116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Lura McBride leads Van Meter into 95th year in Cedar Rapids
Howard Hall award winner sees putting people first in company, community as key to growth
CEDAR RAPIDS — When Lura McBride first learned about Van Meter Inc., electrical and automation sales and distribution weren’t even part of the conversation.
She knew little about what Van Meter actually did when she first met Barry Boyer, then the company’s chief executive officer.
Boyer had reached out to her after seeing McBride on the Corridor Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 list. McBride had just moved back to her hometown and was looking to form a professional network.
Boyer talked about Van Meter’s values: employee ownership, giving back to the community, leadership development, putting people first.
“I left thinking I would love to work for that guy, and I'd love to work for that company,” McBride said. “I wasn't even looking for another job … and then I was pretty resolute there wasn't going to be anything at that company for me.”
She joined the Cedar Rapids-based company as a vice president after the 2008 flood and was named its president and CEO in 2016.
The employee-owned electrical and automation distributor is now celebrating its 95th year in operation. It operates in various cities across Iowa and in Nebraska, Kansas, Virginia, Alabama, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
She recently was presented with the prestigious Howard Hall Excellence in Business Award by the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance. The award is named for industrialist and philanthropist, Howard Hall (1894-1971), who used his influence to boost the Cedar Rapids area economy and community.
Brucemore CEO David Janssen, in presenting the award to McBride, 51, last month, praised her courage, business acumen, deep devotion to those she leads and a “tireless commitment” to the community as traits mirroring Hall’s.
“She focuses on building strong teams, fostering exceptional leadership and a high performance culture to create lasting value for customers, supplier partners, communities and employee owners,” Janssen said. “Her success is evident to anyone paying attention.”
When she arrived to Van Meter over a decade ago, McBride said the company started moving beyond a $200 million to $250 million small company and faced the challenge of its own growth while the community grappled with recovery from devastating flooding.
“It was at a really important inflection point for Van Meter of how are we really scaling up to this next level … and now doing it again as we cross into the $1 billion mark,” McBride said.
Boyer’s legacy was understanding that to get to the next level of organizational growth, it needed a different approach. People, process and technology needed to align.
“I just happened to be a person that had a background and a skill set that was at the right time for the right opportunity,” McBride said.
People at center
Before joining Van Meter, McBride had worked remotely for Accenture in Chicago, her first job after graduating from the University of Iowa.
But Boyer’s initial conversation stuck with her as they continued to meet occasionally. Eventually, he called her to share a job opening, and she became the company’s vice president of organizational effectiveness.
Her previous job had been centered on ”people, process and technology and the alignment of those things to really help achieve business strategies about change management, about human performance and people and how they really drive business,” McBride said. “That really helped me at Van Meter.”
To foster an environment where all those things are in alignment, McBride said there are “five Ps” that Van Meter employee owners live by: People, Partners, Progress, Place and Profit. That means a monthly celebration meeting, recognizing birthdays and anniversaries, twice-a-year performance reviews called “meaningful conversations” centered on the five Ps.
Teaching people how to drive a truck and get a product to the proper location, or how to sell products and enter orders in the system, comes easier than teaching the company’s values, McBride said, so Van Meter developed a one-year in-boarding program.
“Culture is the outcome,” McBride said. “It's what you get when 850 people think, feel and act in a common way and when people think, feel and act those bullet points under each of our values — how you live your values.
“You get commonality, and you get a culture of positivity and of exceeding expectations and taking care of one another and giving back to our communities and being thoughtful about growing profitably.”
Employee owners
Fundamentally, that focus on relationships and values is what McBride says keeps the company growing.
Investing in employee development and sharing why employee ownership matters “plays a huge role in our growth story” since Van Meter became 100 percent employee-owned in 2005. People began understanding their role in relationships with customers and their ability to influence that next sale to grow the value of the company, she said.
“We really started teaching people about employee ownership, and how a delivery driver helps grow the value of the company, how an accounts payable specialist helps grow the value of the company, how a community impact manager helps grow the value of the company,” McBride said.
Every time Van Meter has grown — even through natural disasters or other challenges — Community Impact Manager Danielle Monthei said McBride has been in the middle of it, whether that was intentional or a matter of the timing being right.
“She has the ability to problem-solve what's going on right now at the same time as planning for the future,” Monthei said. “A lot of people, they can't do that. It’s a lot of times one or the other.”
Working for a ‘greater future’
If Howard Hall were still alive, McBride said, she’d want to understand what fueled his entrepreneurial energy and philanthropic passions. For McBride, that answer is being invested in the future and making Cedar Rapids the best place to be.
Monthei said Van Meter has supported a number of community causes, including:
- Donating to a legacy wall that will honor those who have lost family members to suicide or attempted suicide at the nearly finished renovation of the Witwer Center building downtown into nonprofit Foundation 2 Crisis Services headquarters.
- Donating to the new Boys and Girls Club in Wellington Heights that will offer a place that supports children in a core neighborhood.
- Participating in Mercy Medical Center’s breast cancer walk every year.
- Having employees distribute 1,200 turkeys from the company’s warehouse before Thanksgiving for distribution to the needy.
The community seems to take pride in the company’s 95-year history in Cedar Rapids, Monthei said.
“I think the community appreciates long-standing companies that take leadership in making this a good place to be,” Monthei said. “They expect that of us, and then we assume that responsibility and take that very seriously and humbly. It's a pretty cool thing to have the ability to take care of the community that we started in 95 years ago, and then 25 others.”
McBride champions efforts to bring the public and private sectors together, using her position to make an impact on numerous community boards and committees, including United Fire Group Insurance, University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, the Hall-Perrine Foundation and as a founding member of the Grand Impact. She has served on the boards of UnityPoint Health-St. Luke’s and Tanager and co-chaired the Waypoint capital campaign.
Business, youths
McBride said it’s important for her and the company to engage with the broader business community, whether that’s through the Economic Alliance or with city officials on economic growth, workforce recruitment and retention, or quality-of-life initiatives.
Sometimes, it means supporting interviews with new businesses looking to come here like SubZero, which is building a massive warehouse in southwest Cedar Rapids, and seeing it not as competitive but as a long-term gain for the community.
“I just inherently care a lot,” McBride said. “This is my community. This is where I grew up. This is where my family is, this is where my friends are. This is where my business is.”
She also is investing in the next generation of workforce as an advocate for City View, Iowa’s first magnet high school aimed at keeping kids in school who may have been struggling in a traditional high school.
McBride also chairs the Cedar Rapids Community School District's career pathways committee. She’s served on the advisory board for Iowa BIG, which offers experiential learning to high school students through partnerships with businesses and organizations.
McBride doesn’t want to leave it to chance that someone else may assume that responsibility.
“It's about caring for a better tomorrow and a greater future than we have today, for the future generations to come,” McBride said. “Whether it's people in this business, whether it's my kids and their kids living and working in this community, it's just about we all want to have a path and a plan and to make sure that things are better tomorrow than they are today. And I'm going to live here a long time, so it should be great.”
Comments: (319) 398-8494; marissa.payne@thegazette.com
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