Episode 018: Ed Smith and George Hodges Fulton From Agile Fleet

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right.

Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Joining me today, this is a very special episode. I've got myself in the room with me. I've got Steve Saltskiver.

Great to be here in the Valley of the Sun.

Right. Welcome back. And today we're talking a little bit about core values. And we have two guests with us today. First, we've got Ed Smith from Agile Fleet, who— Ed, why don't you take a little minute and introduce yourself for our listeners?

Sure thing. I'm Ed Smith, the president of Agile Fleet. We basically are a company that develops a fleet management information system. The company was formed about 20 years ago. And relative to the context of this podcast, we're about 2 years into an effort where we really focused on core values and really excited to share that information with you. And the person that helped us get our core values put in place and helped us really maximize the value from them is George Hodges Fulton. George, I guess we can have you give a little bio there.

Yeah, great. Thanks, thanks team. Uh, so I'm George Hodges Fulton and I am a certified Pinnacle Business Guide as, as well as actually being a certified exit planner, uh, helping my organizations and teams get more of what they want from their business. Uh, and what I do is actually implement business operating systems and ultimately, you know, gaining traction, helping teams identify their vision, and really sort of helping to eliminate the common frustrations within the businesses, increasing accountability, productivity, and frankly bringing the joy back of running your business.

Awesome. Well, I'm really glad you guys are here. This is, you know, we were on LinkedIn quite a bit, and I started seeing these posts come through from Agile about, you know, these core values that they've adopted. And I started reading about it, and it sounded like this is a fairly recent development. One of the things that, that we're really big on with Fleet Success is this pillar of intentional culture, right, about creating the type of culture that we want to work in. And so, George, I love that you're talking about, you know, bringing the joy back to business and bringing the joy back to the business owners. One of the things that we're trying to do with Fleet Success is, and why intentional culture is a part of this, is bringing joy back to fleet managers. And taking some of the lessons that we get to learn as business owners and and learners and lessons like EOS and this, you know, this business operating system that George talked about, and applying that to the world of fleet, where not a lot of people are doing that right now. You know, fleet kind of gets neglected when it comes to training, when it comes to leadership management, and getting some of those skill sets that we kind of take for granted in the business sense. So I am, I am just excited that you guys are here, because this is, kind of this real-world approach of how do we take our business lessons, apply it to the world of fleet. And, and Ed, so I'm going to start off with this. You know, I'm really curious about this journey that you've been on. Last year, it sounds like you guys kind of defined your core values and set up, you know, what, what it meant for you guys. It sounds like you adopted a little bit of the EOS system, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Tell us a little bit about that journey. Like, what made you decide that, you know, we needed to get some core values in place and why did you pick the 5 that you picked?

Yeah, it's a good question and I'll let George fill in the gaps where I missed them. But for those that aren't aware, the company is about 20 years old and I founded the company. When we started, there was, you know, 2 or 3 people and then there was 5 and we were all very like-minded. We all were kind of headed for the same thing and we all liked to drink the same kind of beer at the time, right? And then when there was a dozen employees, it was, you know, hey, that person's not really in the same clique, they're a little bit different than us. They're coming at this from a different angle. And, you know, when we added more and more people, we found that we weren't all exactly alike. We weren't on the same sheet of music. And with regards to core values, so we went and we hired a consultant, kind of a management consultant that came in and kind of analyzed the company and came up with all the common things you might think they would say, hey, you need to communicate more often. You need to all be aligned on the same goals. But really, it was, that was the message they gave us, but they didn't give us any of those tools. And so we, we rode that way in a little for a year or two, and we brought another consultant and said, you know, I think we are aligned, and I think we are, you know, kind of all headed in the same direction, but something doesn't feel right. You know, we complain about each other sometimes, and we sometimes we hire people that just don't fit in with the group. And so even the second consultant we brought in several, many, many years ago didn't have the tools. Again, alignment, you know, talk to each other more, things like that. But we knew we needed to do something different. We needed to all be operating on the same core values. And so that's when we searched around. And it's an interesting story. I might digress just a little bit about how we found George. George implements these types of things. But my son at the time was in between the summer during college and he went to work at a friend of mine's warehouse. And he said, you wouldn't believe this, when they interviewed me, they kept talking about core values. And then on the walls of the warehouse, they talk about, they have core values posted on their big posters. And they fired a guy today 'cause he didn't represent our core values. And they give us rewards for demonstrating their core values. And I'm like, And the guy that runs this warehouse is a friend of mine, one of the bigger knuckleheads I know in life, but he actually completely embraced the core values and the whole concept between behind this business operating system. So I asked him one day, "Hey, where'd you learn about core values?" And he told me about the whole idea of Entrepreneur Operating System. And at the time, George was kind of backing that. And George came to us and talked to us about core values. So it was interesting to see it, you know, if you could implement core values and have such a success in this just big warehouse where you're bringing in college kids and, you know, people that might not be real business savvy, and see how well it worked. It was really quite impressive. So I'm like, "I want to get on that bandwagon." And that's what started us down on formalizing our core values.

It's kind of awesome when you have a moment like that, right? Like it just clicks. And you can feel it almost like, "Oh, wow, this is what I've been missing." Right? And they can just, you recognize it. And then I'm glad you guys were able to see it, take action on it.

Exactly.

So George, you know, I think like this is a good segue to bring you in is tell us a little bit, you know, Ed brings you in. Maybe give us a little primer on EOS, you know, like a, like a short version of it. Because obviously, I know you could probably spend a lot of time trying to implement it and go into all the nuances of it. Give us a little primer on EOS, what it is. I'm not a practitioner of EOS myself, so I'm not familiar. And I know a lot of our listeners probably wanna learn about what this is as well and how it might apply to their fleets.

Sure, yeah, no, thanks for the opportunity. So EOS is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And whether it's EOS or Verne Harnish's Scaling Up, or some of the listeners probably heard of The Great Game of Business, The Four Disciplines of Execution. There's lots of business operating systems out there. And regardless of which one's right for your organization, 'cause they all have little nuances, At the end of the day, a business operating system is really just designed to harmonize all of the human energy within your business, right? You know, as we like to say, we all need to be rowing in the same direction. You know, we need to identify, well, what is the vision, right? Like, as I like to say to my clients, okay, what's the North Star? What's the Southern Cross? You know, where are we going? And then how are we gonna get there, right? So, you know, that how we're gonna get there is bringing that vision down to the ground and really sort of executing on discipline accountability. And I think as Ed said, you know, there's multiple consultants out there, there's multiple people who are able and willing to help, you know, businesses, but they don't have what I call like the stickiness, right? They might have one or two tools, but they have no way to make it sticky in your business. And that's what a really good business operating system does is, you know, between using things like core values and, you know, annual goals and quarterly rocks, it really sort of drives this discipline and accountability, you know, throughout the whole organization. And as, as Ed, I'm sure, can expand, you know, once we identify in this particular case core values, right, which are just the guiding principles for our organization, right? It just defines the behavior of our organization. Once we have that at the leadership team, we need to push that down throughout the whole organization. And you need a coach or an implementer who can really teach you how to do that. And, you know, it's, it's not helpful to the organization just to have it at the leadership team level. Again, we need to push it down throughout the whole organization. So, you know, in that particular case, what I like to say, right, is education without implementation is just entertainment, right? So I really pride myself as a coach to say, hey, once we know this at the leadership team level, if we don't push it down to the next level of the organization, frankly, I haven't done my job.

And I definitely felt that, right? Like, because we've gone through and done that. You know, we've gotten really cohesive at the leadership level. But then we recognize, oh, you know, some of our teams beneath the team haven't quite implemented this yet. And so that's kind of like that next step. You definitely have to start at the top. But if you let it just stop there, then you're missing out on the whole advantage of it. I like, too, you talked about, there's a lot of authors out there. And anybody who's listened to the podcast knows I'm a huge reader. There's a lot of authors out there who bring in little nuggets. And same thing for consultants is they bring in the little nuggets, and they'll do 2 or 3 things, like you mentioned. But I think what you bring to the table and what systems like EOS or like Patrick Lencioni talked about in The Advantage, or Vern Harnish with Scaling Up, is about making it cohesive, bringing all of it together. And then how does it all fit together? And how do you roll that out through the rest of the organization? So I love that you're kind of hitting on that and that You know, it's all these things working together. It's not, you know, one-off and you've got the flute playing this over here. And Ed talked about playing from the same sheet of music is that everybody's marching together and they're all bringing their own flavor to it.

I'm just going to say I've had the opportunity, you know, to work for a couple of places where I've actually had everybody in harmony, you know, and for a CEO or a boss, it gets kind of boring when you're like that, but because everything seems to work and, but that's exactly what you're after. Is get everybody working on that same sheet of music. And I love that Josh is doing this here because we're really, for me, I'm at the kind of the tail end of my career and it's really a good opportunity for me to see this practice in action.

Yeah, so I think—

Yes, go ahead, George.

I'm sorry, I think Steve, what you're hitting on is what I like to say is that the system sets you free, right? That if we actually get everything running efficiently, everybody knows what sheet of music we are on, the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, is that it enables and frees up all of this other energy that, you know, for the last 10 years in a business or whatever period of time, have been heroically running around putting out fires. And now all of a sudden, we actually can sort of, you know, point it in the same direction. So, you know, it's really, you know, an important thing. As you said, Steve, it just kind of calms the business, right? It really sort of allows us then to focus on the more important things, the strategic ideas that, you know, frankly, most of the time we're so busy dealing with the tactical day-to-day, we never get the opportunity to really sort of maximize and leverage in our businesses.

You know, what's really interesting about that is, you know, if you talk to a lot of fleet managers, they're running around with their hair on fire. I mean, that, that is, that is their culture, you know, and they could really— this is an opportunity for them to really embrace these values and these changes and, and try and get their organization to that, that next level.

Steve, kind of a really funny story, just very recent. We hired a fleet manager that retired from a government fleet. He started about 3 weeks ago, and I talked to him last week and say, how's it going? He's like, I'm kind of blown away. I'm like, why? He's like, well, back in my past life, we'd have these meetings every week to talk about issues. And then, and now I get an agenda, I get a meeting invite to come talk about issues at my new company. And I was expecting the same old, same old. He said, night and day. In my old job, we used to have meetings to talk about issues, and the main objective was to figure out whose fault was it that something went wrong. He said, in this business, we talk about issues too. We prioritize our issues, and you had people volunteering to say, I'll tackle that, or what do you think about if we do this? He said it couldn't have been any different. And that's all a function of these core values, initiative, everybody looking to help everybody else succeed, and It was kind of interesting to frame it that way because of the environment he had just walked out of 3 weeks earlier.

[Speaker:JIM_COLLISON] Yeah, I know, we get a lot of people that come in, they're like, just blown away. We'll have a meeting, and we'll make a decision in the meeting. And they're like, "I'm not used to this. Normally, we have a meeting about a meeting, or we'll have a meeting and we'll talk about something and then never make any progress on it." And I think that's the whole benefit of implementing something like this is that you stop wasting time. And like, you get energized because you're actually doing stuff. You know, you're making a difference. So, Ed, I want to hear about your core value journey, at least, you know, like, what are the 5 that you picked? And it doesn't have to be 5, everybody, you know, for everybody listening. Ed just happened to pick 5; we picked 3. But like, what are the 5 you picked, and how did you get there?

OK, so first, the 5 that we picked, we ended up on Strong Partnerships, Initiative, Approachability, Integrity, and Flexibility. And we've got, you know, little subtitles that kind of define those a little bit more. And then we also have what we call anti-values. I don't have those all written down in front of me, but who we're not, right? And the way we came up with those 5, George led it. So, you know, sometimes you say, well, the CEO is going to ram these core values down your throat and tell you what they are. It couldn't have been any different. And having an implementer really took the stress off of me, so I wasn't worried about facilitating the meeting or reining everybody in. That's what the implementer did for us. It was great. And the way we did it was pretty cool. Basically, he said, all right, everybody, we have a leadership team that was comprised of 5 people, and he said, I want you to think of 3 people who you, if you could clone them, uh, would come in here and just really transform this whole environment. You want You want more people just like that person. So make a list of those 3 people and encourage them to be people in the business, but, you know, in our company, but they could be peers or other people that, you know, that you think would make a big difference. So we all identified these 3 people and then he said, okay, write down all the adjectives that describe why you picked them, right? What's the character traits that you had about those people? And so between 5 people picking 3, individuals that they kind of wanted to clone. We probably came up with a list of between 75 and 100 character traits that we said this is exactly why we like these people, right? And so then what George helped us facilitate was okay well trustworthy and honest those are kind of the same thing let's merge those together. Can we all agree that you know "they're good at hockey" is not one that we need to include in our core values. So we basically just went through an exercise of saying You know, once we kind of got it down to probably 20, we said, OK, let's— we just kept narrowing, narrowing that focus and we got it down to probably about 7. I think the goal was 3 to 7, George, if I remember, was kind of your guidance. And we put those on paper, we define them, and then we let them sit for probably 2 months. And we said, let's go pick those up in 2 months and see if that's still what we think is the most important thing for this company. And we did actually tweak a little bit more, but It was a really interesting exercise to just reflect on, you know, why do you like working with Steve? Or why do you like working with Josh, right? It's, you know, not because they're great looking, honestly, obviously. So there must be something else that draws you to these guys, right? And so when you capture all those and you really think through it, it helped us come up with the core values. And then also, When we had that discussion, you know, we didn't want to have someone that in our environment, for example, that we had to second-guess or, you know, we didn't feel comfortable giving them a master key to the building, right? So we wanted, you know, anti-value was, you know, we didn't want to have anybody working here that we didn't trust. So that was kind of interesting as well, that we had both our core values and we kind of captured those anti-values. But the core values have come a long way. George, anything to add? I think the process was just awesome for us. I don't know how well our journey went relative to what you normally see, but it worked very well for us.

No, I think you described it very well. As you mentioned, as we're sort of teaching this and coaching this, we say 3 to 7, right? Less is more. It's all really about sort of intentionality. And that's what I, Josh, I love this sort of intentional culture that the whole podcast is about is it's about being intentional, right? We need to be strategic And part of being a great strategic leader is actually saying no more often than you say yes. So when we go through these exercises, as Ed described it, you do really go through this sort of keep, kill, combine type exercise. Hey, those are similar. Those kind of sound alike. Let's combine that together. Hey, that's not really a core value or a behavior, a trait, attribute, that sort of thing. Let's kind of kill that one. Hey, we definitely need to keep that one. And then, as Ed said, you really do need to, you know, kind of ruminate on it. You do really need to let it sit and marinate for a little while because it is a journey. It's a process that, you know, they shouldn't be developed, you know, sort of overnight or discovered really, because what we really walked them through was a discovery exercise. It's not like we just sort of sat down and created aspirational core values. You know, we actually sort of discovered, hey, what is the right type of person And in essence, we really built sort of 5 avatars, if you will, you know, 5 ideal people. And those, you know, show up in the core values, if you'll just allow me to describe it that way. So—

Well, and I love that you talked about the difference here between, you know, we talk about the difference between accidental and intentional, but you just brought in aspirational. And I think there's a huge difference between those two. Why is it that you don't want core values to be aspirational? Versus something you already are?

Right. Yeah, it's a great question. And there are, Patrick Lencioni uses that Venn diagram of those 3 types. And specifically for aspirational, it's not what you want to become, it's really who you already are. And it's really discovering what is the culture, the behavior, what is the personality, the identity of, really is about the entrepreneur, the owner, the leadership team within this organization. It's not everybody. We're not looking for lowest common denominator. Coordinator. You know, we're not getting the whole organization involved in developing these core values. You know, it's who we are at the core. And then once we have those, we need to, you know, roll them out and communicate them to the rest of the team. And you may actually find that you have some current team members that don't quite fit those core values. And, you know, you really do need to have some open, honest conversations, you know, with them and the leadership team if you happen to find that.

And in that case, because we went through that journey, right, and we had that situation where all of a sudden, OK, well, this was the standard we were setting for ourselves. And we firmly believe in it, but recognizing we just set a bar that some of our current team members aren't going to clear. You know, how did you guys go through that at Agile? And, you know, I can share how we went through that a little bit with our, with our team.

Yeah. So I think You know, we've probably all been involved with mission statements or vision statements and things like that, and you put them on your website and you're done, right? That was the exercise. My wife comes home and tells me, she's like, you know, we have a core value that we're going to all collaborate with each other and help each other succeed. But, you know, nobody will even talk to each other. Right. So, so I think there's some skepticism that these were aspirational and we weren't going to stand behind them. And I think the second that they saw that we were for real. So we have this saying, and this flowed from George, was that what we accept is what we expect. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. We have one of our largest customers we've had for probably 15 years, habitually pays us late, doesn't get a contract in place. You know, they've taken 6 to 8 months to put a contract in place. And that absolutely is the antithesis of being a strong partner with us, right? And so they were late again last year and we went to them and we said, oh, you're late. When do you think you're going to have that contract and be focusing on paying for the services that we provided? And they said, basically, go pound sand, you know, we'll pay you when we pay you. We'll get the contract when we pay you, when we're ready. And So we shared our core values with them. We sent them an email saying, you know, just to bring you up to date here, you know, these are the core values that we have. And we come to work today, you know, every single day, and we live by these core values. The number one of which is strong partners, right? Strong partnerships. And they responded with, "Go pound sand." And so we basically said, you know, respectfully, We are not going to renew this contract with you that we've had for 10, 15 years. And they said, you have to. And we said, actually, we don't. You know, if we accept that behavior from you, it sends a message to everybody in my company that these core values are just something that we wrote down and we don't live by. And the company was like, holy crap, from the top down, they believe in these core values and they really are That's who we are, right? And nobody in our company— think of the accounting department that spends their day, they come in Monday and call up the customer and say, are you going to pay us today? You're going to pay us the next day. You know, that's not why they come to work. They got better things to do. And so then when they knew we had their back and we said, look, core values, we told you we're going to live by these, we're not renewing their contract. All of a sudden they're like, oh, this is legit. Right. And they completely bought into it. So when you just kept seeing examples like that around the company of us either interacting with each other or interacting with clients and saying, no, we can't accept that behavior. That's not, you know, the fact that you let that thing lie there and didn't step up and resolve it your own. That's not initiative, right? We really expect more of you and you need to step up there. So I think when everybody, you know, each of the department heads kind of pushes this down through the meeting cadence that we have every single week, Every time we got together as a group, and with all-hands meetings, for example, we would start with our core values, just, and we typically recognize at least one, you know, team member, you know, at all-hands meetings, say, "Hey, I just wanted to call out Helen, you know, for going above and beyond, really stepped up initiative. She's exactly what our core values are all about." And when people start seeing there's rewards for our core values and that we are not going to work with people who don't exhibit our core values, it seems very, very real. And all of a sudden, it's ingrained in us. And We all have each other's back and we all believe in the core values. So it's a really neat journey we've been on.

That's an awesome example. You know, sometimes you don't really think about your core values going external like that.

Yeah, to your clients.

Yeah, yeah. But it's truly— that is an excellent, awesome message.

What we did, Steve, along those same lines is we had a company— since we didn't normally— we get together or we do something for our clients around the holiday times. And this year with COVID everybody wasn't in the office. We normally get together and actually hand-sign cards to a couple hundred people, and our customers really love it. This year, we didn't have that opportunity because of COVID so we had a virtual town hall. And at that town hall, what we did was we kind of held off to the end and said, we're going to announce the winners of our core value awards. And so basically, for each of our core values, we recognized— in each of the core values, we recognized, I think, 2 or 3 people, and then we announced who the winner was. And those winners consisted of not only our employees, but also our customers. So, you know, Iowa State wins the, you know, the Approachability Award. You know, they are always willing to, you know, step up and do anything we want and be a partner with us to, you know, help educate the fleet community, right? And so again, it's internal and external, I think, the core values. You can't You can't, you know, draw a line and say, "Nah, they only work inside these doors." But it's, it's very valuable.

That was awesome.

It is.

I know we've gone through and, you know, like, we hand out challenge coins and things like that. They have Humble, Hungry, Smart written on them. Those are our 3 core values. You know, we expand on them. Like, you've done a really good job. I noticed you have your core value, and then you explain what it means. This is how it lives out, you know. So this is what we expect when we see it and behavior. We've kind of done that same thing with Humble, Hungry, Smart. We got that from Patrick Lencioni, The Ideal Team Player is a book he wrote. And then we tweaked it. We said, OK, you know, this is how we, this is our flavor of what Humble, Hungry and Smart looks like. You know, and I love, like, we have, you know, where you've got team members calling each other out and saying, "Hey, you know, Jacob was just absolutely hungry, and he went out and he found something, he killed it, brought it back to the cave." And so it's really cool when you start seeing your team adopting stuff like that. So it's got to be a pretty cool feeling for you.

That's great.

I think it's a good point, Josh. I'm sorry to jump in here, but, you know, regardless of what your core values are and, you know, the words that you use, you know, you'll see integrity, accountability, approachability, you know, humble, hungry, smart, whatever the words are. You know, as you just mentioned, you know, your industry, any business regardless of size, can use words like that. But when you take it down to the next level and you customize it for your unique organization and you really sort of define, hey, what are these behaviors? When we talk about Hungry, Humble, Smart here at RTA, what does that really mean? How do you demonstrate those behaviors? That's really what's impactful, right? It's kind of the why behind it. What I always tell my clients when I'm working with them is, we need two. We need somebody to tell us the color commentary, when we're watching a football game and we need somebody who tells us the stats, right? And that's kind of the difference between those two. So it's really important, you know, two companies could have the exact same core values from the words, but, you know, how they're demonstrated, what the behaviors are, are really unique for each organization.

Yeah, I think that's, it's really clear that you get that clicked down, because it's got to manifest. And they have to know, when you're holding them accountable to core values, like we talk about "Fire, hire and lead to the vision," right? And so when we hire people, these are the behaviors we're looking for. They have to know what the standard is that they're being held to. You know, if we're having those hard conversations, you know, I, I don't like to fire people; I like to inspire them to leave. You know, like that's the kind of method that I try to go with is I really do want people to understand, you know, it's not about termination or like, "Oh no, you're out." It's more like, "Hey, this is OK." And My team will tell you, every all-hands meeting, I'm almost like, I harp on this all the time. If this isn't you, if this isn't your place, like you deserve so much better than to suffer through working at a place that doesn't align with your personal beliefs. And I will help you on your journey to find a place that does match. Because what happens if you're misaligned, and you don't align with the core values of a company? You're not only miserable, you're probably making other people miserable too. And life's just too short. Like, I just have way too much respect for the fragility of life, I guess, to think that you have to suffer through wherever you're working. But so I'm all about helping people on their way. We've talked about, like, I do my 20%. You know, when you come to work for me, 60 days later, if I'm going to give you an offer, 20%, you can walk away right now, no questions asked. You know, 20% of your annual comp. The idea being is that You know, if you're just here for a job, or you made a mistake and picked the wrong company, you have an out. You know, like, here's your little chance to walk away from it. And like, I am dead serious about you have to be all in and willing to turn down, you know, some people, it's a $10,000-$20,000 check. So you've got to be willing to turn that down in order to stay here.

That whole idea of hiring and the role that the core values play here, I remember when George said, you know, he kind of said, "Hey, when we're going to come up with these, you're going to use them to hire people, to reward people, to fire people." And I'm like, "Yeah, right." But I'll tell you what, we've hired 4 people in the last 2 months. All 4 of them, when I sat down and had my intro meeting with them, said the reason they came here is because of the core values. Yeah, I'm like, you got to be kidding me, right? So it's in our job descriptions. It's on our website.

I had a—

there's a colonel from the U.S. Army that's retiring October 1st. He contacted me about probably 3, 4 months ago. And said, "I know of your company. I just read your webpage. I read your core values. The reason I am contacting you is because of your core values. They completely align with, you know, everything that I am." And so, you know, for 4 out of 4 of the last people saying the reason they came here is a core value, it was kind of the opposite of the environments they were coming from. That speaks a lot to the value you know, how important it is to have those core values. And George, you were absolutely right. When you, when the people know coming in the door that this is the, this is the gate that you have to pass through, is this core value gate, you're going to get the right people coming to join you. And there are people that are not approachable, right? And they're going to say, "Oh man, I'm going to have to be happy and talkative and forthright and go out and, you know, get out of my comfort zone, that's— nah, I'm not up for that. So they don't, they don't come through the door.

So it's, it's, it's also like it creates this magnet effect where it attracts the right people and it repels all others.

Correct.

And it makes the hiring process so much more enjoyable, I think.

I mean, that's exactly why I'm here at RTA, is its core values. And I'm fascinated every time we go through executive interviews and we ask these people about the core values. I mean, a lot of the people that apply see our core values and want to come here. You know, we're pretty creative. Josh is really creative on how he puts our job descriptions out. And I think that really attracts people, like the magnet you're talking about.

And then it repels the opposite, right?

Exactly.

You know, everybody that we don't want. It's, it's a great way. It's almost like a sales pitch in reverse is that you really are trying to qualify candidates before they come through the door. And it really helps on that sales process, you know, on the recruiting process to make sure you're getting the right people on the bus.

So, yeah, Josh, I, and I love what you're saying where, you know, after 60 days, you almost encourage them to some level, almost entice them to leave because, you know, what I, what I coach my teams is, is to say, look, as part of this, you know, on, you know, hiring, you know, sort of interviewing process is to say, look, these are our core values. And my commitment to you is that I'm going to surround you with people with these same core values. And if these core values do not resonate with you, then please don't take this job. You are going to be uncomfortable here. You ultimately are going to leave, which means you're going to be looking for a new job. We're going to be rehiring. And if that's the case, I know a lot of people here in our metropolitan area. Let me help you find a job. I have a lot of friends who are business owners. If these core values don't resonate with you, it doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It just means that you're not going to fit here. Let me help you find a job. And, you know, people are blown away when we sort of offer that to them. But it also sends the message, you know, once we allow you to, you know, join our team, you need to make sure you're a team member because that's our expectation. And we were very clear upfront what those expectations are.

Yeah, we're chuckling over here because that's, that's exactly how we phrase it. You know, it's, it's important. I guess it's so important. This is the most important thing you'll do with anybody in their career. They're giving you so much of their time and energy, like you owe it to your people to surround them with good people. So I love that. We could talk for another hour on this. We are, you know, we're coming up on time. So I want to thank you guys again. You know, we'll probably have you back for a different episode. We might get a little bit more into the EOS and the Business Operating System side of things. But, you know, Ed, I love the journey you're on. You know, having gone through it myself just recently, it felt really fresh. And so I loved having somebody to commiserate and co-celebrate with really on the core value journey. So George, thanks for being with us. Ed, thanks for being with us. Any last thoughts from either, all 3 of you?

You know, I think, you know, one of my last thoughts is we're starting to create a strong partnership with agile, you know, so we're kind of on that journey, and I look forward to it.

Yeah. And I think our core values do align. It makes the conversations easier. You know, just because of relationships we've got and we know what type of a company you guys are, we don't have all the formality that we might normally have with another company that we don't feel the same way about. So you can see it affecting and making it just easier to communicate, right? And it makes a more positive relationship together. So good stuff.

Yeah, no, I, I love the fact that the two organizations are working together. We sort of call them cooperators, right? You know, in the sense that, I mean, there's so much business out there the last the last thing you guys need to be doing is, is sort of worried about what piece of the pie you own and actually work together to grow the pie and, um, you know, to get more of the pie from some of your true competitors and people who are damaging, you know, the marketplace and not fulfilling the brand that, that the both of you bring to the, to the table and the opportunity. So it's great stuff from my end.

All right, well, uh, thanks everybody for joining us for another episode. As always, you can go follow us where any podcasts are @fleetsuccessshow. And if you have any questions that you want to hear answered or comments on today's episode, you can email podcast@rtfleet.com. If you want to get any information from Ed or from George, you know, send, send the request over to podcast@rtfleet.com. We'll get you in touch with them as well. Two awesome individuals that I'm grateful to have met and known in my life. So thank you guys all for joining us today and we'll see you next time.

Thanks for joining us on this episode episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @fleetsuccess. See you next time.