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Welcome to GreatConversations, a podcast about leadership and life from GreatAmerica Financial Services. Mitch Leahy, Vice President and General Manager for our office Equipment Group hosts our NextWave series of talks with thought leaders and innovators from across the business world.
On today’s episode of GreatConversations, Mitch hosts Tyler Grigsby, President at Fisher’s Technology from Boise, Idaho. Ty shares his unique story of starting out as Fisher’s customer to currently serving as their President. They dive into Ty’s history with finance and accounting, but also discusses his development into the leadership role he holds today. Ty shares tough lessons he has learned throughout his career and provides insights on how working hard has got him to where he is today.
Listen to full podcast or read the abbreviated interview below!
GreatConversations with GreatAmerica- Episode 5: From Customer to President – Grigsby’s Unique Journey to Leadership | Tyler Grigsby, Fisher’s Technology
Mitch: Hello and welcome to GreatConversations with GreatAmerica. I'm Mitch Leahy, and I'm very excited to welcome somebody I've had to opportunity to get to know over the last year. I’ve been super impressed with him as a person and the organization he’s a part of, Fisher’s Technology, which is an office technology business that services a tremendous area of the western portion of the country. All the way from Boise, Idaho, please welcome, Ty Grigsby
Ty: Thank you for having me here, Mitch. I appreciate it.
Before Becoming Fisher’s Technology’s President
Mitch: You are currently the president of Fisher's Technology, but before we get into what you're doing in your current role, you have an interesting story about how you came to join Fisher’s. First you were a customer of Fisher's, then became part of their finance team, and you’re a part of the executive leadership team. How did that all come to fruition?
Ty: That is a great question. I started my career out of college and getting my MBA during 2008, which was a tough time with the recession. There weren’t many jobs available, so you had to figure out how to get creative and offer any services you could for free to businesses. But I got lucky through some internships, and I started working for a company called Micron Technology, a Fortune 100 customer here located Boise which is quite rare. So, I got a chance to work with them on the finance and treasury team. And as a result, I got to know Fisher’s. Fisher’s was headed for a lot of growth through consolidation and acquisitions, which has been commonplace in this channel for the past 10 years.
While at Micron, I handled a lot of acquisitions, including large ones internationally, so it was a good fit for me. At the time I was looking for a gateway into entrepreneurship and had a lot to learn. That's how Fisher’s and I connected. Chris Taylor, CEO, J.T. Jones, CFO, and Eric Strand, VP of sales are all owners of Fisher’s and brought me in as the controller. But the real interesting part of this story is how I go from a controller to a president of a fairly large company. Truthfully, I am still trying to figure that out today. Previously working in finance, I have a lot of private equity experience and other typical experience you'd see from a CFO, and I always thought I would go down the path of becoming a CFO. However, I eventually realized people are really where my passion is, and I started to understand that when I would interview for CFO positions. At Fisher’s, I felt like we hadn't done enough yet and there was much more to come for us. All they had done is acquire since I came on board, and at a certain point, the acquisitions start to catch up with you to where you have to figure out how to streamline processes and become more automated. Chris and the others saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself, which was that I could lead, but I would need some development to get there. The hard skill of accounting helps when you're leading a company, but the soft skills are really the most important part. I’m extremely grateful for what they saw in me about two years ago. It's very untraditional and not normal, but it does happen. It can serve as a lesson for other people to know that you need to have good mentors in your life that can see far beyond what you can see and take a chance on you.
Mitch: What a great story and a testament to the leadership group at Fisher’s. The shareholders at Fisher's recognized that this is somebody coming through a different career path but were able to identify something in you that aligned with where they needed to be focused when it came to their team members. I know Chris has a huge focus on the team, culture and ensuring that people feel like they're in a good spot so they can take care of your customers. I give you a lot of credit because that's a big transition. Along with that I’m sure there were some nerves with this large step, but you are doing a fantastic job with it.
Ty: It was a scary leap, but I’m up for the challenge and it's been fun. I’ve been able to meet a lot of people like you through that experience, which has been great.
Mitch: No growth without discomfort, I suppose. Ty, tell me a little bit about the acquisition activity that you have been very active in. Is there anything that has surprised you coming from Micron, where you were working with a completely different subset of organizations versus coming over to Fisher’s where you're not the same business, but something that's very similar and trying to expand market share. Is there anything that you've learned over the last few years being involved in this industry that's surprised you?
Ty: There is so much. At Micron the acquisitions were international, which had a different set of challenges dealing with foreign exchange rate, different languages, and other cultures. Here in Boise, Idaho, you're dealing with small family businesses versus these multinational companies. From my perspective, it was a nice and refreshing change. When you start to peel back the onion on some of these acquisitions at Fisher’s, you must figure out what the value is of each acquisition. We have learned a lot along the way and learned hard lessons where we weren’t 100% proud of an acquisition, but through those lessons we have developed an amazing integration team. You cannot wing acquisitions and integrate others into your company without being intentional. You need to think of every aspect that you can and create a checklist. We're lucky enough with our company culture that we've been able to bring in incredible talent. They’ve figured out how to work through the process, even when we’ve thrown several acquisitions to manage at a time. The biggest challenge is keeping the leadership team happy while knowing you want to grow and achieve profit. With so much consolidation you either grow or sell. We're entrepreneurial and we want to be on forefront of growing and do so privately. We're going to do everything we can to make that happen and to differentiate ourselves in some way.
Mitch: You’ve been a key shareholder as far as thinking about how to continue to remain independent. There's a handful of others throughout the channel and throughout the U.S. trying to figure out that exact same thing, many of which I'm sure you guys are familiar with. But I want to back up a little bit further. So, are you a Boise native, born and raised?
Ty: Born and raised. My dad's a banker and he ran the west side of the United States for US Bank for 30 plus years and is retired now. Because of my dad’s job, we jumped around from Salt Lake and around the Pacific Northwest quite a bit before finally settling in Boise, which is where I’ve been for most of my life. I lived and grew up in banks. I would bring my Legos to the bank on the weekends and try to build some fun stuff while they would bring out those big leasing folders and loan docs from back in the day and watch how they filled up the office. That’s how I grew up, which was a little different childhood than most.
Building Leadership Along the Way
Mitch: Did your dad's involvement in a large organization like that influence you to want to be in leadership or did it make you want to be more home-based?
Ty: I think for me, it stemmed from sports. I’ve played sports my whole life and of course we all want to go pro. The sports I typically played were basketball, baseball, and football, but I really leaned into football. Watching leadership within the football team and wanting the team to excel helped me naturally become a leader. That's what helped me understand the power of leadership and the power of a team. I didn't fully translate that to the business world until college. One lesson I’ve learned that I think is important for young leaders to know; I wasn't the greatest in school. I didn't really get the 4.0 until I got my MBA, and I didn't know what I wanted. School wasn't that important to me growing up and so I didn't try. It wasn't something that I felt was the future for me and it should have been. I think that's where a mentor would have been beneficial for me. My story starts off with not really caring all that much about school. I was getting C’s and was focused on sports and girls. I never really saw myself as an entrepreneur; I just loved building things. I was very curious about everything, and I'd ask questions all the time. But the leadership and entrepreneur part came from college. And I realized that I'm not meant for the corporate world, I just wanted to do something different. I had a lot of odd jobs throughout college like bartending or working as a server. I really started to notice my impact on people by just having conversations with anyone about anything and seeing how it can brighten their day. I'm naturally gifted with the accounting side of my brain. Numbers come naturally, and we can formulate some incredible things in our brain that would make us nerds. But I always thought about how to translate being the nerdy accountant or the banker, while maintaining a warm personality that cares about people. That's the niche I started to lean into. I really didn't know the mentorship piece of Chris, JT, Eric and others at Fisher's is when they say, “you know what you have here, and you know you care about people, and you can't do this without wonderful people.” In terms of living and breathing the culture, I believe Fisher’s and GreatAmerica are by far some of the best. If anyone's ever gotten the privilege to go to GreatAmerica and visit, Tony, Martin, Jennie and others that are high up in leadership, you’ll see them sitting out with the rest of the team, and that is an intentional culture move. Imagine what would happen at GreatAmerica if they decided to go to closed offices like everyone else? It would inherently change the culture of that business. I firmly believe culture eats strategy for breakfast. That's a saying by Peter Drucker, and I firmly believe to my core that culture starts with your people. When you have a solid culture, your employees will take care of your customers and everything else will take care of itself. Our structure at Fisher’s looks like an inverse pyramid with leaders at the bottom and our customers and our team members equally at the top. It’s important to have those two equal and the CEOs/presidents at the bottom is because, as leaders, we must bear the weights of the decisions that are made. It’s critical to understand that you're a servant to the team because you must bear that weight. That's exactly what we believe in, and we understand that leadership is hard, and it's a day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute commitment to your team. We do the best we can and there's no perfect leader. I'm not perfect and I'm still learning every day.
Building Company Culture
Mitch: It's so interesting because you jumped into an organization with over 15 locations covering an incredible square mileage across the West. How intentional do you have to be to keep those people connected when physically being together isn’t easy?
Ty: It's hard. Geographically, the Pacific Northwest is beautiful and we're lucky to be located there, but the square mileage alone is pretty significant. While Chris and I need to get out to our different markets, it's more important to develop our team leaders to be a face of their teams. They've got to believe in them. Our intention is the development of those teams and having people be on top of calling out to customers. Another young leader in the industry that works for us is Shannon Sanden. She oversees our Montana and Washington markets. As a general manager for those areas, she's the one that bears the weight of making sure she's in front of everybody, and our job is to develop her to do so. I think that's one way of doing it, but there's no company in this channel that has multiple markets that does it perfectly.
One thing we've noticed is everyone's going to have their local culture, so one thing we've tried to be intentional about investing in is bringing in our team members to Boise to understand and see firsthand the original culture that was created. I don’t have any real stats to share, but I do believe there'll be some positive data to show the correlation between doing things like this for your team and the retention/turnover rates. Once they've come to Boise and felt the culture, then we have to mentor great leaders locally, they can grow their career to do something with it and hopefully we can retain them for as long as we can.
Mitch: One thing that I've recognized is we have a small percentage of team members who work remotely that are mostly in sales. We also have some other office locations now from different acquisitions and growth. I always think about what the experience is of new team members who aren’t here every day. They aren’t sitting next to their team leader or peers who are doing the same things or to helping with onboarding to understand the company.
Ty: Yeah, absolutely. What are you guys doing differently that you think that has been a difference maker with that?
Mitch: We're still learning, but we recently realized our geographically diverse sales team needed more support. So, we brought in a sales enablement leader. Our aim is to keep our sales and support teams in sync, ensure our customers have a consistent experience, and share best practices. We also face the challenge of passing down knowledge from senior team members to interns or new graduates.
To tackle this, we're making a concerted effort to interact more frequently than just our annual National Sales Meeting in Cedar Rapids. Leaders are encouraged to visit our offices in Des Moines, Chicago, Atlanta, and Marshall, Minnesota, at least quarterly. This helps strengthen connections and convey our company culture. While it takes time and effort, it's an investment that should boost retention by making everyone feel valued and part of the team. We're also using Microsoft Teams to enable remote collaboration and improve the onboarding experience. It’s all about making sure no one feels like just another number, but a key part of our team.
Ty: That's one of the hard things about leadership. It demands time and effort, and it’s not something you can fake. Often, you end up spending more time with your team and less on the actual work, which often means working after hours. But building real, genuine connections is what matters. Being authentic shows you care about your team. It’s tough to make it to all their family events or celebrate every win, but we have to try our best.
Mitch: Agreed. It comes down to your team members. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Personal relationships matter. You don’t need to be best friends, but spending a lot of time together means you need alignment on getting the job done, focusing on the customer, and making work life easier for each other.
Career Lessons
Mitch: Throughout your career, what's something that made you say, "I want to keep doing this," or "I'll never do that again"?
Ty: I've had my share of failures and lucky breaks, but it all boils down to work ethic. Even in Fortune 100 companies, hard work can outshine intelligence. A degree from Harvard means little without a strong work ethic. My advice to anyone starting out is to dedicate yourself fully, even if it means long hours and working for free just to learn. When I started at Micron, I was hired as a foreign exchange analyst, but within a month, key managers retired. Instead of thinking about my life outside work, my curiosity and work ethic drove me to step into those roles. I took on extra responsibilities, learning and automating processes to add value. Yes, it was costly and exhausting, but it was a sacrifice to learn more. Now, my goal is to help younger people avoid having to work extra hours to advance. I was lucky to have a supportive partner. My wife, Haley, who also works in our company, has been crucial to my success. Having someone who understands and supports your ambitions is vital. Whether you're an individual contributor or a C-suite executive, having a supportive partner makes a significant difference. We've seen how the lack of such support can impact success.
Mitch: Absolutely. My wife started her own business five years ago, so I've seen the entrepreneurial grind up close. I’ve been in mid-level management at GreatAmerica for a few years and traveled a lot for sales. We're both very career-driven and all in on our work. But unless you’re right there, you only see the end result and can’t fully appreciate everything that went into it.
Life Outside of Fisher’s
Mitch: Ty, what’s going on outside of work?
Ty: We have young kids. Jack is almost five, and Harper just turned three. They keep us incredibly busy. From my dad, I learned that intentional time with kids is more important than the amount of time. Being present, having fun, and wrestling with them is key. I'm working on being a better dad, but I love spending time with my family and golfing. I try not to be terrible at it and enjoy the beautiful Pacific Northwest. I’m always up for a weekend round of golf with friends.
Mitch: Same here. My main hobby is golf too. We love to travel and spend time with family across the Midwest. Locally, we support Big Brothers & Big Sisters, which is rewarding. There’s always something to do, especially with nice weather.
Ty: Been to a Caitlin Clark game lately?
Mitch: I did, and it was amazing. It's great for Iowa and the university to have such a star and role model for athletes.
Ty: She's incredible. Her hard work and sacrifice are inspiring. She’s changing women's sports.
Mitch: She already has. I saw the WNBA got chartered flights, a huge step forward thanks to Caitlin Clark.
Ty: Absolutely.
Mitch: Thanks for doing this, Ty. I look forward to talking again soon.
Ty: Thanks, Mitch, and GreatAmerica for being great partners. We couldn't do what we do without you. Keep up the good work showing what a good culture means.
This has been Great Conversations, a business podcast from GreatAmerica Financial Services. We hope you found some helpful takeaways from this episode as you're charting your own leadership journey. We'd love to hear your feedback for future episodes. Reach out to us
n Facebook and LinkedIn or learn more at our website. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time for more GreatConversations.
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