The Networked President: Using Social Media to Improve Recruiting and Retention | Mitch Fortner, KSA

Thank you. So, Mitch, maybe we can just start if you can tell us a little bit about KSA and your journey to become president of KSA.

Sure. KSA is 40 years old, started as a primarily a municipal engineering firm in Northeast Texas. We're up to 12 offices, about 130 employees. So several, a lot of small offices, mainly in Texas, also in Oklahoma and Louisiana. I came to work for KSA in 84. Started out as an EIT and through the years I departed for about a 3 year stint, came back in 91 as a project manager in about 2000. I became the marketing director and then ultimately the president about three years ago.

Right on. This is a post I borrowed. What's up with that? From you. Sure. So this is a post you wrote inside your firm. I'm going to give you all about 20 seconds to read this. And this is what we're going to do in this interview. I'm going to have a series of posts that we'll pull up and give you guys some time to read it and get a sense for what Mitch has been up to. So, Mitch, can you share the backstory here? What prompted you to write this post on the Internet? And did something happen?

No, I think this was kind of preempting what I thought might happen. Most people that get really active on LinkedIn are interested in finding another job. And I wanted to assure my employees that was not what this was about. I wasn't and I'm still not looking for another job at this point. So that's what I was trying to accomplish here.

Excellent. Well, as Chris mentioned, kind of post conference, after we had this big aha moment of this internal external, we spent many, many hours combing through all of your posts and reading your output on LinkedIn as well as your Internet. And we recognized five themes that emerged that felt really relevant to Kaconnect this year, keeping in mind our theme of elevating the employee experience. So those categories that we saw were redefine core values, create a better place to work, acknowledge employees, recruit and welcome talent, and then share your personal journey and values.

So I'll start the core values section. So we noticed last year you set out to redefine your core values. And we've had some conversations about that. Here are some examples that you kind of reached out to LinkedIn to crowdsource ideas. And this is a theme we noticed kind of in the work you were doing as we were stalking you, reading your output to figure out how you were working and what you were trying to do. So I'm going to give you guys 30 seconds to read this post. Okay, Two more. Here's another one. That one generated lots of comments. One more. Okay, so we had a post about, you know, you're asking folks what the most important thing an employee can bring to work. What's on your reading list? And then quotes. Who is the audience for this? What were you trying to accomplish by asking these things out loud?

So are there any other firms here that have corporate values that are buried in an employee manual that nobody ever looks at? That's what I inherited. We'd had corporate values for 20 years, but nobody knew what they were. And so we set out on a journey with all of our employees throughout the company to establish what we were all about, what's important to us as a firm. And so that's what we were trying to head toward. And so we just threw it out there for the world to see. Very authentic in our process. Ultimately, our values were run through our board of directors after being established primarily by the employee groups throughout the firm. But this was just about basically giving the world an opportunity to see, you know, something's different at ksa. They're starting to think about what they're here for.

So part of it was showing that there was some change happening. Did you get feedback and ideas that informed your process?

Yeah, we got a lot of feedback from my LinkedIn posts there. But the most significant stuff was internal. And a lot of that was going on was not very. It was just we were doing employee surveys and talking amongst ourselves about what is it that's important to us as we move forward in the future.

Great.

Yeah, I'm glad you bring up internal, because we noticed that once your core values were clearly defined, you used your Internet to roll them out. So here's a post that you've shared. So those core values are collaborative teamwork, commitment to excellence, mutual respect, consistent integrity, and future focused. So going back to one of your core values being that collaborative teamwork, here's this post, post that you shared. And we'll give everybody again about a minute and a half or so to read this one. Spit long.

It.

I have a partner who says, mitch, your posts are way too long. I don't ever get past the second paragraph.

Do you like. Some people I know just write in one direction and they never go backwards. I like that. I mean, I think we gave people a chance to read this because as you guys will see, there's just this really great voice, I think, that comes out through the series of these Posts, So I don't know what your partner's talking about.

Yeah, it's nice to see again, going back to being human and that approach that we've heard. I think throughout the day it's nice to get a little flavor for your personality and kind of who you are. So shortly after this post, we saw that collaborativeteamwork became a thing. There were 25 posts tagged to that particular hashtag in a quick 10 month span. So here's a couple of. We pulled a few examples just to take a look at.

We love the hashtag feature. We use it quite a bit.

My question for you is, was this organic? How did you orchestrate this or how did you make it happen?

Our director of HR is a very joyful person and she's very infectious. And so I think it may have come from her. It may have come from. I call her my ambassador of happiness, who is our recruiter and she works in the HR group. But between the two of them, I think that's probably where this whole hashtag thing started and then it just takes off. It's very organic. People will post something and next thing you know they'll have the hashtag on it and it's cool to go back and search for those posts.

Do you feel that using the Internet as that platform was a helpful.

Oh, absolutely. With 12 offices, companies with more offices than that, I'm not sure how you build this cohesive culture within an organization. And one of the things that has helped us greatly is having our intranet. It's very helpful from the standpoint of being able to communicate across offices and get the same message out to everyone in the company.

I want to go back outside the office to the next idea, which is creating a better place to work. So, you know, we talked about this a lot, extensively and this came up a little bit. You asked a question of Jim earlier, you know, about needing to kind of refocus on the environments that we're creating in the industry. What are your thoughts? Why is this important? You know, what are you seeing in ae?

Yeah, I look back on my career when I was a project manager early in my career, that was before cell phones, it was fax machines were just starting to come out and. And I believe that business moved at a slower speed back then. I could get in my truck and drive four hours from my office in Northeast Texas to Fort Smith, Arkansas where we were doing a project. No contact with anybody for four hours because we didn't have cell phones. It was an opportunity to relax, to think through what you were doing. And now our project managers are bombarded by clients, contractors, property owners, nonstop. You know, they can be reached by cell phones, text, you know, on the phone, in the office, email. And I think all of that stuff is building up. And we're seeing. I have a good friend that specializes in this work in our industry. Unprecedented levels of burnout and professionals who are just saying, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm tired. I'm tired of all of this. It's just too hard. And I'm not sure what the answer to that is, because technology just keeps piling up, and somehow we have to be able to help our professionals to deal with all of the impact that's having on them.

Yeah. And so you turn to social media again.

Exactly.

You guys have figured out the system of this interview pretty quickly. So here's 35 seconds to read this one. Okay. Two more. Okay. This one is a shared article. So in these three examples, you know, talking about your dad and the adjustments that firms had to make. Burnout and then employee fulfillment, I kind of have the same question. It's like, who in your mind are you writing for? What are you hoping that they're getting from you?

Okay, so here's the big picture behind all of this. I walked out of a meeting about a year ago, and we were, as I'm sure that many of y' all are dealing with this employment war that we're in. Recruiting and retention has become just one of the most crucial, well, two of the most crucial issues that we face today. And we were talking about our. How we were going about recruiting and the challenges that we had recruiting good employees into our firm, specifically mid level employees. And I said, what can I do as a president of a company personally to have some kind of impact on this? And, you know, that weekend I thought to myself, you know, LinkedIn is free, which appeals to me. So I said, I'm gonna. I'm gonna see what I can do on LinkedIn. And so that's what all of this is about. I've read a stat that about 80% of job seekers would prefer to work for a company whose leaders are active on social media. I have a theory about that. My theory is that they get to know the personality of the company from the outside looking in, which I have heard now that I've been doing this for about a year is, oh, yeah, Mitch Fortner. I'm connected to him. And, you know, I've been noticing what he's doing. So they're seeing a personality of one of the leaders in our company.

How did you build that network of.

All those people that I got busy that weekend sending out LinkedIn connections. And look, when you go into LinkedIn it makes it look like you have to have met this person personally. They want you to have met them face to face. Nah, I just started shooting out connections. If you were an engineer in Texas, licensed or otherwise, there's a very good chance that I sent an invite connection to you that weekend. Before the weekend was over, I'd gone from less than 500 connections to over 3,000. I'm over 7,500 now. And if you're an engineer in Texas, make sure to catch me before I leave and I'll add you before we get through today.

Is there a limit on the number of people you can invite in a day?

Well, there's an overall limit and the way you game that is. So I've done the $60 a month thing on LinkedIn and for our industry I didn't see where it really helped a lot. So I went back to the free thing. So I mean I got other uses for those $60 a month. So what I do is if I run out of connection invites, I go back to my list of outstanding invites and if you hadn't accepted me, I mean I go to the ones at the end of the line. If you haven't accepted me yet, I just cancel that invite and then next thing you know, I'm inviting again.

At K Connect you never know what's going to happen on stage. You now got a crash course on LinkedIn. For those of you. There you go, there it is. Thank you, Mitch.

Yeah, you're welcome. If you do that tonight, make sure to add me.

We'll take score later.

Okay.

So we saw you writing a lot of posts on your Internet as well about your employees experience. So we will run through a couple of examples here. We'll give you just shy of a minute to read this one on Flex Fridays. So going back to pto, give everyone another minute or so.

Sure.

Like a sea of eyes.

We see some weird clapping.

Clapping. You're not alone. This particular post set off a chain reaction of comments with people talking about their own personal vacations, staycations, overseas travel, somebody went on a cruise time with family, time with a new baby driving through the Scottish Highlands. And then after this again, these are just comments to that previous post. Then we started to see organic posts happening of employees out in the wild sharing with the rest of the firm about their own Experiences on vacation, Somebody got engaged, somebody likes the outdoors, making it to your daughter's wedding. So I want to go back to this and dig into the PTO post a little bit further. What compelled you to write this in the first place?

You know, our firm, I said, was founded 40 years ago. And the founders of our firm were very hard driving, hard working individuals. And I think it was more, it was kind of a sign of the time. Like Jim was talking about this morning. It seemed like back then we had life and we had work and the whole idea of combining the two was kind of foreign. And most of us, our work consumed most of our life. Our culture was such that we were. It was kind of an unwritten expectation that we'd be at the office on Saturday morning back in those days. And don't judge us too harshly because I'm telling you, that was kind of the way things were back in those days. And so fast forward 40 years later, I think some of the culture of, you know, look, we work hard, we don't, you know, we're not about this PTO thing that much, Whether justified or not, I think it was still lingering in our culture. And I was trying to exercise it, to be honest with you. I had heard a couple of employees talk about that they didn't feel like they could go on a vacation or this or that. So I was just trying to get it out there that, look, the company gives PTO as a benefit, we expect it to be used and frankly, you need to take it. We're in a high pressure industry and you need to go recharge your batteries from time to time. And that's what I was trying to communicate with this. And I love the fact that it set off that chain reaction and I started seeing pictures of people taking vacation and the baby pictures and all that. It's just outstanding.

Sharing with the firm as well and kind of creating that one firm vibe.

Exactly. Yeah.

That's great to see. Have you noticed a direct impact or maybe correlation on burnout?

You know, we're still looking at that. We have. I know how vacations affect me personally. I know that the first day or so or two, possibly on a vacation with my family, that I'm still back at work. And we went to Oklahoma about a month ago, up into the mountains, rented an Airbnb and had our grown children come in with their families. And all the way up there I was stewing over this problem at work. And I bet I didn't say 20 words on the drive. It was like a four hour drive and I was pretty quiet. And I got up the next morning, I apologized to my wife. I said, babe, I am so sorry. I mean, I was just not present on that drive and I'm going to do better today. I'm putting it behind me. But sometimes I think it takes a while. And so I think it's really important that we do take that time off to recharge those batteries, especially in this industry.

So let's talk about acknowledging employees. That's been a theme throughout the morning so far. And I want to kind of show how Mitch does it, some of the ways Mitch does it. So LinkedIn, here's a post. And so, you know, we've seen you write several posts like this. We edited. You guys are not going to see all of Mitch's output on LinkedIn and his intranet over the last year and a half. This is edited. This might sound like a silly question, but why are you doing this? Who are you hoping to reach? Kind of promoting people inside who are rising stars outside on LinkedIn. Are you concerned about that at all?

I think one of the fears that you could have in this area is that recruiters or other firms are going to identify who your good people are and come after them. Look, they're coming after them anyway. I mean, our engineers get bombarded with calls from recruiters. What's more important to me is that Blake and Jacob both know that they're appreciated, that we know who they are, that we value them and we're proud of them. That's more important to me. And if somebody else can come along and do a better job, they're going to have to show that they appreciate Blake and Jacob, that they value them and that they're very important to them. And a lot of the recruiters know how to do that. But, but, but we want them to know that they don't have to leave ksa. So I'm, I guess in this case I'm speaking directly to these two young men. And I'm also showing the outside world. Look at ksa. We value our employees. We celebrate when something good happens.

And how do you, how do you, I mean, I'm curious about your process a little bit. How do you know that these two guys have done this? And how do you decide on this Thursday morning that you're gonna write this post?

You know, we're only 130 employees. If we had 2,000 employees, this might be different. And I wouldn't be doing this because I'm certain I would overlook people. And so you'd have to be careful with that. But we're small enough that we're. We still know one another. We know each other's names. We know when someone has a baby. We know when somebody gets married. We know when people go to funerals and things of that nature. So we're still small enough that we can.

You can do it.

We can do it.

At that point.

You'Re also acknowledging your employees on your intranet as well. So we'll take a look at a handful of those examples. And one more it. So similarly to Chris question, I'm curious how you decide who and how to share on your Internet.

So Abiel there received our Top Gun Award. The Top Gun Award is awarded for heroic efforts in the area of business development within our firm. We actually have a hubcap off of a 1978 Cadillac. And the reason it's a night we found it on ebay in case anybody's looking for a 78 Caddy hubcap.

Is that what you did with your $60 you saved on LinkedIn pre.

There you go. Exactly. You can go on ebay and find it. So our founders had a Lincoln Continental Town Car and a Cadillac. And they. Texas is a big state, and they covered a lot of the state of Texas in those cars. And so in honor of them and looking back to the culture of the company at that point in time, we've got this hubcap that we send around to our Top Gun Award winners. And we have them take a permanent glitter marker and write their name and put the date on it, and then they have to give it up when somebody wins the Top Gun Award next. And so it's real easy to know when to recognize somebody. Anytime somebody wins the Top Gun, we give them that. Now, it's not every day that we get awarded the kind of projects that I'm talking about in that August 28th post. And so that was huge. And I just. I wanted the entire company to celebrate. We recently were awarded another really big project, and we called an impromptu all hands get on the telephone kind of meeting and had just a big celebration victory right there on the spot. But in this case, we felt like a intranet post was appropriate.

How long has the Top Gun Award been a thing?

I think probably a little over two years. Yeah, we were real excited about it.

So we also noticed that you share client feedback as well as another methodology for acknowledging your employees. We'll give everyone just a minute to read this guy.

It.

So, Mitch, we saw a lot of examples. These are just a handful that we kind of pulled out of the Internet. Where is this feedback coming from?

So two or three years ago, we implemented a program where we put a little button on our email signature where if someone receives exceptional service from any employee of ksa, they can click on that button and it takes them to a form that's filled out, and then it's automatically emailed to me and a couple of other folks within the company just in case I miss it. And so we have kind of a system for what happens when somebody sends compliments of our service and we even give out gift cards in the mail. We put a letter in the personnel file documenting the occasion, and then we put a post up so that the whole company can celebrate this excellent client service. And it's amazing how often now there may be some that are encouraging their clients to click the button. I don't know. But hey, it works either way. And so we're excited to be able to acknowledge when that happens because that truly is, you know, the hallmark of what we do. We've long been known as a firm that gives excellent client service. And I know, you know, it's just a hallmark of what we're known for, communication with clients and service to clients.

Do you share every client feedback back on the Internet?

I do, absolutely. And I would blow that thing up. You know, I'd love to see more and more and more. But we, you know, every time we do now, that's great.

Yeah, we definitely saw a lot.

How are people reacting to this? Both kind of in LinkedIn, but then internally to getting recognized like this.

Yeah. So one of the things that I love is when I post this client feedback, everybody, that or a lot of our employees that know this particular person will get on there and congratulate them and tell them what a great job they've done and thank you for representing ksa. And so it becomes a real organic celebration of that particular employee, which I just love that, you know, that we're all saying, yeah, way to go, you did a good job. And so I got to think that I've never gotten one personally myself.

Is it in your email signature? Yeah, I'm sure we can get you a few. Maybe like 270. We'll see. Keep an eye on the conference app. So we talked about five themes. The fourth one was recruiting and welcoming talent. So you're using LinkedIn to advertise open job or recruiting fairs. So here's a few short posts. You guys have noticed the comments of people kind of interacting and wanting clarification and One more. So my first question for the non Texans in the audience, what does gig Em mean?

Gig em. Whoop. Any Aggies out there? There we go. I love it. So in 1930, happy to answer this question, by the way, we only have.

30 minutes of 40 seconds left, just to be clear.

So in 1930, a former student of Texas A and M asked a crowd, I'm assuming they were at some kind of a midnight yell or something. And he asked the crowd, what are we going to do? Those TCU Horned Frogs tomorrow, that's their mascot is a horned frog. And he said, we're going to gig them. And he put up his thumb and that's where that came from. And what they say about Texas A and M is from the outside looking in, you can't understand it. From the inside looking out, you can't explain it. So that's. There's a spirit about our school, a camaraderie, and it is largely focused on tradition. So things that happen in 1930 have a habit of becoming a long term tradition at our school.

Maybe the Top Gun award will do the same thing.

Yeah, it could catch on.

You mentioned during interview prep that part of your writing process is to imagine the perfect recruit and then write for that person. So can you tell us more about who the perfect recruit is and how do you write to that person?

Well, it varies, but as I am writing, I'm thinking about what kind of a person would fit within KSA and be fulfilled here and want to make their career here. And that's a huge part, you know, in our culture, in our workforce today, we have so much jumping from job to job to job. We're looking for the folks that want to come to our company and hang around and help us to grow and be a part of us for the long term. So I'm thinking about that. You know, when you see me posting a job posting, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Everything that I'm doing on LinkedIn is focused around trying to put a personality out in the interwebs for people to look at KSA and understand what we're all about and possibly want to come join us and be a part of it. And so as I'm writing, that's what I have in mind, is I'm trying to just put that personality out there, be very authentic and real. We're not trying to hide anything from anyone. We implemented an open book management process about four months ago and everything, practically everything that we do other than compensation is just fair game.

How's this working? I mean, do you feel like you're getting the personality out there? Are people contacting you? Are they seeing this?

They are. I'm contacted quite often about either, hey, I have a friend that's graduating and can we get you a resume? Or we have a recruiter that's working for us on a contract basis full time and he's been doing it for a year now. And he said that the increase in our name brand recognition and who knows KSA when he makes that first contact and who knows me has gone up significantly over the last year. And so that I don't have any quantitative data to show that this is working, but I do know that the last engineer that we hired, well, two, two or three engineers ago, when he first. When our recruiter first contacted him, he knew about KSA and he was connected to me on LinkedIn and we wound up being able to hire him, which was a major success for us. He had a very positive impression of our company before we ever started talking to him.

We actually see you do a lot of welcoming of new employees both on LinkedIn and your Internet. So we pulled a couple of examples. Here's one on LinkedIn welcoming a new employee. Rowdy Daly.

I love that name. Rowdy.

Great.

Is that from Days of Thunder?

It's a great name.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Another post. I think it's a little fair to say it's unique to see a president of a company doing this and sharing these types of posts. So why are you particularly doing these posts?

Okay, full disclosure. I have a great director of marketing and I mean, he's amazing, but we had a disconnect over the first couple of years that I was president. I looked at social media as an opportunity for us to get the name of our company in front of more people. And he had a fear of basically wearing people out with too much information, too many posts, and then kind of tuning us out. And I think there's a balance in there. And over the last year, I would say that he and I have come to a point where we're much closer aligned than we ever were before. And he's doing some wonderful things. He has an employee that works full time on content in our marketing department. She's a very good writer and she also manages our social media accounts now for the corporation. And so we've come together, but over the last year I was just doing what I could do personally on behalf of the company, trying to help solve a problem that we have and that's bringing the right people into the company. And it's just. And honestly, I know this looks like a lot when you're compressing a year down into, you know, a one hour presentation here, but I bet I don't. I haven't spent more than about 15 minutes a day and most of it's at my house before I ever leave home. A lot of the articles I would have been writing anyway and I get some. I've started getting help with some of the, like the post about the acknowledgement of client feedback and things of that nature. We've got kind of a routine going now and I get some help there. So it is unusual. And I would say if our firm was thousand, two thousand people, I probably wouldn't have the ability to do this. And I would also say that now that our director of marketing has kind of picked up the mantle and our corporate account has become much more active, that I'm backing off somewhat and I'm not even spending the 15 minutes a day in many cases on LinkedIn.

Yeah, I've seen you kind of resharing the marketing post and just adding a couple, couple lines to just personalize it to your network.

I'm thrilled with where we are from a corporate standpoint.

Now, you mentioned getting some help. Who do you source internally or externally for that type of support?

You know, when I first started, I would have my four directors kind of. I'd give them an opportunity to read something that was crucial. Not the, you know, the little two or three sentence post type things. But if I was writing an article or something of that nature, I would get. I would give them an opportunity to review it if they had time. If they didn't have time, that was fine too. But just to get. And then I have an amazing assistant that she doesn't let anything bad go out and she catches all of my mistakes. So I let her look at critical stuff as well. And then Caroline, our content generator now, she does a lot of the writing for the stuff that's shared internally.

Let's look at the last section. Sharing your personal journey and your personal values kind of out in the network. So I've got two posts to look at. They're a little bit long. The first one is called leader. You're not pizza. In the back. This one? Yeah. Niche.

Do you want to talk about this one?

Yeah.

So the summary is if you've ever had a bad day where you've been criticized for things that you're doing as a leader, Leader, you're not pizza. You can't make everybody happy. I've also heard you're not ice cream. Or as I believe Steve Jobs is credited as saying, if you want to make people happy, go sell ice cream. So I wrote this just as a thought of, you know, look, we're not going to make everybody happy. It's not possible to make everybody happy as leaders, even managers. And the critical thing is to do the right thing and to listen to people and do the right thing. That's kind of the Cliff Notes version of that.

And so why this on a public network out there? Who are you trying to reach? Who's your audience?

For them, again, it's all about sharing a personality. I mean, we're real. And, you know, I think too often I see a lot of stuff that's real uptight, stodgy out there in the world and from our industry in the past, we've kind of had a reputation for being pretty polished. And, you know, we're just real. We're people, and we're doing our very best to serve our clients and serve our employees. And so that's what this was all about.

Got it. One more kind of in the same neighborhood. So this one was inside. Something triggered this. What got you thinking about gratitude and business and writing that for your folks?

We have had a lot of change in our company over the last three years. In 2015, we had a strategic planning retreat where we basically said, you know, we can't keep doing business the way we've done it because our market's changing, our competition is changing. And so if I had to say one thing has been a common thread throughout the last three years or so, it's been change. And change is hard for some people. It's harder for some people than it is for others. Some people like the thrill of change, and some people absolutely hate it. They love routine. They love the way things are today, and don't mess with the way things are because everything's fine. And I think I was just kind of responding to an idea that, you know, we do have to change. And this is kind of an outgrowth of that, of how we look at that change. And we have so much to be thankful for in our company. I mean, we're tremendously successful, have been for 40 years now, and we just have a lot to be grateful for. And I think that that was one of the things that I was just trying to get across.

Great. So those are the themes that we covered. I want to spend a couple minutes on what's next, and then Chad and Brian are gonna pass mics so some things we talked about getting more voices. You mentioned your marketing director. This is Hunter. Hunter likes doing videos.

He does.

So this is one on an Alzheimer's walk. This is another one in a ribbon cutting ceremony. You guys will notice a theme. This is Hunter on the road to Henderson, Texas. He went like, for being not doing this, he's like all in now.

He bought it. Yeah, he bought it.

So tell me about that. Tell me about bringing him along and kind of what he's hoping to do.

Yeah, I think he has seen some of the things that have come out of what I was doing and he just, he's jumped into it. And I couldn't be more proud because he and I are also really good friends and change may not be real easy in this area for him, but he has really embraced it and now he's doing outside of the box things and trying to take us into a different direction here.

You talked about brand recognition as well. And one thing we noticed, in addition to other employees getting involved was actually the brand's LinkedIn profile being much more involved. So here, much like you share about new employees joining, we've got the brand now sharing that content. We have the brand talking about some of your bright spot awards and acknowledging employees. We also have the brand sharing a flavor of the culture of ksa.

Yeah, and I love this because now our corporate. And a lot of the credit for this, all of the credit for this goes to Hunter and to Caroline and also Laney, our graphic designer. They've created a theme that we can quickly pull together a corporate post and get it out there. And it looks consistent from day to day. And I think we're beginning to see that consistent pattern in our corporate accounts, which I just couldn't be more proud of what they're doing.

So how do you decide if it's Mitch who posts or corporate or someone else within the firm?

So at this point, you know, I'm very confident that we're doing what we can do on the corporate side. And so as much as we possibly can, we're pushing in that direction. Occasionally I'll be eating lunch and have a brainstorm and think, oh, I need to post about that. And then next thing you know, I'm. And it's gone. So I don't think there's a whole lot of thought that's going into it more than just, you know, what is it that can help people to understand more about ksa, both on the corporate account side as well as my personal account. We just want people to understand who we are and hopefully find some folks that want to come be a part of it.

I think what I heard you say is you don't personally follow a strict editorial calendar.

None. Yeah, unstructured would be a good word to describe my stuff.

What about your staff or the team?

So we have a. I just got an email yesterday morning from Caroline with our social media calendar for the next two weeks, and she's got it filled out for two weeks. A post every day, and then things that come up along the way get added on top of that. And my wife in the hotel room heard me talking to my cell phone with a message for Caroline telling her how much I appreciated what she was doing with the social media calendar and what a great job she's doing.

The last thing I want to share is this new podcast you guys are starting called the Practice. So give you guys a second to read the copy here. For those people paying really close attention, you'll notice that it features the Top Gun award winner from earlier in the present.

There you go.

Yeah.

So why a podcast? Why now? Who's the intended audience? What are you thinking?

You know, I'm not sure this is something that we're just giving a try. I don't know if the podcast thing will catch on or not. The thought behind it at this point is it's a great way for us to feature a very specific topic, demonstrate our expertise in that area, and to get it out before a broad audience. But we also, if we get an RFQ for a specific type of project, or if we're doing early on, positioning for an opportunity, it's something that we can use. And, you know, we're still playing with the format, we're playing with the time. I don't know how many people are going to listen to 30 minutes on complete streets, especially a potential client. But there may be some opportunities for shorter podcasts that we can get in front of people. And it's all about sharing expertise, sharing, you know, and if we're doing it and, you know, our competition's not doing it, or even if they are, if we give our clients a robust opportunity to see qualifications from both firms. And if this plays into that, I think it's great.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Cool.

So let's take some questions. I see hand in the middle. Is that Krista? Yeah. All right. Fox is coming.

Mitch, really fun to watch this. I'm very curious. Did something happen personally that convinced you that this was a good idea professionally? Did your Facebook network or your family influence this? And if not, did this professional activity influence a personal series of posts.

So I've had a Facebook account for like 10 years now, and I've been very active on it. And I'm very careful. I'm not one of those folks on Facebook that opens it up for the world to see. I'm very careful with, you know, who's included in my friend list or whatever. I'm on a break right now. I've disabled my. If you don't know if you're addicted to Facebook and need a break, there's a disable feature on there. You can disable your account and it's like you're still there, but you're not. People can't send you, you know, anyway.

Well, just tomorrow at the hangout, Mitch is going to be teaching Instagram, Pinterest.

YouTube, covering all the medias.

It's all here.

Love that Pinterest thing. That's good stuff. Yeah.

Just connect with Mitch on LinkedIn and he'll teach you all about it.

Yeah.

So I would say, in answer to your question, I've been very familiar with Facebook and I was trying to. I was trying to figure out a way to use that kind of energy in a professional manner. LinkedIn, I believe, is the. For what I'm trying to do is probably the best platform in terms of sharing who we are and influencing potential recruits, because most of the folks on LinkedIn are either looking for jobs or looking for somebody to hire. I mean, you can talk about all the other values of LinkedIn, but at its root, I think that's what it's there for, primarily.

Got several questions in the middle. I didn't see that. I'm not going to try and adjudicate. Chris, whatever hand you saw first. All right, Kyle, thank you.

I really enjoyed the theme of gratitude. That's certainly a personal goal of mine. What I wanted to know was, are your posts, do you see it permeating to other people in the organization where you feel like you're actively or actually changing the culture, where other people are pointing out their gratitudes or acknowledging other employees? I mean, has this moved beyond you and the organization?

I do. Some of what I post is a reflection of what I see in our culture with other people. We have some very grateful people that I have the privilege of working with who have very positive attitudes. And so I don't know if it's a case of me influencing them as much as me reflecting their influence on or them reflect me reflecting the influence they're having on me. And so. But yeah, it's a voice. It's a common voice. And we do have discussions about this post or that post and how that is being received and the comments we're getting and that sort of thing. Sure do.

Over here.

Whoa, that's a great catch.

Tangential to the first question, you spoke a lot about recognizing and acknowledging your employees. Do you see them recognizing your posts? And secondly, what other motivating factors do you have to continue to post?

One of my greatest desires as president of KSA is to see people succeed. And I believe it's a fantastic place to work, and I want to bring other people into that. And so that's one of my biggest motivations. I mean, I've said it three or four or five times now, is we want to share a personality with the world, and we want to give people an opportunity to respond to that. If they, if that looks like someplace where they might enjoy working, then we'd love to have a conversation. And so. And then also, you know, we have clients that watch what we're doing and just being open and, and just real. That's the primary motivation.

Mitch, I think I remember a story from our kind of pre interviews where maybe to connect Chris's question and this question that there was a. I think it was a potential client who didn't know who KSA was, who you thought, there's no way they shouldn't know who KSA is. And you wanted to make sure that kind of thing didn't happen again.

Yeah.

That was part of what drove you.

Yeah, I heard a comment that. And it wasn't a client.

It wasn't.

It was someone else that I felt should know who KSA was. And they were like, no, they've never heard of ksa. I'm like, what? You know, we've got to do something about that.

I'll fix that.

Yeah, I'll fix that. So that was a big motivation. I want to get the word out about our firm and what we can do. Our Director of Business Development says we want to give every client the opportunity to work with ksa. And I feel very strongly about that. I feel like we've got some great people that do amazing work for our clients, and I want more people to be able to experience that and I.

Think as trying to grow as part of where you guys are as a business as well.

Yeah, we had, we had our formal strategic plan last fall, and we've. We've laid out a vision for 2025 that's very aggressive. And our mission is we build people who build the Future. A large part of our strategy revolves around the people component, and it goes directly to the heart of some of our biggest challenges is recruiting and retention, especially in the Texas market. I don't know if y' all have heard, but the economy is pretty hot in Texas right now, and if your firm isn't there already, you're one of the few. There may be one or two firms in here that's not in Texas at this point, but there are a lot of engineering and architectural firms that have moved to Texas over the last 10 years or so, and a lot of competition for the talent that's out there. It's a wonderful time to be an engineer or an architect, I think.

Peter, you had a question?

Yeah, I was having a lot of questions pop in my head as you were talking, but you covered most of them. But the one that sort of lingered was as other senior managers or senior personnel in your staff have seen the success of some of your personal LinkedIn posts. Is that something that senior leadership has taken on themselves to sort of emulate and try to reflect, or is it still sticking to coming from your voice?

You know, we've had discussions about that, and I don't know if any of you have ever tried to get an engineer to.

Win show of hands.

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure the marketing directors in the room can relate to this, but trying to convince an engineer, it's like you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. So I've seen some of our directors become more active in social media, not nearly to the extent that I am. And that's fine. That's totally fine. And it's like Hunter told me, he said, you know, we're not the president. And so it's easy. It's easier because you have the president behind your name to get the attention of people. And whether, you know, whether you deserve it or not, there is some interest, I think, in being connected to the president of a company as opposed to, you know, his point was you probably have an easier time with that whole interaction process than we would. My point is you've got. Pardon me here, but you've got people on LinkedIn that are trying to sell themselves as personal coaches, executive career coaches who've never managed the lemonade staff. So what I tell my upper level engineers is, look, just get on there and start telling people what you're doing and what you know. And I said, it's a great place to build a platform, build a community around your abilities as an expert in your field. Just get on there and start sharing. Nobody's taken me up on that yet. It's that. It's the horse and the water thing. But I think it's a great opportunity for somebody that really wants to build a community. I think it could really be used.

Well, Mitch will be running a hangout tomorrow. I don't know what he's. You know, you guys take it wherever you want to take it. But, Mitch, thank you for sharing your story with all of us. We really appreciate it.

Thank you all.