How Do I Make My Business a Best Place to Work? Dan Rundle Breaks It Down

What would it mean to be one of the top places to work in your state? Well, it'd mean you could attract, retain, and grow top talent. And let's face it, your business is nothing without your people. That's why I was so excited to interview Dan Rundle from Worthwhile. Dan is the CEO of Worthwhile, and he has made them the number one small business to work for in South Carolina. What an incredible honor and somebody wonderful to learn from as we try to model that behavior and create great places to work. Not only that, but Dan's an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. We had a wide-ranging conversation where we talked about everything of what they do on the tactical level to create an awesome workplace, all the way through to, if you hang in there at the end, we talk about what we do as entrepreneurs to keep our cups full. It's an awesome conversation. You're not going to want to miss it. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Culture and Compliance. I was going to become a pro podcaster today, Dan, but today is not the day. So let's dive right in, man. I was— I found you because I was pilfering through the Best Places to Work in South Carolina list like I always do. It's how we wrote the book. It's— we interviewed a bunch of CEOs at Best Places to Work to try to hear about how they develop their culture, how their— what their philosophies were on, you know, every different element of HR, how I build out a culture, how I think about my internal brand, how I think about my external brand, how I think about hiring, onboarding, performance. All the stuff. And I stumbled across Worthwhile, and I was shocked that we didn't know each other. We had the opportunity to speak a couple weeks ago, and we are cut from a very similar cloth. That, that is one thing I found for sure. But my question to you is, your company Worthwhile was number 1 on the Best Places to Work in South Carolina list in small business category. What do you think set Worthwhile apart from the other companies? Obviously really tough competition to be on that list. What do you think made you guys so unique that you were able to ascend all the way to the top?

Well, Matt, great to see you. Great to be with you. Excited to talk with you about these things today. This is certainly a passion of mine and looking forward to diving in with you on it. I think a couple of things. One would be we really radically and tightly defined our core values. And we've been at this for a while. We've been on the Best Places to Work list, I think between number 2 and 12 for the last 5 or 6 years, something like that. And throughout that time, we've been trying to get better and better about defining who we are and who we're not. And so we started with our, with our core values and significantly reworked those a couple of years ago, which I'm glad to talk more about. We can get into that a little bit later. The, the second thing that, that we've done, and I've grown with increasing conviction about this, is that we need to address and remove unproductive or toxic behaviors. It's not just about what you let in, but it's about who you move on and what behaviors you move out, no matter what the cost. So become increasing, increasingly urgent about that. And then, and third is we started actively tracking our employee engagement a number of years ago, about 7 years ago. And just spinning the flywheel of consistent improvement on employee engagement through good surveys. And I read every single one of those. We do it once a quarter just internally. And then of course we use the data from the South Carolina Best Places to Work survey, which is helpful as well. And we learn from that. We make improvements and get, get better every quarter.

So how are you tracking that? What tools are you using for the engagement tracking? And how big is the team?

Yeah, so our core team is about 25 folks. We have a number of contractors and full-time employees. And even in addition to that, we've got a bunch of contractors all over the, all over the country. But what we're, what we're doing is we're using BambooHR, which has been a great tool for us in just, you know, employee managing employee engagement, but also using the employee net promoter score survey feature that comes out of Bamboo. We use a couple other things as well. And then of course the, the best places to work survey. That employee net promoter score survey, and you, you can use Bamboo, you can use other tools to do that. You can use your own, you can build your own little Google form and ask it whenever. It gives you a nice benchmark that you can compare yourself to over time. And then you compare yourself to other companies to to see how you score.

So I told you this will be hard to stay on culture and compliance because we talked and I was like, man, I almost started and I've had this in the back of my head. I really want to talk about entrepreneurship all the time. I don't really want to talk about it. Like I love culture, it's my passion, but like I really want to talk about the business side of it as much too. But man, if the world's not just flooded with entrepreneurship podcasts, like it is just not like I don't have an angle that's going to make it unique, right? So, so the culture piece is where we live and what we talk about, but the, you know, you talk about the 25 people. It's interesting because, you know, I read somebody's post there today. That's sort of like the, uh, you know, the measurement when I meet a new founder, we always say, you know, how many people you got? It's like the first, you know, like, cause, cause we're not going to say to each other, hey Dan, what's your revenue? Uh, so the, the only signal we can ask that's public facing is how many people you got to get a sense of team size. And now we're living in a world or business size anyhow, excuse me. But now we're living in a world where, you know, I think there's, uh, companies as small as 6 people doing a billion dollars in revenue now. And so like the, the new thing going forward in an AI and tech enabled world is, hey, what can I drive my rev per FTE up to? And I'm interested to hear your perspective on this. Is this a metric you guys focus on? You know, conversely, what do you think are going to be some of the adverse effects of this, right? So if my new expectation becomes— and we talk a lot about this, like we want— we joke, we want everybody on the team to have a robot. Like everybody should be working with AI as much as humanly possible to create as many possible extensions of themselves. I'd rather our rev per FTE drives way up so I can pay you way more And then you're going to be happier. We're going to give you the tools to do human things and not machine things that any scraping app could do or data manipulation app could do. We don't want you doing things that just take time just to take time. But I do think it's going to cause like, you know, that message doesn't always fall perfectly on everyone, right? Where it's like, oh, hey, I rev per FTE as a target number. Like, man, that makes me feel like a, you know, a cell in a spreadsheet. And I get that. And so we have to, be careful how we kind of surface that and make sure that it's clear that, hey, look, the reason behind this is I can't pay you more money if you can't, like, if you, if you, if we can only tie 150 grand in revenue per full-time employee, do you think we could pay everybody 150 grand? Well, no, we can't. Right. And we want to. So like, what do we got to do to get there? But talk to me a little bit about your perspective of rep per FTE, if you think about it at all, and just kind of this new world that we're opening up as, as we start to create these super employees and people that are kind of manning agents. I think as we're, you know, agent's going to be the, the buzzword of 2024. 2025. Hopefully it's not as bad of a buzzword as NFTs, but it should be definitely, you know, a lot of folks betting big that it's the future of AI and even the short-term future. So I know I just touched on a bunch of things, but let me hear your perspective on that.

Yeah, great, great question. I would say a couple of things come to mind. One, yes, we track that. It's very important to keep an eye on that. First thing we have done over the last couple of years is moved to where a higher percentage of our, of our COGS, our cost of goods sold, which is people, which is our team, being variable workforce. So more, a higher percentage of contractors, a lower percentage of full-time W-2 employees. That's been helpful in managing, navigating the ups and downs and also keeping revenue per FTE higher. Second thing we've done is we have gotten very aggressive about adopting AI tools and growing in efficiency. And we've seen some pretty extraordinary numbers in terms of what our team can output utilizing some of these tools.

You know, what are some of the tools that have given you the biggest lift?

I mean, GitHub Copilot has been huge. ChatGPT has been huge. We're especially— I'm talking about in software development and that function. Writing code has become a lot more efficient and not just writing code, like the ability to create entire apps. I think that you've also got to, we were talking about this as a management team yesterday, actually, the, you've got to be careful about it. It's not, I've seen some of our, some people that we've worked with, some of our vendors kind of just spit out to us what is obviously some output of ChatGPT or some other AI tool. And it feels cheap. It's, it's still. You can still tell. And so you've got to have good people on the other side who care about your brand, who care about your, your culture, care about your client relationships, who are trained to take what you get. Maybe it gets you 60% of the way there or 80% of the way there and take it the rest of the way, adding that, that human touch. And I don't think that, I don't think the need for that is going away anytime soon, even as we're adopting and getting more efficient with AI tools.

And you nailed it. I mean, it's as simple as somebody sent me something earlier this week that was client-facing and a Google Doc and it was clearly written by ChatGPT. Now don't get me wrong, it was one of these things where, hey, you know, they probably fed our old terminology into it, said clean this up based on this situation and we've changed this. And like, you know, you could tell the heart of it was our sort of proprietary process. But I was like, look, everybody can tell what ChatGPT writing looks like now, down to the font, the way it puts the lines between, you know, like it's, it's obvious. Like you have to at least reformat it, dude. Like you can't, you can't just send them the copypasta of the ChatGPT, man, because it's, it's so obvious. Obvious. And for those of you listening, one of my many soapboxes, but like, dude, in my feed, when you have ChatGPT writing your posts and every word is capitalized, there's emojis on each side of the hook, like the hook is garbage. Every comment starts with yes with an exclamation point. Like that's how ChatGPT starts every damn comment on, you know, LinkedIn. Like, dude, like just at least clean it up, man. Like clean it up. Takes 30 seconds. Like clean it up. Like don't just copy paste. Quit being so lazy. Um, that's right.

So one other thought on that real quick, and go ahead, a little bit of a soapbox of mine around here, um, and when I talk with others about AI tools is I use— I, I write to, to not just produce content, I write to think. I need to, I need to write it out to figure out how to express myself cleanly and clearly, and, and AI can't do that for me. So, so the process of actually writing it down helps me clarify the thought and express myself better. It's the process of thinking. It's not just the process of outputting. And you, and you can't— AI is helpful in a lot of cases with writing, but it's not helpful in that.

Well, and we're going to go into a rabbit hole, which I'm fantastic at. So the writing to me is— I try to tell the young folks anytime I can, if I, you know, I'm 45 years old, I'm definitely talking I talk like a grandpa every day, but it's like the— I'm like, look, man, if I was 23 years old, I would be investing at least an hour a week in learning how to be a great copywriter. Like, there is no greater skill in any market than being able to write effectively and be able to, you know, articulate your ideas, your thoughts. And to your point, like, as a part of that process, I remember listening to Tim Ferriss once talk about how like the first 8 hours of his writing he almost always throws in the garbage. Which is maybe the most daunting thing as an author you could ever hear is like, golly, dude, like I gotta write for hours before I get to anything good. But it's true though, right? Like, I mean, the more that comes out, the more you finally start to uncover what is the issue. I just went through it this week. I was writing a brief for one of our advisors on a, a big decision we're making. And in the process, like it just clarifies everything, right? Like if I've gotta articulate this in writing to somebody else in a way that they can consume it quickly and easily. It's going to make me more aware of what the real problem is as I'm going through that process. And I can't advocate for writing enough. I'll give a quick plug for Sam Parr's Copy That course. I think it's $150. It's just like a 10-day writing course that many of us on our team have done. And it's a very good process. He uses what, you know, you think about if you're learning how to play guitar, what do you start with? I mean, you start playing cover songs. He has you basically cover other people's music by writing out other people's writing, by writing it down verbatim, exactly what they they wrote, and then you go into your writing session, which is a really fun practice to do. But yeah, told you tangents galore today. But why don't we step— take one step back. I always said this is not going to be a podcast where we're just going to jump in and go, hey, tell me what you do, Dan. But now we've established enough where you should probably tell us what you do. Like, what do you do? And I know, you know, Worthwhile has a lot of different things going on, so, so expand for us. What does Worthwhile do and where are y'all headed?

Worthwhile is in the software space, so we have a couple of different businesses that serve clients in across the full spectrum of software. So we, we work with early stage companies in our venture division to take them from idea to first version of their product with paying customers and all this stuff that you've got to have, not just software, by the way, that includes finance and fundraising and legal and go-to-market and all that stuff to build a successful technology business. And that's sort of our first division. Then our next division picks up from there. And that's our next generation software team where we do scaling. So we help make small software big. We do modernization where we help make old software new, take stuff that's been around for a long time and turn it into AI or modernize it so it's more intuitive and user-friendly. Works for today's tools. Then, and then third, finally, is our Essential Operations division, which helps provide cloud hosting and DevOps and security across our clients, stuff that we built and stuff that other folks have built. So it's really a full lifecycle of software from starting a software business or software-related business to growing it and scaling it. We, we work with, with entrepreneurs and mid-market companies to identify and then grow and operate and scale their, their software product or business.

Now, your story at Worthwhile is unique, and I think it's one of the things that attracted me to you as well. Tell me a little bit about your journey. I mean, you were an early employee, not an original founder, right?

That's right. Yeah, I was employee number 3 here and started out in sort of a sales and operations role. Well, employee number 3, I wore a lot of different hats.

It was probably employee number 3 is like, there's about 18 buckets employee number 3 is responsible for.

So my journey was, was taking off a lot of those different hats and giving them to other people and empowering and delegating those roles to other people as we've grown. But, but ended up over a number of years becoming CEO, buying out a couple of founding partners. And then setting forward on a new trajectory and new vision. Company's been around for 30 years, so it predates me a good bit, which means we've got a great heritage. We've got some solid DNA, and I'm the steward of it right now, and we'll carry it forward and someday hand it down to the next generation.

Love it, man. Love it. That's, uh, I think it's a story that should be told more often, right? Is the Hey, started early, had a vested interest, owners looking to exit. Why not somebody internally take the business over? And as much as, again, I want this to be an entrepreneurship podcast and I want to start to ask you about the funding of that deal and how you structured it, I'm going to move on and we're going to stay on culture. So I heard in an interview with you that you said one of your mentors or someone in your circle called you a culture CEO. What does that mean? What does that mean as far as definition? What did they declare that meant to you? And then what does that mean to you? How do you now carry yourself differently after that. I know that after somebody calls you a culture CEO, you're going, oh, well, dang, now I got to carry myself a little bit differently. I got to wear this title well. So what does that, you know, what does that mean according to definition that they gave you? And then how do you live that out in the day-to-day? What does that look like?

Well, business for me has always been about people first. It's always been about relationships, whether that's with our employees or whether that's with our clients or vendors or whoever. It's always been about people and relationships. And I love that about business. And so a number of years ago, as you mentioned, you heard in that interview, someone sort of started calling me that. And, and that ended up giving me permission to say, oh, actually that's a, that's a strength of mine. I used to say, well, I'm not really into the whole financial side of business, though it's important. And I know I need to pay attention to it. I was always more, more drawn to the people side of business. And what that did is it gave me permission to double down on my strengths and say, all right, let's, let's see what that looks like to lead a culture-first, people-first organization. Still got to have good, good finance and operations and processes and all that policy, all that stuff's important. Don't, don't get me wrong, but for me to be able to double down on what I love has made, has made a big difference. But what I see that meaning when someone, when I say, when I call myself a culture CEO, it simply means that culture culture, that workplace culture, that, that team culture is the garden from which everything else in a successful business grows. That's what I believe to be true, meaning happy clients, a strong bottom line, impact in the community, all that stuff. It grows out of the garden of a healthy culture. Um, and I, and I believe that, uh, aligned, highly performant team, there's, there's almost no limit to what they can achieve. It's I believe it's one of the most powerful forces on the planet, actually. And so that's what I'm all about is building healthy teams.

So one of my biggest struggles as a leader is when you talk about a culture CEO, it almost sounds like a player's coach to me, right? I don't know what your sport of choice is. I'm a football and baseball guy. And if you're a player's coach in football, as an example, when you're winning, everybody loves it, right? And when you're losing, everybody's like, ah, yeah, he's a player's coach. He's not disciplined them enough. He's not keeping everybody in line. He's too much on the side and he's, he's scared to drop the hammer. And there is that world in business as well. And I would never use the term drop the hammer, but it's like, how do we maintain a competitive edge? And I mean competitive in terms of like internal competition. I think, I think competition is great for teams. Right. And again, I do coach a lot of sports, so I am going to toggle back and forth here, but like we have to create that competition on our team and we have to have competitors on our team. It doesn't mean everybody on the team has to be competitive, like, look, different people have different, you know, things that make them tick. But like, how do you maintain that balance of like, hey, look, we're going to be a high-performance organization, but we're also going to really pour into you as an individual and make you feel comfortable and, you know, love on you and all the things that a player's coach does, right? How do you maintain that balance?

First of all, I would say a healthy culture and organizational health, it's not, it's actually not healthy if it's not performant. So, right, so performance is part of— if you're not winning, you actually, what's the point? Like, right, you, you need to have outcomes as a, as a team, as a business. And if you're not, that's not, that's not health. And I would say increasingly that, that's been an area that I've grown in in the last couple of years of seeing it's not just— it's healthy culture is really not just keeping everybody happy and, and, you know, sitting around and, and getting along with each other. That's part of it. It's about winning. And it's about, it's about doing what you say you're going to do. And that starts with accountability, starts with holding myself and then everyone around me accountable for, for doing what they say they're going to do and for making and keeping commitments. And so, yeah, I would say I'm still, I'm still growing in my ability to lead performance. And that's a, that's a big, a big focus of mine actually right now.

Well, it's interesting because, you know, and I mentioned this on a most, on a recent episode with Heather Younger where we talk about Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, says if our team doesn't face any adversity early in the season, I will create adversity for my team. And I thought that was very interesting just to think about because I mean, there's, there's a lot of merit to that, right? Especially in a competitive place of like, hey, we need some adversity. We, I always say we need healthy tension. Like if everybody's on the same page, like somebody's lying, right? Like there's somebody's not expressing their full, full thoughts on the matter if all of us are in agreement. And so like, let's at least make sure that's all on the table. Let's create that healthy tension. It's fine. We need to hear all perspectives. As a matter of fact, I just asked my team yesterday, I was like, is this really like, we came to a conclusion on something and I, and I, it was my path forward was the agreed upon path. And I was like, look, am I just convincing everybody that this is the right path or would you have come to this conclusion without me? And I think that's a really important thought exercise for the other stakeholders to go through as well as like, all right, look, is, is Matt just the most convincing guy in the room? Or is this actually something where, you know, given all the facts, I would have come to the same conclusion? And if not, have I expressed every concern I have about why we're going down this path? And that takes a lot of trust internally, which is important. And, you know, it brings me to another like random question, not on the list of stuff I was thinking about, but it's something I've been thinking a lot about lately. The bring your whole self to work, uh, sort of philosophy. You know, I'll say this from time to time, but I don't think any of us really believe this concept, right? Like, do I really want to know everything about you, Dan, if I work with you? Like, I mean, I don't really want you to bring your full self to work, if I'm to be quite honest, right? Like, because then that's all, you know, like, we're all here. You got 8 hours a day at work, you got 8 hours a day at home, 8 hours of sleep, right? Like, it's, it's, you know, we want to be personable. We want to develop relationships. We want to get to know each other. But at the same time, right, like we've seen, you might be of the same age as me or similar in age where it's like, you remember the movie PCU? Did you ever see that movie back in the day? Jeremy Piven's in it. It's an old movie, but everybody's got their causes on this campus and they're, you know, politically correct university and everybody's kind of fighting one another. And like, that's what you see sometimes when everybody brings their whole self to work, right? Like I've seen it internally. We go into a lot of cultures, has an HR support mechanism and say, hey, like, and when everybody's bringing all their causes, opinions, external beliefs into the office, it's very distracting from accomplishing the mission, right? And the same would be said about any sports team. Everybody's going to have a different thought on how the offense should run and, you know, should the defense be in this formation or whatever. And so if we all bring all of our thoughts, opinions, external beliefs, you know, political, religious, everything, it's going to cause a disaster internally. What are your thoughts on the bring your whole self to work thought process?

That's a great question. It's something I've thought a good bit about. I would say, first off, I've made made myself very clear around here that Worthwhile is a, is a mission-focused organization. We are first and foremost here to do what we do and be who we are. And when you show up at work, that's why you're here. You're here to support the mission of this organization. Now, we want, we want the full variety of people to, to be here and, and work here and, and focus on our, our mission and, and So you don't have to have, you don't have to share my beliefs. I don't have to share your beliefs, um, what, or practices, whatever that is. But I do ask that when you're here at work, you're focused on, on supporting our mission first and foremost. And so, uh, that means we're not going to be, we're going to be unified by our shared values and, uh, and we are shared core values as a company. And we're not going to be distracted by the very many, very evident differences between us. There's plenty of ways that we're different. And so I think a lot of organizations spend too much time focusing on the ways that we're different or getting distracted by the ways that we're different rather than being unified by and rallying around the things that make us similar, which are our shared core values.

Yeah, I appreciate that a lot. I mean, one of, one of our core values is authentic-bracken-bracken. To keep it real. And like, you know, the expectation is, again, like, I want you to bring your weird, quirky personality and all the stuff. And when I go out there, I'm going to see people without shoes on and people at standing desks and people, you know, listening to different kinds of music and, and just, you know, with varied interests. And, and love that eclectic feel. Uh, but at the same time, like, you know, I don't come in and start talking about who I voted for for president and, you know, start to try to rally some support around my causes and those sorts of things. And I don't expect anybody else to do it either, right? So it's kind of like the old, you know, sometimes with certain elements of your culture, what was the thing in the '80s or '90s where they were like, you know, what is pornography? You know it when you see it. Like there's certain behaviors where you're like, yeah, you just, you know it when you see it, right? Like we don't want that here. Let's talk about the core values. So one of the things, you know, the biggest takeaway I had when interviewing CEOs, writing the book, Ping Pong's Not a Strategy: How to Create an Awesome Organizational Culture, was this narrative that persisted that I heard from many CEOs was, look, you know, I'd be asking about hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, all the sort of mechanical stuff to develop, you know, human performance in an organization. And they said, look, here's, here's the deal. Like, you've got to have a process, and you've got to have at least a grade of a B at everything, right? Like, if you don't, if you don't have a B hiring process, if you don't have a B onboarding process, if you don't have a B performance management process, if you don't have a B, you know, like core values, you know, iteration, like, you're gonna fail. Like, everything's everything's got to be up, like you can't have any weak spots. Talk to me a little bit about your, your thought on how the human resources processes support the culture, and are there any that you think you're particularly strong at and why?

That's a great question. I think one thing that a lot of organizations get bogged down in is they start to solve problems with policies, and policies to me are actually more like organizational scar tissue. They are the things left over from the time somebody screwed up or somebody did something wrong and it puts your focus in the wrong place. Not to say that there's not a place for policies. Policies can be important. There's legal reasons to have policies, all that. But when I hear someone coming to me saying, Dan, we need a new policy, my first reaction is, no, we don't. Let's look at the root cause. What— why do— why are we thinking we need a policy? Are we keeping someone around that we shouldn't keep around? Are we letting a behavior from one person go unaddressed and therefore Now we're creating a policy to impact everyone else. So all that to say, policies can be important, but I start with what is the root cause? It's actually one of our, one of our values in action is, is fix the root and look at what is the underlying issue here that we're trying to address. And is a, is a policy the best way to address that? Or, or do we need to address that culturally? One example of that is people I'm a big believer in having your video on for virtual meetings. And we have a lot of virtual meetings because we have a hybrid team. But I refuse to make it a policy that you have your video on because I don't want a bunch of policies. And I know that there are reasons, there are good reasons why every now and then somebody needs to not have their camera on. They're driving or, you know, they're dealing with something else or whatever. So I'm not going to make that a policy, but I am going to keep my camera on, lead by example. I'm going to talk about it from time to time and encourage people, but I'm going to avoid policies wherever possible.

Yeah, that was going to be my question is how do you relay that? Right. Because that's an expectation still, I would imagine the expectation is you're going to have your camera on, like whether or not that's written down, it's still the expectation. Right. And like, while there are always exceptions to every quote unquote rule, Uh, you know, we do have to articulate. I always say like the best leader I ever had, shout out Ken Schmidt, if you're out there, you're one of the best leaders I ever had. I don't, I haven't had the chance to tell you that. I should actually write him a note and tell him how much I reference his style. I'm going to put, do that after today. But I always say he was like Catholic. I grew up Catholic. I always say he's like Catholic service, man. Like every January, you know what you're going to hear every February, you know what you're going to hear every March, you know what you're going to hear like, and it was on repeat. And at the time I was always like, dude, my goodness, this guy's so monotonous. It's the same message just all the time. And then I realized as I took a step back, I'm like, well, between new people coming on board, people forgetting, you know, I always think about the parable of the mustard seed, right? Or like when I'm, when I'm throwing seed down, like, when's it going to, uh, not mustard seed, the parable of the sower, like the seed doesn't always take root. So I might have to tell you something 7 times before it takes root. And he was just awesome at keeping the message consistent, right? And sticking to his talking points and understanding like, I also remember once, you know, again, I don't— I hate to reference Tim Ferriss twice in one podcast, but very influential guy. But I remember listening to him on his own podcast and then listening to him on some other podcasts and then another podcast. And I heard the same story 3 times across those 3 things. And I was like, oh, that's— yeah, first in my head I was like, that's kind of hokey. But I was like, look, those are 3 different audiences, right? And so he's telling you, if you tell the same story 3 different times, like it takes a long time to get comfortable using that muscle of redundancy. Is that something that you find in your day-to-day where you have to kind of like, okay, I know I just said this 30 days ago, but in reality, I know I got to say it again too. Is that a thought that ever comes to your mind?

Oh, absolutely. And I think it's Patrick Lencioni who says people don't need to be instructed as much as they need to be reminded. And so sometimes the CEO's job is to be the chief reminding officer. And that's something that I've had to grow in over the years is I used to think, well, I've said that I've said it 3 times, said it 5 times. It doesn't matter how many times you said it, you're the chief reminding officer. So you've got to, you've got to be on repeat over and over and over again. And the best leaders, the best CEOs, it seems like they, when you hear them talk, they, it sounds like they're, they're saying the same 5 things over and over and over and over and over again. So I've had to really work at being one, writing myself clear, like we talked about earlier, being really clear on what I, what I believe, what I stand for, what's important to this company. And then just repeating it until I'm nauseous about it. That usually means it's, it's, it's getting through when I'm, when, when I am getting tired of saying it or hearing it, hearing myself say it.

Our core values read a little bit more. I remember once having like a 22-year-old who was fresh out of college and she was like, man, these are just great life lessons. Like if I live my life this way, like I feel like my life is going to be pretty good. And that was kind of. Of, you know, whether you want it to be or not, like your core values are 100% a reflection of the founder's values, right? Like there, there's no other way to say it. Like ultimately you'll crowdsource some of this as an organization, but if you don't believe it, live it, can't model it, can't, you know, replicate it, like then it's never going to happen. So I remember early on, one of our core values was something about, you know, it's some catchy term about attention to detail. And I am like the least detail-oriented person ever.. And I quickly realized like, man, this, we keep touting this value and I can't model it. Like it's not me. And so, you know, this thing's gotta go. I can't just keep beating everybody over the head with the expectation of a highest level of attention to detail when it's not my thing. But you know, there are things in here. One of ours is, is, you know, E R O, event plus response equals outcome. And we talk a lot about, you know, life is 10%, what happens 90%, how you react. Like we're in a world of professional services, a lot of customer service aspect to that. So, you know, the thing is, I always joke with people when they start, I'm like, look, you're going to have a great plan every day when you come in because you're super well organized. And then somebody's going to fire you an email first thing that's going to remove 3 hours of your day because you're going to get off on a project that, you know, a client needs today. And that's just our world. And so you've got to like walk in with, hey, the confidence of the preparation, but also know that if something happens, you've got to be able to mentally adjust and move on and like not be huffing and puffing about it all day and not let it ruin your day. And because we've had people where that happens. Happens, right? That's a, that's a personality type. And so I say all that to say, now we have dialed in. I think we're not perfect by any stretch, but we hire for core values really well because we make it part of the process from the initial screening conversation throughout the interview process. We have questions dialed in around each of our most important values. And then, you know, during onboarding and during interviewing, we're constantly reiterating those. And then they're everywhere, right? We're talking about them every Monday. We're talking about them, uh, they're on the wall, they're on the t-shirts, they're, you know, we're about to put more graphics up around here with more, uh, with the values on it. It's a nonstop thing. How do you guys keep the core values top of mind, and what are some ways that you infuse them into your hiring process to make sure that you're hiring people that align with those values?

I love what you said about, about core values and realizing they've got to be authentic and true to who you are as a leader and who you are as an organization. I see core values as the, the ideas that are at the intersection of what is most true about an organization, which is what you were talking about, but also what is most unique about an organization. Because if it's just true, like, you know, we have integrity. Well, that's great, but every organization should have that to some extent.

That was on Enron's wall.

Yeah, that's a prerequisite for doing business. But if you add unique to the qualification as well, then you start to make your core values something that become a hiring tool and a training tool and a reinforcement tool to keep you true to your organization as you grow and as you add and change and add people. So that's the first idea is core values for us are what are— what exists about an organization at the intersection of what is most true and what is most unique. And then the second thing that's important for us when it comes to core values is then translating them to behaviors, translating them to action, because if they're just ethereal to the organization if they're up here, that's good, but they don't really matter until they hit at the, at the ground level and translate to behaviors and action. So what we've done is we've expressed our core values really clearly, and then we've, we've taken them a level down and described our values in action, which are 20 specific actions that describe what it looks like to live out our values on day in and day out basis. These are things we do and things we don't do, how we interact with each other, how we interact with our clients, and they're highly, highly practical. And what that means when you make your values practical and actionable is you can train on them, you can celebrate them because you'll know when someone lived out one of those things, when someone did or didn't do one of those things, so you can brag on them and celebrate them. And it also builds your conviction as a leader to know when they're being lived out or when they're not being lived out, because there's, there's not much room for debate anymore.

How do you disseminate, train, and recognize those actions?

Yeah. So, so first off, our values in action are sort of always a work in progress. Well, well, well, our core values are pretty much set. Those haven't changed for years. They won't change for years. Our values in action, I am actively cultivating. Probably annually where I will say, all right, with this value in action, we're pretty universally good with it. We don't need to keep reinforcing it. Let's drop it. Let's replace it with something else. Here's a gap in the organization, something that we've messed up consistently or we're missing consistently. Let's add a value in action related to that and start, and start reinforcing that. But a couple of things that we do. One, every person in the organization in their job description has a handful of those values in action that they've got to master and they've got to be really good at with their job. So it starts at the front door with saying, all right, here's, here's our core values. Here's our values in action. These are the 4 to 6 values in action that you got to nail every time based on your, based on your job. So we make it, make that really clear. And then on a performance review, we're rating the person not just on our core values, but also on those values in action that are most critical to their, to their job. What we're also doing is we are— every week we have a— it's sort of the centerpiece of our company culture. Every week we have an all-hands Zoom call, and one of the things that we do in that, in that short Zoom call is we open it up to, to the whole company so that anyone can brag on anyone else for exhibiting one of our values or values in action in in the previous week. And someone will share, I saw, you know, so-and-so do this and here's the situation, here's where they did it. And I was really proud of them and I want to make, make sure they got recognized for that. And, and then, and then it'll just go on and on and on and people will start sharing stuff and they'll keep sharing stuff. And sometimes you run out of material in the week before the meeting's over. Sometimes you have to shut off the meeting when time's expired because they're still going. Going with, with BRAGS for our values in action. So those are— there's more we do, but those are a couple, couple of key tools that we use to make sure that we maintain and reinforce our values as we grow.

I like that. It's a step deeper than what we do in terms of, you know, we take some time every Monday to recognize teammates, get the opportunity to recognize each other living out the values the previous week. You get a point anytime somebody recognizes you. You get 5 points, you get to spin the wheel. The wheel's got all sorts of gift cards and stuff on it, whatever. But it gets— it's gotten pretty stale in terms of like, you We've got 6 values, like everybody tends to really hover around 2 of them in terms of recognition. And so like the values in action, I feel like is that layer deeper to say, hey, oh, here's some specific ideas on things that like you can be a little bit more adapted, you know, in tune to doing yourself, but also, you know, catching others doing good things. And I think that's a really important like leadership philosophy is catching others doing good things. I think too many people are hung up on, you know, I've abused the quote 100 times over the last year, you know, if you spend your whole life telling than a fish to— you're trying to teach a fish to climb a tree, you know, it's going to think it's stupid or something along that. I think it's a Mark Twain quote. And, and, you know, we do that with our teammates all the time. Like, I've done it with one of our best teammates. I've spent more time trying to fix weaknesses than pour into strengths, right? And so when it comes to like, where am I going to get the best return? Well, if I've got a— you know, again, I'll go back to the sports analogy— well, if I got a person who can run a 4.44 and the whole time I'm, I'm working on trying to teach them to be a better blocker, and I'm so frustrated that they're not a blocker and I'm not just throwing up a deep ball to him over and over again. It's like, well, look, you're going to be frustrated with your results because you're focused too much on their weaknesses and not enough on their strengths. And, you know, we've got to be willing to throw up the deep ball to the person who's speedy and get the edge.

So that's right. There's a, there's a great, great book called Setting the Table by Danny Meyer. He talks a lot about, about customer service, but he talks about culture too. And one of the things he says along the lines of what you were just saying, I think, is is your culture is the sum of all the good behaviors that you celebrate minus all the bad behaviors that you tolerate. So you have to, you have to address both. You have to address the bad behaviors and you have to celebrate the good. And your culture is the sum of those two things.

We've certainly seen a lift with selective exits over the years, but I see it more with my clients. I have one client that's been with us for Golly, we've been in business 10 years. I'm pretty sure he's been with us 9 and a half. And twice now in those 9 and a half years, he's had a person that has basically just submarined an office. Like, she's so nasty. She's so critical. She's so hard to work with. It's making everybody else on edge. And, you know, it just happened these two were females. I'm not saying this is a character trait or anything, but the, like, and same, you know, I just had this conversation with him a month ago and it was a repeat of this happening once before, maybe 5 years ago. And I was like, do you remember when you let Mary go? Like the sense of relief and like the uplift and attitude and morale of everybody on the team. Like, that's what you're about to get again. And because again, to your point, like, people see you tolerating this, people see you accepting this, people see this as the norm, and it's impacting them in a whole bunch of different ways that are completely unacceptable. And so, you know, the selective exit is definitely a tool we have to use as a leader and Look, we can get into the mechanics behind that, but you know, the same thing I told him, I'm telling more and more people now. It used to be very common if I terminate somebody in that situation, I put together a laundry list of, you know, documentation and all the situations that they caused or were a part of. Well, guess what that is? Subjective. And you know who else is going to find it subjective? Their attorney, because they're certainly going to bring it to an attorney. But you know what's not subjective is, hey Dan, we've made the business decision that it's no longer in our best it's in our best interest for you to be employed here. And here's a severance and best of luck. And you know what an attorney can do with that? Absolutely nothing. So, you know, be careful in how you go about these selective exits, but that's your compliance piece. I did have to— this is called Culture and Compliance, right? I got to hit on compliance somewhere in there. All right. I want to finish up talking about the balance of personal and professional life. So this is something I'm very passionate about. I'm a, again, a man in his mid-40s who has 2 children, 11 and 13 years old. We have a lot of extracurriculars. I like to travel. I like to do fun things. I like to stay fit. I like to exercise every day. Like, I, I want to live a full life and I want to model that for my team. So one of the things I do is I leave every day at 4 o'clock. Does everybody's schedule allow them to leave at 4 o'clock? Absolutely not. And would I expect somebody in their 20s to be leaving work every day at 4 o'clock and working from, you know, 9 AM to 4? Unfortunately, all, it's not the way it works. I put in my time in my 20s and 30s, uh, so that some of the time is not as necessary today in terms of learning and establishing a base. But I say all that to say, what are some ways that you create and model the behavior that you expect from your team? You know, one of the things I found in my research here is you've visited all 50 states, 33 national parks, and 9 countries with your family. Obviously, you have a big focus on, you know, travel, extracurricular outside of work, living that full life. What are some ways you model build that for your team and make sure that they understand that that's an important part of your culture?

Well, we give generous PTO to encourage people to take time away, and we encourage PTO to really be PTO, to unplug as much as possible. We're not zealous about it, but we do encourage people to own their time, take ownership over their PTO, and make sure that they do unplug. And I'm a believer in that because I've seen that help me. And one of the ways I've been able to travel, and I do love to travel, by the way, one of the ways I've been able to do that is by focusing on taking larger chunks of time off. That's been a game changer for me. It's one thing to take a, you know, long weekend, another thing to take a week. But once you get into 2 weeks plus off and unplugged, you come back and you start to notice things that you didn't notice before. You start to notice maybe some unwanted behaviors that you've been tolerating that you didn't even know you were tolerating. You start to notice some wanted behaviors that you weren't celebrating that you need to be celebrating. Talking about, talking about culture. I don't really notice things, new things, unless I can be gone for like 2 weeks. So I've been gradually working my way up, taking 2 weeks, I've taken 3 weeks. I actually took a month off this last year, uh, and that was great because I, I think it, as leaders, it takes us a while to actually unplug, even if you're not working to mentally unplug from thinking about work so that you can come back rested, refreshed, and noticing things again that you wouldn't notice in the daily grind.

Well, you know, there's this— so Bill Gates does his— I forget what he calls it— you know, Think Week or something, where he goes and locks himself in a cabin for a week with nothing but books, no internet, and does that every year. And while I honestly don't even want to do that, that doesn't sound appealing to me at all. The, uh, yeah, like, it sounds like that dang Aaron Rodgers like went to a house that was dark for like 3 days and there's like no light gets in. And I think he had to get out after like a day and a half. Like, I mean, that's kind of what in my head I'm more like, oh my goodness, it sounds awful. The, uh, like, can I, can I at least just have the internet if I'm going to be there alone for a week? But I have started to take it. And this is, you know, beyond the, like, hey, all the stuff you said is really important. Time away is just important. But every year we take a family trip out to to Pawleys Island, at least one. And it— I've over the last couple years turned it into like, all right, when I'm here, I'm going to work, quote unquote. But that work is going to be more like, you know, I was going to ask you early on, you were talking about some of the tools you use. Like, I played with Replit AI Agent out there for like 2 straight days, seeing what I could build, seeing what it's doing, seeing where it's lacking. Is this going to be valuable to us or not? You know, several other tools, kind of same thing. All the stuff that you, you know, would be distracting to maybe do during a normal week, month, year, you know, sort of a testing and learning phase. And, and I found that, like, once I sort of labeled it that, to be incredibly valuable. Like, hey, I'm not out here to answer emails, I'm not out here to do traditional work, I'm going to do more testing and learning while I'm here. And, you know, for me that was great, and, and I know for others it is too. But you also just touched on something that, that I realized last night. I'm getting ready to write a post about this, but. You know, not having policies allows you to, like, the day after Christmas, we're sitting here December 19th when we're recording this, so Christmas is next week and it's on like a, what, a Christmas Day is a Thursday, I think, or maybe a Wednesday. It's either Wednesday or Thursday. And I'm like, man, you know what I don't want to do the day after Christmas is come to the office at 9 AM. And you know what nobody else wants to do the day after Christmas? Come to the office at 9 AM. What feels good to me? Like, noon feels good. So like, let's just do noon, y'all. Like, I'm just going to send a group chat. Like, we're just going to come in noon the day after Christmas. Is that cool? All right. Everybody's cool with that. If you need to come in for some reason or you want to come in, great. But like, let's not rush it in. And that's what I love about— is that in our, in our handbook and our policy and our PTO policy? No, but we just have the ability to do that and say, hey, like, this is the day of the week it falls on this year. Let's make a judgment call on what's best for everybody. And oh yeah, let's leave at, you know, X time the day before Christmas Eve. Like, ah, geez, do I want to work all day Christmas Eve? Now, kind of same thing, like, what's the policy in the manual? Well, we get Christmas Day off. Well, in reality, that's not enough. Let's just go ahead and cut everybody this day too. All right, great. So, you know, I love being able to make those decisions on the fly. When you get too hung up in policy, you just can't. Have you read the book about Netflix, the No Rules Rules Netflix culture book?

I have, yeah.

Okay, yeah, that was a big sort of, you know, big push in there. And the Netflix culture document, you can still find the original PDF on, forget the SlideShare their site, but I'm sure you've read it. But the original 150-page deck from Netflix, if you haven't read it, you need to read it if you're listening to this right now. If you made it this long, you get a damn award anyway. I mean, we're almost an hour into this thing. So we were joking with Dan when we jumped on, you know, audience retention at minute 53 is pretty low percentage-wise. So all of you that are here, thank you. We're really honored that you would stick with us this long. Give us a one-parting piece of advice and where to find you, Dan. You know, what advice would you give to other leaders that are looking to balance their, their core values, their professional life, and living a full personal life effectively?

Start by defining who you are and what you care about early on. Why did— why were you put on the earth to do what you do and be who you are? Um, so think about your— think about your, your purpose. And again, that's what you're good at, the intersection of what you're good at and what's unique about you. And then in your business, work on expressing your core values early and often, even if you're you're a one-person startup and you've got no employees, go ahead and start capturing those things now early on. Or if you're a big, a big company that hasn't been so intentional about describing what your core beliefs and differentiators are, do it now. It's never, it's never too early. It's never too late.

Love it. And where can people find you if they want to connect with you after this?

Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm there. I write every now and then. I hope to write more. So follow me on LinkedIn.

Gotta write more, man. Gotta write more. But only if there's a, only if there's a reason for it, right? That's right. But awesome. Thank you so much, Dan. We appreciate your time and we'll talk to you all next time.

Thanks, Matt.