"A creative, inspirational, and motivational CEO has a more courageous and visionary leadership style."
Tanner Leatherstein is the CEO and Chief Craftsman of PEGAI whose goal is to help people make a statement through leather in the most authentic and stylish way possible.
Tanner found that there is a lack of knowledge about leather in the general public. Big luxury companies take advantage of this lack of knowledge and offer them products that aren’t really made of high-quality materials. As a solution, he started multiple initiatives under the brand such as the Tanner’s Club where he shares entertaining content to people so they can make better purchase decisions moving forward. In everything he does, he always incorporates his humanitarian side by donating a part of the profits generated from his businesses to help people in need.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Tanner Leatherstein: I am Tanner Leatherstein, the CEO and Chief Craftsman at PEGAI. There’s a lack of knowledge about leather in the general public. Not all people know how to assess if the leather is good or if it’s perfect for their needs. Big luxury companies take advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge and offer them products that aren’t really made of high-quality materials. Our company addresses this problem in two ways.
– Through informing them by posting entertaining videos and articles under the Tanner’s Club. We help our audience understand leather and use it to its best potential. We go out of our way to even criticize some famous luxury brands’ products so people would know what the difference is between good and mediocre leather.
– Through offering them examples of what good leather craftsmanship is under PEGAI, LLC. We created the brand to help people make a statement through leather goods in the most authentic and stylish way possible. Our hope is that people can enjoy leather in its natural beauty and lessen the gap between their expectations and experiences about leather.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get to where you are today? Give us some lessons you learned along the way.
Tanner Leatherstein: When I was a child, I grew up in a tannery. My dad was very eager to include me in the business and I’m very thankful for that. I saw leather tanning as a fun game to play as a child but as I grew older, it became my passion. I tried other jobs, took my MBA degree, became a business consultant, became an Uber driver, and sold textiles. But my love for leather has gotten stronger and that led me to create my own brand: PEGAI, LLC. Throughout my journey of pursuing leather in different parts of the world, I learned that it is important that you do what you love to do and don’t force yourself to love your job if that’s not what your heart desires.
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Tanner Leatherstein: PEGAI (http://www.pegai.com/) is an online leathercrafts brand established in 2017 and is located in Dallas, Texas. They are experts in creating lifestyle products that are useful yet elegant. All of their products are premium goods made of real full-grain leather that will surely help you create a lasting first impression. It is part of the brand’s mission to help people experience leather in the most authentic and stylish way possible.
PEGAI is also passionate about creating a better world. Thus, the brand donates $1 to charities from each purchase. For this purpose, they partnered up with two organizations.
– Save the Children (https://www.savethechildren.org/). Save the Children Organization is the first global movement for children and was given top ratings for achieving incredible results for children. They help underprivileged children around the world through their policies and advocacies, emergency response, and their health, education, and protection programs.
– IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation (https://ihh.org.tr/). The IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation provides humanitarian aid and helps to prevent violations of all people’s fundamental rights and freedom. They are headquartered in Turkey and are now serving 123 countries. Their priority is to help people in war-zone areas, disaster zones, and countries and regions with cases of poverty.
PEGAI continues to innovate and implement multiple initiatives to further help more people – either through their leatherworks, entertaining and informational content, or humanitarian deeds.
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Tanner Leatherstein: There are various considerations we need to know before we learn how to become a CEO. There are managerial-style CEOs that are great at organizing and managing tasks and are always on the go. These are great skills needed to become a CEO. However, there are also CEOs that are a more inspirational, motivational, and creative person and they are usually the CEOs of startup and disruptive companies.
This type of CEO motivates their employees to come up with innovative products and services that didn’t exist before in the market. They’re more focused on inspiring their employees to create something rather than focusing on being efficient and effective on the management side of the company. A creative, inspirational, and motivational CEO has a more courageous and visionary leadership style. We should also look at the type of company these CEOs are trying to run and the initiatives they are trying to implement to determine what kind of CEOs they want to be.
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Tanner Leatherstein: For me, the most successful CEOs are the most visionary and creative ones who are trying to change the way we do things like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Elon Musk changed the way people commute or transport on a daily basis while saving the environment. He was very successful in his work and was supported by his customers and employees. However, Elon is way too eager on their business that he spends too much time on it. But if that works for him, then that’s good. As for me, I want to keep a work-life balance. While I also aim to try and change the world, I think it’s still important to take care of ourselves, too, and spend quality time with our loved ones.
Many CEOs fall into the trap of being all over the place. What are the top activities a CEO should focus on to be the best leader the company needs? Explain.
Tanner Leatherstein: CEOs tend to fall into too many pitfalls. Most of them can do a lot of stuff and for that reason, they want to do a lot of stuff. They are involved in too many businesses which is an inefficient way of managing one’s time because you only have a certain amount of time to work on things. CEOs should only focus on high-priority stuff which depends from company to company.
If you’re one of the most established companies, CEOs must focus on the financing side of things, improving efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction, and reducing company costs. If you’re the CEO of a new company or of a new concept that you’re trying to introduce to the world, you have to be more focused on the design, engineering, and development of the product or service.
Fundamentally, one thing that all CEOs must keep in mind is to deliver the value that you promised to your customers. The pricing of your products and services, the quality, the customer service – it should all meet the customer’s expectations.
The Covid-19 Pandemic put the leadership skills of many to the test, what were some of the most difficult challenges that you faced as a CEO/Leader in the past year? Please list and explain in detail.
Tanner Leatherstein: When we first realized that we’re going to go through a pandemic, we were shocked. Our sales dropped and there were business closures. Our plans started to fail which was very scary for me. I took a deep breath and then I realized that it was not only for me and our business, but it was also for the entire world and panicking won’t help anybody. So instead of worrying, I focused on the tasks at hand and changed the things that weren’t working. I asked myself, “How can we go around them? How can we find an alternative solution for it?”
It was also very important to remember that we weren’t the only ones affected, but it was the entire industry. So it was quite a relief to think that you can’t deliver something because no one else can possibly deliver the same thing. So as a CEO, I analyzed what changed, why it changed, and what other creative ways I can do to adapt to this new environment.
Another challenge that I faced during the pandemic was more on the operational side of the business such as logistics and the supply chain. A lot of things got disrupted. The shipping costs increased tremendously, we had a new way of calculating our inventories and stock levels, we changed the way we communicated with our vendors, and our prices slowly increased to reflect some of these changes. We started to communicate new expectations for our customers. And we really appreciated how our stakeholders welcomed us despite the various changes in the business.
What are some of the greatest mistakes you’ve noticed some business leaders made during these unprecedented times? What are the takeaways you gleaned from those mistakes?
Tanner Leatherstein: During these unprecedented times, most business leaders panicked too much. They worry and just stop doing things that they forgot that there’s always a solution to everything. Everyone else has to figure things out, too, so they should stop worrying about the problems and start thinking about what needs to be done and how they will do it now that the whole rules of the game have changed.
In your opinion, what changes played the most critical role in enabling your business to survive/remain profitable, or maybe even thrive? What lessons did all this teach you?
Tanner Leatherstein: We started to look for new ways to increase our impact. Our goal was to have the maximum number of people experience good leather at the greatest fair value possible. With the changes in the environment, the cost went up, the shipping took longer than usual, the supply chain became disruptive, the delivery times were slower, we started thinking, “What can we do?”
We started to look for new ways and new partnerships to keep our costs at acceptable levels and to keep on delivering that high-quality leather crafts to our customers in this new environment. We sat down and talked about it a little bit. We started new networks, research, partnerships, providers, and models of the business. For example, we ship our product from Point A to Point B and then to the customer, but after the pandemic, we needed to be creative so we started shipping from Point A to the customer.
We started questioning every step of the game and how we can move things around to establish new channels and business models to remain competitive, profitable, and operational in these challenging times. Being flexible and keeping our focus on delivering the value we promised our customers is the biggest aspect that kept us operational in this unprecedented time.
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Tanner Leatherstein: The most pressing challenge I’m trying to solve in my business right now is to balance the cost and the service time to the customers. The product quality is never a question but I’m trying new ways to understand how my customers will respond to price changes in my collection. Can they wait a little longer for a cheaper-priced product that still delivers the same quality? Or maybe they’re okay paying at a higher price point to receive their products earlier. I’m trying to figure out how to balance this so I can serve my customers better and offer them better service moving forward.
You already shared a lot of insights with our readers and we thank you for your generosity. Normally, leaders are asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is the most useless skill you have learned, at school or during your career?
Tanner Leatherstein: I consider my handyman ability and my eagerness to do a lot of things by myself to be my useless talent. I’m just basically stopping myself from doing things that I can really do but don’t have the time to start doing. I’m more focused on creating value for people and make them understand how leather can elevate their lives.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Tanner Leatherstein: The most difficult decision I had to make in 2021 was to choose whether we should stay stagnant, shrink the business, and play safe or expand and invest more, try more initiatives, and be bold despite difficult circumstances. As for our business, we did the latter and kept expanding the team, kept investing in more initiatives, kept trying more and new partnerships, new products, new team members, continued training and educating our craftsmen in Turkey, and kept on growing and improving our facilities for them to have a better environment. All these business decisions definitely paid off. We didn’t see a decline in our sales like some of our other competitors experienced.
All our initiatives were profitable. Our employees are even happier than last year because of all the improvements. We had big wage increases in Turkey due to the currency meltdown and we wanted to have them stay at a certain buying power regardless of the country’s economic situation. We wanted our team not to be impacted by those changes. It was a steady 2021 for us compared to 2020, but overall we’re happy. One of the greatest business ideas going forward came to us in 2021 and we’re now very excited to start 2022 as we’re off to a very big start to expand our business ten times this year. All those team improvements, new initiatives, new research, new thinking, new trials, paid off big time and we’re certain that we’re going to receive big results this year.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Tanner Leatherstein for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Tanner Leatherstein or his company, you can do it through his – Instagram
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