EntreLeadership - Don’t Let Your Company Culture Die With One Person

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

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Leadership gets real when life gets real. Sheila Huff helps lead her family's 24-hour towing and recovery company, a $3.5 million business with 23 team members. Her grandmother still owns it. Sheila serves as CEO leading from Indiana while the company operates just outside Dallas. And this year, everything changed. Their general manager of 15 years passed away unexpectedly on the job. That kind of loss doesn't just leave an operational gap, it leaves a

hole in the culture. Now Sheila is leading a grieving team from a distance while trying to carry forward a business her grandparents built from the ground up. The goals are set, the team wants to grow, but when stability is shaken, leadership matters more than ever. Today, Entrey Leadership's head coach John Falcons sits down with Sheila to unpack what it takes to steady a team and move forward with strength. If you lead people, this conversation will challenge you. Listen in. Well, Sheila, thanks for coming down here today and spending some time together. Tell me what's on your mind? Well, we have a towing company that my grandparents started in the early 70s, and I am the third generation. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it's a lot to

to take on, right? Yeah. And so we have a great organization. We have a great group of people. And this past summer, our general manager, who we had for over 15 years, passed away. And so we are in a huge transition time. And our company is in Dallas, and I live in Indiana. And I work remotely.

And I visit about once a quarter. And my main concern is that I want the team to feel like my family's culture. I want them to have that even though none of us are there physically anymore. I would like to impart that on them. They have great vision. They have great drive. They're very excited about the industry and what we're doing in the area. But I want to make sure that even though no one from our family is there physically on a day-to-day basis,

that they feel that legacy from what my grandparents started. I love that. So did your grandparents started in Texas? They did. And then y'all move. Well, I moved because I married a Midwestern man. Okay. Yes.

And then after we moved and started our family, then I became a part of the organization. Have you replaced the general manager? We did. We hired from within and we brought up the gentleman who served as our driver supervisor. And he was very close with our general manager and knew a lot of the ins and outs and made just a really good fit, bringing him up. Mm-hmm. Do you do anything remotely? Do y'all do video calls?

Oh, every week. Every week. Every week, yes. Okay. Tell me about how you have articulated the values of your company to the team. Very informally. Okay. So it would be just times when my grandmother comes in and they get to visit with her a little bit.

Because right now, since the passing of our general manager, no one is there that was there when she was working full time. Okay. And so she comes maybe once a year for the Christmas party, sometimes during the summer. So it's very informal when they get to be around her and see her. and then just hearing, hearing stories. Yeah. So it is very informal. I love that, that FaceTime and getting to see her

and the legacy, I think that's fantastic. Do you have core values that have been written down and shared with the company at all? No, we don't, but that sounds like a great opportunity for us to do that. Yeah, I think, you know, those are the roots of your company culture. Those are the things that were so important

to your grandparents. and important to you. And so it's doubly hard with you not there day in and day out. And you getting clear on those and then starting to infiltrate those into the company in a good way is really going to, even if you were there every day, would be a fantastic thing to do. You know, this is what we value as a company. This is what we value as a family.

And getting those core values. Don't let me say core values. Don't let that start to sound like some business thing. It's just this is what's important to us as a family about how we live in this business. Is that something that I develop with my grandmother, or is it something that we do as an organization? I would say you definitely start with your grandmother because your first question was, I don't want to lose the culture. And I want to honor what my grandparents did in starting this. thing. So it's got to come from her and from you. And more deeply, it's got to come from the heart.

This isn't something that we just ask everybody, what do we think would be good? And I love the, I love the, you asking me that question because you asking me that question tells me you have a servant heart in leading the team and you want to bring them into, right? But you also want to honor your grandparents for starting the business the way they did. And so I think, What would it look like for you to have that conversation with her? Oh, I think that she would love it, first of all. Yeah. And because she loves to be involved, even though that she's retired, she still wants to be a part of the organization and see it grow.

And so I think she would love to have that conversation and to just go down memory lane a little bit and think about all of the different things that took them from, you know, her and my grandpa, you know, having one truck and her answering the phone at the house and how it's grown and what it took and how it impacted. and how it impacted the community that it's in. Do you have a, in one of those quarterly times that you go to the company, do you have an annual meeting? Do you bring the whole company together ever? Oh, yes, yes. We always have an employee Christmas party where we also invite the community

because we do a lot of work with police departments and different cities. And so we bring everyone in at that time, yes. You know, whether it's the Christmas party or not, what would it look like for you to sit at the front of the room with your grandmother and interview her in front of everybody about how the company started. That would be really cool. I think people would really appreciate that because so many people don't get to see her or hear her heart or get to know her very well. And I think she would

like that too, even though she's a little shy, but I think that she would enjoy sharing that. The really good way that I have seen this question get asked is, Grandma, what do you want to be true of this business 20 years from today? And then just listen to her talk. I like that. Like you drawing that story out of her and painting that picture for the whole company, what kind of impact would that have with everybody that's there? I think that it would change how they did their job, right?

If they think about how it was just the two of them and what they grew it into. and now that it provides for many different families. And it just started with them, you know, taking on answering a phone 24 hours a day and my grandpa getting out of bed and, you know, going to help someone in the middle of the night. And then now they're doing that with their families too. Yeah, yeah, that's fantastic.

And I'll just say, we see Dave do that today. He comes and tells the old stories. And sometimes our leadership team has to remind him there's new people. And people forget the old stories. And so, you know, he'll even say sometimes, like, I talked about that, you know, I've talked about that many times. And it's like, yeah.

And then he remembers, oh, yeah, chief repeating officer. Yes. We have to go back and there's new people, people forget, we have to tell these stories, what it took to get to where we are. And so I think if you were to do that the next time, you know, I don't know how frequently your grandmother gets there or how her health is. I don't put it off. Don't put it off is all I'm saying. We'll get right back to our episode, but first, my friends at Belay exist to help business owners who are stuck find the time to get unstuck. Belay connects you with qualified U.S.-based

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and whoever else you want there, start to jot down. It seems like you really wanted this to be, us to treat each other like family. You know, whether we are family or not, and now I'm making that up, right, but you can start to distill down and figure out. These are the things that were so important to you in how we treated our customers and how we treated each other. And jot that handful of things down. And then with your new general manager, sit down and say, how can we bake these into our company? And I'll tell you, for us, we have it in everything from our hiring process. we will show, you know, we have a list of our values. And when I'm hiring somebody, I hand that to

them. And I say, these are our core values. How do these strike you? What do you think of these? And just ask a real open-ended question. And if they look at them and they're like, yeah, they seem fine, that's not a good sign. But when they start to get excited or they say, I really appreciate this, then on the very front end, when you're hiring somebody, you're starting to get people that align to your values. And then all through the organization, we remember, in our staff meetings. We'll get up every time we have a meeting. And it's not every time we have a meeting.

We look for opportunities in every meeting, but we will remind ourselves. This person demonstrated this company value. And we don't do it in a real formal way. We just, when we see somebody, like one of ours is have an ownership mentality. You know, act like this thing belongs to you. Because, you know, in a way it does.

Like, I know, I know the name that's on the side of the building, but at the same time, I've got a lot of ownership in it. And so I'm going to treat it that way. And so when we see a team member do that, we celebrate them for that. So it is tough for you being so far away, but I think you have a lot of opportunity to reinforce and instill. But it does need to start with you and your grandma and making sure that this is who we are. This is our DNA. I think the main word that comes to mind for me is intentionality.

just being intentional about your culture. And so how do you do that? How do you be intentional on how you hire, how you pay, how you celebrate, and even how you would fire somebody? What are the things that you would fire somebody over? You don't have to say those right now, but those things should all be based on your core values. And then it doesn't make the decisions easy, but it makes them simpler because you just know

and everybody else knows. So there are other areas that come to talk about? mind that you wish that was run more like you saw your grandpa run it? That's a good question. The customer service. So I believe that it's inconsistent at times. So we have customers where we go out and we're picking up someone who has had an accident, probably one of the worst days of their lives, right?

And I believe that for the most part, our drivers do a really good job of being sympathetic and helping them get a hold of who they need to get a hold of and getting their car. to where it needs to go and talking with them. But I don't know if that's consistent across the board, if we're actually imparting that. And a lot of times, you know, people forget that the tow truck drivers are, like, they're on the front lines. They're there when someone is having a horrible day, right?

And so that is something that I would love to impart on everyone, making sure that they are actually showing that sympathy and taking the time to just interact with them. And then we deal with a lot of people at our window who are coming to get their car when we've impounded it, or to find out information. And they're not always happy. No.

They're not. And so we... That's not a good day. No. No. And so a lot of times we're just dealing with people who are really having a hard time. And so I think that maybe some consistent standard training on dealing with angry or scared or, you know, people who don't know what's going on confused because there's a lot that

goes into getting your car out of the impound and information that we may not have on hand all the time. Like a title, your driver's license. your proof of insurance, all of those things that we have to help them, and then they might be angry because they don't have it on them. And then so it just takes, I think, some more patience in standardized training. So just as you're asking that, I'm thinking, you know, there's some opportunities there that setting those core values, right?

We treat everyone a certain way, right? And just articulating that, how can we, as an organization, set a standard for how we treat each other and how we interact with our customers? Yeah. And I love that. And if you do that from, let's say, the bottom up, meaning here's a set of rules and processes that I want you to follow around customer service. And that's the way that it gets communicated. People are going to see that and they're like, this is policy.

This is, you know, this is something that Sheila wants us to do. But if you start with, hey, our core value is we treat our customers like that's a family member on the side of the road. And we're going to go help them. And they're having a bad day. And we get the heart of that first, that value first. Then the things around, you know, being patient with somebody, that's the outflow of what the heart is around how we want to treat our customers. And so that leads me to think a little bit about how would you roll these out. Let's say you sit with your grandma and y'all talk and you get a half a dozen things that are, here's our core values.

And that's not a magic number, half a dozen. And I'm just thinking, you know, four, five, six things. Like, these are the core things that we want to be true about our business. What I've seen us do as a company is we would then sit with the leadership team. And we'd say, we have, you know, tried to articulate the things that are most important to us as a company. And frankly, these probably aren't a surprise to everybody, particularly the people that are in the leadership team. Because they're like, well, yeah, that's what we've always done, all right? especially your long tenured people and just have a conversation about it.

What questions do you have? How do you think this would affect the team? How do you think it could affect the team? How do you think it should affect the team? What could we change? What could we be intentional about and have that conversation and just let it have some time and some space to soak that up and then come back again and say, okay, now we're all clear about what this is.

what should be next steps to be intentional with the whole team and just take a little bit of time to walk into it where you're balanced in being patient but also persistent about what's important because it isn't a poll you're not asking everybody do you think these are good do you think you know is this what we should do because if it's not right for you and your grandma it's not going to be it's not going to be right and so just getting clear with your leadership team giving them some time to buy in and then from there them doing the same thing with the rest of the company. So let me ask you, as we kind of wrap up, what do you think is the best next step for you? Definitely visiting with my grandmother.

Definitely. And there's so many things that I think that she would be excited about to see as we're growing, right? And just taking a different direction where we make sure that there's that thread of her and my grandfather and how do we keep that? How do we maintain it? As we grow and we have more people. So definitely visiting with her, pulling back the curtain and saying, okay, what is it that held it together? What was it that made it successful? What was it that, you know, created the reputation that it has? Yeah.

And then going back to our leadership team who are all passionate about the industry, who are all passionate about what we do, and then putting some good words to it, right? And then just as you were talking, I'm thinking, man, you know, we could use it on our hiring. We could use it on just in our team meetings and going, man, you really exemplified this. That's right. Right. And then just sharing stories and giving kudos for people who are really embodying those core values. And we share our core values with the public.

We don't necessarily advertise them. We don't push them necessarily, but we don't hide them either. So if there's one or two of them that you feel like you really want the public to know that this is our intent and you should expect this from us, I could see one or two of them on the side of a truck. I think so too. I think that would be great, absolutely, because we do want to be the company that if a teenager breaks down that the parents are. comfortable calling, right? So we want to share that. We want to be known as that kind of company. Yeah. I love that. Very cool. Thank Sheila. It's great to talk with you. Thank you very much. You bet. What John walked Sheila through wasn't about tactics. It was about

anchoring the business in something deeper than one person. In family businesses, especially, culture isn't built on policies. It's built on story, on sacrifice, on the people who laid the foundation. And when that story gets told clearly, especially by the ones who lived it, it steadies the room. People don't just show up for a paycheck. They show up for a legacy. And if you're leading through change and you need help reinforcing the foundation of your business, one of our coaches would love to help. We'll leave a link in the description for a free 30-minute consultation, because healthy businesses don't drift when things get hard. They get anchored.

I'm your host Dave Ramsey, and this is Entree Leadership.