693: Building a Remote Culture that Works with Don Harkey
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How do you build a strong team when your employees rarely, if ever, see one another? In this episode of Pet Sitter Confessional, Collin talks with Don Harkey of People Centric about what it takes to create healthy remote culture in pet care businesses. Don explains how leadership, communication, autonomy, and feedback all work together to help employees feel connected and set up for success. They discuss practical ways to build community across distributed teams, improve onboarding, and create better systems for performance and accountability. This conversation is a helpful reminder that strong culture does not happen by accident, but it can be built deliberately and fruitfully.
Main topics:
Remote culture in pet care
Leadership through better systems
Feedback that builds trust
Community in distributed teams
Autonomy and accountability balance
Main takeaway: “You can design an organization that works really well for people that also works really well for the company.”
Too often, business owners feel like they have to choose between caring for their team and building a successful company, but those two things are not in conflict. In fact, when we build better systems, communicate clearly, and lead with intention, both people and businesses benefit. This episode is a great reminder that healthy culture is not fluff or extra work for someday. It is part of building a business that lasts.
About our guest: Don Harkey is the CEO of People Centric, a Springfield, Missouri-based company that helps organizations build healthier, more effective workplaces. A self-described recovering engineer, Don began his career at Fortune 500 companies including Archer Daniels Midland and 3M before turning his attention to the science of people and organizations. Through training, coaching, and systems implementation, he helps businesses create environments where employees can thrive and companies can perform better. Don is also the host of the People Centric Podcast, where he explores leadership, communication, strategy, and workplace culture.
Links:
Wanna earn a CEU? Go here! CEU: https://forms.gle/LthLsWwnABtGNoPX7
People Centric (Don Harkey’s consulting firm): https://peoplecentric.com/
Don Harkey – Founder and CEO Bio: https://peoplecentric.com/about/
People Centric Blog / Articles by Don Harkey: https://peoplecentric.com/author/donharkey/
Don Harkey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/don-harkey-8911556
Trello (project management tool referenced in the episode): https://trello.com
Slack (team communication platform referenced in the episode): https://slack.com
Microsoft Teams (team collaboration tool referenced in the episode): https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-teams
Gallup CliftonStrengths / StrengthsFinder: https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths
Book referenced: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman: https://thewisemangroup.com/books/multipliers/
Gallup: https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/254033/strengthsfinder.aspx
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Pet Sitter Confessional, its hosts, or sponsors. We interview individuals based on their experience and expertise within the pet care industry. Any statements made outside of this platform, or unrelated to the topic discussed, are solely the responsibility of the guest.
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet care industry, strong culture, leadership, People Centric, Don Harkey, business systems, employee engagement, communication, community, remote work, feedback, onboarding, performance assessment, team building, Gallup Strengths Finder
SPEAKERS
Don Harkey, Collin Funkhouser
Collin Funkhouser 00:00
Collin, welcome to pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Today, we're brought to you by our friends at time to pet and pet sitters International. I'm really excited to announce that this episode is worth one CEQ for both naps and psi. So listen to the episode, click the link in the show notes, take the quiz, get the certificate and turn that in. Well, hello everybody and welcome back. Strong culture and leadership are foundational to any business, but the challenges faced by the pet care industry are unique. So to help us build healthy businesses that function well and where people actually want to work. Today we're speaking with Don Harkey, owner of people centric. Don, I'm really excited to have you on the show and dive into this topic. For those who aren't familiar with you, could you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do? Yeah, Collin, my
Don Harkey 00:57
name is Don Harkey. I'm the CEO of people centric. We're based in Springfield, Missouri, but we work all over the country. I'm the backstory, the origin story that got us into what we do, which will help explain what we do, is that I'm a recovering engineer. So I spent the first 10 years of my career at big fortune, 500 companies, Archer, Daniels, Midland, 3m and I saw some teams working really well in some places and not working well in others. And I got really interested in interested in what causes that. So I started doing two things. I studied the science of how people work, and then I started studying the science of organizations and businesses. How do businesses work? And what I discovered was something surprising, that first of all, we know exactly how people work, what we don't do is we don't build companies very well that link to how people work. But then the second thing I just discovered that was even more surprising is how companies work and how people work are very, very compatible with each other. You can design an organization that works really well for people that also works really well for the company. In other words, if your organization has people that are really happy and love coming to work every day, you'll also make more money. So that's that's what we do. We help organizations. We do it through training, we do it through coaching, and we do it through systems implementation, to help organizations to better unleash their people.
Collin Funkhouser 02:12
Basically, where does that mismatch come from? You talk about how there's one way to design a business and how the business works, and then there's the way people work. Why does that difference exist?
Don Harkey 02:23
You know, it's funny. It's not even a hard connection. Collin, so, like, when we talk about that connection, so I'll tell you what the connections are just briefly. So when you think about, like, what does a business need? You know, business needs, you need a strategy. You need to know why you're doing what you're doing. You need communication, right? You need execution. At the end of the day, you got to get the stuff done. You need leadership, some form of leadership, right? And then you need the people in those places. Those are the five things that you need as a business. When you now think, what do people need in work? And this is very, very well studied, people need purpose. They need to know why they're doing what they're doing. They need to feel like they're part of a community, right? They need to feel like they have some autonomy, and some of the things that they're making, some decision making, they're making through the day. And then they also need to feel like they're being developed, right? And then they need to be put in a position where they can succeed at the so those, those are the five things that people need, and those are the five things that companies need, if you overlap those things together, if you're going to do a strategy, make it should connect to your purpose. Why are you doing what you're doing? Your strategy and your purpose connect really, really well if you're going to communicate. So if you're going to have a meeting, let's also build community while we're in the meeting. And what happens a lot of too many organizations, is we do the meeting where everybody just reports that I'm still doing my job and no one else is listening to what you're talking about that doesn't build community, and that's the soul sucking meeting, right? Good meetings build community. We're talking to each other. We're building relationships with other. We're building trust. You think about leaders, you think about execution and autonomy. We as business owners sometimes take make too many of the decisions ourselves. We don't allow our people to make decisions, which robs people of autonomy. We do that because we want our own autonomy. We feel like we're really great at doing what we're doing, and we step out. Sometimes we make mistakes on that. We talk about leadership and development. A lot of times, we don't manage our own team, because unless something is bad is happening, and that's when we jump in and manage our team, really good management means you're managing your team when things are going right too, so that you're giving feedback on, hey, that was fantastic. What you're doing. There's some autonomy. So there those things that, when they mix together, it does a really good job. I just don't think anybody has really communicated those. Those are the business systems you need, and this is how you motivate people. I think we're the first ones that have done that and really connected the dots.
Collin Funkhouser 04:39
Well, when you're growing a business, especially as the business owner, a lot of times you're only focused on business needs, business needs, business needs, right? We're so what do I need to do to be successful? How do I execute this? Really well. How do I do this? And then, typically, what happens is, correct me, if I'm wrong, right, we get the business owner, the business gets really busy, or we have. Have to outsource some help, and we just bring people in, thinking, Okay, now you just do this task, and we we move on without actually sitting down and going, Hey, I brought somebody into this chaos and this monster. How do I help? And because you mentioned something that was really, I think that I overlook a lot too. Of are they in a position where they can succeed? I mean, there's a lot of that encompasses a lot of what it means to be in a job. Yeah, it does, and you have to
Don Harkey 05:29
design that deliberately. I always say, like your organ, your business, is a machine that is perfectly designed to get the results it's currently getting. I'm going to say that again, because I think it's really important your business is a machine that's perfectly designed to get the results you're getting, and you're absolutely right. Collin, I think when we start, those of us who have started a business from scratch, which I think is probably pretty common in the pet sitting industry, right? You're starting, you decided to do it now. You have too many customers. Now you need some help. Somebody else needs to send invoices for you. So that's exactly what you do. You're starting. I'm going to bring in some help, and you don't take a step back to really redesign the machine, right? And initially, when you bring in somebody, I'm going to bring in somebody 20 hours a week to do some books for me, or 10 hours a week to do some invoicing, or I'm going to bring in another sitter, or something like that. Initially, like you can get away with that pretty easily. It's when you start to add more than that. Suddenly, what you've done is you've built an organization without really thinking about building an organization, you haven't really taken a step back and worked on those individual things that's that's not just happens. That doesn't just happen with solopreneurs. It also happens with big organizations so many times. I mean, both of the companies that I came from, Archer, Daniels, Midland and 3m both of them at least while I was there, when they would promote somebody into a management position, there was no additional training on what a management position really was like. You're just promoted, suddenly you're leading and motivating other people. It's completely different job than the engineering position they might have. They may have hired you for originally, but now they're not going to train you on what to do next. And that, I mean, those kinds of things happen a lot in organizations.
Collin Funkhouser 06:59
So when you talk about setting somebody up for success when they come into your business, what does that entail? Because for me, I think of, okay, well, you need to be successful. So here's how you walk a dog, here's how you scoop litter, here's how you send an update. But what you're talking about is maybe there's some more things that we're missing.
Don Harkey 07:20
Yeah, that's great. That's a great question. So we need to go upstream of that a little bit, right? So for one thing is, you are training people while you're hiring them. And I think a lot of people don't realize that when you put out a job positions, you're somebody's talking to you about that job. They're thinking about coming to work for you. They are testing your culture. They're learning about what it's going to be like to work there. So if you are hiring, and like, for example, if you're hiring and it's kind of haphazard and you're late to the calls that you know the interview that you're doing, or you kind of just throw some questions out, like, I don't even know what to ask you. I'm just going to see if I like you and me, and they feel that when they come in, they're going to apply what they learn in that hiring process to their job. So then you sit down, you say, we're really tight about how we take care of dogs and how we do the process. If you weren't tight in the hiring process, you train them that they don't have to be tight in their process. If you're not talking about why you started this in the first place, what you're passionate about, you're training them to not care about that stuff. So you have to think about that in the hiring process. You have to think about that in the onboarding, not just the training, but what it looks like when they come into your organization. So when they come in, one of the things that we do at people centric, and I've got a small team, there's six of us on our team right now. When somebody brand new starts on our team on the first hour, the first day that they're with us, they sit down with me, as the owner of the company, and I sit down and I tell them why we hired them. It's the first say, Collin, listen, we have this position that was open. We had 50 applicants for this position that came in. Let me tell you exactly why we chose you. Here's what I think you're going to be able to do for our team, and I'm going to get really specific about it when we talk to you. We learned about this and this and this, this experience that you had, this is going to help us, and this is what we're trying to do as an organization, and this is why we selected you. And I am super excited that you are on our team. Now that conversation is going to make you you're going to feel like, oh my gosh, that is special. I belong here. I know what I'm supposed to do. And then we talk about our vision, our mission, our values. And then we just, we really make sure that you spend some time with our team like all that process is curated to help us, help to us to start to build trust. Then we get into training and things, and then we start and then the training, the training happens. But then you have to go beyond the training, right? I'm going to train you how to walk the dogs and how to have the relationship with the customers and all those different things. But then I'm also going to have processes where I'm going to check in on you, not just when things go bad, but I'm going to say, like, how are you doing? Collin, what's going on in your life? What's it we know I'm going to build relationships. I'm going to spend some time walking around and having conversations. I'm going to make sure I do it on a regular basis, and then when I see something that you do performance related, I'm going to give you feedback on it when it happens, not annually, not on an annual performance review, but when it happens, I'm going to give you feedback most of the time, hopefully. Feedback is positive, right? I'm going to say, hey, Collin, I saw you. Thanks for staying. I know that they didn't come home and they were supposed to, and you had to stay an extra couple hours with that clock, that customer. I really appreciate you doing that and just doing what needed to be done to take care of that. Then that was fantastic. I appreciate what you did there, or it might be negative. Of hey, you know this, you did this and it wasn't the best. And here's the feedback that I have for you. It's those systems that you put into place that builds trust, that builds buy in from people. You're trying to unleash that other person, they have to want to unleash themselves. So you have to build the relationship. You have to show them the bigger picture, and then they decide whether or not they're going to be a great employee for you, or somebody that just comes in and punches the clock.
Collin Funkhouser 10:41
Yeah, you talk about that feedback. And I think it's you mentioned, like, mentioned the good things too, like that I would train employees, and man, early on, it was I was really good at telling them everything they did wrong, everything I was I was Don I was the best at it. I was so good, I could spend three hours and just say absolutely every millimetrically thing they did wrong. And I realized that that was my interaction with them in the field when I was training and doing this stuff. And then when we'd sit down and do the reviews and check ins, hey, we appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here. It's great. And I realized that it must have felt so fake to the employee, because on one hand, every time I'm with them, I'm saying, hey, don't forget about this. Oh, you didn't do this. Oh, here's this, here's this. And then on the other hand, I'm saying, Thanks for being part of the team. We appreciate all of your work and that you do. Of course they were going to be confused, and of course they weren't going to see they were going, well, which is it? Collin like, what is this? And so having that ability to say and speak up, I think that that's, that's something that it's especially as the owner operator, this is something maybe I've done for 1015, years, and now I'm bringing somebody in that critique mindset can really get into everything that our employees do. Yeah, I
Don Harkey 11:57
agree with that 100% and I appreciate you kind of confessing that and being open about that, because I think all of us make that same mistake. Because the fact is, like, Look, if you're if you're trying to run a business and you're trying to grow it really, in your mind, your mindset, might be the only time I have to address a management issue. Is if they're screwing something up, I need to make it better. That's the only time I really have to. But what you forget is the impact that those positive comments make, and you're right, the relationships that you build and the buy in that you create from that, I can imagine if you're only critiquing your employees. When your employees saw a Collin pop up on their phone, there's a there's a visceral response that it's like, Oh, what did I do now? Yeah, you know what? Why are why are we in the office? And then when you do talk and you're saying, Hey, I just want to tell you're doing a great job, there's a little bit of a but, but what? Then? What are you going to tell me? What did I screw up? You think I'm doing a great job? That surprises me, because the only time you talk to me, you're telling me I'm not doing a good job, right? There's a there's research out there that shows that really good healthy teams, the manager gives positive feedback to negative feedback at a ratio of about five to one, five positive comments for every one negative feedback. And a lot of times I've had people say, Well, that's a lot of positive feedback. That is a lot of positive feedback, but that requires a mind shift, difference, which, by the way, will make you feel better as an owner. If you are really in the position where you're giving your people five positive comments for every one negative feedback, you're feeling pretty good about your people. About your people like you. Think about that like change the mindset a little bit. Look for the positive comments to give. The second piece of advice I'd give on that is that the positive comments, they don't have to be broad stroke. It doesn't have to be Collin, once again, I know I told you this yesterday, but you have really changed my life, and you are amazing. I'm so glad to have it. They don't have to be grandiose comments like that. It could just be, hey, thanks for picking up that extra job yesterday. I really appreciate it. Hey, I know you got short notice. I noticed you canceled your plans to be able to go do this that I really appreciate. They could be little, small things that you see, and if you kind of program yourself to look for those things, you'll see more of those things. And then people respond really well when you're telling them, good job on doing that, you are training them. You're preventing something future bad from happening. You're reinforcing that good stuff that happens later. So yeah, you have to make time for that. You have to be deliberate about it.
Collin Funkhouser 14:10
Have you heard of time to pet? Dan from NYC, pooch has this to say?
Speaker 2 14:15
Time to bet, has been a total game changer for us. It helped us streamline many aspects of our operation, from scheduling and communication to billing and customer management. We actually tested other pet sitting softwares in the past, but these other solutions were clunky and riddled with problems. Everything in time to pet has been so well thought out, it's intuitive, feature rich, and it's
Collin Funkhouser 14:34
always improving. If you're looking for new pet sitting software, give time to pet a try. Listeners of our show will save 50% off your first three months by visiting time to pet comm slash confession, one of the things that you mentioned about what do business and employees need? You linked communication to community, and that certainly is a challenge in the dog walking and pet sitting worlds we are work with highly distributed in the. Individualistic teams. Every time I hire somebody, I always say, welcome to the team. There's 15 employees here. You will never see a single one of them, and if you do something's probably gone horribly wrong, because you need help at a client, clients home, you know, like so how do we start bridging that gap in in our businesses, so that we have a positive workplace culture? We have that community, but they're never seeing one another.
Don Harkey 15:25
Yeah, I think of like the and we've worked with lots of teams that are remote from each other and don't see each other very often, like that. That happens a lot. Your business is a little bit extreme and just the nature of it, right? I mean, we've worked with some that are similar to that. We've worked in like home health, where people are kind of going and seeing their own patients throughout the course of the day. And that's probably really, really similar, yeah. And the thing that I would say is the fact that you all work alone and separately does not change the fact that your people still need community. So how do you as a remote operated business? The question is, how do you as a remote operated business create a sense of community? And there are a lot. Fortunately, in 2026 there are more ways to do that than we've ever had before, right? So, like our team, we use, we use a tool called teams, you know, Microsoft Teams. A lot of people have used it during covid for, like, the video conferencing call, but there's lots of other things on there. There's channels you can create that have updates, there's, there's, there's chats that you can put in there. We've got a chat in our ours. It's called a water cooler. That's just people just basically just talking about, like, what's going on, you know, what's going on your life? And somebody got a new dog, and they posted a picture of their new dog on there, and they were really excited about their new dog. And then, and then another person on our team got a dog from the same place, and it's a half brother of the dogs. So now they're part of their family right now they're talking about that now. They share stories of the dogs, and we're connects to each other or somebody like, I'm going to a show tonight. I might post on there later. Hey, I'm going to go see Sweeney Todd at the local community theater tonight, and it's going to be a lot of fun. And done it on here's it's those things you can build community remotely, both like just as a water cooler, which also means you have to be deliberate about introducing people together. You have to be deliberate when somebody on boards that you can't just say and by the way, there's 14 other people that you might you can talk to if you want to, that are out there, you have to be deliberate about that. You have to think about, how do I like, Hey, we've got somebody new. Maybe think about as part of the onboarding process. We're going to schedule a call, and I'm going to have some people jump on and we're going to talk, and I'm going to introduce you to the team. This is the team. These are the people that tell us, talk about how long you've been doing it, and why have you been doing this. Just go around, introduce yourself, talk to each other. You have to be more deliberate about it, where, if you're in an office together, everybody works together. All that stuff happens organically. By the way, even if you're in an office. We still tell people to be deliberate about how you create community inside of an office, but when you do it remotely, you just have to use more of the tools, more of the things that you have in front of you.
Collin Funkhouser 17:50
I know there is a mindset among some who may think like, Is this really my responsibility? Do I really have to do this? Can't they just show up and do work like, Why do I have to take this burden on to facilitate this?
Don Harkey 18:04
Yeah, right, yeah, the world would be a lot easier if gravity didn't exist too Right? Like, that's the way I kind of look at it. I said that to a client. I actually said to an architectural firm, because they were said things, they have the exact same question. It was the owner of an architectural firm. He goes, Why can't I just hire people and they just do what they want to do? Yeah? To do? Yeah. And I said, you're asking the same question, Wouldn't it be easier to build the building you really wanted to build? If, if gravity wasn't a thing, wouldn't that be easier to build that? And I said two things. Is, one is gravity is a thing. People motivation is a thing, right? People are we are hardwired as humans to naturally resist people forcing us to do something. We don't respond as well. We respond a lot better when we feel like we have purpose, we have community, we feel like we're being developed and we have some autonomy. We work better. The good news about all of that is it also helps people to work better. So my question is, do you want people? How do you want people representing you as a business owner when they're out there. Do you want them to represent you as somebody that just shows up and just does the bare minimum of the job and is disengaged in their job and they do their job and go home? Or do you want them to represent you like they almost own the company, like they feel ownership and they feel pride in what they do, and then, if you feel like that's a different differentiator in terms of costs for you, in terms of how many clients you get in the future in terms of growing your business, then you have to, you have to implement these systems.
Collin Funkhouser 19:26
And it's, it's really what you're saying here, Don it's, you're providing that space and being intentional about that. I don't think it's, I'm going to drag every employee kicking and screaming to my zoom function that we're going to do, you know, on Tuesdays, but it's there. It's an opportunity for them, but there is that risk then, though of if people aren't engaging in what we think is an appropriate level, how do we quietly or carefully encourage them to do more if we're concerned about them kind of slipping away?
Don Harkey 20:00
A Yeah, and that's a great question. You know, in our management training, we talk a lot about our management cycle, and it's the cycle of you give feedback, you you assess performance. I'm sorry, start with assessing performance, which you have to know. How do you assess performance in the pet sitting industry? Assessing performance could be you're waiting until there's a complaint that comes in, right? It could be that, or you could be proactively trying to assess performance, like you could be proactive going, how was that? Did you get with the feedback? You could be deliberately going after it. So if you're assessing performance deliberately, you're giving the feedback, and then you're watching to see if the other person owns it, or if they don't own it, and if they own it, we're in coaching mode. We're in no development mode. I'm going to help you to get better. I'm going to ask you questions. I'm going to help you to own your own career. I'm going to help you build a little business inside of my business. I'm going to give you some autonomy, some choices, some freedom, if they don't own it, if they're pushing back, if they're just there for a job, or they're openly resisting to what you're doing. We call that an accountability loop, and that's a different loop that said, Well, I told you you have to do these things, then you dial it up. If it keeps having a problem. I told you that you're supposed to do this. You didn't do it. I told you you're supposed to do this, and you didn't do it, and now I'm going to write you up. I told you you're supposed to do this. I wrote you up. If it happens again, I'm going to let you go. It happened again. I'm going to let you go like so there is, if you're looking for that ownership of people, then what you want it? You want to try to hold them accountable. You want to try to give them feedback. I'll tell you. Collin, the number one problem though, that I see on this and when a manager calls us and says, I'm struggling with this employee, everyone on my team asks two questions. Question number one is, do they know it? And question number two is, do they own it? And question number one, I polled our teams as unscientific data I'm about to give you, but no question number one, I'd say about 90% of the time our team says that the person has not had a conversation with the employee. The employee has no idea that there's a problem. Now, the manager is often surprised by that. They're like, well, you live in the same world I live. And how could you not see that you're don't you're not owning this. You're not having the same problem. Well, it's because you haven't told them. You have to clear you have to tell them. You have to tell them with radical clarity. You have to say you did not. You know what's, what's a mistake that's made. You know, you did not follow up with that customer on this, you did not show up on time. You were 10 minutes late to that customer. This is the problem with that that customer uses on a regular basis that doesn't just threaten that job, that threatens long term job, jobs in the future, that threatens referrals that we get from that person, that threatens all these other things, and you didn't show up on time. I'll be really clear about that. This is a problem where the other person might be going 10 minutes late is fine. It wasn't a big deal. The customer didn't say anything to me. It's not a big deal. So you have to give the feedback, and I'm saying like, 90% of the time, you're not telling your employees that they have a problem. So you have to have those conversations. And then the second thing is, do they own it or not? Once you give them the feedback, do they own it? If they own it again, if they own it, say, Man, I'm so sorry. I was 10 minutes late. My car broke down on the way. I ended up taking an Uber and then jogging the last two blocks to get there. Then it's like, dude, I'm not going to get on you for that. You owned it. You're leaning into it. What can we do in the future? Are you worried about your car? What do we need to do to get your car where it's more reliable? Those kind of questions, that's coaching questions, right? Let them own it. Don't take that away from them if they don't own it. Accountability. Well, that that happens again, there's going to be a problem like this is creating an issue. If you're 10 minutes late again, I'm going to write you up. If you're 10 minutes late again, I'm going to let you go like, like, it's going to be that kind of, that kind of management.
Collin Funkhouser 23:35
Do you feel like that first question isn't asked because the the manager, the leader is just oblivious, or is there some fear involved in on their end of what they're going to hear?
Don Harkey 23:47
I'm going to guess yes and yes the answer is yes and yes, especially in remote work, because I think a remote work sometimes we think if you only get feedback when something's wrong, it also means you're only giving feedback when something's wrong and you know about it, right? So, I mean, that's a piece. If you're there, then, like you have a problem, you got to go upstream to that. So how do you know what your people are doing? How do you know, and in your world, you know, you have to get customer feedback, right? You have to be able to you need to do the follow up surveys, the quick check ins of people like that kind of thing. And there's lots of ways you can do it, both formally and text wise and just and informally. I'm sure you do some of those things. So you have to look for the feedback. And like, in a like, we work a lot in the manufacturing space. The manufacturing space, we tell the, you know, the managers like, you have to leave your office, you have to walk the floor, you have to put your eyes on things. You have to see what's going on. You have to be looking for something. You can't wait for the problems to come to you to be able to say something. So one is, you have to be able to look for it to be able to see it. And then, two, yeah, it sucks. Sometimes going to somebody and telling them their baby's ugly, right? Like you're it is not a fun conversation to say like you were late again. That's not a that's not what you woke up thinking about when you dreamed about you. Know, being owning your own business. Nobody dreamed about I can't wait to see if, you know, 15 of my employees are on time every day. I can't wait to do that. Nobody signed up for that. Nobody wanted to do that. But that's why the positive comment comes in. The positive comments come in so handy is, if you're watching performance, you're giving positive feedback, then the negative feedback is not such a big deal. I was like to say you want to dig your well before you need it, right? That's an old saying, the idea like, if you're out in the desert and you become thirsty and you decide to dig a well, you ain't going to make it. You don't have enough water in you to be able to dig the well. If you show up to the desert and go, Whoa, I'm going to need water in the future, and you start digging, then you'll be able to dig your well, and then you're going to have water. Same thing is true with your employees. If you wait till your employees screw up before you start talking to them, then those conversations gonna be super hard because you're going to call them. It's going to be really awkward if you've been talking to your employees on a regular basis. Then when you've given them five compliments in the last week, or a couple of weeks, then when you call them and say, Hey, this happened. This didn't turn out very well. How did it go? What do you think? And then give them that opening to see whether they own it or not. That becomes a lot easier. That becomes a lot easier to give that feedback. Then one
Collin Funkhouser 26:09
thing that we had to implement was, because we're removed and different people going into people's homes and dealing with pets, was they would go and do their series of visits. Then I or another senior team member would come in and then follow quickly behind and do like a spot check to see how things are going. And this gave us a lot of insight, and gave us actually something to talk about of when we sit down to do our regular check ins, you know, we do. We we have a sequence through onboarding where they're kind of all stacked really close together through the initial time period, and then they get spaced just a little bit further out the longer they're with us, as we kind of build that and have everybody, but we were finding we just didn't have anything to talk to them about. So you talk about, you know, assess that performance. We were trying to figure out, do I do I wait for that client to give that bad review or to tell me that something's bad, but how do I tell them? Man, the bowls looked amazing and the dog was in the crate, just like you followed the direction specifically, we realized we had to do that, which takes extra time, extra effort, extra, you know, labor, to do. But if we didn't do that, I couldn't give any feedback at all to the people who were hiring. And it's really opened up a lot of conversations. And everybody on our team knows it. I'm not trying to secretly, like he sneak around and stuff. They know that this is what we do because otherwise and because we found people would were wanting more feedback from me. I'd sit down with them and say, hey, it's a quarterly review, I guess. Good, good, good, good, great. News is good
27:36
news, right? That's frustrating as an
Collin Funkhouser 27:38
employee, an employee was sitting here, someone actually said, but what am I? Can you give me more? And I found I had nothing to pull from, and it was really this, well, then they're just out there, kind of doing what they think best, and I can't speak to it, which led to a big disconnect between us and our employees.
Don Harkey 27:56
Yeah, I think that's a really, really important insight. And I only disagree with one thing that you said is that it takes more time to do that, because if you take a step back, and I've watched enough companies with that, I would guess when you started to do that, and you started to collect that feedback and started to give that feedback to other people, I would guess you had less employee problems. I would guess you had less turnover. I would guess you had all those things that you spend your time on as a business owner, that you're like, Oh, this is just stuff I have to deal with all the time. And you get used to it. You think it's normal, like, you think the number of times I work with a team, they're like, Yeah, we work with a manufacturer who had 300% turnover, 300 they had for every employee, they had three people went through that job every year. Wow. And they were just like, it's just like, it's just what it is in our industry. Yeah, and I'm like, I don't know. We work with a manufacturer that's got less than 10% turnover. What if your life was like that? What would you spend your time? How much extra time would you have? And then we talked about like, you got to do the check ins, you got to do the floor walks. Like, I don't have time to do that. I have I'm shoveling people in the front door while they're falling out the windows. And it's like, no, if you do it right the first time, you don't have to do it again. Yeah, and you spend so much, we spend too much of our time, as managers spend with the employees who are struggling, and not enough time with the employees who are being successful.
Collin Funkhouser 29:13
Well, talk about the that difference, though, of the autonomy that the employee needs versus my need for feedback, and how do I balance that, especially in this remote work of we don't want to go too far in the other direction, where now I'm they don't have any autonomy, and I'm double checking and I'm kind of looming over them the entire time.
Don Harkey 29:32
Yeah, that's a great question. So this is the art, this is the art of coaching, okay? And again, this is when somebody kind of this is when somebody owns something, so if they're not owning it, you just have to tell so if they're not, if they're not following basic rules, you just got to tell them, hey, you're not following these basic rules. But if somebody's trying to do really, really well, the way that you show autonomy within giving feedback is through questions instead of statements. So instead of going into somebody, let's say you're going after somebody's been. The house, and they're doing the things. And you go and you assess, and you see some problems with the house, but you but it's a really good employee. Otherwise, they usually do a good job and really trying to do well, and you feel like they're trying to do the right things, instead of showing up to them and saying, Hey, you didn't do this right? You didn't do this right. You didn't do this right. And now what I need you to do is do this differently, and you're going to do this differently. You're going to do this differently. What you do instead is you reflect to them what you see say, I went into the house and I saw this, this, this and this, which are, again, which are not in alignment with what our best practices. Tell me a little bit about that, and what could we do differently in the future? And then what you'll hear them, hopefully say is, Well, look, hey, I didn't have enough time, so I was leaving and I scheduled on. I had to leave really fast, and the owner came back early, or whatever. It's the kinds of problems that you have that are real problems. And then instead of saying, well, here's how you fix it, you do this, you do this, you do this, and you this. You ask additional questions. You say, Well, tell me how. How could you plan for that so it didn't happen next time? Is there something different you could do or that wouldn't happen. Well, if I put a bigger gap between my schedule, or I left a little bit more time, that would probably be good. Or if I scheduled this differently, or maybe if I started doing it before the end of the day when the owners came back, if I started picking up things a little bit earlier, I could, you know, whatever the things are, you let them start to solve their own problems. Your job is to reflect to them the score and let them figure out how they can win, right? I'm a big sports fan, you know, we talked a little bit. You're wearing that Texas shirt, and I'm still trying to get over it, you know, I'm a Husker fan. But, like, one of the biggest things that we see that, if you're, if you're playing football, just in the backyard, and you jump in and, you know, your team's down, you know, by two touchdowns, and the game's almost over. Like you know what you got to do, you know what you got to do, and you're gonna take ownership of that. If you don't know whether you're winning or losing or not, you don't know what you've got to do, you're just gonna keep doing what you've always done. So sometimes, as managers, we not only do we go in and we tell them the score, but we also go and tell them the score, tell them exactly what to do on every play, and we take away too much autonomy. Just tell them the score and then let them come up with some solutions. You know, as long as they're owning it, if they're not owning it, again, different, different situation there, that's an accountability loop. But if they're owning it, let them take ownership of it. Let them solve their own problems. We can manage people Collin to be smarter or dumber, like literally we but the way we manage people makes them smarter or dumber. There's a book about this called multipliers, and it talks about that your effective IQ at work is based on how you manage your people. If you answer all of your people's questions every time they come to you, you're training them to come to you with every question that they have. We had a manager of a team and said, hey, people are coming to me with dumb questions. And I said, What do you do when someone comes to you with a dumb question? And he looked at me like I just asked him another dumb question, sir, it. And I said, Well, what if you don't answer it? Yeah. And he looked at me, and he goes, that I did not know that was an option. And he said, what would that look like? And I said, Well, if somebody comes to you and says, Hey, you know the dog had an accident in the middle of the carpet, what do I do? You know, okay, I'm not a dog sitter. Collin, I'm not a dog sitter, but I have a pretty good idea what you should do. I have a pretty good idea. So then you would ask the person, well, okay, well, what do you think you should do? What are your thoughts on that? Before I answer the question, you tell me what you think you should do. That's the way that we give people autonomy. You get their minds thinking, you get them learning how to solve problems.
Collin Funkhouser 33:23
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Collin Funkhouser 33:53
and I can also see the benefit from that too. Don is if I ask them a question and they respond with, I don't know. There may be some things that I need to look back further upstream in my onboarding and my training and my continuing education, and did I actually set them up for success? For this? Are my expectations fully aligned with their job? Are they operating outside of what I originally told them that they were supposed to be doing, and now I actually get a lot more feedback into my internal processes.
Don Harkey 34:27
Yeah, and that, you know, when somebody says, I don't know, I always keep poking Yeah. Keep poking around. One question you can ask, and this sounds crazy, you're going to think this doesn't work, but it works really well. I somebody says, I don't know, a lot of times I'll say, Well, what if you did know? What would you do if you did know the answer? And that sounds really weird, but basically what you're kind of saying is you're saying it's okay for you to be wrong. I won't care for you to be wrong. Yeah, you like, like, give me some ideas. Or you could, or you could go different route. Out with that, and you could say, well, like, let's, let's think through it. Let's solve this problem. If nobody else was there, if I wasn't there, to come in and tell you what to do, what would you do if you own the company, if you were me when I first started this, what would you do? Like, let's talk through it. You don't have to. I'm not asking you for a specific answer, just, let's think through it. You're trying to teach people how to solve problems. Is that not even if they have the right answer, you don't even that's not even as important, because you can then ask smart questions to kind of guide them, you know. Well, I would probably just leave it there. I would cover it with a blanket and hope that they don't notice it when they get back. Okay, well, that's an interesting solution to that. Let's talk more about that. What happens when they remove that blanket later and they find it? You know? What's that going to look like?
Collin Funkhouser 35:41
Yeah, you can pointing them back to more of those company values. And the purpose of the job is, hey, this wouldn't align with our value of, you know, employees, or, you know, client satisfaction at all cost, or whatever that is to you. Now you can start building that and going, Hey, here's a decision tree. And because, you they are sometimes just completely and the other issue that we deal with is a lot of asynchronous communication, right? Especially in it's not like they can just run up to a front desk and say, I need help now it's, I'm going to message in Slack, or I'm going to text or, you know, I can do a phone call if something's bleeding on fire or both. And then we've kind of progressed a little bit too far down this. But how do we walk through that asynchronous communication aspect of send message, wait an undetermined amount of time and then get a response?
Don Harkey 36:30
Yeah, I like that a lot. So I mean, one thing is that's one of the reasons why you're investing in them, in terms of all these check ins and all these other things, is because they're on their own. They're on an island. They're gonna have to make some decisions, right? They can't get you right away all the time. Second thing I would think about in terms of communication. Communication is one of those key systems I laid out. There's five key systems, right? Communication is one of them. You have to design the communication really deliberately designing the communication means you have a regular communication cadence for everything that you do. How often does the whole team get together for discussions on training? How often does do I get together one on one with people? How often do people collaborate? What does that look like? Second thing is, what tools am I using to do that? How can I put that into a common place where people can see it? That's why I recommend tools like Slack or teams or things like that, because it's a visual thing, especially as you're remote, and you can see the work being done on that. And then the third thing, I think there needs to be a communication I'll call it a communication policy. I don't like the word policy, but you should have a standard for when you use what. So for example, because what happens? We have more tools than ever before, but communication is still rampantly a problem, right? We have email, we have text, we have phone calls, we've got, I mean, all the different things that are out there. So then what happens is, if I'm an employee and I've got a problem, and I put something in there, and I do it in a text message to you, another employee sends you an email, and another employee puts a chat on slack for you. Now you're looking, have to look at three different places to find all that stuff, and then that makes it even more asynchronous. You get more of a gap between different things. So what my recommendation is always is come up with, why? When do you use each channel? When do you use each mechanism for that? So like for people centric, if it's a text if it's a text message, that's, that's asking for an immediate response. That's, that's so we very seldom do we use text messages. So if my if my phone buzzes and attacks and it's a text from my team, it catches my attention. I watch I'm looking at it. If it's a if we never do internal email, never we have slack. We have teams. We got enough email from the outside world. We never do internal emails unless we're forwarding something from a client. That's the only time we do internal emails, the rest of stuff goes into teams, and we'll post in a channel. If it posts in a channel, it's basically saying, this is just information that's here. When you want to learn more about it, you can look at it. It's not urgent. If I put a chat on teams on there, then that's the kind of in between that means, like, I'd like you to look at that, like, on a daily basis and catch up with that. So it kind of sets an expectation for these channels have this cadence for you to look at. I think that's that's potentially really helpful in your world,
Collin Funkhouser 39:09
because it also simplifies the decision tree in the moment for the employee and for me too, of if I know exactly, and I have it trained, and it's in my policies, and we review it hopefully on a regular basis, of as a reminder, here's what we do. That way, when you're in the moment too, you're not having to second guess what goes where, and it can actually control a little bit of the chaos for the employee, because they know, and they also have built trust in that system too. I think when you talk about that regular cadence, it's I know when I text, I get an immediate response, and that actually builds a lot of that trust and that relationship between people, because they know, hey, I'm using the system. They're using the system. We can work really well together. Then you also have to train
Don Harkey 39:55
your team that you don't always need an immediate response, because their natural human desire is, I'm going to always. Text them, because I'm always going to get an immediate response. But imagine, like, if your folks were out and they were having trouble with like, your payment gateway or something like that, and saying, hey, it's a little bit wonky, and I don't like the system. That's not a textable thing. That's the thing, like in our world, you would put that in, you'd put that in our team's channel, and then in our regular cadence. So let's say your team gets together once a month to talk about what you can do better. What a perfect topic for that. So you know, on the third Tuesday, at eight o'clock in the morning, your whole team is going to get together, and three people have posted about the payment gateway. You're first of all, you know it's coming. You know that conversation is coming because you're seeing it come in there. You have something there, and now you have something you can address company wide that prevents that knocked out three individual phone call conversations for you that were not fires, that are stuff you can batch. You can batch that communication and make it really, really efficient, because then you can also show up to that and say, Hey, I've seen this coming up a lot, so I've done some research into it, and I'm prepared to answer the question, versus where, if you get the calls and you get the calls, and you get the calls, and you get the calls, and you get the calls, and you get the calls, and you're like, payment, get payment, payment, payment, payment gateway. It helps you to solve it helps you to put the right problems and prioritize
Collin Funkhouser 41:08
them the right way. It also helps the team come prepared too for questions. And I was, again, if you just show up on a random Monday morning and like, Hey, here's our team meeting. I haven't shared the agenda with you at all. I'm just going to be asking you a blank question or a random question, and I need you to quickly tell me this, because our meetings over in 30 minutes, and we got to get through this. Come on, go, go, go, go. Man, why doesn't anybody ever speak up on the meeting and have insight?
Don Harkey 41:33
Well, people forget like so we love using So, like teams, you said you use Slack. Is that right? Yeah. So, so within teams, there's a tool called planner, and the the other version of it outside of teams is called Trello, and it's a board that you can use that. And if you haven't used any of those tools, I just changed your life like those are, those are two. Those are both. They're technically called Kanban boards, but those are things where you can post and put in there, like agenda items for the next meeting. So you don't have to create an agenda every single time, right? Very few people. The reason agendas aren't created is because it's work to sit down and say, Okay, what do we want to talk about? And how do we put this together? If you have a place that's a place where people deposit like topics to talk about, then when you get in, you just run through the topics that people have posted, yeah, and say, okay, somebody posted talking about payment gateway. Let's talk about payment about payment gateway. Okay, now somebody else posted about security while you're there. Let's talk about security issues. Let's talk about that. So and now you have a living agenda that just goes through. And then you can take those old topics, by the way, you can save them, and you can move them over on the side, so that if you've talked about it, you can, kind of, you have a place to memorialize that. So three months later, we're going to talk about payment gateways again. Oh, remember, we talked about this before. Are we fixed the problem? Is there still a problem? Is it just that the training is not, you know, you can kind of go back to things that that that makes it really easy and efficient, especially for remote teams, on how to you know what to expect, you know what you're going to be talking about. And that problem you had on Tuesday that you forgot about on the Monday, following Monday. Now it recharges your memory. You put it in there on Monday, and then or put it on there on Tuesday, and then the following Monday comes around. You're sitting in the team meeting, and then that card pops up and says, Don you wanted to talk about this? Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I did want to talk about that. Here's the thing, yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 43:22
from a, from a leadership perspective, Don What do you think, or what skills do you think we as leaders need to have to effectively run, guide and implement these things that we're talking about with
Don Harkey 43:35
our teams? Yeah? You know, I think that. Let me say one thing. I'll say a second thing here. The first thing is Gallup, if you're if you're familiar with Gallup Strengths Finder. Gallup is a big organization. They are the ones that call you and do surveys and things like that. But they also did a study on different strengths that we have, and they identified, I think it's 34 different strengths that people can have, and you can rank those strengths, and you can look at those. They did a study to see what is the ideal trait, what's the ideal personality set of the most effective leader? What's the ideal personality set? And so there's there's traits in there that you would expect like good leaders to be. Like, Command is one of them. Strategic is another strength. Developer is another strength. And what they discovered is there is no correlation between your ability to lead and your personality, which means that anybody has the tools that they need to be to be a good leader. So anybody, if you're really quiet and you're reserved or you're really out, you know, you're really extroverted, or whatever, you can be an effective leader regardless of what your personality is, what they did find that absolutely relates is two things. One is you are aware and knowledgeable about your own strengths, and two, you are aware and knowledgeable about the strengths of your team, and you are good at activating those strengths. You know what you know, and you know you don't know, and you use your team wisely around you. I'm a big picture, visionary idea. A person. When Diana joined my team and became my co founder of people centric Diana is a detail oriented show me or it doesn't exist. Those are two very different strengths that go together. We recognize those two different roles that we play, and we have designed the company around those different roles so that we can plug people in to their strengths. That's that, I think, is if you're talking about zeroing into one most important strength for a leader, I think that's probably the number one thing is, do you know? Are you aware of your own strengths, and then are you partnering for performance with other people on your team to leverage their strengths?
Collin Funkhouser 45:37
What does it take to break that connection, that bias that we have of personality versus strengths and leader, because I see that all the time. He mentioned, oh, I'm I'm quiet, I'm reserved, I'm not a people person. I don't really like this stuff. So how do I like what does it take to actually break out of that connection?
Don Harkey 45:54
Yeah, you're, I mean, it's hard, right? So like, Look, if you own a business and you have other people in it, you're officially a people person. You're officially in the people business. Congratulations. No matter what it is, whatever the nature of the business. I mean, we work with accounting firms, legal firms. You know, people whose professions, who are just, they have their soulless right. They're they have the accountants and the lawyers. Have no souls on the inside. I'm just, I'm saying that as a joke. But some of them might, some of them might. Don't sue me. They'll come after me. I've got lots of friends. Who are accountants and attorneys so but they still you still, at the end of the day, if you want your business to be successful, if you want your organization to be successful, if you want your people to be successful, you have to think of these things. It's just like gravity. You have to man. You have to acknowledge the reality of the physics of the business world and the laws of physics still apply, which means you have to think about, how do you build a really good culture where people feel empowered and aligned, and empowered and aligned are two different things. Empowered means your people are really excited about their job, but aligned means they're not just excited about anything. They're excited about what's going to make the team more successful. And that's a balance, and the way you achieve that balance, that I found, which excites me as an engineer, is through systems now. So if you're not a people person, but you are a systems person, which most most people would probably put themselves in one of those two categories, or both, but usually not neither. Most people don't say, I hate people and I hate systems. Most people don't do that. Most people like could at least latch onto one of those. If you're not a people person, be a systems person, and just install systems that really activate people, install those check ins, install those that onboarding, install that hiring process, install that communication cadence. Those are things that will activate your people. And even if you're not a people person, you can become one.
Collin Funkhouser 47:37
Yeah, well, this may be kind of tangentially or very closely related to that. Actually, of you know, if somebody's listening to this, and they're they're they're looking at their business, they're looking at their culture, and they're going, I've lost connection with my team, and I actually, I don't know. I mean, you have a culture, whether you realize it or not, if maybe they're looking at it and realizing, oh, I want a different culture, right? Where's, where's the first place we should start?
Don Harkey 48:03
Yeah, yeah, it that's, that's, and that's a horrible moment sometimes, and it's also really opportunistic moment, like it's a moment where you can say, I don't like what's happened. We I work with, I'm gonna be a little bit vague, but we work with a practice that the owner called me and he said, I have some terrible employees, and I'm sick of it, and I just want to get out. I want to get out of the business. And I said, How many terrible employees do you have? And he said, I've got and he was like, how many of your employees are terrible? I think is what I said. And he said, I have 23 terrible employees. I wasn't expecting to give me a number. And I said, Well, how many people work for you? And he says, I have 23 people that work for 23 people that work for me. And I said, you have 23 people that work for you, and all of them are terrible. And he said, Yeah, they are. They're all terrible. And he goes, I have to tell them everything. I've sell them everything. And I said, Okay. I said, You've been hiring people for a while. And he said, Yeah. And I said, when you hire people, you know, it's a little bit like baseball, sometimes you get the right person, sometimes you get the wrong person. He said, Yeah, that's true. I said, if you were going to try to hire terrible employees, if just 100% of the time, wouldn't you accidentally hire a good one? Now, every once in, wouldn't good one accidentally sneak in? And he says, Yeah, I suppose that's right. He said, So what's your point? And I said, my point is, what do you think is happening? You have 23 terrible people. Or I'm just talking to one really bad manager right now. That's a moment I saw your face response to that. This is the good thing about being a consultant. You can fire me and I'll go to the next company, right like, fire me. I'll go to the I can move on. But it's really true. And he took a step back and he said, Okay, how do I start this transformation? What do I do? So he started by, we went and did a listening tour. You have to start by listening. You start by saying, What's it like here? So you kind of take your medicine a little bit. What are the things? What are, what are things that are going well? What are things that are not going well? And then we started to engage people. People to say, what can we make better? What can you do to help us make this better? And we'd have a few people would jump in and fix a little process here and a little process there, and then they started celebrating the wins, and we started coaching him to think a little bit differently about how he worked with his team. I mean, it takes a lot of work. There's a lot of lot of habits we're in that to create 23 bad employees over time, so you have to be changing yourself. You have to change your systems. It's a transformation, just like, exactly like if you're trying to get healthier and you start going to a gym, right? It's not something you just do. You don't just hang a poster up with an eagle flying over a mountain, saying Eagles fly and turkeys die. You should care to work here and changes. That doesn't work. You have to change the habits, and then you have to win back over your team. I'll say, like it was about six months after working with that team, he came to me and he said, You know, I told you I wanted to get out of the business. He goes, I don't want to get out of it anymore. He's like, I'm starting to find real joy in this. So I think one of the messages I have is, one is it takes a lot of work, but the good news is, if you're struggling with all of your people, but you're probably not loving your job very much. If your people are thriving underneath you, you might be surprised. You thought you were building just a company that was going to make you really good money, but you might be surprised that you're actually building something even better than that. You're building a job where you get to go and you get to develop people, and you get to help people on a day to day basis, both your customers and the people that work for you, and there's a lot of reward to that. So you have to know, why are you want to Why do you want to make that transformation? Because it's not going to be easy. It's going to require a lot of change in habits. It's going to require some change in relationships. You might have to fire some people. You might have some toxic people that are working on the inside of your business, that are trying to destroy it from the inside, you may have to have some difficult conversations with them, and you may have to move on from some people, but those changes. Once you do those, you turn around and you'll say, This business has been a blessing for me, not as not a curse, which I think too many but this is what I'm passionate about. I think too many business owners are have built a successful business that's successful in the PNLs and is miserable for them to run on a day to day basis, and that's too bad, because if you love running your business, your business will actually make more money, and you can love coming to work every day.
Collin Funkhouser 52:09
Don I really want to thank you for coming on the show today and helping encourage us to make these changes, connect with our teams and that it's is possible and it is fruitful and is beneficial to not just them, our clients, but also to us, so we can learn to fall in love with our business again, a little bit more every single day. I know that this is a massive topic, and there's so many more facets that are involved in this. If people want to get connected, listen to your podcast and learn more about what you all do, how best can they
Don Harkey 52:39
do that? Yeah. Collin, appreciate you mentioning that. So if you like podcasts, which I bet you do, because you're on one right now, just saying, right wherever you get this podcast, you can also probably get our podcast. It's called the people centric podcast. There's over, I think we just recorded our 270th episode of that. There's lots of topics like this, and we get into details on how to communicate, strategic, strategy, leadership, all those different topics. So check it out, and it's very conversational. It's a lot like yours here, Collin, so I think people will really enjoy that. Check that out and and then also, you can find us on people centric.com go check us out our website. And if anybody needs help or coaching or consulting or working with services or anything like that, we'd love to chat with you and talk. We never, we never charge by the hour. So you never if you call us and we talk and we can help you figure out what maybe the next steps are and go
Collin Funkhouser 53:29
from there. Awesome. Well, Don I will have those links in the show notes and on our website so people can get connected and click through and follow along with you guys doing it's I love, do love your podcast, and your episodes are always very helpful and very informative, so I will make sure that's included as well. Don, this has been absolutely fantastic and wonderful. I really appreciate your time today and coming on the show. Thank you. I think
Don Harkey 53:48
it's really cool, Collin, that you're doing this, because I think that as you build these businesses, a lot of times, especially in your industry, people feel like they're by themselves. So what you're doing here is you're proving that you can be remote and separate from each other and still build a community. You're building that community, so kudos
Collin Funkhouser 54:03
to you for what you're doing. It turns out you can have a company that serves people and the company. Well, all it takes is focusing on people, be about the people, both the people that we serve and those who are in our company, who are on our teams. We brought them in for a reason. We need their help for a reason. Do they see that? Do they know that? Do they feel that? Or are they just another cog in the machine turning and turning and turning? It doesn't take much for people to feel connected. And here's the thing, when you build that team, when you bring those people on, that becomes part of your responsibility as the business owner, as the employer, that's what it requires, and it's one of the most satisfying and gratifying things we get. To do in our business. As a reminder, this episode is eligible for one CEU for both naps and psi. Check out the link in the show notes and get that today, we want to thank today's sponsors tying to pet and our friends at Pet centers international for making this show possible. And we really want to thank you so much for listening. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and we'll be back again soon. Foreign.
