The Art of Leadership: Build Trust Overnight with Jeff Hancher

We have the ability as leaders not to just drive business results, but literally to change the trajectory, not of just someone's life, but maybe a generation. Because when we do, oh my gosh, that's when people start naming their kids after you kind of stuff. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy Chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text notes, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to Elevate and win.com, 4-slash podcast to get your copy. Now, let's go back into the interview. All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. For today, I got Jeff Hancher with me. He is an expert in sales business. He's based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, creator of the firm feedback, president of Jeff Hancher Enterprises. Jeff is a US Army veteran, best-selling author, and nationally recognized keynote speaker who helps leaders in organizations unlock elite performance. As the creator of firm feedback methodology, he guides executives and teams to communicate with clarity, embrace bold leadership, and build high-performing feedback-driven cultures. Through workshops, masterminds, and transformational keynotes, Jeff inspires actionable change, helping leaders elevate their team-scale performance, and leave a lasting impact on their organizations and communities. Jeff, it's a honor to have you on my man. Man, so good to be here. I've had a chance to watch your journey a little bit, leading up to this show. And I know a few of your passions and one of those is developing people. So we share that, and I hope I can make some rich deposits for your listeners. I appreciate that. Let's just start out with a little bit. Where you found your passion in the past, bring us up to today, and what you're excited about in the future. Yeah, I mean, my passion today is equipping leaders. That's what I intend to spend the rest of my life doing. Two things that have transformed who I've become is my faith and great leaders. It wasn't always that way. I grew up very humble, grew up in poverty, two pairs that never worked today in my life. Made a lot of bad decisions when I got freedom as a teenager. Brushes with the law, alcohol abuse. I went to the military, really running from something, not to something. And I met some amazing leaders in the military that helped me grow up. And then in a corporate job that I thought would be seasonal, ends up being a 25 year career in a Fortune 500 space and had some nice success there. I'd love to tell you it's because it's awesome, but the reality is I landed around some fantastic leaders. It pulled potential out of me that I didn't even know that I had. And now I'm on a mission to equip other leaders to do the same for others. I love it. What is, you know, that I think the biggest problem with a lot of the listeners and myself and just the home service industry, the home improvement industry is a lot of times it takes a while to build leaders. And this industry's growing so fast, we kind of got to go outside of the box for leaders. And how long, you know, I got a question just basically, how long does it take to develop leadership skills? And what's the hardest thing about doing so? Well, good news, bad news. The bad news is we never stop, right? It's a never ending pursuit. You know, the path of success, the finish line is always moving, right? Leadership impact is a never ending pursuit. I do believe that there are skills, but I don't think leaders are born. I really don't. It's often debated. I do believe they're developed, meaning leadership can be learned. Here's what we can't teach. We can't teach a passion for leadership. Often we see the mistake inside of organizations that the best individual contributors get promoted into leadership or the high tenured person that is just outlasted everybody gets promoted into leadership. What we want to do is we want to give people what I call leading contributions, people that express desires to lead. Let's find out if they can truly influence people because influence doesn't come with title, right? It comes with influence. It comes with expert authority and it comes with reverent authority. And those two things don't need a title. So I would tell you everybody's on a different scale as far as how they learn. So the curve can be bent, but there's no better time to start, especially, if you're a business leader, you're an owner, a founder. The best time to start developing leaders, it's right now, succession planning. It has to start right now. You could have the best products, the best services, the best systems, the best CRMs, the best SCL in the world. But if you are a void of great leadership, you will never reach your potential. And so we got to start developing people now. And what does that first step look like? The first step in development, that has to start with the lie, no pun, not to be cliche on that subject, but when people come to you and they tell you, in a performance review or development plan, they're telling you their long term, short term goals, and they say I want to be a leader. The question has to be why. Why is it that you want to lead? Certainly it comes with benefits, maybe a better parking space, maybe a better office. Certainly comes with more pay. But we got to get to the root of the why, and we got to find out where their strengths and opportunities are, and we need to start building those. I believe the foundation of leadership, where we have to begin, is we have to teach leaders how to give feedback that's effective. Giving feedback alone is not going to help anybody. Giving feedback that's effective, meaning you can give somebody a tough conversation, and they thank you for it. That is in art form. And I will tell you this, everybody listening, tell me yourself and me. We are a product of either the feedback that we've been given, or the feedback that's been missing from our lives. And so I think at the root of every great leader is the ability to earn the right to have the tough conversations. I think this is a good starting point for leaders. Can we dive into that? I'm really interested in this because tomorrow morning, I'm going to have a very tough conversation. So this, and it's not a common for me to have these fierce tough conversations, but I go about things just a little context, is I want to be liked. I think it's important for the founder to be liked, and I want to be, I've always wanted to be the good guy. I want to be very careful that if someone quits or potentially gets terminated, they say, hey, dude, that guy at St. Em behind on my life got better because of him, but also be able to give feedback because I care. Yeah. Yeah. I want to be liked by my people, I should say. I don't need to be liked by every social media clone on their living in their mom's basement, but I do want to be liked by the people I work with. Yeah, the follow up to that, and you should want to be liked, right? We don't have to lead with a big stick to get results alone. But if I were to ask you, would you, if you had to pick one, would you rather be liked or respected, you're probably going to tell me respected, right? Yeah. 100%. And so what we know is, is the deliters that can transcend being liked, and I'm paraphrasing, right? Because I know you want to be respected and I'm certain that you are. But the leaders that land on just being liked, they may also land on the side of passive. And the passive leader that might be listening, they know who they are, because they're very liked, exit interviews tell us that it wasn't you, it was everything but you, you're the best leader I've ever had, but your turnover is still at 60%. This is the leader that's sheet cake for every birthday, handwritten notes, they're doing all the right things, but they lack a level of respect. On the other spectrum of that is the aggressive leader. They carry a big stick and they can drive a balance sheet like you've never seen, but they're driving compliance, they're not driving engagement. In the middle of this, is not a boss that people report to, but it's a leader that people don't want to let down. And if I were to ask you, Tommy, and I would ask your listeners, to tell me your Mount Rush more of leaders, these are four people in your life that you would say, if it wasn't for this leader, I wouldn't be who I am today. This could be a teacher, could be a pastor, it could be a boss, it could be a coach, a family member, and you think of these four people, and they're pretty easy to think about, because without them you wouldn't be who you are. If I were to, you have these four people in your mind, Tommy, and I would ask you this, were those four people tough on you? Most of the time, I think they knew when to be tough and when to be, they have a good ability to communicate in a way that there's toughness works and toughness doesn't always work, depending on the situation. Yeah, but they probably earned a right to be tough. And I would also say, if I were to ask you a follow-up question, did they care deeply about you? The answer is usually yes. They were tough on me and they cared deeply. So you go into these tough conversations with this confidence that I've earned the right to tell them the toughest thing. And if we have set the table ahead of a tough conversation, that conversation can end with somebody thanking us. So let us, let's set the table real quick. I love this stuff. Yeah, here would be an example, I'll give an analogy example, and then we'll dive into what like, really what happens in leadership conversations. But let's create an analogy that everybody listening will remember, probably for the rest of their life. Tommy and I, we're business partners, we're collaborating on an event, we're gonna go to Nashville for a trade show, and we got the marketing set up, we got the display set up, we have our elevator pitches down, we even know how we're gonna address. And the last thing I say to Tommy in our last meeting before Nashville is, Tommy, if we're walking into this show, and anything is off, you got link on your shirt, or maybe your rest things from coffee in the morning. Would you want me to let you know? Yeah, absolutely. You would wanna know. All right, well listen, I know why you wanna know, because I know how important first impressions are, and I know how important our mission is to you, and how you serve people. So I'm committed to doing that for you. Now fast forward two weeks, Tommy and I are walking into the trade show. Tommy said, and by the way, Tommy's breath is minty fresh, if you've ever been around it, but we're walking into this trade show, and I smell it, and I say, hey Tommy, based off of our conversation a couple weeks ago, I wanted to let you know that your breath isn't what it needs to be, and I pull a mint out of my pocket and I hand it to you. And you take the mint, the first words that you probably replied to me is what? Thank you. Thank you. Now check this out. On that, the local convenience store, I'm grabbing a sandwich. The guy behind me in line, he's kinda close to me, and I can smell his bad breath. And so I turn around to the guy behind me in line to convenience, so that I've never met before, and I say, sir, your breath stinks. I might get punched. Yeah. I might get curled. Now here's the great, here's the amazing dynamic here. The data's the same. It's exactly the same. It's the same exact problem. It's the same exact data. In one situation, I've earned the right to have a tough conversation and it's responded with, thank you. In another situation, I give the data, and by the way, I'm right, and here's what we know about leadership. The goal is not to be right. It's to be effective. We can't tell somebody negative feedback, hard feedback, tough feedback, and expect just doing that is gonna solve the problem. We have to earn the right. How do we do that? It's spelled T-I-M-E. We gotta make deposits. We need to understand why success is important to them. We have to be able to build companies where everybody can win, not just leadership. And we can do this by ensuring that we're making healthy leadership deposits. This is how we become leaders, that people don't wanna let down versus bosses that people reported. Earn the right. That's a very profound thing. You've gotta put in the time. And when I conduct a one-on-one, and I don't have a lot of direct reports, it's really just the C-suite, is it's pretty informal. I had my CFO and COL, great individuals at the house last night. The one thing I feel like more than anything is, you gotta be able to tell me anything good or bad and how are things going. And we talked about a lot of issues. The issues are so small to compare to when I started with, with I felt like I'm not gonna make payroll. But, you know, we work through them and they're still pretty important to the company. And what's great about it is we work through these things. And I'm very entrepreneurial. I love marketing. Not your typical CEO throwing out stuff, but there's a lot of projects that I put out there and let my project team kind of help me. They ruthlessly prioritize and figure out how much is the juice worth the squeeze, how involvement, what's the output gonna be? And luckily I got the right team around me. I think Jeff Bezos needed the right team around him. I think when you're a hunter, you need farmers around you. Because literally there's a lot of ideas that need to be prioritized. People say ADHD or Asperger's or possibly, they can't read correctly. And, you know, leadership, I think you're right. And it's all about communication. I really believe that. No question about it. And that, you know, when we were talking about setting the table, you know, there's a framework to do this effectively and it starts with expectations. You know, to earn the right to give somebody feedback, there has to be expectations. Look no further than a speed limit sign, right? We've all seen them. A speed limit sign in its core is an expectation. We don't even have to agree with it. It would be helpful if we understood it. But guess here, it's the other thing about speed limit signs, they change. You know, when you were on your way into the studio today, you saw multiple different ones. It's not because we were being set up to fail. It's because the conditions changed. But here's the thing, if you're going to set up speed limit sign, you better be prepared to give some tickets. Because without tickets, the speed limit signs mean nothing. So we have to set expectations. And when we do, they have to be reasonable. They have to be fair. Our teams have to be adequately trained to meet or exceed those expectations. And maybe the most important thing about expectations is, people need to understand why achieving them is good for them. Not just the company, not just the balance sheet, but it's good for them. When we set clear expectations that are reasonable, and reasonable doesn't mean that you ask somebody to run a four-minute mile. That might be what you need. That might be what the business needs. But you might be asking somebody to run a four-minute mile that has titanium knees and hips, and they show up to the starting line and steel toe boots and car hearts. That's not an ideal way to run, right? So we have to get these expectations that are reasonable, and we're sharing and creating these with our teams. Once those expectations are set, then we got to move to phase two, which is feedback. Feedback should come on at cadence. We talked about time earlier. I'm a firm believer that every employee in every company deserves a one-on-one debrief with their boss on a cadence. And I often get from the companies, when I get called into companies, oftentimes they're hemorrhaging and need turnickets. And I'm always asking about this, and the number one response when they're not doing it is, we don't have time for that. Well, then you need more leaders, and you need to make the investment. Because at the heart of every great company and every great culture is a great leader that's multiplying themselves in other people. Feedback one-on-one, assessing expectations, assessing smart goals, assessing individual development plans. And certainly we know people are gonna go out of bounds. Before accountability comes a tough conversation, you're having one tomorrow. I don't know if that's gonna lead to discipline or accountability, but we have to have tough conversations. As a matter of fact, if you're a leader that's listening and you're not having them frequently enough, go find them. Because if the hand of a tough conversation is somebody's life that's gonna be transformed if it's done the right way. Oh, I love that word transformation. I got a lot of notes already. I really enjoy these things because, I mean, I devour books and I've read a lot of books on leadership and fierce conversations and understanding these things. But this is just, you ever read the same books three times? It took something else out of it. Oh yes, all the time. It's like all the time. It's the best thing in the world. I do think there's a lot of people I meet that they say they ask very, they're easy questions for me. Like who do you hire first? And what's the biggest thing you learned over the last decade? And how do you delegate better? And do you need manuals? How important are manuals? And I don't like the word manual by the way. I like it to be a success guide. Like, hey, this is our tattoo policy. Here's what happens if your car breaks down, flat tire, whatever. If you're running late to a job, are we allowed to have long beards? Do we have to have still-told boots? What happens if there's all kinds of stuff? What happens if your tools get stolen? There's, it's a success guide of how to win. And you know, that's something I learned a long time ago. But what other, there's so many things here. I just so, how many would you say, because I always say no one should have more than five or six direct reports. Jesus had 12 and he's God. But how many is the right amount? Because there's higher level, like some of my guys can manage, I hate to say this, but they got 40 guys underneath them. What's realistic? I think you gotta look at capacity. What is the leader's impact? What is their effectiveness? Certainly we gotta look at, keep performance indicators. We gotta look at things like turnover, we gotta look at things like results, tenure, all of this stuff. It's never a level playing field. I'm not a fan of creating a policy around direct reports to leadership. I'm not a fan of that at all, because there are leaders that have bigger capacity. And not only do they want more, they crave more, and they have an ability to do it. And when you can give them more, especially at the mid-range of leadership, you're building succession planning for executive leadership. Because what we know at executive leadership, you may not have as many direct reports, but you're being pulled a lot of different ways. This is a great benchmark to find out, can they handle the heat at the next level up? So I'm not a fan of a five-to-one ratio, a two-to-one ratio, a 10-to-one ratio. I like to customize a leadership approach within. Now look, it's a moving target. There's no question about it. But I think when you do that, what you're doing is you're bending and stretching, but you're not breaking. What I wouldn't say is create a 20-to-one ratio and set somebody up to fail. That's not healthy either. But there's some people that can create systems processes. You may have leaders that get creative and they create a captain role on their team. And they're giving people on their team leadership contributions so that it's what? It's reducing their effort and increasing their capacity while developing people on their team. That's the leader that you want to fuel. And so I would look at it more on impact than I would a number or a formula. Yeah, that's really smart. I think everybody's craving leadership development and it's not easy to come by. And it's not, I wouldn't say, you know what's crazy is a lot of people want the leadership role because it does come with a nicer desk and then they get into the role, especially coming from sales. Because sales, I've noticed some of the top sales people, what's the biggest mistake you take your top sales guy and say, now you're the trainer, you're the leader, you're gonna run this department. And they don't even like talking to anybody but clients. They're like, I don't want to do a one on one. And they tend to be almost abusive. Like this guy just doesn't get it. He doesn't want it as bad as everyone else wants it. And I think that's more of, you probably didn't really figure out what they want and what's like you said figure out their why and use those things. So when is that start? No. Go ahead. I think that's a good point to touch on specifically. You run the bell for me when you talked about sales going into leadership, is I spent more than half of my corporate career on the sales side. I carried the bag and then I was the senior sales leader. I would tell you, it's a very hard transition from an elite individual contributor in sales to transition over to leadership. The odds of downshifting in pay go up considerably. Because if they don't know how to reproduce themselves and others, they're earning potentials going to go down. I would tell anybody listening that is looking for succession planning and sales leadership. If you have a peak performer that is like telling you they are hungry for sales, this is the question you ask them in that developmental session. You ask them what is more important to them? Making money or building wealth. Most times they're going to say building wealth. The follow up question then is, do you have a good understanding of how wealth is built? Tell me what your understanding of that is. We want to get them to the root of, it takes time. It's a marathon. It's not a sprint. I have to develop skill all of these things. Because Ken Blanchard told us about this disillusioned learner. And when you go from high-peaking individual contributor into leadership with a pay cut and all the headaches, you get a disillusioned learner quick. And if they turn over, you're out a leader and a peak performer. I would tell you, go to your above average performers and really pour into that crowd. But if you're going to promote a peak performer, you got to lay the groundwork heavy on that. Because those tough conversations are coming, and you will have to push them through disillusionment. What is a healthy amount? And here's something that I've learned that I think is probably one of the best leadership skills I've learned. It's rather than starting the conversation, Tommy, take a seat, we're going to have a conversation. I think they should report to me what they're working on, what their KPIs on, what went well this week, what didn't go well this week. They should learn the skills to be a leader right then and there. And first of all, it should start out with what I've always wanted. And I've got this product now in my hands that we built custom that I get. Because there's a thousand people, I want to know your wife's name. And it's easy if you got a group of 12 guys. It's harder when you're managing a big, big company. And you want to just know the Jack Welch tens of thousands of people. But you want to have some small talk, catch up on your last meeting, have the notes, maybe you even have an EA in there. And I don't know if that's right or not, but if you're not created taking notes and keeping organization, which I'm not good at. And then say, where do you think we need to go? I mean, what are your thoughts? We know here's the average. We know what we said, what our goals are. And we know what you told me, you're saving up for a house. You want to go on this great vacation. What are your thoughts on that of letting them lead the beginning after you do the small talk? I, if you've identified somebody that you're grooming for leadership, the first step is equip, the second step is empower. And empower is where we need to go. And empower is telling them the end goal and releasing them. Now, what we know is they're going to fall off the bike. They're going to get scraped up all of these things. That's where the learning comes. But that's also where the testing comes. So this concept that you're talking about of release them, 100%. But releasing without empowerment is criminal, right? So we empower and we go into coach mode with people that we're developing. You know, there's good, better best ways to go through succession planning. You know, whether you're building a captain's club or whatever, but we want to define what it takes to get into this grooming process, what it takes to stay there and what's expected of you and what you can expect from me. But part of that expectation has to be, you're going to be giving assignments with very little direction. I'm going to give you clear outputs that we need and I'm going to release you to do it. Now, what we, as senior leaders, have to be willing to navigate is failure. Yeah, so be careful what you assign, right? 100% right. I mean, I love it. This is a weird thought process. What about three years ago, I started really embracing failure because if you got the right leader, they learn from it. And instead of them coming to you, you become the bottleneck and say, dude, I've already done that. They come to me every single time you've got that type of question. Will you just ruin and sabotage them? Because now it's not okay for them to fail. So, hey, fail is much as possible. I like small failures. If you got a really big decision, like depending if it's a $100,000 decision, you might want to just run it by me. But otherwise, you're more than capable of making that decision. We're going to lose some, but we're going to fail quickly and we're going to learn from it. Well said, well said. You know, leaders that think delegation is to, is the purpose of delegation is to lighten their load, are missing it. The purpose of delegation, although that's a fact, that's a benefit. The primary heart behind delegation should always be empowerment. I'm going to delegate so that they can become better, not to push work off my desk. Now that's a benefit because what we know is, when you become a level four leader, you become a reproducer. You find me reproducers in an organization. Guess what? They're well on their way to wealth. Because not everybody is a reproducer. But leaders that have this mindset that I delegate to reproduce. I don't delegate to for capacity. We know that's an output and it's a byproduct of great delegation, but my heart in delegation is empowerment and equipping. So when, what is the good cadence? And I know this probably isn't this grandfather rule across the board. But when you're thinking about one on one's, because there's group meetings and I think it's healthy to be as optimistic as possible in a group. Like there's no scolding, there's no putting down people, there's no calling people out. I have done this in the past and it works for some people is just, I mean, a long time ago I had a whiteboard, I draw it on a happy face. And I remember, because the guy reminded me, I said, the guys that were losers this week come up here with the red marker, the guys that won big this week and go draw your numbers out. And this is probably 2015. And, but when is the right cadence? Yeah, I think it's important not to confuse what a connection or a debrief is. You know, because I will go into companies and they'll tell me, yeah, I mean with my people all the time, we'll tell me what that means. Is that mean you're passing them in a hallway or you showed up to the job site to check in? My definition of a debrief is it's dedicated time and it's me and you, it's private. And depending on your direct report load will really depend on how often that happens. If you're asking me what I think is ideal, I think it's weekly. Even if it's 30 minutes, I love it. Now, there will be people listening that say, Jeff, I got 40 direct reports. If you take 40 times 30 minutes, like I have nothing left. 20 hours. Okay. And then it's time between that and you lose more. But it's gotta be something, even if it is once a month for 30 minutes. Now, if you can't do that, then I would say you need more capacity. You probably need more leaders. But let's talk about what happens in these debriefs. I mean, this is where it happens. This is where we earn the right to have the tough conversation. This is where we're asking profound leadership questions. Like why is success important to you? Here's a profound leadership question. How's your family? You know, what we know is Simon Sinek taught us that people will work for their what, but they'll die for their why. So there has to be leadership engagement questions, but we don't stop there. We're pulling out the smart goals. We're pulling out the development plans. We're checking in. How are you doing on those things? And by the way, we're gonna talk about business. How is the job over at the Jones family? What was their feedback? How are you gonna get better at that? Hey, look, did you hit your Toast Masters class? One of the things you talked about was you need to be more comfortable talking in front of the team. How was the Toast Masters class? What did you learn? Hey, how about this question? What do you need from me? Here comes the tough feedback too. Look, you said you were gonna do this assignment by this date and this wasn't a skill issue. This was an effort issue. Skill versus will. Yeah. You've got to put in the time, right? And so when you put in time, your Mount Rushmore, Tommy, everybody that was listening and they picked their Mount Rushmore, one thing everybody on Mount Rushmore of ours had was they invested in us. And literally, they could almost say anything to us. And we wouldn't be offended. We would be sad that we let them down. I remember being in the back of a police car once because I made a really bad decision as a 19 year old. And the only thing I could think about in the back of that car wasn't going to jail, wasn't to fines. It was that my grandma Clark was gonna find out. And I knew it was gonna break her soul. And that's the only thing that I could think about was she's gonna be so let down. How could I put that above the problems that I was about the face? Because of everything that this lady poured into my life. You know, we have the ability as leaders, not to just drive business results, but literally to change the trajectory, not of just someone's life, but maybe a generation. That's my story, Tommy. That is my story. To go literally from being a kid that one of my chores was to cut 10 squares out of coffee cans and pop her victim to the floor of a car to a senior level leader in a Fortune 500 company. How does that happen? How did I know how to tie a tie? I didn't know what a caller stay was. I didn't know how to communicate. I didn't know how to trow close. I didn't know what fuel felt found was. I didn't know any of this stuff. But there were leaders that spent time, leaders like Sean Coin that would be in the field and observe me, a guy like Sean Coin that would take me into a bathroom and teach me how to tie a winds or not. That wasn't in his job description. He taught me how to match shoes and belts. I didn't know that was a theme. This is the high calling of leadership. And when we can develop a rapport with somebody that we can set those expectations, now here comes the feedback, which is time. Guess what comes next in this framework? It's accountability. Because here's what we can't teach in leadership. We can't teach somebody else's willingness. We can't. There's a standard at your company, Tommy. There's a standard in my company too. Not everybody's willing. I'm going to give you the success manual. I'm going to give you my time. I'm going to set clear expectations. I'm going to give you feedback. But if you're not willing, I can't create willingness. So I am going to hold you accountable. And our Mount Rushmore, they held us accountable. And we chose to pivot and improve. And those little pivots and little improvements and tough conversations, they started to transform who we would become. Now we have an opportunity to give that back to other people. If we can get a lift of even 5% in our middle management doing this, look, not only is it transformation in lives, but I'm going to tell you what, I don't know of a better business strategy that there is than that. Yeah, well, these skills are, they translate much deeper than just business. They translate to be in a better parent. They translate to be in a better son or daughter. They translate to having better relationships with your significant other. Just changing the, you're right. It changes the world. Man, think about that. Think about this idea that we could be a leader that not only drove business results, but we could create better humans and communities through the businesses that we're building. We know this is possible and this is culture, right? And by the way, guess what? You know what? We have employees that are going through some stuff. There are people listening right now that have a son or daughter that's fighting substance abuse. There's somebody listening right now that somebody they care deeply about has been given just days to live, that they gotta put their mom in a home for dementia. This is the workforce we're leading. These are the challenges that are coming. And guess what happens when some of these things start to happen sometimes, performance starts to dip. That's what happened to me. My why was I didn't want my mom to have to cut pills and have any more to get to another copay. I worked my tail off in sales. By the way, I sucked at it. But the great thing about sales is you can outwork your sock, right? And so I just went to work and hear my rookie year. I'm about to make presidents club. And I'm having meetings with my parents and showing them new neighborhoods and where we're gonna move and my pregnant wife and things are gonna be great. And I get the call and you gotta get to the hospital, Jeff. Mom's not good. And I get there. I'd been to that hospital so many times. And today was different. That day it was different. That day mom dies in my hands. And all of a sudden that Honda Accord SC didn't mean so much to me. You know that trophy that I was trying to go after. I lost all motivation. I didn't care about the nicer things. I didn't care about the Joseph A. Bank's booth that I just bought. I lost all motivation and that shone that I referenced to you. There was a time in my grief that he pulled me into the office and told me enough's enough. I'm not gonna let you go on like this. And if you decide to go on like this, you can't be on my team. And I hope you don't blow this opportunity because you got more potential than anybody and maybe I've ever let. The old Jeff would have probably gave him deuces and walked out. How dare you? The grave dirt still fresh. How you gonna treat me like this? But Shawn taught me how to tie a tie. Shawn taught me how to dress like a professional. Shawn taught me how to overcome objections and how to make outbound prospecting calls. He knew my son's name. He knew my backstory. He knew why success meant something. And I knew I needed that guy in my life. And so I came back the next day and I committed to him that I was gonna be the person that he was developing and I wasn't gonna let him down. And I hit my first president's club. And I hit nine more and I got promoted 10 times. And I'm building a fantastic company and I have a life that nobody would have ever dreamed that I would have had came from where I came from. Why do I say that? Because I'm amazing? No. Because if Shawn wouldn't have stepped in my life in that moment, I might not be who I am today. I've driven a lot of great business results over the years but I can tell you this, the impact a guy like that has, it literally has changed my life and there's many more like it. And it comes at the hand of making those deposits and earning the right to have those tough conversations because when we do, oh my gosh, that's when people start naming their kids after you kind of stuff. That's when people that left your company for a better opportunity 10 years later still call you and reference you as boss. Like that's the good stuff and that's what I'm on a mission to hopefully help people do. Super, man. This is a great story. I mean, just thinking about the leaders in your life and you know what it is true that you think about I don't love the word leader. And I've said this to a lot of people, I'm your leader. I say, listen, I just want to be your coach because every coach that I've ever had in my life, when I was a kid, they'd make sure I got a dinner and they made sure I was getting my grades. I was allowed to get on the field and I feel like they had my back. They cared about me just as much if not more outside of the game than they did in the game. And I think that's what you're talking about. Yeah, and you know the tragedy in this, Tommy? I have, there's a fragment of the world that calls my teaching fluffy and soft. But I guarantee you, if you call anybody that has ever been under my leadership, those are not words they're going to use. Because I have strong boundaries. If you were to pull my kids onto this show and say, is your data push over, I'm pretty sure what they're going to tell you. Because I love well. And again, I don't want to make this about me, but here's what I know, when you love well, you create strong boundaries. You create high standards as leaders. We should never apologize for high standards. They should be reasonable, but we set high standards and we call people to high standards. I mean, look, if I was creating high standards for myself, it would have been, don't go to jail in the next 10 months. Like, okay, win, I won, I'm winning. No, high standards. I'm going to take you places that you don't even know are possible. That's where, that's the shift, right? So, yeah, that's why this third piece of the framework is so important, which is the accountability. A lot of people can get the expectations, right? They can get the feedback, right? But this overwhelming fear will come upon me when I have to hold somebody accountable, when I have to have that tough conversation. Why? There might be fallout. God forbid they quit, we're already understaffed. I mean, quiet quitting is costing the global economy, nine trillion dollars. What if there's retaliation? What if they call HR or my boss's boss or they point legal? What if I pull that person in and they cry? They're a cryer. I don't like cry. What if they get mad? What if I don't do this right? That's where fear starts to set in. And we feel this tightness in our chest and we start sweating a little bit. And so, we just decide, hey, maybe this will get better on its own. And what we don't, it doesn't. And what we're doing is we're robbing people of feedback they need to grow. How many of those time deposits? I'm just curious. It's interesting that you say what I think everybody's saying is how do you find the time? Well, listen, if you time block correctly, there's 160 hours in a week. I mean, time is just, there's this idea of being off balance on purpose. And I like the thought of that. But the deposits shouldn't just happen on a one-on-one. I hope it would happen in a group setting. It would happen in a group meeting. It would happen outside of work. And when you think about that, it's very hard to handle a massive group. If you, unless you build a captain's club, like you said, or build something underneath, I'd be curious to understand how that, so let's just take, for example, you feel like a person could probably handle, I'm just gonna pull a number out of the hat here. They might be able to handle. If you did six meetings for 30 minutes, that's three hours out of your week. And there's some prep that goes into that, I'm sure. So we'll just call it five hours. But let's walk through that. So you got six people, you want them to captain. And then they report it up to you, they're findings, and then you're just spending probably an hour with them, right? Yeah, yeah, or 30 minutes. I mean, whatever that looks like, but what we're talking about is we're talking about investing. And look, there's probably a lot of people listening right now that have some type of a value system, a poster on the wall that says people first. We put people first, people first. Okay, well, you know what, it's time to show up. If that's true, and I believe when you wrote it in your value system, you've met it. But people first, from a leadership aspect, it means time. And so we have to ask ourselves as senior leaders, C-Lup, are we putting standards in place, workload in place that we can truly put people first? Are we doing that? Because we got to ask ourselves as leaders, what motivates us most? And I will tell you, pain is a bigger motivator than pleasure. And here's how this works. Our six pack abs more motivating, or thinking about open heart surgery. What's more motivating, not having open heart surgery or having it's pack abs? Well, it's an over. Not having this open heart surgery. This mentality, we're going to create a structure, although it might be painful. What is the cost of not doing this? The cost of not doing this from a fitness standpoint is open heart surgery. When we're talking this way, what if I don't meet with that person? What if I'm not investing time in this person? Even the likelihood of it ever happening or happening effectively isn't going to be good. So I think we have to a lot of time and we have to get into a cadence. I wouldn't make it compliance driven. We got to get mid-level leadership engaged in it and believing in it. Yeah, it's interesting. I'd love to tell you, man, there's A1s a different story but when I walk into the hundreds and hundreds of companies I've walked into, it's very rare that I see somebody because to be a coach, I respected my coaches. They'd call the play and run the play. They'd show up, rain or shine. They'd be there before everybody. They'd come and prepare. They'd give you honest feedback. They also gave you the out of boys with a lot of recognition where it was due. And I just go back to coaches. But in a way, I mean, look, I look up to them because they took care of themselves. They smile a lot. They had a clean haircut. Maybe it's just me, but when I walk in, I don't see as many people that fit that profile. It's literally like, I've always said as a leader of the business, you got to take the wins and the losses. And I learn more from the losses. And I walk around a lot of companies and I'm like, man, they don't even talk like they believe themselves. Like there's no authority at all. Like they get in front of their shy. They don't smile. They're totally introverts. And even if they're extroverts, you know, they're sloppy. They don't really care. They don't got their shirts tucked in. And that's, that's when I talk about the home service industry. There's like a lot of people have tried to develop programs, but how long does it take to build a team of, and like you said, it takes a while because you're developing leaders as you go. But yeah. Yeah. Well, we know it's possible because what a lot of people will tell me is, Jeff, we can't afford it. We can't afford to pay people that would care about those things. It's not a pay issue. If you've ever been, if you've ever bought a chicken sandwich, a Chick-fil-A, this is true. You know, I remember both of my kids had required toward duties at Chick-fil-A. One year, well, I shouldn't say required. If you wanted help with college tuition, you had to work there a year, suit yourself. And I wanted them to work there because I wanted them to experience the culture, although Target was paying $3 more an hour. You know, I think at the time Chick-fil-A started at $13 an hour, but you walk in, I'm not saying it's perfect, but you walk into a Chick-fil-A. You're seeing shirts tucked in. It's their pleasure to serve you. So we know this is absolutely possible. So then the question comes is, how do we build it? You have to build it with leadership. You know, part of my M.O. in my corporate life became throw Jeff where the problem is the biggest, throwing into the new startup, the new division, whatever it might be. If I'm going into a problem situation, and I do this now as a consultant, if I'm going in the balance sheet is hemorrhaging, EBITDA is bleeding out, turnovers at 60%. The first place I'm looking is I am going to get rid of some leaders. I'm starting with leadership, and I'm going to build my culture, my brand, my effort, and everything that I have in the leadership. How they dress, how they look, if I want to haircut the look right away, that's how it's going to look. If I don't want tattoos on the face, I'm not going to hire people like that. Whatever that might be for your culture, it's got to start and be modeled out with the leadership, because as the leadership goes, so goes the culture. That's why we have to invest in leaders. Boy, now you're absolutely right. I can tell you right now that I've hired well over of area managers. I'm in 37 markets. You do some simple math well over 100 area managers. And I'll tell you right now, what makes a great market? It's mostly the leader. I will say that bringing the culture to that market with a great tech is important as well. That's the leader in the field. That's somebody they can look up to that'll run the meetings, that'll prove every day that this is possible. And I got to give a lot of my team props. I mean, if you know what's important, let me ask you this one. I'm going to pivot here a little bit because this is something that's starting tomorrow. And it's become the most important thing to me in the business. We just finally got the right tools to be able to do it. And I'm a little bit nervous actually, because it's called the internal net promoter score. And I don't like the name net promoter score. It's a fancy word for nine's and tens will promote you to other people. And they really believe in you and they want to say great things. Right. And obviously the higher the net promoter score, the more internal recruiting happens, the less turnover, the happier they are. And I think there was a stat of like, I don't know, $80,000 a year or something that after that people don't really, it's not as impactful. I don't know if that number's gone up or not. But what are your thoughts about the internal net promoter scores? Is that something you get behind? Or you're just like, it's not the, the be all of everything. I think it is absolutely valid. I think there has to be some level of metric that we know who we have internally. Look, not everybody's promotable, not everybody wants to be promoted. We have all of those things. But also I think money based off of performance is a great idea. So we need some metrics to do that. I think there's three things that everybody that is once better out of their career needs to focus on and its methods, results, and culture. You can't be a bad culture fit, but ring the bell with results and advance here. You might not get fired, but you're certainly not going to advance. Method results culture. I think systems like you're talking about 100% fall into that. These 16 box grids, which I'm a big fan of, whenever we're thinking about who's the future leaders of our company. I love a good 16 box grid of promote ready, well placed, where are they in the spectrum of skill and culture? So I love these tools, because they, especially at your level or a senior level, they're given me a snapshot of the health in the future of our company. I love building a model of a company that the only time we hire leaders to the outside is to stir up any stagnation that might be happening. We don't want a lot of minions running around doing it the same way. So we're going to pull in that transitioning military guy into the mix, but I will tell you, promoting from within has significant advantages, because you know what you're getting from a culture standpoint, and you're the one that built that leader, and now we're doing it the A1 way. Now I'm pulling fingers from the outside, so yes, I love the metrics, I love an internal net promoter idea. Well, you know, the real deal is, the KPIs are extremely important, but that's what I found as it doesn't make a good leader. I think we hire most of our technicians outside of the industry. Unfortunately, a high turnover in the first six months, and what I mean by high 30%, because you're taking on a job sometimes in Minnesota, it's 10 below. You've never worked on metal with 10 below, in an old van, going to a job you've never done for a long time, and sometimes it's 140 degrees here in Phoenix, and you start thinking about it, and they're like, well, this is not what I signed up for. I thought I would love it. I thought I was a little more sales, but I got to do the work too. That's okay, but once they're here for six months, for the most part, everyone's got a scorecard, everybody's performance pay, including me, company doesn't make money, and I think that's the best way to pay for sure. I don't necessarily believe that everybody should be promoted from within because our CFO should have never been promoted from the CMO, the COO, I can see a COO possibly if you're general, if you move somebody up, but they got to be able to grow with the company. I think that's why Jack Welch had so much turnover. He loved turnover because he's got to be fresh blood. Yes. Yeah, I think there is a place for fresh blood. You need it because if not, you will become stagnant. But when you do create a culture of promote from within, it's a great recruiting tool. Oh, it is. You can move up to our earlier. Yeah, you want to make money or build wealth. And I'm probably passionate about this because I started as a fill-in truck driver at a Sintosh Uniform Company, picking up dirty rags and clothe drugs, and I end up a senior leader. Well, I'm a fan of the system, right? But guess what? Every time I would interview somebody, I would tell them my story. And my story told people what was possible. And if you hit your wagon to me, I will give you what I have. You know, the best recruiting tool on planet earth, in my opinion, is the great leadership. Because if you have a great leader that leaves your company, there's probably going to be a certain amount of people that follow them out the door. Why? Because they're following the leader. Leadership is a great recruiting tool. No question about it. I love it, Jeff. This is, I'll tell you what, I think I asked one question out of the three pages of part, but I got so much more out of it. And when a podcast goes like this, you know, I get raving reviews from people that are like, I learned a lot and I got more notes than I even have room for. Jeff, what's it? Go ahead. I have organic is the best way to have a conversation. I mean, you know, I could have given you all the stats and, you know, all the things and why? And this is meeting people right where they're at and you know your audience better than me. So I love where it went. Well, you know, here's the facts. I think a lot of people will listen to this and say I need to do a better job. I think this might be, and I think what you're doing, Jeff, is you're not calling people out, you're calling them up. I hope so, man. That is my passion. That is my heart. That is my life. And now I'm dedicated to doing it every day is trying to equip people with the tools. Certainly I'm not the best at it. Certainly I don't have all the answers, but I'm giving it everything that I have. And it's very enjoyable to watch people grow and transform. I can tell you're passionate. What's the best way to reach out to you, Jeff? I'm easy to find. It's Jeff Hancher like Jolly Rancher, but it's within age. You can hit me on LinkedIn. That is my website. Certainly would love an opportunity to serve you with any free resources we have, whether that's the podcast or any of the resources on the site. We have workshops all over the place. Love to meet you, maybe personally, at a room someday as well. Oh, we will. I know that. And is there any book outside of the norm, E-Mith, and you know, there's so many books, the Michael Gerber and Dale Carnegie. And by the way, all the Napoleon Hill and I could go on and on John Maxwell, a lot of leadership stuff. Is there anything outside of the norm that you're just like, this is a book that'll change your life that you've probably never heard of? Well, man, I mean, I gotta give a shameless plug. Oh, yeah, you do. I mean, firm feedback in a fragile world. I gotta give a plug on that one. I have it, yeah. This comes with this fierce conversation, but I'll tell you other books that transformed me. The first 90 days by Michael Watkins, if you're listening and you're going to another company, you're being promoted into a leadership role. The first 90 days is a must read. It's gonna save you a lot of headaches. The five levels of leadership by John Maxwell. This is gonna help you get past your title very quickly. Move to relationship, move to results, move to reproduction, move to legacy. It gives you the pitfalls of to avoid and the belief systems to go to the next level. And then certainly I would put from a leadership perspective, good to great Jim Collins. This one is a mindset shift, no question about it. As far as self-help, lead to field was the first book I ever read at 23 years old. That book changed my life by our own night and gale. I would throw that one in the mix. Those are some of my top ones for sure. All right, Jeff, I'm gonna give you an opportunity. We hit a lot of great things. So many great things, but give us a final thought to close us out. People are counting on us to lead well and everybody deserves to be led well. It's the greatest investment that you can make is to be a great leader to impact the lives of other people. There are people all around us that are counting on us to win and not just on the W2, but the families they go home to. And so I just want to challenge the listener to be thinking about what they consume and to be thinking about who they spend their time with. Those are two things that can transform the leader that you become and not to be a boss, people report to, but to be that leader, people don't wanna let down. I love it. Well done, sir. I really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you, Tommy, and thank you everybody listening in. It was a great conversation. Thank you for having me. Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I wanna let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high performing team like over here at A1 Grasdor service. So if you wanna learn the secrets, it help me transform my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees growing in the same direction, head over to Elevate and win.com, for slash podcast, and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.