Mike Beckham’s
Unusual Order of Operations

Mike Beckham put photographs on his office wall. Plenty of executives do this. The interesting part was his explanation: the pictures represented the relationships that mattered to him, and the business was supposed to be built around those relationships. Nearby stood a large plant. His mother had loved plants; during his years in ministry, he had decided he needed a hobby. Even the greenery had a backstory.

There were water bottles in the room, too. By then, Simple Modern was selling drinkware through Amazon and major retailers. Yet the photographs offer a useful way into its co-founder’s thinking. Beckham had entered business after years spent asking people to commit to a mission. He wanted to know whether a company could make money while giving its participants reasons to care about something beyond the money.

In 2015, he and his partners settled on the sort of workplace they wanted before settling on what it would sell. Relationships, excellence and generosity were already on the agenda. The product was still looking for a chair.

A finance degree takes the scenic route

Beckham grew up in Oklahoma City and has described living in Norman since his student days at the University of Oklahoma. He graduated in 2003 with a finance degree. The expected next chapter might have involved a bank or an investment firm. His involved Cru, the Christian ministry, where he spent roughly a decade working with people and leading teams.

That work gave him an education his degree could not supply. In small ministry teams, everyone had to do ordinary, unglamorous tasks. Team members raised their own financial support. Keeping them committed required an explanation of why the work mattered. A leader could give instructions, but the instructions needed a purpose people would choose to share.

He also remembers a change during college in how he received criticism. His instinct had been to defend himself and make the other person prove the case. He began treating uncomfortable feedback as something potentially true. The shift sounds modest. For someone who would eventually employ people whose job included disagreeing with him, it was useful preparation.

The turn toward commerce came through his younger brother, Matt. In 2009, Matt approached him about an online auction business. Beckham initially helped around his ministry work. The company, QuiBids, grew fast enough to make that arrangement increasingly difficult. By his account, it reached its first million-dollar revenue day about thirteen months after launch. A side project had developed a rather demanding personality.

Amazon, first as opponent, then as classroom

QuiBids gave Beckham experience in the less ceremonial parts of entrepreneurship: acquiring customers, reading website data and discovering how much a growing business still needed to learn. It also put him on the expensive side of competing with Amazon. Around 2014, he and his brother began looking more closely at businesses selling through the marketplace itself.

He helped build the Beckham Hotel Collection, known for pillows. The experience changed the question from how to draw shoppers away from Amazon to how to serve the shoppers already there. When friends approached him about another venture in 2015, they had a distribution channel in mind before they had chosen the merchandise.

With Bryan Porter and Micah Ames, Beckham founded Simple Modern with $200,000 in initial capital. The first water bottle sold on Amazon in 2016. Established drinkware brands already had customers, retail relationships and larger resources. Beckham saw that crowded field as evidence that people wanted the product. The challenge was finding a particular customer and an approach the existing companies had left room for.

“Competition always comes with demand.”

Mike Beckham, on founding Simple Modern

His founding account describes an opening in price, variety and online distribution. A physical store can give a bottle only so much shelf space. An online listing can offer a much wider selection of colors and sizes. The founders’ experience in e-commerce gave them a way to compete without having to reproduce every advantage of an established retail brand.

Color alone was vulnerable to imitation. Licensing offered another route. Simple Modern secured its first collegiate license in September 2016 and later added sports and entertainment properties. A University of Oklahoma licensing deal helped lead to a meeting with Sam’s Club, whose order gave the young company room to expand. The digital beginning was becoming a physical retail business.

The profit had an assignment

The founding promise was to give away at least 10% of annual profits. That distinction matters: profits are what remain after the costs of doing business. A company has to earn them before it can allocate them. Generosity therefore depended on product decisions, pricing, inventory and all the other work that rarely appears in a mission statement.

Beckham’s conception extends to customers and suppliers. An affordable, well-made bottle can be part of the offer; so can the way a manufacturing partner is treated. The practical question is whether the other party has a reason to want the business to continue. His years in nonprofits made him attentive to purpose. Selling physical goods made him accountable to the arithmetic.

By February 2026, Simple Modern was reporting nearly $3.3 million in monetary and product donations for 2025. More than $2.1 million was direct charitable giving, with more than $1 million in donated products. The same report described $220,000 directed by employees to nearly 75 nonprofits. Those are different forms of support, and keeping them separate makes the scale easier to understand.

Its 2026 grant announcement committed more than $1.8 million to nearly 75 nonprofits and projected cumulative monetary and in-kind giving beyond $15 million. Most of that year’s allocation was designated for Oklahoma organizations. The ambition travels, but a substantial portion of the money stays near the company’s home.

What the office wall cannot do

A photograph cannot decide who gets promoted. Beckham has written about the gap between stated values and the signals employees actually receive: who gets hired, rewarded and asked to make sacrifices. He recalls touring Enron as a college student in 2001, shortly before its collapse. An employee’s enthusiasm for payday left an impression that survived the tour.

The lesson, in his telling, concerns credibility. People pay attention to what an organization makes worthwhile. A declaration about collaboration has little force if disagreement makes someone unwelcome. A pledge about generosity needs decisions that carry a cost. The test happens repeatedly, in circumstances too ordinary to merit a press release.

Beckham includes himself in that problem. He has described the sting of proposing an idea that other people reject, and the temptation to become defensive or withdraw. His answer is to separate the idea’s usefulness from his own worth. A meeting becomes more productive when the founder can abandon his suggestion without feeling that he has abandoned himself.

In his account of collaboration at Simple Modern, he describes meeting employees several times a year to hear their feedback. He also allows for a less comfortable ending: a group can contribute useful views without reaching agreement. The leader still has to decide. Inviting people into the conversation creates an obligation to listen, along with the responsibility to act.

Learning to leave a few answers open

As Simple Modern grew, Beckham’s role kept changing. In 2024, he compared running a growing company to raising a child: the skills that worked at one stage need revisiting at the next. He estimated that his years as CEO had contained five or six different jobs. The title stayed put while the work underneath it moved.

That willingness to revise became explicit in his planning for 2025. He looked back through his calendar and sorted activities into four questions: what to stop, keep, double down on and start. He wanted to keep investing in relationships. He also wanted the company to become more willing to make product decisions before the data made the answer obvious.

For an entrepreneur whose early advantage involved reading marketplace data, this was a consequential admission. He believed the category had become more fashion-oriented and that Simple Modern needed to become more distinctive. The team would have to exercise judgment, take chances and occasionally be wrong. A spreadsheet is excellent company until you ask it to develop taste.

The next person gets a turn

Teaching remains part of Beckham’s public life. He has served as an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at OU’s Price College of Business, and has continued mentoring students and opening the company to visits. His limited podcast series, Scaling For Good, began in 2022. He also co-hosts Operators, sharing conversations with fellow consumer-business leaders including Sean Frank, Matthew Bertulli and Jason Panzer.

At Simple Modern’s tenth anniversary in September 2025, Beckham reported more than $1 billion in cumulative sales and 60 million orders. He also spoke about an employee stock ownership plan, giving team members a stake in the company they were building. Sales measure how much merchandise has moved. Ownership changes who participates in what comes next.

In February 2026, he described the continuing challenge as growing responsibly while protecting the culture that had made the business worth starting. That is a less tidy ambition than reaching a revenue target. It requires other people to keep wanting to take part. The office wall explains where Beckham began: with the people. The company’s future depends on whether there is room for more of them in the picture.