Purpose Driven Business with Jeff Deckman

And that's what we have to do. We have to constantly be educating these teams to be more collaborative, resilient. And it's not about being woke and it's not about taking care of snowflakes that is playing to the lowest common denominator. That'll take you out in business. Business is a contact sport. You have to find that middle ground between letting people express themselves and get the ideas, but also moving the question forward.

Good day everybody. I am Jeff Dutton and we are on the home front as always, this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brands. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, encouraging entrepreneurs to take action to transform their lives, impact communities and enhance the lives of those they care the most about. All the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the home front where it counts. So if this sounds like you, check us out@homefrontbrands.com today and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the home front. Jeffrey and I will be here looking for you. And today we are honored and excited to have Jeffrey Deckman on the podcast today on the home front with us. Welcome Jeffrey.

Thanks Jeff. I'm happy to be here.

Awesome. Jeff is an international award winning executive and organizational performance consultant, strategist, author and a trainer. He is the recipient of the 2021 Innovator and thought leader of the Year from the International Business AW for his work around Conscious Leadership in action and the M3 process which we're going to get into for leadership and organizational transformation based upon his award winning Amazon best selling book developing the Conscious Leadership mindset for the 21st century. Jeff has 45 years of management experience, 40 of which have been as a serial entrepreneur, having built two multi million dollar companies in the tech sector before becoming a leading consultant on the next evolution of leadership. In addition, he has spent decades studying the lessons of the greatest spiritual teachers from many cultures. He is a student of consciousness, a Reiki master and as a stage four cancer survivor. No, you are a stage four cancer thriver.

Thriver.

That's right, driver. And Jeff is also the creator of the bigger known Principles of Conscious Leadership, an advanced training program for the development of 21st century leaders and is the founder of the biannual Conscious Leadership Conference. Jeffrey, welcome to the home front.

Thanks Jeff. Like I said, I'm happy to be here and I love talking about this stuff. I love who your audience is. Entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial people. You know, I agree with you. They are the, if I can summarize, they're the Heart and soul of the community and the economy. They are underrepresentative and underserved. I really admire the work you're doing, and I work to do the same in my own way.

You know, that's a really good point. Just right. Come shooting hard right out of the gate with a good point. You know, small business people like myself, I didn't have access to strategy. I didn't have access to organizational development. And all of these things that, had I known those 15 years earlier, would have made a big difference in how I led the lives of the employees, employee engagement and all of those types of things. Your work is so aligned with all of the things that I believe that we need and that we practice in building healthy, viable, productive organizations. So now, before we get into all of that, would you care to just share a little bit? Maybe go back and tell us a little bit about your story, kind of where you came from and how you grew up.

I am an unlikely entrepreneur. I was one of those kids that I did not do well in school. I'm not an academic learner. I spent more time staring outside the window and wishing I was there than up at the blackboard, as we used to call it back in the day. I moved around a lot when I was a kid. My father had been in the cable television business since, believe it or not, 1951, one of the first people in the country. So he had a lot of job opportunities. And we moved around quite a bit. Went to a couple of middle schools, three high schools in three different states as a result. That didn't help my academic consistency either. So because I grew up around the cable television industry, I was around tower workers and linemen and field engineers, and they were like cowboys to me. I wanted to be a cowboy. So when I got out of high school, I went right into the cable television industry. I was what was called a grunt. And a grunt is a guy that is basically a slave to the lineman. You just did everything that they told you to. And I became a lineman, like I said, tower worker. And what happened was I was moving my way up through that corporate pretty quickly and started bumping up against corporate culture, which I was too young and too unskilled to deal with that. And I had a big argument with my. With my boss one day, and I told myself, if I think I know how to run a company better than he does, I should call my own bluff. So I reached out to a gentleman who had a small contracting company at the time, and he was struggling. And I said, Would you consider bringing me in as a partner? And because of my reputation in the industry and what it was that I knew, he decided to bring me on and I didn't have any money. He was probably doing maybe $3,000 a week in revenue. He wired apartments, he gave me half the company. And his accountant said, you know George, your company isn't worth anything anyway, so you may as well give the guy half so he's as motivated as you are to make it work. So that's what he did. And we started. And then I got another idea about merging this little company in with another company, the Undergr Construction. We built that company up to about four and a half million dollars of revenue in 1987 money. We had offices in four states. That business became too complicated for us to, to manage. And we knew our trade, but we didn't understand business enough to realize that you, you build a business with four offices in those locations and that's like having four separate companies. So it became more complex in our abilities to manage it and it crashed. So there I was, married, with a two year old daughter, a brand new house and another, another child on the way went bankrupt. So I was sitting on the other side of that saying I have a decision to make. Get a job or start another company. If I would have got a job, I was very hireable, people knew me and I knew that if I took a job I'd never start another company because of the direction my life was going in and the amount of responsibilities I had. So I decided I would start another company even though I just crashed one. And everything was telling me I didn't know what I was doing. I just had a sense that I wasn't done being an entrepreneur yet. And I figured if I started a new company and that didn't fail, I could always go get the other job. So one option allowed me to have both options. So I, I had $17,000 and I ran numbers like crazy. And it all said I'd run out of money in about seven or eight weeks. But I thought, well, I'll do it and we'll see what happens at week seven or eight. Very, very long story short, that company almost went under about, oh, probably four or five times. I ended up selling it a week before its 21st birthday to my management team to go off and do what it is that, that I now do. But I've been on the front lines. I've been, I've been used and abused and casted aside. I've had an awesome time doing it, but it was a real challenge and I've managed to stay self employed for the last 40 some odd years. You know, my dad told me when I started my first company, he said, well, Jeff, if you're going to work for a jerk, it may as well be yourself. So I've been working for a jerk for 41 years.

Oh man, I'm going to borrow that. That's, that's good.

Yeah.

So, so when you got into these businesses, what, what was your role in the business? Were you on the sales side? Operations. What was your, what where did you default to?

Operations. Okay, I've never been a sales guy and I've paid the price for that. But I am a practitioner, I'm an operational guy. Leadership, organizational design. You know, my best work is when I can come in, roll my sleeves up and, and help my client build a company that they want to build.

Yeah, you said you were an unlikely entrepreneur, but most of the people on the Homefront podcast are entrepreneurs and they all sound just like that, you know, average or below average student. Always figured that, you know, you might as well, you know, had an early entrepreneurial experience, had at least one or two failures and then, I mean, you have to go through it. Right? You know, I've come to understand that pain is one of the greatest gifts that we have because that's when the lessons are so deep that we learned. So going bankrupt, the company, going bankrupt, having a two year old at home, I mean it's like that's Ray Dalio. I mean if you, if you look at Ray Dalio's principles, I mean he took a bet on the entire industry and tanked it and had to, you know, borrow $4,000 from his father in law to pay his mortgage or rent or whatever. Now they're $16 billion hedge fund. So.

Yeah.

Well that's fantastic. What a great story. And then the business that you had for 21 years, you didn't employee one of these employee stock option plans?

Actually, I didn't. What I did was at about the nine year mark into that company, I ended up hiring three people within about 18 months. And one one was a young man who was really, really good in sales. Technology sales. What we did was we built large scale computer networks. So we went in and put all the cabling infrastructure and all the networking hardware in. So I hired a really good sales guy, I hired a woman who became my controller. She was really good with finance and I hired an operations guy, the operations guy. And they, the, my controller became so good and so Valuable that I ended up giving the operations guy 25% of the company. And I gave my, my controller 7% of the company. And what happened was when they came in, I was doing a million a year. And Steve, the operations guy said, jeff, when you add me, we will triple in size in three years. And I laughed at him because it was inconceivable. You know, I'd worked nine years just to try to break a million dollars. And he's coming in saying, I'm going to triple that in three. Well, we did because he knew what talent I had and he knew what I was lacking. And he, and he fit right into that. So we went from 1 million to 3 million and then we went from 3 to 5 in the next two. So as I looked at that, I said, you know, when, when, before these people came In, I had 100% of a million dollar company that wasn't really making money. I wanted to reward them and I wanted to lock them in. So I gifted them the percentage of the company. So they were already equity partners when I decided to leave. And it made the transition a bit easier.

Find the people that you can trust and take them with you.

Absolutely.

So now you're based on the math, 25, 30 years into your career, maybe a little, maybe a little longer than that. And now you say, well, I've learned a lot about growing teams. And you've been, I guess, studying or formulating your ideas along the way. How did you transition to what you're doing now?

Well, what happened was I realized after 30 years in the telecommunications industry, starting in cable television and then in the data networking, that I was bored to tears. I had built a management team that really could run the place on its own. But, you know, I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I just couldn't go fishing. I started really getting itchy and I started, we started having partner problems. I mean, these people were my best friends. And when I started getting bored, I wanted to go back in and do operations. And Steve said, no, stay out of operations. You know, want to do a little bit of stuff around finance. And Joyce was like, stay out of that. And I started getting resentful, I started getting bored and I just, I was in a meeting one time with them, I kind of heard myself say, you know, I, I gotta get out of here. And they thought I meant like out of the meeting and what have you. But no, I, I meant I had to leave. So I realized that I had to make a move. Most of the moves in my life weren't based on what I knew I wanted to do. They were based on what I knew I couldn't do anymore. And that's a challenging place because it really causes you to make some real, deeply rooted personal decisions of are you going to sacrifice your happiness? Are you going to sacrifice your safety in pursuit of your happiness? And are you going to bet on your past or are you going to bet on you and your future? I'm not saying I'm really talented in that I could be considered foolish in doing that. But, you know, the next couple weeks, I really pretty confused because I didn't know what I could do. I had one industry, and I couldn't be the president of another telecommunications company. I didn't have what I thought was a background that would allow me to go in and be a president of another company. I remembered something that a spiritual teacher told me of mine once, and he said, don't live your life based on questions of fear or lack. Live your life based on questions of love and abundance. What I realized I was doing was I was thinking, geez, I can't do this, I can't do that. That doesn't work. Instead of saying, what would I love to do? And the minute I thought, what would I love to do? Then like, the clouds parted, because that was easy. You know, I went from here, you know, thinking with my head to to here, thinking from my heart. And when I asked my heart, what would I love to do? The answer came, I would love to help other people like me build their businesses with less stress, fewer failures, and less aggravation than what I went through. I would love to serve this community that I'm a part of. That's what set me on my journey. Nobody knew me as a business consultant. I didn't know how to sell thinking. I actually, for the first two years, I made my living as a political strategist. I had built political organizations in the state of Rhode Island. So I was fortunate to do that for two years. And then I got enough business going on and just went over into that and struggled for quite a few years. 2007, I was invited to be a partner in a think tank. And that was really my journey, where what we were doing was looking at what changes were happening societally and within business that were a result of the new millennium, 2005, and the advent of the impact of technology and the challenge that the new mentality of the modern workforce was having on traditional leadership models. So, you know, the work that I do is I help companies go from traditional command and control to learn how to, how to lead the modern workforce in the modern era with less force and more as a communicator, a collaborator and a facilitator of human capital.

So we're going to dig into that. I just want to touch on a couple of things you said. Number one, once you decided to use love and abundance, that the path became more clear. I had a coach who was the president of Husqvarna North America and he built that company to $530 million over 18 years. And then he became a kind of a Vistage coach. And I was with him for nine years and one of the, one of the greatest men that I've ever had the pleasure to spend time with. And he poured into me and so much fundamentally of what I believe now is really thoughts and conversations that we had. And when I saw, I sold my business that I had for 24 years and 11 months in, I guess they didn't want to give me the 25 year watch, but I sold it in 2019. And he said, he said, jeff, now that you have choice, whatever you decide to do, make sure that it aligns deeper with your purpose. Everything that you do, does it align? Is it in alignment? And so even this podcast, you know, I, I, when I've done my on purpose work, I exist to serve by encouraging entrepreneurs. That's what I do. So when I'm, if we're encouraging entrepreneurs here today with what we do, then it's on purpose for me. I'm excited you're passionate about what you do. We've got people out there that this can help. That's it, that's, that's all there is, you know, so if this is the time I'm spending, I'm excited about it. So the obvious question that somebody asks you that gives you clarity always comes from the outside. And it's a question usually, you know, that gives you clarity into, into your thinking. And when you Talk to people 20 years down the road and I say, well, I give credit back to Dave, it's not a lot of stuff, it's the few things that he said that resonated with me, like align with your purpose, that just makes such a big impact. So if you don't have mentors or if you're heads down in your business and you're up to your arms and in it every day, man, you have to find a way to get outside of that and get around some other people that are, maybe they're just a little bit ahead of you in their entrepreneurial journey or their business journey, because they can speak into you and really inform your journey with their journey. So now you're in this think tank and you mentioned a couple of trends. Are there any other trends that you have observed here in the last three to five years that have, that are just really critical in terms of how the workforce engages at work, how we need to engage people overall? Obviously Covid accelerated lots of trends. You know, oh, everybody's going to work from home. Oh, now we can work from home forever. Oh, everybody come back into the office now. So it's, is it more productive, less productive? Is it good for people? What else has the think tank really observed or identified that maybe people wouldn't think about?

Well, one of the biggest things that I got out of that, and I spend a lot of time talking about this is the model of our organization basically tells a lie. The model is the org chart. And the lie that it tells is that organizations are orderly. They're like assembly lines, they're mechanized. It gives an industrial age mechanized representation of the organization. And if you view your organization in that way, you know, the lens that we see things is the, it determines the way in which we engage them. Mechanized lens basically says organizations are like Henry Ford assembly lines. You know, they should operate that way. They should be very hierarchical. And that if the organization is a machine, the people are tools. And if you see people as tools, you treat them very differently than if you see the human in the human. My view of an organization is that an organization is an organism. It's a living, breathing, thinking, creating organism made up of a whole bunch of living, breathing, thinking, creating people. And when you start looking at the organization that way, you go, well, wait a minute, what's the model that I have? What's the organizational model? If it's not the org chart, what is it? And what it is, is the tribe. Organizations are a tribe of tribes. Finance is a tribe. Engineering is a tribe. Construction is a tribe. Marketing, sales, they're all different tribes and operating within a bigger tribe with that tribal dynamic. When you start looking at your organization through the lens of the tribe, you start seeing things that were invisible to you before, and you start understanding things that you never saw before. And those things are the power of tribal dynamics, the existence and the influence of tribal leaders who may or may not show up on the org chart. The power of, of peer pressure, positive or negative. Tribalism is in our DNA. And tribes are the not only the oldest model that we've ever had for human collaboration, also by Far the most effective. It's because of our ability to tribe and to marshal collective resources and tap into the collective genius of the individuals, their talents, their aptitudes, their experiences, et cetera, that have really allowed us to go from nomadic to the agricultural age, to the industrial age, to the now knowledge and information age. It's all done by the effective collaboration and sharing of information and labor by people. When the industrial age came in, mechanization and repetition and efficiency became altars that everybody prayed to. And it was, you can't argue how effective it was. And there was a certain level of human consciousness that, that, that fit. Workers were okay just putting their head down and you know, the, the boss was way up there. The current generations we have now, we've got the five most independent minded generations literally in the history of humanity in the workforce. None of them want to be told what to do without having input. All of them want to have say, you know, older guys like me, I'm a boomer. So I want that because I've, I've earned that. I deserve that. I have a lot to say and hopefully some of it's valuable. Next generation down the same way. But also the newest generations are coming in with an expectation that they're listened to because they kind of determined how they were going to be raised. The kids today tell their parents a lot about how they're going to be raised. So you've got incredibly empowered, independent minded thinkers. And the leadership models we have are not effective in that space. So as leaders, we have to get ahead of that curve, understand that consciousness and develop new ways of engaging those people so they become intrinsically motivated to follow our direction instead of just our directions.

Isn't that fascinating? I'm just absolutely fascinated because this is so much aligned with what I, what I talk about when I go do keynotes or workshops for companies. Our natural state is tribal. That's how we move around in society. It's always been that way and we always look for those groups. One thing I observed is that there's different tribal norms needed within an organization depending on what the area does. So for example, we're a sales organization and we happen to be in a particularly competitive sales environment. You know, it's a mutual evaluation process because we want to get the best fit, but we're also competing for the best people and we really want the best people to join our team now. So maybe that's our hunting tribe mentality. You know, they're out to hunt and compete and to kill. And it's A, it's a different mindset and then we kind of have our farming tribe which is franchisee success. So now this department over here is about empathy and incremental growth and adult education. So there's tribal norms there. So what I've said is we have to separate those tribes because if those two tribes meet at the river and they're looking across the river at each other, the sales team is going to kill the other ones, you know, but yet we, we have one culture here. So trying to find that middle ground through a set of values and make everybody appreciate and understand the differences but yet let people optimize in the areas that they're in is, is interesting. And, and this command and control or chart top down do this. I think it is so restrictive to create, particularly to creatives. So now we're in this time. I don't know if you've ever read how Google works. It's a, it's a, it's an incredible book about how Google, you know, how they hired and how they did what they did. And what stuck out to me the most in it was the fact that they hired creatives because they wanted people at every position that was going to think differently and think creatively and think abundantly and be very curious about things. And now what's happened with AI doing so much of the blocking and tackling that can be done. The creatives become more important because it's about the question and not about the answer.

Yeah. You know, we are in an age where we're in a knowledge age. So we have to create organizations that reward creativity, that foster creativity, innovation, free flowing of discussion. You know, when I was in the think tank, one of the things that I realized was in a knowledge company, like we're in a knowledge economy so we better build knowledge based companies that disagreements are opportunities for education. When there's a disagreement, there's a lot of things that are going to be learned in that. And instead of seeing it as a confrontation which activates, you know, the fight or flight syndrome within our mind and you know, gets egos going and all that type of stuff. Instead of seeing conflicts or disagreements as conflicts, I see them as conversations. Let's keep that conversation going because you feel passionately about what you do for, for good solid reasons. And I assume that and I respect that, but so does the other person. So can we hold the ground where that conversation can take place so we can sort out what is the best idea for the moment? Chances are everybody's going to learn something. Even if it's only how to turn a conflict into a productive conversation. And that's what we have to do. We have to constantly be educating these teams to be more, more collaborative, resilient. And it's not about being woke and it's not about, you know, taking care of snowflakes. That is playing to the lowest common denominator. That'll take you out in business. Business is a contact sport. So you have to find that, that middle ground between letting people express themselves and get the ideas, but also moving the question forward.

I agree with you. Businesses, absolutely. Full contact. And we've got one young manager here who likes to remind us that Jim Collins said that an organization's capacity and velocity is directly related to the number of brutal conversations that you're willing to have. And it's. That is a, like, my biggest challenge in life is that I was so conflict averse and I was just trying to make everybody get along and trying to, you know, smooth everything out and just keep things going. And to a point, it, it served you in building an organization where people felt safe and they didn't feel like they would ever be just fired randomly for things. They knew that. They knew that if they tried to make a play and it didn't work out that it wouldn't be punitive because they tried to make a play and they had good intent inside of it. I was punitive around people with bad intent, you know, dishonest, things like that. But, you know, you're in a meeting, you've got a bunch of people that you respect. Somebody throws a bad idea out there and everybody's like, okay, well, I guess, I guess we can do that. Somebody. I don't use profanity on the podcast, but one of the greatest thing ever said to me was by a gentleman. I was about halfway through my building, my company and he looked at me and he said, that's the stupidest effing thing I've ever heard. After I said something. And I look back at that as the greatest thing ever said to me because he was the first person that ever said that to me. And he was right. And because of that conversation that we had immediately following telling me that it was the stupidest, I just said the stupidest thing you'd ever heard. We decided that we needed to build a call center, which was one of our secret sauces. Yeah, I mean, brutal, brutal facts. Confronting brutal facts, having candid conversations, definitely part of a healthy organization. You know, how you discern whether people are chasing their own motives or chasing the Motives that are in the best interest of the company. That. That's always a trick.

You know, we did two things at the think tank that forever changed how I approach many things. One was that one of us would have an idea. There were four of us. We would formulate the idea, bring it together, you know what? And we always love our ideas. If we didn't love our ideas, we wouldn't promote them. Right. What our practice was was when you had an idea you were ready to put out there, you'd float it out, and it was the job of the other three to try to shoot it out of the air. And that's what the thing was. You'd float your hot air balloon up there, and every. And everybody else is trying to take legitimate shots at it just to see is it a valid idea. Right. Because we'd rather blow it out of the sky and in that safety of that room than out in the marketplace. It really trained me how to love my idea but not personalize it. The other thing that we did was we would do an exercise. I'll give you an example. We're looking to change our logo. There were four logos that came in, and, you know, that can be a maddening discussion. Pick the logo you like, pick the logo you don't like, which I did. So my one partner is from Australia, and he said, okay, Jeff, I want you to sell us on the value of the logo you don't like. And I said no, and he said yes. So it actually got so hot that we had to take a break for lunch. Really? Yep. Because I said, look, there's a reason I don't like it. And I'm. And I'm locked down because I wanted this thing. I don't want that thing. Why am I going to promote that thing? I would cost me this thing. Over lunch, I calmed down, and I reminded myself what I was doing. And I looked at this thing, and I actually found two or three things that I legitimately liked about it. And I came back and I did a pitch on why. Why we should pick it. And at the end of it, and he had that Australian accent, he goes, hey, mate, you know what I just did to you? And I said, other than, like, you know, piss me off. And. And he said, that's called a perturbation. And I said, what is a perturbation? He said, a perturbation is an exercise you put someone through that perturbs them, that generates unique thinking. And we ended up picking a logo that was a variation of the four. But what it showed me is you can always find something and something that's worthy of value. So sometimes you use it, sometimes you don't. But to have the discipline and the maturity to be able to look at something you don't like, to see what is in there that you might like, was a real good discipline. You know, as entrepreneurs we have to be thorough. We can't fall in love with our ideas, we have to allow people to take shots at them and we have to be open to seeing something positive and something that we don't like just to make sure there isn't something in there that could really benefit us.

So let's shift gears. Jeff, to your work today. Who do you help with this and how do you do it?

I help entrepreneurs, you know, business owners. Now they could be somebody who's thinking about should I go into a business? I help them on that level from a coaching standpoint. I also go into small to medium sized companies, you know, typically companies of maybe 25 up to. I've worked with companies with 500 people in them. And what I do is I focus in two areas to be able to help an organization move to what they know. Their, their next level is I have to find out what is holding them back. And I look in two areas. I look in leadership. I help them to understand the new leadership methodologies and make them real for them. And I also look at organizational design. So much leadership looks at developing the leader but ignores the design of the organization that the leader has to operate into. So you know, the, the analogy I use, it's like training a top gun fighter pilot and then putting them in a World War I biplane. They're going to get shot out of the air. So you have to advance your organization so that it can handle the new creativity, have the new communication networks that you have to have and has a hierarchy that supports communication, collaboration, facilitation.

So you go in, you make these recommendations and then do you do an engagement with them to help them manage the transition and coach them along the way or how long are you in with the CL It I tell most.

Clients if you're going to hire me for a day, hire me for three months because that's about what it takes for me to come in and you know, move the needle for you. But a lot of my clients I've had for two, three, four years because once I help them get the, to the next space and I teach what I do because my job is to make you self sustainable. And that way, you know, as you start Building your company, your challenges are more complex. So you need me for the next level. I come in. My best clients are the ones that want me to work beside them. I never forget whose company it isn't. I'm here to serve you, help you build your dream. As long as we can collaborate, work together, we're going to do some really, really powerful things.

And then when did you write your book which was developing the conscious leadership mindset for the 21st century? When did that come out?

2018. And it came out in January, February of 2019.

Is it tactical and practical in nature? Who would be somebody that would benefit from reading the book?

This book is basically a tool that a leader can use to become more self aware and elevate their leadership consciousness. You know, there's, there's basically two parts of everybody. There's our ego and then there's our, there's that inner elder ego is a lot of what's, you know, day to day, out in the trenches, doing the thing or thinking our reactions, etc. But inside of us we all have a very wise entity. So what this book does is this book helps you to look inward, to understand and to become more familiar with that wise entity so that your level of consciousness is elevated, which helps you to become a much better leader. It's designed to be a workbook. Each page is a chapter and the chapter makes a very specific point and it goes through an arc. It focuses on who you are as a leader and, and how you think and what's important to you. And then it starts giving another view of the organization beyond the org chart. And then it goes into some very specific methods you can use on a day to day basis. So it's designed, it's not a novel. You can sit down and read the whole thing within about an hour and a half, two hours, get a dose of it, but then go back, take a kind of a step at a time and work through the various exercises that are in there.

Sounds like anybody who's interested in becoming a better leader, building bigger, more effective companies, raising their leadership lid should get this book and work through it. There's tons of stuff that we've already talked about today that has landed on me. It's particularly the stuff around tribalism and the thinking around that. Because when you started talking about that, I'm like, all right, are we, are we heading towards matrix organization? Are we heading towards, you know, teams or nodes or some of these other, you know, organizational structures that you see coming out from time to time? And I'VE never really been able to articulate clearly, you know, how our, how our organization really works in reality. Like it works in teams and collaboration between tribes of people that are, that are necessary to one another to accomplish a goal.

And I studied a lot of those and some of them are just too mechanical, you know, or they're, they're, they're put out by software engineers. You know, you can have various different departments if you show up as a valued trading partner from one tribe to another. You know, the Silk Road was, was between the Middle east and China and they didn't speak the same language, they were completely different cultures. But they built a very powerful economic engine there because one side had something that the other needed. So they were intrinsically motivated to work together. So when your sales department meets with your farming department, the leaders of those two tribes have to have a level of consciousness where they know that we understand the value between, of each other and we're going to operate that way. And that's, that's what I insist out of any leader that I suggest be promoted, that they have that mindset where they are collaboration because nobody's bigger than their company. So each tribe has to work, yes, in support of themselves and, and be advocates for themselves, but not at the expense of the overall tribe.

Couldn't agree more. And Jeffrey, this has been really incredible. This content is something that every organization needs to review and consider, especially if you're a fast growing organization or if you aspire to be. How can people reach out to you? Get the book, follow your content. What's the best way to get in touch with you?

You can go to my website.

It's jeffreydeckman.com and that's Rey, correct?

R E? Yes, sir. And you can email me@jeffreyffreydeckman.com. you know, you go to my website, I've got a whole thing on resources there. It'll link it to my YouTube channel. The thing about this work is the more people learn about it, the more they realize how much they already know about it. It is so intuitive. I said tribe to you and right away you were like, boom. Oh, I got that. It's like you just realize, oh yeah, I knew this. I just never applied it in the business environment because the mechanized model wouldn't allow for it. Today's world, we have to see the human in the human. We have to tap into the collective genius of the group. We have to mobilize that energy and we have to figure out ways to do it.

Well, we're a big proponent here at Homefront Brands of human centered design and building systems and processes around the needs and the capabilities of people. And so this translates well to everything that we do. Jeff, if you had one sentence to make an impact in someone else's life and you had one opportunity to do that, anything you care to share along.

That regard, live a life that brings you peace and helps other people find theirs.

That's a beautiful sentence. Perfect. Thank you so much. Jeff, it's been incredible having you on today. On behalf of everybody on the home front, thanks for being here.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Yes, sir. And as always, this broadcast has been brought to you by Homefront Brands, simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform and encouraging entrepreneurs to take action and transform their lives. If this sounds like you today, check us out@homefrontbrands.com and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the home front. And Jeff and I will be here looking for you. Thank you.