Start With A Win - Values-Driven Leadership with Brendan P. Keegan

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Brendan P. Keegan is CEO of Merchants, a company that provides customized fleet management and fleet leasing solutions to a wide range of businesses. He is an award-winning six-time president and chief executive officer, leading companies ranging from 500 to 10,000 employees. Brendan is currently leading Merchants to be an industry disruptor in the transportation industry, making a string of bold commitments toward sustainabilityMain TopicsThe everyday life and role of a CEO and focusing on the vision, values, people, culture and goals of the company (2:20)How to keep company values top of mind for your employees (6:25) Turning goals into habits and how to create goals in an organization (10:55)How goals lead to results and evaluating leading and lagging indicators in your business (15:15)How to inspire as the leader of the company through helping people recognizing success in themselves (18:39)Establishing a disciplined morning routine (22:00) Connect with Brendan:https://www.merchantsfleet.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanpkeegan/https://www.instagram.com/bpkfearless/Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/Listen, rate, and subscribe!Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. Coming to you from Brand Viva Media Studios here. Start with a win. Adam Contos here on the microphone with producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing fantastic. I love it. Yeah.

It's, you know, summertime is always great in the sense of there's lots of fun stuff to do. You know, for us, we do a lot of family stuff, you know. Yeah. Camping, road trips. It's great. You guys go and just kind of live off the earth, don't you? I got a nice rig. You've seen my SUV that's all rigged down.

Yeah. It's like the Overlander Lexus SUV. Exactly. And you can go anywhere. That's right. I love it. That's awesome. Well, speaking of car guys. Hey, I'm excited about today. Exactly. You can go anywhere. That's right. I love it. That's awesome. Well,

speaking of car guys. Hey, I'm excited about today. Yeah, transportation. That's right. I mean, I'm a car guy. I like to go camping. I'm headed up this weekend. Okay, good for you. Nice. And then so today we got Brendan Keegan on the show. So Brendan is the CEO of Merchants, a company that provides customized fleet management and fleet leasing solutions to a wide range of businesses. He is an award-winning six-time president and chief executive officer, leading companies ranging from 500 to 10,000 employees. So I know that we're going to be able to gain a lot of great leadership information and ideas from Brendan. Welcome to Start With A Win. Welcome, Brendan.

All right. Thanks, guys. I love hearing about your trips this summer, and I'd love to check out your rate mark sometime. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I have the Lexus LXG GX460. He's got stuff hanging all over it. I got awnings, and I got roof racks, and I got this Yakima trailer hitch connector that can swing free and turn into a cutting board for cooking and all sorts of fun stuff. We're going to have a picnic here at Brand Viva here on the roof. Hey, Brandon, it's so cool to have a CEO on the world I come from. And it's interesting because what happens in a CEO's head is really unique.

And a lot of people love to get into that on a daily basis because you've got a lot that you have to think about. Everybody thinks, okay, you're going to run in the company and producing numbers and handing them to the board of directors. Which, yes, that happens on probably a quarterly basis. But the reality is you're thinking about all the employees, all of the families of the employees, the business itself, the customers, the, you know, different partners and things of that nature in your world. You wake up in the morning the same way as everybody else. Put your shoes on, go out and get going in the day. When you hit the office, what do you start thinking about? I mean, take us through, what do you do every day as a CEO?

And I mean, they've heard my perspective on it, but I want to hear yours. What's a CEO do in your world? Yeah, so my day starts with my dogs actually waking me up every morning. What I actually do is I kind of start my workday at home. And I say that in that after I get up, take care of the dogs and feed them and such, I kind of really focus on any overnight emails, any communications. I kind of go through my day and I walk about an hour, hour and a half on my own because at that time in the morning, and it's early in the morning, I get up a quarter or five, or as I said, they get me up. No one bothers me in that time. So that hour and a half I get is the equivalent of three, four hours later in the day. And, but once I hit the office, I view my day as the company's day. Very little time do I have to close my door and do work that I have to do. I try to do things like this, do podcasts, be in team meetings. When I do have some free moments, instead of oftentimes me working on things that I

have to work on, I'll spend time just walking around the office. One thing that I focus on as a CEO, and as I've had a chance to grow in my CEO ship throughout my career, if you will, what I realized probably in my third CEO role is you can't do everything. Early on, I tried to keep my finger on all aspects of the role. And where I really spend my time now is our vision. Is our vision alive and well? The values of the company. Are we living those values? So one of our values is innovation. Are we really innovating? And if we aren't, then we aren't honoring that value. The third one is people. And I got to tell you, there's been no better time or tougher time

to manage your people than right now. I say better time because I think the hybrid world has opened up tremendous opportunities. For us, it's opened up talent pools that we probably pre-COVID wouldn't have tapped into, but challenging because it's challenging. There's the labor shortage. Culture is the fourth thing that I focus on is are we driving the right culture? And then the fifth, and it kind of is how you take your vision values and turn them actionable is goals. Do you have goals in place on an annual basis, on a monthly basis, quarterly basis, daily basis? And I'm a big daily basis

goal guy. Because if you're not doing these things daily, if they don't become habits, you're probably not going to have them hit at the end of the quarter, end of the year. You've said a lot that really resonates with me. I mean, the first question I have is, then I want to get into these habits and goals. What kind of dogs do you have? I have two pugs. Okay. Yeah. So I brought our better behaved. What do you have? I have German Shepherds and they wake me up at quarter to five every day also. I got the wet nose in the face. And they're like, Dad, we got to go outside. Yeah.

It's 4.45 every morning. They literally come up, stand right on my toe, my head, and basically say, we're hungry. They're the little creatures in our lives that keep us focused and happy. I love it. So you talked a fair amount of things that really, really hit home with me. And, you know, I mentioned the goals and habits and things like that, but let's go to values first. And, you know, the organizations that are strong and continue to strengthen themselves are values-driven organizations. Yet, you know that that's, you know, you walk down the hall, that's not the first thing on the employee's mind,

but we want it to be the first thing on the employee's mind because that's our North Star in this, you know, business environment is, you know, we have to live to our values and that drives how we function. How do you keep values top of mind in your business and with your employees? I mean, it's something you talk about a lot, or do you communicate a lot about it? What do you do with that? I would say you have to make it part of your everyday company. So do we measure it? Yes, it's in our performance reviews, but that's probably not the best thing in the sense that that's an annual event or in our case, semi-annual. So someone's going to think about it, but how do you bring it in?

So I'll give you some examples. We do lots of very large fleet leasing deals. We'll have a credit committee and one of our values is flexibility. So somebody will come in and they'll be pitching how we should be doing the deal. And credit, although some people think credit's there to say no, our view is credit's there to say yes, but. Yes, but this. Yes, but this. And my job in there, really, because I'm the tie-breaking vote, and ultimately, I like when I don't have to vote, my job in there start to become rigid, where they say, oh, no, we can't do that. And I can tell you from, you know, being at different companies when I've gone in, oftentimes the company never intended for their credit committees to say no. But over time, they became less flexible and more rigid, usually as a company grew. So with flexibility, which is one of our goals, then when we're in that credit committee, we have to honor that goal by being flexible. Also, when a client calls and says, hey, I'm having trouble paying this month, or they call during COVID, and we had certain businesses shut down, we have to say, hey, it's our job to be flexible. Now, flexibility during COVID was something totally different than flexibility pre-COVID, but you had to redefine what flexibility meant. So it's got to be something that you talk about every day.

Now, we also have a few values that hopefully we don't actually have to talk about. One of them being integrity. Hopefully integrity is one that you're not often talking about out loud. It's just something that happens. You're hiring to that or firing to that. But service, flexibility, innovation are three that on any given day, you can probably hear in almost any meeting that we're in. That's awesome. I don't think people give CEOs as much credit for the amount of effort that you put towards driving your values. Is that a fair statement? What I'd say is it probably depend on the given CEO. I would like to think all CEOs are focused on their vision and values. I think some of that comes from where did you grow up in a

company? If you grew up in finance, you might be a little bit more finance good if you grew up in sales. I grew up in a Fortune 100 company where they had rotation, so I've had a chance to work all across. And I think I'm very thankful to my mentors, by the way, for doing that because I got stuck in some jobs I didn't really like, but I look back at how much I learned when I was doing those jobs. So I'm hoping that all CEOs are focused on values and how do you embed them. What I will tell you is too many times people install them or implement them or talk about them at a town hall,

but they don't make it the fabric of the company. Now, I do think companies that do a better job of values, have better retention, have better growth rates, and probably have higher job satisfaction from their employees as well. Totally agree. I think the values I'm sure are, and I know in our organization, they were very heavily reflected in the employee surveys because that was something that we really focused on. And you can see them in the trust that the employee has in the organization and in the direction that the organization's going, as well as the leadership and the integrity there.

So thank you for being a values-driven leader. Let's jump into some GSD, some getting stuff done here, which I know is always top of mind when someone like yourself walks in the office. You're like, I'm going to walk out today. I'm going to know I got these things done. You talked about turning goals into habits. How do you guys break down your goals in the organization? A lot of people just run away with a million goals, which more than a very few goals, you have none. So, um, how do you, uh, keep the, uh, you know, kind of herd the cats and keep people focused on the, what needs to be done?

Yeah. So, uh, what I do, I, I haven't have 10 direct reports and I, I jokingly send mine out, um, on new year's Eve, right before midnight. Cause I want them to have every single minute available to hit the goals. And, and what I do as a leader is I break the goals into three sets, company goals. And I keep those very simple, top line growth and bottom line growth. And the reason I say that is when I give that to a marketing person or to our head of operations, they have different impacts on top line and bottom line. So that's the company. And then I give them business or support goals. So if you're in the business, it's the operations role, you're in a support role, and you have five goals there. The first one starts with, do you have a business plan for the year? So notice I said business plan,

not financial plan. And the reason I say that is if you have a business plan, the financial plan is the output. I think too many times we start with the output in mind. Otherwise, do you have a talent plan? What are you looking for on your team? And it might be that, hey, you're not growing your team that year, but do you have the right people? Do you have the right talent? What types of skills do some of your people need? Have you identified the strengths and weaknesses? I always ask each person to have their own leadership plan. What leadership skills are you working on as an executive?

Now, I will tell you, usually when I join a company, this is when I get the most questions about from the leadership team. Senior people, generally 40s, 50s, 60s are saying, what do you mean by this? And I'm always fascinated by that. And I go, well, what are you going to do to get better? What skills? And by the way, even if you have all the skills you need, you should be improving those. And then the third area, and these are written down and they aren't part of their review, but everybody's got to fill them out, is personal goals. And on the personal goals, I have five for everyone. It's health. What are you doing for your health? Now, I'm not trying to turn everyone into a triathlete,

but I want them to be health focused. Wealth, what are you doing to create wealth for you and your family? Family and friends, are you balanced? Are you taking your vacation? Are you going out on the weekends? Like our friend Mark with his Lexus, it seems like it's a mobile unit, a community. I do ask people, as a senior leader in a company, you have a responsibility to be a leader in your community. And then the last, which is very much a Brendanism, I guess, is positivity. I say, hey, part of your job as a leader is to bring that consistent, positive energy to the office every day. And by the way, there's no human out there that every day is a positive experience. So it's like, but part of your role is to bring that positivity,

even if you're going through a tough patch. Amazing. It's nice to hear you talk about the self-care because so many people, particularly the last few years, have neglected the self-care. And I think it's really come back to bite them in the rear and really impact not just their business, but the other people involved in the business, the employees, customers, things like that. And frankly, I think you hit the nail on the head.

Nobody wants to do business with a miserable person. Agree. Agree. You don't want to jump in line and you're looking ahead at the front of the line. The person helping people is just having the worst day of their life. You're like, oh no. At the same time, you know, somebody like you or me or Mark here, we'd look at it and go, how can I make their day better? Which is leadership. You know, how do we, How do we change someone's day that way? So I love these concepts. Let's get into putting these goals into creating results that lead us towards these goals. And you've mentioned a couple of words. One is habits and one is actions. And tell me how those fit into the

goals and how do we translate that into actually at the end of the quarter or month or however you measure that, we look at it and go, we did the right thing. So when you think of goals, there's what's called leading indicators and lagging indicators. I think companies get fascinated by lagging indicators. Lagging indicators really are all financial metrics. Right. So it's July 7th, and I had the chairman of our board ask me earlier today, hey, how did we do this month?

I said, I haven't got the financial numbers yet, but we beat forecast. He goes, how do you know we beat forecast? I go, because I look at leading indicators. And we have nine that we track on a daily basis every day. It's, geez, the distribution list must be over 100 people. We get the stats on nine indicators, and we have what's our plan, what's our forecast, and how did we do? And by the way, the way the system does it, it color codes it bright green, white green, yellow, or red. So you can quickly look at these nine and say, how are we doing? You know, against our plan and then against our forecast. Because keep in mind, beginning of the year, you have a plan. During the year, that plan changes.

So go back to 2020, COVID changed. Right now, supply chain, getting vehicles in our business, but I think supply chain in any business changes. So we measure it against our plan and then against our forecast. And on every morning, I can, in literally five seconds lets me know, do we need to do any corrective actions? Because too many times it's July 7th, it's July 8th, and all of a sudden the numbers come in and you knew where you wanted or you aren't where you wanted. And by that time, you're too late to do anything about it. You're already a third of the way through the next month. Right. So it also allows us to be more decisive. So the first starts with what we talk about is leading indicators versus lagging indicators. And that if you do these things, then you know that the financial outcome is going to get there. The second is we ask the owners of each of those, what do you need to do on a daily basis to drive that given metric. So that metric might be orders. The metric might be deliveries. The metric might be utilization. So if utilization dipped, then somebody knows we should sell off some of our assets or not bring in any new assets because our utilization dipped. So people really on a daily basis know, what do I have to do? And when you can get your employees to understand on a daily basis how they can impact leading indicators, if you're able to do that, I'm willing to bet you're going to get your monthly, like so many people are reactive and, okay, what are

our numbers going to be? But you guys are actually looking at it going, here's the actions we have to take and the results we get. So let's be taking those actions and let's measure those actions in order to get those results. So you're thinking ahead of the game. How do you, and this is like the magic and leadership here. When you look at that, how do you know that you're getting people to do the things that they need to do? And how do you inspire them to do so as the leader of the company? As a leader in a company or a leader in your community or leader anywhere, if you want to be successful at this, you have to get it where the person knows they're being successful, not you telling them. And then

what I've found in my career and in my personal life, most people, if not all people, want to be successful. A lot of people don't know how to be successful or they don't know when they are being successful. When you can internalize that a person can get up in the morning, take a look at these indicators, take a look at what their role is, and they know I was successful today, I wasn't successful today. At that point, as a leader, your job's much easier, much, much easier. I don't have to run around the building and start either cheering for people or barking at people. People show up at the office and they know at 9.01, hey, how did we do? What do I have to do to be better today? So I think as a

leader, and it's why you didn't hear me say what my job is. I didn't talk about financial metrics. I didn't talk about managing the board. I didn't talk about building partnerships. I talked about, are we honoring our vision and values? Do we have the right people? Do we have the right culture? And do we have goals in place? If we do that, everything else is going to take care of itself. And here's the last thing I'll tell you is it's unbelievably contagious.

So when someone starts to see themselves winning, it's addictive. They want to win tomorrow. They want to win the next day. And then on somebody on their team sees their peer winning, everyone wants to be on a winning team. Everybody does. Sports analogy, sometimes we've seen this team that's great and they start losing and all of a sudden the players and coaches are going at it. They win their next three, four games and guess what? Harmony. Harmony. So there's something to be said for when you're winning. It's a good feeling. It does truly bring better teamwork, better collaboration. But my role as CEO isn't to be out there letting people know when they're winning or not. It's creating a culture that people are accountable to themselves

and know when they're winning and when they're not. And I think that's what a big part of my role as a leader is. Awesome. That was put so well. And I love the modeling of the behavior that you want to see in everybody. I mean, you're living what you're saying here. You're not just saying it and then stepping back and going, ah, this doesn't pertain to me. I don't have to. You're there, and you are the model of what you want to see in your people. Brendan, this has been amazing, and I encourage everybody to go back. There are tons of great leadership nuggets in this podcast here. I have a question for you, and I asked you how you start your day with a win at the beginning of this, which I usually save at the end, but I wanted to spin that here for this audience coming from a multi-time CEO, a great leader of many, many people. Brendan, if you were to give some advice to our listeners of how they can start their day with a win if they're getting up wondering, what should I do?

What advice do you have for them? My advice would be have a morning routine. And in your morning routine, be very, very, very disciplined by it. So as I mentioned, one of our goals is health. So for health this year, I said to myself, I want to sleep better because sleep is so important. So I got a Fitbit, didn't own a Fitbit until this year. And in the morning I get up and I have five things I do every morning. The first is I look at my sleep score. How did I do? And then I sit there and I look at it. And this morning was a 78. So that's generally pretty good. Six hours and two minutes. My goal is seven. But I kind of say, okay, did I sleep well?

The next thing is I set up my day. I write out what do I want to accomplish for the day. And by the way, I limit it to five things, not 10, not 15. Because by the way, if I put 10 down, I'm just lying to myself. I can only do five. So that's the second. The third is I read for 15 minutes. Now, I'll tell you, that's something that I've done for a while. That was very hard for me. Very hard because I wanted to go. I'm like, the day's going. The day's going.

What I've found, though, is it grounds me mentally. That's great. It really slows me down. So that was probably 10 years ago. About five years ago, I entered in and this one, I'm still a work in progress is I try to meditate five to 10 minutes a day. Notice I didn't say 10, 20, or 30. I got to tell you though, I do it, but I would say half the times, I don't know. I don't know if I really do. I physically do it, but I'm doing other stuff in my head. Yeah.

But I'm still committed because I said, hey, that's something I want to get better at. And then I do my morning workout because I know if I say I'm going to do it at the end of the day, something comes up. So I get a morning workout in. And our CFO, I love him every night. I see him on the palace and bike and I sit there and go, hey, I'll ride with you tomorrow. Inevitably something comes up the next day and I don't. So that's my morning routine. And what I'd say is just stay focused on that. So I'll give you one last comment. So I know how long that takes me. So if I have a 7am flight, then I can literally just back up and say, okay, I have to leave the airport at 530.

That means I have to get up a few minutes earlier and beat the dogs out of bed. But I don't cheat my morning because that's for me, the whole foundation for the day. Awesome. Brendan Keegan, CEO of Merchants, a great leader. Thank you so much for being on Start With A Win and sharing this leadership wisdom. All right. It was great being with you, Adam. Thank you so much for doing what you do. Thank you.

And thank you for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd enjoyed this content, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast and head over to adamcontos.com slash leadership, where you can get a PDF download that will give you three keys to be a better leader. And don't forget about the Start With A Win book. You can get that online anywhere you order your books. And until next time, remember, start with a win.