EntreLeadership - #229: Dina Dwyer Owens—Why Values Matter

Episode Date: October 23, 2017

During her tenure at Dwyer Group, Co-Chair Dina Dwyer-Owens has helped grow the company into a billion-dollar international business. She credits much of that financial success to the company’s rock-solid system of core values. While many companies have them, most (think 95%) don’t do a thing with them. Tune in to find out how intentionally putting values into action can add major value to your bottom line. Now that’s an investment worth making. entreleadership.com/podcast Create Your Culture Workbook How to Create Core Values Supercharge Your E-Commerce Business With Marketing Automation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Our feature conversation this episode is with Dina Dwyer Owens. Now, you undercover boss fans might remember her. She's the former CEO of Dwyer Group, an amazingly powerful franchise business.

She's got a book out called Values Inc. How incorporating values into business and life can change the world. So we'll discuss that and so much more, you're really going to love it. And I'm very excited. Oh, my goodness. I get to introduce you to our new vice president of Entre leadership. Now for you, Daniel Tarty fans, don't freak out. Daniel is still with us.

He is now moved on from being a grand pooh-bah. to Grand Puba Emeritus for Entree leadership. So still involved, but moved up the ladder, and I can't wait for you to meet his more-than-worthy replacement. So that's going to be fun. And, of course, we're going to bring you some resources that are absolutely free and guaranteed to help you grow yourself, your team, and your profits.

All right, let's get right to it. I told you a little bit about Dina Dwyer-Owens. And for the record, of those of you who want to go back and watch her episode of Undercover Ball. She was on Season 3. And of course, our conversation, to my knowledge, I think Eric the producer, that this is our first deep dive on values. As we really lock in the entire conversation of values, what do they look like?

How do you identify them? How do you fix them? Values, values, values. Sit back or keep peddling if you're on the exercise bike. Whatever it is you're doing, make sure that you're listening. Here is Dina Dwyer Owen. Well, Dina, it's great to have you with us. It's very exciting to have some folks in our new studio.

So welcome. Very nice place. I'm honored to be here with you today. Well, I'm excited because the book that we're going to spend most of our time talking about is entitled Values, Inc. How Incorporating Values into Business and Life can change the world. There it is right there. And this is fun because I was talking to you moments before we went live. And I don't know that we've had a deep dive conversation on this show.

about values. So I'm really excited about it because it's a universal word. In the world that we live in, Dina, if I say values to leaders, it conjures up all kinds of things. And if I say, well, what are your values? And everybody's going to have a quick response and what we're going to give something of substance. But the reality is, this is where I want to start, you wrote this book and you teach so much about this because values in a lot of organizations are just like trophies. there's not a whole lot of active oomph behind them. Why is that? It's so true.

I say that 95% of the companies in North America do nothing with their values once are written. I think there are some leaders, as you kind of pointed out, who don't see that values translate into financial results. I think there are other leaders who spend all this time in strategic planning process, and I'm sure there's lots of viewers out there who have done this. They get clarity about their mission, their vision, and their values. get back to the office and just get back to work, right? They don't put the values to work.

And I think it's mostly because they don't know how, right? We're in franchising. Do our groups are franchise organization? So what does a franchise company do? We take what's most important. We create systems around that so that they can be replicated. People can achieve success because of those systems that have been proven. So I think what they need to do is they need to find a way to how do we take our values

and create systems around those values so that they become front and center. They become part of our DNA. Right. But you can't create a system around a value if the value isn't being lived out and it's not in front of us every day. So let's stay where we were at. So people, they go, okay, we're going to say these are company values. We're going to put them on the wall. But then they're just things that we like the way they sound. How do you go from really assessing what your values are currently to what you want your values to be? In other words, a lot of times we say these are our values. But if you're we allow visitors into our organization and they are doing a checklist and go, I don't see that value here. Here's what I see are your values. Talk about that reality. You've got to be congruent. And so if the leader of that organization inherited those values, somebody who came to an organization that's already existing doesn't have a line with those values, it's not going to work. So you asked, so how do they get clarity about their values? And I think there's a simple

process. We'll talk about this, maybe more towards the end, but I've created a workbook called Create Create Your Culture. complement to values, Inc. It's six simple steps for how do you create culture and how do you make sure your values are truly aligned with who you say you are and how you actually live the values. So it's clarity. And I think it takes team. I think the leader has got to drive the values and live by example, but they've got to get the team engaged. If the team doesn't bind to the values, it will never work. So I think that clarity is key. If you've started the company, you've founded it based on this set of values and yet maybe you've not done a good job recruiting

who are aligned with that, that's another problem. But you've got to have a leader who really believes in the values and is executing to the best of their abilities because there's no perfect company out there. Right. We're far from perfect, but you know what? We've got this high bar we've set. It's our values. And if we get close to hitting that bar every day, we're doing a pretty darn good job versus having a low bar and meeting it. All right, so we have a lot of small businesses listening in here and watching.

If they've not created value statements or just put some values out there in front of the entire organization, never done that, before. This could feel a little daunting. Let's just start with some basic things, whether they're by themselves at first or they get with their top leaders and they just beat them around for a day. What's the process for beginning to articulate values? I think step one of the process, and this is in the Create Your Culture Workbook, is it's simply a worksheet of maybe 130 potential values. So start with getting that key leadership team to either do it as homework or get around a table and say for the next half an hour, let's go through this list. You identify what you think our values are by simply circling them. I mean, it doesn't have to be hard. What are those things that you think

we really stand for? And then coming together and saying, here's what I wrote, what did you write, getting up on a board and then just identifying where there's consistency. And then saying, okay, so how many values do we really want to focus on? Let's say we want to focus on a half a dozen values. So let's agree what those are, right? You've written down what you think is important. This is a company. Every now what I think is important, let's bring them together, let's find alignment, and then let's pick the top six, for example. And then there's the next step after that. How important is it from an entrepreneurial standpoint, if it's a small business that an entrepreneur that's still leading is there, so they're that founder or they're part of that

founding family, how important is it when you're walking through values to go back to the original story? To me, that's what I love about small business or any big, huge brand that started out. I love the story. And to me, it feels like a lot of the core values, whether we want to keep them or not, but some core values happened in those early parts of the story. Do you agree with that? I do. How do you go mind those?

It tells the story. In the case of our company, the company was founded on core values. And we were so small that the leader held us accountable, who happened to be my father, right? So as a kid working for a father, I'm sure many listeners and yours have done that. You work the hardest typically and held most accountable. in our case to the values. So in that setting, he'd let us know each day

whether you lived up or you didn't live up with the values based on his opinion. But in organizations where you're coming in and you're saying, here are the values, how are we going to drive these home?

I think it's having that healthy conversation with the team on, what would our customers say? Would the customers agree that this is what we're really living? If they wouldn't agree, how do we go back to the foundation of this company

and either rewrite those so it is, in fact, what we're living, or step up a bit to be able to live what this company was founded on. I think the foundation, as you said, is really, how was this company built? What was it built on? I don't think you should ever forget that, but sometimes you have to build up from that. We went from what you might call belief systems, right?

One of our values was loyalty adds meaning to our lives. That sounds great. And we want loyal team members. We want loyal franchisees. But how do you measure that? How do you measure somebody's being loyal? That's tough. So our next iteration was how do we take those original beliefs and how do we operationalize them?

So we say loyalty adds meeting, what does that look like operationally? How could I measure whether or not Ken was living up to this particular value so that we can hold ourselves accountable to the values as well as holding one another accountable? Yeah. I love what you just said there. I want to stay there because the idea of when you get clear on values, then how do you make sure those values are matriculating throughout the entire organization? So you've got internal functions of the value, then you have external functions, meaning there's a value that's lived out within the four walls,

but then for our customers, how do those values come alive in every facet of the organization? To me, isn't that the million dollar question with values? And it should be the experience the customer has, right? Where they can come back and say, you guys don't just have these on the wall or on the website. You actually live these. I experienced these values.

So I think one of the mistakes, many leaders make when they come up with their values, they come up with words. That's right, because it sounds good. It sounds good. It's lofty. So we believe in respect. We believe in integrity. We believe in honesty. It's like, okay, so what do you mean by respect? So I think in order for the customer have the experience, you've got to define as a leader what you mean by respect. So we've done it at Dwyer, for example, is one of the values under respect is speaking calmly and respectfully without profanity or sarcasm. Now, we're in the trades businesses. Not all trades people use profanity, but some have a bad habit.

Our customers don't want to hear that. So one of our clearly written values is speaking calmly and respectfully without profanity or sarcasm. That is how we show respect to the customers. So if we're in a customer's home as a service provider and they have an experience with a professional who's in there fixing the plumbing problem or the HVAC problem, they never hear a word of profanity come out of their mouths. That's exceptional, right? That's a different experience. So the customer is going to say, wow, you guys really do live your values. But we also tell the customer about our values.

So we'll go into that situation and we'll educate them on who we are as a company. And then we go back and we measure, right? We do net promoter score. Many of your listeners may also do net promoter score. We ask, how are we doing? Would you promote us to a friend or family member? And if they won't, then we're likely not living up to our values. We've got to measure that you're living up to them.

Yeah, I really love this. I think if I were to sit down with some folks and try to help them figure it out as a professional question asker, I'm going to ask things like, well, what matters most to you? Meaning, as leaders of the company, what matters most internally, externally? That's when you really get at a value, not a word. Right. But if you start with a word, then it feels like you're trying to back the word into our behavior as opposed to going what behavior should be, right? And then when we get that answer to me, then you can maybe look for a word. Yeah. Is that experience? Is that the right experience?

I think that if you know that you want to be known as a company that's respectful of your customers, you know that that word respect is important to you. Sure. Yeah, what's that look on? How do you demonstrate it? Right. I think it's key that those behaviors are clearly identified and in writing. Right. So don't just have the word respect and then expect your team members to live up to that word, not knowing, what do you really mean by that? You know, we work with a lot of millennials today. We all do. And millennials want to be part of a company that has mission and purpose. And when you say, look, this is what we mean by respect. They're either going to be aligned with your company, what you mean by respect,

or they're going to go, yeah, you're not for me. And that's okay. We'd rather know that now than before we hire them and train them. So I think that you've got to know what you stand for, but then have real clarity about what are the behaviors that are attached to that word. All right. I want to spend a little bit of time having you talk on two key parts of the leader's role when it comes to values.

Communicating, I'm making this up. So if there's something I'm missing, throw it in here. But I think you've got to communicate the values over and over again. I want you to speak to that first. And then I want you to come back and let's talk about how to model. Because you can communicate something all day long. I'm a parent and I can communicate it. But if I'm not modeling it, it's not going to stick with my kiddos.

Communicating what works in your experience in communicating values, when you really begin to get serious about this and let the people know, hey, these are our values and we're not just going to talk about them. We're going to keep talking about them and talk about it. them and talk about them. How do you do that? That's the key. Talk about them, talk about them, talk about, you know, I know when I get on the stage or I get in front of a meeting, they're going, we know Dean is going to talk about values first. Right. So it's a consistency of the leader, never getting tired of keeping the values again, front and center. So the communication is

key. And because we're in franchising, we create systems. The system does it for us. So whether Dean Dwyer is around or not, it's not going to matter because Mike Biddle, our CEO is around and our chief operating officers around and our brand presidents are around and our front desk employees around and they know that I work for a company that has clear values and anytime there's a meeting of three or more of us we're supposed to talk about these values so it's creating that system the habit of not only the leader the CEO or founder talking about the values but it's the habit of you you call a meeting with three of your team members here somebody better make sure we're starting that meeting off with the values and if you've forgotten somebody else better hold you

accountable, say, hey, Ken, we're supposed to talk about the values. And sometimes, you know, in our case, we talk about all 15. That's a lot. Talk about all 15. Other cases, we'll say, you know, we just got feedback from a customer and we can get better at responding timely. What can we do this week to focus on getting better at responding timely and make it the topic of discussion for that meeting? Many times we'll kick a meeting off, and this is what I advise the listeners to do, kick a meeting off by saying, this meeting is about this value. So let's talk about this value first, and let's talk about how we're going to do a better job of living it as we work on this project or how we provide this experience for the customer, whatever it might be.

It's that top of the mind day in and dad in your organization. And when they really know that it's working is when you and I are having a conflict, and I say, you know, Ken, let's look to the values for a solution to this. One of my favorites that we have, Ken, is looking to the system for correction and proposing all possible solutions when something's not working. That falls under our integrity. And so if something is not working in this relationship or in this area of our business, it should be automatic in my mind as a leader to say, Ken, it's not about you. It's not about me. It's about the system.

How do we look to the system for correction and make this better next time? So neither one of us have this experience again. So it becomes, again, part of the way you think about your business day in and day out in the relationships and how you solve problems. And so if as a leader, if you're not modeling, if there's constant communication that you've built in to the culture. And if the leader's not modeling it, it'll never work. It just won't work. They get called out pretty fast. They do. Your team will never buy into it. I love that. You know, and one of the ways that your, your listeners and viewers can indoctrinate the team into this is modeling something we did. We gamified our values. So when we took the original core values that our founder created,

we operationalized them, it was new to us. It was new to our 125 employees at the time. So we said, let's indoctrinate them by giving them this simple laminated card. with all the values on it. And we said, look, team, we think this is a solution to keeping our culture special once our founder passed away. He's not here anymore. We need to operationalize the values. Study these values. And any time you catch one of us doing something wrong, give us feedback. The feedback came in the form of a beep. And it's silly. And yet it worked, right? Because they they love the idea of catching us doing something wrong. So they studied the values more than you would have ever thought. They would have studied it. And for 90 days, it was like the roadrunner,

was racing through our buildings because it was a verbal beep, literally. You violate a value, you'd get a beep. It worked. I can only imagine. What was the response from the leadership as they're getting beeped? I mean, give me the good, bad, and the ugly. Yeah, well. Because I mean, at some point that's got to get on your nerves. One of the bad, well, first of all, we got beep so often that we thought this is depressing. We're terrible. We don't live our own values. Instead of getting depressed, though, we said, wait a second, there's an opportunity. here. We're a pretty good company already. What have we really really lived these? How much better could we be as a company? So we had to just laugh because we were beeped so often.

So some of the bad, though, is we had one team member who was beeped and actually flipped an employee off. Okay. Shot the bird, right? You know, you're like, not what you would have expected, but she ended up not being right for our company. So what happened is when we agreed as an organization that we were going to lead with these values, she self-selected out. And great lady, but wasn't right for our team anymore because she didn't believe any employee below her had the right to give her that kind of feedback. And that's okay. We're not for everybody. You have to know that about yourself. When you know what your values are, that clarity becomes alive. And it works. Yes. I love that. It forces this awkward but important reality of, okay, if this isn't you, then you aren't us. That's right. And that's

okay. That's totally okay. It doesn't mean you're bad. Yeah, but this is who we are. That's right. Ooh, I like that. That's really fun. Then you use it in the interview process, right? So it's a conversation you're having an interview process. Sure. It's a conversation during performance reviews. It's a conversation when somebody's getting promoted. We're promoting you because you adhere to our values. It really is tremendous accountability. That's another buzzword. Oh, accountability. But when you have this kind of clarity and modeling of values, it's just like a giant mirror everywhere. It is. And every day in our business, I could give you an example every day where I've experienced either me having to hold accountability to myself for violating a value or another team member,

where it's just part of the conversation. It naturally just comes out. I love that you're a franchising company because in your role as CEO, you can really help explain something to our non-franchise-type businesses. But Systems is a word that I'm a little bit of a freak about because I'm such a sports fan. So if you study great teams, you pick the sports. sport. It does not matter. But if you study great athletic teams, you will find that they've all got a very healthy culture and they've got great systems. And I think they feed off of each other.

You know, you can try to create a great culture, but if you don't systematize it, you said that a few minutes ago. You said, we systematize it. Okay. So that being the setup, here you've got the mothership, okay, your company. And then you've got all these different, what do you call it, franchise? Franchise. family. Yeah, it's a family. So these are people that come from outside the business and they say, hey, I want to be a part of it. You say, okay, but here's the way we do things. And the franchisee has to essentially adopt. This is the way we do it. Right. If they don't do it that way, what happens? We try to redirect them, right? Coach them to the system. Yeah. Well, we have to, right? Because they're not just affecting their own business and the equity in their own business. They're affecting the equity of all the other franchisees in the business. And today, Because of our values, we launched an overarching brand called get neighborly.com. It's a comprehensive platform of home service providers, really. It's one place to go for all your home service needs.

Ken, without our values and attracting, the values have attracted mostly the right franchisees to organization. We're not a perfect company. I'll say that 10 million times because we are not. There are no perfect people. But we have, because of our values, attracted the right franchisees who want to deliver on the values and the brand promise, which builds everybody's equity and creates this amazing customer experience. When a franchisee does not comply

with the system and the values, we coach, we coach, and eventually if they don't take the coaching well, we have to invite them to leave. We help them resell their business. It's a beautiful thing about a franchise is that there's something there to sell or should be unless they've damaged the business

by not operating it properly, but we help them get out of it and we find somebody else that we think is better aligned with our values who truly wants to implement those systems, but the systems, like you said, are really the key. You're the secret sauce. Yeah, so let's talk about systems. How does a successful franchising company like yours, how do you really succeed?

Give me the secrets. How do you make systems work outside of the mothership around people that you can't monitor all the time? How does it work? Well, it's all about the coaching. So we have franchise consultants, much like you have here at Ramsey's Solutions. You're coaching people up. And we have franchise coaches who are responsible for holding the franchisees accountable to the system. Franchisees need to hold us accountable as well, right?

There are certain things we've agreed to provide the franchisees. So it's this relationship. It's all about relationships in franchising. So it's all about this relationship and having that constant communication. We have performance reviews. So it's a performance review that's going to help the franchisee look at their business and help them take it to the next level. Well, that benefits them.

And at the same time, it helps us understand what's the help. of that organization? What's the health of that business? Are they complying with the systems that we promised to deliver to the customer? Because at the end of the day, the customer's not happy. We hear about it. And that's when we know we've got a problem if we haven't discovered on our own. How often do you change the plays? This is my sports analogy. You know, like, this is our offense. And you don't want some 18-year-old freshman coming in telling you, well, coach, I think we should run the play this way when the coach is won for years and years and years. However, there's always opportunity to iterate, to innovate. That's right. How do you change the

plays and keep that system fresh? Yeah. We have advisory councils with each one of our franchise brands, and it's made up of key leaders, key franchise leaders in those organizations that are typically nominated by the franchise network that they're part of. And we pick their brains, and we talk about how do we get better, constantly looking at ways to get better, protecting the parts the system that we know are critical yet saying, what can we do to enhance this? With technology, there's all kinds of enhancements. And we've got to be open to what the franchisee has to share who's out there every day working with the end user customer. We're not. We're sitting in Waco, Texas or some office around the world supporting franchisees. So we are actually very open to get

that feedback. And then we take the collective brain trust of the franchisees that are part of that organization and say, is this something we should try? And usually we'll test it first, We'll do a small, quick test. If that test works, we'll expand it within that one brand. If it works really well for that one brand, we'll look at the other sister brands and say, this probably would work here too. So it's that collaboration. But start with maybe a quick and small test.

Try it out. In the old days, we made so many errors, right? We'd come with this great idea. Maybe a franchisee gave us a great idea. And right away, it's kind of like McDonald's burger. All of a sudden, we're going to throw a different kind of onion on this burger. And you just do it without testing it. And then you think, oh, my goodness.

Yes. We just made a huge error. So the small testing has become the way that we try new things out that are in improvement or appear to be an improvement to the system without putting ourselves into a situation where it's hard to get out of it if you've tried something too big with that first testing. That's really smart. That's really good. Testing, testing, testing.

Yeah. Small, quick. I've gotten several emails over the last year from listeners who have said, Ken, I need some advice on how to lead up on an idea. And I love this question for you specifically because you see it come from franchisees. decentralization. Poster. I want you to speak as an executive. If someone's going to come to you from lower in the organization and make a suggestion of a change to a system that has worked really, really well, what's the right posture for someone to go up to leadership and say this

needs to change? What's the right way to handle that? Yeah, you know, and I am co-chair today at the company. I have a CEO now who has been running the company for three years. What I would say to that team member is thank you. Thank you for having the courage to bring an idea to us. And one of our values is to listen with the intent to understand what's being said and acknowledge that what is said is important to the speaker. It took courage for that employee. Sure.

To come to me or to come to our CEO with that idea. So I would acknowledge that it took courage. I would thank them for that courage. And if I felt like it wasn't going to be a good fit, I probably wouldn't waste their time believing that that's going to go somewhere else. I might say, based on experience, this is what's happened, or I might say, you know, let me bring that to the team. Let me bring that to the growth team or to the president's group

or to the marketing team. And let us hash it around. And we might come back to you with some questions. But thank you again for bringing the idea to me. Because when people don't believe you're listening to their ideas, they'll quit bringing you ideas. And we won't continue to grow as an organization, the way that I like to grow.

That's true. That's really good. Yeah, you stunt the growth when people feel like you never listen to their ideas. There's so much content in the book. I do want you to summarize it. We've covered a lot, but I want you to summarize the book, and I've got a couple of chapters I want to dive into, but I first wanted you to be able to tell our audience,

what you do for the readers, you walk them through this particular book. Yeah. The main purpose for writing that book, I had an initial book called Leverich, which is the acronym for our values, that I wrote primarily because we were growing so fast as a company to try to help our new franchisees

and our new employees understand who we were. And people started buying that book outside of the company. And then I had people saying, you know, this value stuff is just warm and fuzzy, but I'm not sure it really translates into financial results. So I said, I've got to write a new book. And this needs to be a book that's for the general public. And it's not just for business leaders. This is for any leader, for profit, not for profit.

And my point of the book is to help people understand, yes, there is a soft side to values. That's all about people. And I say that when you treat people with respect and dignity, you really live your values. the profits are the applause you get for doing that. I steal that saying from my friend Ken Blanchard. But it's so true. So this book talks about, yes, the soft side of people and giving people the respect.

But at the same time, it talks about the opportunity to create better financial results. So yes, there are companies out there that are profitable that don't do a good job at all being moral and ethical, right? That's right. They can still be profitable, but they may not be sustainable. But what if you're a company who had a great product and service you lived your values, how much more profitable could you be

than the company who does not live with their values? I think you could be much more profitable. And so I point out in the book some very clear data on how it's proven to be true. And my own experience, at Dwyer Group, we've proven it as well. Yeah. Give us some of those data points. Yeah, well, one of the biggest ones is a very recent one.

So we were publicly traded in 93. A founder passed away in 94. Company struggled for a number of years. 2003, the public market was becoming much more expensive. Sarbanes Oxleyo and all that came up. And we said, let's look at opportunities to go private. Private equity group called the Riverside Company invested in us. Great partner.

Aligned in our values. That was the most important thing that I wanted to find out is, are we aligned culturally before we go into this relationship? And we were. Grew the company beautifully over seven years. A private equity company invest to get a return. 2010, they sold us. To another private equity partner that we were very careful in helping select.

By the way, both of those private equity groups didn't have clearly written values when they joined us created clearly written values after joining us because they said it really works. So after going in with the second private equity group 2010, three years later, the original private equity partner Riverside calls me and says, we just raised a $1.5 billion fund, Dina, having a hard time finding companies to invest in

that we believe we can really put our money to good work. And Dwyer came to mind. We've never bought a company back before in the history of our company and they're almost a 30-year-old company today. Would Dwyer entertain us buying you back? Three things I mentioned. We love your culture. We love how you really live your values. The growth team, the management team loves what they do and they're great at franchising. And then there's this opportunity for growth that Dwyer that we don't find in most companies. We know we'd have to pay a premium because your current private equity partner is not going to just sell out just because we

feel like buying, right? Sure. Three years after we sold the company to them. They came back and they reacquired us a little over three years later without going into the numbers for double what they sold us for. Wow. And we had had some nice growth with that second private equity partner. Right. The point of the book is that values translate into value, financial value as well, if you're a for-profit organization. That's exactly right.

Yeah. I love that. I mean, that's, when you go deep is when the customer values, not just likes what you sell them. Right. Or what you do for them. But they actually value. you, they like you. If not, can we use the word love? They love. I think love's a great word to use and I think what you create when you have values is you create loving relationships. And what

happens with those relationships is they multiply themselves. That's right. And referrals, right. Part of your business is built on referrals. That's right. And those referrals are your least expensive lead source. That's right. But it's because those customers trust you. They love you, they appreciate you. Even when you make mistakes, if you handle those mistakes with your values at work, they overlook those mistakes and they still refer you. So I think there's this amazing wealth, if you want to call it that, wealth that's created from those relationships that you've built because it has this multiplier effect.

See, buy the book, read the book, folks, for no other reason then that values create value. I just don't think that's disputable. So you've got all kinds of different companies, Dina, that are listening in right now or folks that are watching. And they're going, how do I compete against the big boxes or how do I, whatever. values creates value. They're differentiators. And I always tell our franchisees, I teach every first basic training class, all new franchisees, all new associates coming.

I want to touch them with this message because if they just do a great job of living our values, they are going to separate themselves from the other service providers in their community so fast. And what else happens? They attract the best technicians. That's right. Technicians want to work for the best companies. Right? And those technicians refer their buddies who are all right.

also technicians to come to work for your organization. So there's all these amazing ripple effects that happen when you leave with your values. It really is so important. Yet, here's the reality. Let's just go negative for a moment. It's hard. It's really hard to do. And a lot of people that are listening in right now will agree with this and they've

been shaking their head. And then what's going to happen is they get back into the grind and they get so busy that they don't look inward, they don't look up, they don't look out. You talk about vision and purpose and mission statements. Values have to drive all of that. How do we avoid the temptation to once we get done listening to this conversation and not do anything about it? Let's just get real because that's what we're facing.

Yeah, it comes back to creating those good habits, right? Whether it's around your health, around your financial situation, around your values, you've got to create those healthy habits. I bring it back and I make it sound too simple probably, but I think it's having the system again around your values. Get your values clearly written, get alignment amongst the team, and then create that system. What is the way that we're going to bring the values up every day? I understand Dave Ramsey talks about it when he has company-wide meetings.

He picks one value, and he drills deep with that value. So do that. Or do what we do. Copy what we do. Take your values and review them at the beginning of every meeting of three or more people. And as you grow the companies, as long as you're hiring the right people, it should continue to just multiply itself. But the minute you get lazy is a leader and you let people slack and you're not starting the meetings because, oh, we don't have time. It's going to take

two minutes to give you the house. We don't have time for that. It's when you start slipping. I liken it to, this may sound like a weird analogy, but when you brush your teeth, right, you can make them look really nice and white and shiny, just brushing the surface of your teeth. But over time, if you don't floss your teeth, what's

going to happen? Gum disease, decay, the whole nine yards. And what happens when you have gum disease, it affects other organs of your body. Absolutely. So it takes a little more time, a little more commitment to get the floss out and to floss your teeth. When you floss your teeth regularly, the dental hygiene is wonderful in your mouth, but also the hygiene and other parts of your body is healthy too. When we start getting lazy as leaders and we slack on visiting our values

and living them and having the tough conversations too, we're not living them, because we're not going to sometimes, we're going to have disease. There's going to be disease in an organization, and we're not going to have the same level of profitability. In fact, we may not even live as an So it's everybody that's listening, I know, probably doesn't always floss their teeth. Oh, I'm just telling you right now, we're all overcome with guilt. How many leadership broadcasts will challenge you on values and leadership and flossing your teeth all in one conversation? Do you guys have any floss in the control room? I'm going to floss as soon as the interview is over because I don't know that I floss last night.

Full disclosure. But I think it's actually a great analogy. Yeah. It really is. I mean, it takes a little more time, right? Yeah, but it really affects. saves the help of your mouth. So the last chapter of the book, you talk about how to incorporate the values.

The question is burning in my chest right now, based on our conversation so far, is the small business man or woman that's listening to right now, and they know that they've not done a good job, even creating values, that they could even answer the question. If I'd say, tell me your top values. They'd stutter. They'd struggle. It's okay.

It is okay. It's okay. No guilt. However, that's their reality. Right. Or they've got some values that have been nothing but posters in the lunchroom and nobody knows how they exist or where they exist. You get this drill. So when they start this process, I'm just wondering, because if we're talking about the value creation that we've been talking about here, this can't just be changed overnight.

They're going to have to really go, well, how does this value affect our business? And if you try to do seven or eight all at once, I guess I'm a little bit concerned that that may not be the right way to go about. agree, disagree, how should they go about it? Yeah, I say if you're feeling a lump in your stomach right now. Right. And you know what, I hope you are. I hope the listeners and the viewers are because this is about helping you be better. And that's a good thing.

If you're taking this with the truth of where you're at today with the values in your organization, I'd still encourage them. They can invest in the book. If they don't want to invest in the book, they can go right to dina Dwyer-Owens.com and download so easy the Creature Culture Workbook. Say to your team, you know, we've not done a great job at living these values, and I own it. as a leader, own it. What does that do?

That creates trust with your team, right? It's like, oh my gosh, she's finally or she's finally admitting that we haven't done a good job with this and say, I need your help. We're going to have to do this together. Take your team, and maybe you start with more of the core team than the entire company, because the core team's got to really agree. Take your team through the sixth create your culture steps. And then do what we do, gamify it, right?

Then invite your employees to get involved. Make sure there's buying amongst the employees, or it won't work either. Right? They've got to believe that leadership is really committed. Not just this is the next iteration of our values. That's exactly right. Oh, boy, if you play the beep game, make sure that you don't have a bleep in there. You know what I'm saying?

It did not work out. Did you like that? I've been waiting for that. I've been waiting for that to come out and it came back to me. Perfect. The book is Values Inc. How incorporating values into business and life can change the world. I love the subtitle.

I don't think that's romantic. I think that is very practical. You've done a great job of it. You just spoke to our team. Yeah. How was that? What a great team? Awesome.

They were so engaged. Unbelievable. Well, thanks for hanging out with us. I know you're busy. You got a lot going on. But thanks for hanging out in our new studio. And I know our audience is better for it. Yeah.

Very cool. Thanks so much. All right, folks. Hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dina Dwyer-Owens. Again, I want to point out her book. If you're looking to make some real change that's tried and true, you want to check out the title of her book. It is, again, Values, Inc.

how incorporating values into business and life can change the world. Well, folks, this is very exciting because I get to introduce the brand new grand pooh-bah of Entree leadership. She is Sarah Sloane, joining me here in studio, has taken over in the VP role as Daniel Tarty has moved into another leadership role, up the ladder, if you will, still very involved in Entree leadership. But day-to-day, Sarah is running the shop here, and things have never been better, and I'm really excited to welcome you.

time on the old broadcast here. It is. Yes. Thanks for having me. Well, we're thrilled to have you because I want to talk about a couple of things. We were talking earlier about the core values at Ramsey Solution, something that aren't just ideas on a wall here. These are things that live and breathe and really do guide us. Right. And there have been a couple core values that have really been instrumental in your growth here. So I want to talk about those. So the first one is it sounds violent, but it's really not, and it's really great, and it's the idea of shooting sacred cows. So what does that mean to us, Amzy Solutions? And then how has that manifested in your role here? Right, right. I think that what it means to us is to constantly rethink the

way we do things. We as humans, I think, are creatures of habit. And so we have to really, sometimes, we talk about this with machinery, like recalibrate machinery, but we almost have to recalibrate ourselves sometimes and stop and assess, okay, why are we continuing to do it this way? is it the right way that we're doing things or do we need to think about that differently. So I would say that's probably my best summary of what we mean. Do you look for opportunities to shoot those cows or is it something you have to be a little bit? I think sometimes I'm a little too enthusiastic about it, to be honest. I think the team is like if you could shoot less cows, we have enough beef in the freezer.

It's not sacred. We actually need it. Because we actually like that cow. It's a pet. So yeah, I do look for those opportunities because I, I think that we can get in this rhythm and get too comfortable. And it's not that what we're doing isn't working. That is, I think, sometimes the misnomer about this is sometimes we're doing something

that's working really well, but maybe it's not the best that it could be. Or maybe we're not as the leader looking down the road five years and saying, all right, well, this makes sense for today, but is this leading us to where we want to be in five years? And as a leader, you're the only one who can do that. You know, there's not other people in the office who are necessarily thinking that same long-term vision. I love how you defined it, but let's go a little bit deeper here for people that are listening or watching. How do we begin to see, ooh-oh, I think this could be coming or it is. It's snuck up on us.

It's a sick or cow. What does that look like? How does the team and leadership act? And then you go, oh, this is a problem. Yeah. It's never exactly the same each time. So I wish I could give you like a standard scenario that it's like, well, you look for these. warning signs and you know you're there. I think this is where sometimes you have to be

proactive about it. Sometimes it's obvious, right? Sometimes you're looking at it and you're like, okay, that is a problem coming. You know, I worked on our live event side forever and Dave Flatt said, hey, I'm going to be traveling less. We knew in this amount of time Dave was going to be traveling less. We've got to get our act figured out and these events that are very heavy Dave. We need to sit down and shoot the sacred cow of what's working, but we know it's not going to serve us in three years. And then sometimes you have to be proactive about it. It's not that there's a fire. There may not even be smoke around a situation. You need to just spend some time thinking about what are my long-term goals and is what I'm doing today going to get me to those long-term goals. And a lot of times,

if you don't think several years in advance, this is a big ship. You can't just turn it in one day and make that happen. So you've got to carve out that time to do that. And I think that that can be hard because we're used to being busy and people need us and we've got to talk about these things and there's all these tactical things that we have to knock out. So the idea of sitting down and making headspace to think about that and then to start mapping out like, okay, well, what does that then mean for year four and year three and year two? And then what do I have to do this year, what has to be true to start getting me on that path? The other core value that has served you very well is this self-employed mentality. You're such a go-getter. So I'm not really surprised

by that, but again, what does that look like at Entree leadership? What are we looking for when we say, hey, we want you to have a self-employed mentality? Well, the reality is we've grown, and so we have a lot of people who are in specific KRAs. But if we focus just in our KRA, there's a lot of gaps that we're leaving on the table. And here's an example. We have our Entree Leadership Master Series. So if we said, okay, you folks on our team who are just in charge of event production, you are in charge of these 185 folks who are coming and you need to meet all of their needs, well, we're going to miss things that are needed, whereas if we take all of our team and say, take off those KRA hats, and if you see something that needs to get done, whether it's for this event or whether it's

not an event season and we're just in the day-to-day office, if you observe something that needs to get done, you just take care of it. You know, you act like the owner. If you were the owner walking through the parking lot of your office complex and there was trash on the ground, you would pick it up. You know, you don't go, well, I think I pay somebody who picks up the trash. So I'm just going to leave that there. And surely he will come along and pick that up. So in practical ways, that has served me by just kind of the buck stops here, owning things, even when it's not necessarily listed out on paper as my KRA. And I think that has served me really well in terms of training my team members. You know, there's a lot of things that I don't stress

about because I know they are also thinking in that same mindset. So if there's something that maybe I haven't thought of or I haven't gotten to yet. I have 40 plus other folks who are thinking in that same way and can help me kind of fill that gap. Yeah. It's really an all hands-on deck. It's that everybody's watching. Everybody's monitoring. There's not going to be a problem that just goes unsolved because they're like, well, that's not my care. Right. We have these shared goals and we're all working towards that and we're thinking about those things. That's really good. Okay, so culture, culture, culture, I love the culture at Ramsey Solutions as a whole, but I really love the culture over here. the time I come over here, it's not in our main building, so I've got to drive. I've got to drive

for 90 seconds. Oh, or ride Donald's butt. Yes, it's so difficult. And when I get here, it really is great from the look, from the feel. I love when I stop by Monday mornings every once in a while, and I routinely will forget. I'll come over on Monday morning with something I've got to do. And I'll walk in, and everybody is up from their desk. The powwow. The powwow is happening. It's a big gigantic circle, and the energy is great. And the energy is Great. And I know we've talked about this, so that's why I'm leading you here. You say that the weekly stand-up on Monday mornings is huge in developing culture. Why? Yeah. Well, I think there's probably a couple different things we hit in that same meeting that are so vital to the health of our team. One is kind of a simple communication. You know, we talk about what's going on. Now that we've gotten so large, a lot of times our dev team is killing it over here in this area, but maybe our sales team doesn't. doesn't know that they're working on this new exciting project.

So it's a cool chance for us just to sit and talk about what are the some of the things that we're working on that everyone probably should be in the loop on. And so that's a big piece of that. I also love the celebration aspect. I love fun. It's just in my core DNA. So anytime we get to celebrate folks, of course, there's like life events that are happening. People are getting married, having babies.

But then also the wins at work. You know, somebody has broken their new best. sales record or somebody over here just got this incredible feedback from a client on their coaching call. So a chance for all of us to get together and celebrate that. A third thing is just reminding us of our why. So, you know, we had a guest speaker in the other day and he was talking about don't lose the poetry of what you do, the work that you do. Well, if I'm a developer and I'm coding all day, I might forget, you know, what am I doing? What's the connection to the work? You know, I might get lost in like, all right, I show up at 8, I do this coding, and then I leave at the end of the day.

But you almost can lose the poetry of these are people that we get to connect with. And these are the exciting projects that we're working on that will then these people will use it to delegate better so they can go on a vacation with their family or all those kind of things. So I would say those are three of the things that just make our stand-ups essential. I love it. Communication. Yep. Celebration. Right. And what was the last one?

Remind them of their why. The why, there it is. So there you go. You can't say it any better than that. Okay, so this is cool. Before I let you go, we have our Entree Leadership One Day, which is really a signature event. It's the playbook and one day, and we're live streaming this event. Yes.

Why would somebody participate in this? Because, my goodness, we're practically giving the thing away. Right, right. Why should somebody get engaged with this? Well, I mean, you're kind of crazy if you don't. Right. I mean, it's very easy for us in a day-to-day basis to be stuck in this tactical bubble that we live in. And if you don't break outside of that and it serves two levels, right, for you to start thinking differently, for you to hear that information and go, man, do I need to reassess some of the ways I'm doing that?

Or I think also you'll have some things that reconfirm why you're doing things the way you're doing. But then, too, why would you not sit down and watch this with your team? I mean, when do you take the time to invest in yourselves as a team and go, gosh, we never sit around and talk about culture? What did you guys think about what Dave said about culture? or if you had to sit down and say how we did it as a team on X, Y, Z, how would you say we're doing? What do you think we could do better there? When do you have those conversations in the day-to-day workplace? You don't.

You're so focused on your piece of the puzzle and tactically getting things done or thinking about the next thing. You don't pause and have those conversations. Very good stuff. Well, folks, here's the deal. This is the final opportunity to get in on this. If you've been thinking about it, I've been telling you that it is such a great deal. $29. Okay, that's one price, $29, and you can bring everybody you'll want to bring to it.

I mean, why wouldn't you do that? I've told you bring the mailman, bring your crazy uncle Larry, whoever you want to bring. It's unbelievable. Here's what you do to get it. You text the phrase, E1D discount. E1D discount, no space. E1D discount. Text that to 3344.

That's 33444. And everything else from there is I can. walk you through how to sign up and we'd love to see you there. I'm going to get to host that event. So it really is a fantastic event and I got to say if you ever get to an event or you get here to Franklin, Tennessee just outside of Nashville, you got to come by and see and meet Sarah Slane. She is a ray of sunshine. She's far easier to look at than Daniel Tarty. I mean, we can all say that. And she's a great leader, really, really great lady doing some awesome work and really proud of you. So congratulations. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Well, hopefully you're going to hear

more and see more of Sarah. She's such a great leader. Really appreciate her stopping by to talk about a couple of key core values here at Ramsey Solutions. So since we've been talking a lot about values, the Entree Leadership team has a great tool for you and it is called How to Create Core Values, five steps for developing and communicating your company's guiding principles. Now, this tool is going to you look at the entire list of our core values. Just so you get an idea of what matters to us, how we worded them. This will get your juices flowing as you hopefully sit down with your leadership because we're going to walk you through. How do you then create your own? And then we're going to recommend how to communicate your core values once you've come up with them or

solidified them so that they become an active, living, breathing part of your company culture. So here's how you get it. Text E.L. Values. That's all one phrase. No space. EL values. Text that to 33444. And we'll also have a link for you to this resource at entreleadership.com.

Click on podcast and go to our episode show notes. Hey, Infuse and Soft as always, they've got some great, great resources for you. We bring them to you very, very often. And this resource is Supercharge, your e-commerce, business with marketing automation. Now again, folks, we live in a day and age where everybody's strapped. You have to constantly be communicating effectively with your customers and with your targeted customers. And marketing automation is the way to do that. In this guide to e-commerce marketing automation, they're going to cover how marketing automation can help you grow

overlooked revenue streams, why customer retention should be the main focus of your marketing strategy. How to grow your list to reach more customers with CRM. How to set up personalized and targeted email marketing campaigns. And as always, here's what I love about Infusionsoft. They give you examples of how automated marketing campaigns should be developed. It's great stuff. Infusionsoft.com slash supercharge commerce. That's infusionsoft.com slash supercharge e-commerce. That's Infusionsoft.com. com slash supercharge e-commerce. All right, folks, I want to put a challenge out there.

If you make a major change to your personal values or your company values because of this episode, we want to hear about this. This is not to pat ourselves on the back. We just want to know what kind of changes are happening in this specific area. And we want to celebrate your leadership. So email us at podcast at entreleadership.com. podcast at entreleadership.com. On behalf of Eric the producer, our engineers Will Rudder and Jim Bab and the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.