Chapter Markers: 00:00 - Introduction and Setting the Stage 01:07 - Company Culture and Differentiation 07:20 - Enforcing Company Standards 10:01 - The Negative Impact of a Culture Without Standards
Chapter Markers: 00:00 - Introduction and Setting the Stage 01:07 - Company Culture and Differentiation 07:20 - Enforcing Company Standards 10:01 - The Negative Impact of a Culture Without Standards
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Speaker 1:
this is unleashing leadership. I'm your host, travis. Knock it off, dave. I'm your host, travis moss, with our special guest, dave nurchey, as we get after the lessons learned from the book the hard thing about hard things by ben horowitz, I'm glad we're having fun. We're having some good fun here. Um, I'm like the anchor man. I'm just reading from like. I'm reading like parentheses and everything. It's uh yeah, company culture designing a way of working that will separate you from your competitors In parentheses seems cult-like in retrospect.
Speaker 1:
This is brought to you by Seed Planning Group, who we, dave and I, in our very biased way, think is a very good example of this. Seed Planning Group, the only fiduciary as a wealth management firm that helps people overcome the challenges that are keeping them from personal fulfillment. Go and check out that journey over at seedpgcom, seed S-E-E-D PG. As in planning group dot com, you can also check out. We have some videos from some of our advisors and some of our staff talking about the stuff that they love doing, and we actually have some of those posted on the NQR YouTube channel. So it's at NQR on YouTube. You can see from some of our people talking about why they love doing the work that they do All right. So get the sponsor out of the way. Company Culture, designing a way of working that will separate you from your competitors.
Speaker 2:
I get excited about this one because you just mentioned the videos of people talking about what they love doing. A thing I really love doing, part of my job is the recruiting aspect, and this one speaks a lot to that and a lot of the conversations I've been having in the meet and greets that we do. Uh, in the meet and greets that we do, and I, you know, I do think seeds a great example, because before I even talked to a lot of these people, they'll, they'll go, you know, investigate our website, and a lot of them, you know, they've had interviews with your, your typical financial service industry players. You know the, the bigger companies, maybe some smaller ones, and I, I open up a lot of the meet and greets and saying you know, what do you know about seed or what do you want to know? And they go into this whole thing about you know how we're different, how we do this, uh, you know how, how it seems so different than everything they know about the industry, and I ask them why. And then we talk about that and it's fun, because that is.
Speaker 2:
I mean, how exciting is that as an employer, right, as a leader at a company, to say we do X, y and Z, differently than the other people, that if you're looking for a specific job, if you're interested in financial planning and being a planner, you know helping people on their journey through what you know wealth means to them and fulfillment, what gets you excited about being a planner and to be able to answer that question. You know, like with them or for them, of how we do it and their reaction to be wow, I never heard that or that seems so different than my internship or my previous job seems so different than my internship or my previous job. Tell me more. That's super exciting, right?
Speaker 1:
That says a lot about our execution of our vision of what SEED should be and what the industry really should be. Yeah, when we created SEED I mean first of all we took the acronym SEED Stimulating Exceptional Ethical Duty was a result of I had made a list of the 80 or so values that I thought were important about business and then categorized them. I had four groups of them and then created an acronym out of the four groups and it came to SEED, and the idea with SEED is you can plant an idea in your community and change your community over time, um, and it's also stimulating exceptional ethical duty. So it's it's it's good values to live by, um, but it was driven by everything that we thought was wrong and broken about the industry that we were in, and you had spent some time in the industry that we were in, and and you had spent some time in the industry before going to PWC and then coming back to us, where you had the same feelings. And there's a lot of people who are part of our team now that have had the same feelings and people who are joining our team because when they've gone other places, like you said and interviewed, they've had the same feelings, like there's something different being at the personal financial costs to ourselves. Meaning, if we were on the commission side of things or we are on the traditional business side of things, yes, I could be making probably three, four times the money that I make, but there would be no seed and we would not have some of the. We would not have anything that we've developed that I think are unique and major value adds for clients, because they would not be allowed in those structures and the way that the industry is designed. So we basically said we're going to create an environment where we can innovate and we can do things different and we have a different message and we can be honest and truthful and have candor with our clients and the community.
Speaker 1:
And look, you know you pay us to tell you the truth. It doesn't. If you don't like it, that's on you, right? You're going to pay us either way. That's our job is to tell you the truth and how it is and to help you make good decisions. Yep, you decide what you want to do with that and there's there's no, there's no handcuffs to it. Right, that's why we built it the way that we built it. You know, with that attitude of you know, the way it's being done is broken and it needs to be done differently. And and we need to you know understanding, we're going to step in the ring and we're going to take. You know we still do.
Speaker 1:
People are like that's not. You know, I saw it on TV. This is how it's supposed to happen. Or I read blah, blah, blah and it's like, yeah, and think about why. You know, because somebody is making enormous amounts of money off of you. So, yes, we can be a profitable firm.
Speaker 1:
If you walk into Sam's Club in the town that you're from and you see a client, you should never be embarrassed to see them Yep, right, because it's something you've done or afraid somebody's going to find you out. You know what I mean. We should be striving to make sure that. You know, every single time a client, a financial advisor, gets paid, it comes out of a client's money. So we're in charge of helping them grow that money and make good decisions out of it. We better make, you know, like if somebody's overcharging a client, you know people don't look at it like this but let's say that you're making more than you should. You're making more than you should at the detriment of the people you're saying you're helping.
Speaker 1:
And if you say that's just the way the industry does it, well, screw the industry. That's a bad attitude. That's, that's ethical creep. We've talked about that. Right, that's ethical creep. It's that's the way they do it. So I'm justified in doing it. Well, they do it, so I'm justified in doing it. Well, fuck you. You're not justified to rip somebody off, right, right, I mean, that's the, that's the attitude of it, so that's the the, the separation. I guess in the culture that creates a reason for people to want to be here, both for people to work for us and for people to work with us, is the fact that we're going to make sure that we feel good about the advice that we give, yeah, yeah, all the time. Now, whether or not you want to accept it that way, that's up to you. We might tell you stuff you don't want to hear, but we're going to do it in a way that we can always sleep at night, that we're always going to be proud of.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, because the advice we give doesn't change anybody's paycheck anything like that, right, like that, that and that is very different. And I love the point you made because of the you know the, the culture we've created um separating from the competition. We always hear the stories, uh, internally, right, whether it's on our newsletter where we share, you know, shout outs and we tell client stories and things like that, of all the awesome different wins we've had. You don't get that at other. Like you said, I was in the industry before that. We didn't do things like that because there was it's all conquest Everything's about conquest, and that's it yeah exactly, and I'm not even saying that we were doing anything necessarily wrong with clients.
Speaker 2:
There are cases that I'm sure, but even when that's not the case, saying that anything we were doing anything necessarily wrong, uh, with clients, right, there are cases that I'm sure. But even when that's not the case, and you're just kind of going along, you know, going with the how the industry does it.
Speaker 2:
I never. You don't get that feeling because you, you did the extra or because of what we've created here, that seed. I do strongly believe that a hundred percent goes into the client's results, because that's how we're just programmed here. That's why we attract the people we do is because they want to make the difference for the client, not themselves and just kind of service clients, because that's what the job is. There's a big difference there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah Well, and there's like in our industry, the washout rate is 90. So, although I said you know you can make two or three times what you make, you know maybe as one of our planners, but the washout rate is 90%. And the ones that do survive, man, there's some good planners out there, but I'm going to say 90% of them are out there for the wrong reasons.
Speaker 1:
They're out there to make money, not necessarily to help the clients. They're just very, very good salespeople. So you'd never know it. So, but in company culture, designing a way of working that will separate you from competitors is the word design, and design implies that we are intentional in the things that we do, and so we've talked about the Just Cause Project. Right, we're going to have the Just Cause Project, which is going to give us Guiding Star.
Speaker 1:
We talked about the manager creed a couple episodes ago. Right, like, you actually have to work at this. If you do not deliberately say here's the flags in the sand. These are the things that we represent and the things that you are required to buy into if you're here. If you can't do that, then you can talk to your blue in the face. The actions and the results are not going to match up with what you want. Yep, right, and people do this. With what you want. Yep, right, and people do this. They live in like plausible deniability all the time where that's like you know they're just. They're just fooling themselves. They're not fooling anybody else, you know, and they cause.
Speaker 1:
They're saying this is you get the buzzwords, everything is what we are about and then they don't actually act it. You actually have to end you. Then you have to hold people accountable, which might mean you have turnover, which might mean you know people who were good employees no longer are good employees because you know they get greedy or something you know it's like. But you have to have the standards. The standards create culture, and then you got to hold people accountable to the standards, cause if you just have standards and then you let people violate the standards, guess what you got no standards Right and guess what your culture is with no standards. It's a hole. That's what it is. That's why people go to work and they hate where they work, because the culture sucks it's words on a wall that nobody mentioned too yep.