JC Hite — Unlocking Success & Scaling Your Agenda to New Heights

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatalent.com Bill g. One more time. Docsatalant.com Bill G. Check it out. Today, live again, we're talking about how do you unlock success? What are the keys to unlocking success for you? We've got somebody to share their story, getting real about what it took them to unlock success. Hey everybody, my name is Bill Gallagher. Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast show comes to you every week. You'll find all our 500 or so shows at scalingcoach.com where you also find out about our coaching programs in scaling your business organization helping you grow. We've got a group starting right now and we have cohorts starting all the time. But there's a group to join right now if that's of interest to you. We help you take you through a year or two of things to get your company growing. Growing, right. Making the whole process easier and faster. Faster and hopefully more fun, right? I think business should be fun. Find all that more@scalingcoach.com for years now we've been putting on the show wherever you're getting. This also is good. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube's our bigger, probably our biggest following is over on Apple. Podcasts on the audio side. But audio, video, we got it all. Like subscribe, download, get it every week. Don't miss one if you can it. Anyway, I wanna bring out JC Height who joins us from Nicaragua or as they say, Nicaragua, but his accent is definitely not Nicaragua. Welcome to the show. JC what's up?

How are you man? Glad to be.

Yeah, glad to have you here. So we're talking all about your business and the growth of it and the work you do with others and that kind of thing. JC Is a founder and CEO of a company called Height Digital. It's a digital agency. It's like a franchise model agency, digital agenc business and they've been growing like crazy. And his Goal is to have offices in every state. And how are you doing on that goal?

We're 24. We have 24 locations across the US right now. And in just five years, and I don't know. Yeah, we're in route, so to speak.

Starting to ramp up.

That's right. That's right.

Yeah.

It's a good jerk.

So he's going to share with us some of his stories and learnings and things like that along the way. And I think, like, as we get right out of the box, Right. The most gripping thing. Let's talk about running a business during a civil war. Why don't you start there?

Well, I'll start here, Bill.

Yeah.

You know, as you know, more than anything, business sucks sometimes. It's really difficult and complex. And if you know anything about geography.

Always easy or good. Yes.

Not always easy, you know, and, and I think this is something that we've learned along the way and we'll come back and say some of our stories. But when we launched height, we launched in Nicaragua, not by choice, but just because that's where I was. I was at. And we found ourselves within six months of launching, literally in the middle of a civil war. Literally in every way, shape, form, or the fact, in fact, in a year's time and about, actually six months time, there were more people that died on the streets within a 20 mile radius of my house than in Venezuela in three years. Literally. Growing a business in the middle of, of a civil war. And so as we've grown and scaled, it's not just about growing in good times, but how do you maintain and how do you continue to survive both physically, financially and mentally during these, you know, really rough seasons that you have in business? Right. Which you've, you've dealt with before many times.

Yeah, yeah. Like, you just don't know what's going to hit you. Right. Like, we don't all go through civil wars, but we go through regional conflicts, we go through personal crises, we go through pandemics, and they all don't affect everyone in the same way. And you're like that. So what are the things that you had to deal with? How did you deal with it? What did that mean for you? Did it mean Internet getting shut off? No phone access? Did it mean staying indoors? Did it mean storing food? Like what, like in real terms, what was going on?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was literally a church. I'll tell you just some stories to give some context here. Right. Literally a church a kilometer down the road was shot up, which historically Churches, children, families are very much off limits, Right. They're very safe. Right. But in this case, the church was hiding people, so to speak, keeping them safe. And the government just wasn't for this. Right? As long as you're not political, and I try not to be, obviously I noticed there is a war happening, but we don't choose one side or the other. And literally we had to go home. Now this was interesting because you'll learn in business as you're growing, or at least in my own experience, all of these big failures and tribulations help build you to. Helps you build the capacity to manage the next problems, right? So like going into Covid, guess what? I had already worked almost a year of my business remote because I had to, because I was forced to, not because I wanted to, but because I was forced to. We had to build the systems and operations. So going into Covid, this, this helped a ton. But your question there was also about survival. And I think this is something that we've really honed into within our organization. And Simon Sinek tells it, purpose or why? Whatever Commitment. Karen and I, my wife and I sold an agency. We had about 350 employees and we exited about six years ago. And the question is, what do we want to do? Right. A lot of us are, what's the next step? Today the average education is the fourth grade. That's the average education today. Obviously we don't have a political stability in the country always. And we found that we could probably change this by creating jobs, creating stable jobs to help people out. And we set this out on the mission. We had enough money personally to live and do well, but we set out on a mission to create jobs and stability. In fact, we proclaimed this mission. It wasn't just like Karen and I in the bedroom thinking this would be cool. We told people we're on a mission. In our first year of business, we had almost every billionaire in the country in our office at one point or the other, learning and going back and forth and figuring out what we were going to do and sets you up in a position where we don't have a choice of fail. Like failing was not an option for us. Our commitment was greater than the pain and the sorrow and the frustration of any type of business. Right. I give the example bill of a stupid example, but you know, go work at McDonald's. If I offered you a job, like, no, never. Well, what if your kids were hungry? Then would you? Absolutely. Right. Without any problem. The commitment to your children outweighs the struggle and the demands and the problems of the business. That gives you the strength to overcome, to outdo, to figure it out, to get smart, to work hard at night, to put in the time and the effort to really go beyond what takes. So now we're sitting here. We've survived a civil war and a pandemic. The pandemic could be Frank, Bill, was nothing to us. Civil war is a lot of. It's a lot easier or a lot easier not having bullets literally hitting the building that you're working in. And then now we're looking at a recession, right. And I'm looking at the recession. Like, what kind of opportunities are there, you know, going into this? Because, by golly, there's. There's quite a bit of them, you know.

Yeah, there's always something, right? Something going on. People need. In the pandemic, people needed masks and tests and things like that. Right. And. And things go up, things go down. People need bulletproof vests, like, to be dramatic. Right. But whatever it is, there's always something to do to help people to deal with things, and a thing to be made from that. A profit, a place to add value, to increase something to take care of people. And that mindset and your thinking of that against what you're committed to, like, is really clear and obvious. Tell us about. Why did you. Why Nicaragua? How did you end up there from Arkansas?

I'll give you the easy answer. And that was a really hot girl I went to college with, and she happened to be Nicaraguan, and her scholarship required her to come back to Nicaragua. So obviously I followed the hot girl that would say yes to me in marriage. And we've been here now almost 11 years.

So it was a family connection.

Yeah, it was a family connection. That's right.

You know, you could have said chasing the perfect surf break or any number of. Of other things and going against, like, you know, that's one of those countries that's definitely been up and down and had challenge, continues to have challenges. Central America historically has got significant issues. So you are a company, then, that's operated remotely in an evolving way and both mixed and remote, and now having partners in other places. Tell us a little bit about what that looks like. How. What have you learned from that? How have you managed that?

Yeah, so I've learned a few things. Number one, we were actually in an office up until two months ago, so we had 170 people. Tallest building in the city. I mean, a bicycle to drive that you could ride from one side to the other, you know, A sexy office and, and we decided to go fully remote where we found an edge. And I think there's a huge opportunity for companies out there is that outsourcing is coming very prevalent obviously, right? Virtual, virtual assistant out there. There's this bottom layer of people in the world that $400 to $900 a month in these up and coming nations that are prevalent. But beyond that, that's where we saw the opportunity. So for example, In Nicaragua there's 12,000 people that work for call centers, right? So 12,000 people work for Capital One, Verizon, they're speaking perfect English all day long. But let's face it, their max cap salary is like 650amonth right now. There's few that will become managers and there's no competition. Where we decided to go is what is, what's above that because in these up and coming countries Walmart doesn't have their, you know, their GMs down here they don't have like you can't really grow from a career standpoint in English in these up and coming nations, right? So we were able to come in and actually provide that. Hey, when we started recruiting, there's nobody really recruiting from the call center and going to this next layer. And so we pay really well. Every single kid at height, the moment you start is on scholarship. So literally from the made up, every kid goes to private schools, we pay for it. And so we try to go in and go, okay, what's this next year of people? And we've been able to, I think too often when we think of outsourcing, our initial reaction is man, I can pay really, really cheap. And that is true. But you can pay too cheap for certain things as well, right? You don't want the cheapest document, you.

Don'T know what they're doing.

Yeah, exactly. But if you go in that middle range where okay, I can cut my comp by 40, 50% from the US sometimes even 20, but I can get hella good people. That's where the, for me I found a huge sweet spot where I can come in the competition. Yet I've got really, really talented, amazing people that are more so thinking careers than this is my first job until I can find the next, you know, the next one. And that's, that's been our, one of our biggest philosophies, right is how do we hire and maintain the best talent possible. Long tail.

So you're, let me, I, I don't know the details of your business, but it sounds like what you're Doing is you've got core service providers, a workforce in Nicaragua, and then you've got your franchise partners that are essentially front office, front end client contact in all the cities you operate in. Is that right?

That's right. So if you think about the, the agencies, a lot of agencies would fit into two buckets in the United States. So either one, you've got the conglomerates, the big guys. These guys have every resource you can imagine. They got Google that comes in their office once. We used to be one of those back in the day. Like, they've got every resource. But let's face it, with employee number 300, you don't even know who the CEO is or managers or anybody in the organization. Like, it's a big organization. And then you've got the boutique agencies. Now these agencies are the mom and pop agencies in their city. The best customer service you could possibly think of. They probably have anywhere from one to 10 employees. And you got people doing a lot of different things at once. We're trying to merge those together. I actually do believe in the idea of localization, like working with your neighbors. I think that's a strong suit. But they don't have the resources, they can't have the resource to really serve their clients at a high level. In our franchise model, we merge that. So operations, fulfillment systems, technology, innovation, all of that is done at the corporate level. And the franchisees are really the relationship behind the entire thing. Building relationships in their communities, doing the account management as well as the sales. So we give the tools and the resources to mom and pop agencies doing anywhere from a half a million to 5 million in revenue.

Yeah, that's an interesting thing. So then what's the range of services that you're providing there for them? What kinds of things are they doing?

We're at the point now where we're doing obviously creative services. So anything to do with branding, we're the largest story brand agency in the us. We do websites, creative logos, all this type of stuff. Then we do SEO, ppc, Facebook ads, analytics. We even have some like fractional CMO offerings as well. And depending on the franchise, there might be some caveats. And we're Texas A and M as a client all the way up to Visa and very large accounts. And then probably our favorite, to be honest with you, are the local SMBs and 40,000 city, you know, population cities. Right? Yeah, very wide range.

And what are you doing for them? Like, like what's the, what's the range of service that you're doing? You mean like kinds of like you're doing, you're doing websites, you're doing visual, like photography, you know, media plans, trying. What are you getting?

Yes, all the above. So depends on the client. So. So I'll give you an example, right? We have, we have huge clients that we do a lot more branding like Texas A and M. We do a lot of branding outside, you know, when people can't do them, when their internal staff can't do them. We're doing a lot of their overhead. Right. And we predominantly focus on branding there. Our favorite though, SEO, we probably do around, I don't know, 7 or 8 million right now just in SEO alone. And we love it, you know, to a big extent. We think we're one of the best at it and we obviously stream towards that. But. And then you get into the paid side, the Facebook and the PPC and those strategies as well. Right. We can do this because we have very high level ownership again in all of these cities. Right. So I've got 25 offices, 25 franchisees that are all high level individuals working on a group or a segment of accounts. Right. In a normal organization you just don't have that. You can't hire that level of people at a solid level, especially at the size that we are. Maybe some of these big agencies could like Scorpion, but our level, you just wouldn't be able to do that outside of a franchise model.

When you think about, we've had quite a few companies that have scaled significantly using franchise model. What have you learned about what makes for good franchising and about people like that share some of that.

Franchising is a beautiful thing. And it's also, you know, it's a marriage, right. It's a serious, in fact, it's a very serious relationship and it's probably easier to get a real divorce than it is a divorce and a franchise model sometimes. I have learned very quickly that you got to really do your due diligence in finding the right people and really understanding the avatar of success. I'll give you an example of ways that we messed up. We really wanted franchises that were entrepreneurs, right? Like entrepreneurs entrepreneurs. Right. And, but when I told you what my franchises are responsible for, I told you sales and service. Right? What we have found is that really we don't necessarily want entrepreneurs as our franchise owners. We really want very high level, successful salespeople. Like tactically great at sales. They make actually the best franchises. Entrepreneurs are like, okay, I'm selling, but, but, but can we look at the product again? I want to make sure that's good. What's the system that we're using? Okay, well, they're all over the place. Right. And so we've really tried to learn. We franchised our model. We're just two years into franchising. So 25 locations in two years. It's a very rapid growth for a franchise model like ours. That's not really a. It's a new industry, you know, fairly new industry to do this in. And it's been a very interesting ride. E Myth talks a lot about this, and I'm learning. Even I'm currently reading the book again. And you're familiar with the book there. But there's a lot of things that we're trying to go back and learn from McDonald's and like, in franchising, we wanted to be very open. Okay, Bill, well, what do you think? Okay. Yeah, let's do it that way. That sounds good. Let's. Where you really need to be very specific. Right. In the book, it says that we're not teaching them how to make hamburgers. We're teaching them how to. How to use the system that makes hamburgers. We're teaching them the system that makes hamburgers, not how to make hamburgers. And we've learned that along the way here. And.

Well, it's interesting about that. That learning about salespeople and operational people versus entrepreneurial people and thinking about who you're looking for. I know I've been involved with one entrepreneurial organization for a couple decades plus, and there are others that I've been around and worked with, and. And they often struggle to, because they continue to reinvent things that don't need reinventing versus refine them. So they get bored. They don't want to stick with things. They don't want to refine and improve it. They want to, like, do a whole new thing. I'm onto a new thing. And now we're doing this. And we've gone into this business and we launched that service, and we're opening this office, and it's unfocused. It's undis. It's fine. There's a time and a place for it, like launching a business, turning a business around. These are all really valid places for it. But other times, it gets in the way of the big growth, which I.

Think consistency has been huge for us. We charge the exact same amount today. Not that you should be doing this. We charge the same amount today for basically the same products that we did five years ago. Just more people know about us now, and Are utilizing, like, I love. Sorry. The consistency here is understanding as an entrepreneur, polarities is really important. Like, how are we loving and caring with people, but also very disciplined? How are we saving but also investing? And in this case, how do we understand when to be consistent and when to pivot and how much to pivot is.

Yeah, it's a balance. It's a balance. It's a really different and difficult thing in scaling a business is thinking about what to actually work on. And if you're more of a strategic person, more visionary in nature, more creative, if you're the person who started the business, probably learning when to rein that in and where to deploy it is a useful thing to do. I know. It's definitely something that I continue to deal with. I'll play with something. I'll be very amused and entertained by some new idea. And I'm like, does this really solve any problem that I have? Should I be doing this at all? You know, or is this a complete distraction from getting what's important done?

That's right. Understanding your end goals and what you really need to accomplish and having that right there in front of you and going to. Is this really helping me or. Yeah, it's not. It's tough. Very tough.

Yeah. If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently in the franchise model?

I would have. As I just mentioned, there's. I've always been someone that worked with people first. I want to work with my friends. I like working with my friends. And I wish I would have really more focused on the business application and then becoming friends with them, so to speak. I think there's been a lot of deals that one of my mentors would say, bro, deals where I was just, man, I like this person. And a bad deal with a friend is going to lead to animosity or frustration or something down the road. I still love the idea of working with friends. I think this is a great thing, a great opportunity. But making sure that they're really positive positions you can always go back to, okay, here's our contract, here's our agreement, so on and so forth. And that goes with the franchise as well. Again, not so much focusing on the right people, but the right people for the job.

You know, we work with companies a lot on that, and sometimes as they're growing, it's time for certain people to move on because they're not suited to the next stage of growth and they're not interested in growing or evolving. And, you know, they've outlived their time There other times they're not really like they're a good friend. They're somebody you'd love to have a beer with, you work well with at another company. But they don't belong in this company, in this environment, in this job. And that's another thing that we see a lot. I think about it often like there was a guy I worked with years ago in a big company and he was fantastic in his thing and he's lovely human and but. But I wouldn't have him. You're like being chased by a flyer mosquito.

It's about to drive me nuts. But that's all right. It's part of it.

It's funny. Most of our listeners won't appreciate that we're watching on. On camera as you're.

And I think that ties into something.

That'S that principle of like, okay, he's a good guy, there's nothing wrong with him, but he just doesn't belong here, you know.

Yeah, that's something I've. I'm young, I haven't done this a lot. I don't know. Hopefully I'm like most entrepreneur. I have just have no idea what the crap I'm doing probably 50% of the time. But I. This is the opposite side of that. It's been very difficult for how to get rid of toxicity, how to get rid of bad partners and being very proactive with going okay, this. I see this going down in the wrong direction. We just need to like part ways versus spending too much time trying to heal it or trying to accommodate or trying to go out of my way to make it work or whatever the case may be that gets. Being quick to let those things go. It's difficult, very difficult for me.

It's like that decision of where to go and what is happening with it. I think there's something to deal with. Our clients are typically looking at, well, where do I need to be in the long run run, should I even fight this battle or should I move on from it? Whether it's a person or a product or a customer or an office or something like that. Like how does this fit three years from now? Should I even, you know, or maybe this is time for this thing to get shut down. Right. That's a critical place is looking out to the future. Not the pros and cons of the present moment, but out projected changes for sure how we think about things. What would you say has been your luckiest break so far in growing this business? Where did you get lucky?

I'll tell you this so speaking of partnerships, so the agency I was at before, the minor equity holder in, we got up to 350 team members. Honestly, I thought it was going to be my career, like I was going to be the CEO for that organization. And everything was going really, really well. And it became a very, very toxic partner relationship, not between me, but between the three majority owners. And it got to be really rough in the organization and to an extent where two months before we had our first child, my wife and I decided to walk away. And it was basically just. We just didn't want to be a part of it anymore. And we from the business take our equity back. In exchange for my non compete type of situation, they were going through some stuff that was forcing them to do some things that I just couldn't do. From a value standpoint. We'll just leave it at that. I'm good people, but business gets tough sometimes. Over the next year, that company ended up really developing a rough culture. And I had a lot of animosity towards that, Bill. I was just very frustrated. I was like, man, we were going so big. We were doing so good. We were doing all these great things. Things. It was just a stupid CEO did terrible stuff. And this is, I think, a good lesson that I've learned in life holistically. But I was really angry. That agency has helped my company more than anything ever because as they were going down and amazing people were looking for new jobs, where do you think they went to play? They came to work for me. So we started hype just five years ago, franchising two years ago. But really I didn't because I was bringing on my head of fulfillment, was already there for five years in the other company. My head of operations, my. My head of training, my head of product. So my first 50 hires, Bill, all had two or three years of experience, right? And so for me, you talk about lucky, right? Like this is. And they were doing this. There was the, the pandemic, excuse me, the, the civil war happened because they were also in this country as well. The civil war happened and then they had some culture issues. They had all these problems and people weren't feeling safe there. And then they did a line of layoffs. It was just someone else's problems. Could be your, you know, success and your, your blessing, so to speak. And even more so for me because I had some frustration there as well. And now they were my best, you know, the best company, right? Not everyone gets lucky where they have another in their backyard going through a lot of failure. That they can feed off of to help them launch and grow. With such amazing talent to get going with right now, that company's doing, I think, a lot better. They're having growth, they're turning things around, power to them. I think they're doing great, wonderful things. But.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting that when you're in the right position, when you're not desperate, then things happen around you and you can get lucky from them. You can take advantage of them. Right. Those same things happen. You're not in a position to do it. It's actually not luck for you. It's like something happening to someone else. That's a useful learning. What am I well positioned for? I think about that. Well, the pandemic, for sure. In our business and for many other companies that we worked with, it's like, okay, well, what's happening? All right, and what resources do you have and what could you do and where could you go? And you think about that now with some version of recession, soft recession or shifting sands of, economically speaking, like, what are you doing? How are you dealing with that? Is an interesting thing to think about. Where is it most likely to go? How will you deal with that? What could you do? I was talking with one of our CEOs yesterday, or no, day before yesterday, and I'm like, well, you're kind of primed to start doing some acquisitions now. And he hadn't been thinking of that. And he's like, oh, yeah, you might be right about that. Right. Like, yeah, there are companies doing exactly what that have capabilities, people, offices, things that you need and want that you could bring in. And they might not be that well run, but that's where you come in 100%.

I mean, we're about the. Who knows what the economy's happen. There's so many opportunities where people are going to give up. They're going to stop their businesses or great talents not going to see the opportunity to grow or they're going to have fear. And it's a. There's just as many people in the world today as was yesterday. These people are just going to be shifting. And you can either be proactive on that shift and you're positioning yourself to get ready for it, or be on the downside of that shift either way, but we're getting ready for it. I think there's going to be some great talent to capture over the next six months.

So as you talk about this and about people moving between companies, I'm. I'm struck by or curious about values and culture what kind of values and culture do you have? How do you bring that to life and how does that work between employee based in Nicaragua and franchise partners in the United States? Can you share a little bit about that with us?

Yeah. Culture has been huge for us in a lot of different areas. We had the. When we first launched our company, there was a huge opportunity for us because being in Latin America. So I'm a guy of faith. That's my background, grew up, went to a Christian school, all this good stuff. And that's why I wanted to run the organization. I wanted it to be a culture that was very different and unique compared to all the other places out there. Right. And so new to Latin America, that's a lot more acceptable than it is potentially in the U.S. so what we were able to do was we really created a culture on family and faith. And so a lot of our benefits we ended up. What we found was the talent we wanted to attract were not necessarily the young folks. They were really smart, they were really good, all this fun techy stuff. But they also were unstable. They were always looking for the next job, working remote, moving different countries. We wanted the young married people that had kids. And so we decided to form a culture that went towards them. So we immediately opened a nursery in our office so kids could come anytime. We fully equipped it with multisuri everything. We decided that every child at height was going to be on scholarship. Right. So we positioned the organization, we positioned the organization so that we were attracting the specific talent we want. Most of our benefits went towards kids benefits. Right. And so this was something that we, we learned down the game. Originally we wanted all these college kids that were more affordable, we could teach anything too. And they already knew a lot about tech. And we realized that they had some advantages, but they also had some disadvantages. If I could teach a 29 year old with two kids that valued stability, that was going to be really big. And then we hone that culture into. We are one of the most stable places to grow in the country. So through the civil war, we didn't fire one person, we didn't cut one salary. Through Covid bill, we didn't cut one salary, we didn't fire one person, thank God and the recession or whatever's to come, we wanted to do the same thing. And so our culture has really been based on this place of stability, being home, being a part of a family. And how do we make that as much? Yeah, that also comes with some problems, but we'll take those problems well, it's a challenge.

Right. Trying to provide that stability and not just scale up or down or pivot left and right is a challenge against changing circumstances in the world. That's not an easy thing to do, but it offers kind of special advantages to someone. If you're young and flexible and you don't have a family to support, maybe you don't even have a partner yet, that's far less of a concern. Right. When I was young, I'm like, hey, I could put everything in the back of a car and I could move somewhere tomorrow. And then you have orgs, you have a family, you have a house, like you start to want to do some more consistent things.

Yeah. One of my, one of my guys got offered a job the other day that was with a brand new company, startup, but it was 30% higher salary. You know, a dad would be like, there's a risk involved, it's a startup. But a young guy, screw it, I can get another job, you know, in, you know, in times to come. Right. And by the way, what I'm saying here, as you know, Bill, isn't a value that society holds. So I went to the bank, you know, and I say, hey, bank, look at my, I want, I want a big loan. They're like, okay, how good of a company you are. Well, I'm so good that I saved every job. Even though my revenue went down by 35% during COVID I kept every job. All they see is, yeah, your profits sucked that year, you know, like you were, you weren't making any money. Right, but I was keeping jobs.

Right? That's not their concern.

That's not their concern. Right. They want to know, you know, Exactly, Exactly. So you choose to pick your, your battles as you grow.

You know, the other thing is that's unique and appropriate for you, but not for everyone. And if you think about it like, so there are many companies that are organized and based on regular turnover. I had a restaurant company client, a group of restaurants, and they had a whole well developed culture around giving people a stepping stone job. This is a place you work while you go to college. This is a place you work while you work on something that is of interest to you. This is a place you work in transition in life. And they attracted a regular turnover. And they knew people would turn over, they'd recruit them well, they'd teach them certain things, they'd level them up. It was a place that they remembered and identified, but they knew they weren't going to last forever. So it was a regular kind of Thing and they knew they had them, then they had other people that were kind of on the professional track. So along the way, some people would come through like that and they'd realize this kind of a business is home for me. I like these hours, I like this schedule, I like this environment. I'll be here. And they became kind of the lifers, the career track. Even if they weren't life life, they became now part of that industry. They weren't just moving through a thing. And that whole business, that model was something that they took and embraced rather than, you know, just trying to find people at a little, a different stage in life. Right. So it'd be a totally different kind of environment if you found the other kind of person. And I noticed the same thing in different businesses. At a tech company once some years ago, and we would attract a lot of young people, but I realized they were really good to come in and learn. They did things really fast, but they didn't always stick around. So you want to be prepared for them to move on. You didn't want to maybe put them as your account managers on like a banking client that wanted the same stability of support and that kind of thing. Right. You wanted they could maybe be account manager for like a tech business. Right. That was also changing rapidly, cycling through things. Right. So that thinking about that. Right. Fit what kind of people work here and what do we embody now? How does that play into your international, your franchise partners? How are they like that or not like that?

Yeah. As you know, you know, franchising now, you're dealing with a lot of different personalities, you know, in a lot of ways. And they come out in different ways as the business grows. Right. You'll get one person having success and then how he handles failure might be something completely different. Right. And we try to be very hands on. So our franchises, we meet up every single day on like a Fran daily is what we call it, where we have a virtual. When they become a franchise, we bring them to our headquarters, they meet everyone. We have about four meetups every single quarter. We do a meetup as well. And integrating them into the culture is key. And you can definitely see a difference between those are integrated and not integrated. Right. Those that are. I don't really want to be a part of it. I'm just, you know, here for the whatever. Right. Those that are integrated have a lot better success because they can lean on people when they're doing bad or they need help. And they can also then thrive and even help others when they're doing really well and lift people up. Right. So it's a very complex, I would say, in our industry, specifically because of how you probably know more about this than I do. But because marketing can be so volatile, marketing is not a guarantee. You know, it's hard sometimes to perform for clients. You know, it's a part of the sales system. It's not just, oh, we crushed marketing, so you made a billion dollars. And because there's a lot of volatility there, it's not like a hamburger where I can go eat a hamburger at McDonald's in one state and another in another state. And it's identical in terms of the end result, you know, SEO.

Yeah.

It's just not the same. Right. And so this even allows us or forces us to be even more particular about the culture that we have and the people that we're, that we're working with.

Before we shout out the company and that kind of thing. Let me give some thanks and shout outs. One of Mitchell, our show producer, getting shows ready, guests ready, things in the background. We can always see her on screen. You can't, but we can see her waving at us when we need to do things. And then my friend and mentor, Vern Harnish, who I'll be leading the Mastermind masterclass with next week. And we do a couple of boot camps and some master classes and some summits and that kind of thing several times a year. And I get to help him lead those. And he's the author and creator of the Rockefeller Habits and the Scaling Up Framework. So big thanks to Verne and then to the folks at Pop Flight Productions who get our show ready and out the door produced every week. If you'd like to know more about what we do or connect with us, that kind of thing, info scalingcoach.com is a good email for us. Find us on the web scalingcoach.com infoscalingcoach.com scalingcoach.com that's our website. All the back stuff, all our programs, coaching things, workshops, events, all that listed on our website as long as as well as links to the show. Now get the show wherever you are now is fine. But if you're getting into audio only, maybe some of you'd like to see the video. You'll find that YouTube, LinkedIn all over the place and then the audio side stitcher, Apple podcasts, I don't know wherever you get it as well like subscribe, share it with somebody else. Please pass it along and so that others can benefit. If it was helpful for you. I've enjoyed talking to you. J.C. j.C. Heights been our guest today and you can find his company@theheights.com theheights.com thanks again everyone for watching, for listening. Keep scaling up. We'll talk to you again next time. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard via line to try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.