Scaling with Adaptive Leadership with Kevin Zerber at Treering

Join me for a conversation with Kevin Zerber, co-founder of TreeRing Inc. 5000 company ranked No. 3200 in 2025 that is redefining the yearbook experience through technology and innovation. Kevin shares how adaptive leadership has guided TreeRing from its earliest days, with an emphasis on continuous improvement, curiosity, and customer-driven personalization. We discuss how the company successfully pivoted during the COVID-19 pandemic to maintain service continuity, as well as how fostering mentorship and an adaptive culture fuels both innovation and employee growth. Kevin also explains how integrating technology and data enhances efficiency and the customer experience while staying true to TreeRing's core values, offering practical insights for leaders looking to modernize traditional industries and build resilient organizations. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 0:58 The Importance of Adaptive Leadership 2:29 Understanding TreeRing's Journey 8:50 Exploring Adaptive Leadership Principles 14:51 Mentoring for Employee Growth 18:08 Technology and Cultural Alignment 23:30 Adapting Through Challenges 23:52 Closing Insights on Adaptive Leadership Adaptive Leadership and Continuous Improvement In this episode, I speak with Kevin Zerber, co-founder of TreeRing, about how adaptive leadership has shaped the company's evolution over nearly 17 years. Kevin explains how a commitment to continuous improvement has been foundational to TreeRing's success, emphasizing that excellence is never a fixed destination. By embracing adaptability and ongoing innovation, TreeRing has built a resilient organization capable of learning, evolving, and thriving in a changing market. Disrupting the Traditional Yearbook Industry Kevin shares how TreeRing entered the yearbook market as a disruptor, challenging the one-size-fits-all model with a technology-driven, personalized approach. TreeRing's platform empowers families to customize yearbooks, enabling individual storytelling and deeper engagement. We explore how innovation and thoughtful design have allowed TreeRing to deliver high-quality yearbooks that better reflect today's students and communities. Building an Adaptive Culture with Technology and Mentorship We conclude by discussing the importance of curiosity, mentorship, and continuous learning within teams. Kevin explains how fostering an adaptive culture encourages creative problem-solving and supports employee growth. He also shares how TreeRing leverages technology, data, and AI to scale efficiently while staying true to its core values, sustainability commitments, and customer experience. Leading by Example, Trust, and Letting Go of the Outcome True leadership is built on trust, and trust is earned by doing what you say you will do. Austin shares how leading by example shapes culture, influences behavior, and reinforces standards throughout the organization. As leaders mature, they must also learn to let go of micromanagement and release attachment to perfect outcomes. There is no flawless business—only leaders who care deeply, persist through challenges, and remain committed to developing themselves and their teams. Key Takeaways Adaptive leadership enables organizations to respond effectively to disruption while maintaining long-term vision. Continuous improvement is an ongoing journey, not a one-time initiative. Personalization and technology can successfully modernize even the most traditional industries. Rapid pivots during crises can create new growth opportunities when guided by strong leadership principles. Cultivating curiosity, mentorship, and learning drives both innovation and employee development. Leveraging data and AI can improve efficiency and customer experience without compromising core values. About Kevin Zerber: Kevin Zerber is the co-founder and CEO of TreeRing, a technology company transforming the traditional yearbook industry through personalization, sustainability, and innovation. With decades of experience in software engineering and technology leadership, Kevin has guided TreeRing's growth by applying adaptive leadership principles, continuous improvement, and a strong focus on customer experience. How to Connect with Kevin Zerber: LinkedIn: Search for Kevin Zerber on LinkedIn for professional updates and leadership insights https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinzerber Company Website: Visit TreeRing.com https://www.treering.com/ to learn more about the company, its mission, and leadership team TreeRing Blog & Media: Kevin's perspectives are often featured through TreeRing's content and interviews Resources & Next Steps Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level? Explore free training and resources at training.coreelevation.com https://training.coreelevation.com/ to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team's performance.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's never been satisfied with the status quo of where we are right now and always wanting to be moving further and further up the efficiency ladder and the proficiency ladder as well. And so it's really that continuous improvement principle that stuck with me for such a long time. That's been one of the driving forces behind my leadership style and the way that we've built this company and grown this company to the point that we are right now. And for me, this is just a point in time. We're continuing to grow. We're continuing to improve. We're continuing to outdo ourselves and push ourselves forward in the future. So we have not reached the end of our journey. We're just in the middle of our journey.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Welcome to Growth Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Hemmott. I help leaders and their teams navigate the defining moments of their growth. Are you ready to grow? Today, we're going to talk about adaptive leadership. When you think about your ability to lead a team through challenges, sometimes you have to be adaptive. And so you want to make sure you have an adaptive culture, an adaptive leadership, and they work collaboratively together to create a high-performance team. Our special guest today

• 1:22Speaker 01

  is Kevin Zerber. He's a co-founder of Tree Ring. Tree Ring is a company that's made the Inc. list before, and we talk about adaptive leadership. He described to you what it is, some of the things that he does strategically and tactically to create this adaptive leadership. I think you'll find it very interesting today. My name is Gene Hemmott. I'm a CEO coach or a founder coach, and we help companies and their CEOs create the business of their dreams. If you're in growth mode, you know that you've got a certain amount of chaos and your first step might be to work harder. Your calendar fills up.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  You feel burned out and that is a signal that you definitely want to change some things. You've got to shift your leadership model. It's not about working harder, it's about leading differently. And if you want to get a free training that we have, all you have to do is sign up today. Absolutely for free. Go to training.coreelevation.com. It will help you be a better leader and create the company of your dreams, one that grows beyond you. Just go to training.coreelevation.com and sign up now. Now here's the interview with Kevin. Kevin, how are you?

• 2:31Speaker 00

  I'm great, Gene. Nice to see you.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Well, it's great to have you on the podcast. We're going to talk about adaptive leadership and what that is and how that impacts the success of your business. Before we go too far, let's talk about what your business is. Tell us about TreeRing.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Well, TreeRing is a company I started with a business partner of mine almost 17 years ago. So we've been around quite a long time and I think our success is the fact that we're still here. We're still growing and now we're growing even faster and faster. So I'm really proud of the tenure and the longevity that we've had and the growth that we've had over the years. We started out 17 years ago as a yearbook disruptor business. We had the idea that there has to be a better way to build a yearbook. Kids were still interested in yearbook. You know, I had young kids at the time. My partner had young kids at the time and they were always excited to come and bring their yearbook home and show us their picture in there.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  But the problem was that the yearbook was really about the school while the child was there versus the child at the school. And so we, with our experience and technology readiness and everything else, saw that we were in the right place at the right time with the right technology advances to really go in and disrupt the traditional yearbook industry, which had been around for over 100 years and hadn't really changed much in that time. And so that that's what launched Tree Ring. It was the the name itself was a vision into the future that we envisioned for ourselves as well. So if you think of the name Tree Ring, if you take a cross section of a tree and look at the rings of the tree,

• 4:13Speaker 00

  each ring tells what happened to that tree during that period in time, that one period. So if it was a good year, then you have a healthy fat tree ring. If it was a lean year, a drought year, maybe there was a fire in the forest, then then it's a very thin ring. So it's about capturing memories and we've always been a memory company. We just started with school yearbooks and now we're expanding into other types of memories. And we've really blossomed into a memories as a service company, really capturing memories for all people of all ages and places and such. And so we're really proud about where we started, how we started, and then what we've become and the rapid growth that we're now in, et cetera.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for that, understanding what you do and whatnot. You kept talking about the innovation of it. Like if we opened up this book, how would we see it different from a traditional yearbook?

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, we, you know, I'm a technology guy. I'm an engineer by training, went to school for engineering, been writing code for forever. And I always look to solve problems with technology because technology, the one thing I really love about what I do and and the opportunities that we have is if I can envision something, I can usually write code and software to make that thing happen. And that's what happened with Tree Ring. We we applied technology to the problem to create a better yearbook. Now, what that means, it depends on your perspective. If you're the student or the parent, that means that you get a yearbook that's higher quality, full color,

• 5:47Speaker 00

  better construction, better materials, and most importantly, it's customizable or personalizable. So you can make that yearbook about yourself versus the traditional model was you got a yearbook that the school designed. And if you were in it, you know, you were in it, but if you were popular, you maybe. Might appear in there more often than not. If you were not so popular in the school, then you were in there once or twice and that's about it. We created a personalization based technology platform to allow everybody to customize the book for themselves. And so the main thing that you would notice as a student or a parent is that this book is more about me while I was at school during this year. For the school, from their perspective, we created a better business model.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  In the old traditional model, the schools would buy the yearbooks from the yearbook company. And then resell them to their students and parents. Uh, meaning the school had to be in budgeting and planning and operations and sales and marketing and do all these things that schools are really not set up to do. They're set up to educate our children, um, not run a small business of yearbook sales within there. And so, uh, what we do is we sell directly to the parents. Uh, parents order on our platform. School is now out of the sales and marketing business. Um, there's no pre-orders. There's no nothing. Um, it's a guaranteed win for the school. We allow the school to, uh, attach a fundraiser to our, um, pricing as well, so they can generate some additional revenue for

• 7:13Speaker 00

  other programs, whether it's after school programs or arts or music or things like that. Uh, and basically we, we make it a win for the school. And then finally, because we are a technology print on demand technology platform. Uh, we only print a book when it's been ordered. So we always sell out. We print exactly the right amount of books. Um, we don't have any waste. We, um, use recycled materials and we plant a tree for every book that we sold historically. So, you know, we realize that producing an actual physical book consumes materials and resources from our environment and we want to give back to that as well. So we've created a win, win, win situation across the board and, um,

• 7:55Speaker 00

  and, you know, and we're, we're very proud of that model that we've come up with and, um, the, the main question that I often get is where is the catch here? It seems too good to be true. You're creating a better yearbook for our parents. You're creating a better model for our school. You're, uh, creating a better, um, use of our environment and our resources. Uh, and the answer is no, this is just the way we do things.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for sharing us a little bit of the background of Tree Ring. I think it's very interesting. I wish I had a book like that because I'm kind of in the phase of my life where I'm like, why did I buy these things 30, 40 years ago?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  That being said, Gavin, I brought you here not to talk about the company itself, but about the leadership principles and what really drives the success of the company. So you've got about 90 plus employees. You've made the Inc. list, which is impressive in its own right. And I know that adaptive leadership was what came out of the research. Can you share with us what your perspective is on adaptive leadership?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Well, thanks for that. I've always been a fan of education and learning. Yes, we started an education technology company and doing yearbooks, but really personally, my journey has always been continuous learning and pushing myself to learn new things, understand where my deficits were in terms of my knowledge base or skill set, and then working to improve that. Another thing that stuck with me is about 30 years ago, I worked for a company where the CEO was very interested in Japanese business culture. And so he embraced this technology called kaizen, which means continuous improvement. And that that thought has stuck with me for the last 30 years,

• 9:40Speaker 00

  both when I was working as an engineer writing code, as well as when I started my company and built the company to where it is now. So continuous improvement to me, it means you're always pushing yourself. You're always learning. You're never satisfied with just resting on what you know and what you've built. You always want to continually improve yourself, whether it's writing better code or building a better business plan or building a better marketing plan or training to sell more effectively and efficiently solve problems, operational problems within the company. It's never being satisfied with the status quo of where we are right now and always wanting to be moving further and further up the efficiency ladder

• 10:25Speaker 00

  and the proficiency ladder as well. And so it's really that. Continuous improvement principle that stuck with me for such a long time. That's been one of the driving forces behind my leadership style and the way that we've built this company and grown this company to the point that we are right now. And for me, this is just a point in time. We're continuing to grow. We're continuing to improve. We're continuing to outdo ourselves and push ourselves forward in the future. So we have not reached the end of our journey. We're just in the middle of our journey from that perspective.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  It makes a lot of sense going back to think about the tree ring kind of premise of reinventing the old to make it

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  that today's technology and it's really based on innovation. And so you can't get to innovation without that continuous improvement. But it started with that, really thinking differently. Do you have trouble getting your employees to adopt this continuous improvement as you go along?

• 11:22Speaker 00

  It's really, it depends on the personality. Some personalities are just curious by nature and curiosity is one of the principles that I try to foster. I always say that we, there might be five or 10 different ways to solve a problem, given the context that we're in. Don't just pick the first one that you find. Be curious, investigate other ways, look at different perspectives. Embrace that experience that you do have and embrace what you don't know to explore things that might provide a better solution for yourselves. And so this curiosity, this continuous improvement, those all create the environment that really

• 12:06Speaker 00

  we want to move forward with. And everybody has a different level of curiosity or a different level of comfort with the unknown, if you will. And another part of my leadership style is mentoring and teaching. I myself have a certain amount of experience. I learned from people that had a lot more experience than I do and I appreciated learning how other people think about problems and how they solve their problems and how they completed their projects and their work product. And so I try to impose that onto the company that we have here in that, whether it's always trying to be better, always trying to be curious, always trying to be learning, using

• 12:51Speaker 00

  my experience as a guide. I love to Teach and mentor through stories and telling stories of my past and things that I've run into and experiences that I've run into to illuminate

• 13:06Speaker 00

  a problem or a potential solution. And I think that's a great way, you know, it's been really successful for me to work with people of all different levels of curiosity and all different levels of ability to bring them up the learning curve. One of the, you know, one of the best strategies that we've had over the last 10 years is we hire a lot of people right out of college. And so, right out of college, you're, you've, you're young, you're smart, you've got a lot of energy.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  But you don't have any real world experience. You've got a lot of academic experience, but there's no practical experience. And so, you're kind of like in a blank page where I can work with you and help to teach you and train you and enhance your curiosity to really become the maximum of the potential that you have within you. And I think those, those types of people have been very successful within Tree when you have a number of, a lot of people within the company that have started down that route. You know, at the same time, it's always good to bring in experienced people with a lot of bench experience as well, because then they bring in different perspectives. One thing to realize that, that I've realized over the years is, you know, the, the way that I think of things is not the only way of doing things.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  You have to be open to other people's perspectives and viewpoints, and that really creates the opportunity for the best solution to the problem. It's not always my way or the highway. It's, it's gotta be, you've gotta be open to ideas, open to understand where your strengths and weaknesses are, and open to understand that what you know is not the be all, end all of everything.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  I want to go back to the mentoring there, because I think that I'm interpreting that you've had this for a while, so you've had some lessons learned of what works and what doesn't work. If you had to highlight a couple of things that you have learned around a formal mentoring program for your employees, what would you share with us?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  You know, mentioning some of the things that we've already touched on, it's really understanding that there is always room for improvement in your knowledge base and your skill set and your experience base that we can, that the right solution to any problem, whether it's a business problem or a sales problem or a marketing problem or an engineering problem, is not the thing that you're most comfortable with. A lot of my mentoring has been to make people uncomfortable and put them outside of the box that they like to live in, that comfort zone, and really challenge them to see things from a different perspective and to understand things from a different perspective.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  You know, as an example, you know, I've led a lot of engineering teams over the years and there are different levels of engineers. You have engineers that work at the client level, you have engineers that work at the business level, you have engineers that work at the database level. Whatever level you're most proficient in is where you always see the solution to a problem, right? And so, I always challenge the engineering team to step out of their comfort zone. So, if they're a client engineer, don't always try to fix the problem or implement a new feature up in the client layer. Perhaps a better solution is to implement it in the business logical layer on the server or in the database.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  And it's easy to say, but it's hard to do repetitively because you always fall back on what's comfortable for you. And it's easy to just get stuck in a rut where you're not really improving. You're doing your job, you're producing great work, but you could be doing better and there could be a better solution or a better answer to the problem that we're working on as we move forward. And so, really challenging people to think outside the box and to step outside of their comfort zone, to really push themselves to be out there. And sometimes it's not a technical thing or a skill set thing. Sometimes it's a personality thing.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  A lot of people who are more on the quiet side, personality wise. And I've had to really encourage them to step outside of their comfort zone. And you know, whether it's participate in meetings or put forth that great idea that you have in your head, but you're afraid to put forth to the rest of the company and says, hey, shouldn't we be doing this? Or shouldn't we be doing that? On the other hand, working with people on the other side of the scale where they're very outgoing and they talk a lot before they think about things. And sometimes that's a great skill, but other times that's a distracting skill. And so finding the right balance of, of, you know, working with people on one side of the personality spectrum versus other side of the personality scale.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  And just, you know, understanding that each person is unique and individual and needs a different set of growth and guidance and mentoring to move forward.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  There was something in our research to be able to allow you to come on the show. Something we do for everybody is because we get pitched so many times for others to want to be in front of this audience. But you said something that you use technology to scale without losing cultural alignment. How do you do that?

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Well, again, I'm an engineer, so I always look at things from a technology perspective. Again, as I said before, I love to build things and I love the fact that as a, as a software engineer and with the, with the state of the world that we have now on internet and the cloud and everything else. And now AI, we can really build some amazing platforms and tools and services. And we've certainly done that at Tree Ring. I've, I always look at how we started and how we started was we took technology and we disrupted a old static industry, right? And so we're doing that again now with our travel photo book industry.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  And we've, we've embraced AI, not in, not in a way that you might think where we're just saying, well, we're integrating generative AI so we can generate images or we've integrated, figured out a way to integrate chat GPT. Now what we've done was We've looked at our experience base and we've looked at the seventeen years of data that we have. And we've used it to train our own custom AI models. Um, to create these behaviors and these actions and these services that now allow us to. Uh, within a matter of minutes, create a photo book from scratch versus. Doing that by hand, which might take you, you know, half an hour to several hours to do. And it's a, you know, a fairly.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Computationally mined intensive um, project. Um, so I always look at technology as an enablement. Platform to move the ideas and the technology that we have forward. And so as a company, we've, we've embraced technology and that's proved us to be successful as a strategy. Um, over and over. And one of the more recent um, examples of. Leveraging our technology to really scale the business and to scale people's abilities is when COVID hit five years ago. You know, think about our business at the time. We were, we were a yearbook software company. Uh, we had a platform in the cloud that allowed schools to create content.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Uh, and take pictures and upload those pictures and then create a yearbook out of them. Have the yearbooks delivered to a school for a yearbook day. Have the school hand them out to all the kids, all the kids. You know, e- enjoy the books and have it, have their friends find it and then take it home to their parents, et cetera. Then COVID hit and what happened? All the schools closed. There was nobody on campus. There was no new pictures being taken. There was no way to deliver the books to the schools because there was nobody at the schools. We were all. Sitting at home quarantining. And so we had to adapt as a company. To be able to overcome that challenge. And you know, if you remember, this is March of twenty twenty, right at the beginning of our yearbook season where everybody um.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Does most of their work and then the books typically get delivered in um, you know, late May, early June. So in this three month period. We had to dramatically adapt the business to, one, allow parents to create more content and share that content with the school. The fact that we had a cloud-based platform worked to our advantage in that case because we were able, you know, you were able to, as a yearbook editor, work from home or work from wherever you were quarantining to create the yearbook, but the content now more and more was being submitted by parents and students and our platform allowed for that. But then finally, we had to shift from delivering the school yearbooks to the schools themselves to each individual family.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  So we changed to ship to school and we migrated to ship to home to accommodate the need that everybody was living at home at the time. And it was really our technology platform and our embracing of technology and the readiness of our team, not just the engineering and product team, but the whole company, being a technology company, was comfortable enough to be able to manifest that fairly significant change in the way that our business operated and allowed us to really meet the need and adapt to the demand of what the environment gave us at the time in 2020. We did the same thing for 2021, 2022, we were starting to come out of COVID and so we started shifting back to the more traditional way of doing our business.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  But it was really the fact that our staff and our people were comfortable enough that in the technology that we had to be able to adapt things across the board to a once-in-a-lifetime type of situational change that we had to deal with. And we did it in a matter of weeks to be able to deliver this new newly-formed product and business model to our customers. And, you know, in looking back in retrospect, a lot of our competitors weren't able to do that. A lot of our competitors missed their delivery windows or delivered the books three or four months later and had all kinds of trouble.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  We adapted and pushed through those challenges and came out stronger on the other side. And in many cases, if you look back at our growth of a company, that's really where the rapid growth phase that we're in really started. We really took that to heart and learned from the adversity that was thrust upon us by the environment that we were living in and we succeeded and achieved and really pushed forward.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Gavin, thank you so much for being here to talk about adaptive leadership with us and sharing your wisdom. Wow, another great interview on the podcast. Really love coming to you to share with you insights from experienced, high-performing CEOs like Kevin. And if you want to be an adaptive leader, hopefully this gives you a little bit more insight around that. If we can help you with anything as you grow your business, please let me know. I'd love to get to know you and create maybe even a custom plan for you. If you are listening to this podcast, you can get that absolutely for free. All you have to do is send me an email, [email protected]. Or if you want to dip your toe in, sign up for the next free training we have to help you be a better leader, create the company

• 24:35Speaker 01

  of your dreams. And that is at training.coreelevation.com. When you think of growth and you think of leadership, think of growth and think. As always, with courage, we'll see you next time.