Noob School - AI won’t replace great leaders. But great leaders will know how to use it.

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

In this conversation with Dan Rundle, we talk about what human-centered AI actually looks like inside a business. Dan shares his journey from early employee to CEO, why technology should strengthen people instead of sidelining them, and what separates leaders people want to follow from those they quietly leave. This episode isn’t about chasing tools. It’s about clarity, consistency, and using technology to improve the human experience — for employees and customers alike. If you believe AI should make teams better (not smaller), this one’s worth your time.In this conversation with Dan Rundle, we talk about what human-centered AI actually looks like inside a business. Dan shares his journey from early employee to CEO, why technology should strengthen people instead of sidelining them, and what separates leaders people want to follow from those they quietly leave. This episode isn’t about chasing tools. It’s about clarity, consistency, and using technology to improve the human experience — for employees and customers alike. If you believe AI should make teams better (not smaller), this one’s worth your time.

Hey, we just finished filming the podcast with Dan Rundle. Dan runs an AI company. All they do is help other companies get AI across their whole business. It's fascinating, very cool what they're doing, right here in Greenville. If you like what we're doing here, do me a favor and like and subscribe to this channel. Enjoy it. Welcome back to Noob School episode 158. Today I've got Dan Rundle.

Welcome aboard, Dan. Great to be here with you, John. Yeah, man. Dan and I have known each other quite some time. We actually worked in the same office kind of across the hall for a while, so we probably know a lot more about each other than we planned, but we do know each other,

and I've got a lot of respect for Dan, and what he does, what he's built at worthwhile. Also, at one point in the past, I worked with his brother, Paul. And Paul has, as many of my alumni have, he's gone on to bigger and better things that I've ever dreamed of. I mean, he's just crushing it now. He's got his own business and real happy for him. Yeah.

It's wonderful. Have you learned a lot from you? Well, he gives you credit for all the good stuff. Well, thank you. Thank you. I'm checking the mailbox. I hadn't seen anything from Rundle in there. Anyway, I'm happy for him.

And let's, you know, your company worthwhile started in 94. Right? And so that's like, God, 25. 31 years. 31? Yeah. Did you all do anything special for 30? We didn't. The story is I didn't start the business. It started about 10 years before I got that we can get into that.

Yeah. We started doing business in 94 as the story goes. And then didn't incorporate until, officially until 1997. So that's our real 30-year anniversary. We're going to do something big in 20-year. Okay. That's coming up. All right. Good. Good. Yeah. And worthwhile, obviously, after that period of time, you've got great clients and employees that do AI development, web development, handheld, you know, normal computer stuff. Is that generally how you describe it? High tech products. We're building software. We're building AI. We're building teams of agents. And we're helping clients be more effective at whatever their mission is with software. Okay. So when you say you're building agents, that would be like if I wanted a marketing lead machine agent, AI agent, you'd find out exactly who I wanted to go after and you'd build that for me and it would start just delivering the inbound.

Yeah, normally it's teams of agents. A lot of the art and science of AI development is dividing the work process or processes up into the right bytes so that an individual AI agent can take each bite in the right. order in the right way. Okay. And then work together to generate the end goal that you want to have. Okay. We're ahead of ourselves already, but I can't resist. I love talking about this. I know you do.

This is great. I'm interested like everyone else is about how this works. I follow a guy in Silicon Valley that's got a decent size company. He's not a huge company. And he says, they do like, Mr. Jason Limkin. They do all kind of SaaS training, and they kind of talk about SaaS, and they do a big show in Europe and a big show here. But he's kind of the SaaS promoter guy. And he says a year ago, he had 22 employees, and now he's got four.

And his revenue's up. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, it's real. It's real. It's possible. And I hear those stories and see those stories. and see those stories happen all the time. Yeah.

So let's just say what we're going to do, I said, okay, I want to do, I want to go, I want you to find, find it, find the perfect lead for my software business. And then I want you to qualify them to the point where they're interested enough to get on the calendar for a discovery call. How many agents would that be? Well, I have a lot of questions for you and want to make sure that it was something that agents could do first.

But assuming that it is, there's a lot of different ways we could slice that up. And I'm not the, I'll tell you at the outset here, I'm not the technical details guy on the worthwhile team. We've got people who are much more talented at that than I am. But it's a little bit like organizational design when you're building a team. How do you build a sales team? Well, I mean, you've got some people that are probably focused on lead generation. You might have some people that are even further out than that, focused on marketing and brand.

You've got some account executives or closers. It's probably going to look something like that. And then a customer success manager. Exactly. And then a renewals person, right? So almost all of that could be AI. maybe there's a sliver there when they're okay are you are you ready to place the order or talk whenever you're close to the order maybe right there it's got to be a person but maybe not

maybe not I was on the other day I had a flat I needed I needed AAA to come help me with my car and so I called AAA and just as soon as I hung up the phone with them I got a text hey John you know this is Darla I'm sorry you had this happen we're all over helping you I'm like well thank you darling that was really nice of you and then as soon as I finish time and she's like well that's my job I'm happy to do it and then I'm like there is no Darla I'm talking to AI but it was certainly nice I didn't mind I mean she was helping me that's crazy isn't it that that should be the goal with every AI use case is is to, can it be done better than it was before?

Not can we do more with less? Yeah, cheaper. Can we just do it cheaper? Yes, you probably could, but can we do it better? And when you make that, your goal, I think it changes the conversation around AI and the business. Well, particularly now with AI, with the knowledge capture, you know, that we can do so much easier, you know, if you knew everything about my software company, let's say I've got a company. company called Sequent Software. If you knew everything about that and had all the customer support records going back in history,

that's more than any one person can know. Right. So it will be better. And it'll be instant, 24-7. Yep. You can do that. That's the idea. And the other thing that I tell leaders to think about, too, is this the goal is not to eliminate people.

People are still in charge and need to be in charge. in the business. And people are important. There's things that humans can do that machines will never be able to do. So the goal with AI needs to be to make the humans that you have more effective and more efficient to superpower them, supercharge them, not eliminate them. And if you're coming out the AI conversation looking to cut people out, I think you'll get to a fundamentally different end game than you will if you're looking to make them

better. Yeah. Well, I think I would agree with you that the goal should be how do we make it a better experience for our customer? How do we sell more because of that? And likely you'll have people that you can either redeploy or have to go work somewhere else. Exactly. You know, but that shouldn't be the mission. Mm-hmm. Okay. Or you'll be able to, or those same people, same people will be able to do 10x or 5x the output that they could do before. Yeah. So, Jason, in my earlier example, he was like the people we have now are working really hard, but they're mostly managing those agents and tweaking what they do and changing the algorithms and all that stuff.

So I've heard like a one to ten ratio. Is that about right? Like one person can manage about ten agents? Every business is different. Every agent is different. I mean, I don't see any reason why that number couldn't be a lot higher. Okay. But I think the principle there is correct, and that is that AI is a process, not a project.

It's not something you just deploy. Right. It's done. Right. Thank you. Yeah. And it runs and it spits out money on the other side. You've got to manage it and improve it and tweak it.

And a lot of the gains come when you're babysitting a little bit. Like, again, I compare it to organizational design, but you can compare this to employee training. If you hire people but don't give them good training or resources, the other things. They're going to flounder. They're going to go somewhere else. They're not going to be as effective as they could. Well, salespeople are like that. You know, kind of my area is, you know, you can hire a good person.

If you don't have just regular training like forever, they're just going to, if you, as soon as you stop training, they're just going to stop right there. That's why people need this podcast. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. Everybody knows it.

Well, I'm going to come back to this because I want to talk more, but I don't want to skip over at the beginning. So I think. if you go back to your beginning. So it was San Diego? Sacramento area, Northern California is where I grew up. It starts with an S. Yeah, my brother spent some time in San Diego too.

That's what I was assuming. You're Sacramento. Yeah. Okay. And then did you leave there to come here for school? I did. And you went to Bob Jones? I did.

You got a graduate degree. I did. Okay. Now, who was the president then? It was Dr. Bob Jones III was the president when I was in school. So that's the son. the son of the original Bob Jones? The grandson of the original Bob Jones.

There was Bob Jones, Senior, and then Bob Jones III. Okay. And I know he got ill at some point. His son, Stephen, took over in the 2000s, and then had some health issues, and they've had a couple of the presidents. Not family members. The first one who wasn't family was a Citadel grad. Yeah, Steve Fettit. I know Steve.

You do you know him? Where is he now? He is with the Palmetto Family Foundation, I believe. It's a nonprofit. Yeah. He's good. You should have him on the podcast. That's a great idea.

Yeah, I met him at a Citadel event, and he walked in the room, and it's just one of those things where, you know, we're all just kind of standing there, and this guy walks in. It's like, you know, the president just walked in. I mean, he just looks the way he stands, and, you know, he just looks. Like a Citadel guy. Well, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe some of that and some of like, you know, the preacher, you know, the guy who's like up on the thing and you're all looking for him for advice and stuff. But I, you know, use my sales thing and just three-foot rolled of like, hey, John Sterling, graduate with so-and-so, I'd like to come see you.

Yeah. I had a great experience at Bob Jones. I'm really thankful for it. I transferred there in my junior year. Okay. And I was at a small community college in Northern California and had really not spent any time in Greenville, South Carolina in my life. Had not spent any time at Bob Jones University and just I showed up here and ended up being

a great decision. Met my wife within a couple of weeks. Nice. We've been married for over 20 years now. Wonderful. And I've built, I learned a lot of course there, but I've built some great relationships there that I still have to this day. And so you had no other reason to come here.

Like, did Paul come to school here too? Mm-hmm. Okay. And you've settled here. He's in Charlotte. I guess he went to Charlotte for work. Yeah. Yeah.

He'll be back here someday. Yeah. I met Dr. Jones, I think. I met, I was out there with Steve, and he introduced me to him. I think that was Dr. Jones three. I don't know. Yeah. Sounds right.

I felt like I was, you know, shaking hands kind of with the Lord. Not all the way, but kind of. But he just, he was very, very kind. I enjoyed his kindness and genuinely interest in everything. Steve wasn't there when you were there. No, he became president just after I left. Okay. And how did you meet him?

I don't know how I met him originally, just Bob Jones circles, I guess, going to events. He's the bluegrass guy. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. All right. So after college, what year was that? Graduated in 2003 with my undergrad and then started at a startup, which we can talk about.

I learned a ton. It was another great experience. a really perfect formative experience for my first real job working at a company called Level 1. While at nights and weekends I got my MBA at Bob Jones. Yeah. And those two things really worked together to form me and mold me and give me, again, some great relationships that I had to this day. So Level 1, what were they selling? So they were a startup in the apartment industry, the multifamily housing world, merging tech and software and a call center to act as a centralized lease-in office for apartment communities.

It's really the first of its kind. I think I was employee number five or six there. Was there for a little over two years, got to have every job in the place. it grew to a couple hundred people within the two years that I was there. And really a great entrepreneurial story, something that didn't exist anywhere in the country, was started here in Greenville and started by a couple of really, really smart entrepreneurs who were also really good salespeople. And that's where I first learned sales, by the way, too.

And then ended up exiting to a publicly traded firm a number of years later. They did. But I learned a ton in those. a couple of years I was there. So what are some of those early sales lessons you learned? Well, one thing at level one that was cool is before level one existed, my understanding is this idea of leasing an apartment over the phone didn't exist. You'd go into the office and do the paperwork.

You'd go to the office and level one really pioneered the idea of a sight unseen lease. where our reps could, over the phone, help somebody get comfortable enough to sign a lease for an apartment. And they're moving across the country or their jobs transferring them or whatever. They don't have the chance to come out and visit. Or maybe they're, you know, maybe they just live across town and you can build such rapport with them that you can close them over the phone. And one of the things that I learned there is we often put, we put our own expectations on the prospect. I wouldn't buy that way. And therefore, the prospect won't buy that way.

And that can create some blind spots. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good one. That's a really good one. Is we projecting what we think onto what the buyer might be thinking. because it's very often. I mean, we're all so different, you know. I was talking to a guy yesterday who was talking about how they do their front-end qualification on a software deal.

I thought, well, just tell me about it. He goes, well, I'll show you. So he gives me four pieces of paper, all full of questions. It was so detailed. It was like, you know, how many people, how long they've been there, what's the average tenure, how big is the building, when was the building, built who built the building. I mean, it was just like all this stuff. And I'm thinking, none of these really help me understand what this person's problem is. These are just questions. But he was projecting what his mind, he's a PhD in engineering. He wants four pages of information. If he's making a decision, I want no pages. No pages. Just tell me big picture. Yeah. You know, John is probably going to save you 10, 12 percent. I'm like, let's try it.

Mm-hmm. Right? Sign me up. Sign me up. So, yeah, that was an example just yesterday. Did you ever listen to Zig Ziglar? Yeah. One of my favorite Zig stories is he said, when he was selling pots and pans, you know, he was just starting out selling pots and pans door to door,

he would walk down the street and he would see a house that needed paint, you know, and grass one mown and there was like a bicycle laid in the grass. It was just kind of a messy looking house. And he would say to himself, those people, you know, they don't care about nice new things. They're just kind of messy people. They probably don't have the money for it. So he would just walk right by the house. And go to the next one.

The next one's like, beautiful house, freshly painted, new roof, grass, pristine, you know, the water's going, the sprinkler. And he would say, they'd probably already have pots of things. And he would keep walking. We can talk ourselves out of things pretty easily. Yeah, that's a great one. Huh. So, we did level one. Mm-hmm.

And then what happened? Then I made the jump to worthwhile. Okay. Wow. Yeah. So. Not exactly a job hopper. No.

One hop. Yeah, it's one hop. I had 20 years and I'm still there. So, And that was probably one of the biggest, looking back at it, it was one of the biggest risks that I ever took in my career was making that move. I had a great career ahead of me if I had stayed at level one. I was riding a rocket ship and the company was growing and we were doing great.

But I had, I'd fallen in love with tech and software and wanted to focus on that. And so I made the move to worthwhile. And I was employee number three at worthwhile. So I started out as an employee. Your COO to begin with? No. I was sort of operations. I did everything other than software developer.

I wore a lot of hats. And then eventually worked my way up to become the CEO and then bought out a couple of partners along the way to own it. Nice. Well, I'm proud of you, me. That's a great 20-year run. I'm very fortunate. Tell us kind of what the company looks like, like employees and where they are, clients, stuff like that. Yeah, so we have a hybrid remote team all across the U.S.

Our core team is about 20 people. And that hasn't always been the case, by the way. We used to be just Greenville-based. And we can talk more about that if you want to because I have some thoughts on that. but we're hybrid remote and we also have a network of contractors that we work with that gives us a lot of flexible capacity and a lot of specialization. So we work with contractors all over the U.S. and all over the world to scale up or scale down depending on the project or clients that we're working on. Okay. All right. So how many of that core group are in Greenville?

Probably about half. Ten? Third to half. Yeah. Yeah. But I know where we work, I see a handful. Like, they're not all there, right? Are they there?

Yeah. No, most people don't come into the office, even those in Greenville. Most of them work from home. I have some young guy, some friend of mine, he's young West Point graduate. He's out of the Army now. It's like 27 or something, 28. And he works remote for some software company. I said, what are you going to do if they make you come back in?

He goes, quit? Go another one. I'll go somewhere else. I mean, without even thinking, there's a whole generation of people that ain't going in. Right. Let's say, do you want the work done? I'll do the work. Right.

For a lot of years, I was the guy that was the stick in the mud in a changing industry in an industry that was going remote and going hybrid. I was the guy that said, no. Yeah. We're going to stay in person because we're a culture first company. and you can't have a great healthy culture if you spread out and people aren't coming to the office. So I conflated culture with space, with physical space, and I don't think that that, and I've come to learn through COVID specifically, where I was forced to reckon with that, that you can have a wonderful, highly performative, highly healthy culture in a hybrid work environment. You just have to be intentional about it.

You have to work on it. I met some guys. I tried to buy a company in 2007. So a long time ago. And I felt they were in, they were in Sacramento. It's called Maintenance Connection, the name of the company. And, I mean, I don't think I should say the exact numbers, but there were somewhere, you know, under 10 million and their profits were, you know,

let's just to say roughly half of the revenues. And I was coming out of a public company where we were making like 10%. Yeah, it's a pretty healthy business. They're like 50%. I'm like, well, okay, I got to figure out how they do this. And they were already remote. I said, where were we going to meet? 2007.

Yes. Wow. Completely remote. They built little huts in their backyards. And they were just at a certain time of the day, they would all boot up. And they would kind of stay with a picture on the screen. Like they could see each other all while they're working. Wow.

They were ahead of their time. Twice a year, they would take some of that money saved and they would go skiing or they would spend like, I don't know if it's a week, but a couple days having fun and having team meetings. But they're so far ahead of their time. That's really important, though, too, is to get the people back together from time to time. Yeah. Because if you can do a really well-planned event or gathering, you can build culture in some really exciting ways. I think so. I think so.

We used to do during COVID, we would do joke boat. You ever play joke boat? No. It was a game. We'd play it once a week and we'd all, you know, of course, get online. And it would, like, give you a subject. And then you came on stage and you had an avatar and you were, you were standing up comedian and you were telling a joke about this subject. And it was really, really fun.

And, of course, we'd all vote. you know who was going to win and I thought I was funny but I never I never won you know probably old guy funny jokes they don't get but yeah I think you do have to be intentional to make it work but I don't know how any of us can get away with I mean it wouldn't be smart to make everyone come in anymore right and you close yourself off to a whole world of talent that's out there if you're just confined to the best talent in your locality. Right. Right.

And once you drop the must be present to win, clause, it opens up the entire world. Yeah. You know, I told you earlier, my, you know, one of my very best people that I work with lives in Portugal. And I've been over to see him once. He's been working with me, I think, five years now. but we talk every day on the, you know, on the web. And no way I would, I mean, he's not moving to Greenville. He can't even move to Greenville.

We can't even get him, you know, if we wanted to, we can't get, get him a pass to come in. And so, yeah, I agree. And you do that also. How do you find those people, like your overseas talent? We have found a couple of firms that we work through. We generally don't hire direct or work directly with folks. We'll work through firms who we've grown to know and trust over the years. Okay.

Okay. That's good. I found mine from a couple of them I found through working with other companies and working through with partners. I'll just notice there's a person that I think would match up with us real well. and then when they had the chance, you know. So that's a, I mean, I like that, you know, if you see them in person or if you see them in action, then you know.

We've also had good success on LinkedIn as well, recruiting and finding good folks. You just post, post that you're looking. Or just cold outreach to people, just message somebody and say, hey, you seem to fit exactly what we're looking for. Do you find that person on LinkedIn? Would you put in a search criteria or something? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. C++ or what is it? How do you program into one of these agents? What do you need to know? Well, we use Python primarily. Okay. There's other languages and tools. I mean, there's about a million of them out there.

Oh. Okay. Interesting. Okay. Well, let me ask you a couple of, of other questions, if you don't mind. Go for it. Okay.

You mentioned a couple of times that you're interested in organizations and people and technology, this intersection. Where did that come from? Why is that one of your things? Maybe you can help me figure that out during the podcast. Yeah. That's a good question. I have always been focused on people in relationships. relationships. That's what I love about business. That's what I love about, you know, life.

And that, whether you work with someone for a few months or a career, you get an amazing opportunity to build some really phenomenal relationships. And I learn a lot from those people, too. And they challenge me and they help me grow. And so I think that's part of it. But I also, I think I have a high view of human beings. Human beings are really important. And when we talk about AI and technology, it's very easy to lose sight of the importance of humanity in all that we do and the importance of human beings. And so I see technology. And when we talk about the intersection of people and technology. I see technology as something that can fundamentally improve the human condition and make humans more effective and productive.

Unlike anything else we've created so far, we'll create something else in the future that's better. But when I think of software and AI, I mean, there's no better way to improve the human condition right now. Okay. Yeah. So you kind of, I know you studied operational effectiveness in graduate school or college? Yeah, operations management was my undergrad degree, school of business. And the MBA was more entrepreneurship. And you kind of just weaved into technology, and that's kind of how they come together.

Mm-hmm. Okay. That's good. Yeah. Interesting. Let's talk about leadership a little bit. What do you think makes a leader that somebody really wants to follow? I think you've got to be consistent.

If you're showing up as a different person from one day to the next or you're moody or you're, you know, you never know what you're going to get. You don't want to be a jack in the box leader where you're just, you know, reel a thing and what's going to pop out? When's you going to pop out? Right, right. I think consistency is huge. I think backbone is key, too, when you are just, when you're a leader who is just trying to make people happy or lead by whatever you think is popular or most people go along with, I don't think that's a very effective leader as well.

So you've got to have some opinions about the world. You've got to have a worldview to say, here's how I see the world, here's how I see the world. Here's how I see our industry. And you've got to be consistent about living that out. And then I think you've got to have, you've got to understand your own core values. What is it that's important to you? And I see core values as the ideas that are at the intersection of what is most true about a person or a business and what is most unique about a person or a business. If it's just true, but it's not unique, well, it's not very important or meaningful. And if it's just unique and it's not true, well, you're telling a lie about yourself or your business in terms of your value.

So consistency and dependability, backbone, and then values. Those are great ones. Three elements, maybe not all of the elements of a good leader, but three that I think, at least in micro, career have been really important. Yeah, yeah. I'll give you a summary of that. We had a guy, someone had a guy come speak to one of our next groups over in the one building one time. So it's just packed house, you know, they had all these speakers coming through, and he had sold some business for a hundred million or something. And they said, what's your, what's the one piece of advice you'd give all these entrepreneurs, you know, if they want to succeed?

And he's like, you got to get your act together. He says, if you're not any of those things you just said, no one's going to follow you. Right? You can have the greatest idea in the world. You can work hard. You can put all your money on the line. But, you know, if you're not, if you're not, you're not, you know, you're not, you're not going to follow you.

Yeah. I just thought of a fourth thing. Can I add one more thing to the list? Of course, of course. I think you've got to have a long-term view. if you're if you're if you're just in it for quick quick buck or a quick turnaround or whatever you got to think in terms of decades instead of years and years instead of quarters and quarters instead of months yes but you've got to you've got to have a long-term view because if

you don't have a long-term view you'll either get distracted by whatever the thing is in the moment or you'll get discouraged because of the ups the downs that come with leading. I've been coaching companies lately the past couple years on their comp plans to make them year-long comp plans, not just monthly, you know, or good month, bad month, good. It's like we want you to deliver this much minimum for the year.

That's your quota. I think that's really smart. Yeah. And then the commissions, the percentage can build over the year, but I see so many of them get whipsod. but you know the salespeople are going to do whatever the comp plan tells them to do right to maximize their money so that's a good one that's very very very good let's see all right hey back to AI you said we need to have a culture healthy AI what does that mean to you

Well, if you are looking to AI to help you extend what you're already doing, well, AI is fundamentally strong at helping companies be better, do more of what they're already doing. And so you have to understand what you're already good at in order to scale with AI and to get the most out of AI. So it starts with understanding who you are. And your culture and your values is just as much a part of your company as anything else. Maybe the most important part of the company. And so if you don't bake that into your approach to AI, then you're going to scale something that isn't you. That isn't true to who you are. Yeah.

So you have to know what you are in the first place. Okay. Interesting. Very interesting. Okay. Now, here's one I think you're probably very good at. Tell us what the qualities are that you look for to hire tech people today. What kind of things are you looking for?

I'm looking for someone who is more focused on and more excited about the problems that they're trying to solve than the particular solutions that they have. And what I mean by that is a lot of tech folks, I've been guilty of this myself, can get distracted by tools and whatever the latest and greatest cool gadget or gizmo is. And there's some pretty cool gadgets and gizmos in the world, by the way. But those things are going to change. And they're going to change year to year, decade to decade. but the real talent are people that are more focused on the underlying problems they're trying to solve. The how they solve it is almost irrelevant.

Tools they use are not that important. But how do they think about the problem? So if you're interviewing someone, what kind of question would you ask to figure out how they would fall on that? I'm going to get into how they learn and whether they're a continual learner. Okay. That's one of the things I love about this podcast is about continually learning and, you know, getting knowledge from people.

Yeah. And you're really good at asking questions, continue learning yourself. Yes, absolutely. I think that's incredibly important for anyone, probably in any line of work, but especially technology in 2025. Yeah. And then the second thing I'm going to get into is values. Got the prop.

And I got a prop here. And we have this little booklet here of a worthwhile culturedome. And we interview based off of this. And so what we've done is we have taken our core values. And we've obviously explained those in here. But then we've broken those core values down into what are called values and action, which for us are 20 specific to-dos, their actions. They're things, they're behaviors that we exhibit within the company and seek to reinforce and live out on a daily basis.

And if we do these things, we'll be a better version of ourselves and we'll have lived out our core values. And so we want to let people in who are all all in on this and are all in on our way of doing work and business together. So you give them that before the interview? We will typically include the most important values and actions. in the job description, so they see it even before they apply. Okay. And then in the interview, we're going to ask a series of questions that are derived from those values in action.

That's great. It's wonderful. I love writing it down because if you don't write it down, the poor employee, you're guessing all the time, what am I supposed to do here, you know? Exactly. And then if you write it down, it also becomes a management tool. Yeah. now I can use it to reinforce.

I can use it to train. I can use it to incentivize. I can use it to celebrate and praise people because they're living out what we said we want to do. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Good job.

I need to write one of this. Now, this probably is what you're doing right now, but are there any other signs that you see in companies that employees would say, this is going to be a great place to work? I mean, that's one. is writing writing things down. Have they taken the time and did they care enough to really describe at their core who they are?

Instead of just saying culture is important to us, you actually say, this is what our culture is. Yeah. Here's what it's like. I don't know many people that have done that, really. Yeah. I think that's key. I mean, you can also look at how long do people stick around? Are they a revolving door or do people come and do they find a good?

healthy career there. Yeah. Well, that's outstanding. I love that. Um, now, have you, do you have any examples of leadership that you've seen maybe in some of your, even your customers go really right or wrong during a transition, like a tech transition? Oh yeah. We've seen it. We've seen it all. Yeah. We've seen it all. Give me a good one and a bad one. So a good one is going to be when the implementers are involved in the ideation. So what I mean by that is companies that manage change and navigate change well and implement technology well are those that involve from the very beginning at the ideation stage. the people who are going to have their hands on the keyboard, their hands on the mouse, doing the work, using the thing.

So not just tech people? Not just tech people, for sure. Yeah. Not just executives as well. The workers. Yeah. The people who are actually doing it. And if you can get that right and ask the right questions and be sincerely curious,

you will not only bring them along in the process because they'll be part of it, but you'll build a better solution. And so the bad ones are the opposite of that. Oftentimes it's some leader that has a great idea, and they're convinced that everyone's going to love it. And so they build it or we build it for them, and we build exactly what they ask us to create. And it works exactly as plan,

and it completely falls flat on its face because the right people weren't involved in the process of creating it. Interesting. That's great. That's great. And one thing I've seen with leadership when it goes well is when some real troublesome thing happens in the business. Let's just say there's a recession or there's a lawsuit or something like that happens. It's like to show up extra early and say everyone in the conference room, we have an opportunity here.

to fix this. You know, we're not running. Yeah, at level one we called it Opportunities to Impress. It's an OTI. OTI. We've got an OTI right now. We have an OTI.

We want to get in here. Exactly. Yeah. So, I've seen that, and I had a professor at the Citadel. Honestly, I can't tell you I learned a whole lot there, you know, but I learned a few things. And this guy,

I was whining one day about, you know, exams or something. I was like, I got all these exams. coming and he goes, son, don't you know what an exam is? I'm like, no, Colonel, I don't know what it is. And he says, it's just a chance to show off. You know, you should change the mindset. Like, well, that's what it ought to be. I shouldn't be scared of it. I should study, learn it, and show off a little. So I think it's the same in business. You got to trouble. That's your exam. Yeah, that's right. And that reminds me of another thing that's important here too is, is, is

demoing progress often. When you're working with a client, especially in software, you've got to show it off. They don't know what you're doing. They don't know what you're doing. You can't describe it to them enough. You can't put enough words on paper. I don't think they're doing anything. I got another bill, though.

That's right. You got a demo early and often. Yeah. That's smart. That's smart. So one rule for leaders next year to become someone. that will get called back. You want to get the call back?

I mean, I think it goes back to talking to what we talked about a few minutes ago, and that is write down your core beliefs. You can call those values, purpose, or some combination of the two, but take the time to really discover it if you're not clear and capture it and write it down and help the people around you in whatever business you're working in, whatever size team you're on to understand

this is the standard. Yeah. Set the standard. Yeah. I remember, my thing answered that question would be particularly today. It used to be we had all the power.

We'd interview. Well, okay, Dan, we'll give me the job. You know, like that. Well, thank you, Mr. Sterling, you know. And now it's definitely a two-way street. You know, this is global talent, and here's my company, and I'd like to acknowledge it's a two-way street.

Like, we'd really like to get you over here, and here's how we'd like to do it. And we've got, you know, I remember in college there was a one company, there was a shipping company, and their offer was, you know, we're going to hire you for whatever and teach you how to sell shipping, but we're going to fly to New York for training. It's pretty cool.

And we're going to get you five suits. You know, you have to wear these suits, you know, want any one every day, I suppose. And I almost went to work for them because they're the only person who offered anything other than just the job. I love that. I want the suits, you know. So PeopleSoft. I don't know if you were ever People Soft, but they were really, because they were kind of

in the people business, they were really into. this thing of like if you got the job you got the job you know you give you a people soft knapsack with the with the laptop in it and the headphones and the you know it's just all this people soft branded stuff to say we want you to be part of this you know we're together now versus the old-fashioned way that's really important and i and i think that shift that you talk about is a good shift like people people are deciding where to spend what a third plus of their lives. Yes.

That's a really important decision. It shouldn't just be thrown into the highest bidder. Yeah. You're right. I mean, it's a, it's a time, commitment, and partnership a step down from being married. But, you know, it's in the ballpark. I mean, you're there.

I mean, there was times at Datastreamer. I was spending more time with Larry than I was with my wife. I can tell you that. But, yeah, so you're right. It's a big commitment. And it should be acknowledged that way. It's taken seriously. It's just, okay, we'll hire you.

Come on. Like, no, this is a big deal. That's cool. Okay, that's good. Well, I think you've done it. You've had a great career. We're so glad you moved here from Sacramento. Way back when, and you went to Bob Jones,

and the only job hopped one time. I feel like I'm just getting started. I hope for at least another 20 years. That's good. That's good. That's good. I think you should feel that way. And back to what you said earlier,

if you seriously think about worthwhile 20 years from now, you know, go have a retreat on that one. What could that look like? Tech's going to be a lot different. It will be. But I guess you just have to make some assumptions. We did a retreat when our little company, our company at the time was $5 million.

And we did a retreat at Kiowa for three days with the whole management team. And we said, the subject is, how do we get to $100 million? Half the team was laughing. Like, the market's not big enough, John. You know, you can't do that. How can we support it anyway? I mean, they literally laughed me out of the room.

But we kept going on the meeting. And sure enough, that's exactly where we ended up before we sold it. So. The old 10x is easier than 2X question or whatever. Yeah, I think so. And I think also, you know, I'm exactly sure what your resident and everything is but the more you get, the easier that next jump is because you have better managers, better people, resources, people know you, you know, all that stuff, you just have to add a little gas.

So I don't know where you could get any sales coaching from. I'll help you figure that out. But where – tell everybody where they can contact you if they need some of this worthwhile help. You can email me. You can find me on LinkedIn. I write about AI a good bit. My email is D.Rundle, D-R-U-N-D-L-E at Worthwhile.com, and I'd be glad to help.

All right, well, that would be great. Well, it's been wonderful. I learned a lot about the AI and the agents. That's pretty cool. But, yeah, thanks for coming, and congratulations on your success so far. Thanks for great questions. All right, man. Thank you.

Thank you.