How I Built a World Class Company Culture

Thanks, alex. Good. Okay. So 20 years of reflecting on running my business. I think about all the people that I've hired and all the clients that have onboarded, all the clients who've left, and all the hard stuff that, as entrepreneurs, we go through. And happy to be able to say that I have no regrets wouldn't change anything. Everything had a purpose and led to where my company is today. But I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that I wish someone would have introduced me to EOS 15 years ago, for sure. Because it's made such a difference in my life, personally and professionally, and so many people around me that it's hard to know that that gift was out there and I didn't have it. So obviously it wasn't meant to be at the time. And I'm very blessed now to have Alex as a partner who was able to not only introduce me to eos, but able to help me gain traction in my business. When I first started the company, I was a senior at Ohio State, and I started my company while I was in school, and I didn't really have a company. I was out pounding the pavement getting clients, and a year out, I opened up my first office and hired my first teammate. And I always had, in my mind, I wanted to really have a cool office, selfishly, because I wanted a cool place to come every day. And it was really easy because I was going there every single day. I was real big on no management, no managers. I didn't want anyone managing me, and I didn't want to have anyone come in. And I kept hearing from people that I was interviewing that they hated their managers. So I was too young to know anything different other than that I didn't want anyone standing over my shoulder telling me what to do. And I tried to build the type of culture without using a flat structure and realizing very quickly that you need leaders. And so as I started to build more of a leadership team throughout my company and organization, and reading all the leadership books and all the core values and how to build strong cultures, we did a really good job with it. As a collection agency, it's hard to get people to come and want to come work for us. You know, people don't wake up and say, I want to go work at a collection agency. And it was very difficult. So our culture was our kind of our secret sauce. Right? So people loved working in our company. And I knew I was missing something, though. And when we did the core value piece in EOS and learned how you perpetuate the core values by hiring and firing and recognizing and rewarding. I knew as soon as I heard it that was it. Like, that was the piece. And as a quick start, Colby, I jumped right in, and we hit the core analyzer hard and sweeping changes. People went on performance improvement plan for their attitudes. They went on performance improvement plans for the core values. They stuck as soon as we did it. The fact that we collaborated together as a team and created them, but the fact that we were using them was the difference, because I had always done it and I had broadcasted it and I championed it, but it wasn't being perpetuated throughout the system enough to where everybody was involved. And it wasn't just coming from my megaphone. We have taken it to a whole other level. We've baked it into our L10. We call them high fives. And so as we do our updates and our headlines, we do employee teammate headlines, and we recognize people for their core values. When they exhibit the core values, we measure them because we have actual specific things that you can do to measure the core values. And people take to DOS out of our L10 meetings to go high five somebody to recognize them for their core value. And that was such a multiplier on my team because it wasn't just coming from me taking responsibility that I had to go perpetuate these core values. And I didn't realize what was happening at the time, but people were finding really cool, creative ways to high five people. It wasn't just saying something to them. It was a note. It was being creative. They're real personal, so they know things about their personal lives. And it did multiply the culture. So much so that as we hire people now, we talk them out of the job. Like, hardcore talk them out of the job using the core values. And it's just like a pay to play. You can't work there unless you're a core value fit, period. So we're really. We've taken it to a level we kind of say. We say we take it on steroids with our high fives and all the things we do. I've never been a big fan of the whole best place to work gigs and being recognized for that stuff. I never really saw the value in it until my team kind of beat me up with that and realized, you know, this is important. It'll help with recruiting. And a year and a half after starting with Alex and doing the core values and having them stick, my team was. We got recognized by a local business first newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, as The number one medium sized business to work for in central Ohio. And there's no doubt it's from EOS and from the Core Value Culture piece, hands down. My introduction with Alex and EOS was a little bittersweet. Bitter because I showed up to my big first meeting with my leadership team and not everybody who showed up ended up in a box on my leadership team. It's very difficult. This is one of the most highest performing people in my company. Incredible leader, but wasn't in the box. And so that was really tough. Very hard. The sweet part was my introduction was my friend who told me about this really cool company, eos, that has this thing where they teach you how to run meetings. So I heard that two minutes later I'm on YouTube watching the L10 meeting. Two minutes after that I'm calling trying to schedule my 90 minute meeting to get set up because I just knew it was such a game changer how to run these meetings. And I always struggled in my history to build teams without management because peer to peer is difficult. Strategic Coach has helped me with that vision of building a self managed company. I get it now. I didn't when I was growing my company and the L10s just took fire in my company. I mean, knocking out 20, 30 issues every single meeting, just in flow. And I knew with 80 people I got to push this out to the whole company. So I didn't really have teams, I had team leaders. It never really stuck. Everyone didn't understand, like, who's that? What's that person's role? The accountability chart brought crazy clarity to us. That was amazing. But when I rolled out the L10s throughout the entire company and I facilitated teaching each department how to run their L10s, I just remember stepping back and saying, wow, like that is just incredible. Like I don't even. So many issues are getting resolved and solved and ideas and issues being bubbled up that it never would have happened without the whole L10 kind of piece to running simple meetings in Strategic Coach. They introduced me to Colby and up until this point the departments were running their L10s and everyone was doing well. Everyone's getting eights and up and we're really kind of feeling the traction start to bubble up in the system. And I got back from going through their training because I wanted to certify myself and go teach my company how to use this gift because I've really embraced it myself as a quick start who I am and where my role is in my company. But I wanted to give that gift to all the people that I was working with. And there was a picture painted as I gave everybody their Colby scores. And I started looking at these L10s and seeing that we've done a really good job hiring people in the right fit zone of our salespeople and our clerical people and our collectors and all these cool things. The problem was they were all similar Colby scores. So I had all my salespeople in the same range doing L10s. I had all the same Colby scores in my clerical team. So my office is full of fact finders. So you can imagine having all these groups, departments running their L10s, all fact finders. I couldn't keep it. So three months ago, I blew up all the teams. I'm in ypo. I don't know if you guys are in YPO forum eo, but they have forums. So instead of teams, I put people in forums. So each forum has six to eight to 10 people, and they run their L10 meetings. And I synergized them using the Colby scores. So here we are in January 2018. I've paired everybody up. Now. You've got a controller with salesperson. You've got the clerical person with one of the collectors. And wow. Like, it just. You could just feel us hit that next level of. Instead of just having all the salespeople solving problems as salespeople, now they're connecting with every single person in the company. And again, take a step back at this point, and just watching what happens in my company, it's very obvious to me that I'm not as needed as much, which is great, because I don't want to have to be involved with every single issue and problem. And now the company is kind of solving their own problems. We use Trello. So if you don't know what Trello is, it's a software system to communicate with other people. And we have team issue lists. So everybody just goes onto the Trello board and they load up their issues list for company issues. And when people go into their L10s, they can just pick things off that stir the thinking, and they can bring it into their L10 and solve their issues. And it's been an amazing nuance to running meetings and solving problems and taking the company from point A to point B. My biggest win, though, with the L10s is in my community. And philanthropically, I got involved in, in Bexley, Ohio, with the Jewish community and some of the organizations. If you've ever been part of a board or if you've ever been part of a meeting. That's not an L10. Wow. I can't do it anymore. I can't do it, and I want to help. So of the four organizations that are really the only four in a small community where I'm at, these rabbis, they never got leadership training, so they all complained that nothing gets done. There's no execution, there's no volunteers. So we built teams around these leaders. We showed them how to run an L10, and literally within six months, there were like, 100 to DOS coming out every week from these organizations. And it's like, literally, like changing a community. So I don't know if EOS knows that that's the impact they're having. You guys all have such amazing stories that everyone we've all been connecting with all day, but that one, for me, hits home. It's very personal, and it's just such a cool gift to be able to give back. One other nuance that we do is in our L10s, we score our rankings and we score our to dos. I wanted to mention that. So it's really cool to see a pulse on my business so that I don't have to always go inspect it. I just see it on the scorecard so I can see a trend of how the company's scoring the L10s, which is really cool. And I'll end with the fact that it's funny watching the journey of being an entrepreneur and using eos. I was doing things that I didn't know I was doing. So I was in every single accountability box when I first started, as most founders are going to be. My whole career has been spent delegating and getting out of every box I've been in every single box. I've gotten to a point where, as a visionary and an integrator at the same time, I'm to the point now where I'm currently recruiting for an integrator spot. It's funny, though, reflecting on even the last few weeks, I think I'm in a few different boxes right now, which is a really weird feeling because six months ago, I would have said there's no way I'm the visionary, hands down. But it just keeps changing, and I think that's the result of having traction. And so, again, big thanks to Alex for helping my company and EOS for helping my company gain that traction. Breakthrough ceilings. And I'd say for people who are. I know there's a lot of people who are starting with the os. We were joking before. We said, you know, be careful what you ask for, and be careful what you put on that vto, because you're going to get it. If you're with eos, may not exactly the same way you put it on paper, but you'll get somewhere. And you really have to be deliberate about where you want to go, because, again, there's a very good chance that you'll get it. So I appreciate being able to share my story with you guys. Thank you.