Live Right and Do Right In Business and In Life w/Dina Dwyer

Hello, I'm Brian Tracy, as you know, and we are here today with an absolutely remarkable woman, Dina Dwyer Owens, who is the head of the Dwyer Group, which has more than 1600 franchises under seven different umbrellas. And she has built this company almost from scratch when she took it over from her father. And she's come up with an incredible philosophy based on values that she's going to share with us today. Dina, welcome. Thank you very much for being here.

Thank you, Brian. If I can just say thank you for being a mentor of mine pretty much my entire adult life. So much of what I have learned that I've applied at the Dwyer Group came from actually listening to your audio programs, and I continue to listen to those today. So thank you very much for your leadership.

Well, thank you. Now, you have really made a focus on values, and you had an enormous impact on the people that you work with. And now everybody who hears you talk. And I've studied values and I've taught values, including last week, as a matter of fact, in strategic planning, and I know how important they are. Tell us how you got into values and the values that you espouse and how you practice these values in your business. Just go for it.

Well, it all started with Don Dwyer, my father and the founder of the Dwyer Group in 1981. He always studied great leaders, Again, including you, Brian. He's the one who introduced you to me and to the Dwyer Group team. But in studying great leaders, what he learned was that those that had the greatest success were those who had clearly written values. So he said, I'm going to start the Dwyer Group with clearly written values. And that's exactly what he did. And no matter who he touched, whether it was a prospective franchisee, an employee, an existing franchisee, even the bankers, they all knew what Don Dwyer's values were and what he stood for. And it created this amazing culture, very family oriented culture, but a culture where everybody was clear about the expectations and everybody wanted to be part of that team. Now, unfortunately, he died in 1994 of a sudden heart attack at the age of 60.

Wow.

Yeah. A really young man.

Yes.

But the gift he left us was this foundation of the core values. And the one thing we knew as a management team, that if we could just get the values right going forward, the company would continue to succeed. But we couldn't choose the original version of the code of values, because Don Dwyer really held us accountable to those. They were more belief systems. Things like loyalty adds meaning to our lives. You know, how do you quantify whether Somebody's been loyal or not. It's not so easy. It's not so black and white.

Yes.

And the one just as I reflect on the original core values was we must re earn our position every day in every way. And I tell you what, Brian, if you weren't re earning your position, Don Dwyer would be very sure to tell you, I don't think you re earned your position today.

So let's talk about your core values. Let's talk about them one at a time. What would be the first one?

Yeah. Well, we took those values and his beliefs and we operationalized them. So that's the solution we came up with as a management team in 1995, and we brought those to our employees.

And when you say operationalized, what you mean is you broke them down into specific behaviors that people practice.

Exactly. Under the categories of respect, integrity, customer focus, and one of my favorites, having fun in the process. Right. So. So we call that living rich. It's not about the money, though, Brian. It's about treating people with respect and dignity.

Respect, integrity, customer focus, and having fun.

And when you do those things well by the people, you create trusting relationships. And those trusting relationships multiply themselves, as you know. Right. The referrals start coming in, and eventually that creates wealth. If you've got a great product or service and you've got this foundation of core values, the end result, as our friend Ken Blanchard would say, is the applause is the profit. Right. And so to answer your question about the specific values under each of those four categories, and we have very specific standards, or I call them values, but Ken might call them standards. So under respect, we have treating others as we like to be treated.

The golden rule.

Right.

Greatest of all principles. You know, I teach sales and marketing all over the world, and I teach people over and over again that the fundamental key to success is trust, is that people trust you. There's a wonderful thing about branding that I always like. It says that, is that your brand is made up of the promises you make and the promises you keep. The promises you make when you say, please buy my services, and this is the value that I will give you, so that I say, all right, I will accept what you say on faith, because I haven't yet experienced it, but when they come back and buy again, it's because you kept your promise. So basically, it's always the promises you make and the promises you keep equal the brand, which equals your level of trust.

There you go. I would agree with that. So we actually cover those types of things under the category of integrity. But to finish out under respect, then we have listening with the intent, understand what is being said and acknowledging that what's said is important to the speaker. It's long, but it's very specific because we want our team members and our franchisees to understand you've got to really listen to the other party. And as you know, it's not just about listening with your ears, it's about listening with your eyes too. And it's challenging. Right. Today's societies, we've got so much going on electronically that we really don't know the body language of the person who's texting us. So we misread sometimes those communications. But listening with the intent to understand what's being said and acknowledging that what's being said is important to the speaker. So that's the second one under respect. The third one is responding in a timely fashion.

Right.

So it kind of goes back to your promise thing you said a minute ago. In our businesses, Brian, we're in customers, homes and businesses every single day, over 2 million homes and businesses a year. And we're there to make your home or your business more comfortable. And if we don't show up on time and you've got a flood in your offices, it's not going to be a good day in your offices.

You know, that reminds me, I've had this same experience where they have great advertising call us get for your service. It will be there immediately, 24 hour service. And you call up and you get an answering machine or you call up and you get a harassed mother with a baby screaming in the background and her husband's not here, but he'll get back in a few hours and he'll give you a call today or tomorrow and so on. And what you do is just hang up. And then you call. You finally call someone and they say, we'll be right there. And that's the person you do business with forever. That's the person you tell. And, and that's really important for people to understand is that if a person changes to someone else, they change forever, they never come back. And they'll just do this today because of this need for speed. So you listen and you respond quickly. It's so important to build that trust and that confidence that they keep coming back.

It is. And then the one that follows that is one of the ones that we probably struggled with the most. Speaking calmly and respectfully without profanity or sarcasm. Now we're in the trades businesses, Brian.

So a lot of tough guys in.

That business, sailors bad language has a tendency to come out of their mouths. But I tell you what, we've proven that you can clean up somebody's poor habits with bad language. Because even if the customer uses profanity, they do not want your service professionals using profanity in their home or business.

No.

And we both know sarcasm is a dangerous thing. So we really work hard to make sure that we use sarcasm sometimes as having fun in the process. But we have to correct ourselves when there is something aimed at somebody that could be hurtful. We really try to make sure we're clear about, wait a second, that's not even funny. That's harming the other person, and that's not what we're about.

Which loops back to the golden rule.

It does. And then the final one under respect, is acknowledging everyone is right from their own perspective. Sometimes people give me pushback on that. They'll say, wait a second, I don't want to agree with Brian's perspective. And I'll say, I'm not asking you to agree with Brian's perspective. All we want you to do is to appreciate that everybody does have the right to their own perspective. Brian was raised by different parents than I was. Isn't it natural that we're going to see some things differently? It's not good or bad. It's just the way the world turns. So that's the final one out of the category of respect.

Yeah, that's so important. You know, we find in our own business that you come up with an idea and you're very, very definite about your idea based on your own knowledge and experience. But if you're open to somebody else's idea, you suddenly realize their idea is better than mine. I mean, from their perspective and from what they bring, it's a much better idea than the one that I had.

The key is if you're open, right, You've got to be open.

And you have to be open and.

Be almost like a kid. You know, kids are so curious. What I find with kids is they'll start just asking questions, well, why do you think that way? Why is it like that? And if you just have a curiosity, it seems like it's much easier to be open to somebody else's idea just to remain open. So under integrity, the very first thing we say is making only agreements we're willing, able, and intend to keep. It goes back to that promise you talked about. Yes, but then the value that follows that one is communicating any potentially broken agreements at the first appropriate opportunity to all parties concerned, because today things are moving so, so fast.

Yes. Address it immediately.

Immediately. And the neat thing about email, for example, is if I've got 10 people to tell that I'm going to have to break this commitment for whatever reason, I can quickly get that out to all 10 people. And everybody gets the same communication at the same time.

Right.

So that's where I think email comes in real handy. The following one after that is looking to the system for correction and proposing all possible solutions when something's not working. Now, we're in the franchising business.

Yes.

So in our world, everything is about systems for success.

Yes.

So when things are not going right in our business, this applies at home, too. Things are not going right. We look to the system for correction. So if we've got a breakdown in something going on in the office, instead of pointing the finger at somebody else, because you know that old rule of thumb, right. We point three back at ourselves as leaders. Instead we say, let's look at the system for correction. What failed in the system? And sometimes it's, we failed because we didn't train our team well enough to the system. Or maybe the system's antiquated and needs to be updated, but it saves people a lot of heartache and high blood pressure.

Let me jump in here. There's an area that I've been working on a lot for the last couple of years, and it's called business model innovation. And what sort of triggered me into this was the discovery that almost all business models currently in use are obsolete in some way. A little obsolete, a little outdated, medium outdated, or totally outdated. And the way that you can tell if your business model needs to be revisited is results. Are you getting the sales and profitability that you were getting before with the same business model? And one of the things that I think is so important is you keep your mind open to the possibility that maybe there is something that needs to be changed in the model. And, you know, Peter Drucker has this wonderful observation. He said, you keep trying to solve a problem, it keeps coming back over and over again. And the system's wrong.

That's right.

He has a description of certain jobs. He calls this job a widowmaker is that no matter who tries to do the job the way that it's constructed, they can't manage to be successful, even very talented people. And he refers to ships that used to have an undue number of people dying on the ships. And they would. Eventually the ship owners would bring it back and break it up. They'd say this ship is a Widowmaker. There's something wrong with the ship that's causing people to die at an inordinate rate. Well, I always think of that expression and Drucker uses it with regard to any business operation, product, service system, or anything else that just keeps not working. Then instead of saying he or she or somebody is to blame for it, you have to pull back and say, maybe we need to fundamentally reevaluate the system.

That's exactly what this value is all about.

Yes.

So you get it. Of course, the next value is operating in a responsible manner, above the line. So everything above the line is about accountability. So we say the things that fall below the line are things like blame. We blame somebody else for something not going right. We justify. We have all the excuses why something didn't go right. Or maybe we're just ashamed and we're not willing to own a mistake that we made.

Yes.

So anything below the line is complete waste. You don't have time for it. No business owner has time for that kind of below the line whining and excuses. So we want our team members to always play above the line. Just own it. You and I are going to have a lot greater respect for somebody and greater trust if they'll just say, you know, it's my fault, I made a mistake, here's what I'm going to do to correct it and move on.

Right. What I've done with my kids, you know, you're supposed to teach your children values. So I've always worked to teach my children just two values because I thought if they get these two values, everything else will be fine. And it's worked. One is always tell the truth and you never get in trouble for telling the truth. And once they understood that, then it just is a great relief for them. They used to tell me they were so happy because we never have to lie to our parents because they know them, never get into trouble, no matter what it was. The second was accept responsibility. So they'd say, all right, here's what happened and I am responsible. And now as adults, that's exactly their philosophy. But the second part of responsibility is always, what did you learn? What did we learn that we can use to be better in the future? So instead of focusing on the mistake and who made it, we say, well, I'm responsible. But now what did we learn? And you find that the most successful people in all businesses are those who are really focused on the lessons contained in the short term problems.

That's terrific. Those are great Tips though, with kids. Mine are 24 and 19 now. I wish I would have known that. I didn't hear that one in your tapes. But what a great lesson.

Yeah, it is a great lesson with regard to your values. I'm putting in my own 2 cents worth here to sort of add to what you're saying. But this idea of saying, what do we learn? What did we learn? What do we learn? Because focusing on what you learn is purely positive.

It is.

There's no negatives, there's no recrimination, there's no blame. Just keep focused on the lessons. And the most successful companies are the ones who are just the hungriest to learn lessons from their short term challenges and difficult.

Terrific.

So please continue.

So that was operating responsible manner, bottom line. Then we say we need to communicate honestly with purpose, which you just said. So I think we don't have to revisit that one. You made it very clear what that one means. The next one is asking clarifying questions if we disagree or do not understand. And you know, it really empowers your team members. And at the Dwyer Group, it's all about making sure our team members understand. You know what? If you don't understand what it is that I'm asking you to do, please ask me for clarity. Because let's go out and do the best we can do the first time versus you walking away and then trying to figure out what it is that I wanted you to do instead of just asking for clarity.

Right.

And then also being willing to disagree with me. You know, I. You and I both, we can't have team members surrounding us that just agree with everything. Right. We come up with never build great organizations. So I want team members who have the courage and the desire to give me that feedback and say, you know, Dean, there might be a better way. We thought about X, Y or Z. Kind of like you saying, what lessons did you learn? If they're going to come to me with a better way, they better come to me with some ideas. Not just, I don't think your way is good. Instead, come to me with some other solutions that we can apply here. And you know what, 99% of the time, Brian, their ideas are much better than mine.

Yes. Isn't that amazing?

It is.

Isn't that amazing? There's a principle in Japanese management called line of sight theory. It says that everybody can see improvements in their line of sight because that's what they're doing. They're doing their work. And so when they come up and they say they have a suggestion to change something, they have much better perspective on it than you do. And sometimes those changes are priceless.

That's right. If we'll just listen. So the final value under integrity is never saying anything about anyone that you would not say to him or her. And that, I think, for me is the very hardest. Because it takes, yes, it takes courage to get face to face with somebody when there's a difficult thing to discuss. And as leaders, sometimes we're really bad at even getting face to face with somebody to praise them. It's unfortunate, but sometimes we don't even do that enough. But I find it's really hard for people when they've got something negative to share with somebody to do it face to face. Sometimes I go around and talk to four or five other people about my problem with Brian. Of course, those four or five people can't fix my problem with Brian. Only Brian and I can fix that challenge. This was a value that our employees came up with, Brian. So we came up with the operationalized version of the values in 95. We brought those to the team and we said, we know these are new to you, they're new to us. So for about three months, we said to our employees, we want you to study these values, and anytime you catch one of the six management team members violating a value, we want you to give us feedback. And it came in the form of a simple beep. So they could be walking down the hallway, hear an executive use profanity possibly, and all they would have to do is go beep, and basically we would get, uh, oh, you know, we just messed up. So after that 90 day beep game and we were beeped right and left, we brought the team back together. We said, what do you think? And they said, we think this is the solution to keeping the Dakota value special here at the Dwyer Group. But there's one value missing, and that's the one they added. They said, there's too much drama created in an organization when people don't have the courage and permission to get face to face with those who they need to have a constructive conversation. And it's not easy, but it's so much better. It goes back to trust again when, you know, if I've got a challenge with you, I'm going to talk to you directly and not four or five other people about you. Your level of trust goes way up with me. And it may not be a comfortable conversation, but you and I are going to both feel better about each other. We may not agree at the End of the conversation. But, you know, you can trust Dean is going to come to you.

Well, you know, I heard of this great technique that people should use, and it's when somebody comes to you and they have a complaint about another person, you say, wait here and go and get the other person. Bring them in.

Love it.

Tell them to say to him or her exactly what you just told me. And you sit them right down there and you have them do it. And then the next time it happens, do it again. And it'll never happen again. They'll go to directly to each other because they know it's going to happen anyway, but they won't come to you with a complaint. They'll go to the person that they're complaining about.

That's such a great way to do it. But it's difficult, isn't it? I mean, it is difficult. So that's a tough one. But it's one that if people can get it, it makes life so much better for everybody on the team. The next category, of course, is customer focus, which is key in any of our businesses, Right. And we have two very specific values here. One is continuously striving to maximize internal and external customer loyalty. And at the Dwyer Group, we consider our employees the internal customer. We believe if we take great care of our employees, we provide them the tools, the resources, the training, the positive praise when they've earned it and the constructive feedback when they need it. They need that direction that will create this wonderful internal customer who will then take great care of the external customer, which in our case would be the franchisee and the end user.

Let me contribute something which I teach all the time has to do with past and future is when you say constructive feedback. The natural tendency from our childhood is that means criticism. I'm going to criticize you. I want you to sit there and take it. So what I found is always focus on the future rather than the past. Say, the next time this happens, why don't you do this? Or in the future, when we deal with this, why don't you do that? You see, if you criticize people for a past event, they feel frustrated and angry and trapped because they can't change a past event. But if you say, you know, this happens so in the future, and always direct the conversation toward what will happen in the future. People are always positive about a future event because they can control it, but they get frustrated. If you beat them up for a.

Passing, they can't fix it. You know what? That's brilliant. And if I had my Notes out. Right here. I'd be taking a note down. So I cannot forget that one. Yeah, you see, that's key.

This happened and the past is the past. But in the future. Yeah, in the future and next time. Those are magic words.

They're magic words. I can't forget. Those are great. Thank you. So the next value under Customer focus is making our best effort to understand and appreciate the customer's needs in every situation. Goes back to looking at it from their point of view, you know, seeing it from the customer's eyeglasses versus ours. Because what we know is different from what they know. So it's really, especially at the end user level, is making sure that we put ourselves in the shoes of that customer who's just had a fire in their home.

Yes. Now let me tell you a little something which I started to do in all my seminars with regard to customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, making customers happy. So I say to my business owners, I say, now what would happen if each customer that you had was so happy with you that they bought the equivalent amount of products or services again in that year, increase the frequency of purchase. What would that do to your business? Everybody goes, oh, double the size of your business. Yes. Well, now, sometimes that's possible, sometimes it's not. If you have a fire, flood, repairs and so on and so forth, it's not a recurring situation. I said, so let's take it a little bit further. Let's say if the customer was so happy with you that they told one other person to use your services rather than something else each year, what would that do to the size of your business? Double the size of your business? So I said, well, what if they were so happy that when they were out talking, they encouraged two other people to use your services in the course of the following 12 months? So you made a sale, and in the calling 12 months, they brought you two more customers of the same sale. What if they brought you one customer every three months? What if they brought you one customer every month just in talking and talking about what wonderful treatment they got from you. Just like if you go to a movie and you tell everybody about the movie or you go to a great restaurant or you have a great food or dish or something like that and you tell people about it? What if people just in the course of their lives once a month sent you a customer or see the customer? One customer. Let's see, how many months are there in a year? One customer time, that would be 13 customers of the same size from one Happy customer or 12 now and then I say now, let's go crazy. What if each of these customers that you've got, you took such good care of them that they each showed one customer per month? What would that do to your business? Well, 12 times 12 is hum, yes, it's one, but it's 145. Now there's another thing that I teach and I just say this because people watching this, I want them to have this information. The average person knows about 300 people by their first name. Politicians know maybe 3,000. But the average person from childhood and school and work and everything else knows about 300 people. So let's imagine that the person who is your customer knows a lot of other people in the same socioeconomic category have the same needs, same requirements, same thing that you do. But let's say just 10% of all those people that they know is a potential customer for you. All right, and so how many would that be? Well, 10% of 300 would be 30. So I want you, from now on, whenever you deal with a customer is to imagine that they have a neon sign blinking on their forehead that says 30, 30, 30. Treat me nice. I'll bring you 30, 30, 30 more. Now if this person is married to a husband or wife, they know three hundred people also. So now that means that they know thirty. No, it's thirty times thirty. It's thirty. That's not thirty plus it's thirty times thirty. It's nine hundred customers. Because all of those people know all of those people.

That's exactly right. Wow.

And so whenever you do with a customer, imagine that this customer, basically, if you treat them really nice, you want my love and advice. Treat me nice. You remember that song? Well, if you treat them really nice, they've got 10, 20, 30 more customers to bring you without raising a finger or running an ad or spending money on advertising. So that's a great value.

Powerful.

Yeah.

Well, that's a great lead into to our final value, which is having fun in the process. So anytime I'm learning, which I'm learning a lot from you today, I'm having fun in the process. So fun comes in so many different forms, right? And we all define fun a little differently. But as business owners, I think about our franchisees, we want them to have fun operating their businesses and it's really up to them to define what fun is. Some people fun is that big bonus they get to give to their team at the end of the year for pulling off a wonderful year and getting 30, 30, 900, whatever number of additional customers without lifting another finger to other people. The fun. The fun part of the fun is having a cookout for the team when they've had an exceptional week or a day. So part of being business owners is we need to incorporate fun into what we do. Life's too short not to have some fun. You know, the customers feel that they know when they're dealing with an organization that the employees are happy and they're enjoying what they're doing.

That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Now, so these are the rich values. And you got a wonderful book on this, which I've read. Now, what advice would you give to business owners who are watching this, saying, geez, I'd like to do that. Where would I start?

Right. Well, so the first book you mentioned is called live rich, and it really does tell the story of really a lot of adversity that we had gone through in the death of the founder and then recreating the operationalized values and how that's really made a difference in our business. Today. I'm writing a new book that you were nice enough to write, the forward for values, inc. And in that book, we talk about, on a more global perspective, how values are affecting businesses in a positive and a negative way. In the final chapter, chapter 17 is all about, how can anybody do this? Because you know what? It doesn't stop at organizations for profit organizations, Brian. This could be for. Not for profits. This could be for church organizations. It could be for youth groups. It could be for any. Any relationship, really. And to me, it's quite simple. It's whoever the leader, the main leader of the organization, whatever that organization is, is to have real clarity about what's most important to them, what are their core values. And be specific. As you said very early on, you can't just say respect, because your definition of respect might be a little different than my definition respect. And so before you know it, the company's really not operating under the same definition of respect. So I like to say you got to take it into the detail so that the team members really know what you mean by respect. Yes, but the leader has to have clarity, and then those values have to be put into writing. Just as I walked into your office today, your values were clearly on the wall. Right. There's no question in my mind about what's important to you and your organization, Nor should there be with any of your employees. Right. So write them down. The next thing is to make sure you have an alignment with your team, which sometimes means cleaning up the team you have today. So if your team is not aligned in those values, you're not going to have success because they've got to buy in.

Let me just comment quickly. Jack Welch, past president of General Electric, you just maybe touched on that already. But what Jack Welch did is he wrote an article in the annual report for General Electric a few years ago and it was so impactful that it's now taught in all the business schools. The article, and he said that in your business you have four types of people. He said you divide them by competence versus buy in. So you up in the upper right hand corner you get people who are competent and they buy into the values. These are the people who you build your business around. The second quadrant are the people who are competent, but they don't buy in. You know, they go along with it, but they don't really think that they're serious. These are the people that cause you, that you try to bring over, get them to buy in. The third quadrant are people who buy in but they're not competent. You train these people to try to bring them up, up into the first quadrant. And then over here you have people who are neither competent or neither buy in, he said, and these people are out of here. Here was the point that made this studied in every business school. He said, all of your problems come from competent people who don't buy in. It's the second quadrant that causes all of your problems. So what you have to do is you have to bite the bullet and say either buy in or move on. It's as simple as that. And that's exactly what you were saying.

Powerful. It's so powerful, but it's so true. You know, we've proven it that the Dwyer Group, we've grown from 125 employees to over 500 now. But bigger than that is the 1600 franchisees that we have who are all building their own unique businesses. There's 10,000 employees now represented, Brian, by these organizations because these people have bought in to the importance of our values and have we do this right and we have a great product or service, everything else is going to fall into place. So know who you are and be clear about your values and have them in writing. Align yourself with team members who buy in and are competent. So you just help me with another lesson that I can, I can teach. And then it's systemizing and internalizing those values. Because 95% of the companies in North America based on my studies do nothing with their core values once they're written you know, so I might have them in writing, I might have them on the wall, I might even have them on a website. But if I'm not executing them as a leader of this organization, it doesn't matter. So we've got to make sure that we, we as the leaders, internalize them and talk about them all the time. Hyper communication about the values, but lead with the values.

Yes.

Knowing that the one thing I've got to say is knowing that none of us are going to be perfect at the values. I will stand up in front of every audience and say, we are not a perfect company. I'm a human being, you're a human being. As hard as I'm going to try to live by these values every day, there's going to be times where I'm going to make a mistake. Please just know that I'm going to be vulnerable. I will hopefully own my mistakes, but we've got to internalize them. And then when you do that, it's like you live and you breathe them every day.

Let me just give you a thought. For our viewers that has been helpful to me. What we've done here is we sit down with our entire staff and we say, what values should we live by? What should be our values? And we write them all down, go around and use a whiteboard or flip chart around the room until we end up with 15 or 20 values. We say, now let's take a vote. Let's each person pick the five values that they like the most. And so we take a vote and everybody writes them down, we collect them up, somebody adds them all up and we give the score. And it's really quite remarkable. One value, usually integrity, is number one. And then customer service and so on. And these are the result of the election, the selection election. And so we say we all agree with this. Well, now everybody has at least one or two of their values on the list and the others are okay. I mean, there's nothing negative about them. So this is how you get your values rise up like cream in an organization as opposed to being announced and handed on top down. Here's another question which I always ask people. If someone were to interview customers of your company and ask them, what are the values of that company, what would they say? What would people who deal with you, people who work with you, people who work internally, people who supply you, what would people from the outside say? Your values are based on your actions, based on your experience. And then you start to think, oh, wow. If we say that one of our values is we take wonderful care of our customers, then do we do that all the time? And so I ask, how would an outsider rate you in terms of those values? And when you reach the point where the outsiders rate you based on your own aspirations for values, then you know you've got it perfect.

And that's my fourth. The fourth action item is you've got to measure performance.

Yes.

Because we could talk all day long about the way that we live our values, but if we're not asking our employees, our franchisees, our customers, how do you think we're doing? Then we're kidding ourselves. So what we do every year at the Dwyer Group is we actually do an annual survey. We. We ask every single employee to rate their supervisor on all 15 values. I am evaluating one of my teammates right now. We do the annual performance reviews. We try to do day to day performance reviews. And like you said, this is how we should do it in the future if there's a correction area. But just today on the airplane, I was working on evaluating my assistant of 16 years, and the thing we just added was I'm evaluating her too, on all 15 of her values. You know, from she just excels at it to she's got an opportunity for improvement. And that's the way it should be. We should be evaluating all parts of our business. We ask our franchisees, once a year, we survey them. Please rank your franchise coach on all 15 values. And the good news is the franchisees give us about a 94% score out of 100. So it's an A, Brian. Could be better, can always be better. The employees are a little tougher on us. It's about a 93 last time we checked. But that gives us the opportunity to say, where are we weak and how can we get better? So instead of just reciting the code of values at the beginning of a meeting or three or more, which is what we do as a habit around the Dwyer Group, we don't just recite them day in and day out. So if we've got a meeting and there's, you know, four or five of us, and we've already recited the values, you know, this morning at another meeting, let's talk about one of the survey results. Let's talk about that one value responding in a timely fashion, that our spirit score was a little bit lower than it should have been, and how are we going to get better at that? So it's not promising we're going to get better at all 15 values in one day. But what's the One value that we got, the lowest score, and how do we get that better next year? So it is about measuring performance and then acting on the feedback that you get. But the good news is we've been doing that for years. So for almost what, 16 years now, we've been asking our employees and our franchisees to rate us every year.

That's wonderful. You know, for the people watching this, business owners who want to instill values. We know that everyone lives from the inside out and the values form the core of your personality. Peter Drucker said that almost all problems are cultural problems. And cultural problems are basically the agreed upon values by which people are going to live and work. And he had this beautiful line that I read the other day. He said, culture eats strategy for breakfast every, every day. Isn't that great?

I want a high five on that one. It's so true.

Yeah, it is. More important than anything else is the culture. And they look at all the senior executives which are brought into large organizations who don't work out. It's always a cultural class, not a technical ability class. It's. They just don't fit in with the culture.

Amazing. That's another line I've got to use because it's so true.

Yeah, culture, culture.

It's strategy for us eat strategy for breakfast. That is incredible.

Well, that's wonderful. So what we like people to do now is get your book Values, Inc. And read it through. And values must be in writing and they must be defined and they must be actionable. In other words, they can't say, well, we believe in integrity and quality and customer service. Exactly. How would you observe a person acting like this? What would be the behaviors of a person who is living by this value?

How could you measure at the end of the day that they lived it?

Yeah. How could you say, yes, you did or no, you didn't? On a scale of 1 to 10, you know, there's a wonderful part of psychology and Ken Blanchard you'll be seeing very soon made this observation is whatever you focus on grows and changes. Whatever you concentrate on. You actually it's called the Hawthorne effect, is whatever you think about a value, you actually start to change your performance in the area of that value. For example, an example I use is what if an outside company was going to measure how much you smiled at customers today and they were standing around watching with a clipboard? How much more would you smile if you knew that you were being observed? Well, see, it's a very simple thing. So if you pick a value and a behavior and then you observe and reevaluate that on a regular basis, it automatically improves for everybody. Just the very fact that people are now aware that this is an important value causes the performance of that value to improve.

Well, thanks to you, our company is going to be even better as a result of this visit today. Some great tips you can give the.

Book is called Values, Inc. It'll be out very, very shortly, early.

In the new year.

Early in the new year. That's 2015. By all means, get it. It can have one of the most profound effects, not only on your business, but on your personal life, your family, your relationship with your children, which Dean and I both know, with your friends, with your community. But here's the greatest thing of all is when you live in harmony with a high, clear set of values, you feel wonderful about yourself. You have high self esteem, you have high levels of self confidence. You're a more positive person. You're more genial. You're just genuinely happier with your whole life. And of course the results and the people around you just improve and improve and improve. Like the ripples spreading in a pond. So get the book. Value Sync. Read it. Put it into your life. Good luck.