Podcast: Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith
Season 2 Episode 6 Title: Success Under Pressure: Leadership, Business, and Life Lessons from the Turf to the Terroir

Episode Transcript:

00:05 Maxine Cuffe

You’re listening to Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith, a podcast by the Haverford Trust Company. On Speaking of Quality, Hank chats with authors, influencers, and wealth management experts to bring a sense of clarity and calm to the complexity and stress of personal finance. And now here’s your host, Hank Smith.

00:25 Hank Smith

Hello and welcome to another episode of Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights. I’m your host, Hank Smith, Director and Head of Investment Strategy at the Haverford Trust Company. On this podcast, we explore topics ranging from quality investing, retirement resilience, stock market trends, estate planning, small business ownership, behavioral psychology, and more.

Today, I’m excited to welcome NFL Hall of Famer, Super Bowl champion, business owner and outstanding leader, Dick Vermeil to the show. Welcome, Dick.

01:01 Dick Vermeil

Thank you, Hank. Nice to be with you. I appreciate the opportunity.

01:05 Hank Smith

Well, let’s just jump right into it. You are considered one of the quintessential leaders, whether it was on the gridiron or now, a co-owner of Vermeil Wines. Can we talk about some of the keys to your leadership success and how you developed into being such an effective leader?

01:29 Dick Vermeil

Well, Hank, I think leadership is an unbelievable topic and there are so many different varieties and different qualities of leaders. I say number one – I was just myself. What I learned as I grew as a leader, I learned from the people I worked with. The young kids I coached starting in high school, two different high schools, two different junior colleges, two different major universities and three NFL teams. I think the opportunity to work with the age group from 15 to 38 really allowed me to study people as they are in all environments. From an intense environment to warm friendly environments to family environments, and I really learned a lot from watching them perform. Watching them within their own situation, from the classroom to the practice field to the game day to with their own families as they matured and became married men and fathers. I really grew and I finally said to myself when I got out of coaching, leadership isn’t complicated. People aren’t complicated. If you start out with people knowing you care, you got a chance.

Then, I started writing down things that I believed in. And then I started reinforcing what I believed in by reading what other leaders have done with their careers in all walks of life, military, coaching. I learned a lot, but I keep coming back to number one. Nothing else matters unless people know you care.

So, I started coaching with that philosophy especially after the Rams. It matured at the Rams organization because I’d been out of coaching for 14 years and I’d watched the great coaches coach as a broadcaster. I was in their meeting rooms, on their practice fields, studying what they did, and watching them communicate with their own players, their own staff. I admired some and was sort of not able to understand others. But what always impressed me the most was the guys that cared the most. I kept going that way and I started reading what other people wrote and my concepts all came. They weren’t forged in the classroom. They were forged in the field like I’m sure you have Hank in your career in leadership in the financial world. I found out if players know you care, it’ll make a big difference. If staff members know you care, it’ll make a big difference. If people who work in the personnel department know you care, it’ll make a big difference. If the people that deliver the mail to the building know you care, it makes a difference in how they approach their job. So, I sort of built everything around that philosophy. I hired coaches that had the ability. They didn’t have to be the same, but had the ability to be a little bit compassionate. And some are more compassionate than others. You don’t want all the same personalities. But anyway, I built my whole philosophy around that. I went from there to saying, well, if this is what I believe in, then I’ve got to surround myself with examples of what I believe in. When I talked to people I would think, would he be a good example to another person? Would this guy sitting in the locker room getting prepared to go to practice or go to a meeting or go play Sunday afternoon, Saturday or Friday night game? Would he be a good example to the guy sitting next to him? And would he follow my example? I had that added depth to it, so I started saying, well, you know, if you care and you’re a good example, you’ve got a chance. Then I recognized, well that is not enough. You’ve got to build an atmosphere in which it’s easy to care, in which it’s easy to surround people with good examples. So, I started working on trying to improve what it was like to come in the building, what it was like to go in the meeting room, what it was like to go on the practice field, what it was like to come into the building as an outsider. Then I gave a thought to the atmosphere in which people find themselves daily. Yeah, you have to include coaching. But I found that a positive atmosphere was really important. So, I added that to it. Then I went well, you got enough. You got people in there that care that’s working for you. And then the people that are under your management know you care. You’re surrounding yourself with good examples and they’re happy to come to work then you better give them a good plan. You better define your purpose, your process, your value system and you better define it for them. If you don’t define it for them, they can all be working with a smile on their face. But we’re not getting the job done.

So we did that. And then, Hank, it moves in. You got him in the office. They know you care. There’s a lot of good examples around you every place you look. Look, you got a guy that thinks like you do or is willing to do what you’re doing and and they’re happy to be there and they understand the plan. Then you have got to get them to go to work. I learned this a long time ago as a kid working for my dad because he was sort of a Belichick-like tough guy. Hard work is not a form of punishment. And more so today. More so today than maybe at any other time in our culture. Sometimes hard work appears to some people as a form of punishment, so I made sure that people that were buying into my process were willing to go to work. I would say you know guys, if you want things you’ve never had, you gotta do things you’ve never done. That might include working longer and harder and more diligently and more intelligently than you’ve ever done before. It also might include listening and learning and adding to your whole profile as a person. And while you’re doing all that, you know what happens. You build relationships with people. And relationships can be intense. They can be emotional. They can be very impactful.

I was always given credit for being an emotional leader because that’s my makeup, my own personality. I can’t help myself. I have a lot of very, very, very, very, very, very lifelong friends that I coached that I was tough on and I drove them and I had some tough love involved. We have great relationships and I found that when teams gather to accomplish something that hadn’t been done before, if the relationships are molded properly, it’s a very tough organization to beat. Everybody feels a part of it, and nobody wants to let the other guy down.

It’s so, so critical, maybe more so today than ever before because we’re so distracted by so many different devices that tell us what to do and give us information, as you would know, in the financial world. You can’t do any of this if you’re not sincere. If they don’t believe you, if they don’t trust you. I learned a long time ago, trust is not a physical thing. It’s an emotional thing. And you’ve got to work with integrity. Your business, your company is what it is because people made it what it is because they were trustworthy. They had great integrity.

Everybody knows Haverford Trust. Everybody. It’s all built within this same scheme that I’m talking about. This same process of leadership. The old saying if you have integrity, nothing else matters.

In a nutshell, that’s how I ended up being somewhat successful in my career and ended up in the Hall of Fame. I think about the guys that I have unbelievable respect for that aren’t in the Hall of Fame when I say I’m in there. Maybe the only edge I had in being a head football coach was this concept, was this process that I molded that started in high school. Six of my starting football team in 1960 – championship team at Hillsdale High School – were at my Hall of Fame event. That told me this system works. This system works. I believe it more deeply as I talk to you, Hank, than I did six months ago.

10:40 Hank Smith

It’s fascinating because our Founder, George Connell, when he was running the firm, he stepped back in the spring of 2008. He would talk about what was important. And he always put people – our colleagues – first because if you don’t take care of the people, then how can you take care of clients. He built a culture around that. Talking about leadership, you’re a leader by example and no one worked harder than Dick Vermeil. You were notorious for 20-hour workdays, sleeping for a couple hours in your office. And if you’re doing that, it becomes infectious throughout the whole organization.

11:27 Dick Vermeil

Well, thank you for saying that. You know, I’ll be honest with you. When I came into the league, there’s Tom Landry, George Allen, Don Coryell, Don Shula, Bud Grant. All these guys. Here I am going to coach against these guys? I knew I was not going to outsmart them. But I thought being younger and passionate and willing to work because it wasn’t a form of punishment that maybe I could catch up that way. Believe me if I was smart enough to do it easier, I would have, but I didn’t have the background coming out of high school. I didn’t come out of playing for Tom Landry or Don Shula with a pro football background. I was a coach in high school. I had one assistant coach. I had one assistant coach in junior college even.

As I look back, I say part of my work ethic came out of being afraid I wasn’t doing it good enough for my players. The only thing you as a leader have total control of is your own preparation. That’s the one thing you have total control of. I had total control of my own preparation and I never wanted to feel guilty game day. If you can honestly say, you know I gave it all I had. It wasn’t good enough. Maybe I’m not smart enough to make it easier. I don’t know. But it wasn’t good enough. We got our butts beat. But we went from winning 35% of our games our first two years to winning 73% of the games our third year. So the process works. It works. Now, did we win two Super Bowls? No, we won one and lost one.

We won a championship in college. We won a high school championship. We lost the junior college championship. Because other people, some of them are doing it better than you’re doing. And hey, in your business, the financial advisors today and all this and my my son David worked for Merrill Lynch. Everybody has their financial geniuses. So how do you make what you do better than what they do? You prepare. You prepare and you care.

13:46 Hank Smith

I can’t speak to your high school and junior college, but at UCLA, you stepped into a mediocre program. A couple years later you win the Rose Bowl. You beat the number one team in the country, Ohio State. You come to the Eagles, which was a kind of a dormant franchise for several decades. You turn that around. You turned around the Rams. You turned around the Kansas City Chiefs.

In looking at your Wikipedia page, it notes that you are a tremendous judge of character. Tell us a little bit about that. They call it culture today, but you called it chemistry that could come together as a team. So how do you judge character?

14:34 Dick Vermeil

First off, to be honest with you, the best decisions I made in putting staffs together was not based on my interview with the person. It was based on conversation with people that had worked with the person. Bill Walsh helped me a lot, OK. Another fellow named Tom Catlin. We were assistants together as young coaches at the Rams and worked with people had made recommendations to me. When I went to UCLA, I still had a month of coaching to do in pro football. So, I kept seven members of the UCLA staff under contract and let them work for a month without the head coach. I knew them, but I didn’t know them personally. I couldn’t even interview some of them. I didn’t have time. I’m working full time and had responsibilities in the NFL playoffs. I talked to people that had worked with them. I love the environment in the background of people that have come up the hard way. That that worked their way up the ladder.

I don’t know what you call it in in your business, but that they keep working. Their performance takes care of their advancement. I used to have young coaches say ‘God coach, I’d like to be a head coach. How do I get there?’ I would say just do the job you’re doing better than anybody else can do it and you’ll end up with a good coaching job. My success in hiring people was based more on the trust I had in people I questioned about the person I was going to hire. I was not a great interviewer. More often than not, I already knew more about the guy I was interviewing by talking to the people that worked for him for years. Bill Walsh and I exchanged coaches, OK, so you know that that’s how I did it. I think it’s harder today. In the NFL, they got 25 guys on the staff. When I came to the Eagles, we had 10. That was the largest staff in the NFL by three. But I would say I was not a great interviewer, but I was a very good listener that people had been with the individual that could possibly fill the position I was looking to fill.

16:58 Hank Smith

Coach, you may be aware of this, but the most famous investor, Warren Buffett, owns a collection of businesses in addition to owning stock and publicly traded companies within Berkshire Hathaway. Each year, he meets with the managers of the businesses that he owns, and he asked them a question. Who out there in your industry is like you? Because I want to meet that person and perhaps buy their business. Success begets success if you’re dealing with the right people.

17:34 Dick Vermeil

There’s no one formula to leadership. What I’ve noticed on the coaching staffs that I’ve had – there were some people that were more instinctive, But you can’t prepare for everything that’s going to happen on a daily basis. Every day is different day. Every day a different situation. Every day a different crisis. I found the best leaders were the guys that instinctively knew what to say at the right time, knew how to handle the situation, knew how to get pissed off, or knew how to give that guy a hug and get a tear in your eye. I don’t know if you can train people to do that. I think that comes from a gift at birth and. They’re all different. They’re all a little bit different, but the judging character and that kind of stuff. I felt, personally, nobody could con me. I’m not bragging when I say this. I’ve coached every level and every level my starting quarterback was either All Conference, All American, All Pro or NFL Player of the Year. And one Hall of Famer. People keep saying that can’t find the quarterback. They can’t find the quarterback. I don’t know. I never complicated it and I’m not saying I was always right, but for some reason or another my quarterbacks always played real well, and with the help of everybody else. Something in me told me this was the right guy. And I feel very fortunate for that.

19:13 Hank Smith

That’s just gut instinct, right?

19:15 Dick Vermeil

Jaworski. You’ve talked about gut instinct. I was on the Rams staff as an assistant when we drafted him out of Youngstown State. He never even lined up behind the center. He lined up off the set of that old fashioned formation. But when I was there and watched this guy, I loved his passion. I loved his insanity. So I’m here for a year and then I trade. I trade a first-round pick all pro tight end for him straight across. People say Jaworski, hell, he’s never really played that much. Became a pretty good player. Instinct. You said gut feeling. That gut feeling about this guy. I liked him. I wanted him on my side. It made me look good.

19:56 Hank Smith

Dick, let’s segue and talk about Vermeil Wines and how it started. I know that there’s a family history with wine on both sides of your family, but if you could give us a little backdrop on that.

20:11 Dick Vermeil

Well, I think that comes from how you were raised. You know, when you’re born and raised in Calistoga, the North End of the Napa Valley, there are vineyards, prune orchards, all kinds of things going on agriculturally. My grandfather Vermeil – my dad’s dad – made our Vermeil Wines himself. That’s what he did as a hobby. As he got older, my brother Stan and I were assigned to help him do some of the physical things. The moving of the barrels, the racking, the crushing. I’ve actually got in the old-fashioned press and and turned the crank down the juice comes up over your feet. Physically, it impressed me. I was enjoying it. And then the next level was to sit around your holiday family dinner. 18-20 people sitting around a huge table, which we still have in the family and listen to the adults talk about the vintage they’re drinking right now. Usually, just a red and just a white. I can’t tell you if it was Cabernet, Cabernet franc Merlot. But it was red wine and white wine. And listen to my dad and my grandfather. And then sometimes Frediani Vineyard, which we still get our grapes from the original people in it. Now the kids run it, sit and talk about that vintage. What made it this? Well, it’s a little more this way this year than it was in 19, you know, 52. Those kind of things. It interested me. Then pretty quickly get to an age and my dad said Dick, would you like to taste a little wine? Oh, dad, I’d like to, you know. And I was afraid to say I didn’t like it because it meant it was important to him that that we like it. That’s how it all turned out.

A person had married into the Frediani family. The vineyard that my great grandfather on the Italian side of the family, owned 18 acres of. He had a little winery, part-time winery in the basement of his home on Spring Mountain behind Saint Helena, and he was working full time for Mondavi. His project was Opus One. To build it, organize it, buy the equipment, putter and weld it together. I said to him one day I would really like to make a bottle of Cabernet with our family name on it. He said, ‘I’ll do it! I’ll do it. Are you kidding me?’ His wine was called OnthEdge Winery, and he was making I don’t know how many cases, but it was a hobby with him in the basement of his home. Nice little family winery. So, he started doing it. The first release was 1999. I don’t know when we started at like 96. 1999 is the year the Rams go to the Super Bowl, and we win it. So now, he’s selling that at like $65 a bottle. He’s selling it much easier than he was selling OnTheEdge Cabernet. Who knew this little winery on the side of the hill? And I had no money in it. And every bottle of wine I got from him, I paid full price for it. So he said, well, let’s keep doing it. So he kept doing it.

Then along comes my two good friends, John Scarpa and Michael Aziz. They say, let’s take your process and turn it into a full-fledged business of both of these people and get extremely successful entrepreneurs on big time big time. So, money was not an issue. I said all right, you guys want to do it, we’ll do it. But that’s not my idea. So, we bought out all the wine barrels already made full of wine from Paul Smith OnThEdge Winery and produced the wine with Vermeil name on it. In 2008, we turned it into a Vermeil Wine business completely. New labels, new everything. I think we started with about 2,000 cases. Now our case production annually is based on the quality of the crop. The volume. Because we buy our grapes from the Frediani Vineyard by the row, not by the ton. One year these six rows produce five tons and next year three tons. So, it varies. This last year for example, Hank, was one of the finest years in the history of the Napa Valley in the history of Napa Valley. The 2023 wines are going to be excellent and there’s going to be a lot of it. I think we’re going to end up with around 2,300 cases. Now the project – thanks to you, you became a member already. Our business is tough to sell for us little guys. 2,300 cases in their normal rotation of vintages each year. We’ll work at it. But the 2023s are going to be outstanding. The 2021s that you already got involved with. Two of the cabernets just got 95 grades and one got a 93 grade. All three cabernets got A- grades and that’s hard to do. Little guys like us when you compete against the best wines of the United States. That’s my project. I’ll spend some time on it today. I’ve got a charity wine dinner. I provide the wine for a little fundraising dinner for Chester County Hospital. I provide the wines for the Boys & Girls Club Downtown, which we make over $2,000,000 with, and I like doing that. It’s part of my heritage. Everyone exchanged wines. There were no labels on half the bottles in the old days. That’s my wine history. We have a tasting room in Napa. 1018 1st Street. It won best tasting room in Napa this last year. Number one tasting room in Napa. It doesn’t break even, but where we make it break even financially is where we sell a lot of our wine club membership. As of last week, we had 502. You made it 503 club members. We have about 140 club members in Philadelphia and it’s expensive. Hey, the wines are expensive, but we don’t own the vineyard, we don’t own the winery and we are not the wine makers. Our wines have competed against wines people are paying over $400 a bottle and cabernets and won blind tasting. I’ve sat there in awe. In fact, I didn’t even give my own wine a first in the blind tasting that we won. But anyway, that’s my history in the wine world.

27:19 Hank Smith

Dick – talk about 2020 with all the fires. You elected not to produce wine that year because you knew it would not be a quality wine.

27:34 Dick Vermeil

Within our contract, if you pick the grape you pay for it. If you don’t pick it, you don’t pay for it. There was a tremendous forest fire in 2017. Our grapes were all picked in 2017. 2020 – forest fire comes at a time grapes are all on the vines. The fire flame did not hit the vineyard, the smoke did. In our opinion, it damaged the quality of the skin. Now you get the flavors and coloring that from your skin. So, we did not make any red wine in 2020. We just didn’t do it. It created an issue in that serving our wine club members, but we had enough of 2019. We had over 700 cases because of the crop that one year. We were able to satisfy most needs using our 2019 reds to supplement. Of course it was a lower price than the full cabernets to supplement what we didn’t have. Carol and I rented a house there out there every year for a month in August / September. That house burned down in the forest fire, so it was not a good year in the wine business. 2021 was much better. We’re going to have at least three years in a row of 95+ plus cabernets and I’m very proud of that. To me, Hank, it’s like being in the NFC Championship game every year. You got there.

29:16 Hank Smith

I suspect there were a lot of wineries that did bottle their 2020 grapes, and it speaks to the integrity that you mentioned earlier. If you can’t put your best foot forward, don’t do it.

29:33 Dick Vermeil

The bigger people also have second labels. A lot of them have second labels you don’t even know it, and they charge much less for it. There are no inexpensive faulty wines in the Napa Valley. None. But people have second labels and they can sell that at a much lower level and people paying it don’t expect to get the $300 cab. They get a $35 bottle of wine that’s drinkable. We just felt we could not do that.

30:07 Hank Smith

You have brought together a great team of people at Vermeil Wines, much like you brought together great teams of people in both college and your NFL experience. But talk a little bit about your team at Vermeil Wines.

30:23 Dick Vermeil

Paul Smith was our wine maker and everything and that disintegrated a little bit because of a divorce. Situations occurred. I had been talking to a guy named Thomas Brown. To me, he’s the number one wine maker in the Napa Valley. I call him the Bill Belichick of the Napa Valley. I talked to him for a couple of years. He didn’t want the job. He said you have a good wine maker, you have a good wine maker. I like your wines. You’re doing a good job. Then we lose our winemaker for personal reasons, and now I don’t have a winemaker, so I come to him. He lives in Calistoga, my hometown, and I still had credibility in Calistoga. At that time we had a tasting room in Calistoga as well, so he said alright, I’ll do it. He owned a percentage of a winery at that time, so he has his winemaking team make our wines. He’s the consulting wine maker. At that time it was Andy Jones. Andy Jones did a great job for us. He’s actually the guy that made these 95 cabernets. Did 90% of it. He went on to a bigger job in the Napa Valley. Then Thomas Brown added another one of his wine makers out of Mending Wall Winery to make our wines and it’s a nice modern winery, not too big, very practically run, very nice, very nice place on Silverado Trail, between Calistoga and Saline. That’s where our wines are made now. Carol and I were there, for example, this year when they crushed our sauvignon blanc, we are sitting there with glasses tasting the juice as it came out of the press. That’s how close we were to it. That’s Thomas brown. Tim Beranek is now our winemaker. Our tasting room in in Napa is run by Andrew Curry and Kayla Brown, our manager and assistant manager. We have about five employees that work through it. It’s open seven days a week. It opens at noon, normally closes at around 10pm and weekends sometimes later. Our issue is that it’s become more of a wine lounge than a wine tasting room. People come in and buy a glass of wine and sit down. They enjoy the environment. They enjoy the fact we’re remodeling all those seating structures as we speak, and there’s no other tasting room that has a replica of an NFL coach’s bust from Hall of Fame and a Super Bowl trophy and a few NFL-type pictures and that kind of stuff. There’s over 50 something tasting rooms in Napa, right along that whole area. We’re doing something right because last year we were voted the number one tasting room in Napa. So that’s how we do it.

Now our wine club. We don’t sell wine wholesale anymore. We did initially, Hank, because we needed cash flow. You would understand that and we just don’t make enough wine. You can’t wholesale it because we are losing a lot of money every year. I mean to the real money people was a lot of money. When I say we make money to real money people, you’re not making money. A little better than breaking even. And if we need $300 to buy new furniture, we have it in the bank. We don’t have to take it out of our pocket. Took us 12 years to get to that state.

34:02 Hank Smith

You’re pursuing a love and a passion in this business, for sure.

34:07 Dick Vermeil

Part of our debate at coffee time and toast at breakfast is which wine are we going to taste tonight? And you know what I have found? Carol and I will drink half of it one night and then the second night we always say this wine tastes better than it did last night. It’s not mental either. You can taste the difference.

34:30 Hank Smith

I would welcome our listeners to learn more about Vermeil Wines and and visit www.vermeilwines.com. You’ll get the history. And trust me, it’s pretty easy to sign up. You give a handful of different options depending on the price points you want to be at, and I found it very easy. Very quick. And as you were kind enough to say, I became a member last week and look forward to my first shipment.

35:03 Dick Vermeil

Thank you. You will not be disappointed, I promise you.

35:08 Hank Smith

Dick, I always love to ask my guests what are some of your favorite books you’ve either recently read or have had a big impact on you over the years?

35:21 Dick Vermeil

You know, I love reading military. Why? Because of leadership. I just read. The Last Hope Island by Lynn Olsen. The Last Hope Island is an outstanding World War II book. It’s a little disappointing because the mistakes our leadership made. If they had listened better rather than get politically involved, we wouldn’t have the issues with Russia right now that we have. And now those kind of books, the other one I just finished reading War in the Pacific series by Ian Toll. There are three books, 700 and something pages of it. Outstanding. I’m reading Angelo Cataldi’s book right now, called Loud. It’s a really good read. I just finished the book called Nimitz. Admiral Nimitz, outstanding man. And a unique style leader. Outstanding man. Outstanding Admiral.

36:31 Hank Smith

That’s terrific. I look forward to getting those because I travel and and there’s nothing better to make an airline flight quicker than by reading a good book.

36:44 Dick Vermeil

Well, get the Last Hope Island by Lynn Olson. She’s written many. I started reading. I couldn’t put it down. It was really good.

36:57 Hank Smith

Don’t give that up. I can’t wait to get that book. Well, Dick, I think I could spend another hour or two with you, and I certainly want to thank you so much for joining us on our podcast today.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights. Our next episode will be released shortly. In the meantime, please send suggestions or questions for me or the Haverford Trust team to marketing@haverfordquality.com. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share this podcast.

Until next time. I’m Hank Smith. Stay bullish.

37:37 Maxine Cuffe

Thanks for listening to this episode of Speaking of Quality Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith. To hear future episodes of Speaking of Quality, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about the Haverford Trust Company, please visit www.haverfordquality.com.

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