Leading with values: how CEO Jim Emme scaled NOW Health Group

Jim Emme, CEO of NOW Health Group and and chairman for he Natural Products Association (NPA), was awarded Nutritional Outlook's 2025 Best of the Industry award for Industry Leader.

In the second part of our interview, Emme discusses finding success and accomplishing significant goals, including reaching $1 billion in revenue within 10 years, which the company is on track to achieve in 11 years. He also explains the importance of company culture in a business strategy and highlights the company's international growth, now operating in over 100 countries, guided by its mission to provide value and health through quality products and services.

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Sebastian Krawiec: And I wonder if you could elaborate, as you mentioned, 2014 you became CEO of NOW Health Group, obviously you wanted to maintain the culture you wanted to, maintain that form of leadership. But I wonder if you can kind of talk about some of your other goals when you took on a leadership position, what you wanted to accomplish, and maybe look back on what you have accomplished that you're proud of so far.

Jim Emme: Well, one of the things we're blessed with in our team is a rock-solid vice president of HR, Michelle Canada Holda. She's an unknown in the background. That really is the culture guru. And when I first became CEO, Michelle had been on board a couple of years. We'd already worked together. I was the division president of NOW at the time, which was 85% of the company back then anyway. And she insisted I get an executive coach and I thought, well, all right, I've been through coaches before. Why not? And this gentleman, his name was Clyde Lowstuter, and he actually just recently passed away. He had not been my coach for many years, but he got me started, and he challenged my assumptions. And one of the things was, okay, you need to start thinking like a CEO. And some of the things were, we had to go through and identify my operating tenets. What is it that was different for me about Elwood, our founder, or my great predecessor, Al Powers, who really set the table for me so well here. I had to go around, do a road show, town halls and tell everybody what I expected. And he worked with me, and we put together my operating tenets. And I have to admit, they're my tenants, I came up with him, but he guided me through, he helped me through the nuances and taught me that the nuances count, especially when it comes to cultural leadership, and that was one thing. So to this day, every new person that comes on board gets to sit through a video of me going through my operating tenets, and I explain what they are, and even the back of my business card even has my operating tenants on it, and that's great. And, you know, people look at that and you know what? Sometimes they say, Tell me about that. What's it for, well, it's our culture and really their alignment with the continuity and sustainability of Elwood's vision and what the Richard family expects of us. And so it wasn't that novel. It was a matter of putting together and putting them together in a way I could easily articulate them. And so that helped.

And the other one was, well, you need a BHAG goal. Well, I'd been to business school. I knew about big, hairy, audacious goals and, and such. And he said, if it doesn't scare you, it's not big enough. And I said, Well, I can't think of much that scares me. But I said, Well, you know what? We're little over $200 million company. It'd be really cool if we hit a billion. He goes, Okay, when you're going to hit it? I said, 10 years. Let's do it in 10 years. And I did not realize how important it was to have a specific goal like that, that we could rally people. And I'd even had some of the leadership team saying, wait a minute. You don't want to talk revenue numbers to everybody. They won't understand it. They'll think the Richards are being greedy. Well, we have a quarterly bonus based on profitability and it was common sense to me to tie it together. People are getting bonus. Let's connect the dots and give them ownership and participation in our PNL. And to this day, that has been one of the more powerful things that I could have set up in those goals. And well, you know what, Sebastian, we're going to hit it in 11 years. Missed 10 by a little bit, but it was big, hairy goal. Who knows if we were going to hit it or not, but after a while, we realized, you know, we've got momentum. We've got that inertia in our flywheel to keep us going and make it happen. And had support from the family on it too, and pretty soon it became a reference point. And I'm very fortunate and grateful to Clyde for giving me that guidance because I wasn't thinking big enough and I needed to think big.