Joshua White | Must Read PPAI Media: BAMKO is a successful company in our industry, and you’ve highlighted the culture cultivated by company leadership. Can you tell me more about that? White: Business is philosophy and people. If you communicate with clarity what you believe, and if you hire and empower the kind of people who are aligned with that, you create a great company. The numbers, the results, the clients – all that stuff are outcomes. It’s the inputs that matter. The input for us is clarity around what we believe and living in accordance with those values. We are very passionate about that. And if you create a powerful culture that everyone understands and knows and has bought into, people start making those choices themselves without ever having to be encouraged to do so. It becomes its own selfpropelling thing. I think we probably talk about culture so much because we think that the type of company we are is basically downstream from philosophy. Everything flows from there. There is very little separation between the personal and professional, and it’s one of the reasons people, in my experience, are really happy here. We believe human flourishing transfers across realms. If you succeed in a thing that is expressly contained to your personal life, a hundred times out of a hundred, that shows up at work. Better people make better employees. PPAI Media: How has BAMKO’s culture and philosophy been a factor in the business’s success? White: We looked at the industry and recognized that there were opportunities to do things better and smarter and more efficiently. And we’ve evolved through a series of trialand-error experiments to who we are today. Our philosophy has been, if everyone else is doing it this way, we’re going to go the other way and see if it’s better. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but that approach has always been at our core. We’re totally comfortable with failure and making mistakes, because in the process of doing so, we’re going to come up with some cool, innovative ideas. Not being limited by a fear of failure has allowed us to be flexible and agile and open-minded when it comes to experimentation. We’re willing to be bad at things in order to get good at them. It’s a huge part of our success. You saw that core ethos of agility and entrepreneurialism during the pandemic. BAMKO got onto a lot of people’s radars when we went from, I believe, $108.6 million in revenue in 2019 to $202.2 million in revenue in 2020, and in a year when most people’s sales contracted by 30%. We found opportunities that were buried inside of the adversity. That was partially because of our sourcing capabilities, but we would have never created those opportunities without that ethos that allowed us to quickly expand in new and different ways. PPAI Media: How has your experience with BAMKO and its culture affected your experience on the PPAI Board of Directors? The numbers, the results, the clients – all that stuff are outcomes. It’s the inputs that matter. The input for us is clarity around what we believe and living in accordance with those values. We are very passionate about that. PPAI • JUNE 2023 • 43
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