Revitalizing Corporate Culture with Entara CEO Linda Maclachlan
Linda Maclachlan is the CEO of Entara, a successful IT support firm. Entara was originally named YJT Solutions, and operated for 17 years under that name. Expanded services for the company led to a re-branding with an attention on the future of the IT industry. Linda also serves on the Board of Directors for the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. Previously Linda had served as owner and CEO of Bracken Resources.
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[07:30] The 4 Core Values of Entara
[16:08] Measuring employee fulfillment of the Core Values
[37:05] Linda gives advice for adopting culture to lead a company
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Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: From Core Values to Valued Culture, here is your host, Will Scott, interviewing another CEO about leading culture in their company.
Will Scott: Hello listeners, and welcome to another Culture Czars interview, where we talk to CEOs that care about their corporate culture. We call this series From Core Values to Valued Culture because we want employees to love where they work and why they work. And Linda Maclachlan is CEO and czar of culture at Entara Corp. Hi Linda.
Linda M.: Hi Will.
Will Scott: Linda, as you know, I was referred to you by Todd Smart. And he said what an excellent job you are doing there with your culture at Entara Corp. But before we get into that, please introduce us to Entara Corp. Tell us what you guys do there.
Linda M.: Well, good. Thanks. Well, first let me say thank you to you, Will, for having me here today. It's really fun to do this, and I love talking about culture, so I could talk about it for hours on end. And yeah, a little bit about Entara. Some people might have known us as being formerly YJT Solutions. We were YJT for 17 years. And as we evolved, largely in part because of our core values, and I could talk a little bit about that later, we realized that we were not the same company that we were. And we realized that it was time to give this baby a new name, and that really we had grown up. Our positioning in the market has evolved. The skills and services we offer have all evolved. And the direction we want to take our clients has evolved. And so there was so much change that we felt it was really time to give it a new name.
Will Scott: That's awesome. Yes, it's lovely. And a very nice rebranding, and I get all your logic behind it. Let's start there because I think you actually credited your core values as kind of pointing you to the way that it was time to rebrand. How did that happen?
Linda M.: Yes, yes. We do IT managed services, like about 190,000 other companies in the United States, so there is a very, very crowded marketplace. And what that entails is doing management monitoring of infrastructure and doing help desk 24/7. And we're very good at those things, but we are not the only company out there that can monitor a network. Right? And so it was really as we started working with EOS, which was about three years ago, when we started thinking, we know that we're very good at this. But what is it? What's in that special sauce? What is it that's different about working with our firm versus another reputable company?
Linda M.: And as we started talking about it, core values were at the front. And what we realized was that the values that we thought maybe we would have aren't the real ones. Right? They're not the underlying ones. I remember Todd said something very interesting to me, because there were a list of 99 wonderful qualities. I mean, they're all wonderful. And I would like to think that we have an element of each of those 99 somewhere in our culture. Right? But Todd said, "Pick three. Pick three." And we went around the room with our leadership team and we picked out the ones that in hindsight were probably more aspirational or personal.
Will Scott: Interesting.
Linda M.: Or these are the ones that we would like to grow into. And we got to the end of that exercise. We all had a different list of three things. And Todd said, "Give me 10 examples off the top of your head that you saw this in action last week." And we all kind of looked at each other, and we were racking our brain. Some of us couldn't really think of a great example when we had seen this. It was just a principle. We believed in it. We knew that we needed to get it out there. And yet, as he started saying, "Why is it that you keep clients?" Because we do, we have exceptional client retention. Why do they stay with you? Right? Why do recruits want to join your firm over another firm? What was the reason they gave?
Linda M.: And as we started talking about it, the core values were culled up. And honestly, Will, I thought this was going to be, I don't want to say a silly exercise. But I thought, oh, this is sort of the check mark. We'll go through. We'll do our core values. This took us all day long to do this exercise. It took us the whole day. We used up our whole session with Todd doing nothing but this one exercise because he said, "If you get this wrong, then all else is lost. You can't be a company that revolves around your core values."
Will Scott: Yes.
Linda M.: That's where we landed.
Will Scott: Okay. And conversely, if you get it right, then everything else kind of falls in line behind it.
Linda M.: It does. It does.
Will Scott: It's actually right. And your story makes the point very eloquently that core values cannot be aspirational, that you need to really dig within and find out. Who are you, and what are you? And what values describe who and what you are? Which, of course, is definitely more helpful if you've been in business for some time at that point.
Linda M.: Right.
Will Scott: It sounds like you went through that. You're referring there to, I think, the eight questions that the EOS process talks about for determining the vision traction. You said you were helped by Todd Smart at the-
Linda M.: Honestly. Yeah. I've forgotten what some of those eight questions were. And it felt like a lot more than eight that he asked us that day. But that's the heart of it. Right? What is true for your company? And what keeps you in business? And what is, at the end of the day, what is it that you know you have to hold onto? Because I do think we all aspire to bigger and better things all the time. And those things can be good. But when you get down to it, we ended up with four instead of three. We were supposed to only have three, and we got down to it and we had four. And Todd said, "All right. I'll let you have four." But you get too many more than that and it starts to become a laundry list...
Will Scott: Absolutely. I say I recommend four as a maximum because I've interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands of employees about: can they recall the core values? And most cases, they can remember four, but if there's any more than that, they can't recall them.
Linda M.: Right. Right.
Will Scott: Three is also a great number though, if you can't have that. You have four core values.
Linda M.: Yes.
Will Scott: What are they?
Linda M.: We do. Well, they actually all start with E, and it did not start out that way, but we realized they all fall into an E, which was actually kind of fun that now Entara starts with an E.
Will Scott: Nice.
Linda M.: But the first one is empathy. And I think that empathy is a very overused word in the marketplace, even in the business marketplace. But we mean that to be kind, to understand that we are in a business where either there's short-term pain. Like this morning, I was laughing, Will, for those of you who ... Well, nobody would get this is watching. I have a tech company, and we were having issues trying to get the site to work. We're laughing. Right? And I call our guy and I'm like, "I've got to get on this with Will right now." And he heard in my voice, it's right now. It's urgent. We need to get this working. And he was on the phone, and he was so patient and kind and helpful in a very human way.
Will Scott: And empathizing with you and your situation. Right.
Linda M.: And empathizing. I said, "I'm probably the only company on the planet that has their technical engineers watch a Brene Brown video about the meaning of empathy."
Will Scott: Nice.
Linda M.: But that is how we start our new employee training. It means to take the other person's perspective, to understand where they are and why they're hurting. Right? And it could also be, I need to downsize. We have to get rid of costs, and I don't know how to do that. That's a different kind of empathy than gets me connected right now. But we look for people who want to help first. We look for people who have kind hearts, who want to be of service to others. And that is something when we see a brilliant network engineer, or anybody that we would hire, but we see that they're about them first, we know it's a mismatch. Right?
Will Scott: Yes.
Linda M.: And we've made that mistake in prior years. That's the first one, is empathy. The second one is excellence. Why is it that clients have stayed with us. Well, we, at the end of the day, we may have plenty of faults, but we do really good, high quality work. And we have people that take pride in that. This is not, these are people who get frustrated with an A minus. They go, "Oh, what was it that kept me in the way of getting the A?" These are people who, they have been this way since they were born.
Will Scott: They're hardwired.
Linda M.: They're wired that way.
Will Scott: To strive for excellence.
Linda M.: They're just wired to do things in a very excellent way, even if that's inconvenient, it's just how they are. And they want to work with people who value that. And then the third is execution because I have worked with people who are both empathetic and who are excellent. And I'm standing there saying, "When will it be done?" And they're immersed in the well, I'm going to try to make it better. And I'm white boarding this, and I'm white boarding that. And meanwhile, you've got a client that's waiting for something. We also say that no matter how hard you are working, or no matter how committed you are, at the end of the day we place execution over intention. And this is born out in many decisions we've made because maybe somebody is just fantastically wonderful to work with, and you enjoy their company. And you feel like they're a great fit personally with everybody. But you're just not seeing it getting over the line. So we made the decision. It was tough. What are we going to value? And we're going to value the execution piece.
Linda M.: And then the last one is evolution. And evolution is all about being better. I want to be a better mom this year than I was last year. I want to be a better CEO. I want to learn how to lead better. We find that the people from a core values perspective, these are people who would be driven nuts if they had to do the same job every year. They couldn't stay in it. They want to evolve. Those have been our four. They were not obvious to us at the beginning. But the more we work with those four things, the more we realize that is what makes us who we are.
Will Scott: That's great. That's really wonderful. Thank you for taking us through your four core values there. Have you posterized those in any way so that they're up on the wall? How do you put them in front of your team?
Linda M.: It's so funny because I think we're the opposite company. We actually, through our rebranding we talked about doing a wall and putting them on there. And in the midst of everything else that had to get done, that didn't make the list. And so to this day, it's a project that remains. I want them on the wall. It's not that I'm against it. But I think a lot of companies have them on the wall, and then aren't living them.
Will Scott: Yeah, absolutely.
Linda M.: We're the opposite. You walk into our office, you don't see them. Maybe in six months, we'll get that done. But where they are found is in our quarterly conversations. Every employee is evaluated on these four core values every quarter. And they're hired on the core values. And we use them to make the very unfortunate firing decisions, so they are embedded throughout our culture. They're just not on our wall yet.
Will Scott: Okay. Understood. They're great. Take words like empathy, excellence, execution. Have you done anything to embellish those words in terms of what they mean at Entara? Did you add any sub scripts or behavioral kind of characteristics around those words?
Linda M.: We do. And I think where they really come to life is in conversations with people. We have quarterly conversations, which are one on one with the employee and their manager. But then we also have, we call it the state of the company. And this is straight out of the EOS principles. And we follow EOS hook, line, and sinker. We are complete believers in the program. And so every quarter we gather the whole company together. And it's usually a fun, well, I think they're fun meetings. Hopefully they are to our employees. But we talk about the progress that we've made. We talk about progress against our goals. And then we talk about what's coming up in the next 90 days, where we want to lead the company and where we're going. And then we talk about, at the very end, we have what's called core value shout outs.
Linda M.: And it is so much fun because people will just say, "I remember this person did this." And we just work with a it little bit. It's grist for the mill. We talked about, I saw evolution because this person decided that they wanted to learn the service now platform. They're taking it upon themselves. And this person ... So it's fun to really call those out in real life. Then we have an annual Thanksgiving dinner, which is actually coming up. It's a very special event for all of our people and their spouses and significant others and friends. And we formally do core value shout outs there as well. I think it's in those conversations and examples where they really start coming to life.
Will Scott: Yeah. I love a lot of things that you said there, and they're definitely a best practice in terms of maintaining a healthy culture. But you mentioned, for example, shout outs, which end up being stories. Don't they? You're telling stories about what your team members have done, and tying those stories to a core value. And there's really no better or memorable way to continue that culture and endear people in that culture. And then you also mentioned something which I call the core score, where you're scoring folks on how they adhere to core values. You're probably using a simple plus, minus, or one, two, three kind of measuring system there, a bit like Traction [book by Gino Wickman] would recommend.
Linda M.: Yeah. It's even simpler than that. And I have to tell you, I fought back on this a little bit with Todd, actually, because I do think sometimes one, two, three could be better. But Todd has really steered us towards either it's a happy face, or it's an unhappy face. And we use the get it, want it, have capacity.
Will Scott: Sure. GWC. The people analyzer.
Linda M.: That's actually down in the accountabilities. But with core values, either it's green or it's red. And we don't use them as a red, bam, that means you're out of the organization. But we put it red for a quarter if we say, "We're concerned about this, so we want to talk about it. And we need to figure out a way to bring you back to green," because we would never hire anybody who didn't match green, green, green, green. But everybody, we all have issues. And we try to be honest in this quarterly conversations and say, "Empathy, that's important here." And there have been a number of examples in the last quarter where we've seen a problem with that. And what's going on? Let's talk about it. But we'll mark it red.
Will Scott: Yeah. Okay. I see that. I think the important thing that you're saying is happening in quarterly conversations. You are able to have a conversation with the individual around perhaps why they're not coming across as green for empathy or evolution.
Linda M.: Right. Right.
Will Scott: Okay. Yeah. The other thing you mentioned a couple of times, actually, is how much fun this is. And that's certainly a point I always like to make because I find that so many CEOs are not naturally inclined to put energy into this. But I like to remind them that there are very few things they can do as a leader of their company that it would require such a low investment because it's just a bit of your internal time, really. And it has a very high return, which I think you would agree with that. And it's fun to do. So many other initiatives in the company are going to take a lot more investment, perhaps not as measurable a return, and can feel like work, whereas, this stuff really is fun.
Linda M.: I couldn't agree more. And I have to tell you that six years ago, I would not have believed that. I ran the old YJT Solutions from a very different place. And what I have learned, I always say when you start your own company, and you kind of keep going, nobody ever promotes you. Right? I mean, I was CEO of a company of a couple people. Now we've got 60 here. But I still hold the same title. But what has changed is that my understanding of leadership and of the things that matter and the things that have the best return, that has significantly changed, not even close to where I was 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And this is a perfect example. I think that the return on doing core values work is just, it's huge. It's huge.
Will Scott: It's hard to measure. Isn't it? But it is huge.
Linda M.: It is. Yeah.
Will Scott: You would credit it with a growth in your top line and your bottom line probably.
Linda M.: Well, I think what it does, and it's one of those things where if you go sell something, you can measure that revenue. And you can say, "Oh, this person sold $100,000 of this. And therefore, I'm going to attribute investing in sales there with this person here." What core values do is, I think about it like completely cleaning house. It's finding the things that really matter, letting go of the things that aren't core, being organized and purposeful about how to move forward in the most efficient way. And I love numbers, and I'm a quant person by nature. I was always the math person, not the art person, just personality wise, which is why my former self probably would not have put the emphasis on doing core values work like I do now.
Linda M.: But there's just such clarity. And I think there's also simplicity. And I have always found beauty in simplicity. The simpler you can make something and stick to it, the better it is. And it also brings clarity around: Who are the people that we need to be hiring? I used to hire fantastic people, or fantastic performers, great people and great performers. But they weren't the right fit for our organization. And I would think, well, they're so great and I have failed. I have failed them, or they have failed me because I must be a bad leader or a bad manager, which there were times I was, for sure. Or they're not good, or they're not doing a good job, which sometimes would happen.
Linda M.: But the majority of the time, they're a great performer, and I'm leading the company and growing it. But the problem was the fit on core, on who we are, it just wasn't there. There's a guy who quit one day, and I still remember this. He came in and he said, "I want to play golf in the afternoon when I go home." He goes, "I used to work at the Board of Trade. I'd leave at 2:30. 2:33, I was out of there. I could get a round in." And he goes, "That's the life I want." What he was talking about was excellence and execution. It's that we do. We don't stop when it's 80%. We take it all the way and we get it over the line. Well, if you're wired that way, and I'm not talking about not having a work life balance but if-
Will Scott: Some people have been conditioned...
Linda M.: It's a waiting. Right? You just say, "I'd rather honestly come in, do my time, whatever, and go leave and go home." There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, he might be smarter than all the rest of us, right, that are out there every day trying to make it happen. And I think those are great examples, where you go, if that's what's driving you, if that's what's most important, then it's probably not a good fit.
Will Scott: Yeah. Absolutely. And I hear CEOs talk all the time about sort of the before and after, when they start tackling culture. And at first, it's a feeling. Isn't it? A lot of it's about a feeling. How do you feel when you walk into the office? Or how do you feel with certain team members? And when they transition from having some people that aren't a great fit on the team that are sort of a little bit of a drag on things, they're not sure why. When they start to do something like you're doing, like evaluate and measure, then it becomes clear who is not a great fit. And when you transition those folks out and transition folks in that are fitting, suddenly, and it can just be a few months later, wow, this feels different. This feels better.
Linda M.: Yes, exactly.
Will Scott: And everything starts to feel more aligned and go a little smoother and easier. And it's so, so rewarding.
Linda M.: It's true.
Will Scott: It's very exciting to hear you talk about that and give those examples. And you've told us how you evaluate existing or current staff members. How are you hiring for fit? People say, "I hire for fit." And I'll ask them exactly how. And they say, "I don't really have a good answer for that." How do you hire people that do have empathy and are ready to evolve?
Linda M.: Yeah. Well, I often start my interviews by telling a story about my daughters because what I want them to understand is that I'm very sincere about fit. The story that I tell them, if I can take a couple minutes to share that with you here, when they were ... I have twin daughters that are now 11, which times flies. But when they were babies, they had this toy, like a lot of babies have, a shape sorter toy. And you take the circle, and you put it in the circle hole, and the triangle, and you put it in the triangle hole. And then as the baby progresses a little bit, you get them a more complicated shape sorter, and you end up with a globe. We had one that was a globe. And pull it apart, and all the pieces come out, and you trip over them and hurt your feet.
Linda M.: But the point of it is that the baby can take a hexagon and find a hexagon shape, and a pentagon and put ... And I remember being stunned, truly stunned at the amount of emotion that this silly little toy could provoke in a baby. You think, really, they haven't done anything yet. There's nothing to be sad about. They would take the oval shape, and they would try jamming it through the circle, jamming it through. And they would get so frustrated. And on the other hand, they would truly exude joy when the oval plopped right through the oval hole, and they'd feel it go in.
Linda M.: And so I share that story with recruits because I say, "I want that joy for you. I truly do. And here's the deal. You're already a good shape. You're not talking to me if we have not vetted out that your background, you're fine. You're a good shape. What I don't know is if you're an oval or a circle. And I need to really be honest about who we are and what we value and what life is like here. And I might even try to talk you out of working here. And I will ask that you do the same with me. Tell me who you are. Let's forget this, let's try to get the job." Because what happens is, after 90 days, we all know anyway. Right?
Linda M.: And I think life, this is where I get a little existential, but I think life becomes very sad and almost tragic when you stay in something that's a B. Right? And this goes back to my excellence. We should generally love our jobs. Not every day, every moment, but generally, you should love what you're doing. And I can see in you, Will, how much you love this. And as your friend, I'm so happy that you're doing this. And you love it and you light up over it. And I feel like we should all be in roles and companies where we have that fit.
Linda M.: The first thing I do is talk about the importance of letting me know who you are. And then secondly, a lot of the questions that we ask and go through when we're hiring have nothing to do with IT, management of systems, monitoring, network engineering. We touch on those later. And we really try to find somebody who authentically has those four things.
Will Scott: That's awesome. Amazing. Love it. And what a great analogy about the ... I thought I knew where you were going with that analogy because it's a square peg in a round hole kind of an analogy. Right? But actually, no, you were going for it's not just about fitting with the company, but it's about what's best for that employee because if you're really not a fit here, don't come and waste your life here. And I agree.
Linda M.: Right. Right.
Will Scott: One of my motivations for doing this work, Linda, is that I just get so upset about so many people going through life kind of just doing a job and just getting a paycheck. And they're not loving where they work and why they work. I want CEOs to get culture down so that they can get employees to love where they work, and then of course, figure out the core purpose for their business so that employees not only feel valued, but feel like they're doing something meaningful for the world, which can come from determining the core purpose. Then they can love where they work and why they work. Those people are going to stay around longer. They're going to enjoy working. They're going to give you more. And wow, what a difference that is from someone that's actually just showing up for paycheck and doesn't really love what they do.
Linda M.: We're in violent agreement. I totally agree.
Will Scott: And you're right. I haven't had this chance to do this in one of my CEO interviews yet. But I'd like to tell a story about why, for me, this work is so meaningful for me and one reason.
Linda M.: I'd love it. Love to hear it.
Will Scott: Goes back to my childhood, actually. When I was a boy growing up in Zambia, one of my favorite things to do was to build cool club houses. I would build tree houses. I built a fort on stilts. I built an underground cave. And I remember also building a house out of bamboo underneath a mango tree. And it had a fence around it and everything. Now what's fun about building these great things, if you can't share those environments? Right? I wanted to invite my friends over, but I didn't want to go to all this effort and have my friends come over and trash the place, or be mean to each other, or spoil my enjoying my experience there. So I would stick on the wall, probably in bad seven year old spelling, on the wall, a little sort of club rules. And they were things like no littering and being nice to each other.
Will Scott: And so then when people came over, I didn't have to kind of police the environment. I would just point to the rules and say, "Hey. We agreed to be nice to each other." And I found that so, wow, that was easy. How easy it is to actually create environments where people thrive. So here I am today doing this work. And I'm thinking so much of defining culture begins with core values. And so put those on the wall, but you have to think further than that. But yeah, that's how I'm kind of going back. Oh, yeah. I remember beginning life like this. And now here I am doing something that feels so right for me.
Linda M.: Yes, that's great. That is great.
Will Scott: Thanks for giving me the opportunity to tell the story, Linda.
Linda M.: Well, that's a good one. In fact, you can borrow my shape sorter analogy if I can borrow your club rules.
Will Scott: Yeah, absolutely. And you know another one, just to continue that theme that I talk about, and I realize, listeners, I'm doing too much talking in this particular interview, but Linda has touched a chord with me. I like to use the analogy of the United States Constitution because they really are a set of core values for our nation. And you can't really be specific or measure those, but you know what they mean, liberty and justice for all. You know what it means. And how would we coexist harmoniously in this country if we didn't have that baseline compass, those core values that our forefathers delivered those years ago? Who wants to try and run a company now without core values or without that constitution? It's crazy.
Linda M.: Right. That's a beautiful analogy. That's beautiful. I love it. I love it. If you think about most great organizations, the truly great organizations, that's their core values are apparent and known, and we can name them.
Will Scott: Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of stories, can you remember any specific stories that you'd like to tell? There was one involving your daughters that was great. But have you had some that have happen with employees, where they are representing the core values that are great stories to tell?
Linda M.: Oh my goodness. I have lots of them. I have lots and lots of them. I think the most rewarding stories, and I have multiple examples of this, but I'll pick Daniel as an example. Daniel was absolutely a core values fit with us from the moment he walked in. The problem was he just wasn't quite sure where he was going to go. And he started as actually my assistant. But he in spades just had the empathy, the excellence, the execution and evolution just all the way through. He started as my assistant, knocked it out of the park, just knocked it out of the park.
Linda M.: We would have quarterly conversations, you're phenomenal. You're da, da, da. And then you'll talk about goals. And then he moved more into a finance role, and he started helping us with all of our finance. And I very sadly had to not have him be my assistant anymore because he was moving on. Although, I have another fabulous one. This is how core values can work. Like you say, "You are the right person for this organization." And we are committed to making sure that then, we talk about right person, right seat. And so anyway, moving on, you can imagine what happened to Daniel. He is now on our leadership team and holds one of the most critical spots in terms of handling all of our finance, all of our contracts. He administers the firm. He helps us with process work. He is one of the pillars of the company. But had we been hiring for-
Will Scott: Skills or something.
Linda M.: Skills, right? Let me do a search on LinkedIn, and we're going to find people that meet these eight criteria. We would have missed somebody who has transformed our company.
Will Scott: I feel that story. It makes me emotional just hearing it. That's awesome. And you know, I'll bet you, I'll bet you Daniel is going to be incredibly loyal to Entara. Right? The chances of him leaving are so low. Aren't they? He must feel so at home there.
Linda M.: From your lips to God's ears. I hope so.
Will Scott: He'd be a big loss, I'm sure too.
Linda M.: Yeah, no. And I have more stories with that. We have a lot of stories of people that have just, we know they are right for the organization. And then the sad part is, there's a sense of sadness when you part ways with an employee, but at the same time, I always think back to what I was talking about before, when we say, "You're just not a core values fit. But go find somewhere where you are a core values fit," because there are so many jobs. And we owe it to ourselves. This is where we spend so much of our lives, that I think all of us need to be in a place where we fit, where we're working.
Will Scott: Yeah. Absolutely. I know you're an EO too, aren't you, Linda? And we try not to give it ... Go ahead.
Linda M.: Yeah. Well, I actually was. This is another core values thing. But one of my individual core values as well, my children are at home. I want to be a present mom to them. And I could be an EO crazy woman. I could be all over EO. But there are so many fantastic events and travel and all this, that I put it on hold until my children are out of the house. And then I hope I can return to it.
Will Scott: I totally understand the decisions around priorities there. I was going to say though, we don't typically, or we're sort of taught not to give advice. But if you were to give advice around ... By the way, how many years has Entara been in business now?
Linda M.: We're just over 17.
Will Scott: 17 years. I heard you say you've gone from two people to 60 people. I'm sure it's been some ups and downs along the way too. Congratulations on all that success. Is there any advice, to use that word, or encouragement that you would wish our listeners to this podcast to adopts from your learnings using culture to lead your company?
Linda M.: I think the advice that I would give is to not underestimate the importance of leading from this place and making all decisions on it, and I mean that genuinely. I believe this through and through. It has transformed who we are. It has made us, made our hirings better. It has made the number of people we've had to let go much lower. And we're just doing such a better job of finding the people who fit in with us. And the financial impact to that, I still don't know that I could quantify it because it's imperfect. At Kellogg, I had a wonderful finance professor who said, "Just remember, zero is just as arbitrary as any other number on the number line," so just because you can't quantify it doesn't mean that you shouldn't.
Linda M.: Is it negative 10? Is it positive 10? Is it minus 1000? Pick something that is going to help you justify this and give it a range or what you need to do. But I will tell you this about the core values work we've done, is I don't know exactly what the number is, but it's significantly produced great ROI for us.
Will Scott: Yeah. That's awesome. And early on in that response there, you talked about decision making. And I'd like to remind folks that one of the ways to get your employees, and once you're at 60 people, you can't be close to every decision and every interaction with every client and all of that, so you need to be able delegate decision making. And one of the beautiful things about having a set of adhered to core values is your team will tend to make decisions the same way that you would, which just frees you up enormously. It's just another great thing about having a set of core values is when you're growing, it enables the delegation of decision making, and you'll find that your team is doing things as other great employees in the company would.
Linda M.: Yeah. Very true. Very true.
Will Scott: Yeah. Linda, so excited to talk to you today. It's been really wonderful hearing your story and getting your anecdotes. And would you mind sharing? Would I be able to share your values on the website along with our other interviews and part of our library there?
Linda M.: Sure.
Will Scott: Because I'm sure there's a lot of people that would just love to have the same success that you've had.
Linda M.: Yeah, with one caveat. I think it's very tempting to look at other people's core values and go, "Oh, those look like good core values. We're going to bring those in." And I can't emphasize enough how they were a surprise to me, that the things that I had looked at from other companies, and thought that they would be our core values, they're really not. There are probably things that I would like to be, but I'm not. And so they have to be authentic to who you are.
Will Scott: Absolutely, yes. And they can go to my website, and thank you for that, at www.cultureczars.com, and get my nine steps, or nine deeds I call it, in 90 days as ways of how to discern their core values at the beginning of that process, and then how to make those values come alive, how to use them to thrive in your organization, and finally, to drive performance. So yes, make them your own. And that's probably a great place to end, so thank you very much, Linda. I definitely appreciate your time this morning, and I look forward to continue to watch the growth there for your company.
Linda M.: Oh, thank you.
Will Scott: Are you expecting a great 2019?
Linda M.: We are. We are. We implemented our software platform, and all gears are set to go, so we're excited. But thank you so much, Will, for the chance to talk with you. It's great even for myself to be reminded of the importance of this yet again. And I wish you all the success. If I was watching this podcast, I would call you.
Will Scott: Thank you. Okay. Well, great. Have a good rest of the day. Bye.
Linda M.: Take care. Bye bye.
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