and we were a year away from perfecting the Adrenaline. That shoe saved the company. I [took over] in April 2001 and that year we generated cash, we turned our loss to a small profit and we had the Adrenaline coming in 2002. It was a fantastically well balanced shoe and runners bought it.”
What was your most challenging moment at Brooks?
“The call to focus only on run in 2001 was actually not difficult because we didn’t have a lot of choices. The Great Recession and the barefoot phenomenon was crazy, and we navigated that well. But in 2015 and ’16, running stalled. Retailers were struggling, Sports Authority went out of business, Amazon was transcendent, millennials were not spending as much on gear in any category, including run. It was like performance had seen its time. You had to build tech-light, $80 affordable performance, which we were not good at. We planted a flag in 2016 that we thought performance was timeless. That was a lonely moment because the whole category was going to approachable performance or athleisure — but it worked. We began to grow double-digits in Q3 of 2017, and we’re growing to this day. Because of our investment in performance, we had fresh products and we added a lot of premium customers and runners to this brand. That was the gut check moment because our sales were down, our profitability was way down and it was a situation where we were zigging while the whole industry was zagging.”
What will you miss most about leading Brooks?
“I’ve had an interesting career. Brooks was the fourth company I ran. What kept me here is I love building things and I love to be part of a team. Across this team, I enjoy working with people that are really good at what they do — the factories, our accounting teams, HR teams, sales teams, marketing teams. I enjoy working alongside people that have passion, care about the work they do and are really good at it. I love being part of this team. I’m going to miss that, for sure.”