$>>$ I think I've always been, and I$\text{'}$m learning to not be as much solely, but I've been a very qualitative business person saying, you know, oh$,$ I want to$,$ you know, do this because I want to change the world and those kinds of goals to begin with. And I still believe all those things, but in the last $13$ years of running this business, I've also had to learn how to be a nuts$-$and$-$bolts business person. My name's Chris Mittelstaedt, and I$\text{'}$m the founder and CEO of the FruitGuys. Over time, I've developed a sort of model in my mind of sustainability, and sustainability has to involve some level of economic reality, or it's not sustainable. You know, you can have all these wonderful intentions and goals and, you know, you can effect change, but, you know, the business has to survive in order to do that, and its survival requires you to manage it very well. Yeah, I mean, we've been through ups and downs, no doubt about it$.$ I mean, when I started the company, it was $1998,$ and we$,$ you know, dot$-$com was booming, and we were lucky enough to get picked up by that dot$-$com wave, and, you know, unfortunately, we didn't realize we were getting picked up and then slammed down, you know, in $2001$ when the dot$-$com wave came to a very abrupt crash. You know, I'll never forget. We worked with one company called Red Gorilla. We showed up at their door, and the doors were chained, and people were coming out crying, you know, with pink slips, being laid off, and somebody had, you know, called a big meeting, and the admin said, hey, we're going to have a huge company$-$wide meeting. Let's go order a thousand dollars' worth of produce, you know, and all this stuff just like it was, you know, we were doing throughout the entire year, and everybody got fired and laid off, and the company was immediately shut down. And, you know, we knew that that was the beginning of the end, and then we went through a very difficult time. We had, you know, a lot of bad debt. Fifty, I think it was $$50,000$ of bad debt. I got personally over $$100,000$ in debt on credit cards. We had to lay off a lot of staff. You know, it was very, very difficult for me because that was, you know, first time I ever had to do that, and, you know, and making me physically ill, and it was just, it was horrible, and I really had to readjust my thinking of who I was and how I was running this business. So I, all of a sudden, went from being the CEO of this great company that's serving all these dot$-$com startups to basically a truck driver, and it was at that time that we decided we really had to think about how to change our business model so that we weren't just locally focused in San Francisco. So we looked around and said, OK$,$ what could we$,$ what area could we pick that could kind of be local between New York and DC so we could get to$,$ and Philadelphia was the obvious choice.

$>>$ So I started out there in Philadelphia. I was there for about two years before I came out here. My name is Erin Mittelstaedt, and I$\text{'}$m the Vice President of Operations. I mean, at the time that I was brought on$,$ we were really new in Philadelphia. So even though we had been out here for ten years, you know, there was different challenges, different vendors, different staff, different way we're getting fruit.

$>>$ I mean, I've always known that I have to build a stronger executive team. I know it now because I know that in order to grow the business, we have to constantly be thinking about how we delegate and how we grow responsibilities, and then as those responsibilities change how other people pick up other pieces of those responsibilities and make them into new jobs. I mean, the organizational chart process constantly evolving, and we're talking about it all the time. So we developed a system around helping people think about the decisions they make every day and breaking them down into five simple questions. You know, one, have we been respectful to whoever we're working with, whether it's a peer, a vendor, or just somebody in the world. Have we been responsive to their needs? Have we been realistic with them about what we can or can't do$?$ Can we take personal responsibility for the outcome of the situation we're working on$?$ And then when we walk away, are we going to be remembered positively?

Chris Middlestat, founder and CEO of The FruitGuys, says he wants his employees to ask themselves five questions: $($a$)$ Have they been respectful? $($b$)$ Have they been responsive? $($c$)$ Have they been realistic about what they can and cannot do$?($d$)$ Did they take personal responsibility? and $($e$)$ Will they be remembered positively?

An HR manager at The FruitGuys wants to measure how well employees are doing on these questions, so she measures customer satisfaction, goal attainment, and projects initiated for each employee. The HR manager is going to give her boss information based on:

metrics.

workforce composition.

rare resources.

core capabilities.