Jeffrey Leland Clapper Creating connections counts

Across the street from the Wal-Mart Home Office, on the third floor of a shared office building, someone rings a cowbell.

Jeff Clapper shifts in his seat, looking toward the commotion and laughing easily. His blazer rests on the back of his office chair, and his daily commute -- a bicycle with a trailer for dropping his kids off at daycare -- rests in the corner.

The joyous jingle is a company signal of good news worth celebrating. If he wasn't visiting with someone, his coworkers say, Clapper would ordinarily run across the room at full speed to deliver high-fives and a heartfelt "well done" or "I appreciate your hard work."

Clapper is chairman and chief executive officer of 8th & Walton, a company that helps suppliers do better business with Wal-Mart through education and media, providing informational and training resources and filling temporary staffing needs.

Many of those cowbell rings are for "when we've had someone on the phone, and you could hear the relief come over them," he says. "They say 'I'm so glad you called, I need to talk to you.' That's so satisfying. I've had those jobs where I was stressed and not sleeping -- it's terrible.

"To know we're having those connections and conversations, and the person on the other end of the phone is going to go home and feel better is awesome."

With any other CEO, "you might think he's running to see what's happened, that 'Hey, there's new business or new dollars,' but that's not why," says Darrell Rosen, president and chief operating officer of 8th & Walton. "He's running to go recognize and celebrate and congratulate the person."

This year, the 8th & Walton team has grown from five to 45 staff members profitably and expanded its client base to include other regions, like Puerto Rico and, internationally, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica and Chile. The growth means a change from serving hundreds to now serving thousands of suppliers all over the world.

Last week, 8th & Walton announced the arrival of Neile Jones, formerly KNWA producer and anchor, to Saturday Morning Meeting, its broadcast TV show to keep suppliers up to date on things they need to know about Wal-Mart. The weekly production will now be known as Focus on Suppliers.

GLASS HALF FULL

Clapper's role at the company is the natural motivator. He has the sort of good-humored demeanor that suggests he's excited and hopeful for whatever a day may bring.

"His approach is one of encouragement to everyone," says Mike Cockrell, adviser to and partner in 8th & Walton. "He's high energy, always optimistic and the sort of leader you enjoy working with and for.

"He encourages us to have fun but also reminds us that we have goals to meet and does a great job of balancing as a leader."

"Jeff has always had a real commitment to how he can find a meaningful way to be engaged in the world," says the Rev. Brett McCleneghan. Clapper was associate youth pastor for his Park Ridge Community Church for a year following college graduation. "Both professionally and as an individual, he actively engages other people to experience meaning and purpose in what they do and who they are."

Clapper was also the heir to the family business, a publishing company that made Crafts n' Things, among other sewing and craft magazines. Under his leadership, 8th & Walton staff members are similarly treated like family. Each is given an oar, a visible reminder that they're all in the same boat, reaching for the same destination. They sign each others' oars as a symbol of their commitment to help each other and award gold stars for an exceptional job, the mark of a milestone.

"Jeff likes to make people happy," says Marie Clapper, his mother and producer of Saturday Morning Meeting. "He likes to understand them and saw that we built a nice culture (in our business), and that's what he's doing at 8th & Walton."

On the 8th of each month, staffers get together to enjoy each others company, usually through customized games like a few rounds of Jeopardy with questions about their coworkers, such as "Whose nickname is Puma?"

"He wants work to be a place where you experience happiness," Marie Clapper says. "There are plenty of trials, but he's always been tuned in to people and wanted to understand them."

"You want to go to the beach or to a nice dinner," Rosen says. "Most people don't necessarily want to go to work, but I'll tell you people here working with Jeff want to come to work. It's fun, it's exciting, and you're not all bound up in rules and policies.

"Common sense gets to prevail."

All staffers -- executives and Clapper included -- are in the same open-floor plan of an office to encourage the free exchange of thoughts, plans and ideas. It works to keep everyone accessible-- sometimes a little too well.

Since its incredible growth, Clapper still wanted to hinge the office on the same values, like open collaboration. Instead of adding walled offices or compartmentalizing, a busy partner will place a paper sign on his desk that says "Hey, I'm accessible, but can it wait?"

"We're having fun here," he says. "I want people to have fun and feel like, 'Wow, I tackled a giant problem, look at how I've developed myself, and I figured it out and it was an exciting challenge.' And at the end of the day, the people they served by the solution are better off. I mean, [hopefully] the whole world is a little bit better off."

NOT THE BLUE BLAZER TYPE

Jeff Clapper never imagined in his wildest dreams that he would be living in Arkansas, the leader of a fast-growing business, a husband and father of two. Don't get him wrong -- he loves it -- but the longtime Chicago boy just never saw it coming.

"At least once a month my wife will say, 'Can you believe we live in Arkansas and have two kids and this is our life?'" he says with a laugh.

The Clappers arrived in 2011, when his wife Brenda accepted a job that sent her to Bentonville. Jeff sold his business, the video game Gimme Golf, to an investor in Silicon Valley and packed his bags. Expecting an 18-month excursion, they rented a house at first. But not too long into the stint, they knew they were here to stay.

Something about the laid-back Southern culture spoke to his own love for making friends quickly and often.

"The people are, for the most part, a lot more down-to-earth and unpretentious than they are in most places, and I love that," Clapper says. "You can find people with big egos anywhere you go and people with bad attitudes, but it's a much smaller percentage here, I love it."

Back in the windy city, his hometown, most people in any given coffee shop would have a variety of career backgrounds and interests. But walk into a Bentonville coffee house and chances were 17 or 18 of every 20 were businessmen and women.

Clapper's own disposition is to openly approach new people. Optimism exudes from him, an obvious taste for new opportunity and ways to meet others and help each other out.

"In Bentonville, I can walk in and be like, 'Hey, let's talk,' and we might be able to come up with a really interesting and beneficial way to work together," he says. "That's thrilling to me."

"The great thing about Jeff is that he's naturally curious," Cockrell says. "He's one of those people who asks for and welcomes advice and tries to learn something from everyone he has a conversation with."

In Arkansas, that's a lot.

"It's neat how accessible everyone is here," Clapper says. "I realized there are all kinds of entrepreneurial opportunities here."

It was music to his ears. Clapper mixed some opportunities together, took some and cultivated others. He became involved with 101 Ventures, a holding/business incubation company, and learned of 8th & Walton through it.

It was primarily a classroom education tool at the time -- to help suppliers gain useful tips for successfully dealing with Wal-Mart, especially those new to the process. But Clapper saw "a lot of unrealized potential" in it and made the leap to transform the business into something else.

"I liked the idea, that we can help suppliers learn what they need to know and get back to doing business with Wal-Mart," he says. "For suppliers to do that by knowing what they need to know faster, that seemed like a good cause. But I thought it could be so much more."

COUNTING SHEEP

Clapper's family had been a supplier to Wal-Mart in the past, so he had some sense of how tense those hours and days before meetings at the Bentonville headquarters could be.

Some of his staff members, a mix of people in fledgling careers and others encore careers -- with their past being at Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Procter & Gamble and more -- have been there, too.

"I was impressed with Jeff's knowledge and understanding of the business model and how it worked, for never having lived in it [directly]," Rosen says. "He had a really good understanding of the need, the gap between suppliers and Wal-Mart, and how to fill that void -- to truly help suppliers be better business."

Building a base of field experts who'd already had one successful career selling to Wal-Mart was Clapper's way of rooting the business in easing suppliers' anxiety -- with training from people who knew it inside and out, upside and down.

With their help, Clapper set out to make 8th & Walton the impartial liaison, one suppliers can turn to with their vulnerabilities (without letting Wal-Mart know) and the general mouthpiece that Wal-Mart can use to speak with suppliers (without singling anyone out).

It's the sort of detailed, constantly evolving help suppliers of all experience levels can use.

"We're often either working with companies who are brand new to working with Wal-Mart or all the way to the Fortune 100 company who's sold to Wal-Mart for decades," Clapper says. "We help their teams develop really specialized skills that are unique to serving Wal-Mart.

"There's a lot of opportunity to win big and opportunity to do it wrong with severe consequences."

Landing a position as a supplier and keeping it for years requires a tricky skillset, so having the benefit of expertise from those combined 200 years of Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart supplier experience makes for happier, more confident clients.

In just a few years, Clapper and the 8th & Walton team added custom education by traveling to various company headquarters and offices to train teams globally, expanded media offerings to include more information through free outlets, like TV, email and newsletters, and filled workload gaps with their more senior consultants -- who can then train the new hires.

"We help them feel more comfortable and equipped to go in and deliver on that meeting," Clapper says. "There are people all over the world who are trying to understand how to serve Wal-Mart, and we have their best interest at heart ... to teach and empower them to do it themselves.

"It's helping people sleep better at night, honestly."

ALL IN THE FAMILY

Most people start to develop their business savvy while earning an MBA or launching a first business and keeping it afloat. Clapper's own education started developing while sitting around the dinner table in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago, where his family discussed business every night.

"Jeff is very comfortable with entrepreneurship," Marie Clapper, his mom, says. "Lyle (his dad) had his business, I had a business, all his grandparents and parents were entrepreneurs. Jeff saw risks, highs and lows, big opportunities and saw how to have a huge influence on the lives of people you worked with."

The family magazine business was small, and the office an intimate space. Marie and Lyle brought Jeff to work with them until he was 18 months old, old enough to attend a daycare. His very first days and months were spent in a playpen in the center of the open-style office. The Clappers' staff members would take turns picking him up, playing with him, changing his diapers and walking his stroller at lunch.

Jeff even took his first steps at the office.

The next to youngest of six children (his dad had two from a previous marriage, his mother had two from her previous marriage and they had Jeff and his sister together), it taught him things -- whether he recognized it then or not.

"Mainly I learned how hard [business] was," Clapper says, in a way that suggests the difficulty an exciting challenge. "I think it was a lot of fun for them, like they looked at the business as a game essentially, and I learned that attitude."

Watching his father handle potentially ugly competitor conundrums with a quiet, steady approach has come around to help him, now that he faces conflicts of his own.

Clapper received his formal business training from Ohio Wesleyan University, where he majored in economics and philosophy and earned a music minor.

While studying, it was the financial sector of business that appealed to him most. He had a change of heart after a couple of internships with Merrill Lynch. Like every place he's worked, he loved the people there and has always kept in touch. But the mission, which was all hinged on money, didn't align with his mindset as a connector, a guy who wants to genuinely help others.

"My parents raised us with a simple thesis of 'We just want you to be strong and independent adults who strive to make things a little bit better than how you found it,'" Clapper says. "8th & Walton is my chance to do that in a big way."

NAN Profiles on 08/16/2015