EntreLeadership - #255: Investing in Culture with William Vanderbloemen

Episode Date: March 26, 2018

Regardless of the size of your organization or the type of work you do, William Vanderbloemen, CEO and founder of Vanderbloemen Search Group, says intentionally investing in your culture always pays off. Not only does a healthy workplace increase revenue and employee retention, but it also helps create a place that people are happy to come to every day. And the returns on that, as we all know, are endless. Tune in to find out William’s best advice for assessing the health of your own culture, and if necessary, how to whip it into tip top shape. entreleadership.com/podcast Culture Tool from William Vanderbloemen Culture Tree from EntreLeadership Harness Your Inner Genius from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even a donkey can pretend to be a thoroughbred for three interviews. That's a fact. That's an absolute fact. 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 on this episode.

We're going to cover one of my favorite topics, culture, our feature. conversation is with William Vanderblumman. He's the founder and CEO of Vanderbluen search group. Got a brand new book just out called Culture Wins. This guy's sharp and he's in the search business, placing people in the right place. So he understands culture and has a great winning culture in his own company. You'll hear about that in the conversation. And of course, we're going to give you a couple of great resources from Entree Leadership and Infusion. So if you don't want to miss my conversation with Chad Kirby from Infusions. I've a lot of fun and very, very practical. So let's get to it. William Vanderbluen's new book is entitled Culture Wins, the Roadmap to an Irresistible Workplace.

I got to tell you, I love the subtitle. And I think that he actually can help you get there. I believe it. The book is great. I enjoyed this conversation. Now, you're going to need to listen well and pause and rewind. I think it's this kind of conversation, and you don't want to miss, at the end of the conversation, William is going to give you an opportunity to get the culture tool that he mentions in our conversation. So don't sleep on that. Here is my conversation with William Vanderbloom. Well, this is a big treat. William Vanderbloom in studio with us, a longtime friend of mine and Dave Ramsey and, of course, our organization.

Excited about the new book, Culture Wins, the Roadmap to an Irresistible Workplace. and boy, we talk about culture a lot here. And so this is not a new conversation, but you've done some really cool stuff. I'm going to highlight some chapters and tee you up momentarily, but I love the word irresistible in the subtitle. And I know you're a professional communicator and you thought about that. So when we hear irresistible workplace, I mean, that's what I love where you're going here. What are you doing overall here with this book?

Yeah, you know, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. Oh, absolutely. You guys and your culture here are, highlighted throughout the book, and Dave was real generous with his time with me. And if every workplace would be like this, then we would solve a really big problem. Because from what we've studied, we found, you can read all kinds of different studies, but two out of three Americans hate their job. That's absolutely right.

Not sort of dislike or, eh, me, but hate. And it's almost like the last place they want to go. So what would happen if you could capture some principles that would enable people who are building workplaces to make a place people wanted to come to. And if you're hiring, you don't have to go, as my great-grandma would say, scare up some people to come work there. There's kind of a line out the door or people that want to be there. What would it take to build that? That question started getting answered just sort of by accident at our office. And a lot of the cues we've taken is we've built our company came straight from Andre.

leadership. I can draw a straight line from any success we've had back to the week that Adrian and I spent in the entree leadership class way, way back. We were in Orlando. I think you guys only had maybe 300 employees and you're up to what, 40 million now or something like that. I mean, we've got to be approaching 650. Is that right? Somewhere in that range? Wow. Yeah. So, you know, the idea is we've had some success. We've won a few awards similar to the awards you guys have won. And we started to say, rather than just tell our story, you know, we get asked all the time, how do you win culture awards? Rather than just tell that story, what if we interviewed CEOs and founders of companies that are winning awards all over the country and see if they're common threads,

and see if there is sort of a roadmap so people don't have to figure it out on their own. You have a unique vantage point. I want you to just summarize your business, but because of your unique role and the role that your company plays for other companies, you really do have a behind-the-curtain viewpoint here. Yeah, we're an executive search firm. Our backbone is churches hire us to find their pastor. We also have businesses that hire us. You guys have hired us.

It's almost always a values-driven business, like I'm almost a faith-based business, or maybe a relief organization or a school. And it's usually higher-level recruiting. So when someone says, oh, gosh, I need help finding a senior leader, they're not having a good day. You know, it's usually because they've banged their head against the wall for a while or because that's just how they choose to do business. So by the time they call us, it's already, even if we're meeting for the first time, kind of a high trust relationship,

they let us see the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it does give us a little bit of a unique vantage point into how an organization works and what their culture looks like, functionally or dysfunctionally. All right. I'm glad you mentioned that. Give us some high level commonalities between healthy cultures. As you've seen them, worked with them, put people in those cultures. Give us a couple of the ones that you just, they're not negotiable. If you see a healthy culture, you're going to see this. Yeah, well, we outlined in the book there about 10 or 11 traits. Before you start saying, what is our culture? You've got to ask, are you just being nice to people? Like our company, your company, the bedrock of the culture for both of them is a faith that says,

hey, you love God and you love each other like you'd want to, you know, treat people like you'd want to be treated, that sort of gives you a head start over corporate America. A lot of places it's not, oh, tell the truth. That's kind of interesting. Oh, yeah, that's right. If I'd boil it down to really just one principle that you've got to start with with healthy culture is, are people treating others the way they would want to be treated? Yeah, that's good. That's really good. Okay, we're going to get through several the chapters that I've highlighted that I really want you to unpack. But I think it would be fun to start with the end in mind, and specifically the leader that's listening right now, William, and they got a sense. They have a sense. Or someone's told them, but they just kind of ignored it or they didn't know what to do with it, that the culture you've got is not healthy. And they're hearing it. Maybe they've had a sense. They can't maybe identify all the things that you outline in the book. But here's the question I have, what's the best way for that leader who's feeling that right now to get an accurate assessment of what their culture really is.

Well, I didn't know you'd be so nice in asking that question. We actually, in addition to the book, have developed a tool that's, you know, free to take and get high-level results back, almost like a personality profile of your company's culture. Truth statement. I did not know that. I did not know about the assessment. So that is a legitimate question. And I'm re-asking because I want people to know that's not a tee-up for a product. We're just getting started.

Here's the point. I think, William, correct me if I'm wrong, and I don't mind, that the reason that some of the reason that some, you know, So many cultures are unhealthy or a disaster or whatever you want to call it, toxic, is because the leader doesn't really know what the culture is. They're so unaware. Is that right? You're absolutely right. In fact, if there is a leader listening today or watching and they have a sense that

something might be wrong, the leader's always the last to figure it out. It's so true. So if you've got a sense, it's already bad. That's right. They're just not telling you. So you've got an assessment and it walks them. So what it does is essentially shine a mirror at them? In about 10 or 11 different areas and just say, you know, how are you doing in these basic functionalities?

Okay. Before you ever, you know, the key to an irresistible workplace is knowing, having a healthy culture and then knowing what kind of crazy you are. You know, really good companies are crazy. We're crazy. You have crazy. You know, but you've got a handle on what that craziness is like, right? Acceptable crazy and not acceptable crazy. Exactly. Exactly. Encouraged crazy and discouraged crazy. Yeah. Well, that's a great setup. That's chapter three. And I did want to spend some time there. Let's unpack that a little bit more. Sure. Because we hear crazy and we go,

wait a second. And Dave will say all the time. And you know this practice here. He'll say, look, the reason we hire so much off of internal referrals is because we want to keep crazy out. So if you know they're crazy, we're trying to keep that out. However, what you're saying is it's a different kind of crazy. And here at Ramsey Solutions, it's based on the crusade, which is one of our core values.

Yet we're weird. We do things differently than most companies. I've found that the key to unlocking your particular culture, your DNA as a company, it's not going to copy what Ramsey does or copy what Vanderbloom does. That's not going to help you at all. Your culture is something that's already embedded in who you are. And the key is finding the best parts of it and lifting it up and enhancing it and encouraging it. And is it crazy? Yeah, here's newsflash. If you're working with humans, you're working with crazy people. We are all a little dysfunctional. So, you know, for me, Ken, it sort of centers around here's a question. leaders can use to just tee up a conversation about culture, right? When we're functioning at our very best, what are we doing that's common to us, but uncommon to the other teams that we see at other companies? So what kind of crazy are we? It's not the leader going off on the mountain and finding the two stone tablets and coming down

with culture. If anything, it's an archaeological dig at the bottom of the mountains saying, okay, what have we got here? What's the best part of? it and how do we unearth that uncommonness or that craziness and start to lift it up as a value? Yeah. I want to stay here because you just said something I think is so important and I want you to really challenge us. Pat Lynch-Denny talks a lot about this, that, you know, don't come at people with a bunch of values that you slap on the wall and everybody knows that you don't actually

live those values. So culture and changing culture and growing culture and keeping it vibrant and all that has nothing to do with overt acts and posters in the lunchroom. Absolutely. No, it's about how we behave. You know, if your mission is what you're trying to get done, your culture is how you're going to get it done. It's the how we function as a framily, how we function together when nobody's looking. What kind of crazy are we?

And that's going to get more important as years go on. We've got a huge demographic shift happening in the workforce all over the world in every sector. You've got baby boomers retiring. You've got nobody at our age. Just by birth rate. You've got a ton of millennials behind that. They're the number one demographic. I want to point this out. They're the number one demographic now in the American workforce. Absolutely. You're exactly right. You know, Barnett did a study some years back and asked question of different decade-born people, different generations, right? What are the five things you want to get accomplished by the time you're 35? And it was a pretty cool study. And five things

sort of popped up in nearly every decade. And it was something like, I want to get married, I want to have a family, I want to own a home, I want to be on a career track, and I want to have some financial stability. You ask the millennials, that same question. The only one that shows up out of those five is financial stability. It's probably because you guys have been around a while now. But the own a home, not to be married, not yet, by 35. That's right.

Kids, man. So what does that mean? You've got a workforce that has no one to go home to, that has no one to care for and the people they're spending their day with are the closest thing they have to a family. So the businesses that will say, all right, how do we turn this place into a family? How do we turn it into a place people want to be? Man, you're not going to have trouble with those millennials. You're actually going to draw them in.

They're going to stay and they're going to work harder than you've ever seen. That's a great point. I'm going to throw another stat at you, let you teach us on this as well, because it just lines up beautifully with what you're saying. CBS News came out with the study last year in 2017 in the spring. And it said the top two, the top two qualities or factors for a millennial in a corporate or just professional career is number one. This is great. You love this.

The number one thing they value more than anything else is, are they good at the job? So they are a strengths-based generation. They're thinking, I've got to be good at this. And then the second thing, and they're right close to each other. So they're really the same. And that is, does the work really matter to me? Absolutely. So this speaks to culture. It speaks to purpose too.

Yeah, well, for them individually, yes. But they're going to be attached to an organization that is actually have a very clear, this is where we're going. It's missional. Yeah. Yeah. This is why we're doing what we're doing. Simon Sinek's talk, the why before and what. It's just one of the best there is, and it explains millennials like crazy. If you can build your culture around that mission and start to bake it into everything you do, you won't need stickers on the wall.

You won't need plaques. Yeah, that's well said. That's exactly. That's what I wanted you to tell our audience. Okay, we're going to jump to chapter five. Stop culture leaks. So what is a culture leak and then how do we stop it? Yeah, one of my mentors said, and I doubt he was the first to say it,

when you talk about strategic vision, he'd say vision leaks. You have to keep repeating the vision over and over. I think culture leaks. You know, one phenomenon that happens, and you guys, you guys have been named Best Place to Work many years in a row now, right? Yeah, about 10 years. Yeah, but 10 years. And if it's like Houston, we've received the same type of award.

They break it into small business, medium-sized business, business. Okay. So if you're a healthy company and you're growing, your culture is going to leak. If you're an unhealthy company with bad culture, you've got a whole different set. Even if you're succeeding, it's going to leak. Well, why do you say that? If you look at those different sectors in the best places to work, like small, medium, large, they all take the same test. They all come out with a raw score. It's the same control for everybody. The highest scores are always in, not the big companies, but the small companies. Because it's five people sitting around a table in one room and everybody knows what everybody's doing. But as you get bigger and silos

begin to happen, which are not a bad thing, culture begins to leak. It becomes more important, the bigger you get to start to build into the entire life cycle of your employee, cultural indoctrination. We do it from when we're interviewing and recruiting all the way to a termination conversation. Now, give me an example, maybe one thing that you're doing, walking them all the way from starting to when they've got to leave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Let's say, you know, we get finished with this and we'll have an offline conversation about how you're unhappy with, you know, Entree and the producers are driving you crazy. Right, right, right. So I want to interview.

So we fly you down to Houston and we interview you and we're like, you know, Ken made an impression. And we don't just let you interview with me. You interview probably with an intern. You interview all the way around. So different parts of the family, right, are seeing you. And it'd be more than one interview. I think y'all are familiar with doing more than one interview. No question.

I told Dave one time, I think I could probably. probably place somebody in the CIA quicker. Oh, no question. Yeah. You could actually vet a nominee, like a presidential nominee that has to be approved by Congress faster that you could get hired here. Let's just go to the inf degree. It's working.

Hard to argue it. You know, Dave said in the interview I did with him in the book, I said, so he told me he was up to like an average of 14, 15 interviews before a job. And I said, yeah. And he said, yeah, because you know what, even a donkey can pretend to be a thoroughbred for three interviews. That's a fact. That's an absolute fact.

Yeah, yeah. So we interviewed a couple times. We get excited about you. We're like, oh, man. So one of our values is called ridiculous responsiveness. Okay. Like we just really believe speed wins. We don't think anybody gets back to anybody. We think that if you return a call, return an email personally, not automated stuff, that you will have a competitive advantage of everybody else. It's a ridiculous. So in our sales and marketing team, particularly, if an inbound lead comes, to us. We expect that to be personally answered within 60 seconds. Wow. So you've come down, you've done your couple interviews. We like you. Probably 10, 30, 11 at night. You're going to get a text from somebody. Maybe not even anybody you talked to you at the company, but somebody else. Sure. And they're probably going to text you and say, Ken, man, heard you at the office there. So good. Just wondering, we're sitting around talking, you have any idea what the odds are that the Houston Texans are going to win the Super

ball next year. And, you know, if you don't text back and you're in bed, it's whatever time, 11 o'clock, you're not going to lose the job. But if you text back within a minute, it's like, interesting. That, that's the same kind of crazy we are. Now, if you text back within a minute and you say, I don't, I didn't know offhand, but I checked the Vegas odds. And right now, it's 50 billion to one. Yeah. Yeah. That's even better. Yeah. That's even better. And if you say, And 50 billion to one is a lot, but we all know the Texans are never going to win the Super Bowl, not just next year. Well, now, now, so we have two other values you've just hit. You've solution side living.

We get asked to solve problems. That's right. Other people can't solve. And we also place a value on contagious fun. So you're snarky with us. You've shown a solution. You've responded within 60 seconds. And one text, now I can't ever use this example again.

Right. No, that's really good. It's interviewing on the front end to see, are you our kind of crazy? and doing it when you're not in an interview context. Yeah. And see, that leads into chapter six. We're hiring for culture. So you're doing these tests to say,

let's just see if they're already where we are. Because that's a game changer for you. They get moved up the ladder. Yeah. Well, an interview with us starts with us trying to talk you out of being here. Ah. You know, I'll pay for a quicker flight home. Right.

If you like these things, you need to leave. I'll just pay for your dinner. Right. Go take your wife to dinner. And it's on me, man. Sorry. And we kind of threw. reverse psychology, walk through our nine values and say, here's where people that like this are

never happy here, because we're the weird one. And then all of a sudden you flipped it around in the interview, so you're not calling them but the person that doesn't fit in. You're calling yourself the mistake. Yeah, that's brilliant. And that way you don't have to say, you know, Taylor, you keep going through the boyfriends. Maybe they're not the problem. Right. That's so true. It's so great. Great Taylor Swift reference there. That's the first one on the Entry Leadership pockets. Can we make a note of that guys? That's brilliant. Or maybe she's doing it just because she knows she's going to get a hit song out of that. It does send a work, right?

She's got a good formula. If you can make yourself the misfit as the company, it puts you in a positive. It is a difference. I made a mental note. And so I thought, it's different to say, hey, Larry, you're not a good fit for us. Or, hey, Larry, I don't think we're a good fit for you. Very big difference there. And you almost help them self-select. Yeah, you hate us. Yeah. That's so true. So true. All right, the culture whip. I love this. This chapter jumped out of me just because I love the title. It was almost the title. Of the book. I was wondering that.

Yeah. And folks, our age and younger loved it. Folks older thought it had something to do with like yogurt and probiotics or something. Oh, yeah. They didn't get that it's like, yeah, the house majority whip. Right, exactly. I know. I guess. No, this is the person on your team, this tag. with and paid for driving culture through the organization. And it might be five hours out of their week if you're a smaller company. It might be an entire person. Our friends at HubSpot, it's an entire department with a C-suite person that is the chief culture officer.

You can take it all different levels of serious, but you know, you guys believe this as much as anybody. What you pay for is what matters to you. That's right. And if you're not paying somebody to drive culture through your organization, you're not saying it matters. And it probably ain't going to get done. Right.

All right. So I'm thinking of our audience right now, and they're going, okay, William, but good grief, man. I only get 20 people. Yeah. So let's let's have fun with this. If you got 20 people, if you got 100, you get 200, you play with the numbers. Yeah. But you know the challenge is there. So if we got the small business owner, the culture matters, whether you get 8 or 18 or 88 or 880. How do you, if you can't afford the full-time position, how do you make the culture whip position come alive? or do you say, Ken, you can, I'm pulling Dave Ramsey right now, I'm channeling Dave. Are you saying, Ken, you can't afford it, maybe you've got to cut another position and it's worth it. I'm just curious what your position is. Well, so the first question is, do you like the 20 people you have?

Right. So if the answer is no, then we've got a different conversation. But if the answer is yes and you want to keep them, the best investment for retention is investing in culture. I interviewed 150 CEOs for this book, everyone that I asked this question, why do you spend so much money on this? Dave, why do you throw this kind of Christmas party? Retention. It pays for itself. That's right.

So, you know, when we named our culture whip, I think Katie was with us when we were about 12 or 13 people. And we said, Katie, give us five hours a week and not three to five p.m. three times a week because no one works from three. I mean, like three o'clock is when Jesus died. It's like it's a hard hour. So, you know. I mean, it's a slow time, right? So give us your best five hours. That's right.

In a block and drive culture. And then it begins to develop itself. And before long, she had named ambassadors from each of the main teams just to give her an hour a week. And it will start to guard itself. But not until you assign somebody the job. And frankly, if you can give it to a millennial, that's awesome. As our mutual friend, Craig Grichelle says, if you give them a task, you're just going to develop followers. Give them the authority.

And you'll develop a leader. And what we spoke to earlier, a mission. And what you're proposing is a mission. That's right. I mean, it's a cultural mission inside. I think you're right. I think that's brilliant. I will say one place we screwed up.

We had a millennial in charge, and she got a couple of her friends to help her be in charge. And all of a sudden, it was all millennials. And all this stuff was getting scheduled when all the rest of us had kids out of school. Right. So you have to have some balance. Yes. I hate the word committee, but maybe. Maybe there's some kind of team.

I think that's a good move. Have a boomer and have an X or on there. You know, do not schedule something on the night of the last day of school. That doesn't work. That's exactly right. But that was my short side of this. I love that. Maybe we fixed it.

That's great. Okay. Compensation. Chapter 10 is compensation. You say tie compensation to culture. I love what you're doing there in that chapter. And I think our audience is going, what? Wait, wait, wait, I'm just trying to stink and figure out, how do I get a culture whip?

And now you're telling me I got a tie compensation to culture. What's that look like? Well, you know, it started for me with a friend of mine, Cliff Oxford, who runs the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs, probably 700 CEOs of high growth companies. Yeah, in Atlanta. Yeah, exactly. So I've become friends with Cliff, and I'm a member of the Oxford Center. And he wrote an article for The New York Times a few years back, and it was called, What Do You Do with the Brilliant Jerk? Hmm.

And everybody who's listening right now that's working, he's like, oh, yeah, it's that guy who hits his sales numbers. Yeah. And it's a total jerk. Yeah. He's crushing it. And by the way, they're afraid to lose him. Right. We can't lose the rainmaker.

You know, it's the law partner who colors outside the lines ethically but brings in the rain. And what do you do? So for us, we just started to say, what if we said to everybody, including salespeople, you can hit every number you have, but we're going to have a cultural scorecard on all your reviews. And if you're not killing it on culture, you're not getting full compensation. What if we tied you choosing to proactively live out the country? culture to how well we're going to choose to pay you, it tends to motivate. There's no greater motivation than compensation.

I mean, you can talk mission and that's good. But at the end of the day, people have got to feed their family. They've got to take care of their world. I'm laughing right now because you and I both are friends of John Maxwell. He's had tremendous impact on both of our lives. We know him well personally. And when you said that, I could just, at our audience, appreciate this, who knows you, I could just hear him going, it's the principle of the pocketbook.

I'm making it up, but am I right? That's what it is. You hit them in the pocketbook, and that's where you're really going to put the rubber to the road right there. Well, you know, the flip side of that, it also gives you an avenue for dealing with a person who maybe isn't killing it. I'll ask this question of your listeners, and I bet if you took an instant poll, you'd get a pretty high percentage. You can anonymously answer this, right? Does anyone out there have someone on their team who's working just good enough to not get fired? Yes.

You know, they're not... 100%. They're not bad people. Right. They're probably highly liked. They're probably a golden retriever. Yeah. But they're not getting enough done to kill it, and they're not, you know, getting killed enough to...

Yeah. To fire them. Having that cultural scorecard in your performance reviews, huge. Yes. I think when you have that kind of person, nine times out of ten, it's not a performance or a character issue. It's a cultural score. fit issue. That's exactly right. And cultural fit is seasonal. It can change. You can fit in for a while and then your life changes and all of a sudden it's just not, and that's not the end of the world.

But having a regular pulse taking on how well are you living out culture makes compensation, conversations easier, but it also makes, hey man, we're going to have to enter a probationary period because this is not what you think you're doing with culture and how I think you're doing are two totally different pictures. And it can even lead to a more pleasant, terminate, nation conversation. I want to go back to something you just said because you made a brilliant point. Culture is seasonal, meaning that as the company grows, think about Ramsey Solutions, William, at 300 people versus now at 650 and whatever it is. I think it just went to 675. While we were talking. Yes. Yeah. So it is a different world. And some people, like,

when you're growing, that means the company's changing. Growth and change are symbiotic. It happens together. It's a really, really important point. And I just wanted you to speak to leaders, because, you know, there are a lot of leaders out there listening that are going, wow, I'm really loyal to this person. They were with me in the beginning, but they're not keeping pace with where the company is now 15 years later. And what you just suggested becomes of, let's just say, a much easier way to have a difficult conversation.

Is that correct? I think that's absolutely right. The hardest call we get is from a guy who runs his company or his church and says, hey, you know, William was great when we were here. Yes. And now we're here and the wheels are wobbling and we're going to hear. and he hadn't done anything wrong. He's been nothing but loyal.

What in the world do I do? So, you know, one little tip if you've got that situation, if your listeners are in a growth mode, I actually bought a copy of, you know, what got you here, won't get you there. And I just left it on my desk for the first five years of our business, just so people could see the cover. You know, maybe I'm the one that won't fit.

But if we're going to go places we haven't been, it's going to mean I'm going to be asked to do things I've never done. and not everybody's going to be able to make that leap. That's not a bad thing. No. Yeah, that's good. That's so good. I'm glad you shared that.

Okay, now jumping to cultural endings. What does that mean? What does that look like? How do we get there? Yeah, so cultural endings. I'm borrowing from Henry Cloud, you know, necessary endings, which, oh my gosh. Yeah, brilliant book. Read that book before you read mine.

It's awesome. You know, it's just like, look, you're not fitting anymore. And I don't have a performance reason to let you go. I think of one of the people that we had to let go. in the early years, and the person's leader was a very young leader, probably 25 years old, and this individual had never let anybody go. So I'm like, look, I'll sit with you through the process, but this is your conversation. And they chose to use culture as the barometer.

That was really the way this chapter started. It was like, okay, Ken, look, here are nine values. Score yourself one to ten on how you think you're doing it. I'm going to score you. Let's match up. And, you know, if we're, you say you're seven, and I say, you're seven, and I say, you're, say you're an aide or the other way around, fine. But if you're saying you're a 10 and I'm saying you're a two in a couple of areas, we need to have a conversation. That's right. And that's

exactly what happened. And this individual that we had to let go, when they did work, it was brilliant. It was just awesome. But he was pulling us off task. He wasn't happy. We could tell, you know, but he was making a decent living. And so went through this process and said, look, we're going to enter a probationary period. You can call it a personal improvement plan. If you're in a church, You can say, we're going to have a prayer meeting in, you know, however you want to say it. But the employees should know this is, we're not talking about, come on, let's do better. We're talking about this is probably not going to work out unless there's a severe change. Right.

That's the kindest way you can say it to people. That's right. Unless they go home saying, oh, my goodness. That's right. This is bad and I've got to change it to fix it. And we said, let's see if we can change this cultural value. You know, the quality of your work you're putting out is fine when you do it. But let's change the cultural value.

So listeners are saying, well, how long? Well, I think it takes longer than two weeks. And you might decide somebody needs to go. And unless they're stealing money or breaking one of your cardinal rules, you might make the decision they have to go, but you still need to walk these paces so that you have had. You owe it to the people that have worked for you to walk these paces with them. And longer than two weeks, why longer than two weeks?

Go to the gym the first two weeks in January. Right? And then go the third week. Yeah. Right? that's right. Change can be faked for two weeks. That's right.

It can't be faked for much. That's why all those churches you and I know have 40 days of this and the 50-day adventure. That's right. You got to get on out, not forever, but we usually say 60 days. And so we measured, and you have to have a couple meetings, and yes, it takes time. Sure. But have those meetings, and are we getting any better? By the end of the conversation, this employee who we're all still acquainted with,

and some of us are still pretty close friends, he was like, yeah, you know, this isn't changing. Right. And so we had to move to the hard conversation. Then we're going to have to make a change. And it wasn't a surprise. That's right. And it wasn't tied to, I'm not a good worker.

And it wasn't tied to they don't like me, right? It depersonalized the whole thing. Yes. And it goes back to the interview. It's like, Ken, we're crazy. Yeah. You're just not as crazy as you used to be. You're more sane.

You're more like other people. That's right. We're weird. And we got it. And at the end of the day, I was so proud of this. young woman who was the leader who had to let this guy go, she said, when you do work, it's good. We like you as a person, but we have to protect the culture of this place. And if the culture isn't matching, that trumps everything.

So good. He is William Vanderblomen. The book is Culture Wins the Roadmap to an Irresistible Workplace. Again, you're somebody who's living this, not just writing about it, and that's always refreshing. your big friend of Dave and Ramsey Solutions and Entree leadership. And we're so grateful to have you in studio with us. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks so much, Kim.

I appreciate it. Appreciate all you all you are doing to bring hope to the world. All right. I told you that we were going to give you the culture tool that William mentioned a few times in our conversation. What is it? It's a 20-minute full staff engagement survey with eight key identifiers of healthy teams. It's 100% confidential. And that's huge.

And it's free. That's huge as well. Here's how you get it. Info.vanderblumen.com. Now, I'm going to spell that for you. That's V-A-N, D-E-R, B-L-O-O-E-M-E-N, V-N-V-E-B-E-N, Info dot Vanderblomen.com slash culture-d-Tool. Now, I know you're going good, heavens, Ken. Well, trust me, it's worth it.

type it out, rewind, pause, type it out, go get it. This is going to be a game changer, I promise. Our free resource from our Entry Leadership team, this episode, is our Culture Tree tool. What does a winning company culture look like? We've got a PDF for you that's going to help you see it. And then once you see it, you're going to be able to implement it. Here's the deal in the long run. If you don't have your team on the same page as you,

If they're not truly passionate about what the company's mission is about, the company will be limited in its ability to succeed. In this PDF, we're going to share six ideas that can help you turn your company into an amazing place with amazing culture, where team members and you love to work and love to work together. This will revolutionize your business. Here's how you get it. Text the words, culture tree. There's no space. Culture Tree to 3344. That's 33444.

Well, I told you about Chad Kirby at the top of the program. He and InfusionSoft given us a great resource. It's called Harness Your Inner Genius. It's an e-book and it's free. This is really cool. I've read it. It's a lot of fun. And so I had Chad join me over the phone to talk about this e-book and how it can help you. So listen in to Chad and I, and then I'll tell you how to get the first. free e-book. Well, folks, here's what I know about hanging out with leaders, talking to you, audience members when we see at events and just the general pain points that we at Andre leadership here from time of time is that the small business owner, the leader who is crazy busy, has to be very, very intentional to spend time dreaming so that they can continue

to update and share a fresh vision. So dreaming, vision casting is something that has to be done intentionally. And there's a guy by name of Jim Collins. He's been on this program many times who coined a phrase, B-Hag, big, hairy, audacious goal. And I wonder my friend Chad Kirby from InfusionSoft, who joins me on the line to talk with us about this, because, Chad, you're somebody who believes very much in the philosophy and methodology behind a B-Hag. Why is it so important that every business owner understand this concept and then begin to plan and execute around it? You know, Ken, years ago, I was speaking at a conference with Michael Gerber, who's written books on entrepreneurship. And he made this statement.

He said, your responsibility as an entrepreneur is to be the chief dreamer. And as he said that to a group of CEOs, they looked at him and thought, you know what, he's right. But for some reason, we get caught in the trenches. And what a B-Hag does is it pulls you out of those trenches and sets you back in your place as the chief dreamer of going, okay, I'm going to set a big, hairy, audacious goal. We just finished up our last big, hairy audacious goal. We called it the Everest mission just last year. And now this year, our new big hairy audacious goal is our mission to Mars,

where we want to simplify growth for five million small businesses. And right now we sit back and go, wait a second, five million small businesses. There's no way. But that's the big, hairy, audacious goal that drives us every day. Well, how do we balance this? So you've got some people who never spend any time dreaming or casting a vision around a B-Hag Chad, and then you got others who they spend a lot of time on it and maybe they don't spend enough time in the operational side of things.

The point is there needs to be a balance here. It's not 100% one, zero percent the other. How do we strike that balance? You know, I think the first problem is people don't set the B-Hag because they're afraid of failure. And so they don't want to put it out there. But what they don't realize, and I love this analogy that we use here at Infusionsoft, is that when Babe Ruth points to left field and says, I'm going to hit it in Section 116. When he hits a home run into left field and hits Section 118, no one's complaining. You know, no one's going, oh, man, I can't believe he missed that.

But there's a fear built in within all of us where we're going, oh, I'm nervous about setting this B-Hag because what if I fail? And so you have that driving. then you have the people that are just perpetual dreamers and they don't want to go and execute on anything. And so I like what Dave says when Dave talks about if someone shows up at his door dating one of his kids and says, and Dave asks him what do you want to be? And he says, well, I'm a dreamer. You know, that's a short conversation with Dave, right? But the reality is if you're not doing anything each day to fulfill that B-Hag, then you know you have fallen into that just simply dreaming.

category. Yeah. Well, what I love is you've got a great e-book that InfusionSoft has put together, and we're giving this to our audience. Harness your inner genius, how to dream big and grow your business. So really that beautiful combination there of being a vision caster, but also being an executor. So tell us a little bit about this e-book and what our listeners are going to get out of this. You know, the e-book answers the very question that you just asked, and that is, how do I dream big while doing the things I need to do to execute on the dream. And so as you read that ebook, you'll see, okay, wait, I'm capable of more,

and yet here's how I can become more through the execution of it. All right, folks, so this is another free resource. That's all we give you from Infusion Soff, because they're so generous. This is the ebook, again, harness your inner genius, and you can get the link to be able to download it in this episode's show notes. So if you're rolling along and you're not sure what episode,

just go to Entreeleadership.com podcast and click on this episode. You can get it there in the show notes. Chad Kirby, always good to talk with you. Am I going to see you very soon at the summit in San Antonio? Absolutely. Love Entree leadership. Love the summit. Greatest event at the year.

It's going to be fun. Now, what is it going to take for me to get you to go down the water slide with me? I thought that was already planned. I was already counting on that. All right. Very good. Very good. We will see.

friend. Maybe we'll get the old GoPro out. Yeah, we'll bring out the GoPro and then we'll have a link to that. Oh, yes. There's a free resource. That's what people will flock to for sure. Oh, boy, I'll be pasty still at that point of the year, so we won't release that video publicly. I'm sure you understand. No, no, absolutely. We need to, that needs to be released. Okay. Well, I'll tell you what, folks, we're going to get back to the episode and Chad and I are going to hash this out with our legal counsel as to whether or not this footage will be released. Chad Kirby, always good to talk with you, buddy. Thanks, Ken.

Big thanks to Chad Kirby and InfusionSoft, as always. They provide so much value to us and to you. Here's how you get the free e-book, harness your inner genius. Go to the link in this episode's show notes at entreleadership.com. Look on podcast. It's episode 255, and you'll see the link to the free e-book, harness your inner genius. That's going to do it for this episode. so thankful for you joining us on behalf of Will the producer and Jim the engineer and the entire Entree leadership team. We appreciate you so much.

We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey folks, I want to make you aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions. Here's a sample of Christy Wright's Business Boutique podcast. Hey, I'm Christy Wright, and I help women all over the country take their ideas and passions and hobbies and turn them into profitable businesses. If you have an idea in your head or a dream in your heart and you've ever wondered if you could make money doing it, I'm here to help.

Join us on the Business Boutique podcast where we are equipping women to make money doing what they love. If you'd like to hear full episodes, just search Business Boutique in iTunes or go to business boutique.com.