In this episode of The Radio Free Enterprise, CEO of Jetco Delivery Brian Fielkow makes it clear that corporate culture is not just a high-minded ideal, it’s a profit-driving imperative for every company.
Click here to learn more about Brian’s book, Driving to Perfection on Amazon
Click here to visit the Jetco Delivery website
Email Brian: brian@brianfielkow.com
Click here to view Brian’s LinkedIn Profile
What follows is a computer-generated transcription. Please excuse any typos.
You know, founding and running a successful business is very difficult, and we often find ourselves focused on whatever it is directly in front of us. Whatever problem needs to be solved, whatever hurdle needs to be jumped right now and we can become so focused that sometimes we lose sight of some of the bigger picture items that are really critical to success. Things like culture and leadership.
But those concepts can, if you lose sight of them, you can also lose a lot of profitability and lose really what your whole business is all about and what your entire entrepreneurial identity is all about. Culture and leadership are critical to your company success and that’s why I’m so pleased that today’s guest Brian Fielkow was willing to spend some time talking with us today. Brian’s President and CEO of a multimillion-dollar company, Jetco Delivery, a freight hauling company based in Texas that he purchased a few years back and his enjoyed a great deal of success with.
He’s also the author of the book, Driving to Perfection, achieving Business Excellence by creating a vibrant culture. And that’s what Brian’s here to talk to us about today. Brian, welcome to Radio Free Enterprise.
Thank you Frank. It’s great to be here and I really appreciate the invitation.
I’m so glad that you’re here. I’ve had a chance to read a great deal of your material and listen to a couple of other interviews that you’ve done, I think your message is really strong. It’s very critical and I’m so glad to be able to share it with my listeners.
Now as I mentioned as entrepreneurs, we tend to be very dollars and cents oriented and sometimes fuzzy ideas like culture and leadership. They sound like high minded luxury’s that yeah we can worry about that later after we get our business up and running and firing on all cylinders.
You argue that culture actually drives bottom line results and is something that should be focused on right from.
Get go what makes you say that an what brought you to that belief in the 1st place well?
I guess what brought me is the belief in first place. I began My career actually practicing law and I went to go work for my favorite client.
And they were in the recycling business.
An after a few months in the business I’ve.
I learned that they the our company, was receiving ten 1520% premiums relative to our competition.
For a Bale of Cardboard now wow there is no difference. Bale of Cardboard is a Bale of Cardboard. I can assure you that.
Why are we getting more? You know, it’s it’s just a commodity. Well, they weren’t buying our Cardboard. Our customers were buying our culture. They were buying integrity that if we delivered, if we promised to deliver a certain amount.
Our customers could come at if we promised to produce to a certain quality specification our customers would come on that they were buying the Peace of Mind.
That we offered and that really got me interested in the whole topic of D commoditizing what we do. Let’s face it, very few of us. Very few of us are into business.
Where we control the market and we’re the only choice in in most every business, our customers have plenty of choices.
An unless you enjoy competing on price an enjoy getting work at the bottom dollar.
You have to figure out a way to D commoditize yourself and that’s your culture. That’s the convergence of your people and your process. That’s something that nobody else has.
An I would take it a step further.
And I would ask you, I would ask your listeners just to just to think about this question.
Have you ever had a customer say?
I can buy the same product across the street for less money.
But I choose to buy the product from you.
I’ll bet you everybody that’s listening right now is nodding in agreement. Yeah, I’ve heard that before.
So then the question is why? Why would an economically rational person pay more for the same widget thing it across the street?
An when I’m going to give me a presentation.
I’ll ask people why and what they’ll say is because of our reliability because of how we deliver our service, right that you can because of our shipping methods, whatever the answer is.
It’s something it’s something that’s their secret ingredient, their mystique.
That allows them to successfully rise above the pack and D commoditize the business and that no matter what the answer, no matter what the answer, it lies in their culture. It’s tide to the culture is tide to the unique way that that business that that’s successful business.
Executes its its product or service delivery in a way that’s better than the competition. ’cause again, there’s just no fun. It’s no fun competing on price an and your culture is the difference. Your culture is your difference that lets you compete on a different level.
You know that is just powerful, powerful statement. I you know, I heard you say economically rational person.
I take it you must have had to study economics as part of your pre law and your law degree by degree is in economics and when you talk about commodities and competing on a 10th of a penny per unit, you’re absolutely correct. There’s the whole definition of a commodity is there’s. There’s no differentiation between one and the next.
And I’d never thought of the company’s culture and how that impacts the customers buying experience being a competitive differentiator. But you’ve made the point very clearly. I think that’s great, and one of the things we’re going to have to do through this conversation. Brian is we’re going to have to quickly move from one thing to the next. ’cause I know that you and I could talk forever about this.
I think a great segue right out of that is.
Can you give me, you gave a great example there buying bales of Cardboard. I take it it’s recycled bales of Cardboard? Or is that a Cardboard manufacturer?
No, actually I was in the recycling business, so we would collect Cardboard and Bale it so that it was recycled bales of Cardboard that then a paper mill would buy and make into finished product again.
You know and if they weren’t receiving.
Our feed stack there pulpers.
Shut down so they paid a premium to know that they were going to always have paper coming through when they needed it. It was the Peace of Mind that we sold and the Peace of Mind. The command of the premium, not anything special about our bales of Cardboard.
I understand, and I think it’s also fascinating that the paper companies are in a commodity business as well.
I I was in the printing business for a long time, which could an is sold or or different printers sell it as a specialty or commodity but.
I’ve purchased a lot of paper in my time and I just think it’s fascinating. I love that example because hard to find a commodity that is of seemingly less value than Cardboard, especially recycled Cardboard. But can you give me a couple of other examples of companies that we may have heard of where this type of culture is having an impact on their bottom line?
Let me give you, let me do a comparison and contrast for you.
In the past couple of years.
First, I was fascinated by CVS Pharmacy’s decision to stop selling tobacco.
Uh.
Because that took courage, they gave up over 2 billion’s with a B in sales on tobacco wow and they said look, our mission is to help people get better in the promote Wellness.
And selling tobacco is inconsistent with that. So there is a company that had leadership.
And had courage to say that our values right? And culture is based on values. Culture is based on your company’s non negotiable set of values and so if there you know I’m not here to tell you what your values should be, I know what my company’s values are, but all I can say is that once you’ve locked in on your values.
There is no compromise and there is no looking the other way. And here’s a here’s a company whose leadership said our values are to help people get better. Cigarettes take us in the opposite direction and we will give up the $2,000,000 in sales and since then they’ve grown. They’ve outperformed the market.
But even in a large level like that, the decision to give up two billion dollars.
In in sales is value.
Based, it has to be value based and again that that’s an example. I think of a company who stuck to its values and stuck to its culture. Now let’s contrast that for a minute to Volkswagen.
Volkswagen the trouble they got in late.
Late last year.
That wasn’t some innocent mistake.
Volkswagen.
Deliberately installed software.
In certain of their diesel powered cars.
To deceive regulators.
About its admissions, because the emissions.
Without the without the cheating software, the emissions were not up to standard.
Now there there’s a company that made a decision somewhere. I don’t know what level the decision was made, but I can’t believe that it was made in at the production plant. I think it had been made it pretty high level that we’re going to deliberately install this software to cheat.
In order to sell our products now, how would you feel if you were a Volkswagen dealer right now with a damaged brand? How would you feel if you were the owner of one of those cars that its resale value will obviously be impaired and to my knowledge as we sit here probably six months after the scandal is broken.
Volkswagen has not done anything to redress the problem, so there is a great example of a company who.
Made a decision.
To cheat.
And I think it’s going to pay the price for a long time completely out of line with values I would tolerate in my company. I mean, in my company you know we’re in the trucking business, on time. Delivery is important, but I also be lying to you if I said that we were on time 100% of the time.
You know, so stuff happens, but when stuff happens, we’re not gonna say the dog ate my homework, we’re gonna tell.
Our customers transparently what happened? What’s the plan to deal with it? And you know, you gain respect. That way. You gain respect when you, when you have a problem and you deal with it with openness and transparency and a sincere commitment to fix the problem so it doesn’t happen again.
But I just think the contrast between Volkswagen and CVS is stunning. It’s absolutely stunning because it’s all about companies that uphold their values, and companies that throw their values out the window.
Those are great examples. Brian and I think it’s instructive to think about the fact that.
Even though these are multibillion dollar companies, the difference between them is a very human thing of how they choose to.
What their values are, what values they’ve chosen to drive their company with an, whether it’s at the individual level or at the at the boardroom level of a multibillion dollar company. As you just pointed out, those values can drive all sorts of consequences for good or ill.
Anan it is how you open this.
Our conversation that this is.
Not just for the the big companies which I am using as examples. This is for Main Street that this is. This is for our our businesses. No matter how big or small they are, our legacy the way we want to be remembered. We want to be remembered as somebody who did things the right way, where the employees felt a sense of transparency and honesty.
Do you want to do?
You want to be the guy that was, you know, out for the quick Buck an you know the heck with everything else.
So this is very much a mainstream value proposition, and the people that think this is fuzzy feel good campfire stuff, or they are horribly mistaken. I mean, they’re giving up their secret, competitive their best competitive weapon by ignoring it.
This is great stuff.
Now you know we were just saying that Volkswagen and CBS showed how your values can drive results one way or the other. I often say that just about any example of bad behavior on the part of a human being or a or a company or a country or what have you generally there’s either fear or ignorance behind that bad behavior.
And I notice that Chapter 5 of your book is titled Are Your Fears Leading You? and I just would like for you to speak to that what do you mean by that? What is that question driving at?
Sure, let me let me.
Answer It a couple ways. But first of all you use the word behavior and that’s what culture is. Culture is managing behavior, philosophy and attitude.
And I’ll have. I’ll have new managers come in and say managing behavior, wait a minute, wait a minute, you hired a manager, not a kindergarten teacher.
They’ve got it wrong. Our job as leaders is to manage behavior and define what behaviors in our companies are acceptable in what aren’t. But when we talk about are your fears leading you? What I’m really talking about is this.
In order for culture to succeed in any size company, it has to be leader driven. An employee owned meaning that you know the push has to come from leadership.
Leadership cannot be disengaged in the process, but if leaders are driving it in the front lines, don’t on it and don’t care, you really haven’t accomplished anything. So in this chapter, what I’m really talking about is you. You, as the leader are your fear is leading. You look when you when you engage in bark.
An entrepreneurial venture. Whether you’re an owner or whether you’re a manager or a, uh, you know, uh?
A senior executive. Generally, you’re all in. You’re fully invested.
Maybe financially, hopefully, probably emotionally, and at some point you know your business can become you. You can become your business.
And that’s where I think you give up the ability.
To lead with confidence.
Now, as leaders, we cast a huge shadow, so if we’re letting fear lead us and my gosh, there’s a lot to be afraid of.
You know the fear of failure, the fear of losing.
A big account. The fear of you know more and more and more regulation that we have to comply with all these things out of our control. The fear of a good employee leaving and going across the street to a competitor.
If you let those fears lead you.
Then you can’t lead.
You know if there’s if there’s one book, I would recommend to anybody I know every I know people recommend you know the Dale Carnegie book, The How to Win Friends, but that’s not the Carnegie book. I’d recommend the one I’d recommend is how to stop worrying and start living.
You read it, you read it today an. It was written in the 1940s. You know some of the.
Some of the stories in some of the languages is cute. You know it’s a little bit antiquated.
But it makes a point. People are people an you know he.
The book deals with different case studies of business people who absolutely paralyze themselves.
In some cases to the point of irrevocably damaging their health.
Because they were consumed by fear. So the book is about how to manage fears and I’m telling you it’s every bit as relevant today as it was then. It’s going to be every bit as relevant in 200 years, is it is today because we’ve been wired this way for for millenia, and so my point is that that.
When you lead.
You have to understand that you cast a giant shadow. However, big of a shadow you think it is you cast.
Quadruple it, multiplied by 50. That that’s how big of a shadow you’re probably casting every move.
Is under the microscope.
And do you mean it’s under the IT casting a large shadow across the employees or what? What do you mean by that?
I mean across the employees that your every move is watched.
And if they kind of see you.
Down and an paralyzed by all the fears.
Many of which, by the way, are really legitimate. They’re very legitimate.
You got to learn how to manage that before you can lead, because otherwise people will take false signals. I love to tell a story. I was out walking my warehouse at one point.
Just I, I don’t know why I was doing that, was just deep in thought. My shirt was Untucked late in the day and the next day one of my drivers came and said hey man are you are you OK? And is the company OK are we? Are we in trouble? Wow? I mean I’m like what in the heck are you talking about? He goes well I saw you walking in the warehouse yesterday and.
In your head was down and you didn’t even look up to say hi to me an you know I was like oh man I I was. I was deep in thought I wasn’t paying attention. Now everything is fine but it it really I never forgot that lesson because it just how such an insignificant thing.
At least what I thought was insignificant. It could be perceived by somebody else is Oh my gosh, he’s upset.
That or the companies the company is in trouble or something, and so I’ve never ever forgotten that how I show up is.
Is critical, and I think that’s true for all leaders, and it’s not a matter of ignoring your fears. That’s naive. It’s a matter of learning how to manage your fears so that you can lead aggressively so that you can lead proactively and not let those normal natural human fears paralyze you.
That’s great stuff, Brian. I you know you were just talking about the leaders and the and the followers are the owners and the employees and their roles in the culture. I recently gave a presentation to a tech startup where I tried to emphasize to the employees that the creation and development of a successful corporate culture in this new startup that they were in.
Would greatly be dependent upon them an I’m not going to say anything one way or the other, but that’s what I said to them about a month ago and now I’m listening to you what? What is your reaction to me making that statement to them?
Yeah, I mean I know nobody else can do it, but the people in that room.
Well, I meant specifically this was the employees I was seeing to them as opposed to the owners of the startup founders who were also present in the room. But the point I was making was that I guess I was just trying to tell them a lot of this is on you guys.
Absolutely, you got to distinguish between power and authority.
Maybe what’s on my business card or in my job description? An authority gives me the ability to influence the actions of others, but you got to look at where the power really lies in any organization. And it lies with the people you were talking to with the front lines with the mid level managers, they’re the ones that have the power to pull this off.
Make the call to successful or not. There’s no memo. There’s no policy that you can write to make this happen, so.
You’re absolutely right. In a healthy culture it must be employee owned and the employees have to have passion around it such that they hold each other accountable to live the values of the culture. And quite frankly, when it’s really working.
They’re the ones that are going to elite weed out the misfits you don’t. You don’t have to do it because your employees are going to weed out the misfits for you.
That’s great, that’s great stuff, and I there was a phrase you used.
Leader directed and employee owned or how did you put that?
Yeah, Leader driven, an employee owned leader.
Driven and employee owned. I think that’s just a critical little short statement.
So with that in mind, how does accountability factor into your vision of how corporate successful corporate culture works?
Uh, well, you can’t really build a culture without accountability, but what I like to advise people to do is take that word accountability that we all talk about.
But it’s a lot harder to implement and break it into three. There’s three kinds of accountability, individual, organizational and peer to peer. Individual accountability is kind of easy. That’s the type of accountability.
That you know a well trained employee chooses to do something, otherwise their behavior isn’t right. It’s an individual failure on their part. That’s the easy one. Organizational accountability means that we as a company, have failed to educate our people on the processes.
For doing their jobs and on the behaviors that are acceptable in our company, that’s great, and if our people don’t understand.
But how you hold them accountable in a lot of times it’s the poor guy holding the bag that gets blamed. We revert to individual accountability because we don’t like what we see in the mirror.
Or we refuse to look at it.
And then then the final accountability is peer to peer, and that’s when you know that you’ve arrived. Peer to peer means that your team is is holding each other accountable. Like I said before, this whole parent child mentality I’m going to run to the boss all that crap’s out the window.
Because peer to peer is in place, so individual organizational and peer to peer. You’ve got to think of accountability three ways. It’s too complicated of a term to think about in just a 1 dimensional manner.
You know, I worked recently with the company where they’ve put a lot of investment of resources into creating training manuals and.
And laying out processes of every aspect of the business.
But
An argument could be made that they don’t do a very good job of actually communicating the information in the training. They basically just hand over these, you know, black and white printed pages and say here read this, memorize it, learn it, live it, and then they come back and do the individual accountability. Well, you didn’t do what it says on page 40, three of the accounting manual. Why didn’t you do that?
And so can you just in a general sense, talk about training or development as a part of your culture.
You have to have a culture.
Of.
Continuous learning, you know people aren’t going to come in.
On day one and know how you do business, and I think one of the mistakes that we make is we, you know, think about a job interview for a minute.
It’s all centered around.
Your technical ability to do the job at hand.
And obviously, you’ve got to be technically confident or we don’t need you. But that’s just the beginning. You’ve got to be aligned with the values we need to spend more time in our interviews looking for cultural fits, and having employees who are trained to ask questions to determine whether there is a cultural fit.
Or not.
Because good employees technically trained employees, you can find pretty easily quite frankly. But finding the ones who have the behavior and the characteristics that you need that that that’s more difficult. And as far as those 600 page handbooks you get introduced me to somebody that’s red. One I know.
What we do is we let our employees write the Handbook that.
Tell you that’s how you merge accountability with Handbook. Look, you have to have processes. You can’t have a company that that that that doesn’t have process driven. It’s the way that you, you institutionalized your learning. But these big handbooks. You’re right, nobody reads and then you’re in trouble for not remembering page 47 as you said.
But the Handbook is simple understandable.
Written an owned by your employees, the chances of those processes being ingrained in the company are a lot better than the usual, you know. Here’s the Handbook. There is the bathroom orientation.
That’s great, I love that and I would love to at some point in the future interview you again. Nothing but the topic.
Of doing a job interview that’s focused on culture match, but we’ll have to leave that for another day. Wonderful, yeah, that’s a great one. Now quickly now, chapter nine of your book is titled Never Waste a Good Crisis. I love that title what?
Does it mean?
Well, it means that our everyone of our businesses will go through some sort of cyclical period of boom and then a period of adversity.
And when we go through adversity, we have a maybe a economic crisis or a market driven crisis on our hands.
That’s the time to really look at the company and make change, and that might mean you know reducing people where you were willing to look the other way in other markets. I’m not saying it was right that it was ever right to look the other way, but let’s face it, we all do sure so that when you’re.
When you’re in a crisis, it’s the time to clean house. It’s the time to reinvent yourself. It’s the time to go build new markets. It’s the time to do things that maybe you were too busy to do when everything was booming and you could barely keep up with demand and what’s, what’s kind of sad is that when we get into a crisis an again.
It’s not a matter of.
Yeah, it’s a matter of when instead of heading for the Hills, use this attempt to plant and pave the way for a better tomorrow by upgrading. For example, if you’re in a period of high unemployment in your in your city or in your geography, well.
Strikes me as a good time to hire good talent. Now when everybody is working.
And so you have to be a little contrary, and an also, when there’s a crisis and people in your company see that you know their neighbor got fired, their cousin got fired.
They didn’t get fired. They’re lucky to have a job. You also have a way of if you’re transparent with your employees of creating unprecedented alignment.
That will create goodwill for years and years to come because you treated me right when I saw the rest of the world.
Just treating people like numbers and Anan firing him, that’s great. You got to use the crisis to your advantage. ’cause if you do, you’re going to come out stronger. And if you don’t you might not survive.
That is wonderful. Great stuff Brian. I want to wrap up with this. I really appreciate all the time and wisdom that you shared with us today, but.
Because of the success that you’ve had in effect D commoditizing, what are essentially commoditized industries like waste management and the company you’re currently in freight hauling. I understand that you’ve increased the size of your business or built your sales by over 6 fold since you acquired the company in 2006. Is that right?
Yes, that’s correct.
Well, clearly you know what you’re talking about here. This is not just a theory coming from the ivory tower. What you’re talking about works and impacts the bottom line.
Can you give us like one thought to one last Pearl of wisdom that a listener could use take back to their business tomorrow morning and start implementing to get their culture going in the right direction and start trying to recreate the type of success that you’ve seen.
Sure, you know a lot of the detail.
Is covered in my book. I’m driving the perfection an the whole book.
Ignores theory and focuses on these kinds of things.
Practical easy how to so the first thing I’d say is that you know, make sure that when you are going through your ideas.
Having prioritized and focus on the easy, high value ideas.
Difficult high value ideas take too long when you’re getting started.
Now you’re talking about cultural ideas. What sort of ideas are you referring to?
Well, cultural or cultural ideas, yes. An including ideas that will feel your growth. ’cause ultimately that’s what we’re talking about here is is that you know your culture is your ticket.
But to growth into unparalleled customer experience, so you come up with 100 ideas and you’ll be paralyzed by all those ideas. You got to come up with.
Easy high value ideas.
One example I like to give. Now, admittedly this isn’t in the growth arena, but I think it will make my point.
When I bought my company we were having, you know, some workers comp losses that we shouldn’t have been having so we could have written, you know, a couple of 100 pages of policy.
But with my extensive background, I.
I’ll tell you what.
I did I went to Best Buy. I bought a big screen TV and I put it in the middle of the office and I said if we go a whole quarter without a lost time injury somebody’s going to win it. Everybody like everybody laughed and they said the TV will be there in 10 years.
An we gave away eight TV’s in a row, eight quarters in a row. That’s fantastic. And the whole point is that it didn’t take.
A lot of brainpower. It was a simple, easy, easy idea. Got our team focused around a goal as opposed to you know, a million goals that you can’t achieve. The other thing is that people you know we live in the Twitter world, right? We have 140 characters now.
So people don’t have the patience for.
Complicated ideas that you know will wait five years to see how they come. You’ve got to have ideas where people can see progress and celebrate those milestones and above all.
This cannot be dictated if it’s dictated it doesn’t work. The idea is that you’re going to implement these easy high is easy, high value ideas that I talk about have to be owned by the team, have to be there has to be broad understanding from the from the boardroom all the way at the front lines.
About where we’re going mission alignment. Because if you don’t have that, you don’t have metrics that anybody can measure against and people want to be part of something they don’t want to punch a Clock. Punching a Clock and just showing up for work is a sign that you’ve got a disengaged workforce.
They know how to fix problems and solve challenges better than you. You know your front lines know where the opportunities lie, they know where the efficiencies lie. They know where the problems lie. If you only involve them in your most critical.
Mission, and in this case, let’s say it’s corporate growth.
You’ll unlock hidden talent that you don’t even know you have, so it’s a matter of involving the front lines having the line team keeping the ideas easy, measurable, high value, and then you can get into the more complicated high dollar, complex value complex ideas. Once you won the team over to the fact, hey.
This stuff really works.
That is just great stuff. Thank you so much for that and I will have a link to your book on the show notes page for this episode of Radio Free Enterprise. But if somebody wants to talk to you further about this about corporate culture, I know that you do a lot of seminars and presentations for Vistage and for individual corporations and so forth.
What is the best way for them to connect with you?
The best way is going to be my email which is.
Brian Brian at Brian Fielkow BRIANF. As in Frank IELKO www.com, I’ve also got a website by that name, you know, brianphilco.com an I’m really active on LinkedIn too and all that got to do is connect with me.
On LinkedIn, so there’s plenty of ways to get in touch. And yeah, I’m always glad to brainstorm. Always lead to share ideas.
An you know obviously I’m doing a limited number of speaking engagements every year and there are still I’m still taking some engagements for the back half of this year, so very interested to work with your listeners in in any capacity that makes sense.
Great and I’ll put links to all of those things as.
Someone named Frank Felker would know Brian Fielkow. Yeah, people don’t always get your name spelled right, so I will. I’ll have the links directly to your email.
On your website, and I think people can find you on find you on LinkedIn, but I’ll put a little link there as well that goes to your profile and that’ll make it easy for people. So thank you so much Brian. I really could not thank you enough for all of the wonderful ideas and experience that you brought to us today on radio free Enterprise.
It’s very pleasure.
Thank you.
Thanks again to Brian Fielkow and thank you for listening. Now what we need to do next is you need to go to the iTunes store and subscribe to the Radio Free Enterprise.
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