From the Millner’s flower bed to the top of Cabela’s

Tommy Millner became CEO of Cabela’s Inc. in April 2009.

It was a job he didn’t mind relocating for from the Piedmont Triad area of N.C., where he had lived for 25 years, to Sidney, Neb.

Needless to say, Sidney was a far different world for the warmer climate native.

“I got to Sidney the Friday before Easter. I drove across the country from North Carolina and the whole way I kept hearing about blizzard warnings,” Millner spoke of his unforgettable trek.

“I arrived on Friday night, the blizzard is supposed to start on Saturday, and I was in a rental place here, so I went to Wal Mart got some food and the next morning I woke up, I had never seen it snow that hard, sideways, in my entire life,” Millner laughed.

“Snow was horizontal and I had left the Carolinas where the camellias and azaleas, everything is in bloom, and I thought, ‘Oh this is going to be really interesting.’ Then the power went out and I thought, ‘Oh this is great I will just freeze to death here.’”

Though if he had frozen to death, it may have been all right by Millner, as he had landed yet the second dream job of his life, to “work for another iconic business.”

Millner’s road to CEO of Cabela’s is filled with turns. Many would have to wonder how he became the businessman he is today.

Even he admits to wondering.

“It’s been a really interesting journey and every stop has been one of those ‘how did I end up here?’ I never really had a plan.”

Millner went to college in his home state of Virginia, and earned a liberal arts degree in classical languages, studying ancient Greek and Hebrew, and backed his degree with a minor in Philosophy.

“I’ve never had a business class; never taken a business class. I am a pure liberal arts major, I love philosophy, religion, I have a gift for languages; my desire was to teach classical Greek in a divinity school.”

However, that was not the road Millner’s travels would take.

According to the fellowship he won the only way he could fulfill the teaching dream was to become a minister, but he knew that was not his calling, so Millner walked away.

“Here I am a week away from graduating college and I couldn’t even get a job teaching,” Tommy said. “I graduated Phi Beta Cappa, no qualifications to do anything, so I just went to work for a bank to have a job.”

The position at the bank he took was for management training and then to run a branch.

“I quickly realized that is not what I wanted to do for a living and my neighbor was a furniture rep, he was making $15,000 a year, which I thought if I could make that much money it would be more money than I could ever imagine. We became friends and he said ‘you could be a salesman, let me get you an interview with Broyhill Furniture Company.”

To his surprise he was hired, moved to Colo., and for that job traveled around Wyoming, eastern Montana and Colo.

He said it was a wonderful experience for him, even though he more or less lived out of a suitcase, and fell in love with this part of the country knowing even after he left that someday he would end up back out here.

He would stay with Broyhill for a couple years then go to Thomasville Furniture, having the same kind of job as he had with the other furniture company, traveling around the three states selling furniture to stores.

“Literally one morning I woke up and thought, ‘do I want to do this for the rest of my life?’”

He said it was then he realized he wanted to learn how to run a business, a realization that would rocket him into the position he holds now.

“I called the CEO of Thomasville and I said, ‘if there is an opening in North Carolina, I’m willing to start my career over financially, I am willing to give that up to learn how to run a business. He said, ‘okay, I don’t have anything right now,’ but I think three months later he called me and said, ‘there is an opening do you want to move back? You’re going to be the assistant nobody to the vice president of nothing but you’ll start learning.’”

Within a couple years and in his early 30s Millner found himself running Armstrong Furniture a division of Thomasville.

He said his time in this company was invaluable, “they really developed talent, and they taught you how to lead and taught you business fundamentals.”

Lessons he picked up on quickly and utilized them to the point of getting noticed by “the big dogs.

“One day my phone rings and it was a man named Martin Dubilier. His firm called, Clayton and Dubilier, had acquired one of the two direct competitors of mine (for Armstrong) and the business was really struggling.”

Dubilier is well known in the business world, he and another man are accredited with creating the Leverage Buyout Model in the United States, according to Millner.

Seeing a talent and gift within Millner, Dubilier told Millner that he had a couple choices he could make in his career: One could be to work the rest of his life for someone else or become the actual boss by having ownership in a company.

He was offered the Vice President of Sales and Millner would also become a major shareholder within the company, of course expected to take out a loan to purchase the shares.

“I said no thank you. I have a perfectly good job. I have a bright future. I am on the path to one day be the CEO of Thomasville Furniture if I work hard I will succeed. Thank you very much.

“He was not a person to be told no,” Millner said of Dubilier, “he called me every night for a week. And he finally convinced me that the best thing I could ever do for myself and my family was to roll the dice and bet everything I had on myself.”

It was time yet again for Millner to move on, going to work at Pilliod, which made according to Millner, “the ugliest furniture you have ever seen in your entire life.”

“I show up the first day, I didn’t know about their financial situation, it was a complete catastrophe. In less than a year the company was hanging on the precipice of bankruptcy. I had borrowed all the money I could borrow and more, the bank I borrowed the money from called the loan. I said, ‘Look if you can find this much money on my person, come get it, because there is no money here. Do what you have to do, but I don’t have the money to pay it back.’

“In the course of this catastrophe they made me the captain of the Titanic, so I became CEO, the business has hit the iceberg, and is halfway under the water. Mr. Dubilier called me and said, ‘I am going to put some of my personal money in the business can you fix it?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I’ll personally guarantee your loan at the bank and we are going to fix this thing.’”

Despite the bleakness along the horizon, Millner and Dubilier were able to turn the business around making it profitable once again within a year’s time.

The successful turnaround was not just profitable financially for Millner but within his experience as a businessman.

“It was a classic turnaround, you learn a lot about business when you don’t have any money and can’t pay our bills. You learn to be very cleaver, very ingenious, you have to believe in yourself. There was about a year I would go home every night and my wife would look at me and say ‘Did you survive today?’ and I would say, ‘Yup, we survived today. I don’t know if we are going to survive tomorrow, but we got through today.’”

These lessons he learned would stick with Millner and make him into the businessman he is and more sought after than ever before.

How they turned the business around, Millner said, “I have never seen a problem that wasn’t solvable with enough thought and enough fortitude. The number of business challenges I have seen that were just intractable and couldn’t be solved, I can’t even name one to you. But that ability to think through is really a great benefit to a liberal arts education.”

As has happened with many businesses that are pushing full steam ahead after almost crashing, the company was bought by Lazy Boy in 1993and it was again time to move on.

“I had gotten a taste of owning a part of a business and had no desire to stay with the new owners and just be part of a corporate cog. By the grace of God, my partners at Clayton Dubilier, when we were selling the furniture company were in the process of buying Remington, the gun maker, from DuPont. So one of my partners called me from New York and said ‘We’re buying Remington do you want to run the company?’

“I didn’t even ask what my salary would be, because the first thing my father, when I was a 13-year-old, made me save my own money to buy was a Remington 870 shotgun. And then 25 years later to have the chance to run this iconic American company,” Millner said in still slight disbelief as to the road his career led him.

Millner would get his first chance to take a company and change it from the inside out.

“In business schools they teach these classic divestitures of non-core businesses from really big companies. Over time a lot of big corporations have these little businesses that are embedded in them that they own for all kinds of reasons and they never get the attention they need, because it’s not core to the company.

“So being able to create a company as a free standing business out of a large corporation was a phenomenal experience. We had to transform the culture, get the company caring about the customers, product innovation and all kinds of really neat stuff. I thought we would own that company for six or seven years, and I would end up doing something different, we ended up owning the company for 15 years.”

In 2007 Millner and his partners sold the company and after a couple years, allowing the Remington a smooth changing of hands, Millner moved on as well.

He said he had no idea where he would go after the company was sold but during the last portion of the two years he stayed on at Remington the answer would come in the form of a phone call while he was in a Wendy’s drive thru.

“A recruiter on the other end of the line said, ‘Would you have any interest running Cabela’s?’ Of course at Remington, Cabela’s was one of our largest customers. I knew the company really well. Respected the company like you can’t even imagine, because everything I know as the CEO of the company now, I knew as a vendor. Unbelievable ethics and integrity, wonderful people, great work ethics here and everything I believed in Cabela’s believed in.

“And I said, ‘Please don’t kid me.’ And then I said, ‘There is absolutely no way they would hire me, I have never worked a single hour in a retail store in my entire life. I’ve done a thousand different things but I have never been paid one hour for working in a retail store.”

He said a great regret, after being with Cabela’s for the past four years, is not having retail experience, because the interaction with the customers is something people don’t get with manufacturing.

After agreeing to have his name tossed in the hat and many, many conversations with his wife, he was offered the chance to run Cabela’s an opportunity he did not want to pass up.

“Getting the chance to run Remington was a once and a life time opportunity, but then getting the chance to lead another iconic company in the outdoor industry, I feel like I have been blessed way more than I deserve.”

His success could be attributed to the leadership perspective he practices as well as the liberal arts degree he obtained.

Millner said his degree, “had everything to do with my success. My liberal arts education taught me, a trait that all successful people have, which is insatiable intellectual curiosity. The liberal arts thinker asks why and wants to know how. It’s helped my success professionally.”

He said he feels the degree has allowed him to be multi-dimensional within his thought process, allowing for him to gain the successes he has seen within his career because he is able to think things through even when it comes to being a leader to many.

However, it isn’t just the broad degree that helped, many years ago, he said he was recommended a book by his boss that was about leadership and how to become a great leader, based upon the concept of servant leadership.

“Servant leadership guides me more in my job in my job here than any other single thing. It is a simple premise that if you think of yourself at the top of the pyramid that is a recipe for disaster. Because you look at the organization that they work for you and servant leadership philosophically flips that pyramid upside down.

“So that the leader comes to work every single day, walks in his office, humbled by the fact that he is responsible for and must serve, in our case, 15,000 people. They don’t serve me, I serve them. It is a completely different way of looking at yourself.”

The roots in which this type of leadership can be found, according to Millner, is the Bible, when God sends his son “as the servant of humanity not as the prince of humanity and if that lesson was good enough to create Christianity over the past 2,000 years I think it is good enough to live your life by and led a company by.”

He said quite often this concept is discussed within the walls of Cabela’s because he feels leadership is not something that is someone’s “right or privilege but a humbling burden to serve those that work for you.

“So if you are a part of a company or store that is not working, look at yourself first, not at the people.”

Millner said the opposite type of leading has plagued not just industry but life in general.

When asked if he feels this type of leadership separates him from other bosses, “Virtually every CEO I know, or have been affiliated with or invested with they are really good people who come from very humble beginnings who got lucky, were clever, smart and worked hard, and really understand that the success of the corporation doesn’t come from them, it comes from the hard work and shared values of hundreds or thousands of people.

“My experience tells me that most successful men and women that lead successful companies do it in the way I just described (servant leadership), not by being the imperial CEO. I think that may have been the case 50 years ago, it may have worked. But I don’t think it works anymore.”

Another lesson he values and that has done him well during his ventures, comes from his parents, that is “to be nice to people. People expect a CEO to be firm at times, but never lose your humanity.”

A rule he lives by when it comes to business making him as successful as he is today is to “always do the right thing and be fair.”

The valued lesson, and a hard one for him to have accepted, Millner said was, “that bad deeds do not go unpunished. That those who do you wrong, there is karma in the world and it is real force. As a young person you think, ‘well someone did me wrong and I’m going to get even and I’ll get them.’ I’ve learned when people behave that way to just sit back and wait. It’s taught me to be patient and when people do terrible things, nature sorts it all out.”

When asked who Tommy Millner was he responded promptly, “A very, very lucky person, lucky and blessed, and very grateful for everything I have.”