EPISODE 105: Why is customer-centered strategy key to business growth?

We want to thank AFB International for sponsoring this podcast. AFB International is the premier supplier of palatants to pet food companies worldwide, offering off-the-shelf and custom solutions and services that make pet food, treats, and supplements taste great.

Lindsay Beaton, editor, Petfood Industry magazine and host, Trending: Pet Food podcast: Hello, and welcome to Trending: Pet Food, the industry podcast where we cover all the latest hot topics and trends in pet food. I'm your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine, Lindsay Beaton, and I'm here today with Ryan Estis, best-selling author and our Petfood Forum 2026 Wednesday Eye-Opener keynote speaker. Hi, Ryan, and welcome!

Ryan Estis, best-selling author and former Fortune 500 chief revenue officer: Hi, Lindsay. It's great to be here.

Beaton: In case you've not yet been introduced to Ryan, here's what you need to know.

In addition to being the co-author of "Prepare for Impact: Driving Growth and Serving Others Through the Principles of Human-Centered Leadership," Ryan is a former Fortune 500 chief revenue officer with 20 years of experience working with commercial and leadership teams to initiate change, inspire innovation and deliver growth. He helps companies and individual contributors embrace change as a catalyst to achieve breakthrough performance.

As I mentioned, Estis is the speaker at Petfood Forum's 2026 Wednesday Eye-Opener Session, being held at the end of April, where he'll be presenting "The Art of Standing Out: Leveraging Remarkable Experiences and Experimentation to Create Brand Evangelism."

This, alongside his multifaceted business and leadership experience, is why I've brought him on today to answer this question: How important is it to center customers as part of a company's business growth strategy?

Ryan, what exactly does it mean to center a customer when it comes to business strategy?

Estis: You put the customer and the customer persona at the center of everything you do — your decisions and strategy are aligned in order to serve the customer. The other consideration is that you want to do that in lockstep with customer insight, input and partnership. 

One of my favorite definitions of innovation is meeting the unmet and unarticulated needs of customers. The world is changing very fast, and customer expectations are changing with it. The thesis really comes out of design thinking principles — how is this going to affect, be used by and impact the people it's intended for and the people we serve?

Beaton: Who is in charge of figuring that out?

Estis: The C-suite and leadership have to directionally align the organization toward a very clear strategy. Then that strategy has to cascade throughout the organization so everybody clearly understands it and can connect their work to it.

Beaton: How important is it for everybody to be on the same page? Many years ago, my company did something like this — it was a top-down effort to figure out our messaging and our purpose, and we held meetings just to explain to everyone what their roles were in relation to that larger purpose. How do you make that happen, and what does the nitty-gritty of it look like?

Estis: That sounds like a great approach — that company was probably a case study. Embedding strategy in every facet and function of the business gives everyone clarity about how their work impacts the whole. Alignment is critical because it's the catalyst for execution.

There's an idea I first heard at Intel, and Amazon used it as well — disagree and commit. When you're discussing strategy or a new initiative, a leader's responsibility is to engage in the debate, bring your best thinking forward and challenge assumptions so the best idea can rise to the top. At some point a decision gets made, and whatever side of the debate you were on, when you walk out that door, your responsibility is to support and execute around that decision. That's alignment.

Now, I had an experience that was a little different. I worked on an executive team whose strategy was really "agree and dissent." People wouldn't voice their opinions or ideas — they would just nod their heads because that felt like the safe thing to do. Then everyone would go out to the business and there was no alignment or consistency in execution. You'd hear things like, "That's a corporate thing. We're the Western region. We don't do it like that." 

It was fractured, you could never get a cohesive delivery, and it created barriers, impediments and resentment that ultimately hurt our ability to deliver a world-class customer experience.

Beaton: A lot of this sounds like a culture issue. How do you ensure the culture is healthy enough to even have these kinds of conversations in good faith — and make it so people actually want to be on the same page rather than dismissing it as corporate mumbo jumbo that doesn't apply to them in the trenches?

Estis: A few things. First, I deeply believe culture is a reflection of how you lead. At the enterprise level, it's important to define it and be it — and that goes beyond what we do to how we do it. Do we disagree and commit, or agree and dissent? It's about defining standards and behaviors and then creating accountability, and it starts with leadership.

A framework I'm a big fan of is model, coach, care — a human-centered leadership and culture framework. A leader is expected to model defined standards of excellence and values, reinforce those behaviors, coach those behaviors and create accountability around those standards. The care piece is equally important, because embedded in culture are our relationships — how we work together and how we feel about working together.

We're in the midst of a culture crisis. Engagement is plummeting — around 20% of employees in North America today are fully engaged. We're having this big conversation around innovation, change readiness and disruption, and yet eight out of 10 employees don't want to be there. 

Organizations and leaders need to get more potential, more commitment and more effort out of their people — and we've never been getting less. Looking at innovation and change through the lens of culture, talent and readiness is really important. Those things are indispensable.

Beaton: It used to be that somebody stayed with a company for 40 or 50 years. They felt invested. We've broken that down, and now people job-hop and struggle with work-life balance. Do you think that's part of why we're having so much trouble? Are we in a transition period, or is something broken that needs fixing right now?

Estis: We are in a transition period, but I don't think that's necessarily the root cause. The world has always changed — look back 100 years to where we are today. People are constantly changing, too. The challenge is we're living through an accelerated pace of change. Cycle times are getting compressed. I call this the era of complexity, defined by constant disruption, where the landscape is continuously shifting. That mandates a different kind of leadership.

Take talent mobility as one example. People used to stay with an organization for 20 years, and I grew up with that expectation. The average Gen Z employee is projected to stay with an employer for 1.7 years. That's the new reality. When I told two of my interns that I had worked for my first employer for 16 years, they couldn't understand it. In their minds, there's nothing wrong with having 12 jobs in their 20s — they're figuring themselves out and where their passion is. We have to adjust to that.

I can be angry about it and say they're not loyal, but that's not the right approach. As a leader, I have a responsibility to adapt and consider what I'm offering good talent — what's the employment value proposition? If I want to be innovative and disruptive and create breakthroughs, I need great people on my team. 

My thesis is that I always want to lead people a little better than I found them. Whatever time you spend here, if you invest and commit and go all in, I'm going to develop and nurture and stretch you. When it's time for you to move on, you'll be better than when we first met, and you'll have access to my network and mentorship for the rest of your career.

Why shouldn't work be that way? Why shouldn't it be a place where we can become the best version of who we are? When you look at the trends, a recent Wall Street Journal report noted that one in three people consistently report mental health challenges stemming from work stress. Part of our responsibility as business leaders may be to be trusted institutions — places where people can come and be nurtured, developed and supported, and aligned to something worthwhile: a mission, a pursuit, growth, something we're bringing to the world together.

I did a project recently for a large organization, working with their leadership team through focus groups and interviews. I added a question: "How much longer could you continue working at your current pace in these current conditions?" Not one person said more than six months. If we want to deliver something meaningful to the marketplace, leadership has to start from the inside out.

Beaton: Let's say your company has built this customer-inclusive strategy and everyone's on board, but then people leave and new people come in who don't know anything about it. How often do companies need to re-up, get everyone together and confirm alignment — especially when customer needs change and being customer-centered five years ago doesn't mean you're customer-centered today?

Estis: Agility is important because the world is changing. How often do we need to get everybody together? Every day. Change management is no longer an event — it's a way of being. You have to embed agility. You lead from the center and adapt in unity. There's a resilience and flexibility, a continuous iteration. Leaders need to invest ahead of the curve — executing and performing given today's reality while simultaneously preparing for a future that hasn't happened yet. That's part and parcel to innovation.

When you bring new talent into the organization, you have a responsibility to onboard and assimilate them, to provide mentors and training. There are also two cultures in every organization: the enterprise culture — the mission, purpose, values and behaviors we've discussed — and the microculture, which is the culture of working for a specific leader. In a large organization, those can feel very different depending on where you sit. The consistency of standards of excellence across both is the critical component.

Some of this is a leadership crisis. Is the leadership team aligned? Are they delivering a consistent experience? Are they passionately committed to evolving in lockstep with the customer? Are they willing to take intelligent risks, learn from failure and manage through mistakes? Standards have to be reinforced every day. A leader is a coach — not someone who has a performance conversation once a year. It's real-time feedback, constantly in those conversations. That's the job.

Beaton: Where are the bottlenecks in implementing this kind of strategy? Is there a particular department or way of thinking that usually holds things up?

Estis: There are bottlenecks everywhere. One is having a clearly defined strategy — if every employee in the building can't articulate the strategy in a sentence, you don't have one. A second is connecting everybody's work to it. A third is whether you're willing to create consistent standards of excellence — whether those standards are ideas on the wall or whether they live and breathe in the hearts, minds and actions of people every day.

I've done some work with Mayo Clinic — the No. 1 recognized brand in the world for patient care. Their purpose is clear: the needs of the patient come first. They activate those values based on who gets hired, who gets rewarded, who gets promoted and who gets let go. When you manage that with the same intensity and rigor as you manage other areas of the business, it becomes embedded. It becomes you.

And in this era of complexity, with change and uncertainty and technology accelerators, I would argue the most complex part of any business is still the humans. We have different needs, expectations, values, hopes, dreams and motivations. Understanding and tapping into that is a real opportunity.

Beaton: Have you ever seen a company get this wrong, and what can others learn from those missteps?

Estis: All kinds of companies get it wrong — honestly, it's probably harder today to look at who's getting it right. Here's an exercise: look at the top 50 companies in the world 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago. How many are still in the top 50 today? What happened? Did they hold on to a certain way of doing things so long that the world changed around them while they stayed entrenched? Blockbuster went bankrupt. They had the chance to purchase Netflix for $50 million and passed. What led to those choices?

I got it wrong, too. I worked at that agree-and-dissent company, and it wasn't just the company's failure — it was mine. Early in my management career, I went from individual contributor to manager and then got involved in setting strategy at the executive level. I think I was still more interested in what was in it for me — a little something to prove, some ego, some insecurity. That mitigated my ability to lead in service of others. 

Leadership isn't a job; it's a responsibility. It shouldn't be about me. It should be about putting other people in a position to become the very best they're capable of. When you have a group of people aligned to a mission, with their potential being maximized, you can deploy something into the marketplace that's pretty special.

Leadership is about something to give — contribution, service and the impact you have on others. My brother and I write about this in the book. We talk about the idea of a family tree: people come into your orbit, you spend time together and then people move on. But those connections can shape them and endure. The best boss I ever worked for — I haven't worked for him in 16 years, but I wouldn't be who I am today without his mentorship and guidance. If I texted him right now, he'd be on the phone within two hours. That's a human-centered leader.

Beaton: The pet food industry has a lot of small companies — two entrepreneurs who started making treats in their kitchen and five years later are on store shelves — as well as medium-sized companies and the big three. Does any of this look different depending on company size? Does anyone have an advantage if they're starting from scratch?

Estis: I'm uniquely qualified to answer this, having spent half my career in a Fortune 500 company and half as a small-business startup entrepreneur. There's nothing harder than starting a business — it's a pursuit defined by uncertainty, and it's not for everybody.

These principles matter in both settings, but for different reasons. In a small business, one person who isn't aligned can change the whole dynamic when your team is only three or four people. That first group of hires is critical to shaping who the business becomes. As a small-business owner, I borrowed ideas from large companies and applied them to my business, and it gives me an advantage.

As a business scales, a lot of small-business owners find themselves in a familiar situation: they're really good at making the thing — making dog treats, say — and then suddenly they have six or eight employees and they realize managing people wasn't what they signed up for. At some point you have to recognize you're building something bigger than yourself. If everybody wants to be there, is getting what they need and is pointed in the right direction, you can accelerate faster.

Beaton: Are there any other business strategies that lend themselves to transitioning toward this approach? If a company is close but not quite there, what tips would you offer?

Estis: It starts with getting clear on who you are, where you're going, who you serve and what you need. Those are the four big blocks. When you have that clarity, it's easier to prioritize and make decisions — what's a yes, what's a no, where does resource allocation go, what talent do you need. When that's ambiguous or fractured, tensions will follow.

Having a clearly defined strategy and plan is important, and so is being flexible enough to recognize that plans will change. I heard someone recently question the value of a one-year or three-year plan when everything changes so fast. That's not a reason to skip the planning exercise. My three-year plan looks very different than when I first articulated it, but it's iterative and it's pointing us in the right direction. For me as a small-business owner, it provides the discipline to say no. If it's not a clear yes in support of the strategy, it's an easy no. That focus keeps me from getting distracted when I'm on strategy.

Beaton: On the subject of knowing plans will change but having one anyway — my dad spent 35 years in the Navy, and one piece of advice he gave me has stuck with me for decades: "It's always good to have a plan. That way you have something to deviate from." Sometimes you just need an anchor. 

If your company can establish its primary purpose, everything else is details that can shift. As long as everything goes back to your roots, the branches and shape of the tree can change however they need to.

Estis: Your dad gave you some good advice. Let's stay with that for a minute. At the top, the enterprise has mission, vision, values and purpose — and you can drill it down further to target customer profile and a plan for the year. Then at the individual level: What's your plan for becoming the best leader you're capable of being? What's your personal leadership vision? How do you want to be remembered? What kind of impact do you want to have on people?

Most people haven't thought through that — they're just doing the work. But the best leaders I've spent time with give real weight to introspection. They thoughtfully consider the bigger questions. What does success look like for you? If you don't have any idea where you want to be in five years, the odds are you're not going to get there. Set a target, and if you decide to deviate, shift the target — but have a target. That's how you avoid waking up one day wondering how you ended up somewhere you never intended to be.

Prioritization matters, too. When someone says they have 76 priorities, they don't have any. What are your top three? Part of today's overwhelm and anxiety comes from the sense that it's too much, that you can't keep up, that you also have to learn artificial intelligence and everything else. You've got to prioritize — and align your priorities to something.

Beaton: As we wrap up, I'd like you to give our audience some homework. Many of the people listening will be attending Petfood Forum, and even those who aren't are in leadership positions or aspiring to be. What is one question everybody should be asking themselves to continue to grow — as a company, as a person? What is a question that you constantly ask yourself to make sure you're still on the path you want to be on?

Estis: What is my definition of success? It's a question you can ask about your life, your business or your role as a leader. It's a worthwhile examination. Get specific — the more specific you can be in answering it, the better. It's really about knowing your destination.

Beaton: That's amazing. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Ryan. Being human-centered sounds like a no-brainer on the surface, but with everything moving as quickly as it is, it can be easy to forget that everything is made up of people — the people working for you, the customers out there. Life is people.

Estis: Life is people.

Beaton: Before we go, where can people find more information about you and get your book?

Estis: The hub of everything is ryanestis.com. You can find the books, the blog, a podcast and a lot of content there, including free downloads — we have a change guide you can download at no charge with exercises to help you orient around change. I'm also active on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect there.

Beaton: Ryan will be presenting "The Art of Standing Out: Leveraging Remarkable Experiences and Experimentation to Create Brand Evangelism" at Petfood Forum 2026's Wednesday Eye-Opener Session. Petfood Forum will be held April 27-29 in Kansas City, Missouri. You can find more information about Petfood Forum and all of our speakers at petfoodforumevents.com. We hope to see you there.

That's it for this episode of Trending: Pet Food. You can find us on petfoodindustry.com, SoundCloud or your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow us on Instagram @trendingpetfoodpodcast. If you want to chat or have any feedback, feel free to drop me an email at [email protected].

Thanks again to our sponsor, AFB International, the premier supplier of palatants to pet food companies worldwide, offering off-the-shelf and custom solutions and services that make pet food, treats, and supplements taste great.

Once again, I'm Lindsay Beaton, your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine, and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks for tuning in!

Petfood Forum and Petfood Essentials show dates are April 27-29, 2026, in Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. To register or stay informed on the latest event developments, go to PetfoodForumEvents.com.