10 Simple Ways to Create a Thriving Company Culture (KRISTI HEROLD)

So in 1996, Christy Harold founded the Sport and Social Group, which is the largest adult sports league in the world with over 130,000 members. They are scaling fast. 130,000 members, right. That's so impressive. When a company grows at this rate, employee challenges can make or break your success. Christy's not only been victorious at building a strong company culture, she's designed a process that will turn your team into superstars. How many of you would like to have a team of students? Superstars? Yeah. Okay, so you're going to learn how to do this. So Chrissy's going to be sharing what she does to keep her 200 plus employees engaged and excited to move her vision forward. Are you all ready for this? All right, let's welcome Christy Harold to the stage.

Hey, now you're an all star. Get your game on, go play. Hey now you're a rock star. Get the show on.

Hi there.

Thanks very much for the warm welcome. So I am here today from Toronto, Canada. It's very nice to be in warm California. So, as Alison mentioned, I am the founder and CEO of the Sport and Social Group based out of Toronto. Started the Sport and social club in 1996. And in my first year, it was just me doing everything by myself. Some of you can probably relate with what that feels like when you're starting a business. And in my first year, I had about 250 teams play sports. So we run adult sports leagues. It's basically think of intramurals for people who aren't in university anymore. So everything from basketball to volleyball, dodgeball, ultimate Frisbee, flag football, all sorts of different sports leagues. In my first year, we had about five different sports, had about 250 teams playing with us. And since in that first year, this was before Internet was a thing, websites weren't a thing, email was barely a thing. So in those days when I was trying to do my marketing, it was a lot of grunt, grinding it out. I spent a lot of time calling people on the phone telling them, hey, this is my idea. What do you think of it? If they liked the idea, I was like, you like the idea? Can I maybe get your address book? Will you fax it to me? And then I would literally call everybody in their address books and tell them my idea, say, hey, I've never heard of, you've never heard of me, but I'm friends with so and so, and they gave me your name and this is what I'm doing and what do you think? And I did that for hours and Hours and hours. And that's how I started my organization in 1996. So since that time the business has grown and it's not me anymore. By myself, I now have about 35 full time employees and over 200 part time employees that are making the magic happen. And we now have close to about 150,000 people playing sports with us. Over 10,000 teams a year. We're in eight different markets up in Canada. And we a few years ago came up with a vision to grow the company. I was a bit bored and I wanted to do more. I had 10 years of running a lifestyle business when I was home with my kids a lot and it was fantastic. As they grew, I started to realize I need more of a challenge. So I want to grow this thing. And the way to do that, I decided is going to be through acquisitions. So this was about a year and a half ago and this past year. So the way where we're trying to grow too is a goal. Our bhag. Who here knows what a bhag is? A big, hairy, audacious goal. I want to get a million people playing every year, off the couch, out being active. That is my goal. I would love to touch that many lives every year. That's going to take a lot of work. And I decided the best way to do that would be through acquisitions. So this past year I've completed four acquisitions in our first year of doing acquisitions. And those were all in Canada. And I'm excited to say we actually have our first joint venture deal planned for the U.S. i hope that'll be completed by the end of this year. So that's really exciting. I'm hopeful to be able to say I'm doing business in the United States anyway. I will say that the growth we've had has been largely because of the culture that we've implemented over the years. That's why I'm here to talk to you today is about culture and how important it is to have a strong culture when you want to build a successful business. So why is culture so important? Culture is the DNA of your organization. It is the identity of your business. It is your values. It is what differentiates your business from your competitors. Culture will also help you attract rock star employees. And it's those rock star employees who are going to drive your business to success. Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago, a member of ours was coming in to pick up some sports equipment and I guess he came into the office a number of times over a few years and I only learned this story after we hired this fellow, but he told me that every time he would come into our office, he was blown away by the culture. And I'm not talking about fancy, funky office space, although we do have a cool office now. We didn't always. I'm talking about. He got a vibe from. From my team of people. He couldn't believe how everyone just seemed so happy working there. And everyone was so friendly and outgoing. And he said he just was so hating his job that every time he would come into our office as a customer, he was like, I wish I could work here. So he kept his eye on job postings and a job came up and he ended up getting the job. And I heard this after the fact, but it really does work. Having a strong culture will help attract Rockstar employees. It also will help retain Rockstar employees. And that's the key. You want to retain them. Because if we retain our employees, we're spending less time recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training, onboarding.

Right?

That takes a lot of time and energy. And we're not actually driving our business forward when we're doing all that. So retention of strong employees is really important. And that's something culture, a strong culture can help you with. Thirdly, having a strong culture means you have employees who are happy, they're engaged, they're inspired working with you, versus a crappy culture where someone's miserable, negative, dragging their ass to work every day. That kind of culture does not create happy customers because a miserable employee isn't going to be giving great messaging to your customers. Engaged, inspired, passionate employees. Yeah, they are. They're going to be giving great messaging and they are the ones who will create happy customers. And happy customers creates repeat business and increased word of mouth, et cetera. So a lot of reasons. I think we can all say that having a strong company culture will go a long way to benefit your business. But don't just believe me. Let's go on to some statistics. I think every good presentation needs some statistics, right? So these are some statistics for you on culture. Forbes tells us that companies that have a strong culture will experience 4 times increase in revenue growth. Culture IQ tells us that 86% of employees who work in companies with strong organizational culture feel that their senior leadership listens to them, versus only 70% of employees who work at a company without a strong culture. And Deloitte did a 2016 global human capital Trends survey, and in that they found that 82% of respondents surveyed believed that good organizational culture was a strong competitive advantage and www which is, as you probably know, the World Wide Web tells us engaged employees are 24% more likely to help boost sales. These are very convincing statistics. To be honest, I have no idea how any of these statistics got measured. I'm not sure you really can measure statistics like this when it comes to culture. But I do believe, I really do believe strongly that although I don't think you can actually measure it, strong culture definitely does point to improving your business success. Let me share a personal story. I learned the hard way how having a horrible company culture really can negatively affect your business. It was after my first year of university. I moved back to the small town. I'm from north of Toronto. It's a small town called Sudbury. It's about four hours north of Toronto. I am just a small town girl living in a lonely world. And so I was up there for the summer, hired all these painters. I was going to run a franchise of College Pro Painters. You guys heard of College Pro? So it's a university franchise opportunity for students. You learn how to run businesses. It was a fantastic experience. So I hire all these painters. I had eight painters working for me. They start working in May and June. They're producing all the jobs. The end of June, half my painters quit. Let's just say they thought of me as a dictator. So I was acting like a dictator. Truth is, I was a hard ass. I was driving them to work towards my vision and my goals that they had no idea about. I just wanted to make a lot of money. I didn't really care about their personal needs, their goals. It was all about what I wanted. And I worked them hard and it blew up in my face. So halfway through the summer, half my painters have now quit on me. I have to stop production. I have to start recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training, a whole slew of new painters and finally get started on production again to finish the summer. Now, immediately, I decided I better change my ways. For the second half of the summer. I started bringing popsicles to the job sites on hot days to show them I appreciated them. And I planned social outings once a week or once every two weeks to take my painters out and show them I appreciated them, have some fun with them. I also shared my vision, my goals for the summer. I shared it with them. I told them what I was trying to do. And I created some incentive programs, some contests to help them get behind my goal and help them want to make those become reality. The difference was unbelievable. So from that second half of the summer, those painters all stayed with me for Two more summers after that. So the retention was huge. And my profitability, my second and third summer of running College Pro painters, I made double the money that I made in my first summer of running College Pro. So that's my personal experience with how a really crappy culture can really negatively impact business and a really positive culture can really positively impact business. No statistics. I'm sorry. But my personal experience is it works. And I became convinced I'm going to invest in any business I do. I will invest in having a good culture. So today what I would like to do is share with you the top 10 list of ideas, David Letterman style top 10 list of ideas that we use at the sport and social group to keep our focus on culture being key in our organization. This list is in order as voted by my staff. They gave me their feedback. We do more than just 10 things, but these were sort of the top ones that they all feel and it's in order of how strongly they feel about them, which is I found quite interesting because it wouldn't have necessarily been the order I would have put it in, but it's powerful that this is their order. And so I will remind you that although every company is unique and every company culture is unique, as I said earlier, it is the DNA of your organization. I believe that there are some very easily implemented tactical ideas that any business can do. And so that's what I'm hoping to share with you today. I would love if each of you grabs one or two little nuggets that you can walk away with thinking, hey, I might try that in my business. I hope that many of you will get an idea that you'll try and that it might help improve some business success for each of you. So take what inspires you. Leave the rest number 10 on our top 10 list, incentives and profit sharing. I will note. So you can see on the bottom of each slide there's a little dollar figure majority of these ideas are low cost. So I tried to give you a little legend to show which ones are more higher cost. This one is a big cost. Many of them are not very low cost or no cost at all. So this one. Incentives and profit sharing. Yes, it is a high cost to do these types of programs however you budget for them. So the truth is you're only paying out for incentives or profit sharing if you hit certain targets that you've planned for. So truth is, if you're paying out the money, it means the company's done well. So you should be really happy paying out that money. So that's the way I've always looked at it. We'll talk about incentives first. We are a seasonal organization. We try and hit a certain number of teams in a given season. That's our business. So I set targets with my team. If we hit this many teams in the season, we usually have some kind of a fun prize at the end of the day season if we hit and if we don't hit, we don't get the prize. But the prizes have been anything from a funky new espresso maker for the Office or perhaps $100 shopping spree where we all will go to the mall for an hour at the end of a work day, everyone gets $100 to spend and then we meet up for drinks afterwards and everyone has to show what they bought. You only get one hour and you have to go spend that hundred dollars and you all have a drink afterwards. And it's just a fun, a fun way to celebrate hitting a target. Maybe we'll go out and do a night out on the town at a comedy club or a boat cruise. I mean it's been so many different things over the years, but each season we have some kind of a fun seasonal incentive that rolls up to an annual target. About 18 years ago started having an annual target where we told our team if we hit this target we will take you on a trip. Three days somewhere warm and all inclusive. And if we don't hit the target, we don't go on the trip. So we, I'd say In the last 18 years, about 15 years, we've hit our target and we've gone to an all inclusive. You can see that's a photo of a couple of years ago with all my team at the all inclusive and I have a young staff so this is exciting for them to get to go to an all inclusive. And yeah, it's expensive but we're only paying for it if we hit certain target which is really exciting that we just grew and hit that target. So I'm happy to be paying that. Okay. Also on those trips you get incredible bonding that happens that you just, you don't get. Working in an office day to day getting off site is really powerful. So all those years that we haven't hit where we haven't been able to go on an all inclusive, we still make sure we do a one night. We always budget for one night getaway. A little closer to home might be snowy. We may only be getting on a bus instead of an airplane. But it's still one night and, and it's incredible collaboration that happens and bonding that happens. So that's our incentive plan. Profit sharing is slightly different. You have to work with us for a year before you can be part of the profit sharing plan. Over the years, I've had three or four different versions of profit sharing. Our most recent one now is focused on hitting a budget every season, a financial budget based on gross margin. And you have to have worked with us for a year before you're part of the plan. I would say 10 to 20% of my staff's compensation comes from this profit sharing plan. So it's fairly significant. It is paid out seasonally and the payout period is actually a month after each busy period. So you have to be there to get your bonus from the last period. So I make. It's strategically paid out at a time where we've just gotten through a busy period. So hopefully people aren't going to. If they are thinking of moving on and leaving, they'll at least stay through the busy period to make sure they get their profit sharing bonus. So you do want to think about that if you're going to do something like this. And the gross margin is actually something that they are the ones making the decisions on. They're the ones deciding, should we spend the money on this, should we spend the money on that, what do we want to do to try and grow, how hard are we going to work to get new revenue sources, et cetera. It's on them. So they're empowered to drive the business forward. I'm not micromanaging and looking at how everyone's spending their money because they're bought in to the bottom line success of the business by having this profit sharing plan. It's very powerful. So that's incentives and profit sharing. Number nine, our team. I would like to make it very clear that we are a team. We are not a family. In a family you get unconditional love. In a team, you better be performing. You don't get unconditional love. You need to perform to stay on the team. So we are a team. And I also want to point out we are a very collaborative team. We all have the same vision and goals that we're driving towards. We are not competing against each other, we are competing with each other. We are on the same team. We are competing within our industry. We want to be the best in our industry, but we are not competing with each other inside our organization. And I think that is something that everyone feels, which is very powerful. In fact, it is super common in our Office. We have a big area where majority of the team sits called home court. We have a lot of sports analogies. We run a sports business, right? So again, think about your own businesses and what will work with your business. So home court at the end of the day, quarter to 5, 10 to 5. It is so common to hear someone say, hey, I'm going to be leaving soon. Does anyone need help with anything before I go? Every day you hear that get said multiple times or you'll see a slack message go out to everyone. I'm going to be leaving shortly. Can I help anyone with anything before I split? That happens all the time. And that is something, I think, that is shocking for new employees. They're like, wow, this is unbelievable. But they see that everyone is doing that, so they start to do it too. It's a really collaborative, cohesive environment, all driving towards the same vision, same goals in order to get a good team. That doesn't just happen by fluke. You heard the saying, hire slowly, fire fast. You guys heard that saying, I believe in that very strongly. From the time that we post a job to the time that we actually have someone sitting in the seat, working can be two months or more. It's a long process. So we'll post a job. We may get usually 200 to 300 applications. For most jobs that we post, we will narrow that down to about 20 applicants on paper. And then we invite those 20 applicants to come to a group interview. So we usually do two group interviews of eight to 10 people. And the reason we do this is this enables us to meet 20 people in three to four hours versus 20 people in 20 to 30 hours. Okay? So it's very efficient having group interviews. So we invite them to a group interview, we tell them the process up front and the process, you're going to think it is a bit. Perhaps it's going to sound a little bit Donald Trump and the Apprentice like, but I'm not Donald Trump at all. So what happens is we tell them the process. And the process is, when you come to the group interview, we spend about an hour with the entire group. After about an hour, we narrow down to three or four people that we will ask to stick around. And we let everyone else go home and we tell them they know in advance before they show up for the group interview that this is going to happen. And so they're not shocked. And we remind them very clearly at the start of the group interview that this is going to happen. And we always say, you know, if you're uncomfortable with this, you can leave now if you don't like it. But if you want to stay, we would love to have you. And everyone always stays anyway. It's a bit awkward at that one hour point when we've sort of gotten a feel, but really what we've done is we've asked a bunch of questions around the table and we are assessing for fit. And I will tell you, in 15 years of running group interviews with my, I don't do a lot of the interviews anymore, but over the years I've done a lot. And my business partner, president of our company, Rob And I, in 15 years of doing group interviews, he and I leave the room. We each write down our top three choices. Not once has our top three choices been different, not once we know from that one hour who we can imagine being on our team, who in that room we could see fitting in. So it's very easy to go back into the room and say, hey, thank you so much to all of you for coming today. We really appreciate your time. We don't want to waste your time. We value our time and we want to respect your time. So respectfully, we are going to let four or five of you go today and we're going to keep three or four of you around for the second half of the interview. And that's what we do. So then they leave. We get into a little more in depth for another hour with the three or four people who have stuck around from there. From the two group interviews, we usually pick two or three candidates from each interview who we would consider sending a homework package to. We then send them a homework package which is it can take anywhere from two to three days for them. We give them two to three days to complete. The homework package can be. Usually it's about three different little mini projects and we're assessing for any number of things. It depends on the role. But you can quickly assess with any kind of homework package. If you want to find someone who's detail oriented, creative, resourceful, you can come up with a lot of different little ways to do that that will show how are they really going to do their work when they work here? Are they going to hand it in on time or is it going to be late? Is it going to be filled with spelling mistakes or will they have proofread it? You know, you can really assess for a lot of that kind of thing by doing some homework packages. So it's very, very powerful. When we get the homework packages back, we then choose two or three people that we'll bring in for a second interview. Second interviews are about an hour and a half. They're done with more different people than who ran the group interviews. So more people on the team have met with people and then we narrow it down usually to one person that we're thinking that's who we want to offer the job to. And we do a short third interview which is really digging in to see is this the right person for this role and do they really want it? How hard are they going to sell themselves to us? So anyway, that is how we get a strong team. It takes time. We hire slowly, we fire fast. And then lastly, just a small point because again, we are a sports business. We want to recognize our rookies and our vets. So at the one year mark, all of our employees in these pictures that you can see here, all of our employees, we give them, we have an official draft ceremony and they get their sport and social club jersey. And the number on the back of their jersey is the year that they started working with us. So I'm a 96. You can see some 11, an 11 and a 17 up there. All the veterans have their jerseys on the back of their chair in home court and all the rookies don't have a jersey. So it's just a little, it's just a fun little thing that we do, you know, so you can think of little things like this that add some value. They add a little spice of culture to your organization and the team loves it. So that's the team. Giving back is number eight on the top 10 list. We didn't always give back. Took me some time to grind out being able to feed myself, clothe myself, put a roof over my own head and actually start to get some profits coming out of the company. That didn't happen overnight. I'm sure many of you can appreciate that. But once the company did get to a point when it was profitable, I felt very strongly that I wanted to give back. And so over the years, we've had a number of charity partners. And I would say at first I don't think I did it very well. I just picked charities that I personally was attached to. So at one point we were affiliated with the Canadian Cancer Society. My mom passed away of cancer and I thought that would be a great charity. Truth is, my members weren't really, they weren't feeling that, like they weren't aligned with that. And it became clear why we should have alignment with this. So we now have partnered with a charity called Right to Play. They're an international organization that helps orphaned and vulnerable children around the world. They teach life skills through the power of sport and play. So the alignment naturally makes a lot more sense for our organization. So I think over the last six or seven years, we have donated over $300,000 to Right to Play. We give a portion of all of our team fees to right to Play. Members have the ability to add on to their shopping cart when they're checking out. And our members feel alignment with it.

As well, because it makes sense that.

Hey, this is a sports organization and I'm signing up to play sports. So that all works. In addition to just giving money, we found another way that we can help out and give back to our community. When people sign up to play sports with us, they get a basketball or a football to play in their leagues. And when they return their sports equipment at the end of a season, sometimes it's garbage. Sometimes it's in fantastic condition and we can use it again. Sometimes it's been slightly worn to the point that we don't want to give it out to a member, but it's not garbage. So we make sure it gets in the hands of underprivileged children. Inner city schools in Toronto. Our members know we've developed what we call the replay program. Pick it up, play with it, pass it on, make sure it gets into the hands of other kids. So our members know if you're going on a trip somewhere, you're going to Haiti or you're going to, you know, South America, come on into our office, we'll give you 10 soccer balls or a whole bunch of Frisbees, and you can take it and give it away to underprivileged children. So that's. That's a small program that we try and do with our business. Giving back. It does have a cost, but again, this is a cost you can budget for. We budget for how much we're donating, so it's not a shock to us. And frankly, I love that we're giving back. It feels good to me. I know it feels good to my staff, and I know it feels good to our members and the kids that we're helping. It makes an impact in their lives.

Side effect.

Something we don't do a very good job of. We do not do a very good job of marketing this. I think you can actually probably do a really good job of respectfully letting people know how you're helping out. And it's something I think we need.

To do a better job of.

And we will start to but there can also be the side effect of a little bit of nice publicity that comes sometimes when you do this kind of thing. And in a few years ago I was awarded the Governor General of Canada awarded me the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Award in recognition of the support to community that we give. So you know, that was a pretty nice recognition, a little bit of nice publicity. And so this work can help your business in that way as well. That's giving back. Number seven, book club. Book club is probably one of my personal favorites. And I will say not all of these ideas have been my own. A number of them have, but a number of them have come from other sources, other mastermind groups I've been part of. It's all about R and D, right? Rip off and duplicate. So book club came from a mastermind group I was a part of. A friend of mine was doing this at his business and I was like that is a great idea.

I love that.

So I've started my business. It's awesome. It's optional. Book club is optional, but highly encouraged. The way it works is I do a survey. We do about six book clubs a year. So every two months I survey my team, I send them a little survey monkey with the top three books we're thinking of reading. And we've done a range of books, business biographies, self help books, business books like books on customer service or books on marketing or you know, whatever. Many different types of books over the years, operational books. And so I survey my team, pick the top book that they want, pick a date, then they get an invitation to join us. If they RSVP that they would like to come to book club, then the book is paid for for them. They're expected to show up at 7:45 in the morning. Breakfast is served for them so they can grab their breakfast. We all get into the boardroom by 7:55, we talk until 8:55. It's not about me giving my opinion on the book, it's about me moderating a discussion. I want to hear from everybody, whether they've worked for us for two weeks or 10 years. I make sure that everyone gets equal time sharing their feelings, their thoughts on the book we've read. And from these book club discussions we've actually implemented real business ideas from book club discussions. It is a very easy way to get education. It's a very affordable way to get education for your team and yourself. Actually, I will give a shameless plug to my brother right now, Cameron Herold. He has written a number of books on Business. And one of the books we read was his book called Meetings suck. And meetings do kind of suck, right? But meetings don't have to suck. And that was the point of the book. So it was a short read. We all read it, and we all realized, holy cow, we've been running meetings without agendas. How inefficient is that? And so now, you know, we don't have a meeting unless there's an agenda attached to it. There's a lot of things that have come out of that book. Specifically, there are a number of different books where they've actually become mandatory reading. When we onboard a new employee, we'll say, you have to read this chapter in this book, A customer service employee. You have to read this book, Customer service Revolution. You'll understand why we do this, this, and this now, because it's come from the book, so very affordable. Now, if you're sitting there thinking, but I'm only. It's only me and my to employees, that probably won't make a great book club discussion. How about the idea of pairing up with a friend's business who also maybe only has two or three or four employees. Take turns book club, once at their office and then once at your office, take turns supplying breakfast. You can do this. It's very easy, very educational, really fun. People really on the team feel empowered, engaged. They feel like their ideas are cared about. So that's book club. Number six on the top ten list is having a fun, inspiring, and collaborative place to work. Now, please note, this does not just mean a physical place to work. More importantly, I think it's about having a vibe that feels collaborative, where people feel that their ideas matter, that there's not a lot of red tape and bureaucracy. My team tells me that they really do feel empowered to look for efficiencies. They feel that we really, truly want their ideas. I mean, I bring it up all the time. I'm constantly telling people, we want to hear from you. We want your ideas. And we have one really symbolic way of doing that. We have our can you imagine wall, which is in this picture here. The can you imagine wall is the first thing you see when you walk into our office. It's a bunch of decals. It does not cost a lot to put decals on walls. And anyone in the office, anyone who's on our team, is allowed to put something up on that wall as long as they're prepared to put their name beside it. So there's an accountability, and it can be anything. They want to help drive the business forward in a positive, fun way. So a number of them are business related. For example, some of mine that I've had one was to get a Canadian acquisition done. So I got my dun. You can see there's done stickers. When you get your. Can you imagine done, we put a big done stamp over top of it. So I got my done sticker for that one. I have another one which is to do a US acquisition and I'm hoping I'll get my done sticker for that by the end of the year. But this wall is open for anybody on the team to put up. Not everyone does, but I'm always gently encouraging people to share their ideas and put it up there. And if you put your name beside it, there's some accountability there. So this is just a symbolic way to show we do publicly support ideas for change, taking initiative and it's empowering. So if you can spend a little money on making a fun, funky office environment when you can afford to do so, do so. I don't think it's. It took me a long time to get to that point that I felt I could afford it. Our office for a number of years was in the basement of my house and then it was over top of a cigar store. It was the dingiest little place. But once we could afford it, we built out funky office space where my staff felt excited to come to work every day. And what that does do is people feel happy being in a space so they're more apt to want to stick around and work and be there longer. Right. And always you can afford to have healthy snacks on hand, have some coffee on hand, maybe have some beer in the fridge for Friday afternoons. That doesn't cost a lot. And it goes a long way to help have a collaborative, fun, inspiring place.

To be for your team.

Number five, go play days and vacation time. So in Canada, the mandatory vacation time is two weeks. I don't even know if there is a mandatory. What is the mandatory time in the United States? Zero.

Zero.

Okay. Yeah, it's a bit of a problem. So in Canada, it's two weeks. Anybody who starts working with us in their first year, they get three weeks. Right off the bat. Right off the bat. As soon as they've worked with us for more than one year, once they hit, they're going into their second year, they immediately get bumped up to four weeks. And with some seniority and time, it gets pushed up to five weeks. Now let's stop and think about this. When you go, when is the time that you are busiest and most productive in your office. Just before you go on vacation, get a little bit of shit done during that week, don't you? Right, like, oh my God, I'm going on vacation. I gotta get this done, I gotta get that done. And then when's the second most productive time? When you get back. You power through an awful lot. So I don't think my logic is flawed by giving my team a little extra vacation time. The loyalty is massive.

They love it.

Duh. They are very productive before they go away and when they get back. And anyway, sorry. The other aspect is studies have proven how energized we get when we get out of the office and turn off and just relax. It re energizes you. It's good for your brain. We all need that. We need to shut down sometimes. And you want to do that for your employees because when they come back, they're going to be excited and reinvigorated to drive the business forward. So think about that for vacation time. Go Play Days is something that we do at the Sport and Social Club Canada. Our summers are very short. We get a very limited amount of warm sunshine. So I implemented Go Play Days. From the May long weekend until September's Labor Day long weekend, my staff are allowed to take Friday afternoons off whenever they want. There's a catch. The catch is they need to book it a week in advance. They need to let their team leader know that they're going to take the Friday afternoon off coming up and they need to put in the hours that four hours that they're leaving early, just put in the time, get your work done earlier in the week. So. And it's up to them. I have never, ever micromanaged this. I have empowered them to figure it out amongst themselves. And the only other catch is I've just always said, hey, make sure someone's in the office to get the work done that needs to get done. So if you're on the customer experience team, not all six of you can leave the office on Friday afternoon. Make sure there are enough of you there to respond to customers emails and phone calls, et cetera. Make sure there's enough of you in the finance team that if someone needs to cut a check, we can get the check, you know, whatever. So that's how Go Play days work. And my team, again, they love this. So they work Monday to Thursday, you know, 8:30 till 5:30 to make up for the fact that they're going to take Friday afternoon off. They get a head start on traffic, they Beat the traffic to get out of the city, to get up to cottage country and enjoy a long weekend, a little extra long weekend in the summertime. So that is vacation time and go play days. Number four on the top ten list is having a mayor. So we have a mayor and we get a new mayor three times a year. So again, we run seasonally. We have three season finals. We call. So we have our winter, spring and summer is a long season and then our fall season. So we have three four month seasons and the mayor terms run on those seasons. So at the end of our season finals, which is a big all hands meeting that we do every season, we run our mayor elections. Anyone can step up to say, hey, I'm running for mayor. It's very casual, it's quite silly actually. But people love it and they will make silly mayoral promises. Like every, you know, one Tuesday a month, I'm going to make tacos for everyone. It'll be taco Tuesday or I'm going to organize a ping pong ladder. So tournament. And that's something I'm going to be doing. And you want to vote for me because I'm going to run a celebrity death pool that we're all going to bet on. It's crazy stuff that comes from it, but it makes for a very fun social environment. The mayor gets a budget. It used to be $200. As we've grown, they now get about $750 per season. But again, it doesn't have to be $750. Think about the size of your team and you know, stretch that out. And so we have 35 people on our team. They take that $750 over four months. They plan some social outings or maybe they'll organize something fun to do in the office and they'll make sure that there's beer and snacks there, whatever. But it's up to the mayor to plan the social outings. The winning mayoral candidate gets some special privileges. They get a special parking spot and they will at the end of their term. You can see the big wall of photos. They get a funny picture of themselves framed and hung on the wall in our kitchen locker room area. It's just the mayor wall. So the value here, I think is quite priceless. Everyone has their say. It's a Democratic election and it's just a ton of fun. That creates team bonding out of that. So that's the mayor number three, having a vision. You guys have probably never thought much.

About that, have you?

I'm being sarcastic. Okay, so having A vision. Let's look at the dollar sign legend on this one. It doesn't cost anything. So there's not really an excuse not to do this. It just takes your time and your energy, and sometimes it's hard to do working with groups. Working with a mastermind group or a coach can really help with this, I think. But the truth is, you've probably heard that saying, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. Don't go that way. I really would encourage you to have a vision. I didn't always have a vision. And for a number of years in our company, we just kind of were floating. It was okay. The ship was floating and just kind.

Of sailing around wherever.

Now my team knows where we're going. We are going after a million people, and everything we do is driving towards that vision.

So.

So I have basically created. Think of a blueprint. You want to build a house, you come up with a blueprint. And that blueprint then can be shared with the general contractor, who will share it with the painters, who will share it with the drywallers, who will share it with the window guys.

Right?

So your job as the CEO is to come up with the blueprint for where you want your company to get where you want to take it to and share it with your team and have them make it happen. They're your painters and your drywallers and your window guys. You may be one of those people too, right now.

Right?

So get everyone rowing the boat in the same direction by having a vision. Don't just have a vision and just put it on the wall and like, oh, yeah, we've done our vision. There it is. It's on the wall. Doesn't that look nice? It's in a framed picture frame and it's right by the front door. No, no, no. You have to share that vision and remind your team of the vision all the time, constantly. So our vision is up on the boardroom walls.

That's.

You're seeing a picture of that. You see the mouse pad in that picture. Every single employee has a mouse pad that has our core values and our vision. This is our 2019 vision. It was done in three year increments. So next year, at the beginning of 2019, I will start to work on our 2022 vision, and it'll be all, we'll redo the wall and we'll redo the mouse pads. But, you know, for three years, everyone knows this is where we're going. This is what we're trying to get to. The other thing we do is we don't just have them on the walls. We have. Our leadership team has an off site strategy session three times a year and at that session we go through a very detailed. I have this vision checklist that I came up with. It's five or six pages long. So all the sort of the bigger themed ideas on the vision are broken down into detailed items that we say, are we doing this? We give ourselves a green, a yellow or a red. Either. Yeah, we're doing it. Let's keep doing it. That's getting us to the vision or red. No, we're not doing this yet. Then this better become an area of focus for the next season. So we pick our big projects. What are we going to do? And we're constantly driving towards getting. We want all green on that vision checklist. By the end of 2019, we probably won't get all green, but that's okay. We're going in the right direction. It gives us something to all work towards. So I highly encourage you to take the time and the energy.

Get out.

Of your office, go sit somewhere and just start dreaming of what you want your company to look like three years from now. Write it all down extensively. I think you'll find it's immeasurable, the value you get from that. Getting your whole team and then sharing.

It with your team.

Because then you share it with them. You're all going the same direction. Number two on our top ten list is having core values and awarding on core values. We did not always have core values. We only implemented our core values about six years ago. And how we came up with our core values is a story in and.

Of itself, which I don't have time for today.

But it was a fun exercise to do and it was not done just by me. And it wasn't done just by our leadership team. It was done by myself, one or two people on the leadership team and two or three people employees in the company. It was a mix of people who put together the core values and it took us some time to do it, but it was really great. And now that we have it, so our core values of our company, we have six. They are deliver what you promise, take pride in what you do, live and breathe sport and social club, get shit done, be a Tigger, not an Eeyore, and treat every member like your best friend.

Those are our core values.

Those are unique for our business. Everything we do in our business comes from our core values. Every decision we make, I reflect back on our core values. Before I make the decision, anyone we hire, we hire and fire around our core values. So that's core values. We don't just talk the talk, we walk the walk. We have them on the wall in two different places actually. They're up on the boardroom as well as in home court. They are on everyone's mouse pads and we talk about them all the time. We do a core value award. You can see the trophy there. It's an apple core.

I'm just a bit of a literal.

Person, so I thought that was funny. And the base of the trophy has our core values written around it. And every month our staff get a nomination form emailed to them, a survey monkey. They nominate. It's optional, but we really. Almost everyone does it. They nominate anyone in the office for a core value award and they just give them a one sentence shout out as to why they're nominating them as the CEO. I read through them in front of everybody. So it's publicly done. People love a little shout out for themselves. But even more so, people love being able to shine a light on someone they work with.

It's really powerful.

It's like giving a gift at Christmas. It's really powerful. It feels good to give someone a shout out. So good, in fact, that we actually were like, we can't just do this once a month. We have to have more. So we have a Slack channel now and one of the channels in our Slack system is the shout out channel. So there are shoutouts that come through on Slack daily, like multiple times a day. Hey, I'm just giving a shout out to so and so forth. This core value. Da da da da. And it's really costs nothing. It's some time and energy to figure out what your core values are. They should not be aspirational, by the way. Do not have aspirational core values. They should be what you are, what you're all about. To so and so for this core value. Da da da da. And it's really costs nothing. It's some time and energy to figure out what your core values are. They should not be aspirational, by the way. Do not have aspirational core values. They should be what you are, what you're all about. And then everything you do in your business will stem from that. So it makes making decisions really powerful and really easy. Priceless. Lastly, number one on our top 10 list is having a team lunch. Have you ever heard about how important it is to break bread as a family? To sit and have a Family meal together. We've all heard those studies, so this is no different. Although we're not a family. I made that clear earlier. We are a team, but eating together as a team is very powerful. And this started in the very early days. My first employee, we were working in our house and I used to say, hey, I'm going downstairs to make a sandwich. Do you want one? I'll make you one. And then the next day he would be like, do you want me to make you some lunch?

Sure.

The third employee gets hired. We just started taking turns making lunch for each other. Before we know it, we're like, hey, why don't we just have a schedule? I'll make lunch for a week, lunch for a week, and then you make lunch for a week. We did that until we had up to the point where we had 10 employees. It got to the point we had any office we had. We always made sure we had a kitchen in it because this was our part of our culture. It got to the point where I would sit at my desk, work, work, work, work, work. And then I'd hear, lunch is ready. And you get up from your desk, just like mom called, dinner's ready. And you get up from your desk, you go to the lunchroom, sit down and have a meal together with everyone on their team. Our voicemail in the office actually says, we eat lunch together every day from 12:30 to 1:00'. Clock. So if you haven't, if you called during that time, that's probably why I'm not answering the phone. And it is so powerful. After we got to 10. So nine weeks would go by where I wasn't making lunch ever, or buying lunch.

It was actually quite pleasant.

And then I would make lunch for 10 people for a solid five days. But it was so fun and so powerful. It got to the point where with different eating habits and stuff, we couldn't keep that up. We're now, you know, 35 people. I'm not going to make lunch for 35 people. But what hasn't changed is everyone still gets up from their desk, goes to the lunchroom. Not always exactly at 12:30, but you loosely start to see a train of people head into the lunchroom around 12:30. Everyone leaves their desk for lunch. You're basically not allowed to eat lunch at your desk. Everyone just kind of gets that. That's just not done at our office. And the power of, you can see in that photo, people sitting around having a laugh. They're talking about sports and movies they've seen and what Trips they're going on, whatever. It's just fun. It's fun. It's collaborative.

So very, very powerful.

Costs nothing. Incredible. Team bonding comes from having a team lunch. And that was the number one thing, as voted by my team, that they.

Love about our culture.

That's why it's in the number one spot on my top ten list, team lunch. So, in summary, I guess I just want to express to all of you that it's really important the cultural ideas that you choose to implement fit naturally with your organization. I think first off, you're going to want to think about your core values because that's where natural culture will flow from and get your vision really clearly shared and nailed down from there. Other cultural ideas will flow naturally from that. Please keep in mind that successfully establishing a strong culture means that your habits, your values, your behaviors will carry on throughout your organization even when you're not there. That is what having a strong culture means. And culture in your organization will be the sum of the examples that you set, the incentives you create, and the behaviors that you reward. Culture is what will nudge people to act in the way that you and they will be very proud of. Thank you so much for having me here today. It's been a pleasure.

Couldn't find the opening of the curtains there. Was she awesome? All right, well, have a seat. We're going to just chat a little bit. Oh, my goodness. So do you guys get some ideas here? Yeah. How about the lunch? Are you going to be having your lunch? Your team have lunch together?

Do you?

That's so great. So, I mean, sometimes I think, Christy, people get this idea that culture is fluff and it's just this extra thing that's going to cost more, but it actually ends up making you a lot more money.

Totally. Yeah.

And it doesn't have to cost anything. I mean, the top three, the top three on my list, core values, vision, eat lunch together. Every one of those costs nothing. Just your time and energy to implement that.

Yeah. So I'd love to open it up for questions from you all to ask Christy. So just, you know, share situations in your company, challenges you might be having, because I assure you, she's had them having that many employees. And so let's have a couple people at the mic here and a couple people here.

Hello. That was great, by the way. So I have a product based business and I have created my business to be where I outsource everything. And what I realized is, even though I outsource to a manufacturing fulfillment house sales team that They. I need to be treating them like they are my employees, and I haven't been doing that. So I was wondering, how would I apply this with, like, my sales team that are independent contractors or, like, my fulfillment house and they're all outside of my office?

That's a great question. Have you got core values established for your company?

Not in writing.

Not yet. Okay. So that would be a great place to start, in my opinion. And I think that when you're looking to work with any partner, we do partnership deals where we have, you know, sponsorships, et cetera. If they don't share our core values.

We won't work with them.

So it's the same idea. You can share your core values with the suppliers that you're working with, your partners that you're working with, and make sure that they, you know, how do.

You feel about our core values?

Do these fit with. Do you guys believe in these core values? These are my core values of my company, and you make sure that they get that. And then secondly, sharing a vision, letting them know, this is our vision for our company. This is where I'm trying to get to.

How can you help me with that now?

Thank you for that. I just realized they do have that, and they've been with me for 11 years, most of them. The part that I wanted to know is, how do I create, like, the incentive program with them? Like, because, like, my sales team doesn't necessarily work for me. They represent all these other products.

Right.

So I'm trying to figure out. And I don't know if that's something.

That I can give you an answer for. Well, I mean, could.

Could you not create some incentives for them? I mean, so they're working for you as well as a number of other companies. I mean, I think a lot of organizations have sales incentives, right? Where if they sell a certain amount of product for you, you've got some kind of a trip, or you can create whatever you would like out of it. Some kind of contest. The contests happen all the time with sales organizations, so perhaps it's as simple as incenting that way.

That's great. I'll be talking with all my mastermind team for my ask.

Fantastic. Yeah.

You know what?

Honestly, the power of talking with other entrepreneurs or coaches, it's so huge. Right?

Like, being able to sit in a.

Room like this and share ideas and ask questions like, does anyone.

What do people think?

How would you guys do this? Because maybe someone's already doing it and can share. Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, we were talking about that. Because I think so many business owners feel like I should know how to do this myself.

Yeah.

Which is.

I mean, truth. We don't know how to do anything ourselves. Anything in life takes good coaching.

Right.

To get good at. And I don't think business is any different. And you can get coaching from business coaches and you can get coaching from peers. Having a network of peers that you meet with on a regular basis, fellow entrepreneurs. I certainly have had huge value in that over the years because especially when you're in an. You do feel kind of alone on an island when you're leading a company. And so it's great, Very powerful to be able to ask other people about their experiences and get ideas from doing so.

So many of.

So much of what we do at our company has come from getting shared experiences from others. For sure.

Right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes.

Hi, I'm David with Shift My Orders. I really like your presentation. Thank you for that. I have a couple of questions, so the first one will be regarding the core values on your interview process. It's something I have been personally struggling with. So pretty much I'm trying to see how to assess someone's cultural fit through the interview process for these core values that sometimes are not very. I mean, if you ask someone, are you, you know, this way or the other? So my question to you would be, do you have. How have you been able to. Do you have a process with questions to assess how someone is good for your particular core values is through questions through behavior. I mean, have you through the times, kind of developed any particular. Any advice on that regard?

Yeah, sure. People are really honest, I find. And so we often ask in the group interview process, we ask people which core value. It's written on the wall. We can literally point to them. Which core value on the wall do.

You feel most speaks to you?

Most sums you up? And then you ask which one doesn't. And people are really honest. And in fact, when I was hiring my last ea, which I heard you.

Say yesterday, it took a bit of.

Time to get, I guess Heather is your assistant now. She's pretty awesome. Met her in the gym this morning. And when we were hiring our last ea, one woman who stood out to me, I thought she was really great. And then I asked that question and.

The core value that she said least.

Spoke to her was get shit done. And I was like, oh, God, okay.

So, yeah, that's not going to work.

Like, yeah.

And she was talking about how. And I said, well, tell me about that.

And she was saying, oh, you Know, like my current job, I let things.

Pile up and I'll just, I'll take care of it. And I was just like, yeah, okay, that's so not gonna work for me.

So it wasn't it wild how people are honest?

Yeah.

But her 1, 1 core value for her that she said she most would.

Attach to was, I forget it was like treat every member like your best friend or something.

They're all good core values.

Right. And everyone has their, their strengths and weaknesses. And not everyone's going to be 100%.

Across the board, but ideally you're trying.

To find people who, your core values speak to them.

And some people will see the core values, some people will see get shit.

Done on my wall or on my website and that will offend them.

They won't like that. And that's okay, that's totally cool.

But clearly they're not going to fit very well at my organization. I swear.

A little bit.

You know, in fact, I'm okay with that. Like, I'm okay with having the word shit on the wall in my office in two locations.

So having, just being really public about.

Sharing your core values, I think can be really powerful things.

That the way we, you know, I used to do it is our final interview process. So I will go and do the cultural fit, you know, piece, so to speak. So we have the core values and I talk about everyone and I ask them, okay, so how do you identify with this? And can you illustrate with an example, do you think something that fits your personality, but these have self fulfilling prophecies. So if you ask someone, okay, so tell me about a time where you were showing this core value. I mean it's like they're going to deliver something just to check boxes.

Absolutely, yeah. And sometimes having the homework package I think is really powerful because if someone says that they deliver what they promise and that yeah, I'm really good about delivering what I promise, and then their homework package shows up three hours late. Clearly they're not big on delivering what they promised.

Right, I like that one. So one question. When you are making people jump through all these hoops to get, you know, hired by your company, are these like, you know, employees with a kind of a medium higher salary or you know, do you have any lower level employees?

Everyone jumps through hoops if they want to work with us.

No matter what they're doing, everyone jumps through hoops. And this comes with my second question. So do you have mostly salary employees versus hourly wage employees?

Well, we have, yeah, our full time employees are all salaried. So over 35 full time employees, they're all on salary and those are the ones who, they jump through hoops. But even the part time employees come in for group interviews and they have to do some small homework packages even though they have to go through training.

So we're pretty intense.

We want good people representing our company. And I think if you make people jump through some hoops, they want it more.

Yeah, that's true. So my second question and final question, it's about your vacation. You know, how do you structure your vacation? So I see that you have salary employees that kind of change things a little bit versus hourly wage employees. So do you allow people. Because the whole purpose I guess is that you want people to actually take their time, disconnect, and you kind of refresh their minds, whatever. So do you have people who kind of never take them? You know, do you force people to at the end of the year to use their vacation time? Do you allow them to roll them over? I mean, how do you have issues with that? We do have issues with people who will actually spend all their employees day by day and at the end they never get like a full, you know, real employee time because they have been taking one day here and there. So how do you do that?

It's. Yeah, people are pretty good. I think about there are a few employees who don't take all their vacation time, but for the most part we're pretty flexible too. Like there's one guy who didn't take much vacation time the last two years and then he came to us and said he wanted to take six weeks at once. And I was like, great, go do that. We'll make that happen. We will support you because the truth is you can survive. You'll cover. What would you do if they got really sick again? It just builds loyalty by allowing that. And another woman, it was her dream to go on a big trip. And so she sat down and planned out how was she going to take. She wanted to take a little more time off. So she took some unpaid leave in conjunction with some vacation time. And we supported that for good employees. I want them to love working with us. I'm going to bend over backwards to make them be happy as well.

We do that too. I mean, I'm super flexible with my team. You know, they ask me, can I take the day for this? My family is here. I've got this disappointment. I would say 99.9%, I say yes. And because they don't take advantage, they really appreciate that you know.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thanks, David.

Hi, Christie. Thank you so much for talking about this in a way where it's just not a nice to have, but actually a must have. I know you called them 10 tactical ideas, but really, when I was looking at those, and I'll say in a minute why this is so important for me, I was looking at them as everything on there was you aligning what you do every day with your core values. So it was a blend of your actions, your offerings, as well as your perks for your employees. And what I loved about it is that you mixed your core values internally and externally. And let me introduce myself.

I guess so.

My name is Samara Hakim and my company's name is called the Culture Factor.

Ha ha.

And what we do is we integrate culture into business metrics. So I was about to jump at everything you're saying there. I was loving it. I've been hearing from the morning until now that word culture fit. And one thing that I do as part of my work as we integrate culture into business metrics is how do we foster more inclusive and as a result, more innovative workplace. And I would love to just suggest shifting from culture fit to talking about culture add. We had talked about the core values. There's a way where we can still align with our core values, everybody. But there are people who will apply them differently. And so looking at what they add and that homework package, when you mentioned that, that's a great way of going past the superficial and diving deep to see what exactly can they add in terms of their communication style, work style, behaviors, and all that. So thank you for doing all of these steps for culture Ad. My question is to. And I know earlier you had said, I'm not sure how this is all measured. These are beautiful statistics and all that. I would love to tell everybody that there's a way that you can measure.

Yeah.

And tie it to your business objectives and your bottom line, your performance. So I'm curious if you've been able to do that through your company where all of this have you been able to see and kind of touch it in terms of.

I have never measured it. I guess I've just never really. I was sort of just joking around when I put in. I was. As I was preparing for this presentation, I thought, every presentation needs statistics. I better throw in some statistics. And I'm laughing, looking up on the Internet statistics around culture. And I was sort of being facetious by putting some of those in there. But I would love to know how you can measure it. I've only been able to measure it from my personal experience. Experience. I mean, our employee retention is huge.

Great.

So I can see.

I just have never, you know, sat down and physically, like, are they staying because we eat lunch together every day. Like, is that why they stay? Are they staying because I give them all this vacation time? Like, I don't know how you. We do so many things to have a strong culture that I don't know how you measure.

I mean, I would imagine it's all these things, things together. You know what I mean? It's not the one thing.

Right.

And, you know, so it's. And they feel part of a family because you're going to spend more time.

Right.

Team.

Not team. Oh, team. Sorry, team. But they spend more time with you than at home.

Yeah, right. Totally true. Yeah, for sure.

So excited to be there.

Yeah.

And also, the truth is you could.

Do a lot of things right, but you do one thing not well.

Like, if you're a dictator, even if.

You are bringing popsicles, people aren't going to want to work with you. Right.

So I don't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Hello. Tom Nguyen. Nice to meet you.

Hi.

I run a company called wincorp Solutions. So I love this topic. It's a people company, so we staff. The question I had for you is I know you have probably entry level, mid level and senior level folks, and you probably have had as you've grown and really expanded for maybe senior leadership mindset or maybe maybe the manager or senior leader who someone's not in your company. Have you had any challenges with. For finding that right arm or the left arm, a senior person? Can you share with us some hiring challenges for that really key position, whether you have it now or in the past?

Definitely. We, for a very long time have been a company where we always brought in junior people and they worked their way up and at some point, they didn't necessarily see. See a path for themselves anymore because for a long time I didn't have a vision. I was literally playing a lot of tennis and having a great lifestyle, taking summer holidays with my kids. And then I got bored and was like, I better do something different. That's when I came up with the vision and a growth plan. But for a long time, we'd hire junior people, they'd stick around for a while and then they'd move on because there wasn't necessarily somewhere to grow or there would be a place for them to grow, and they would move up. When I came up with the growth plan, it was a challenge. I was like, I can't do this by myself. I don't know what it means to do a merger or an acquisition. In fact, I remember in university taking a finance class and the term merger and acquisition made me want to throw up. I was like, God, what does that mean? I don't even want to know. And so then when the idea came to grow the company and the best way to do that was going to be through acquisitions, I was like, how.

Am I going to do this? I don't even know what that means.

I had to hire a cfo, but I couldn't afford a full time cfo, so I hired an interim cfo, a fractional cfo. We ended up hiring a woman who works for us two and a half days a week. She has been a huge resource for me, like for the last two and a half years she's been working with us and she worked at a big company in Canada and she didn't want a full time gig. She wanted flexibility to be home with her son. But she's really brilliant and has done lots of great work in this area. So it was a big. It's been a fantastic fit hiring someone fractionally at a senior level. And it was done through. It was done through. I used a headhunting firm to help find this person and I interviewed five people. And it was. Although we didn't do group interviews for this role, but I did do homework packages for them. And I'm actually looking. I just reached out to the same headhunting firm recently. I'm considering potentially hiring a fractional cio.

I'd love to reach out with you on this just to provide information.

Great.

I'd love to provide information.

Great. Yeah. Awesome. Does that answer your question?

Tom has staffed a lot of our Pinnacle members.

Awesome.

Yeah. And it does. It speaks. I think you alluded to this about the point where you can find it measurable, because I think there's a definitional issue with the word culture. Actually. Studies have shown with vast amount of studies in organizational behavior and design, that the most enduring culture that really lasts and that's measurable is a performance based one. So getting shit is a performance based culture. So that will. That's why it can't be measured. So I guess getting shit done is pretty performance based.

Yeah.

Awesome. Okay, thanks. Just two more. Yes, Gwen?

Hi.

Gwen Grossman. I run an architectural lighting design company in Chicago. I have a couple really practical questions. So I have struggled so much with the hiring process and getting the right people. Because what we do is so niche. When you're hiring people that are coming in from out of town, we struggle with like the cost of that. Do we pay for their flights? Do we host them for dinner and hotel? And how much do we have to entertain them?

Interesting. That's a great question. So we haven't hired a ton of people from. I haven't had that experience per se, although I have had the experience of trying to do some joint ventures and acquisitions and trying to do some partnerships where one, I did fly in from the United States and put him up in a hotel and it's taking forever to move that one forward. And the one that I didn't pay for him to. To come in or pay for his hotel, I took him out for a great dinner when he came in. Is moving forward very quickly, which I found quite interesting. Like it was almost like I wanted it too much and I was putting, you know, let me fly you up. Let me. So you know what we actually have, now that I think about it, we have hired two or three people who have moved to Toronto to work for us. I'm thinking of one young woman in particular. She flew from Vancouver to Toronto on her own for an interview. I mean it wasn't even offered that we would have paid for that. So. But I never had really thought about that. She just applied and said we were sort of very impressed that she made that effort. I don't know what the right answer is.

I would be impressed if they offer that too. But yeah, just looking for that higher level person and then we end up.

Studying for a senior level job.

Maybe you would.

I mean we've done it where we've split the cost.

That's a good idea. Okay, one other question. Nine to five culture. In my office, we have a very small office. What's happening is people do get up at 5 and then everyone else thinks, oh, that's the pattern, we just do that. So they don't get the idea. At least the way I came up, where you need to get your work done and it might not be a 40 hour week. And so I think since everyone else is doing it, it's just like they're just hands off. Once in a while they'll be like, oh, I'll take my computer home. But I don't moving forward, like I don't want to have that as a culture. So how do you change something that's kind of embedded already in there?

So what we talk about a lot.

Is I don't want facetime in fact, I just let an employee go who had worked for us for over 10 years because she was not going to be able to keep up with the change of our organization. And she interestingly, was in the office. I work late on nights when my kids aren't with me. I tend to stay late at the office till 7 or 8 o' clock at night. Just if I'm getting shit done, I want to keep rolling. And she was the only person who was always there later than me. That didn't impress me. In fact, it actually really made me think. You're not very efficient with your job. So for me it's more about performance. I don't want the face time. I don't want you sitting at your desk just to impress someone. I want you getting your work done and get home and have a life. Go do all the fun things that you're working for. That's sort of.

So we talk that talk a lot.

And our business is very seasonal. So in the very busy times, people know, don't plan your vacation during this week or this week. That's blackout period, we call it. That's a busy, busy time.

You're gonna maybe have to stay late.

At the office that week.

But if you're really efficient as a team and you're working together and you're.

Helping each other out, you'll get out of the office a lot sooner. The woman we let go was a real. Like, she was a bit of a bottleneck. She wanted to. She was a perfectionist and wanted to prove everything before it went out. And it was like, you're holding up everybody by with this attitude and it's not going to help us scale. And so I think it's an attitude, you know, I think it's more about performance. Are they getting the work done and are they performing? Are they hitting the targets you need them to hit?

And if they are, great, who cares.

If they left the office right at 5:00'? Clock? But if they're not getting their work done and they're not hitting the targets, it's about like. I think that's the more important discussion to have.

Yeah.

Thanks, Gwen. Awesome, thanks. We've got, I think just one more. That's it all we have time for right now.

Okay, thank you.

I'm Angela Sayers. I am a CPA and I run my own firm. The questions I have are twofold. First of all, when you do this long hiring process, I've had people that come and they seem like great. And I go through the process And I call them to give them an offer and they've accepted somewhere else. And some people call back and they didn't like a decision that day. And the second question is, when you give them homework, what do you mean by homework? Give me an example of something.

Sure, yeah, that's a problem. I hate it when that happens. When you've sort of gone through this, you invested and you're like. That actually happened quite recently to us where, you know, we would narrow down to this is the guy. And they. I heard they offered him the job and he had just. He. What happened was he went to his current job to give his notice and they convinced him to stay. They begged him to stay. So we had to spend start again, which is frustrating. It doesn't happen that often because we really do try and probe, you know, how much time do you need to give your current job? How, you know, we get them to sell themselves to us a little bit. Like, how badly do you want to work here? We often ask actually one of the questions in the group interview. One of the questions when it's narrowed down to three people that we ask is who's the best person in the room for us to hire? You would think that everybody would say themselves. That doesn't always happen, which I find hilarious. Some people, actually, that person is. And it's like, really, you're not going to sell yourself? But then the next question we ask is if we could hire two people for this job. We want you to write down the name of the other person in the room that you would have so we can see who they think is a strong candidate too. And it kind of confirms who you think is really strong. And then we really probe on how badly do you want the job and you get them to sell themselves to you. So that sometimes helps with that first issue, the second issue, remind me what.

It was an example of. Homework package.

Homework package.

So it's very job specific. One example, we just hired a marketing.

Coordinator in January and one of the. We wanted to see how creative they were and I wanted to know how much effort they would put into going out and meeting members, going out to the games and connecting and hearing the voice of our members. Because I think that's really important for our marketing team to know what's important to our members. The homework package was create a social media post or video. This woman, this one woman, the video she came up with was unbelievable. It got her the job. I was blown away. And the other candidates was so lame. What they came up with, they Put no effort in. They did not go to the games. We gave them the schedule of this is when games are. This is when you can meet people. She went out and interviewed members and she put a lot of effort into that. So that was like we were trying to see creativity there. We were trying to see how much effort they'd put in to jump through the hoop. And she blew my mind. You can also. Scheduling is a big part of what we do. So you have to be real detail oriented. So if they're hiring an operations person, they'll give them a test schedule to come up with. They'll say put together a schedule for a volleyball league and they look for the detail. If there's a whole bunch of mistakes in there, they're not a very detail oriented person. So it really is job specific. But we have a number of different homework items depending on the job. We always ask people to come up with their bio for our website. And again, you kind of just see how creative they are, how detail oriented they are. When I was hiring for our ea, one of her homework packages was. Was to plan a trip she was given. We have this budget. You need to plan the staff trip. What are you going to come back with? And so the three people who did the homework package all kind of put together an itinerary for a trip for my staff. And they researched online and said the.

Flights will be this much and we're.

Going to go to this location and the bus is picking us up at this time and whatever. And it was just an itinerary.

Yeah. Do it specific to your. We've done with marketing. Do a 30 day marketing plan or 30 day sales plan and come back with that. So.

Okay.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thanks.

Let's give Christy a hand. This is so fantastic. Thank you.

Thank you.

Wonderful. Really, really.

Scaling a business is not for the faint of heart. Playing it safe causes 34 million American business owners to avoid risk entirely and suffer from smallness. I understand what you're feeling. No matter how hard you work, no matter what what you sacrifice, you just can't seem to get to that elusive next level. That's because what got you here is not going to get you there. Scaling is not about working harder. It's not that one. Right. Strategy. It's the whole picture. It's you, it's your big, beautiful vision. It's your team, it's your drive. It's how you show up. It's time to take a leap off.

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Sam.