Can you build a multibillion-dollar beauty company selling cosmetics at $1, $2 and $3 a pop?
Conventional wisdom would say no. But over the last 12 years, e.l.f. Beauty CEO Tarang Amin has done it, and on this week's episode of WSJ Leadership Institute Presents: Leaders , he shares how.
It's a master class in building a powerhouse consumer business in the age of TikTok. I particularly enjoyed listening to Tarang's origin story. He was born in Africa to Indian parents, who brought him to the U.S. at a young age, and bought a motel in Virginia, putting him to work at the age of 14.
"Everything I know about cash flow, economic profit, how you treat people, really came from those early days building up our family business like that," Tarang told me. "It also taught me a tremendous amount of humility. If your head ever got too big for itself, that you're the owner's son, and the maids didn't show up, guess who's making all the rooms?"
"And it's a lot of where many of my other beliefs [come from]. I saw the power of ownership. So I knew when I had my own companies, one of the things I wanted to make sure we did, and we're unique this way at e.l.f. in the beauty space, is we grant equity to every single employee every year."
You can watch the episode on wsj.com, or listen on Apple or Spotify .
Separately...
Erle Norton here. Friday's striking jobs report raised some significant questions, chief among them how a smaller pool of workers will affect the economy. After all, as my Journal colleague Justin Lahart pointed out , "the economy relies on two big engines in the labor market: growth in the workforce, and growth in how much workers get done, or productivity."
I asked some of our Leadership Institute CEO Council members for their perspective on two broad job market trends. First, how AI is changing the workforce, because it is expected to help with Justin's second point.
Jason Girzadas, Deloitte's U.S. CEO, wrote in an email that "working with AI at scale is helping our professionals be more productive and enabling real change in how we deliver exceptional services to our clients." But he also noted what we've heard from other chief executives, saying AI "is increasing the value of human judgment, experience, leadership, and trust." (Deloitte is a sponsor of this newsletter.)
"AI's impact will not be uniform. In some areas, it will reduce routine work and change roles," he said. "In others, greater productivity will create capacity to meet growing demand."
The second is the great data-center build-out. Construction jobs were a bright spot in the July report.
"We are witnessing one of the most dynamic moments in modern construction history," Leslie Duke, CEO of engineering, architecture and construction company Burns & McDonnell, wrote in an email. "A surge in megaprojects for data infrastructure and power generation projects is reshaping our industries -- and the pace is accelerating. This isn't a typical growth cycle. It's a fundamental shift driven by new technologies and an urgent need to modernize and grow our energy backbone."
But here's where that supply of workers comes into play. Duke wrote that "we face a persistent challenge: a shortage of skilled workers. The demand for craft labor, engineering talent and project management experience exceeds supply."
Leadership Institute members can join us at 1 p.m. ET today for a virtual Breaking News Exchange where Alan and Greg Ip, the Journal's chief economics commentator, will dig into these questions.
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About Us
CEO Brief is written and edited by a team from The WSJ Leadership Institute: Alan Murray, president; Erle Norton, C-Suite Content managing editor; and Lila MacLellan, CEO Brief editor.
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