Barry J. Beck is an accomplished American entrepreneur with a passion for disrupting industries and developing innovative business models. A strategic leader and brand builder with a consistent track record of delivering value to public company shareholders and private equity, he founded Bluemercury in 1999 and transformed the independent beauty boutique into the largest luxury beauty retail brand in the United States. Barry Beck served as COO of the company for more than 15 years.
By the time Bluemercury was acquired by Macy’s [NYSE:M], a Fortune 100 Company, he had developed it into a nationally-recognized retail chain with stores in more than 30 states and approximately 2,000 employees. He has deep experience in the beauty and cosmetics industry and founded M-61 Laboratories, best known for creating the first clinical, vegan, and sustainable cosmetic brands: M-61 Skincare and Lune+Aster Cosmetics. While at Cornell University, Mr. Beck co-founded Tower Systems, a contract services business which was eventually acquired by The Emcor Group [NYSE:EME].
Barry Beck now serves as Founder and CEO of Evenly Technologies, the nation’s fastest-growing telemedicine orthodontics company. Evenly has pioneered the extensive use of artificial intelligence and 3D printing technology to offer AI powered remote treatment management and expert manufactured form-fitted Invisalign aligners to patients. Today, dental practices across the nation rely on the Evenly platform to provide world class, cost-effective in-house orthodontic care.
Prior to founding Evenly, Mr. Beck’s first two entrepreneurial ventures became public companies and he has earned several honors for his entrepreneurial success, including Retail Innovator of the Year in 2016 and Retailer of the Year in 2017. Cornell also named Beck the Alpern Distinguished Alumni in 2020 and he was the recipient of the prestigious Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2023. He created The Beck Entrepreneurship Fellows Program at Cornell in 2016 and serves on the Advisory Council of its School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He was also appointed to the Harvard Business School Board of Dean’s Advisors and previously served on the Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
I wake up every morning around 6 a.m. and go for an intense run, and then grab a nuclear strength coffee at Quartermaine in downtown Bethesda. I know everyone in the shop — it’s my neighborhood haunt.
At work, my day is structured but flexible. I prioritize my time, focusing first on critical business matters and delegating other responsibilities to empower my team and enhance productivity. I use my lunchtime for another quick workout or to head out with my team for a working lunch, which builds stronger relationships and always sparks innovative ideas. My afternoons are dedicated to company strategy which usually involves reviewing performance and planning for growth. I leave the office between 6 and 7 p.m.
I travel a lot but am always home Friday night for dinner with the family, it’s a definite a rule. These moments are invaluable and reinforce our family foundation, providing me profound joy and fulfillment. My wife and I try to stroll every night around 10 o’clock to catch up on the day and get some fresh air before we go to bed. If I go to sleep without doing it, I feel like something is missing.
I review daily business performance at night before I go to bed, and while I’m doing my thing, I’m continually looping through the house to make sure everyone is settling down for the evening. I’m never off, but I’m lucky I have the opportunity to create an innovative company and an amazing fun-loving family – they are not mutually exclusive.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Great businesses are as difficult to find as they are rare – and they are not an item where you can just go down to the ‘office of bright ideas’ and pick something up. The best way to develop the next miracle idea is to solve a problem. In every problem there’s an opportunity, this is where my ideas come from. No problem, no solution, no company. At Bluemercury, we knew people were dissatisfied with their beauty buying journey. We solved that problem for our customers and made a lot of money for our investors.
There’s opportunity everywhere around you, but real progress will only come from finding value in unexpected places. So many people have certitude that things will continue in the same way, but any presumption of linearity is a dangerous thing. Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.” At Bluemercury, we had a hypothesis that the department stores were no longer convenient, but the so-called industry experts dismissed our neighborhood strategy and Neiman Marcus largely ignored our expansion as we surrounded them with more convenient locations, until they eventually went bankrupt. They left it wide open for us.
Every industry is naturally inefficient because employees at large companies are not incentivized to innovate, and are focused on best practices managing their numbers, quarter to quarter. In fact, Jeff Bezos recently predicted that Amazon will eventually go bankrupt, because he understands that there are limits to be gained from fine-tuning any business and best practices ultimately lead to dead ends. This is easy to forget, when so much of what we do is just repeating what has been done before. The history of the world has mostly been written by surprises. Just look at the lifecycle of a turkey. They’re an egg, they hatch, they grow and get fat and think everything is going great – and then Thanksgiving comes. I have jumped into three vastly different industries and was able to transform each one because, as an outsider, I recognized problems the insiders could not see.
It’s also worth noting that every great entrepreneur rides some great wave. Bill Gates – the software revolution, Steve Jobs rode the personal computer revolution and even Rockefeller rode the wave of industrialization. We don’t know which entrepreneur or which specific company will succeed, but we know there are directional arrows of progress. Bluemercury started as an internet-only company during the first internet boom and then shifted strategies. I didn’t know exactly how, but with the internet growing at 2,300% per year, I knew I could raise a lot of money and jump in with our cosmetics idea. Artificial Intelligence is the next huge wave. If you start a company today that surrounds AI, you are more likely to attract capital.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
Productivity, to me, is the nexus between efficiency and effectiveness, achieved through a synthesis of disciplined habits, tech leverage and a culture of continuous improvement. Each of these elements feed into a cycle of growth — both personally and professionally. Firstly, I adhere to a structured personal routine which includes time for deep work, allowing me to engage with complex problems without interruption. I supplement this by daily reviews where I align short-term actions with long-term objectives, ensuring that every task undertaken is purpose-driven and impactful.
Technologically, I harness cutting-edge tools to streamline workflow and communication across my teams. Naturally, automation of routine tasks frees up my intellectual and creative capacities, allowing me to focus on strategic initiatives. At Evenly, my latest venture, we utilize AI-driven analytics to gain real-time insights into customer trends and organizational performance, significantly speeding up our decision-making process.
Lastly, I foster a culture of empowerment and accountability within the organization, which has been crucial. By encouraging a decentralized decision-making process, I can tap into the collective intelligence of the entire Evenly team, which not only speeds up project timelines but boosts morale and innovation.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Get in the game. Experience is what you get when do you don’t get what you want, so start your company now. Entrepreneurs must be optimists, you must believe that if you get into the game, good things will happen. Sometimes being too early, is just being wrong, but you start, fail and then pivot into the right strategy. It’s impossible to connect the dots in advance, so follow your intuition and curiosity – most of my adventures were lived forward, but only fully understood backwards. There is no passion to be found settling for a life that is less than one you’re capable of living, and nothing is worthwhile unless you take at least some risks, so get in the game and don’t let other people’s voices drown you out. You will fail at some point in your life. Accept that. You don’t need to swing at every pitch, but when you swing, swing for the fences.
Break the Rules. There is a tendency to catastrophize any new technology, like automation on the factory floor, which had some kernels of truth to it, but in the end, we are a better society for having done it. I have a new hypothesis that when your parents say a new technology will rot your brain, that usually predicts the next $10 billion industry. That’s what the experts said about rock ‘n’ roll, television, video games and social media. Those who succeed are those who change the status quo and reinvent genres. If you look at economic history, the main way societies grow is through innovation and most everything else is a rounding error. Creating a new idea, formula, or recipe, applying human ingenuity to solving problems will increase the standard of living and make life better for the masses. This is how we can harness the entrepreneurial mind and change the world for the better.
It’s a marathon not a sprint. Some companies start strong and flame out, some companies take a long time and then become incredibly successful. You can’t produce a baby in one month, by getting nine women pregnant, because some things just take time. The first year is the hardest, but you’ll get the hang of it. Google routinely had a party at every failure, so they could move on to the next big idea. I believe it is an evolved level wisdom. Don’t be afraid to fail fast, be innovative and pinpoint the path towards success.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you on?
There are several contrarian business assumptions about which very few people agree with me, including the Last Mover Advantage, flipping on its head the common wisdom that the “first mover” in any industry yields a competitive advantage. First movers are usually the presumed winner by first introducing a product to market establishing early dominance through strong brand recognition and customer loyalty before competitors have a chance to enter. The first mover advantage has real risks, and they are easily disrupted by later entrants.
Each national company I have founded, Tower Systems, Bluemercury and now Evenly, benefitted from a deep comprehension of the mistakes of the first movers and by entering the market later with a vastly superior strategy. Last movers – like my last 3 companies, all became the dominant players, because we innovated from what came before us and made the lasting solution to the customers’ needs. Moreover, while early entrants bore the initial costs of developing the market and the associated uncertainties that come with it, we always enjoyed a substantial advantage because we had the perspective of what everyone else tried and what we could do better. Companies like Google and Facebook, which were not the first in their field, improved so much on what was there before that they ultimately came to dominate their sectors.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Take long walks with someone you love. This nightly ritual is a key to the success of our family and marriage, which has enjoyed the same longevity as our careers. We started this tradition when we founded Bluemercury in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. We were in the startup of phase, with lots of stress, and we walked every night down to the monuments. That’s how we blew off steam and puzzled out the business. Back in those days, we didn’t always check the weather reports and one time we got caught in such a deluge of rain that we had to pull garbage bags from cans and use them as slickers. Another time, we got caught in a lightning storm and had to call friends to pick us up.
These wonderful walks bond the two of us together, they keep us healthy, and they give us time, a minimum of 20 minutes, often as much as an hour, to get perspective on our lives and our business. It was on one such walk back in 2000 when we struck upon a new vision for Bluemercury which was initially founded as a pure e-commerce company. We were having trouble getting investment and realized that we had to open up a retail store and pursue a clicks and bricks strategy. This became the future of Bluemercury, the largest luxury cosmetics retail company of its kind. The queen of England said there’s nothing that can’t be figured out on a good walk. Our walks have taken us everywhere from Washington DC to New York, where we frequently travel, sometimes walking from our hotel in Midtown all the way to lower Soho for sushi. One night, we did the math. Three or 4 miles a night, roughly 6 nights a week for 20 years, we have walked nearly around the world. We talk about how we hope in the next 20 years of our lives, to continue our second loop around the world together.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
I’m rarely not dialed in, but I use a simple and effective tool for time management and prioritization to drive high levels of productivity. I divide tasks based on their urgency and importance, helping to decide which tasks to do immediately, schedule for later, delegate or eliminate.
1. Urgent and Important (Do first): These tasks have immediate deadlines and significant consequences. They are the top priorities that require my immediate attention.
2. Important, Not Urgent (Schedule): These tasks are important for long-term success and need to be planned for, but they do not have immediate deadlines.
3. Urgent, Not Important (Delegate): These tasks require prompt action but may not necessarily need to be done by me. They can be delegated to others.
4. Neither Urgent, Nor Important (Eliminate): These are the least productive tasks that offer little to no value and should be eliminated from my schedule whenever possible such as attending unnecessary meetings.
This matrix helps me focus on what truly matters, delegate appropriately, and set aside or eliminate distractions, leading to the highest and most efficient management of my energy and time.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
We mostly engineer our own software to efficiently manage our workflows, but there are several great pieces of software across different domains that offer free trials, allowing us to test them out and see which can best fit our requirements. Some of the off-the-rack software that helps me streamline processes, improve organization, and boost productivity are:
1. Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) offers a suite of productivity tools like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides that are excellent for collaboration and sharing.
2. Asana is excellent for task management, project tracking, and team collaboration. It allows me to create projects, assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress.
3. Microsoft Teams integrates well with Microsoft Office products and is great for video conferencing, file sharing, and team chats. Increasing productivity, in my view, is less about managing time and more about managing energy and focus. Integrating our technology and systems automates our routine tasks and optimizes operations, which further increases efficiency and frees up our team to focus on more complex, value-adding activities.
Key learnings
1. No problem, no solution, no company.
2. Get in the game, start your company now.
3. Follow your natural drift.
4. Droom, Don’t run out of money.
5. Break the rules.
6. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
7. There are few problems that can’t be solved on a good walk.
8. Great entrepreneurs are curious and get deeply interested in things about which they are passionate. Curiosity is the fuel for creativity.
9. Every great entrepreneur rides some great wave.
10. Artificial Intelligence will forever alter the way humans interact with knowledge.
11. You don’t need to swing at every pitch, but when you swing, swing for the fences.
12. When your parents say a new technology will rot your brain, that usually predicts the next $10 billion industry.