Stories That Move
We've been dreaming about this for a long time... and now it's finally here!
Get a first look at DreamOn Studio's brand new podcast, Stories That Move!
When we create videos for our clients, there's often incredibly rich narrative that we can't include in the final cut. Being behind the scenes, we're fortunate to hear the depth and full context behind each story.
So in this podcast, we want to pull back the curtain and allow you to experience the extraordinary stories of extraordinary people we've been honored to connect with.
Go on an adventure with us.
Gain a new perspective.
Learn something new.
Be challenged.
Feel inspired.
www.dreamonstudios.io
Stories That Move
John Ratliff | Transforming Business Through DreamFulfillment
Discover the journey of John Ratliff, a dynamic entrepreneur who transformed his childhood knack for business into the foundation of Apple Tree Answers, a call center company that grew to 24 locations and over 650 employees. John reveals how his early ventures, from selling cotton plants to managing a ski resort snack bar, instilled a deep understanding of leadership and business dynamics. His insights into scaling a company, building strong teams, and navigating exit strategies provide a treasure trove of knowledge for aspiring entrepreneurs eager to learn from someone who's excelled in the art of business growth and sales.
Learn how John's innovative DreamOn program revolutionized company culture at Apple Tree by addressing employee turnover and morale. Inspired by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, this initiative focused on fulfilling staff dreams to create a supportive work environment, leading to remarkable improvements in retention. Through these stories, John conveys the critical importance of storytelling and culture in mergers and acquisitions, demonstrating how a compelling narrative can significantly enhance a company's value and ensure a successful sale.
John also shares his perspective on the current economic landscape, underscoring the importance of resilience and precision in business operations. By embracing challenges as opportunities for growth, he highlights how middle-market companies can thrive amid economic adversity. Throughout the episode, John's passion for storytelling and strategic excellence shines, offering listeners an engaging exploration of entrepreneurship and the powerful impact of effective leadership.
FIND US ON THE SOCIALS:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dreamonstudios574/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DreamOnStudios574
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dreamon-studios/
The only reason the human species is still on the planet is our ability to tell and interpret stories. It's the ultimate way to communicate a message and, you know when, you can do it in ways that can move people kind of intellectually and emotionally and even spiritually or even physically. I think it's a total, like levelup type advantage versus the ones that can't tell stories.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another episode of Stories that Move. I'm Mason Geiger, and I'm here with my co-host, matt Duhl. Today, we're diving into a conversation with someone who has built and scaled companies, transformed cultures and now helps leaders do the same around the world.
Speaker 3:Our guest today is John Ratliff, the managing director of Align 5 and CEO of Scaling Up Coaches. John's a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience, including founding Apple Tree Answers, which he grew to 24 locations and over 650 employees before selling it in 2012.
Speaker 2:And what's really exciting is John's focus on strategy, company culture and employee engagement. His work in scaling successful companies led him to co-found Align 5 in 2013, where he advises growth companies and family enterprises on strategic issues like mergers and acquisitions. Plus, through scaling up coaches, he's helping support over 2,500 companies globally.
Speaker 3:We're excited to dive into his insights on scaling businesses and leading with purpose. Let's get started. Please welcome John Ratliff to Stories that Move. Hey, everybody, welcome back to Stories that Move. I'm your host, matt Duhl. With me is Mason Geiger. How are you doing today, mason?
Speaker 2:Really good, so excited for today's conversation. I think we're going to unpack a little bit of the origin of DreamOn from a different perspective.
Speaker 3:That's what I understand. So today we have with us John Ratliff, who is currently the managing director of Align5, a strategic consultancy firm, as well as the CEO of Scaling Up Coaches. So John's been a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience as a CEO and investment banker. John, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Awesome. So, john, to start us off, tell us a little bit about yourself. Just kind of introduce yourself, and what are you up to in the world today?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know, interestingly, I was that kid that you know. When everyone said what are you going to be when you grow up, I never said fireman or policeman. I kind of always knew I'd probably be. I didn't know the word entrepreneur, I was an eight-year-old but I always knew I wanted to own a business and that kind of led from one thing to another. I did all the kid stuff, paper routes and all those things and then got to college, started a little marketing company in college and then when I got out, ended up kind of in the wireless phone space, opened a store, opened a second store and then sold those two stores and opened a really small couple-seat call center company from scratch. Don't do that. By the way, it's my first piece of advice, because that business is 24-7, 365, and I had one employee so I didn't get a lot of sleep, wow. But I managed to get that sort of on track and and growing and be able to hire one and then two and then a handful of people and that business treated me and I say we and us a lot, but when I say, just translate that to you or me.
Speaker 1:But that business grew. It took about seven years to get to a million in revenue. And then we started to do acquisitions and bought 24 companies between 2003 until we ultimately sold it in 2012. And along the way I obviously learned a lot about buying companies but really kind of cut my teeth, I guess on the whole entrepreneurial journey I got to buy businesses from families that were second, third generation. The business had been in the family for decades plus and started by grandmoms and great-grandmoms, decades plus and started by grandmoms and great grandmoms and really started to see the entrepreneurial world from a lot of different seats at the table. So fast forward to 2012,. I sold that business in 2012 and was able to sell it for a strategic multiple, so almost five times what we had been buying companies for on a multiple basis for a multitude of reasons that I'm happy to get into.
Speaker 1:But also in the process of doing that, realized how the playing field for entrepreneurs there's so much written about marketing and sales and management and operations and all the things, but there's very little out there on exit strategy and kind of how to think about your business in that full circle, that full cycle and that kind of led me to an epiphany post-close that a lot of entrepreneurs get to. I was lucky, I had a really good advisor and we had a great transaction. A lot of entrepreneurs get taken advantage of in that most fundamentally important moment, which is the exit. If you think about operating a company as the income side, the wealth creation event is when you actually sell it or pass it on to employees or do whatever you happen to do, is when you actually sell it or pass it on to employees or do whatever you happen to do, and that's the least understood and that's the area where entrepreneurs, I think are getting the most taken advantage of. So from about probably 2014, 15 on, it's been a mission for me to help other Because, again, I feel like I had good advisors and kind of got lucky and had a great outcome. So now I spend most of my time trying to help other entrepreneurs navigate a really lopsided, unlevel playing field and navigate the exit stuff. So that's most of what I do.
Speaker 1:I do own Scaling Up Coaches. It's about 300 coaches around the globe that teach a methodology on how to build a growth company called Scaling Up, and now we're helping those coaches also understand how to help their clients navigate kind of all the way through to their exits as well. And exit doesn't mean sell the business. Exit means one ownership group or individual transferring their ownership interest to somebody else. It could be family, it could be employees, it could be shut the business down in some cases. But when I say exit it's kind of that all-encompassing. You know what's next for the entrepreneur moment.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. I love it, I love it, I love it. So for you, let's rewind the timeline here a little bit, so take us back to early life for you. Where were you born? What did life look like for you growing up?
Speaker 1:Wow, I didn't know we were going all the way back, uh. So I grew up uh kind of a middle class kid, philly suburbs, um, parents divorced when I was little. My dad, uh, was a pretty significant player, corporate america style player, was a c-suite executive at a fortune 500 size company. Um, and his background he literally came from nothing dirt floors, growing up like level of of struggles and worked really really hard and and was really proud to kind of establish himself in corporate america and the thought was always that I was gonna follow in his footsteps. But I really had the entrepreneurial bug instead. So kind of establish himself in corporate America and the thought was always that I was going to follow in his footsteps, but I really had the entrepreneurial bug instead. So, but I grew up with that sort of larger than life dad. Parents were divorced so got it like in, you know, in phases basically, but really learned a lot about work ethic and what's possible and stuff from him, but also was able to be fairly independent because you know my mom had remarried and my stepdad wasn't quite as larger than life and demonstrative in the world. So I kind of had a really cool blend of you know, I had this sort of like rock star corporate America dad. And then I had a pretty like stable kind of household to grow up in where I was able to establish my own identity which, interestingly, I look back and think that was one of the most important things that ever happened to me in a good way, was to not grow up under this massive shadow, and that sort of shaped me.
Speaker 1:I was a business junkie from early early days.
Speaker 1:Went to college, university of Delaware, close to home, and then I got out of college and that's when I started the wireless phone business, mostly the prodding of my parents that uh, I'd been about six months, no job, and they're like you're gonna do something right and worked for a little wireless store for a handful of months and then went out on my own.
Speaker 1:So it was, I think it was in the cards for me or in my blood from an early, early stage to be an entrepreneur. And then that ultimately my landlord in the wireless phone business was in the call center space but non-competitive to what I was going to start because of geography back then you couldn't really compete geographically over state lines in that little niche of the call center space. So learn that business from him as our landlord. We sort of shared office space together and and started a company in that business but in a in an adjacent geography, so we didn't really compete and that was the beginning of uh, of, of kind of the I guess it was 18 years um, with the was called Apple Tree Answers and that was literally a startup in an apartment to 650 employees at the end. Wow.
Speaker 1:A good outcome, a good exit yeah.
Speaker 3:Incredible. That's awesome. Do you remember your very first entrepreneurial venture? I mean even you said you know you had that bug early on. I mean even maybe prior to college. I mean, is it mowing yards?
Speaker 1:My very first I mowed a lot of yards, but my very first a lot, my very first entrepreneurial endeavor, I guess we could call it that. I was four years old and we did what you do in 1974. That's a little primer on how old I am. But we had driven from the Philadelphia area to Myrtle Beach for vacation and we were driving home and and passed like acre after acre after acre of cotton fields in the south um and we stopped somewhere and we picked some like cotton from this cotton field and brought it home and somehow I managed as a four-year-old back when you could do this, to go door to door.
Speaker 1:I sold like these cotton plant things to our neighbors as a four-year-old, which became one of those folklore stories among, specifically, my grandmother was the most amused by that story because she and also my biggest cheerleader, but yeah, she'd love to tell her friends that my entrepreneurial journey started as a door-to-door cotton ball salesman as a four-year-old. But it was just always sort of like I was the lemonade stand kid, right, I was always looking for the opportunities to do different things.
Speaker 1:I love that Paper routes, you name it. I mean I did all that stuff, different things. So, yeah, paper routes, you name it, I mean I did all that stuff. But the funny sidebar there, I guess like if you really want to look at, all right, what was the true like entrepreneurial start.
Speaker 1:We lived in this neighborhood that backed up to a tiny little ski resort, so it was only open for about three months out of the year, but it was literally and it was adjacent to our property. So I grew up there from the time I was a little kid and learned how to ski at a young age and spent all like if it was if, if it was in season and it was called chad's peak. If chad's peak was open, my brother and I were there all the time, literally any minute they were open, and because they were so small and in such an out-of-the-way area, they had a hard time finding employees. So a lot of me and my friends worked there as teenagers and ultimately, by the time I was 16, the resort had changed hands.
Speaker 1:The new owners really didn't know what they were doing and I de facto became the manager. I had 25 people reporting to me in 11th grade at this ski area in my backyard and then I convinced them to let me take on the snack bar rent-free and I would split all the profit we made. So, yeah, I was running uh like a food service business and a ski area and not doing well in high school and uh, yeah, that was like my big and I saw seemed perfectly normal to me as a 16 year old. But in hindsight when I tell the story I always laugh and think the hell was going on back then yeah.
Speaker 1:So good times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what were some of those early learnings for you, like, yeah, I mean kind of being thrust into leadership roles at a young age and, you know, probably not having a whole lot of models in front of you.
Speaker 1:I have an unbelievably distinct memory as a 16-year-old. The reason I ended up in the role of general manager was there was a general manager there and the two owners were research chemists at DuPont and they were were Taiwanese, so they didn't speak a ton of English so and I didn't speak any Taiwanese but I could kind of like figure out and translate it. So I got the the privilege of firing a 32 year old kind of like sort of sketchy journeyman ski area manager when I was 16 years old and I remember distinctly, about halfway through firing him, no clue what to say other than you're going to be fired today and and having this moment of this guy's going to kill me. I'm not going to see my 17th birthday because it's going to end. He wasn't really happy to be fired by a 11th grader. Yeah, um, but that was kind of the moment where you know, I, we, I laugh about it. I've laughed about it for years and years.
Speaker 1:But I look back and that was one of the moments where I probably started to learn like there's a human side to business, right, there's more than just like you're not doing a good job, you have to leave.
Speaker 1:There's how are you going to feed your family and you know you need new tires for your car and you already can't afford those. So in that moment of terror, when I thought I was going to die, I also, I think, really absorbed the lesson of how fundamental it is for us as humans to work and to be productive and to care of the people around us, to be responsible, and there's way more to it than just you're not doing a good job, get out of here. So, and I haven't reflected on that probably in decades. But as I tell the story now, I think that was the beginning of me learning that you've got to capture the heart and mind of the people that you work with or you're all wasting your time. And I'm a big believer in pattern recognition and what we process at a subconscious level is a thousand X more important than our conscious level thoughts. And that was the beginning of me starting to ingest some of those subconscious patterns about how you treat people at work and how important work is and meaning and all those things.
Speaker 2:How you treat people at work and how important work is and meaning and all those things. So so, as you started, then started into apple tree. So you're saying it started kind of like I mean, bootstrap solo, it's growing, walk us kind of through that growth journey and what was the yeah, as you started, kind of the initial goal? Was it to build it up to sell it or was like hey, this is just a mom and dad are telling me I need to do something and yeah it's.
Speaker 1:You know it's funny. The the initial goal was let's just see if this is possible, can it be successful? And um again started it with not a lot. There was no business plan. There was was no deep thinking that went into it. It was I had an offer from someone to buy the two wireless stores that I had for what I thought would be the biggest check I'd ever see in my entire life.
Speaker 1:It was $103,000. I was 23 years old and this was in 1990, whatever was 93 or 4 um. But I needed something else to do and and that that's kind of how the call center came to be. So I all it was almost accidental how I started it and didn't have like a big vision for the future, um, and struggled a lot in the beginning cause we started from scratch. No customers, no revenue. I mean I couldn't even pay my apartment, slash office rent in the beginning, um, but I was referred to a marketing guy in. I want to say it was 1997.
Speaker 1:I referred to a marketing guy in. I want to say it was 1997. And he was going to do a business plan, marketing plan, all this stuff. So I meet with him, we spend hours and hours, I tell him all the things that I think I know about the business and I get this ridiculously bad report that's essentially just a recap of everything. And I told him that was the deliverable, no help whatsoever on the marketing front. But he actually said offhanded, in the middle of our conversation he asked me have you ever read the E-Myth? So there's a book called the E-Myth, revisited by Michael Gerber. And I said no, I've never read the E-Myth and he's like oh, I'm working with another client, she just read it, you might really enjoy it. And that's all I said. And we moved on. So I'm a learner. I got the recommendation, it sounded intriguing, so I get the book. And his advice to read that book at that point in my journey was probably the most important thing anyone could have ever said.
Speaker 1:There's a section in the book where you essentially write out I think Gerber calls it your strategic aim. I don't know what that means, but you essentially envision yourself in the future I think it's a seven-year look ahead and you write a really kind of verbose, descriptive, sort of first-person account of where you are seven years from now. So I actually did that. I was a good student, so I didn't get good grades, but I was a good. I'm a learner. I'm not a good grading person, but I did that exercise and, like most things you do, got put in a drawer somewhere and forgotten about.
Speaker 1:But in there he challenges the reader to really think way beyond what you think is possible. And why not? Because it's seven years from now. Who's going to tell you that you're wrong anyway? And I did that. So at the time we might have had 15 employees in one location and losing money. So I wrote this grandiose we've got 15 locations and 25 million in revenue and hundreds of people and really like very, very, very, very descriptive and put it away, never thought about it again and then, cleaning an office, we found that about five and a half years later, my CFO at the time pulled it out. She's like what's this? And we started to read it and it was like I predicted the future. It was.
Speaker 1:I think I said we were going to have 15 locations and at the time we read it, five and a half years later, we had 18. Um, we were going to be dressed in a certain style of, you know, logoed apparel and, and totally unbeknownst to me, that's what we were like wearing. And you know we're going to do this, we're going to stand for this. These are going to be our core value, like all this crazy stuff, revenue, like almost to the dollar matched. And when I I know, when I wrote it, I was like none of this will ever come true. But what the hell like? Yeah, he said, think big, and I did so.
Speaker 1:That, I think, really speaks a ton to the power of visualizing success as opposed to planning success.
Speaker 1:Like I didn't know how I was gonna like if I had to put the plan together when I wrote the strategic aim to make it happen, I had to stare at a blank page for a year and I had no idea there was no possible way we could get there.
Speaker 1:But by putting it out in the world and speaking it into existence and parking it in the back of my head somewhere, my brain subconsciously went to work on the, on the how, and I didn't have to worry about that. It happened in the background and it all happened and then some, and that pattern's repeated for me a lot in my life. So anytime I have the opportunity to share, like you know, obviously, as you can imagine, I get asked for advice every now and then, and that's one of my big pieces of advice is whether you know how you're going to do it or not. Simply like drawing a line in the sand or put a state, use whatever silly metaphor you want, there's a lot of power in the subconscious of of you. Set an ideal or visualization or a target and you just sort of let um, you know the universe guide you in that direction, not to sound too woo, woo, but, um, I've just seen it work enough times now that I don't have to question its validity anymore.
Speaker 2:As it grew and you started to have these multiple locations and teams growing like what, yeah, and you're kind of learning all this as you're going. What are some of those things that you kind of learned throughout that growth or some challenges that you faced that you had to kind of figure out some creative problem solving for?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know one of the watershed moments for me and I think this is really important for entrepreneurs many of us start in an industry or a vertical or whatever it is, and we think we can't talk to our competitors because they're going to steal all of our ideas and we're all alone and our friends don't understand and we end up on this really like sad island of you know. Things aren't going the way we want. I don't have anyone to talk to. Um, you know just this downward spiral of stuff. And I was in that boat for sure, and ended up we were upgrading our equipment platform that we use to take calls and stuff, and that company that created the platform we ultimately bought, there were about 250 other customers of theirs that had come together and formed a users group for that equipment. So it's a membership organization. You paid to be a member but you could get together and talk about what I thought were going to be all the technical challenges with that particular platform and then what I found out was that was about 25% of it. 75% was how do you run a business in this space? How do you find better people? How do you like?
Speaker 1:So, as soon as I found a tribe or a community of people that were also entrepreneurs, that were also in the same space.
Speaker 1:I realized number one I thought I was the only dumbass with all these challenges and mistakes and I thought they were all my fault. I'm like wait, you all have these employee problems, customer problems, vendor problems, telecom problems, and the consistency of the problems was striking, that what I thought were totally unique to me were almost universal challenges in the space. So that was when I kind of learned the power of community and making sure that you have a peer group of people to go to. And again, when I talk to young entrepreneurs that beat that drum as hard as I can that you need to have because it's not going to be your high school friends, it's not going to be your college friends unless they happen to be entrepreneurial as well. It really gets lonely when you choose this life and it's the most rewarding. I can't imagine doing anything different because you have autonomy, which I think is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But with autonomy comes a tremendously lonely experience. So find your drive is my definite piece of advice there.
Speaker 3:That's great.
Speaker 1:So that's what I learned early on was not alone. The other interesting thing the business was harder to run with 12 people than it was with 112, 212, 512. So as the business scales and you can start to properly delegate things to other people, you can go way farther as a team than you'll ever go on your own. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs have one or two bad delegation experiences, which in hindsight really were more likely abdication. They weren't really delegating, they were just tired of doing something and gave it to somebody else to do, and then we're so happy to have it off their plate. They never followed up to make sure it was done right.
Speaker 1:Um, but you, you get in these cycles where you start to do some of that and it doesn't work out and then all of a sudden you think you have to do everything completely by yourself. So that was the other big lesson for me was um, the bigger we get, the better the team we build, the more we can get done without requiring heroic effort from me, because the early days were horrible. I mean they were 80, 90, 80, 90-hour heroic effort, weeks, week after week after week. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I just thought that was the forever way it was going to be.
Speaker 3:Wow, that's awesome. So talk to me about that the scaling up with just the team of you know, starting with you with one up to 600-plus. What were some of the culture pieces inside of that? I mean, you talked early on. You know that job when you're 16, you're learning some of those human aspects of working with people. How did some of those things apply and what did you learn as you scaled your team?
Speaker 1:Yeah, just from a straight learning perspective, I think what leads us to be entrepreneurial is we're probably not normal in our ability to tolerate risk like we can tolerate risk at a higher level than many. But I also think that we're also very, very picky, in particular, about how we want things done.
Speaker 1:Very, very picky in particular about how we want things done, and I think the reason we get into these micromanagement cycles is when we delegate or abdicate something to someone else, we expect it's going to be 100% to 110% as good as we would do it ourselves. So, early on, I think you have to learn to tolerate Like if it gets done to 80% of the level you would do it ourselves. So, early on, I think you have to learn to tolerate like if it gets done to 80 of the level you would do it yourself, but you have 10 people operating at 80 of your capacity. That's 8x better than you on your own. So early on, when you start to build a team, I think you have to teach yourself and learn how to trust other people to get stuff done, and know that it may not get done exactly the way you would have done it. But if you build a system and a feedback loop to communicate exactly what you want and then some mechanism to close that loop at the end, you can get way more accomplished by trusting other people to be part of your success story.
Speaker 1:And I think that's one of the hardest as you make the transition from startup to a company that's starting to scale.
Speaker 1:One of the hardest transitions is literally letting go of things that you held really, really kind of near and dear and not sort of letting go of but then micromanaging the poor person that you gave it to.
Speaker 1:So now you're wasting their time and still doing two-thirds of it yourself. So the early stages of building a team for me are obviously you have to choose wisely, but you also really need to be thoughtful about giving them enough leeway to make decisions be part of the process, and people areway to make decisions. Be part of the process, and people are going to make mistakes. I mean, you can't react to mistakes as I'm just going to do it myself and we've worked with thousands of companies and the ones that tend to scale the fastest are the ones that are willing to fail a lot and fix their mistakes, and the ones that tend to get held back and not scale are the micromanager entrepreneurs that just can't tolerate any like. If it's not exactly to their spec or standard, then they take it back on and they just never get out of their own way.
Speaker 3:So that was the early team building yeah, for sure how long did it take for you to sort of develop that muscle of just realizing the art of letting go and building that trust?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's see, I started in 93, 03, 13, 23. That's 31 years ago, so I think it's about a 35-year lesson, because I'm still not very good at it. But you know, you reach a point. I think if you're, if you're really scaling and growing and again, this is a, this is a kind of common theme story, not just my story, but you if you're gonna hold on and micromanage like that and still grow, you reach a point where you just can't do it anymore. So sheer exhaustion and and like you've run out of will is when a lot of entrepreneurs finally make the, the switch. But a lot of entrepreneurs hamper their growth so much that they never get to the point where they're completely burned out and they end up in that cycle forever.
Speaker 1:For me, luckily, we were growing really consistently over a long period of time and eventually I got to the point where, like it or not, I couldn't micromanage anymore. I just didn't have the cycles to do it. Um, I think there's a way, smarter way, and that's learn how to delegate and not burn yourself out to the point where you're so desperate you like let a, you know, someone off the street could have come in and run the business and I'd have been fine, because I just couldn't do it anymore, like I literally had had enough. So, um, that's one of those early and they don't teach. Like many of these important entrepreneurial skills they're not really taught, even in college and grad school. You just sort of have to learn them by hopefully studying someone else's dumb, dumb mistakes and not doing what they did. But for me, I just had to learn them through painful life experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so through that journey is your um. You're having to delegate more and bring on a team around you to support as you guys are growing and scaling. I'm sure, like the employee, just engagement and retention of making sure that you're not only bringing in the right people but you're keeping them. Um, talk to us a little bit about some of the systems and initiatives that you put into place to help with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So another area where and I like to think my, what I'm going to my mark, I'm going to leave on the world is I've done every dumb thing you're not supposed to do. So I've set a lot of bad examples for people to avoid and learn from. But we were awful at company culture, frontline employee engagement. We were terrible. So we in 2008, by the way, this is, I do podcasts and stuff and a lot of times you tell all the good stories and all the wins. You rarely tell what went wrong stuff. So many things had to go wrong for me to get to the point where we had these wins and I like sharing all the stuff that went wrong. I don't know why I like sharing all the stuff that went wrong. I don't know why.
Speaker 1:So 2008, I'm at a conference in Canada. A buddy of mine's got a Canadian company it's like a two-third size carbon copy of mine. I think there were 12 locations, same equipment, same customers, same everything. And we're having a beer and he said, hey, do you track your frontline employee turnover? And I rolled my eyes and I said, yeah, he's like what is it? And a voluntary turnover. And I said we're like 115%. And this guy, who's still a good friend of mine to this day. I'm going to see him in a couple weeks. He looks me in the eye and he's like that's great. And I was like great, I said 115, not 15. He goes. Well, you know, our industry average is about 150. We're at 135 and you're you're beating the industry average by almost 50 percent and I'm like why do we tolerate that? That's really, really stupid. And that kind of started me on a journey to figure out. And we had 115% turnover if you were an hourly employee and we had 3% turnover of our salaried employees and we were about a 1 to 5 ratio of salaried to hourly. So you can imagine what a fun place that was to go to work Like talk about haves and have-nots, two classes. I mean it had every problem you could possibly imagine. So that's when we got really serious. We're you know, I own Scaling Up Coaches today.
Speaker 1:We were a scaling up methodology company back then. Part of scaling up is quarterly themes. You pick one big problem or thing you want to accomplish every quarter. You get everyone to put their shoulder to that wheel.
Speaker 1:Our third quarter of I think it was 2008, we decided we were going to really try and get on top of this front-line turnover problem and we had lots of ideas. We had just done a bunch of work around core values and this was sort of a wholesale approach. But the idea that came out of that planning meeting very specifically was DreamOn and the DreamOn program and I appreciate you guys are dream on studios. The uh, the dream on program was essentially similar to the make-a-wish charity model, but it was for our in-house staff and salaried or hourly it didn't matter. But, um, yeah, we decided we were going to create kind of this make-a-wish model internally and some of the other interesting things that happened. So you can imagine, with three percent turnover, the employees in that group were super happy and thought this was the greatest place ever and you know.
Speaker 1:So we walk out of our quarterly planning meeting. We've come up with this great idea called dream on make a wish charity. We're gonna roll it out. We're so smart. This is, people are gonna love it, we're gonna be heroes, all the, all the stuff right, all the pats on the back you can imagine. And we get out of that meeting. We build a whole marketing plan, we roll it out. It's got its own email address, the whole nine yards posters, like you name it.
Speaker 1:We did it right and a week goes by, a week not a cent're. You know at the time we're about 500, 450, 500 employees and a week goes by not a single submission. Not one dream request comes in. So what do you do when you're 3% salaried employee turnover? Clearly the email address must have a problem. So now IT is trying to track down, like why isn't the email? We're sending test emails, like surely someone must have submitted a dream. It must be the email. So we do another big push the email was fine, by the way. We do another big push. Finally, about 17 days after the launch, we get our first very humble dream submission. It's from an employee in St Louis. We have an office in St Louis and through a series of bad spouse, marital issue, whatever she's recently found herself homeless with two little kids you know like, homeless, like and we paid above market, like we were, like we took good care of people.
Speaker 1:We just didn't have a great fun place to go to work. And but you want to be humbled as an entrepreneur, find out one of your employees is homeless, which is like a gut punch yeah so she submits this dream and it was like, like you know, maybe I could get a hotel for a night.
Speaker 1:Like it was so humble, it was like hard to believe. So we get it. And a, we're like high-fiving each other. We finally got a dream, submission b we're like how in the hell do we have a homeless person Like, are we not paying enough? So that started a whole bunch of stuff. But that one was easy. We're like, okay, this one we can grant. So we work with her. We call her up and yeah, we're going to put you in a hotel for the next couple days. We're going to find you an apartment, we're going to get some furniture, we'll. We're gonna find you an apartment, we're gonna get some furniture, we'll help you with the lease, whatever. So we get her in a apartment in like 48 hours.
Speaker 1:And uh, but one of our and we didn't have a lot of rules around dream on. But one of the rules was everything is confidential. We're not going to share your story like publicly. So we're like, damn it, we're trying to get this thing off the ground. We have this amazing story. It's confidential. So we'd send out an email. That's like a dream's been granted. That's all we would say we told her, we're like it's confidential, we're not going to tell anyone, and she's like not telling anyone. I was homeless 48 hours ago. Telling anyone they don't listen like this is the most amazing thing. So so then it spreads like wildfire.
Speaker 1:We used back then I think we had Salesforcecom, had a, I think it was called I forget what it was called, but it was like an internal Salesforce for our team and we used that. It was all over there. Amazingly, we start getting all these other dream submissions. Amazingly, we start getting all these other dream submissions. Ironically, the second one we ever got was an almost carbon copy of the first, another homeless employee. Thank god they were the only two in five years. They were the only two that we ever got like that. But we did the same thing.
Speaker 1:And then and then we get this incredible range of stuff, everything from. You know I never got to take a honeymoon to. We had an employee in puerto rico that had written a book of poetry, spanish poetry. We she wanted it published. We printed like a thousand copies of a book. Like we did all this um anniversary parties. We. We bought headstones on a couple of occasions for just the most random, weird things, everything around, specifically the frontline employee and what it's like for them to go through a day-to-day existence relative to other people that are in different circumstances. So of all the things we did and we did a lot but DreamOn, I think, think, was probably by far the the most impactful. Our turnover went from 115 to 18 percent. Uh, in about I don't know, it was 12 to 18 months or so and it wasn't all dream on, but it was a shift in our mindset that was driven largely by dream on said 115.
Speaker 2:Hell of a story, 115 to 18.
Speaker 1:And the industry average was like 150? 150, yeah, so we had almost a 10x advantage on our industry. Wow. And by the time we sold it was about 500 frontline employees. And if you just do simple math and you say conservatively, it costs $5,000 to hire a new frontline between. I mean, it's six to eight weeks just of training to get somebody ready. So if you're turning over, if you've got 500 and your turnover is 115, you're hiring what? 575 people a year. It's bananas 000 a piece, like it's crazy.
Speaker 1:So that that was one of those hidden call and it doesn't show up on your pnl as turnover. It shows up in like nine different buckets. The other interesting thing our customer churn got better by about a 4 to 5x multiple. So 4 to 500% improvement in customer retention. That definitely doesn't show up under turnover anywhere. I mean that shows up on the revenue side of the ledger. So we stopped measuring the ROI of all these programs, dreamlon especially, and we used Amex to pay our bills. We had a bunch of Amex points. We were creative about how we funded it, but our KPI was how many more dollars can we put into DreamOn? Because the return on investment is immeasurable, like off the charts. Immeasurable, Wow, yeah, like immeasurable, like off the charts, immeasurable, wow, yeah. So I think it really was kind of the fundamental part of our whole story.
Speaker 3:It's pretty cool, that is awesome. That is awesome. And for our listeners who are listening and like wait, hold on a second Dream On Studios Dream. On.
Speaker 1:Wait a minute.
Speaker 3:Wait a second. So there is a connection for us. Wait a minute. So I think the first meeting we had with Tim where he said, hey, video is going to be a major part of my business he was network partners at the time and you got to see this and he showed us the video and so we got to see some of the testimonials of your people and I mean, I just remember sitting at the conference room with Tim and just these amazing, amazing stories. And then that's where Tim turned to us and said, hey, I want to do this, I'm all in on this and I want you guys to be my video guys, and let's call it dream on, you know, and it was boom, boom, boom. So that that was the beginnings for us and just some of the vision pieces. So, so, yeah, so we're, we're grateful to you for that incredible program and ways it's even influenced our business from the beginning.
Speaker 1:So that's really cool. That's such a great story. What I really admire about Tim is Tim is probably one of the best students we've ever had. I mean, my running joke is, if we told Tim to move that plant and stand on his head on that table for 10 minutes while we did our interview, it's going to help your business. He would just do it Like he's been such a great student.
Speaker 1:And that video that you saw Relatively Dream On was actually we had an in-house full-time documentary filmmaker on our team because we were we were trying to drive culture across 24 locations and hundreds of employees. Back then. It was hard to do I mean, this was 2008, 9, 10 like. Video was obviously there, but it was a little bit more difficult to really use it in in a day-to-day sort of way. So we brought a full-time resource in to do that. We told our stories via video, but we taught our team how to tell their story via video as well. So we had a private YouTube channel that we actually made public, but it was really just for internal use, and we'd have a prospective customer come and say why you guys over any of your competitors, and we would just say just go to this youtube channel.
Speaker 1:These are our people like they and this is all self-made content. This is how they communicate with each other. Just just pick some some videos and watch, and that became such a powerful sales tool because it was our people telling the story about, and not even just our culture, like they just got to see them sort of in their day-to-day environment and we use video God totally extensively. So when Tim was at bootcamp, I was telling stories about how important I think this medium in particular is to connect people and build a company culture. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And one of the things we recommend for entrepreneurs especially if you have diversified or spread out teams, particularly post-COVID is, once a week, just pull out the production studio in your pocket called the iPhone or the Galaxy Right and just shoot a 30 to 60 second like here's what I'm thinking about. Here's hey, this happened this week, this went well, this didn't. I'm thinking about this. Maybe next week, focus on this and have a great weekend. We teach entrepreneurs to do that. Only like one out of 10 ever even take us up on the idea and have a great weekend. We teach entrepreneurs to do that. Only like one out of 10 ever even take us up on the idea.
Speaker 1:But the ones that do 100% have come back and said one of the most important things we've ever done there is a power to video that doesn't exist in any of the other mediums. Now. Michael Dell used to do it with an email and Greg Gretemann was a turnaround specialist Burger King Continental Airlines. He would do it via voicemail. I believe really strongly it should be video and it should be organic and kind of from the heart. But to Tim, that was the beginning of his sort of buying into this idea that video is an important medium and that's where Dream On, obviously was a follow-up from there, no I love that.
Speaker 1:Tim's an unbelievable entrepreneur. He is.
Speaker 3:He is, no, just yeah, so amazing to us and, yeah, our biggest cheerleader and coach and yeah, can't be more grateful. I love how you started though this program with you know just great intention of how can we pour into our people. But let's keep it quiet, let's keep it confidential, and the turning point was telling the story, like the power of story and what, what happens, um, when you do that, is is just so amazing, so I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I don't have to tell you guys, but we exist, Like the only reason that human species is still on the planet is our ability to tell and interpret stories. It's the ultimate way to communicate a message, and when you can do it in ways that can move people intellectually and emotionally, and even spiritually or even physically, I think it's a total level-up type advantage versus the ones that can't tell stories. So I'm biased because it works so well for us, but I think you guys are in a really, really interesting kind of position in space Stories, I mean, it's everything in business.
Speaker 1:And in M&A too, you can sell a company for its financial value. That's easy. But to get a buyer to see beyond just the balance sheet, the P&Ll, the cash flow statement and what it's what you're really acquiring, the better the store and it's really important. Story doesn't mean fabrication or lie. Story means the tale of why and if you can. For me, when you tell a story, if you can put another, if you can put the viewer or the audience in, like physically, where they feel like they're in the scene, they feel more connected. And m&a is that exact. Like if you can put a buyer in a state where they're visualizing they've already bought the company and how they fit in to the future of that business.
Speaker 2:That is an absolute game changer in terms of m&a and the ability to tell stories in m&a is massively important so and through that, as you turn to selling apple tree, what or how important was that culture piece and like obviously the numbers and everything spoke for themselves, but obviously that being able to see like, hey, you're now at 18%, you know way, way beyond what the industry average is, so how how much more valuable were you in the m&a process?
Speaker 1:yeah, so we, we bought 24 companies, um, so I kind of have a good sense of what the market was on the one side. Um, we paid anywhere from two and a half to four times. But, uh, and think about that like net income or like the profit of the company. It's a measurement that takes into account some other things, but for most intents and purposes it's the profit. So we paid two and a half to four, max four. We probably averaged about three, three and a half, and then when we sold, we sold for close to 15 times profit.
Speaker 1:Wow, and part of it was we were a little bit bigger than the companies we were buying, but a big part of it was we were a total outlier in terms of turnover. We were really good at telling our story. We had great customer retention, we were great at buying companies. Because that's the same thing when you, when you acquire a company and you know day one as the new owner, you've got a group of employees that you have to capture their heart and their soul and their effort and you do that their story as well. So I think you know in a lot of ways it kind of knits itself through all aspects of our success.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I mean I can at least definitively say it was worth 5x arbitrage on the value of our business from what it would have been had we traded for industry average. But it's more than that. I think it made it a more fun place to go to work every day, like it was miserable when the turnover was 115 and we were at like war with each other. It just it's hard to get out of bed. So you know, I look at the turning point stuff and the ability again to tell those stories. Well, like it enhanced the quality of just walking through the door every day, which is way more important than you realize until you're in a situation where you don't feel like walking through the door every day no, that's one of the things I mean.
Speaker 3:This is something tim preaches to us all the time of you can worry about the money, the bottom line. That can be your focus and it'll produce a certain result. When you focus on the people, that's where things explode, right, and just that. You've got to focus on those right things and those right behaviors and just always looking at, yeah, what can we do? How can we do right by the customer, how can we do right by our people along the way? So you certainly figured that out in a big way.
Speaker 1:For sure. And one of my massive biases and again, most of my massive biases were just make a ton of dumb decisions and then learn. This would be one. But think about some of the companies where you have a suboptimal style experience on a pretty consistent basis. Airlines come to mind, some hotel chains come to mind. But there are categories of companies, and certainly individual companies, that have enough critical mass, they do enough business, but you just don't get a good feeling.
Speaker 1:When you're a customer, you kind of know that you just signed up for a lousy experience.
Speaker 1:It's part of the entry fee and you look at those companies so many times the reason that I believe you're having a lousy experience.
Speaker 1:They spend all this money externally to convince you as a prospective customer that they have a great brand story, that the experience of doing business with them is going to be great, and this is why. And then you get there and the experience doesn't even come close to matching what the external promises were. And it's expensive to advertise and pay the money to create those expectations and none of that money gets spent internally, getting the employee to fall in love with the brand first and then deliver the customer experience second. So we turned it the other way around, then deliver the customer experience second. So we turned it the other way around. We took every incremental dollar we had to sell an external brand experience story to a prospective customer and we just spent it internally to create a great experience for our employee. And it was more important for me for our employee to love our brand, and we literally had an employee tattoo our brand on her body like we we.
Speaker 1:We wanted the employee to love our brand way more than our customers ever did, because they would then actually deliver the brand experience, which spoke for itself.
Speaker 1:And I think there's two ways to go. You can can spend, and not today's version of Starbucks, but the 10-year-ago version of Starbucks. They didn't do any advertising. They spent all their money internally getting their employees to fall in love with Starbucks and you just had the Starbucks experience by default, because they were run by 250,000 17-year-old Starbucks zealots that were in love with Starbucks and when they started to really kind of struggle I think I mean there's a million reasons and smart people at Harvard will write Harvard Business Reviews about it all day long but they stopped spending that money internally to get the employee to fall in love with the Starbucks experience as an employee and they started spending money externally and everything changed. So that's a massive bias from that. You can certainly spend external dollars on your brand, but don't do it at the expense of internal. Spend the money inside first. Your employees should love your brand more than any customer ever does. In my again, I'm an opinion of one, but that's a strong opinion I have of one. And you see it everywhere.
Speaker 1:You literally see it everywhere, and it's the employee that mutters under their breath these systems never work. Oh, I wish they would stop telling people we could do that. Uh, like, and you just watch it like you can. By the way, I just ruined it for you guys. If you didn't notice this before, you're gonna see it everywhere now when you think of me, think of me apologizing for pointing it out, but yeah, it's like, it's everywhere and you're like, oh, and it makes such obvious sense when you, when you see it how, uh, how, could someone who's listening to this right now like what would be a good first step for them?
Speaker 2:let's say that they are in a company, they run a company and they're just feeling that like angst of like something's not right here. Or it's like the people like I want to pour into them. I don't know how, what's that like angst of like something's not right here. Or it's like the people like I want to pour into them. I don't know how, what's that like first, like tangible step that they could make it's such an awesome question.
Speaker 1:So the the very first, most important thing in all of this is you as the entrepreneur, the leader, the whatever you're. If you have people that report to you, you have to and this is I rarely ever say. Most of my stuff is suggestive, like you might want to think about this. You might want to think about that. Rarely do I like have like locked in place platitudes, but one of them is if you're going to have people report to you and you want to build a great culture, you have to believe in your heart of hearts that it's your obligation, your privilege and your responsibility to create a great experience for the employee that reports to you. If you don't believe that and I mean like in here believe it, you end up doing things to try and manipulate people into believing that you know you care, believing that we care about the customer or the brand, and this is whatever it is. But if they perceive, even at a subconscious level, that you don't really believe this, you're just trying to manipulate their behavior. If they were mediocre yesterday and just going through the motions and now today they feel like you manipulated them, they'll come in tomorrow with a purpose, a real, serious, like driven purpose. Unfortunately, the purpose is going to be to make your life miserable because they perceive they're trying to be manipulated. That's like the worst thing you can do.
Speaker 1:So the first step is and this sounds like such a Pollyanna answer, but the first step is the leadership team, and it starts with the senior leaders and the owner, founder, whoever has, you know, the cap table. You have to believe it's your responsibility to create the experience for the frontline employee. If your mindset is well, I pay them. And I don't understand, I give them a paycheck. Therefore, I deserve their best effort. All the time like, like that worked in 1956. It's not 1956 anymore. Yeah, and when you think about the level of distraction that your employee carries around in their pocket, yeah.
Speaker 1:There's an author his name's Aubrey Daniels. Aubrey used to write before, like the smartphone revolution, that employees had about a 40% discretionary amount of effort that they could choose to give to their employer or not. So when people are highly engaged and really bought in, you might get 80% or 85% of their effort. When they're marginally engaged, the table stakes are you get 50 to 60 percent because you give them a paycheck. Now, in my opinion, with the smartphone revolution, I think it's flipped. I think you get 40 percent of people and they have 60 percent discretionary effort that they can choose to spend with you or with Instagram, or with TikTok or Candy Crush or pick one of a million other distractions. And it's your responsibility to get that incremental extra effort because you've created a place where they feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves and they feel connected to the work and the outcome. So first step is the leadership team has to believe it, that they own it, and the second step then is around communication.
Speaker 1:For me, I think most companies where culture is either waning or mediocre or an afterthought, the leadership team doesn't feel it's necessary to really communicate what they're thinking, what the vision is, how each individual connects to this bigger idea, all those things, how each individual connects to this bigger idea, all those things. So step one is you got to believe it and step two is you have to over-communicate the why behind what's going on. And I'm not a big generational, you know this generation, this or that, but I can, from that perspective, say it's never been more important because of we have instant access to information 24-7, 365. In my view, it's never been more important than right now to over-communicate the why behind your purpose and what you're asking people to do and how you see your customer delivery process and how you see the experiences you want to create. All those things I don't think we can communicate enough and I think mediocre companies don't communicate. So those would be step one and two, and then there's 2000 more.
Speaker 1:But you have to get those, like those are the front dominoes that have to go down to make the other dominoes work to me. And last thing on that, and then I'll, I'll go. It's a, it's a process, not an event, like so many times we're like, all right, we're gonna fix the culture around here and then through like a set of miracles and hard work and everything. Like all of a sudden the culture is good and then you get distracted by 58 other things and you forget, like then all of a sudden, the culture sucks again and you're like wait, what happened? Like it has to be an ongoing, like just part of your DNA to always be thinking about.
Speaker 1:We had, at Apple Tree, any employee that had at least one direct report had a little plaque, like tombstone style sign, on their desk that said what can I do today to make the employee experience better than it was yesterday? We wanted everyone asking themselves that question all the time, all the time, and it was massively big things, like you know hey, our vacation policy needs an overhaul to the tiniest of like dumb things. Like hey, the wheel on this chair is loose and it's squeaky and people hear it when I'm on the phone, and it was everything in between, like we were in constant search of all the tiny irritants. How many employees have quit companies because they got hand-me-down technology that isn't necessarily the best, doesn't work well, they're not really productive, and all of a sudden they wake up and they're like I'm sure I like this job very much anymore, and they don't even know that it's because they have shitty technology or whatever it is. But these little irritants that creep in and they're like yeah, I'm going to look for something else. This isn't really doing it for me.
Speaker 1:So it's big things, but it's a lot of little things too. And again, you're never going to be perfect. But if people think that you care and you're noticing like hey, that wheel that's really squeaky, maybe we should get that replaced. Versus it's been squeaky for three years and nobody seems to care enough to fix it. Like those are two, it's a five dollar problem either way, but one can be a five dollar problem that drives a you know employee away, and the other one could be wow, they noticed that was squeaky. Like that's pretty cool. Like for $5. One way or the other, the Delta inexperience is massive. So it's just gotta be part of your DNA.
Speaker 3:Well, John, when you write the book with the 2000 other dominoes, I want to be first on the list for that one. What are you excited about for the future, as you think about your work with Align 5 and your coaching business? What's got you excited?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know it's interesting. We've obviously at the risk of sounding ridiculously obvious it's been a challenging four or five cycle in business. Um, you know, covid, however you think about it, obviously was a challenge for many, it was a win for some, but all the follow-on stuff that I think we don't even really realize. But work has changed pretty dramatically to, from my, from the seat at the table that I have, or the view from the seat at the table I have, and we're obviously in a perpetual news cycle and you know, forget even talking about the upcoming election, but there's so many like new sort of variables that have come into play in the last four or five years and I'm a contrarian a lot of times in my thinking and there's so many people that are talking about how challenging it is. Now I'm part of a group that you know. It's people that are struggling in their business and looking for advice and all these kinds of things. I actually think of myself as a micro-economist, not a macro-economist. And when there are macro-economic tailwinds which we had really from 2009 through probably well, at least through 2019, and we really even got a pretty good push from some of the stuff that happened post-COVID when there's tailwinds like that, a lot of really bad competitors can be sustainable, right the low-cost ones, the low-quality, the ones that are kind of nipping at your heels, that are just annoying and you'd wish they would go away, but they're just sort of around. When the winds shift around and all of a sudden you have challenge and headwinds, you notice certain groups of people start to really whine and complain about how bad things are externally. Things are externally, but the microeconomists, the good operators, the ones that are running great companies, actually like those markets right. They like to lean in to challenge because the cream rises to the top In a kind of rising tide, tailwind-based market. A lot of suboptimal companies can be successful, but now you need to be optimal. So in the work that we do, we're really excited about helping companies become more optimal and we're really excited about helping companies. I just had this conversation last week where someone noted on a call that I was on with them, like yeah, you know a lot of our competitors that used to be really, really annoying. They're not around anymore and that's because they were running suboptimally enough to be a hindrance to our client, but now they can't operate in this environment and a lot of his competitors have gone away and he's having an easier time in this environment because he is cream, rising to the top versus not.
Speaker 1:So I love like contrarian style trends. I love kind of when we're in situations that maybe we haven't seen before. I I like I think I early on I was a business geek from the time I was a little little kid and this current environment we haven't really been through a lot of inflation is a fascinating sort of dojo to look at and I'm a middle market guy. I know enough to be dangerous about the Fortune 2500. I'm really talking about the middle market when I share this Middle market. For me, 5, 10 million to a billion in revenue right now have a massive opportunity if they're the cream and their bad competitors are gone away. So I'm excited about that and not a lot of people right now are talking about how excited they are by the current economic environment. I think it's really healthy to have downward trends where sort of those those resource and time-wasting competitors go away, and I think we're in that cycle right now. So we saw it through COVID.
Speaker 1:When COVID first came, we really leaned in with our coaching community.
Speaker 1:We were about 250 at the time. We got on a daily call. Then we were doing it twice a day, and then three times a week and then once a week and we were global, like 45, 50 countries, five or six continents. So we were getting data points from all over the place, like even China at the beginning, and scaling up coached companies this is anecdotal but it's pretty close outperformed their peers by like 5 to 1, 8 to 1, 10 to 1. Because they had already established everything.
Speaker 1:I talked about communication methodologies and helping people see how they connect to the bigger picture and helping people see how they connect to the bigger picture, and COVID was like the ultimate force multiplier for a lot of them, where competitors weren't just like hampered, they were disappearing in droves because their businesses were shut down and somehow these scaling up coach companies tended to really, really outperform. I feel like we're in one of those cycles right now where the cream is rising to the top and I love being part of that conversation with companies. So that's probably what I'm most excited about. I'm pretty sure you haven't had many people on with you guys that say the current economic environment's the thing I'm most excited about, but a bit of a wackadoo. So for me I would say that that's true.
Speaker 2:No, I mean I love it because I think it is the. You have to have those, the valleys to appreciate the peaks and vice versa, and so it is healthy to have those, like the ups and downs, and, yeah, the cream rises to the top. I mean I feel like we could sit here Well think about you guys.
Speaker 1:I'll land on this with you guys. I mean, you know, I know through Tim that you guys take a tremendous amount of pride in the work that you do, in the ability to tell a story and get the message not right but just right, like to get it where. You know you take a viewer on an emotional journey and you know we're going to take them to here and then we're going to drop down. The attention to detail in your craft is notable. Six years ago there were a lot of people telling stories that weren't taking that level of precision and care but were your competitors, because you didn't have to be that precise and care that much. So all those competitors kind of got drug along with the rising tide.
Speaker 1:Well, now the tide's turned. It is important to be that precise and that's a win for you guys, because those you know with all due respect to the kid, but the kid that just got his, you know, three-year visual arts degree from community college that launched his own, you know video production studio yeah, they're on every corner. Well, they're not on every corner now. Studio yeah, there's, they're on every corner. Well, we're not on every corner now, like it, you don't want those, like you know, again sort of nipping at your heel. Competitors ground and we're in a space now where they're going away. All right, that's.
Speaker 2:That's enough on that yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, we are very, uh, yeah, we're advocates of like details matter and it's like, if you focus on excellence and always under promise, over deliver, focus on the client and what's going to be best for them.
Speaker 2:It's. We're always looking to play the long game and so do what's right. And, yeah, we love the stories that we get to tell and we're passionate about that. And, yeah, grateful for what we get to do every day. Yeah, but as we start to wind things down here, one question I had coming to this I'd love to get your insights on as we wrap it up, is how has your, through your journey yeah, just wide range of you grown and scaled? How has your definition of success changed or shifted?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great question. So for me and I alluded to it at the beginning and I'll kind of double down on it now I guess I think the middle market entrepreneur is the most abused of all the different constituents in the kind of business landscape. So the startup entrepreneur gets tons of attention right, the local chambers of commerce and ribbon cutting and tax benefits and all these things, and eight out of 10 of them fail. So they take all the kind of early momentum and some get it and some don't. The two that don't fail then start to scale and as they start to scale they're forgotten about by the startup ecosystem because they've moved beyond that but they're not big enough yet to have any influence over kind of the you know, the large corporate side of things. They, they don't have lobbyists, they don't have any advocate in government and they get totally forgotten about and they get stuck kind of in this middle.
Speaker 1:And for me my definition of success is I was lucky. Somebody pulled back the curtain early on for me and said hey, read the e-myth by Michael Gerber, really important. Hey, you might want to think about this pricing strategy, not this one. Whatever it was. I had these very seemingly lucky but in hindsight, completely synchronistic moments along the way where I got help right when I needed it. So my definition of success were all the obvious ones up until we sold the company.
Speaker 1:But for me now and I'm not a give it back guy when people say I want to give back, that implies you took something in the first place. I don't feel like I took anything. So I'm a pay it forward, not give back guy. Same church, different pew maybe, but my definition of success now is especially for the middle market entrepreneur. If I can help in any way level their playing field and give them access to some of the stuff I was lucky enough to get access to, then that's a day that I feel like I won. That's why I like doing this kind of stuff. If one per and literally I mean this if one person listens and gets one idea that helps them not get taken advantage of in one thing, then this was totally worth my time, effort and energy. So for me that's success. If I can pay it forward and have and again, as a microeconomist, it doesn't have to be a thousand or a million people, one person's enough. If I can move the needle for one person, then that's a successful day for me.
Speaker 1:And I know that sounds super like. Yeah, of course, platitude, that's what everybody says. But I mean that I wake up every day and think how can I help one entrepreneur not get taken advantage of today? Because, I mean, you guys know this is hard right.
Speaker 1:This is not a luxury, fun, easy lifestyle. To scale a company is hard, and to have people take advantage of you solely because you don't know or they've got more know, more scale or critical mass like that's nonsense. So that's the person that I want to be a hero to is because that's my hero. The middle market entrepreneur, I think, is the most important group of people on the planet. They're creating stability. They're creating 7 out of 10 jobs in North America and globally. They're creating all the things that we take for granted and appreciate. And you know, I mean I got a pair of readers here, I've got a you know all this stuff Like it's all middle market entrepreneurs that are doing these things and they don't get the level of respect they deserve. So success for me if I can help that group Awesome.
Speaker 3:Awesome, so good. Well, we appreciate your generosity. I know we are walking away with several amazing thoughts.
Speaker 2:I got my notes dribbled. Yes, absolutely, you've already affected two people and moving that needle for sure, for sure that's a successful day, good good.
Speaker 3:How can our listeners connect with you, your businesses? What's a great place for them to go check out?
Speaker 1:yeah, I guess the best would be um, our, our kind of top level domain is align5, it's a-l-i-g-n, and then the number five dot com, and then I'm j ratliff at a line five dot com. So those are probably the two best. Um, yeah, and, and certainly they're, you know, welcome to reach out to you guys and have you connect us as well, whatever I mean, I meant what I said.
Speaker 1:I do this because I feel compelled to share, and specifically share things that didn't go well for me, that hopefully I can keep someone else from doing so that. That that's all that I need to come out of this. But, yeah, if someone's got follow-up questions or whatever, we're more than happy to. Yeah, and my chief of staff, actually, she's amazing. Her name's Kristen Kopp. She's an Ivy League grad. She like same thing total mission for her to help middle market entrepreneurs. She actually keeps the trains on time too, which I certainly don't. She's K like Kristen K Kopp, k-o-p-p at Align5.com. Awesome, if you want to email me, go ahead. If you want an answer, you might want to email her as well, or at least Kopp.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's good.
Speaker 1:And I don't mean that bad, I mean that overwhelmed, yeah, yeah, for sure, go ahead.
Speaker 3:No, and I'll also encourage our listeners check out the Align 5, Instagram and other social media. You do a great job of just presenting some of your big ideas and stories and thoughts on video through that so great, great resource.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we shot some video over the years. Yeah, awesome.
Speaker 3:Well, cool, well, john, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us, watching along, listening in today. We will see you next time on.
Speaker 1:Stories.
Speaker 3:That Move. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Stories that Move, brought to you by Dream On Studios.
Speaker 2:Make sure to subscribe so that you don't miss the next episode. And remember, if you or your organization have a story you're eager to share with the world, Dream On Studios is here to bring that story to life.
Speaker 3:Don't hesitate to reach out. You can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or visit our website at dreamonstudiosio. We understand how overwhelming it can be trying to bring your vision and story to life, but that's why we exist, and we've walked alongside hundreds of clients doing that very thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we believe every story has the potential to inspire, to move and to make a difference.
Speaker 3:Let's make yours heard Until next time, keep moving forward and keep telling those stories that matter.
Speaker 2:Take care, everyone. We'll see you next time on Stories that Move.