How I Created a World-Class Company Culture.

Here's the thing. You cannot teach people how to have a core value. You can teach people a scale. And I got to a point where I stopped hiring anyone with experience in my industry because they had to unlearn what they had learned. I always thought to myself, I want to build the kind of company that I want to go work in every day. One of the ways that we define leadership is if you have a leader that can build other leaders, who can build other leaders. And so for a company to grow, you're going to have to be able to do that, have issues, lists, so that we're capturing all the problems that are happening and all the challenges that we're up against and having things flow back up to the leadership team. That was an absolute game changer for our culture because people were involved and they were engaged. I ran my company based on a way of being compassionate and empathetic, not only to the people that we were serving, but to my employees. And I wanted everyone to do that with each other. Businesses get so cutthroat and so focused on profit, and they lose the personal touch. And so I brought that back in. It's a real, real success when you can build a company culture and sustain performance and have people love working at your company, give people purpose. I think that's just a really cool thing for a litter to be able to do.

Okay, Chad, so last week or two weeks ago, or whenever it was, we spoke about your story, building your company and a company that people really loved in an industry that people really hate. And I understand this week we're going to dive more into company culture, which I know is a topic that you're passionate about. So I guess, first of all, why. Why are you so passionate about talking about this topic? Building a good company culture.

I think it's sad how many people hate their job. And it' rare that I find people that say they love their job or they love the company that they work for. And I don't know, I just. Since starting my company in college, I always thought to myself, I want to build the kind of company that I want to go work in every day. And who wants to walk into a culture in their own company and have it be negative or have it be toxic? And it's a challenging obstacle as you grow your company to bring in new people who don't care as much as you do about your company and try to build a culture that people will run through walls. And it's a challenge every single day. Just because, again, we talked about how hard it is to be a leader. And I think for me, training to be a leader is something that I'm really passionate about. And I love working with other people in my network that love doing that. And so the challenges are pretty much across the board, the same, no matter who you are, no matter what you're leading. And I don't know, I think it's a real, real success when you can build a company culture and sustain performance and have people love working at your and, I don't know, give people purpose. I think that's just a really cool thing for a leader to be able to do. And one of the ways that we define leadership is if you have a leader that can build other leaders, who can build other leaders. And so for a company to grow, you're going to have to be able to do that. And you can't do things just in a vacuum in the corner office with your door closed. So it's a challenge that I was always up for. I still am up for, and I'm still learning, and I really enjoy it. So the company culture piece is just. I don't know, that's where I found my passion in business.

Nice. Nice. Okay, so let's. Let's dive into the weeds. And I want you to pretend that I'm a CEO trying to build a strong company culture. Where should I start?

Yeah. So, you know, I didn't know any different when I first started my company because I didn't go to business school and I didn't, you know, have a job that was training me to be, you know, a CEO. So I had to learn the hard way. And I think the fun part about being a CEO is that you learn through failing. And one of the areas that I failed in that really kicked off this whole process about the. How I built my culture was when I was with one of my friends at lunch. His name is Brett Kaufman, and he told me about this company, eos, and he told me how cool it is because he learned they taught him how to run a meeting. And I remember at the time I was running meetings and my meetings were just. They were a blur. I was using my meetings for different purposes to train people. I'd sit up there for like an hour more, sometimes more, and just blab on and on, and try to use that as an opportunity to inspire and motivate, you know, the team. As I grew the team and I knew that I didn't have, you know, a nice structured environment to be able to run something as simple as meetings. And so to make a long story short, I went and hired EOs. When I hired EOs. For those of the listeners who don't know what EOS is, it's entrepreneur operating system. And it's just basically a way to run your company. It gives you an operating system. And this is really where I failed because again, as a visionary, I'm just kind of running and I'm just dodging bullets and I'm pivoting when I have to pivot, like most owners will do. But you can only do that for so long. And what EOS brought to my company was this ability to like build a system with structure and sustain it so that you can grow and you can get everybody engaged going in the same way. And that's like their motto. And it works. I mean, if you take it and you run with it with your team, it works. And they have a few different components of it that I really held onto dearly. I changed it a lot because I like to try to make it better. And I found some, some holes with the process. One of them being that you sign up for this company, you spend a lot of money and you bring your leadership team to work with a consultant who helps train your leadership on this structure that they've created, a real simple structure to how to run meetings, how to hold people accountable, how to build core values in your company. And these are things that are really, really important to be able to do. If you're going to grow your company and you break through ceilings, their big motto is that you're going to build traction. What I failed to understand when I started with this company was that you go and you get trained and they do a great job. But the problem is you come back to your office and nobody's training your entire company. So I kind of took it upon myself to self facilitate this whole and start training everybody in my company because we were running these meetings and they were going incredible. And they teach you a process for how to solve problems. They call it ids. You identify, you discuss and you solve problems. And you do it as a team instead of just one person kind of like ranting on and on about what to do and what everyone else should do. They have this really cool system to run a meeting, how to solve problems, how to keep an issues list. It's really nice. And it gave us the structure that we never had and it just, it just let us take off. And the big problems that I ran into at the time were that no one was training everybody and I wanted everybody to run These kind of meetings. So I had to train every single person in my company and all the different teams on how to run these meetings and how to solve problems so that I wasn't being stuck being the only one to have to solve all these problems. And then we started incorporating all the other tools that they gave us. And so today I figured we were going to talk about the culture and how I built my culture and how these other companies that are running on EOs build their culture because it's been proven and it's a system that works. And whether people use a system like this or not, it doesn't matter as long as they have a system. So for me, the experience of being able to run a meeting was just, it was phenomenal. I ended up using an lms, a learning management system called Playbook, so that when I was tired of repeating myself 10,000 times and having to be the only person to train everybody, that I could dump all that knowledge, that wisdom into a lms. And then when new people came into the company, they could watch these videos, they can see the training and it could be something that you can scale because you can repeat it. And that was a very, very powerful shift for us because I was shifting out of my role and going into a new expression for myself, career wise. And I was afraid that I was going to lose this investment, that I was pouring my money and my time and my energy into training my whole company. And then all of a sudden I've got some other thing I've got going on in my career and I was afraid it was just going to all just collapse. So having some sort of an LMS in a company is really powerful, especially for today when companies are remote and they have teams that are off site. But having the company builder run their own meetings, being able to solve problems, have issues, lists, so that we're capturing all the problems that are happening and all the challenges that we're up against and having things flow back up to the leadership team. That was an absolute game changer for our culture because people were involved and they were engaged.

How many employees did you have at the time that you discovered EOS?

So I think probably around would want to say 50 or 60.

50 or 60.

And then, you know, we close to doubling it before I sold the company. So, you know, it started to scale up and, you know, we have a lot of, you know, it's hard with my business. We had a lot of new people coming in the door. I used to meet with every single person when they come in the door. I was trained to be a Colby Corp assessment trainer, which gives people a little bit of discovery about themselves. And I used to sit with people when they first came in. We'd share our story and we'd give them their assessments, we'd introduce them to the team, they'd go to lunch with their department, and then we would basically given these playbooks through the LMS to get them trained.

Sorry. So this was after you had discovered EOs, you started doing Coby as well?

Yeah, it's funny, I don't remember much before eos because things were so chaotic and it was just like, always pivoting to try to, like, you know, put out whatever fire I had to put out. And then once the structure kind of came in, that allowed us to really start to grow and really start to pick up that momentum. The silent killer that I did not see coming, and I don't really hear people who are in the EOS network talk about it, was that it actually worked. Like, we built traction. We were running through these walls, we hit new ceilings. And the silent killer in that is that that creates a big problem for companies that don't have the capacity or the capabilities that the new level that you've reached requires. And that's a big problem.

Can you tell me more about that? What do you mean exactly?

Yeah, I mean, and I'll tell you how I was the biggest problem. What led to me removing myself from my position and shifting into another role. So we were doing great, and the company was doing great, and we were kind of running really hard and breaking through ceilings, getting lots of new clients, and we were what we call a meeting pulse. So we had this meeting pulse that I was doing a weekly meeting every single week with my leadership team at the same time, same place every week, hitting those issues, knocking things out. And then quarterly, we had a state of the company meeting, and right before the state of the company meeting, where we were telling all the company and the employees kind of where we've been, where we are and where we're going. I met with the leadership team and we did our quarterly meeting as a leadership team to set our next 90 day goals and to make sure that we were on pace to hit our annual goals. So we constantly had this pulse of the business where we're meeting every week, we're looking at our scorecard every single week. The most important numbers, hearing the most important headlines, the most important things going on around the company. And then we were meeting every 90 days to talk about the last 90 day goals and then making sure that we're on pace to hit that next at the end of the year. And there were certain exercises that we would embed into those meetings that really kept it healthy, it really kept the team connected. And then being able to come back to the company and have a state of the company meeting and then connect everybody to that made everybody feel like they were, they were part of something. And that was so powerful. And then when you add in some of the other things, I'm going to share that we did, it just transformed us. I mean, it really took us from like night to day and it was a difference maker for us. I think every company has those things that kind of just like shift everything. And eos for us, that operating system for us was one of them because it's simple. I mean, we had a two page business plan that showed our core values, our 10 year vision, our marketing strategy, which was like three bullets, our three year picture of where we could see things, and then our quarterly goals and our yearly goals and it was like accountability, like through the roof because, you know, eyes are on you. So one of the things that was very powerful for us and it was an interesting story of what happened. We showed up as a leadership, leadership team to our first kind of team building exercise that we were working through with one of their sections of this program. And it was about building accountability into your company, which, you know, most teams fail with accountability either because of a failure of nerve from the leader because they're too scared to call people out, or because they suck at it and they make people feel really uncomfortable having to call people out. But at the end of the day, like if you think about a sports team, the coach has to call people out. And as a leader, if you're really super nice and you're trying to be a people pleaser, that's a difficult thing to be able to do, is keep everybody happy, yet call you out. And so there are things that we learn as leaders that we have to do. We talked about it last time, you know, getting your ratios right, making sure that you catch people doing good things so that when I have to hit you in the head with a, with some feedback, it's not the only time you've ever heard from me. But we showed up at this leadership team, you know, meeting and what they did was, is they put our business on a whiteboard and they asked us to get very clear on what functions existed in our business. And every business has functions, right? And the problem with most teams is they'll build their business around people. And you can't do that. As important as people are, you can't build around people because if that person leaves, then what? So what we did was, is we would mark this up on the board. And we had finance as a department function. We had sales, we had operations, we had it. And so you just have. Every company has those. And so there's some anomalies that some companies will have. Some people might have a marketing in their main function, and some may not. We didn't. We had marketing under sales. It wasn't a major function of our business since we didn't pour a lot of energy and money and time into our marketing because we had salespeople. So once a team gets clarity on what those departments are and you call them boxes, then you decide, like, what are the most important three to five responsibilities of that function? So, again, something simple. Sales. You know, one of the functions is get new clients. You know, one of the functions is retain the current clients. You might have something like it. You're going to be the point person for any IT breakdowns or challenges, cybersecurity, whatever it is. And once you get clear on what functions exist in your business that are major functions, and then you determine what are those three to five main responsibilities for that function, then you put the person in, and this is the right person, right seat, making sure that you have the right people in there. And when you go and you figure this out and you're doing it backwards because, you know, we already had a team. We already had people in positions and titles, and all of a sudden we're throwing those out the door and we're throwing these up on the board. And one of my best employees in 25 years, she was definitely one of. One of our highest performers. Didn't end up in a box. And so imagine having a leadership team that has trust and has people there who've been there 5, 10, 15 years showing up at this meeting, learning how to take your company through the roof, and finding out that the one person who's probably one of the highest performers doesn't belong there. They can't be in that meeting. And, boy, that was tough. It was tough for me as a leader, and it was really tough.

Why not make a box for her?

Because you don't do that. Because you don't build your business around individuals. And everyone has a role. She had a very important role in our company. It just wasn't on that top row. And I think it was something that she had to grow through we had to grow through. And ironically, she ended up, long story short, kind of looking backwards, being on the leadership team when some of the other people were not on the leadership team. So, you know, things do evolve over time. And she was a high performer. I mean, that's what she did. And you know, people have those kind of things happen to them in their career and this is the true sign of a leader. And they either react to it going one way and say, you know what, you know, they screwed me over, I'm out of here, or, you know, they step up and they know their role in the company and they play that part and they, they earn their keep. And this individual did that. She did such a great job. And she really, she really. It's such an inspiration to me thinking back at how she handled the situation as hard as it was. And you know, so we, we made those functions and then after a while we started to carry it down throughout the entire company. I took my accountability chart, which most companies will call their hierarchy chart, you know, their org chart, I flipped mine upside down and I was at bottom. And then the tree kind of went up. Because my thought was the leadership team, we called it lit leaders in training. We were serving them. Most executives are at the top of the tree and they're like, they're looking down and they're looking down at entry level folks. And I just thought the opposite of that. I really was thinking we serve them, we have to impress them. And the way we communicated that to our team was just as simple as saying the accountability chart is, is a way to hold each other accountable. So whoever you're connected to above, below, you get to hold that person accountable. That's who you go to. But another powerful thing that it did was it gave everybody clarity on who to go to for what. And some of the biggest chaos that happens in companies is that you have people wearing multiple hats. And so I was in three boxes. Well, that's a problem. And you don't have the capacity to work in three boxes or you have two people in one box, that's a problem. Because if I go to that person and someone else goes to the other person, they're going to hear different things. So as the CEO, when you have accountability in your system and you have everybody in their function staying in their lanes, and everybody knows who to go to and knows what they're responsible for, you can grow. And there's just clarity. And I think that that one piece alone was transformational for our company. And I stuck to it. I really stuck to it. And you think about what you can do when you have a model like that. We were able to kind of then map out three years from we can see our company adding an IT person and putting that on the box. We can see and predict what positions we're going to need, what we can start seeing before it even happens. That again, that's a very powerful predictor. It's not always, always 100% right, but it certainly gives you a roadmap for where you're going. And I think that's really critical for companies to be able to do as they're growing because all it takes is one big client to change everything. Or you open your doors and you get slammed with new business and all of a sudden you got to figure out what am I going to do? And if you're not prepared and you don't know what fun going to necessarily need, then you're caught scrambling and you're like, what do I do? And I've seen that happen. I've been part of that and I think I had to, to learn, you know, how to handle those kind of situations. But I think just that, that, that tolerance for risk, balancing it with being prepared properly and having true accountability in your culture. Culture is very important. You know, J camp. Another thing that it did that it was really good is once you have that accountability in place and you're having these meetings, it allows the accountability to bubble itself up so that you don't even have to call people out because the spotlight's on you, you know, like you're responsible for that. It's not going so well. Guess who that's on? That's on you. You know, if you're in charge of our development team and there's a problem with development, I get to go to Jacob and like what's going on. And when you're showing up to a weekly meeting every week and we're going through our to do's and our issues, they're either getting done or they're not. And you're in front of your team and so what can you do? You have to either own it or you don't. And if you don't, usually you're bye bye.

Yeah. One of the funny things about development in general on that note is it's very obvious when something's broken. If there's a bug in other areas of a business, it might not be as obvious where it falls, but with code, that's one thing that I think is nice about it.

And well, in most areas of business, maybe to the CEO or to that individual. It's not to someone, it's very obvious. And here's the problem. If it's not obvious whose it is, then it opens up a can of worms for another problem, which is there's nobody who owns it. And that's like who's supposed to. And then someone has to jump in. And that's the chaos that happens, especially when a company is growing and they don't have anyone to fill that function. And you're growing. So you really have to have things documented. You really have to be able to communicate that to your team. We put our accountability chart inside our LMS. We would update it every 90 days. When new people came in, they were introduced to this, they saw the accountability chart, they knew who to go to, they knew who was responsible for what. And when we found those holes and those gaps, we would just fill them in and so very process oriented, which again, for somebody who's not a process oriented person, it really gave us that roadmap for like the way things are supposed to happen in a business as you grow. So that was really cool.

So it's interesting that you started talking about eos and your experience getting organized. Really, it seems at your company. It seems like what was really key for you at that moment was basically just like turning chaos into order and having systems in place. But I think when most people think about company culture, certainly myself, it's organization and systems like you've described is not the first place where my head goes when I hear the word company culture. I typically think of like happy hour with the team or something like that. So how did you, what about that aspect of your company? How did you build that part of your company culture? I'm not talking about happy hour in particular, but hopefully you know what I'm getting at.

I do know exactly what you're getting at, because that's the result. People aren't going to go to happy hour unless they enjoy the people that they're with. And so at the heart of all performance, at the heart of any team being happy and smiling at happy hour, there's trust, period. And one of the things that we did was we focused heavily on building trust. Because if you don't have trust, you have sabotage. If you don't have trust, you have people out looking for themselves. And when you trust and you build trust and it's like a brick, brick, brick, and you just keep building this trust, it builds over time and everybody's got a different way of defining Trust. And you have different levels and types of trust. You have ethical trust, you know, are they going to do what they say they're going to do. You have strategic trust, which is going to be, you know, do I believe that he can take us to where he says he's taking us? You've got personal trust. Do I trust myself? You know, and I think, you know, between ethical trust and there's just so many, so many different types and levels and people have a different worldview and belief. I have a lot of people that would say things like, you know, I'm not going to trust until you, you earn my trust. And here I am, I extend that trust on day one, almost blindly, until you prove me wrong. And even when you prove me wrong, I'll give you another chance. So I think everyone's kind of baggage their past has a lot to do with, you know, where they, where they, they lie on that trust. But what we do is we brought everybody together in that culture. And I did that a couple different ways. One, eos did that for us. It brought everybody together to work on a common structure. We also heavily invested in professional development, so we would practice as a team and do leadership practices. Not everybody showed up, but we didn't need everybody to show up. So when we did come together, we were transparent and vulnerable in a way that we tasted trust that led to flow that was so magical that companies just don't, they don't taste that kind of stuff before. And the connections were so real and they became so tangible that, you know, addressing conflict ended up just being a conversation. And so it just, it transformed the culture over time. But at the heart of all of that, with trust being the foundation, there were core values. And our history with core values and my personal history with core values was a real wake up call for me when I met this structured way of doing it. Because I always put core values up on the wall. I always stood up in meetings and talked about how important the core values were and how to do the right thing and how to be, you know, I had a whole long list of core values that I preached and preached and preached for years. And looking back, I think I was doing the right thing. But I know now it was going in one ear and out the other because people didn't care. And I think if you just stamp words on the wall and you parrot them out by yourself, that's what you get. You get people who think it's really nice, but like, okay, so what? And that's really what it comes down to what we did in the exercise as a leadership team was we would, on a whiteboard, paint a picture of our best, most talented teammates, and we would describe those teammates as a team, and we would light up our whiteboard with all the qualities that we'd love to see in that person, if we could duplicate that person. How many. How many people can we get that have these qualities and what makes that person so special? And then we had fun wordsmithing things and just coming up with really cool labels that we all bought into and said, these are our core values. So, like, for us, we had distinct and deeply connected. Distinct because we knew who we were, deeply connected because we knew we couldn't do it by ourselves, and we wanted to be connected to other people. My favorite one was love. You know, I ran my company based on a way of being compassionate and empathetic, not only to the people that we were serving, but to my employees. And I wanted everyone to do that with each other because I feel like businesses get so cutthroat and so focused on profit, and they lose the personal touch. And so I brought that back in, and so we had. Responsibility was our number one. My number one core value. So we came up with our core values, and the game changer for us was what we were taught to do, which was recognize, reward, hire, and fire, Right? So think about that. If you're hiring and firing, recognizing and rewarding people for your core values, and you're making that a discipline for your team, imagine what happens over time. It's incredible. First off, you have people catching people doing good things because they're exhibiting the core values. I'm giving people recognition publicly, and we did all kinds of cool things. We gave away pto. We gave away bonuses if they got picked. We had a thing at the end of the month where everybody voted who did the best at exhibiting this core value and that core value, and we made a big deal out of it. And so the difference was it's either me sitting at the top, you know, screaming from the mountaintops of my megaphone core values, or my team together doing it. So it didn't just come from me, and I just took it to a whole new level. I had one leader stand up at the end of the month, and everybody took one core value, and they would share an experience that they saw someone do in the office, and they would tee it up, explain it, and then recognize Jacob for being that person. And everybody was giving him a round of applause. We gave him a free PTO day at 8 hours paid off, time to go, and it just, it just did something. Over time, people just started to gravitate and it truly became a culture. It really became a thing where we were living at not 100%, but I can tell you that people felt this from the leadership team, people felt this from me, and it was real. And I think, you know, when you're, when you're hiring people and you're looking for those types of values in people and you get it right, one person can come in and just literally make a whole. It doesn't matter how big your company is, they can literally light people up. So I was taught that you have the right person in the right seat. And you can determine that in two ways. They're either a culture fit or they're a gwc. And GWC stood for. They get it, they want it, and they have the capacity to do it. Meaning they're the right person for the job. They know how, if they're a developer, they're good at what they can do. I had collectors who were on the phones and they didn't want to call people at work. Well, that's a problem if that's your job. So they were a good culture fit, but they weren't gwc. And I would terminate people for that. And I would do it in the nicest way possible because deep down inside, people know. They know the job's not right for them. They can feel the dissonance in them. And if they're not a culture fit, they're made to feel really uncomfortable. And it's a really uncomfortable place to come in and not feel like you're to them drinking the Kool Aid. But, you know, at the end of the day, people can call it what they want, they can call it fake, they can call it that, people are kissing butt. But, you know, when you have the core of your team living the core values and they believe in it wholeheartedly and they were part of creating it, which is really another big piece of it was it wasn't just me. I can't explain, like, how much that shifted. And when you compound that with things like an accountability chart and then you have this core value and culture piece, when you go out to happy hour with your teammates, you actually enjoy yourself. You really care about these people. And I think for us, we had this 10 times multiplier because we had our leadership practices kind of just like cherry on top, where it got real. It was, you know, people called it sometimes like, this is like self therapy, you know. Yeah. Because People are sharing. They're real. They're coming out, and they're sharing things with people that they normally wouldn't say at work. You know, some people say, when I go to work, I leave it at the door. And I'm like, how do you do that? Like, you can try, but, like, you're not gonna be yourself if you're leaving it at the door. Like, I'd rather go and just be myself. And as long as you're not judging me and I'm not judging you, then we can have a really great relationship. And, you know, were there people that judged people? Of course there were, but I think for us, I always thought 80%, and we had that 80% mentality, and we had majority of our people on. And you could feel it when you came into our team. It was a very tangible, fun thing to be part of. When Covid hit and everybody went home, boy, you could just feel the air pop out of the balloon.

Right, right. Yeah. There's a whole. That's a whole bag of worms that we could dive into in terms of how remote work impacts culture. But I'm curious to first go a little bit deeper into the hiring and firing. You said that you did both of those things once you had established your core values. Everything kind of including hiring and firing, revolved around, does this fit with our core values and who we want to be?

Yeah.

There are any things that you did in interviews to help, kind of help. Help your team, I guess, figure out if this person was going to be a good match based on the core values that you set. I know that, like, I was reading before this and thinking as I was preparing for this interview, have you ever, you know Zappos, the company?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I studied.

They're like, yeah, so they're. They're really famous for their culture. And one of the things I think that they did was they offered people $3,000 just to leave and not take the job before coming in. And that was, like, one thing, but they were famous for a whole bunch of other things that they did. I tried that in interviews.

I tried to do that because I read the Zappo story, I talked to some of the employees, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. So I was. I was. I remember having meetings with my team talking about, should we offer people bonuses to quit? Because if they take it. And, you know, I always exited people out after I learned how to do it the right way on a high note. And I always went above and beyond because one, I Didn't want to have any problems. And two, because they helped me, they tried to help me. If they were, if they put in their best foot, then I wanted it to be a nice exit for people. So I didn't make that a discipline, what Zappos did. But I love what they do and I think it makes sense to do it. Here's the thing, you cannot teach people how to have a core value. You can teach people a scale. So I was definitely heavily tilted more towards interviewing people for the core value than I was the gwc. First off, I was looking for people without experience. I didn't like people with experience. I didn't want people. And I got to a point where I stopped hiring anyone with experience in my industry because they had to unlearn what they had learned. And I didn't want that from another company because I didn't like what other companies were teaching people in my industry. And I wanted to do it different. And I wanted them to learn my way because my way worked really well. We had really worked a system of how to treat people, how to act on the phones, how to respond to people, how to deal with complaint calls, and I liked it. And when we had people come in from other environments and they had to unlearn it, they struggled so bad. So I stopped hiring people. So my thought was I can train people to do this job if they have the attitude, if they have the will, if they have the desire. And one of my core values was constant, never ending improvement. And it was championing change. And I think, you know, when you have people who are willing to learn and they're willing to pick up new things and new skills, you can do anything with those types of individuals. So I was hiring people 100% for me on core values. I let other people on my team interview people for the gwc and I would ask them questions that I would try to weed them out. One distinct and deeply connected was, are you you? Are you? Distinctly you. And if people were fake in an interview, they could never get past me. I would just mine and mine and mine. And I would not let you go until I either got either what I was looking for, which was the truth or the real story behind whatever it is, or I'd catch you in a lie. Because I knew that if I did that, and you're going to do that with me today, this is going to be your best foot forward. What's going to happen when you're sitting with my team a month from now, three months from now? And if I don't want to sit with you. Why would I want to put you next to someone on my team? And so I was looking for genuine. And I remember my coach would come in and help me interview, and he taught me, really how to, like, look for this. And what happens in these interviews is people will just spit out their answer, and you tend to just hear their answer, and then you move on to your next question. But when you hear something and you kind of dig a little deeper, you find out that if they repeat themselves, if they tell you, tell me a little bit more about that, you start to get to the root of whatever it is. And so I would ask people questions about the biggest mistake they ever made and how they handled it. And I'm looking for that responsibility. I'm looking. Did they own it? I'm looking. Did they point the finger at their boss, at their manager? And it only takes a couple more questions after that first question to determine if this person fully accepts responsibility for what had happened or they don't. Because the question was, when did you mess up? So if you can't take responsibility and you can't just say, you know, I screwed up, which so many people are scared to do. So I just. And ironically, people thought I shouldn't go to an interview and say that it makes me look bad. And here you are interviewing me, and it looks good. So again, I always thought I like to do things a little bit of the opposite. So I didn't want to set people up in these interviews. So when I was. I would tell people what the core values are. I would explain to them what they're walking into, and I would tell them it's a very difficult environment to adapt to because it's not like other companies. And either people love that and they were just so attracted to it, or they were like, get me out of here.

So it's also a win. It's a win, right?

Win.

Win.

So we did a really good job, hiring and retention. And I just made that. One of my number one strategies in the business was to attract talent and train them and hire slow, fire, fast, and once you know they're not a good fit, get them out. And I don't mean that in a mean, ruthless way. I just mean that if you have a wrong culture fit and they're making people feel uncomfortable, what are you doing? Why would you wait? And the problem is, there's this way of being paralyzed as a CEO or a hiring manager where you pour yourself into hiring this person. You did everything you could to train them and get them going. And you spent money and time and then you realize they're not the right person. You don't want to start over. It's almost like the loss. Aversion of that hurts so much and you rather just let it go. And one of the biggest things.

Do you think it's that or do you think it's people just not wanting to hurt the other person's feelings and maybe being too agreeable?

I think people are scared. They don't want to address conflict. They don't want to call it out and say, look, Jacob, you're not the right person. Like right from the get go, everything we've seen from you in the first week is the opposite of what we're looking for. I don't want to waste your time. And I would have those conversations and they went, well, people knew. And if they didn't know and they were shocked and they were, they fought for it, then I'd have a. I have a choice. I can give them a second chance. And I've done that too, you know, And I think, can, can you think.

Of a time where you did and it worked out?

Not many.

Well.

Not many. And I can tell you, as my career progressed, I stopped giving those second chances because I, because I, I would know, but I just had. I was a softy. I would, I wanted people to work out. So that's the problem. I wanted it more than they wanted it. And I'll tell you one of the things I learned when I brought a different leader into my company to kind of pass the torch of leadership. This person had come from more of a corporate environment and they didn't get involved in the lower level employees. And I think if you look across most businesses, you'll find this, you'll find a corporate environment where I don't get involved with entry level folks. I mean, I have too many people that I'm responsible for. And there's truth to that. There are people. There is. And maybe it's easy for me to say because, you know, I didn't have thousands of employees. But like, if I knew there was a problem with an entry level folk, I got involved. Like, I got involved. If it's a conversation I need to have, it's. If it's something with. That something's wrong in their life. And I'll tell you, that goes a long way with people and they remember it forever. And I wasn't doing it for any other reason, but I cared. I actually cared about people that they were working in my company, I wanted that. A good experience. And people got tough lives. You know, everyone thinks they come into work, and everyone's kind of living the same kind of life. I always knew when people left my office, we're all living completely different lives. Some people are going home to an empty house. Some people are going home to a sobering environment. It could be emotional abuse. It could be physical abuse. Who knows? You know? You don't know. Some people can go into a loving marriage, some have kids that drive them crazy, and they want to bang their head against the wall. Everyone's living a different life. And I know that everyone struggles with something, period. They just do. And I just. That that way of empathizing with people that you're around, you see them every day, you know, I just knew, like, the door got closed. I knew something was wrong. Like, so I'd pop in. You know, I check in, and usually when you ask a few times, and they don't feel comfortable telling you if you keep asking, eventually they see that you care, and they're like. They let it out, and that's when trust just goes right. Like, it could just be one of those conversations. I can tell you there's a lot of those. And you have to be careful. You don't want to get too close. It's hard. My friend used to come to my office, and he'd go, why is everyone so comfortable around here? They all have pictures of their family on their walls. Don't they know that their job could be gone tomorrow? Why are they making themselves so at home? And I laugh at the cause. They feel at home. They feel good about it. They like working here. And yet I can't tell you how many times I'd see situations where they had to take those pictures off, put it in the box, and I mean, it's life. That's the way transitions happen. And I think people run their time out at a company. And my culture, as we built this accountability and as we built these core values and as we're running these meetings, and it started to bubble up, all the issues and all the problems, it weeded so many people out of the system. And that was really what we talked about last time. Acutely painful, but boy, oh, boy, did it take those chronic problems and just throw them out the door and allow us to really start to build that traction all the way to the point where. And this was my transition was I got stuck. I hit a ceiling myself, and I was in over my head. I had grown the company to a certain level that in order to be able to get it to the next level, I knew I was not the right person for the position operationally who could do that. And I embraced my visionary, quick start way of being in the way of working. And I was not going to be the person who's going to be able to run the operation, put the automation and have the processes in place in order to be able to get us to that next level. And so I had to make a hard decision to remove myself from an integrator role where I was the operator, bring someone else in so that I can kind of move over. And that was a very difficult transition for me that I made. And I always say, are you in the right seat? And if you're not, you better recognize it fast and make a change before someone else makes the change. And I didn't want to have to wait until I became a bigger problem and had all my employees calling me out because they would have, because we had that kind of trust and I kind of pulled the trigger beforehand. I think people have to be honest with themselves. You know, sometimes your company grows, you're in a marketing role now. They need you to do XYZ and you just don't have the capacity. And with today, I think AI and I think all these things we're seeing right now hit the market with technology really helps you because if you can learn how to, you know, embrace those new tools, you can take those tools to enhance what you're already doing and make yourself that much more valuable where before it got outsourced, you know. So, you know, I'm seeing the shift of the news, talking about whether or not AI is going to replace people's jobs, are they going to make their jobs easier and better? And I think it's a combination of everything. And we don't know. But I know right now if I'm in a position where I'm starting to feel like getting crunched, my capacity is like, I'm feeling trapped and I'm like getting stuck responsible for things that I'm not that good at. I'm going to be looking for every single tool I can and trying to make my job more successful by, by, you know, utilizing these amazing tools that are now been released that you can use to make your job better and produce better results. And I think that's as a CEO too, you're saying, oh yeah, big time. Because you think about what a CEO has to do. Look at it from just writing recommendations for people, writing emails to clients, handling big relationship problems, that are rising in your business. Dealing with a contract with. With. With a vendor. These are all things now that you can do in seconds that I used to either have to spend thousands of dollars on or procrastinate because I didn't want to do them. And it would take forever to get it done. I mean, I did an agreement the other day, and I literally. I was able to just go online, get it, and I still use my attorney, but I probably saved who knows how many thousands of dollars because I was able to get something up with, you know, a template and then enhance that myself and then get some help and then give it over to a third party. And that just probably cut the time three weeks down and saved me thousands of dollars.

Yeah, it seems, though, too, that, I mean, you said you were getting caught in a position and realized you were doing all sorts of things that you didn't want to be doing and realized that to take the company to the next level, you weren't the right person to be in that role. And I'm wondering, you know, was there a part of you that. That it's very obvious from listening to you speak in this. In this talk that you loved being in the weeds with your team, running these contests, getting to know people on a very personal level, and, you know, little things that you were doing, like switching the organizational chart upside down, saying, like, you were responsible for everyone else. Was there a part of you that looked at that next stage of growth for the company and recognized that, you know, maybe it would be difficult to scale that level of culture that you'd built and part of you that, like, wanted to kind of get out ahead had. Before that. I guess one of my questions was just about scaling company culture and how that changes.

Yeah. So they say in the. In the Armed Forces, 125 is the number. That's what I think. I think that's the number of the battalions. They. But everything changes around that. 125 people. And I started to definitely feel that. And I think that's why I think you have to pour more into investing in professional development for your team, continuing education, building trust, leadership, coaches. I mean, I know companies are spending a huge amount of money on coaches and on. Because it works when you have the right people, it works. It's not for everybody, but again, you don't need everybody. And I'd say. Was there a feeling of that? A little bit? Yeah, there was. I like the small feeling. I like a small private company. I don't like what happens when you have to have certain things in place because you got bigger. I just don't. And so I think some people thrive off that. They like that. And so I think it's a personal preference. For me, I definitely like the smaller feeling of being more connected to a smaller group of people and having a more closer relationship. By the time I sold my company and there were some people that started and I didn't really know who they were. Yeah, it was really uncomfortable walking into my office and not knowing. You know, for 25 years, I'm walking around, I know every person. I know everything about them. And now I don't know them. They know me because they're watching these videos and looking at our playbook, and they're seeing me train them still on how to run meetings. But I didn't know who they were. And I was big on connecting with people, telling them the story. I wanted them to. I wanted our tradition. I wanted that legacy to kind of just keep kind of going. And I had a way of doing that. And that was by connecting people to our past, Celebrating wins, sharing stories about how we got here, connecting people to how that happened. Because when you build a company and you're 25 years in and a new person comes in today, they have no clue and no context. Not only about something like eos and our build to lead program, but they don't know how I started out of my apartment. They don't know the story about when I used to go knock on doors and when I. And everything that we had. I lost a big client in 2013. It was the first time I ever to lay people off. And my company rallied together. We had lost a lot of business. Two years later, we came back stronger. Right. So, like, that was something we went through together. Well, a new person comes in. They didn't experience that with us. I bought a partner out in 2013, and I had to rebrand my entire company. New name, new everything. And when I did that, I wasn't by myself. I had a team that did that with me. They went through that with me. So I had people when I sold that were with me over 20 years. And I have to tell you, it becomes so real. And it's a special thing. You know, it's a really cool thing when you can build a culture and you have that trust and you have people performing and you break through ceilings, you go through hard times and, you know, like that individual I told you who wasn't in the box, and she ended up being in the box. I mean, she was one of the most valuable people in our company. And I think, you know, I just have a lot of gratitude and a lot of feeling of just like, I was inspired by them. And these were entry level folks that came in like I did, where they just didn't have the experience and, and they built themselves up and they just earned it. I love that. I think that's so cool. I think if you look at most companies today and you have a manager or supervisor, they come in, they've never done the job before. You know, it's hard to respect that. It's like a, you know, it's like a football coach who's overweight telling everybody to run, or a leadership coach who has never built a company, but he's telling people how to run his companies. I don't know. I think there's a credibility factor and we had that on our team. So, yeah, it was always a challenge. Every single day was a challenge, constantly growing. Those core values changed once in a while, but most of the time those staples were there. They never, you know, the four or five of them, they were just like, they just stuck right away. And we had fun with them. And again, I think, you know, the culture gets built around a culture of accountability, a culture around caring and challenging, holding people accountable, and a level of performance and really making sure that you keep raising that bar. And that was a hard lesson for me. It was. I was always focused on trying to get the people who are at the bottom of our numbers, get them up. And I was ignoring these high performers. And little did I know, and I had to learn the hard way that these people are draining me. But if I could focus on the high performers and tee them up even more, they're contagious. They can just take everybody with them. Whereas these people, they didn't deserve to be in the culture. So you have, you have to have your benchmarks. And we did that with our core values. We had a core analyzer and we had a scorecard, and we had our five or six core values. And we would take you every 90 days and we'd say, and you would do it too, for yourself. How do you rank with responsibility, with being distinct and deeply connected? If you're in your office all day with your door closed, you're not very connected. And you were told that. And we want to see improvement. And again, that either makes you want to run for the hills or get engaged. And so that's how we were able to weed people out. And what was interesting that happened over time is like, some of My employees were running people out. I mean, they were, like, fighting, like, get this person out. They don't deserve to be here. And that was such a change for me because I was always the one telling, you know, we have to get this person out. Meanwhile, their team's gonna be with an empty seat. But they rather have the empty seat than have the wrong person. And I think once I had my team rallying around that, that's really when things started to take off. And you were breaking records and having fun and having a real run, I think. And then all of a sudden, you know what happens when Covid hits. You know what happens when a 911 hits or when the stock market crashes and everyone freaks out is that you can weather those storms and as a team, come together. And Covid was the best example more recently in the last few years, where all of a sudden it's like, like, oh, my gosh, our entire business just shifted. We were a call center go home. Like, unheard of. Nobody worked from home. And we were able to kind of just get through that together as a team. People were just doing things. They were meeting each other in their car. They were picking things up at the office. And, you know, I think people, when they. When they care about people, and they deeply care about people, you get things done. And, you know, it's a selfless kind of a way of being that really works well when you. When you build a great culture. And. And I miss it. I do miss it. There's no question. I miss it.

Okay, two more topical questions for you, let's say. So things have changed in the world a lot since you started running your company. And it's not uncommon today for companies to come out on social media and to take very public political stances on social issues. I'm curious, have you heard the story of Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase? Founder and CEO there? So he had an interesting story where I was listening to a podcast with him recently, and he was talking about. I think this was in 2021, maybe around that time, where he noticed that a lot of his employees were coming out and wanting him and the company to take a very public political stance. And the way that he describes it, I think he's not very like a. You know, he doesn't pay attention to politics much. He was working on his mission and building Coinbase, and so people were getting really mad, and he noticed that this was, like, happening in his slack channels at work, that people were arguing about politics, and he made the decision to come out and Say, we're not discussing politics at Coinbase. We are on a mission to change global finance and to, you know, help crypto come to the world. And if that's not okay with you, here's a severance package, and you can leave. And he took a lot of. He took a lot of heat for that. It was a very controversial issue at the time. I remember.

Yeah.

So I guess I'm curious, number one, if you ever experienced kind of similar pressure from your employees to talk about political issues. And. And I guess, number two, just what you think of his response there and how he handled that situation.

So, first off, I think that's great that he did that, and it takes strength and courage to do that. In my environment, when we were bringing people together and they were working on themselves, spirituality came out with a lot of people in my office. And that made some people really uncomfortable, because you shouldn't talk about religion. But our take was. And my take, too, was that, like, I'm not pushing my stuff on you. Don't push your stuff on me. But I'm curious and interested to hear your story, and when you have trust, you can allow that stuff to happen. So I had a weird culture. We were doing things that you should not do, that you don't see people doing at work. And again, they either weeded people out or brought people in. And so I think that as long as I don't care if people are talking about something like that, as long as they're not pushing their views on other people, as long as they're not starting conflict. Because. Because of your belief. Again, we were distinct, and you're distinctly you, period. And I'm deeply connected because I care about being curious about why you believe what you believe, but I wasn't trying to push my belief on you. And I think that was a very powerful way of being able to communicate any of those kind of issues with my company. And, sure, it came up when the elections came around. Obamacare was a big thing for our business. So everyone with Trump. So there was just a lot of that kind of talk. And, yeah, we talked about it, but, like, I think people just. In my culture, it just was. It was okay. Like, you could talk about it. There weren't any problems, at least none that I knew about. And I just was very clear that don't, don't push it on other people, and there's a time and place for it. Right. So I think I didn't really have that much of an issue, but I applaud him for doing that.

Okay, last question. And another topical one. Elon Musk recently took over Twitter. He's in the headlines all the time now, for better or worse. And one of the things that he did that I thought was interesting thinking about building team culture and just everything that we've been talking about was he came in and fired most of the staff, first of all, and just changed things so radically in a way that really shook a lot of people up, not just at Twitter, but also, you know, managers at big tech companies who are. Who are paying attention to this stuff. I'm reading from his email right now that he sent out to just all staff, I think, maybe a couple of weeks after he took over. But part of his email, he says the road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed. We are also changing Twitter policy such that remote work is no longer allowed unless you have a specific exception. Managers will send the exceptions list to. To me for review and approval. And without going into the whole email, you know, the tone was very stern. He was essentially like, look, we got to get to work and solve all these problems. I guess. I don't know how much you've been following what he's been doing at Twitter and that whole takeover, but just your. Your opinion on that.

Well, here's my opinion. My opinion is we know nothing. We know only what we see. And people think that he just comes in and just does that. No, there are meetings going on, their decisions and everything done with purpose. And I do know that there's two sides to every story, and we don't know the other story. We're not hearing the problems when he came in and fired everyone. For all you know, if you would have known what was going on with all his employees, maybe you would have done it, too. So it's easy to sit back and judge and say what he did was wrong or I don't agree with it. But you have. We have no clue. Zero context. And so I just know that you don't earn what he's been able to earn and get to a place where he's been able to get. Unless you're really smart, unless you have a lot of great people around you because you're not doing it by yourself, and that you have to be able to make tough decisions that are not going to make everybody happy. And so get everybody back in the office. If I was running my company today, everyone comes back, hands down. It is a mandatory thing. I don't care if you quit, because I can't. I know I can't. Build the culture that I want to build that I want to be part of that. I want to come into every day with everyone working at home. I would keep a little flexibility. Like, you earn it with performance. You can work one day a week. But I would have brought everyone back, and that would have upset a lot of people. I have good reasons for that. I could lay them out for you, but I don't need to. But if someone put my memo out in the public, oh, look at him. He's coming in now, making everyone come back like they have no clue why. And I have good reasons why. So I think, you know, my answer is we have no clue what's going on over Twitter. And you've heard a lot of tough things about their company. Change is necessary. He recognizes that. He knows what he's doing. He's smart and he's making changes and he's the one doing it. And I like that. I like that. Because he can easily say to any one of his people, you do that, you put out that memo and he's taken. He's taken the heat for that. And that's what leaders do. They own it. Even when it's not good news, some hard news. He delivered that. How he does it, that's his style. And again, you can judge it all you want, but you don't know the guy. And we just see what we see on the Internet. But I think the fact that he's doing it, the fact that he's making that decision, and I'm sure he has good reasons, I think that's probably the best thing for his company. That's what he sees, and he's doing what's best. And he knows more than any of us. So I say that I don't judge it.

Anything we missed, you think about that. You want to say about building culture before we wrap up here?

No, I think at the heart of it, you have to care. You actually have to care, and you have to care with a big heart. And you want to have to see the best for the people that are around you. And you have to try to close that gap for how much a CEO makes and how much maybe your entry level folks make. And you have to want the best for the people around you, and you have to be okay with them using your platform as a stepping stone to get to where they're going. Because if you get an opportunity that you can't pass up, you're probably going to go. You're probably going to go start something. You're probably going to probably going to go, you know, shift. And you can't blame people for wanting to do that. And if you create fear in your culture, then you're going to basically create a fear based culture, and people are going to quit without giving you notice, and they're going to sabotage and stab you in the back without you knowing. And that's what you get if you're. If you're not leading with purpose and you're not, you know, letting other people do the same and have the same freedom that you have.

All right. All right, Chad, thanks for the talk. Thanks for watching, everyone.

Thank you so much.

Those are all the tools you need to build a big culture. Great culture there.

Really easy. See ya. Okay. See ya. Bye.

Bye.