EntreLeadership - Top Strategies for Leading a Team Toward a Vision with Louie Giglio

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

As an entrepreneur, you have a clear vision for your business. You know exactly what you want the future to look like. The problem is: Your team may not share the same vision. Or worse, they may not even know what your vision is! In this episode of The EntreLeadership Podcast, we sit down with Louie Giglio. Louie is the pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, Georgia, and the co-founder of the Passion Movement. He talks about how he stewards his organization's vision and continually finds ways to communicate that vision to his team. Then George Kamel chats with Ramsey Solutions Chief Marketing Officer Jen Sievertsen. They discuss what a vision really is and how to effectively communicate yours to your team.   Take The EntreLeadership Podcast Audience Survey   The EntreLeadership Podcast Louie Giglio's website Don't Give the Enemy a Seat at Your Table by Louie Giglio Recent Episode with Kacy Maxwell: How to Tell if You're Making the Right Decisions Download the Team Communication Field Guide. Schedule a call with Tim, our producer.   Learn more about the offers from our EntreLeadership Partners: BELAY | Gravy | Hite Digital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have a grand vision for your business? Does your team know what it is? Maybe some of them do. How can you make sure that it's clearly communicated to your team so everyone's focused towards the vision? From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits.

I'm your host, George Camel, and in today's episode, we're talking about leading your team towards a vision, which connects to our business drivers of purpose and people. Our first guest is Louis Giglio. He's a pastor, speaker, author who's got a new book out called Don't Give the Enemy a seat at your table. It's time to win the battle of your mind. He's the visionary architect and director of the Passion Movement, which includes Passion Conferences, Passion City Church, Passion Publishing,

six steps records, and he's the founder of Passion Global Institute. And I sat down with him to talk about casting vision. In our second conversation, I talk with Ramsey Leader and CMO, Jen Seavertson, about how to rally a team around a vision. Up first, my conversation with Louis. We talk about the vision he's been faithfully pursuing for over two decades now. Louis, it's great to have you in the Entree Leadership Studio today. So great to be here. Thanks for having me. So you've had quite the journey since 1997 starting this passion movement. It's been 24 years now. Something like that. Yeah, it's crazy to think. How do you do that for 24 years? That's a big question. You know, when you can do something else,

you should go do something else. That's kind of my philosophy in life. And it's one of those things that the Lord just hasn't released us from, you know, the calling's strong. And we tried to get out of passion after four years. We had a short, fuse vision of a big explosive movement. And four years in, 40,000 college-age young people show up in a field in Memphis, Tennessee for the holiest thing I've ever been a part of in my life.

And I thought, that's it. That's what God called us to do. there it is right there in front of us. And it really was the picture that was the vision that God put in my heart on a plane one day that started passion. And there it was right before our eyes. And I thought, okay, we're done. So we didn't do anything in year five. And some of our great staff left and people were looking at me like I was crazy. You don't stop momentum. But we thought that was it. But then the Lord said, hey, just reminding you, there's a new group of college freshman coming through the door every year. And I want you to keep serving them until I tell you that

we're not going to do this anymore. And Lord willing, a few months from now, 60,000 of them will show up in Mercedes Ben Stadium and we'll be rocking for Passion 2020. That's unbelievable. That's hard to maintain momentum for that long of a period of time. Well, our ride, interestingly, has not been programmatic. And so we've had so many left turns, right turns, up, down, stop, pause, go, go hard, go not hard, go to the world, come home. And that's what's kept it interesting. It hasn't been, oh, we do this every single year, the very same way, at the very same time, and we've done that for 24 years. And so there's been variety in it. My wife says I have the spiritual gift of sabotaging my own momentum. So I'm trying to hire people around me in this season to help me not do

that consistently, but it is a little bit true. I like challenges, and if there isn't one that's presented by somebody else, I'll normally make one for myself. But that's been part of the variety of it, but a lot of it has just been, it's a big world, there's a lot of opportunity, and there's something different to do every year. I mean, a few years ago, we did a 17-city, 16-nation world tour. Wow. And we did passion events on every continent around the world in three, one-month stretches in 2008 actually put me in, I think was the final straw that put me in the hole of depression I was in for a few months. So I do understand, you know, the toll it takes to do big things, but it is the, it's a big world. There's a lot of opportunity and that's what keeps us

going. Yeah. Well, you know, I see you as a pioneer, an innovator, obviously you're a pastor, author, speaker, you name it. But I also feel like you're, you're the leader's leader. A lot of people look up to you in that vein. And so I want to know, what do you see the primary job of as a leader, whether it's a movement or a business or anything else? Well, thanks for setting me up that way, but I really genuinely don't think I'm a really great leader necessarily. I have big vision, and I'm very committed to that vision. And somehow that's created a movement, and I'm at the front of it. So I've had to learn how to lead. And I learned from a lot of people around. me, but for me, leadership comes down to a few key things. Number one, vision, why? Why are we doing

this? In other words, what is the problem that we're trying to solve? And if you don't know what that is, then you shouldn't be in business and you're not going to be a leader. I think the second thing a leader does is create culture. So people think, oh, you're the leader of passion or you're the pastor of a church, so you write sermons and you minister to people and you do pastoral visits. It's like, yes, I do all of that. But the number one thing I do is I'm a caretaker of culture. Because without culture, whatever it is that you're called to your vision, it's not going to last. Your team's not going to last and you're not going to last.

So it's vision, culture. And then it's really inspiration. It's keeping people focused on the why. And that obviously vision has a very short shelf life. And every leader that's a good leader knows that. You can give the greatest leadership speech at the midweek devotion for your company or team meeting or board meeting or whatever. And three or four days later, people don't know what you said.

So you've got to keep casting that vision day by day by day. So I think knowing what you're doing and why and then creating a culture around you that will sustain that vision and sustain that why, that's the primary job of every single leader. And it's interesting. when you have that vision, you get people excited about it and you create a culture around it, you've got people who are real fired up about, you know, your movement or your business. And I think a lot of business owners out there, maybe they haven't communicated that vision enough. You know, there's that old Andy Stanley quote.

It takes, you know, 27 times or whatever for communication to actually stick. And I think a lot of leaders out there maybe struggle with putting that vision on paper and making it real and then creating that culture around it where people really can dig into it. Yeah. And, you know, if the vision is successful, your organization's, going to grow. So you're going to start adding people and you're going to be further and further away from the people that are actually now doing the thing that you feel called to do. So you have to close that gap a lot of different ways because I wake up every day and I don't need a vision lesson.

I don't go to my vision manual when I wake up in the morning. I wake up and I'm breathing the vision. It's in every molecule inside of my body. And so I would say if you're leading a business, Are you there? Are you waking up with a sense of why are we doing this? What problem are we solving? What good are we bringing to the world today? And it could be paperclip manufacturing or somebody could be in a landscape business, but you have to see it as we're serving people. We're bringing beauty to the world. We're bringing order to life. We're reflecting God in our job. And if you wake up like that, that's how the way the leader wakes up. But then the leader realizes most people on my team didn't wake up like that today. And therefore, I've got to cast a vision again today. I've got to clarify what is it that we're doing here. And I've got to embody that. I have to walk through the door with a sense of, hey, I've got a pep in my step today.

Because I woke up, fired up about what we're going to be able to do together to serve people and to make this world a better place. And that sounds totally cheeseball, but that's what God asked Adam and Eve to do. on day one. I want you to take care of this for me. And I want you to continue to steward the beauty that I've made. And we're all in a process of rebuilding and rebranding that in a broken world every day by whatever our particular business is. So really, when it comes to leadership, you're a caretaker and a steward of that vision and the culture that has been given to you. You are responsible and a steward of it, but you're also a spreader of it. So you've got to be contagious.

and you have to have a contagious nature. And I think if I'm negative, wow, I just sabotaged everything that I'm stewarding. So I want to be real, and I think it's important for all of us that are leaning in today to realize that if you're a leader, you don't have to be perfect and you don't have to be bulletproof and you don't have to be a superhero. But you do have to have a different gear. You've got to have the rise above gear. People say, what have you done during COVID to succeed? And I said, rise above. That's the number one thing I've tried to do every day because I don't know how to lead through COVID.

I didn't learn in any business training or any grad school how to lead through a global crisis. No one has that manual. Yeah. And this is a once-and-a-hundred-year event. So we don't even have too many living people around to say, hey, you've been through something like this. Tell us all, you know, how to do this. So what can you do if you don't have a manual in a go-to? you can shift into a gear that says, I'm going to rise above this today. I'm going to somehow

trust my instinct, ability and experience, and I'm going to lean on my not-so-silent owner. I have an ownership group in what I do, and my owner is not so silent. He owns it all. He's the owner of the whole earth, and he gives me a supernatural ability to join him. And so show up and rise above. That's what leaders do. And I don't care if you have nine people, or 900 people, you have to shift gears every day. And it doesn't mean you have to be a superhero. You don't have to walk in and fake it and say, hey, life's great. And aren't we all blessed today?

But you can't walk in six days in a row and say, man, I don't know. Wow, this is crazy. I'm not sure. You have to shift gears. And you have to say, hey, we're going to figure this out. And we're going to find a way through. Yeah, Dave Ramsey addressed our team not long ago with the vulnerability of going, and hey, leading during COVID, I didn't know what I was doing.

And it's so crazy to hear someone like Dave say that, who you see is such a strong leader. And you go, no, that's strong leadership. It's owning it and going, I don't know what I'm doing, but we're taking it day by day. And I've got the leadership team in place. And God gave me this thing to manage. And we're going to do the right thing, the right next thing in front of us. So that's powerful. It seems like it all rises and falls on the leader, which is a lot of pressure.

But how do you lead yourself well as the leader? What does that look like? I think for me the main thing that I've got to do is find a rhythm. And we go hard where we are because our calling's big. And I think every leader that's listening to us right now knows what that means. Hey, I've got to put in the extra hours or I carry the extra weight. And I lay my head down every night on the pillow. There's only one pillow in our organization called the Pillow of Responsibility.

And that's the pillow I sleep on every night. But that leader puts his head on that pillow of responsibility. And no one else does that. No one honestly but Dave here has to put their head on the pillow that says, wow, there are a thousand people here whose livelihood depends on me and my team making the right decision every day. And then there are millions of people around the world who are going to be impacted and changed by the decisions that we make here. and as much as other people here contribute great things, they don't put their head on that pillow. They go home and go, I'm glad Dave's sleeping on that pillow, and I hope he makes the right decision for my family.

So to answer your question, what do I have to do? I have to find a rhythm that allows me to unburden myself. And there is no work-life balance. I don't believe in that. But there are work-life rhythms. And so how do I lead myself? It's by finding the space where I can decompress and I can let it all go. go and to do that consistently. So I'm not talking about a vacation. I'm not talking about a three-week

step away once a year. I'm talking about a rhythm through the day of going, wow, I'm not running this. I'm not ultimately in charge of this. God, you're in charge of all of this and in charge of me. That felt good. And another way of saying it is you just can quit often. You can quit every day if you want to. You can get in the car and say, I quit. And then you go home and you have a great. night with your family and you wake up the next day and you go to work. But it's that rhythm of just releasing and then taking hold of. What has that rhythm look like for you? Is it daily, weekly? Is it really the stuff that happens outside of the work day? Is it how you start your day, how you decompress at the end of the day? Yeah, it's mostly how I try to end the day because the rhythm of life is you go

hard and then the sun goes down. And God was thinking when the sun went down that we were going to go down. But now we don't go down when the sun goes down because life keeps going and we've got phones to look at and TV shows to watch and problems to solve. And now we're staring at the ceiling at two in the morning trying to work out all the stuff. And I think that what God wants us to do is to go hard while the sun is up and then to trust hard while the sun is down. And so for me, the success rate is based on my ability to transfer to him in the sundown season of the day, all the things that are compressing me and all the things that are stressing me. And I literally, I hand them to him. I mean, I don't literally hand them to him, but I say them. This is concerning me. May I hand this to

you? So and so, I don't know how to work that out. Can I hand that to you? This thing is bigger than me, can I hand it to you? And I need to sleep now. So I'm going to trust you. Thank you. And then when you wake up, you don't really want to take them all back. That's not the way the rhythm works. You wake up and you remember that he has them and you say, what do you want me to focus on today? I'm going to give it my best. The pressure is on the leader, but you can also release that pressure and go, hey, I don't have to have it all figured out today. I can rest. I can have a rested mind, a rested physical body, to go fight the battle again the next day. I like to take life in small bites, and other people are bigger planners, and therefore they have more to stew over on a given day.

But for me, today has enough problems for today. So I don't need to onboard tomorrow's problems into today because I've got issues I have to solve today. So I live in very short windows of time, and we're working and planning on things that are six months out, a year out right now. But I am real focused on you and me right now in this conversation. that we're having and that's where I am and I'm trying to be present, do my best in the moment. And if you keep doing that moment by moment, you end up putting in a pretty good day. Yeah. And you do that over a period of time and you get 24 years. So that's, that's impressive. I want to circle back to this idea of vision because I heard this quote from you that I love.

Leadership is communicating vision, trying to marshal people in a direction, reminding them of what God is calling them to, helping them endure the valley and take the hills. how do you communicate that vision to the team in a way that sticks? The way the vision sticks is by making it sticky. And stickiness to me is where you are connecting the dots on the daily from, this is what we're doing right now, this is how this fits in the big picture. And I think that's what every good leader has to figure out. It's not about, hey, we just did something great.

That's our purpose. Now let's all go back to the grind. We work so hard in our organization to do everything we do. And I think like Ramsey's solutions, great organizations make amazing things look easy. But nothing is easy. Nothing great in life is easy. And so we work really hard. Passion does not just happen because we put out a flag and say, hey, we're going to meet in the stadium in a few months.

What it takes to get there is extraordinarily different. difficult, but it's getting in the little cracks and crevices and trying to tell the stories in the crack and crevice of how this is changing the big story and the big narrative. And I think it's not just the, hey, we had an all team meeting today and cast a big vision. I'm sure everybody's going to be inspired. It's trying to get down in the littlest thing and say, see how what you're doing is impacting what we're doing and see how what you're doing is impacting this person's life. and if you can do that in the littlest places, the smallest places, the little cracks,

then the vision is sticking and it's sticking in the right place. Do you have a recent example of something that happened with your team where you had to communicate that and it either stick or it didn't stick? Well, I think that almost I'm trying to think of a specific example right now, but it's COVID, so none of our minds are working super great. But I think it's connecting a dot. We do every team meeting we do, we do what we call Jesus stories. And so we start every meeting with tell a story about somebody whose life has been changed or impacted because of what we've done.

And I know for me, we just came from a big student event that we did with several thousand students, one of whom is just finished a freshman year in college and celebrated while we were at the end. event the two-year anniversary of losing her dad and her leg in a jet ski accident. And on the day that they woke her up from a four-day coma to tell her that her leg was missing, and then she quickly noticed and surveyed the room and asked where's dad. And they told her that her dad was in heaven. One of our team was standing right there, and he was in the role that he needed to to be in that day as a leader of our team, to be in a very difficult spot that no one can be fully

prepared or trained for. But he showed up and he was present in that moment. And as we were sitting together a few days ago, he, her, Shelly, my wife and myself and his wife. And we're just recounting the journey we've all been on for two years. It was easy for me then to go back to him and to two people on his team later and say, So when we're in these little spaces, some of them are hard, some of them are easy, some of them people see, some of them people don't see, here's how that impacts someone's life. And then here she was sharing with four or five thousand people for the first time ever in two years about God's faithfulness in her life. Wow.

And it wasn't a polished presentation. It wasn't, hey, here's the three things that you need to do if you're going through a hard time or a hard season or not believing you're going to make it one more minute. but it was God is bigger. It probably did more to impact the lives of people that week than all the amazing messages that were shared by all the great speakers. So it's taking that moment and then going back into another difficult moment that someone is in right now and trying to draw that line and say, see these moments make a difference.

And sometimes you don't see it until two years later or 22 years later, but what you're doing matters. And if you hang in there long enough, you're going to see it on Earth. but you're definitely going to see it in heaven. Yeah, it reminds me of a lot of the things that we do here at Ramsey. You know, Dave gets up there on stage and staff meeting with all thousand team members every Monday, and he'll read an email that came in about someone whose life change, someone who met Christ because they went through Financial Peace University,

or we see the debt-free screams on the Ramsey show every day, and it reminds you of the vision every single day. And so I think for the business owners, what are you doing in your day-to-day that is making it stick with your team? What are those rhythms that you can put in place? Yeah, and you know the owner probably is getting that story. It's whether or not we're doing a good job of communicating that story. And you guys are doing that fantastic here by making it visible to the whole organization. But you also are, you know, it's quasi in the entertainment business.

And so if somebody owns an auto parts store, they're probably going to bump into somebody. And they're going to say, hey, you know what? When you did that thing and worked on my transmitting. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it saved this money. And because of that, my kid got to do whatever. And the owner's typically going to go, well, thanks for sharing that with me. But we got to take the next step to go into the guy who actually worked on the transmission and say, I want you to know what I just heard.

I got handed a napkin in a restaurant a few weeks ago about this book, and it's not a promo for the book, but a guy came over said I don't want to interrupt her meal because there's a big story about that in the book. And he was making a joke. He said, I don't want to be that guy. But he just put a napkin on the table. And he said, thank you so much. And he walked away and I read the napkin. And it said, thank you for this book. My daughter and I are reading it together. She's been going through a horrible battle with an eating disorder. And this is giving us practical ways to see victory come to her life. Well, I took the napkin to our all team meeting. and I thanked seven, eight, ten, ten, fifteen people who you'll never know are responsible for this book

and whose fingerprints are all over it. And I just said, hey, guys, I got the napkin, but your fingerprints are on the story. And each one of us who owns the business is typically going to get that story if it's a good business. Yeah. But it's taken the next step and not absorbing all that, but reflecting that. And that's what, you know, one of the ways of vision sticks if you don't let it all stick on you. You know, you don't go, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm amazing. I'm amazing.

Yes, passion's amazing. But you go, hey, you are the one who did that. And they don't know how to thank you. They just knew how to thank me, but I know how to thank you. And I want to make sure that you understand where you fit in the story. Yeah, that's a beautiful, selfless posture of humility that the leader can take to show that. I love that. And talking about the book here,

Don't give the enemy a seat at your table. It's such a powerful title. And the tagline, I think a lot of the business owners will go, yep, it's time to win the battle of your mind. I think this past year, it's been more of a battle of the mind than anything else. It's all been a battle of the mind, and it still is. You know, we don't win and lose in life based on the choices we make. We win and lose in life based on the things we think. And we have control, and that's what I'm trying to say in this book.

This isn't like a power positive thinking, but that's not a bad idea either. This is an invitation to understand that God has done some things for us, namely, he is given us victory through Jesus. And one thing I can do is take back my thinking. And I wrote this book. Someone asked me, they said, who'd you write this book for? I said, I wrote it for myself. I was in a zone where I needed to commiserate with a friend after going through a real hard season. Something had happened. We all sent a text, hey, you're not going to believe what I heard today. You're not going to believe what just happened. Sent that to my friend, wanting commiseration, but my friend loved me enough to tell me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear. And he sent

me back those nine words. Wow. Don't give the enemy a seat at your table. And I realized I had just spent the last season of my life in consternation, frustration, trying to control, manage, situation, staring at the ceiling at night, letting all this fear and all this strife in my mind, I had let my adversary just pull up a chair at the table, and he was eating my lunch. And my friend loved me enough to not go, Louie, you're awesome. I'm so glad that happened today so that you would know that you were right, and you should feel vindicated. He was like, what are you?

You look like you're acting like an orphan, and you are the son of a king. And it just cut through the clutter. And I was standing at the top of my driveway staring at my phone. And I said, you know what? I'm taking my table back. I am going to take back my thoughts. And the enemy, yeah, he's not going to be welcome at this table. And so that's not a one-time deal.

That's a daily process. But God's giving us the opportunity to manage our own thinking. Do you think that's what leaders are struggling with the most right now? 100%. Leaders are waking up going, I don't know if I can make it. They're waking up going, today's going to be the day I quit because I'm just done with all this. And I promise you every business leader, pastor, school teacher, parent has written their resignation letter in the last 18 months.

And if you haven't, please notify us at the Entree Leadership podcast and let us know because you should have them on. Give us the secret sauce. Give us the lowdown. But we're struggling. I don't know if I can make it. I think this is the day I'm going to quit. I don't know how to do this. I'm frustrated or I'm doubting myself or I'm starting to get paranoia and thinking my team doesn't love me anymore.

I'm not sure we're going to be able to succeed in business. I don't know if our model is going to work. And all of that starts with our mind. And it's getting those thoughts, you know, into the right order where we're, where I'm concerned and I'm planning, but I'm not letting that trickle into worry, and I'm not letting it weigh me down before I even get to the first problem to solve today. You unpack a lot of lies in this book, and you counter them with some more powerful truths. And so what I'd love for you to do as we wrap is take the lie that you think most of the business owners listening,

the leaders listening, are struggling with today, and give them that encouragement to go fight that battle tomorrow. I think for a lot of us right now, the lie is I'm not. going to make it. Here's what I would do and here's what I have done. I've just started writing down the lies. Like, I'm not going to be able to make it through this change at work or am I going to make it through this economic flip-flop that just happened or these new regulations or the fact that my best employee just quit or the fact that I've got stuff going on at home and I can't do the job and do the home thing right now at the same time. Just write it down. I'm not going to make it through blank. And then I write above it what's true. And here's what's true. Okay, it's not hype. This is not

a hypey leadership. This is truth. I have made it through every situation I've ever been in in my life. That's true. Oh, I got scars all over me, but I made it through every one of them. Loss of both my parents through debilitating diseases. My wife's father's seven years into cancer treatment right now. Depression took me out four months of my life. out of commission. I got scars from that, but I made it, and all the rest of them. So I write above it. I've made it through every situation I've ever been in life. I would personalize that God has brought me through every season and every situation I've ever been through in my life. So when I write that on the top of I'm not going to make it through, then I scratch out, I'm not going to make it through.

And I circled, God has brought me through every situation and every season I've ever been through, that's my new narrative. And I'm going to walk into work today. I'm going to walk into the office today with that narrative. And I'm not going to be a fake about it. So if we do have the coffee and you say, how's it going? I'm not going to go, I am blessed and highly favored. I am so pumped about the fact that three of my best employees just quit and the market downturn has knocked our revenue out 33 percent and we can't get any shipping from Asia right now. You know, it's awesome. Now I'm going to go, But listen, man, things at home or things in my marriage or things, these things are tough. Man, it's tough right now, if I'm honest.

But you know what my story is? I'm going to make it through. I know I'm going to make it through. And I know that anything that says I'm not is a lie. And the only way the enemy can lie to me and tell me I'm not going to make it through is because when he told me that the last time he was lying. Yeah. The past is a great indicator of the future. So I just want to encourage people.

You are going to make it. And you need to make that your narrative, but you also need to make that your company's narrative and your team's narrative. You need to let them hear you say to them, hey, guys, we're going to make it. I don't know exactly how, and I'm not exactly sure when, but we've come through a lot as an organization, and we've come through a lot together as a team, and we're going to come through this together. and that's not hype. That's the real story. And I know every business doesn't last forever, and so maybe the business is going to morph, but you're going to come through that too. Maybe this chapter of our business is going to close, and we're going to do something new in life, but we're going to come through that as well.

And that will be part of our overcoming story. Leaders rise above. We don't have an option, and when you rise above, your story is we're going to make it. Couldn't have said it better myself. Well, Louis, I'm pumped for this book. Don't give the enemy a seat at your table. It's time to win the battle of your mind. That's so powerful.

And I think I needed to hear it. I think the listeners needed to hear it. And I'm just so grateful for your time. I'm grateful for your faithfulness over the last multiple decades. I'm grateful for your perseverance as a leader and showing us the way and doing it all with an optimism that is rooted in reality. It's just super inspiring and I'm thankful for your time today. Well, thanks for let me be a part of this conversation. It's really an honor for me as well. And at the middle of our story is a resurrection. And so people say, hey, we got to keep it real.

And I'm like, yeah, we're keeping it real. The stone was rolled away. That means everything's possible today. Beautiful. Thanks so much, Louis. Thank you so much. Huge thanks to Louis Giglio for coming by the Entree Leadership Studio and having a great conversation. If you want to order a copy of his new book, don't give the enemy a C-Eglue. at your table, it's time to win the battle of your mind, just click the link in the show notes. If you've learned anything from this episode, it's that you

need to have a vision for your business. But when you have a vision, how do you lead your team towards it? We'll have a conversation about that right after this. In our second conversation, I talk with Jen Severson, our chief marketing officer here at Ramsey Solutions. She shares how she took our

company vision and rallied her team around tackling a huge project. Jen, thanks for being here. So happy to be here, George. Let's talk vision. Let's. So how do you see vision at Ramsey with all of your experience here? Yeah, the way that we talk about vision here is we talk about a future state, a desired future that's 5, 10, maybe even 20 years in the future.

It's not usually very tactical. It's really this, we see a day where, when, you know, fill in the blank. We see a day or imagine a day. when fill in the blank. Yeah. And at Ramsey, we have a big vision and you're a huge part of that on the marketing side with this global branding thing. So unpack what that means and we can talk about a big project that you guys just completed. Yes. So we started talking a few years ago about some of the components, what must be true as we transition away from Dave Ramsey, who's this founder. He is our CEO, but he's also a public figure, which is a pretty unique position.

to be in. And if we don't want what we do to go away when Dave decides he doesn't want to work anymore, then we have to plan very intentionally around what does it mean to transition things from Dave to others. So we transitioned both Dave as a personality to Ramsey personalities. We're being very intentional about that. We've been transitioning the leadership, Dave as a leader of the company, to lots of leaders within the company. And we're really, really looking at various things of that. Well, one of the things is we were pretty much known as the Dave Ramsey Company or Dave says this, I need to do this, or over at Dave Ramsey's, they do fill in the blank. And we said, hey, we really need to transition to Ramsey to Ramsey

solutions and really get away from being so Dave Ramsey, the person dependent from a branding standpoint. So we initiated something that we lovingly called global branding, and we really took a pretty big picture look at our whole company and how we could both bring things closer together because we had a lot of brands at that time, but they weren't necessarily connected. So how can we connect those things together? How can we better emphasize Ramsey for the long term and really transfer trust from one thing a consumer might interact with us on to the next thing? And, and do that in a really seamless way. And one of the things that came out of it that you are alluding to is we took on a big project

to consolidate over 20 domains, website domains, into one, Ramsey Solutions.com. And that was a pretty big undertaking about an 18-month, maybe a little more than that project, where we involved, gosh, probably, I don't know, a quarter of the company, at least, you know, probably 250, 300 people involved in making that transaction. transition, not 24 hours a day, obviously, not even eight hours a day, but as part of that project over that period of time. Yeah, people are listening going, okay, so they went from Dave Ramsey.com to Ramsey Solutions.com, and it's part of this bigger vision. But there are thousands upon thousands of pages and code and things that need to be updated and moved so they don't break and customer

facing things that we need to make sure don't break so the customers can get served. And so this was a huge undertaking that you had to really cast the vision for, delegate that, communicated, get people excited about it, and it didn't happen overnight. That's right. No, it didn't happen overnight. And the biggest component, I feel like, of casting the vision around it was just continuing to talk about the why, about how we want to better serve our customers in the future and how we want to better organize things, better transfer.

Again, transfer trust. A brand is all about trust, right? And how we do that from a digital standpoint on our website. You're talking about this trust thing, and you had to delegate this project to your leadership team to go, hey, you need to execute on this with your teams. Was there a level of I need to make sure that they've got this, that I can trust them? And obviously, we trust our leadership team, but how did you go about that process? Yeah, that's a great question. I wish I could say, well, I did A and then I did B and then I did C.

I don't think it was that clean. and yet delegating this project, I was very involved all throughout it, and yet there were a million details that were delegated throughout the team. And so to the core team, though, that worked on it, we met once or twice a week for about 18 months at a minimum. And that core team really owned this. I don't feel like I had to get them bought into the vision. I felt like they adopted the vision as their own pretty much from day one. And I think that was because they understood the importance of this project as part of our future desired state. So there was a clear end goal of what you wanted to do.

So as part of the vision, like you're saying, it's not this tactical thing, but the goals within that to get us there do get really tactical. And they understood it. They understood the importance of it, the why behind it. They also really owned, this was an important piece of it. They really owned wanting it to do it the right way, like the best way. possible. We could have kind of dumped all these various websites together into one domain, and technically it would have worked, and we would have consolidated the domains. And yet, from a customer experience standpoint, it would not have been a good experience. And so they really owned not just

where we were going, but the desire to do it the right way. I want to talk about leading the team towards this vision, because I think a lot of the listeners out there are going, Jen, this all sounds great. I've got my vision. I've got leaders I can trust. But, you know, you've got to get the entire team rallied around this stuff. So talking about the delegation to Casey Maxwell, who was on this podcast recently talking about decision making. Yes. What was that conversation like ongoing?

Yeah. So ongoing. So Casey led at the time what we called our Dave Ramsey.com team, which was an entire team, that helped to maintain all things on our biggest website. and he pretty clearly understood where things needed to go. One of the things, though, about delegating to him is he's such a great leader that he would come to me with things that needed to be done. So I might say something like, hey, I think the hardest part of this project is going to be X. And I was probably right about that in the broadest sense.

But then he stepped up and said, yes, and here's how I think we should tackle that. And he would come back with all these great ideas for that core team to really beat up on and figure out the best way to move forward and a lot of different things. And so a lot of the delegation was me either surfacing things that I thought were going to be big hurdles to overcome or the team themselves saying, hey, we have a big issue we have to overcome here. And then us getting together, we wouldn't solve those things and sometimes in discrete pockets, but usually the big issues, they would come to that. that core team. And sometimes they'd even come up to the operating board where we would talk through

in detail, hey, here is what we're trying to overcome. These are our options. This is what we recommend. Do you guys agree? We wanted to make sure that a project this big, that leadership all the way up to the top, and all the way down to boots on the ground, implementing the code changes, understood everything and was on board with the decisions we were making. So it sounds like there's a lot of proactive communication happening, ongoing communication, and you guys are meeting regularly to make sure that we're on track, we're on pace, you're getting rid of the blockers that are in the way and helping to make those decisions. Yeah, can I say something about the communication?

Yes. Communication was something that we stubbed our toe on a little bit early, and we realized that, hey, we're going to have to do communication totally different than we have before. And we identified different stakeholders or groups of stakeholders within the company that needed different types of communication. And sometimes those stakeholders really needed to be actually. speaking into the decisions. And we kind of mapped out a plan for communications and then we would adjust it as we were going. And even to the point that probably at least once a month,

we were talking to the entire company at our staff meeting about this project so that they were understanding where we were as we were going. It was like we were trying to have ongoing communication about where things were at in real time so that if there were things that we weren't thinking of, then the people that really knew those things would have a venue to come and talk to us about them. Yeah, I remember that ongoing communication with the team. And it was at least once a month of, hey, here's where we're at, here's where things are. Even if it didn't affect us, it was great for the team to understand the why behind it, the fact that we're tracking along.

And here's where we could use your help. And we had a lot of team members jump in to help out just going, hey, make sure the links work on all these pages that exist out there so that we can make sure the customer has a great experience. I want to talk about momentum and excitement because that can be hard for vision because we're talking long term and I can get excited for a day, but it's going to be really hard to maintain that level 10 excitement for a year. So how did you keep the momentum and excitement going for the team working on this? Yeah. We just tried to have a lot of fun while we were doing it. So, you know, we came up with a code name for the project. Got to have a code name. Had a code name and those are always fun. We would try to do fun things just as part of things that. might otherwise feel tedious because this was a transition. We actually had to make the transition

on a day. On a particular day, we actually had to consolidate all those sites together. So we had some dry runs where we would spend pretty much, I think there are two different days we spent pretty much the whole day in a room together with a large group of people that need to be involved in that one day switchover. And we just did things to try to make it fun, to break up the day and to have a good time as we were going. Even when we made the transition, it was into the evening that we were working, we had a gourmet coffee bar come in. We partnered with our live events team who always makes things fun,

and we had all of the different domains we were consolidating up on the wall, and we had a light underneath each one of them, and every time that we switched one over to the mothership, the new Ramsey Solutions.com, We turned off that light and we had a little celebration. We had, you know, red flags and green flags on each of the tables where groups of people were working. And if they came across a blocker, they'd put their red flag up and then the right people could come around and help solve that blocker. Like, we really tried to have fun.

We cheered. We enjoyed ourselves. We joked around. And we had a good time. Yeah. And, of course, at Ramsey, we love a good sticker. And so I do remember the day we celebrated this, everyone gets the sticker. And it was very clever with a little pointer, the little mouse pointer on there, which was so fun.

And I love that we did that because I think that does encourage the team that, hey, we know this matters, but making it fun along the way, there's so many creative ways that a business owner can do that for the team. And it doesn't have to be big. No, it doesn't. I mean, it can be getting pizza. It can be. It can be silly balloons. It can be whatever. You can do whatever works for your team. but just sometimes being silly and just laughing and allowing the team to laugh blows off the steam of the pressure of a big project or breaks it up. Yeah, I love that. So what did you learn personally from leading the team towards this vision,

towards this goal within a bigger vision? The thing I would say, the biggest thing that I learned, and I think I already knew it, but it hit me at a new level during this project, was the communication. You have to communicate the why all the, the time because it may feel like you said it 100 times. You probably need to say it a thousand times. You need to say it so often that the people involved with it are just naturally saying it on their own. And that's a really, it can feel kind of uncomfortable. You feel like you're being

redundant talking about the same thing over and over and over again. You're like they don't want to hear this anymore. But really, it's important. It's important that everybody keeps that front and center because the why is what pushes us through the hard work and what pushes us to the best solutions to a given problem. Yeah. And when you're talking about the why and getting people to care about this thing as much as you do, obviously at Ramsey, we try to hire people who care already. But for the business owner who may have a team and they're going, oh my gosh, I can't get this guy to care about the vision as much as I do. What encouragement would you give to the business owner who's kind of struggling to get the team rallied around the vision? Yeah, that's interesting.

One of the things we have a benefit of here, and I think that a lot of different businesses could actually proactively do this, is we hear from our customers pretty regularly. They come to our lobby and watch our shows on a daily basis. But even if you don't have that setup, getting the customer stories and how and why this is going to make their experience better or the product that they experience better, the service, whatever it is, getting those stories. to the team to me is one of the most motivating things that you can do because everybody wants to help others, wants to make other people's lives better, easier, more fulfilling. Yeah, you want to feel like you're making an impact and there's significance in the work you're doing, no matter how mundane it may feel in the moment and connecting with the people being affected by your product, your service is such a great way to get pumped. And we have the benefit of getting to experience that every day.

Dave reads emails and staff meeting of how people's lives are being changed by the stuff we do. okay you know what that line of code does matter and I do need to put excellence into that email I'm sending in into that tweet that I'm creating whatever those things are that your team is doing it really does make a huge difference to keeping the momentum and excitement long term for that vision yes for sure that's huge well Jen thanks so much for your time you're welcome appreciate the way that you have led us so well and continue to lead us towards this huge vision and how you've helped the business owners today no thanks George as Louis and Jen talked about in today's episode, you need a vision and you need to rally your team around it. And a huge part of that

is getting really good at communication. As Dave Ramsey says, communication is the grease in the gears. You can have great gears in your company, but it will still freeze up, grind to a halt if you don't put the grease of communication in the engine. Who new cars and great leadership have so much in common. Thanks, Dave. Our team has put together a free download designed to help you get started creating a culture of communication and greasing those gears. To get this free communication field guide, click the link in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed today's episode of the show. If you did, leave us a review and subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

And if you're a small business owner with 2 to 200 team members, we want to hear what you think of the show, what you like, what you don't like, and what we could do better. Give us your feedback by clicking the link in the show notes to schedule a call with Tim, our producer. If you want to keep up with us on social, you can follow us at Entree Leader. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, edited by Jacob Harrison and Bob Borquez, and mixed and mastered by Will Rudder. I'm your host, George Campbell, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.

If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like Ramsey Call of the Day. Check out our new Ramsey Call of the Day podcast. It'll give you a quick hit of advice about life and money in underage. 10 minutes. Listen to the Ramsey Call of the Day, wherever you listen to podcasts.