From Good to Great in the Boardroom: Elevating Board Performance for Private Companies

The E.A. Sween Company, located in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, serves as a compelling example of a private company that has transformed from humble beginnings into a national foodservice powerhouse, producing over 70 million sandwiches annually. If you have ever grabbed a quick bite from a convenience store cooler-a San Luis burrito, a Market Sandwich, or Deli Express-you have tasted one of their products. This family-owned business, founded in the late 1950s when Earl Sween responded to an ad for a Stewart Sandwich franchise, has grown over three generations from a single delivery route to a $200 million enterprise. Growth such as this, amidst tight industry margins and fierce shelf space competition, speaks to much more than simple operational efficiency; it emphasises the critical roles culture, leadership, and long-term strategic focus play in driving success. Indeed, E.A. Sween's stated purpose and values are remarkably reminiscent of the timeless lessons in Jim Collins' classic Good to Great: respect, honesty, trust, and a commitment to change while generating a fair profit.

The Boardroom as Catalyst

Making the transition from good company to great company is a difficult journey for businesses in today's competitive environment. Achieving this requires both strategic insight and great leadership, particularly for private companies, which enjoy certain advantages and are also beset by unique challenges. All this centres around the boardroom. Boards act not merely as overseers but as catalysts in lifting the company's performance by instilling discipline, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Good to Great's Enduring Relevance for Private Boards

Although almost a quarter-century old and targeted originally to corporate managers of public companies, Jim Collins' Good to Great remains extremely relevant. The insights into leadership and organisational culture are universally applicable, especially in private company boardrooms. Private boards enjoy unique freedoms, relieved from the pressures of short-term earnings reports or activist shareholders. This latitude allows them to prioritise long-term performance and value creation. Unfortunately, too many private boards lapse into passivity or become narrowly focused on compliance. They may fulfil their basic duties of governance but poorly use the opportunity provided by their position to drive their companies beyond good to truly great performance. It requires board leadership that challenges assumptions, is deeply engaged in strategy and culture, and stays oriented toward success that is sustainable.

Resilience Through Formal Governance

One of the surest hallmarks of E.A. Sween’s remarkable resilience is how this company has managed to keep a sharp focus right through evolution. The company has expanded beyond its initial product lines and routes into new markets and invested significantly in facilities such as its Greenwood County, South Carolina manufacturing centre. Still, it has remained a family-owned enterprise, now under the leadership of the founder’s grandson, Tom H. Sween. What is more important, however, is that the company does not function as some sort of closed family club; it has instituted formal governance structures typical of larger corporations.

Building a Diverse, Accountable Board

Unlike many private companies whose boards consist largely of family members or close friends, E.A. Sween established a fiduciary board with independent directors from diverse sectors, including food, logistics, and private equity. That is a mix that expands perspective and accountability beyond the norm for many private companies. Public statements by Tom H. Sween underscore how the board is central to long-term planning, strategic investments, and people development-leadership engagement that matches Collins' research on the disciplined leadership of great companies.

Level 5 Leadership in Action

Collins discovered that great companies are not built on the backs of visionary founders or larger-than-life CEOs but are instead managed by "Level 5 leaders" who blend personal humility with professional will to create cultures in which honesty and truth are valued. These leaders make the hard decisions early on rather than putting them off. Private boards, especially those of family-owned firms-succumb to the temptation to maintain harmony or overly defer to management. To make the leap from good to great, a company needs directors who can face the uncomfortable truth, ask tough questions, and help the business define its core strengths. 

Confronting Brutal Facts

This begins with creating an environment where the truth is not varnished. Confronting the brutal facts, as Collins puts it, is the starting point for greatness. Boards seeking to lift company performance should nurture environments where transparency of data, diversity of opinion, and avoidance of denial are taken for granted. Boards that insulate themselves from frontline perspectives foster a culture of denial at the expense of candour. At E.A. Sween, this dedication to transparency reveals itself in the board's regular review of detailed key performance indicators--well beyond the balance sheet to encompass safety, product quality, and employee engagement. Needless to say, such diligent governance does not ensure greatness but does create the necessary conditions for it. As Collins warns, good is often the enemy of great--not because good companies fail but because they succeed well enough to avoid the discomfort that forces harder effort. 

Mastering the Hedgehog Concept

Great companies push beyond confronting reality; they gain intense clarity about what they should focus on—and crucially, what to avoid. Collins coined this the “Hedgehog Concept,” a framework where a company identifies the intersection of three truths: what it can be best in the world at, what drives its economic engine, and what it is deeply passionate about. Public companies often reach this through extensive data, analyst scrutiny, and benchmarking. Private companies lack these external pressures and place additional responsibility on their boards to uphold strategic focus amid operational noise. 

Avoiding Opportunity Creep

Private company boards often experience "opportunity creep," where great ideas abound and legacy projects live on simply because no one votes them off. Great boards centre a company on its core competencies and drive change and innovation through the discipline of that lens. In the case of E.A. Sween, the relentless focus is clear: This is a convenience food company with rapid logistics and high-volume production; that is what it does. Unlike peers chasing markets or hot new segments, E.A. Sween has perfected operations in those areas where it excels, very conscious of what it is and is not. 

Three Questions for Strategic Clarity

The boards that wish to develop this kind of clarity do not have to invent the Hedgehog Concept, but can instil a simple discipline by repeatedly asking three questions during strategy reviews: 

• Does this leverage our unique strengths? 

• Does it help our long-term economic engine? 

• Does it align with what motivates our people? 

Simple as they sound, these questions are seldom asked with rigour. Too many boards approve incremental or interesting projects without testing for alignment with the core focus. The result: scattered resources and diluted performance. A board that gets this right acts as a critical filter in helping leadership prioritise initiatives, deploy capital effectively, and walk away from distractions. For any company, this stewardship role plays a vital part in the journey from good to great.  

Shaping Culture Intentionally

Culture is also an underappreciated foundation for achieving organisational excellence. A compelling, positive culture in alignment with the company's strategies energises employee commitment, helps attract talent, and maintains continuity across the inevitable ups and downs. Perhaps most importantly, private company boards have a unique capacity to intentionally craft and foster the culture over time, using their governance position to instil core values and enabling behaviours at all levels of the enterprise. One of the most overlooked but powerful roles of private boards is their ability to shape culture intentionally. Public companies often fail to bake in consistent values through the pressure of quarterly earnings and executive turnover, while private boards can reinforce the language, behaviours, and leadership mindset that underpin greatness. At E.A. Sween, culture is not a cosmetic mission statement but is operationalised daily. Commitments to "constructive straight talk" and "thinking before doing" permeate its values and decision rhythms. These are more than HR catchphrases; they are governance principles in disguise, mirroring the cultural clarity that Collins found in standout companies. Such companies do not just have values; they maintain disciplined, honest, high-performance cultures at every level. Boards can champion this by modelling these behaviours consistently: facilitating frank discussions, setting clear priorities, and not shrinking from confronting brutal facts. As Collins would say, they lead with unwavering faith but tackle the brutal facts. They drive clarity of purpose and are guardians of culture. This is what separates the boards that protect the status quo from those that create momentum. When family or founder legacies dominate private firms, it is tempting to assume that culture "just happens." But greatness requires more than just tradition; it calls for intent. Boards are in a privileged position to hold the line, raise difficult questions, and ensure the values the company says it stands for go beyond the slogans to become real in everyday life.  

Leadership Transitions with Rigour

Private company boards that seek to lead their organisations from good to great do more than oversee; they embed the habits of greatness in every aspect of governance. What distinguishes E.A. Sween is not just its size or long history but rather the seriousness with which governance is approached. When Tom H. Sween took the reins as CEO in 2017, it was not just a matter of familial succession but a disciplined, board-approved decision based on formal recommendations, underlining the reality that transitions of leadership are business decisions, not birthrights. It is such rigour that is rare among private firms, most of whose boards are still primarily composed of relatives or insiders. But it is this disciplined approach that fits Collins's profile of those companies that transcend good and achieve greatness.  

Choosing Greatness from Within

For private company boards, greatness remains a choice—and not a consequence of outside investors, crisis mandates, or regulatory pressure. Greatness starts with leadership from within: the discipline to confront uncomfortable truths, to challenge assumptions, and to raise expectations. It is through this leadership that private boards can move beyond checking governance boxes to creating enduring value and ensuring their companies continue to thrive long into the future. In short, to elevate board performance in private companies requires much more than compliance and tradition. Rather, it demands an infusion of the Good to Great lessons into the boardroom, in the form of disciplined leadership, strategic clarity, cultural intentionality, and long-term stewardship. Companies like E.A. Sween light the way, demonstrating how boards can be transformative forces that vault private companies from good to truly great. It is not a journey that is certain to happen, but with purposeful board leadership, it is wholly possible.

Our Directors’ Institute - World Council of Directors can help you accelerate your board journey by training you on your roles and responsibilities to be carried out efficiently, helping you make a significant contribution to the board and raise corporate governance standards within the organisation.