061: Tristan White - How to Develop a Winning Culture

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Today, culture's everything. Culture trumps everything. Culture will make your life easier. And we're going to talk today all about how to develop a winning culture with someone who's developed an award winning culture. Foreign. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with us today is Tristan White. Tristan is the founder and CEO of physio company. Physio company provides physio physical therapy work. Well, he could talk you more all about that but he's, he's been ranked at number one of Australia's best places to work. He's a qualified physiotherapist. He's got a terrific background. He, I sort of know him through the Gazelles organization. He works with another coach. He's been around. He's got this great book on culture is everything and he's also a member of the eo, the Entrepreneurs organization that I've been involved with for many, many years. And I'm just so excited to have Tristan on the show today. Welcome to the show, Tristan.

G' day Bill. Fantastic to be here with you. Thank you.

We can hear right away that you are not from the US of A. We have a tremendous number of listeners in Australia, a few in New Zealand. We've got the UK and Canada. Surprising to me to see just how far and wide people are listening in. So great to have you on today. Now it's morning your time, it's late afternoon our time. So it's great to connect, nice to find a place. So we're going to hear all about your secrets of developing a thriving company culture and how you became one of Australia's. Well, at one point, right? Number one. And then for many years in the top 50 places to work and you took a company where you're struggling at 20 up over 100 people. So we want to hear how to do that. And it became a more fun place. You're going to cherish your four big secrets to creating this world class culture and how we're going to do it. So I'm so looking forward to that. Before we get into all that. Right, take us back. Like tell us how do you get started? Tell us about the development of your business and your career as an entrepreneur.

Absolutely. Bill, it's fantastic to be here and share this story. And I think an important starting point is to note that I am what's known as a physiotherapist here in Australia or a physical therapist as you know them in the States. And I went to physical physical therapy school here in Melbourne. And when I got to the end of that degree, I found myself with a ten year dream, a ten year career dream that I thought I'd finish my degree, I'd start working in the large teaching hospitals as a junior physical therapist. I would learn the trade and I would slowly move towards more of the private practice direction with a focus on sports people. And my 10 year dream would be that after that period of time, after 10 years, I would be a partner or an owner in an elite sports practice and I would be the physical therapist for my favorite AFL football club, the mighty Richmond Tigers. And Bill.

The mighty Richmond Tigers, everybody.

The mighty Richmond or the once mighty Richmond Tigers, Bill. Because we're not going, we're not flying. But that was the dream. But you know what? After finishing my degree, the idea of working, actually physically working in those large teaching hospitals with a whole lot of structure and guidelines and strict approaches to work was not something that I thought I could stomach. So I actually skipped that step and I started working in a growing group of private practices in regional Victoria, so out of Melbourne. And I was working in this small treatment room where I had a new patient coming in to see me every 20 to 30 minutes. And for the start of that year, Bill, I was loving it. I thought, whoa, Tristo, you've skipped forward on this ten year dream. You're making fantastic progress. And I was also working with an elite football team at the time in the evenings and the weekends. But you know what, after the first six to nine months, I started doubting the work that I was doing. And I was really, my head was telling me I was going the right direction and to the career, but my heart was telling me that I just didn't love the work that I was doing and I felt like I was helping healthy people become healthier as opposed to actually helping people live the best lives they possibly could be. And so after the first year I resigned from that job, I left that job and I didn't have another job. And I reflected heavily on what I actually enjoyed doing and what I wanted to do, and also on what the future of healthcare in this country was going to look like. And I settled on something which, As a then 24 year old young bloke, I settled on working with elderly folk in aged care. And that was a huge hit to my ego in some ways because I told the world, told all my mates, my family, my friends, that elite sports was where I was headed. And here I was deciding that aged care and working with elderly people was for me. And so what I did was I went and got a 12 hour per week subcontract job at an old nursing home here in Melbourne and I started working with elderly people, including people like George and Marjorie, who were very early elderly clients, who I remember very clearly from those days. And Bill, I loved that first job and working with elderly people, even though it was so different to the sexy world of elite sports. And during that next year I slowly got introduced to another nursing home up the road and I become the physical therapist there. And over that first year I ended up working about six to seven days a week at various aged care homes. And that there is the starting point of what became the business that has grown to over 100 person team today.

Being physiotherapists, what did you love about working with elderly seniors?

Yeah, with seniors with elderly folk, with whatever, whatever the appropriate term is.

The silver set.

Yeah.

And you know what, Bill, it's an important concept because they're just people.

No, they're not. You and me. Yeah, I'm never going to be like that. I'm 52.

What did I love about it, Bill, was that I felt that I could help them in a significant way. And for example, an elderly person who really desperately lives at home, in their own home and they really want to stay independent and mobile and an important thing for them is every day to be able to leave their home, go down a few steps, walk out the driveway and collect the mail from their mailbox at the front of their driveway and then go back inside. For someone who that's a very significant goal for them and they want to keep doing it because it's important to them. If I can help them to do that, that was something that really made me happy. And felt like I could do something, grateful. They were happy and I were happy. And that's one of the examples of what made it really useful for me.

They're probably pretty appreciative just to have the dignity of being able to do that.

Right, you got it, Bill? Yeah. There's so much in it that I felt like I was doing something useful in the world. And they felt very grateful of the help. And you know what, it's not just the physical therapy. It was the human connection and the chatting and the talking and stuff that comes with it as well.

So there you are, you start to go out and you start to have your own company then, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So year two, I had more of these elderly folk to help that I could possibly do myself. And even as an accidental entrepreneur, I figured out that if I've got more people to help, then I need to employ some people to help me out. And so some part time physical therapists started joining the team. And the same thing continued happen over the next few years. And then five years in, Bill, I found myself with a 20 person team of physical therapists. And, and at this point I had not thought about culture. I didn't even know what the idea of culture was, to be completely frank. I was clearly focused on being a physical therapist and I turned into a bit of a supervisor, I guess, because I was answering calls and questions from these 20 team members who reported directly to me. And it was actually at that point, Bill, at the fifth year point, that I was no longer loving being the owner of this business. And I wasn't as engaged as I had been. And the major reason was that I hadn't put the structures and systems and focus in place and I was completely stuck.

I just want to have you pause right there before we get the stuckness of it. Right, because this happened for you at 20. And that's a gift that it happens that early. Because I regularly see, I mean, even in the last year I see companies at 60, at 100, at a little over 300, at a thousand people where they have suddenly realized, wait, we don't have the right structures, we don't have the structures. We have structures that suck. We have structures that make it no fun. We have chaos, we have disorder, we have disagreement, we have people working, we have all kinds of symptoms of a company not working well, but they come to that often a lot later than 20. So I think it's really cool that you came to that. But whatever for our listeners, at whatever point you're at now, Whether you be at 20 people like Tristan was, or you're sitting at 50 or hundreds now, or even thousands, there can come a point where you realize your structures are bankrupt or they have just evolved organically instead of thoughtfully. So tell us about how you're stuck and what you did about it.

Yeah, thank you, Bill. And on reflection, I hear you entirely about the gift of that happening at 20 people. At the time, it did not feel like a gift.

Bill, I.

Yeah, you got it. But look at the time. 20 people reporting to me and I hadn't empowered them with anything like the type of training they needed. The core purpose and core values as guiding principles. We didn't have a clear vision. We didn't have any of these systems that we've learned today, a lot of it through the gazelle systems, as to what was required to have a thriving and growing business. Bill I was a physical therapist at that point. I thought I had two options. One was to get out and this whole entrepreneur thing was not meant to be for me or I could find a better way and I could figure out a system to do it. And clearly I took the second option and I did something that scared the hell out of me at the time. Bill And I think this is important learning and that is that I took a short break. It was only between two and three weeks, but my then fiance, now wife Kimberly, and I jumped on a plane and we headed up your way to North America and we went to do some research. We visited the guys in Vancouver at Nurse next door and we also visited one or two other seniors businesses on the west coast of the States. And I did some reading and I discovered it was that point that an EO member here in Australia by the name of Naomi Simpson, you know Naomi, and she suggested to me that I connect with EO and that I read Vern's book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. And it was that point during that short break that I discovered this values based approach that has become the guiding light for the growth that we've had from that 20 person to be now north of 100 in terms of team members and has been the starting point for my learning and growing that has put this culture is everything system together.

Yeah, you know, it's really great what you did because there are many entrepreneurs who practice learning, growing themselves, but they don't always translate that to the rest of their team. They come back and they share some idea. They learned in an awkward way and it doesn't quite translate. And then they go on developing themselves, but not necessarily Developing their company or their own leadership. And then they wonder, God, why does my team suck? Well, you thought you could go off to classes yourself and come back and figure it out and you didn't figure out how to translate that. So it's really great that you. That you had that, that epiphany in that way. And what a great one. Of course, we talk about Naomi Simpson in particular around developing and enshrining and driving a BHAG frequently in public workshops. Vern speaks about her. You know, we know her from our work with clients, so that's terrific. So what did you do with that then? How did you take that and apply that? What did your company end up looking like?

So what we did, Bill, was some important foundations that we put in place at that point, which were probably the two parts of the two first parts of this discover. Sorry, the first two parts of the culture is everything system, which we'll get to soon. But one of them was discover the core. And really nailing down the core purpose of our organization and our core values of our organization were two really important steps to get the framework in place or the boundaries in place for us all to work towards. And so getting our core purpose in place and the set of four core values which we then started using for reward and recognition and for all sorts of other ways of telling stories and using a common language in our business was the first part.

Right, so discover it, create it, capture it.

Right, all that, all that. And the second part, which we did, which is document the future, is that I learned the idea of bhag, as you mentioned, from Jim Collins and the fact that there needs to be a North Star, a shining light that we're all aligned to and heading towards over a long period of time. And so we put in a place what we now call a ten year obsession. And that ten year. Yeah, and that ten year obsession is for us right now, we're still in the middle of our first 10 year obsession. We're getting towards the end of it. But to deliver 2 million consultations for Australian seniors was the 10 year obsession that we put in place. But I also Learnt, Bill, that 10 years is a very long time for many team members and physical therapists in our team to be focused on. And so I applied the learnings that I picked up from Cameron Herold in the concept of the painted picture vision vision and reverse engineered our ten year obsession back to a three year painted picture vision, which we use as a base camp, towards our bhag. And with those things in place we put together this information and this 10 year obsession, our painted picture vision and also the core principles of purpose and values. And went about, set about communicating over and over and over again in a one to many, one to one, all types of way with our team members.

Pause for a second there and let's just bring it to life a little bit more for folks. So what was the purpose? What is the purpose of the company?

The core purpose now the refined core purpose is the physio coexists to help seniors stay mobile, safe and happy.

So your why is helping seniors stay mobile, safe and happy?

Yeah, that's right.

And then you have a set of values, Right? Can you rattle them off?

Of course, yeah. There's four core values. Respect everyone, be memorable, think big, act small, and find a better way.

Respect everyone, think big, act small, find a better way, Find a better way, be memorable, be memorable. Okay, really great. So I want to point out that the, the purpose is the why of the work. It's the motivating factor. If you're familiar with Simon Sinek, start with why. It speaks to the deep core of the brain that drives action. We care about it, we feel something. And then that's the why. Then the values are the how. If I walk around your company today hearing those values and knowing what I know about you, I'm sure that I will see those in play. And, and they're not throwaway words like, you know, teamwork, communication, integrity. They're rich, evocative things that paint a picture of something. So that's the why, the how, and then the what. I would say is your 10 year goal for, what was it? 2 million.

2 million consultations.

Yeah, that's right, 2 million. I can tell you're a fan of Naomi Simpson.

She had a similar, similar behave.

That's right, yeah.

In the early days.

And this is one that I get. People struggle all the time. So very frequently the CE CEO or founder has a monetary kind of a BHAG in mind. They're like, I want to hit 50 million, I want to hit 100 million. Or my favorite is I want to hit a billion dollars in sales. Great. What does a billion look like in purpose is the simplest way that we can translate to something that everyone cares about. Because for the most part, your customers, your employees, your vendors, your business partners, they don't care about you hitting a billion dollars in sales or 10 million or 100 million, they don't care about any of that. But when you express that financial goal that you and your spouse and Your equity partners care very much about. Anybody else on some kind of a bonus or exit plan will care about that, but the rest of people don't. But as soon as you translate that to that purpose statement of helping seniors lead safer, better, happier, I bastardized that a little bit. But we got the idea then. We've now impacted that too many people. I know that there's a financial thing that relates to that, but now everybody loves that, right? Everybody's motivated.

Absolutely. It's an allotment.

And then you create, you do a painted picture piece. So we've had Cameron Harold and his old partner Brian Scudamore talking about paint a picture, vivid vision, or sometimes we call it a three hag, the three year highly achievable goal. And that's an interim kind of a thing, a three year horizon where we paint a very clear picture that everybody can feel a part of.

Yeah, absolutely, Bill. That's, that's exactly what we did in those early days. And that was way back in 2009. I was still figuring it out. But you have communicated that in a beautiful way. So thanks for summarizing that for me.

I do it all day long. Right, so. And then your next thing was, was the just relentless execution. Right. So you, you started to repeat it frequently and often and drive home the movement to it. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So the four steps in the Culture is everything system. We've talked about two of them already, Doc. Discover the core, document the future.

Right.

And the fourth one is show more love. And when.

When.

We'll get to that.

Okay.

The fourth one is show more love and we'll get to that in just a tick. But when you think about a culture based system and you think about the why, you think about the vision and you think about showing more love to your people, I think most entrepreneurs would say, yep, I get it. That makes a lot of sense. The one I want to speak to now is called Execute relentlessly. And that's not always a habit that entrepreneurs would apply to a culture based system. Some people would get it and some people would think, I don't quite understand that. What's been a real learning from me, Bill, and I know you know this inside out, is the fact that culture systems can be repeatable over and over and over again. Just like sales and marketing, just like recruitment, just like quality control, just like all those other things that there are checklists and systems in place to build parts of a business. Well, this is what execute relentlessly is about. It's about having a checklist in place to make sure you are using the right language of the core purpose and core values. You do have a reward and recognition program based upon storytelling around core values. You do have ways to make sure that you are aligned on a regular basis to the paid pitcher bid and or the bhag. And so two examples that we use in our business, Bill, is the daily huddle, which of course is part of the Gazelle's scaling up system. But execution, execution, execution around a daily huddle system is critical and they can have ups and downs in terms of the energy in daily huddles. And it's important to know that that happens. But it's important to make sure that we stay specific. To get the real value from daily huddles is one and another way to execute relentlessly is the hiring system, which again, the hiring system that we use is based upon the top grading approach, but it's making sure we have these repeatable systems that are relentlessly executed over and over and over again. And I think that's the important point of execute relentlessly.

So if you look in the world of culture, right, the culture lives on the tactical side of the time horizon. It's all the things you do day in, day out, day after day. And you've got the daily huddle to do it. We've got with most companies and clients that we work with, if you read the scaling up book, you learn about the daily huddle, you learn about the weekly management meeting, you learn about the monthly meeting where we take the alignment to quarterly goals and the truing up and the problem solving, we add a little learning to it. And then you see quarterly planning where we see and make adjustments to quarterly plan against the three hag against the annual goals. And then we run through that. And then of course, we have an annual meeting where we set things and we revise the three hag or the painted picture and create a new one for the year. And of course then we're also tying in each person's personal plan or they're tying it into what they're doing in their professional life as well, so that all the things work together. And if we think about culture in our communities, culture in our religious traditions, our ethnic traditions, we think about habits and routines, right? And a daily huddle is a particular kind of habit. Rewards for achieving and reinforcing company values are, are part of cultures and traditions, right? They're the things that we do and we give and we celebrate and we train. So training them, learning them, teaching them Rewarding them, talking about them, reinforcing them, enshrining them. These are all kinds of things that create cultures and traditions rooted in. Right. The core and the future. So the purpose, the values and then the ten year and three year futures.

Absolutely, Bill. And you've nailed that beautifully. And that's what the execute relentlessly part is. And in recent years at the physio company, we started with the daily huddles as one of the starting points from that challenging time I had. But over the years we've added more of those routines and ritual that you do speak of. And we do work with a scaling up coach that guides us through. Internally, we have the weekly and monthly meetings and then we have the quarterly and annual off sites with a scaling up coach.

That's brilliant. There's a little investment and not every company at 20 people does that kind of thing. But you're now 100 people thanks to doing that kind of work, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

There is a payoff to the investment and it does take time.

It sure does. It sure does.

If we walk around your business, what does it look like? What does it feel like?

Well, good question, Bill. Because our business has a central support office which looks and feels like a friendly family home is the way we try to describe us. With lots of photos on the wall of our team members and lots of interacting with lots of seniors. There are stories of clients and there are stories of people living our core values in our central support office. But it's important to remember that we've got physical Therapists in over 100 locations around Australia and they're working on site in aged care homes, in retirement villages and in people's own homes. And we can't control the physical environment of those places, but we absolutely can control the communication we have with our team members. And we make sure we're continuously communicating in a meaningful way, using the language of our business to promote not only the great existence of helping seniors stay mobile, safe and happy, but helping people be the best human beings they can be. Because we really think that if we the best people we can be, then we can get the best results for our business as well.

This sounds like where you get into the show More love, is that right?

Absolutely, yeah. Last part of the system, Bill. And this was learned through pain. This section was learned through pain from my perspective. And that is a number of years ago we were putting these routines and rituals in place and I was building a team and they were great people and they were Doing good work. But they weren't doing what I thought was great work. I didn't think they were bringing any every part of themselves to really love their work and love their clients to do their life's best work. And I reflected on this and I was frustrated by it and then become very apparent to me Bill, which feels ridiculous when looking back but why would they, why would they show more love to their work and to their clients if their boss and if the business didn't show more love to them? It really seemed like a cause and certain a effect type of approach. Instead of going for the defensive type of approach, I went for the investment in the people. I went for the investing in obviously and systematically showing more love for people. What I mean by that is some very simple things that have been learned through my entrepreneurial journey of things like make sure that when every single person joins the the team they have a welcome day, they have proper induction and training and then at lunchtime we down tools so to speak and we have a little lunch where we have some sandwiches and some juice or a glass of water. And then during that lunch we raise our glasses to the person and say hey, this party is in your honor. Welcome to the team. We love having you. Thanks for choosing to be part of the physio co. And that welcome experience is part of it. There's also very simple things like sending handwritten cards on people's birthdays and anniversaries. And probably one of my favourites is the acknowledgement and the importance of knowing that there are influences in your team and in my team that aren't on the payroll. And what I mean by that Bill, is that the wives and husbands and kids and housemates of the people in your team are important part of their life but they're not necessarily part of your business's life. And when I started to understand that and including those people by communicating, by sending these cards to people's own homes so that their wives and partners could actually see, hey, there's a note from that person's work and they really appreciate what you're doing. Hey, that's good, nice job. And there's this communication that happens and probably the last bit, Bill, which is critical to this involving people in the ups and downs of business and life. It's just acknowledging when either good stuff happens in your team members life or challenges. And an example that I've learned from Tom Peters is that he suggests that people have an unlimited budget for flowers, which is a crazy idea that I thought he was a nut when I first heard that Bill, but I have embraced the idea. And just on the weekend, just gone there was. Our finance manager's wife was in hospital. She'd become ill during a pregnancy. We made sure we communicated to her and sent her a bunch of flowers. And the return is just such a sense of inclusion and caring. And it's not even her workplace, it's someone else's workplace, it's her husband's. But that showing more love in a meaningful way. But it's the small gestures that can often mean the most to really align a team.

It's funny. One of the first things when you talk privately and candidly with CEOs and entrepreneurs in about their challenges, they'll complain about people, oh, I got all these people problems. I love my business, but the people. And you'll hear that a lot. And yet after you start to go into this, people start to love and appreciate their people like they never did before. They start to see and relate to their people as being full of possibility, of caring, giving human beings and so on. But makes a huge difference to put in place these kinds of structures that create a culture where people are empowered, celebrated, where people are enabled to do the best work of their lives.

Absolutely. It's easy to blame people, but when we take responsibility and act as the best human we can be, I think we get the best outcomes in our businesses.

Bill, it's interesting as you're talking about some of these people practices around showing more love, I realize how inconsistently sometimes I have been over the years in my onboarding practices, but that sometimes we'll do a bigger deal on the day somebody leaves us than the day they join us. And that just is crazy. If your onboarding process doesn't do more than just teach people how to work the phone system and access their email, then you're making a mistake because you're not teaching them purpose and values in the BHAG and some of the cultural aspects, you're not welcoming them into the team and having them be a part of that in the way that you really could. And a simple thing to do, because I think so many of us have done this over the years, is ask yourself, do you have a bigger party for someone leaving the company than you do for their arrival? Do you have anything at all as part of a formal onboarding process?

Bill, I'm with you. And I actually learned that practice from Jack Daly and he describes the way he described it to me was that a working relationship is like any relationship where it's like dating for a start. And then potentially you have a few dates, then there might be an engagement where you decide to work together. There is the wedding where you actually decide to start working. You actually do work together. And that, that's where there should be a party to celebrate someone joining the team. But a lot of businesses do wait until the separation, until one person decides to leave the relationship. That's when they have the party. And it makes no sense in my experience, right.

On the other hand, if people had parties at their divorces and celebrated each other interview, maybe we'd have less court time.

Well, Bill, don't get me wrong, you got to celebrate people when they leave, but you got to celebrate when they're.

Coming at the beginning. Yeah, you got it. It's a brilliant thing. We've referenced so many other folks in this, from Jack to Daley to Cameron Harrell to Naomi Simpson and so on. And we're, you might say we're an incestuous bunch. We're all changing and rehashing and iterating on the best ideas that, that we can find all the time. So I think it's really great. Let me underscore a couple things and tell people where to learn more and where they can get a little bit of your book. So we start off with in creating a great culture, discovering the core, the things like purpose and values that are at the core of all of it. And then we create a future in documenting the future. And then we start to bring all these things to life over time with executing relentlessly. And we show more love to bring it on home, to have people feel really appreciated and part of the whole process. That's the heart of it. Of course there's a lot more to learn. Always when you hit these principles, there's both Wait, but how about and what if and all that you'll find in Tristan's book. Culture is everything. Of course you can find it in places like Amazon, but you can also go to tristanwhite T R I S T A N W h I t e.com and you can get a sample chapter there and you can learn about Tristan's speaking and things like that and read his blog and so on, but find his info there. Tristanwhite.com au or go get the book on Amazon. And then of course from our end, we've got shows like this and others every week and love you to subscribe. And here what we've got, if it's helpful and useful and you love it, then go to scalingup business.com scaling up business.com there. You'll also find our free growth guide which you can just download right away on registering on the site and that'll tell you how to run your own quarterly meetings and begin to do it. Got sample agendas and a little overview of the Scaling up book there and so on. So lots of good free stuff for you. Go and get it. Once again, Tristan, thanks for joining us on the show and to all our listeners, thanks for joining us. We'll see you again next week on Scaling Up Business.

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