Though she says she was never a San Francisco hippy herself, Cathy Duncan did find herself “aligned with those sensibilities,” having come of age in that tumultuous era of American history. Not only does Duncan try to bring those ideals to her management of Seymour Duncan, but her whole association with the company and its eponymous founder can be traced back to Woodstock performers Canned Heat.
“Seymour Duncan had been over in London doing a bunch of work and, at that time, we had a mutual friend, James Shane of Canned Heat. He introduced us at the ice cream store in Topanga Canyon, of all places,” Duncan said. “So, we kind of started together and, actually, my role then with him was the same as it is now in the company, which is really that concept of taking care of people and helping them to reach their dreams—all in a smooth, efficient manner.”
Duncan describes the time of her company’s inception as “the period of the mid-’70s when Fender, Gibson and some of the other companies of that sort were not taking care of their customers,” so the Duncans set out to make their company and products as fair to its customers as possible. She recalled one instance in particular that helped to define the return policies to which Seymour Duncan still adheres today.
“We were living in our warehouse,” said Duncan. “A kid comes in and he’s already bought a competitor’s product. He spent $100, but didn’t get the sound he wanted. He spent $100 on another similar pickup, but didn’t get the sound he wanted.
“I realized this guy’s been eating macaroni and cheese as long as we’ve been eating macaroni and cheese to do one thing—get that dream in his head,” Duncan continued. “So, I found myself saying, ‘Look, we’ll do it for you and we’ll take your money, but if it’s not right, we’ll do it again and again and again until you get the sound you want. You shouldn’t have to pay us money and still go out searching for the simple thing of getting the sound you want.’”
Make Your Own Rules
Not only do policies like that give comfort to Duncan’s customers, but they also helped ease her internal struggle of becoming a businesswoman after embracing the hippy mentality that “businesses were kind of yucky guys; they were the snakes” for so long. Finding that balance is something Duncan points to as one of her great achievements.
“The biggest challenge for me was coming to an understanding that you could develop your own value system and your own way of doing business with integrity,” said Duncan. “Once I decided there were no set rules that you had to be a ‘snaky’ person, it was then very creative and enjoyable.”
One such way Duncan was creative was in the company’s dealings with employees internally. “I think it’s nice to take the stresses out of your employees’ lives,” said Duncan. “We have places for kids in the lunchroom and elsewhere so, when your kids are sick and there’s no childcare, we have work tables for them, games, and computers in the lunchroom. If you know you have support as a family, as a parent,” she added, “I think those things go a long, long way.”
Quite a few of the company’s employees have been there 25 years or more and, according to Duncan, the average tenure is about 12 to 13 years. Despite that, her company does go through personnel changes like any other. However, Duncan came up with a way to make those transitions easier.
“I was never comfortable with that concept that people would come in on Monday morning and the old name on the door has been taken off. You know, the person got their walking papers on Friday,” said Duncan. “We just don’t do that. We talk to people well in advance of a separation and they then have time to pull their life together, and lots of freedom to go out and do interviews. We coach them and help them.
“You don’t have to wait until there’s that final last straw,” she continued. “Then you get to say goodbye to all your friends and your environment. And it works both ways. People in our company now—if they’ve decided it’s not really working out—give us notice. Oftentimes, that could look like much more than the standard two weeks. That could be months or, in some cases, even a year down the road. That’s nice. It’s a different way of doing it.”
Learning on the Job
Duncan had no aspirations to go into business when she was younger. “Do I love making really cool Excel spreadsheets that are good tools for people to make good decisions? Yeah, I love efficiencies and keeping things so that people don’t have to keep tripping over their own shoelaces. I didn’t realize that I would be good at that. I hadn’t figured out what I was going to be when I grew up,” said Duncan, who was a math major before dropping out of college.
“I feel very fortunate because there’s a lot of creativity inside the business world,” continued Duncan, who, despite her lack for formal education, doesn’t feel she suffers at all professionally.
“I didn’t know anything about business. I was pretty dismayed when I’d go to the library and I couldn’t find out what’s the difference between a wholesale price and a retail price,” she said. “So, one way I [learned] was volunteering around the community, getting around other bright people, listening and learning from them, and getting on some boards. That’s been my teaching tool. That’s been my MBA.”
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