Nuts and Bolts of Leadership
Delivering First-Class Solutions with Tom Lazzaro
Tom Lazzaro walked into Midwes t Transatlantic Lines looking for a job indoors after a season of digging ditches by hand. He was employee number 21. Today he's President of MTA, an employee-owned international logistics company in Berea, Ohio. Tom explains to Billy Duren how foreign trade zones work and why the tariff war turned them into a gamble. Then they get into what happens after a company becomes an ESOP: making someone an owner on paper is fast, but the mindset takes time. Tom shares the moments he knew it was taking hold, from a warehouse manager cleaning up "my parking lot" to an employee selling a new hire on the ESOP at the company picnic. They also cover how MTA found its Core 4 values in its best people, the receptionist who leads without a title, and why sometimes the answer is who, not how. 3 Key Listener Takeaways 1. Ownership Shows Up in Small Words "Taking care of my parking lot" is different from "your parking lot." An ESOP makes people owners on paper. Leaders build the mindset by noticing those small moments and saying so, like Tom texting a young team member to tell him what he overheard at the picnic. 2. Find Your Values in Your Best People, Not on a Poster MTA's first value words hung on the wall and nobody noticed them. With their EOS implementer, the leadership team whiteboarded about a dozen key players and listed three attributes for each. The four words that showed up most became the Core 4: knowledge, dedication, reliability and positivity. 3. Connect the Dots, Then Get Out of the Way Tom sees his job as the bird's-eye view: showing people the impact of work customers never see. It also means knowing his limits. As an operations guy by heart, he brought in a director of revenue and growth to build the sales team he couldn't. Quick Leadership Lessons Billy Wants You To Remember - Hard work and a good attitude will present you the opportunity. It may not present you the destination. - Accountability is a positive event when the team has agreed on how it will behave. - Deliverables are more than freight. Opening a door for someone counts. - Clean up your box before you think outside it. Then push the walls out and make it bigger. - Move the team to "we-ville." It's a we thing, not a you thing or a they thing. - Shortening the runway means putting in people who can do it better and faster. Show Chapters and Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:30 What Midwest Transatlantic Lines does 02:19 How a foreign trade zone works 04:12 The tariff war and the FTZ gamble 06:24 From digging ditches to employee 21 08:05 Connecting the dots vs. getting in the way 10:08 90% of life is showing up 11:08 ESOP, EOS and "my parking lot" 12:12 What Tom overheard at the company picnic 15:33 How do you measure positivity? 17:10 Taking the values off the wall 18:58 Accountability as a positive event 21:36 Janine and leading without a title 22:47 Clean up your box first 23:43 Pride in work nobody sees 26:10 Owners vs. employees when turmoil hits 27:44 How Tom's team would describe him 28:21 Who, not how 30:55 Advice to young Tom 32:23 Billy's nuggets and close
