Bonus Episode: Kurt Wilkin Hates Business Books. So He Wrote One

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week in a special bonus episode Kurt wilin talks about how he helped build several businesses including most recently a recruiting business called hire better and he also explains why he hates most business books it has to do with the attention deficit issues he like many entrepreneurs tends to experience so when he decided to write a business book of his own he kept it short and he structured it so that you can find the parts that are most relevant to you and skip the rest it's called who's your mic and it features chapters on the kinds of hiring and management challenges all entrepreneurs confront including situations involving employees like Mike who exactly is this guy Mike oh you know he's the incredibly loyal and hardworking employee who's been with you from day one but who isn't necessarily growing with the business says Kurt we all have or have had or will have a mic even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which Inc magazine recently named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews this week's episode is titled Kurt wilin hates business books so he wrote One welcome Kurt wilin thanks so much for doing this it is great to talk to you hey Lauren thanks so much for having me I love what you guys are doing with 21 hats and the podcast and newsletter really a great resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs I really appreciate that listen in a moment we're going to talk about the book you've just written it's called who's your mic we're going to find out who exactly this mik guy is and why we need to find him but first you you have a really impressive resume that has given you uh I know from our previous conversations great insight into the way lots and lots of privately owned businesses uh have been run let's go through that resume real quick you started I believe as an accountant at ey is that right I was there for four years and did I love the client service aspect and learning uh lots of different businesses but I wasn't a very good accountant why not be too much of a entrepreneur you know I I just love people more than I love numbers and while the the numbers interested me and it was a great background I just was way more interested in the relationships and the people involved I bet it's been of use to you though as an entrepreneur being familiar with the numbers uh probably has helped a lot I would think absolutely you definitely need to understand a profit a profit and loss statement you definitely need to understand how the numbers work I just not uh I didn't want to make it my career I wanted to use it as as a part of what I I did but not not define who I was so after that I believe the first business you started was a fractional CFO business is that right not quite I I start well after there I left to go uh work for a do com but uh after the.com Bubble Burst I started a business really at an necessity what was the what was the business the dot it was called Ean shop and we we sold licensed Sports Products on the internet e-commerce it was uh well before our time um but uh and we got caught right in the middle of the crash in in uh 2000 interesting what did you learn there wow I learned the biggest lesson I learned is when people want to to give you money as as far as raising Capital don't uh get greedy and and uh try to raise your valuation because you feel like you're in the driver's seat you take take what money you can because you never know when that next uh next check's going to come so what came after that well uh when when that went belly up I had a young child and a new wife and uh we had uh you know I had to make ends meet so I started doing some Consulting with some old ey clients and uh some a friend Jay Norris connect to me with uh one of his clients and and made it into a nice project and before you knew it I had a a burgeoning young business where I was helping companies prepare for their audit and uh I thought it was a great business I got poo pooed quite a bit as I was uh form minut it and we had some success and then sarban why was it poo pooed what was the concern you know that idea was what you're going to go out in in front of Auditors and and prepare the companies that they go to audit prepare them for audit to make their job easier so you're basically asking the the company to pay twice once for the preparation once for the audit but the Auditors loved us because we got everything you know nice and pretty in a bow for them for when the audit came out so we were a lifesaver for them it was it was a solid business but in honesty uh all honesty the uh star Bain Oxley Act of 2002 which came out of the uh the the shambles that was Enron which required all public companies to do an internal controls audit basically uh that was uh what really catapulted our company from a nice idea to uh right place right time what was your target market what size businesses um that was in definitely in the Middle Market uh I'll say uh 20 to 200 million or so in Revenue which is really my comfort zone is is where I've been on my entire career working with companies who are big enough to be able to pay you and have complex enough problems but not so big that they won't listen to you so after sarban Oxley what happened we grew that business to about 20 million in Revenue over a relatively short period five years and we sold to a company which is the fractional CFO firm you talked about called Tatum CFO uh when they acquired us they changed their name to Tatum uh our company was called the controller group uh which uh if you're know anything about a county and a controller usually works in reports to the CFO we provided a leverage Consulting model for them where when I say leverage meaning in a traditional Consulting model you have Partners who Bill a lot of per hour and then you have a lot of people underneath them that really do the grunt uh the bulk of the work and so that's what we did highly profitable leverage Consulting model Tatum CFO is a very flat organization so really no leverage whatsoever so most of the money that was built by the the CFO Partners stayed with the CFO Partners so the firm itself didn't make much money but we provided a profit for them so that they could grow and and really become a multinational firm why did you decide to sell you know I I I didn't set out to sell which I'm sure a lot of your listeners don't necessarily set out to sell but when when they came to us in late 2005 uh we felt like it was a great opportunity to take their model that they built in their Nationwide footprint take our highly profitable model maram together and let's go create a national firm out of it so it was really great opportunity to build something bigger uh and we were able to take some chips off the table as well which was very important as I'm I'm sure many of your listeners will appreciate everybody likes that sound of that well look I'm an entrepreneur I get it 95 or 99% of your wealth is typically tied up in the one asset which is your business and if anything goes wrong with the economy or Ukraine or you name it all of a sudden your house uh of cards if you will falls down and and I was fortunate enough to uh to be able to take some chips off the table and still try to grow something beyond what I had built prior but I definitely understand the pressure when you're an entrepreneur and 99% of your wealth is tied up in that one asset so you stayed involved in the parent company after the sale yes uh we grew our our practice we at least doubled it uh the next year or two and then the ' 0809 banking crisis uh uh hit everybody including us so it was a it was a tough go after that so we were very fortunate to have sold when we sold how did uh you come to start higher better I actually uh bought it ah after I left Tatum I like to say I became unemployable um it is hard to go for me being an entrepreneur to work in for working with with a boss I started with a a one of my former Associates from Tatum Melinda Owens we started looking for companies to buy we wanted to do something different so I was really looking for something that was Tech enabled maybe Tech focused in the I'll call it save the world type of mindset we called it business Earth which is our marrying up the uh do gooder you know tree hugger side of the left with the money mongering capitalist pigs on the right and make the world a better place we looked at a couple of companies to buy and I decided I realized I wasn't a tech person so I I retrenched and said what do I know well I know people I know business I know that the recruiting industry is dastardly broken and about that time I stumbled into the guy who who found it higher better they built a nice interesting little practice it was different than most recruiters and we decided you know what let's buy this and and let's uh let's make it what we want so we we re-envisioned our little slice of the of the recruiting world what was different about it that attracted you most Recruiters in this lower Middle Market are called contingent recruiters that means you don't pay they they are paid contingent upon when they Supply a body there are so many misaligned incentives in that in that model and I think the thing I liked about it was it wasn't a contingent model it was an hourly based model so really um you paid for what you got long story short we've evolved that model quite a bit so that's why I call myself co-founder because we've changed it so much but I love the name uh I actually have a trademark to the words hire better so if you Lauren decide you want to help people hire better I can cease and assist your ass that's great do clients prefer the hourly um model I I could imagine them thinking you know I'd rather know exactly what this is going to cost and pay you a flat fee yeah you know we we actually did evolve to that exactly we clients wanted to it was nice when you filled the roll in you know 20 or 30 hours and it cost a few grand but if if it took you a thousand hours and it's you know uh 100 Grand they didn't like it so much Soh we decided to to go to more of a Project based billing structure So that obviously I mean all that experience adds up to a lot of insight into the way a lot of people have have run businesses and especially with higher better you've had a front row seat on uh what's come to be called the Great resignation I I gather you consider the great resignation something of a myth what what do you mean by that you know it's true that people are leaving their jobs I think what if you really look back at the data what the data would show you is that people have been leaving their jobs in increasing numbers over the last five or 10 years and there was a an anomaly in 2020 because of the pandemic and it it exacerbated it kind of caught up if you will in 21 and 22 uh to back to the same growth levels that was before people leaving in droves the reality is people were leaving already now it's just more pronounced because of the the Hiatus from from 2020 and the reason people are leaving is what a lot of folks have studied and I think there's perhaps some still some disagreement it's not just for money it's usually for for purpose especially that your younger generation folks who are uh beginning their careers or early in their careers they realize they didn't like the job they had and they wanted to do something different but even folks like you and me Lauren we're really realizing that life is freaking short and the pandemic taught us that uh we have an opportunity to reinvent who we are do you put some of the blame for that on business owners who haven't done enough to create cultures and environments where employees actually want to work you know I hate to use the word blame but but that's what we're really encouraging our clients and and CEOs and entrepreneurs to do you have to have more than just a paycheck if you entice somebody with a paycheck they they may leave and and join your opportunity but there's nothing if you don't stand for anything else they're going to leave and so what we're we're actually seeing a lot of boomerangs people who have left and then gone back to their previous job so the encouragement I would provide to entrepreneurs is uh take do the hard work to uh to make your company stand for more than just a paycheck and then make it a reality create your core values but live your core values create your mission and vision but live your mission and vision we actually have a lot about that in in this book we have a chapter dedicated to building a great culture you mentioned Boomerang employees some people going back um after realizing that the grass really wasn't Greener what do you think of that is hiring a boomerang employee a good idea personally this is Curt speaking I love it because they know what they left and they left uh to go somewhere else because of some greener grass but they came back because they they appreciate what they left and we've had it happen a couple times and and I don't want to name names but typically I think those employees become more more loyal might not be the right word but more dedicated and uh some of your best your best team members there are a lot of people who just absolutely refuse to to even consider it have you had conversations with people like that who wouldn't consider coming back you mean no wouldn't consider taking an employee back oh I mean over the years I've had those types of conversations but nothing nothing re right now most people are so desperate for people to probably take care right they can get but I think it can be a good employee you want to understand the reasons they left and you want to make sure that they're not they're coming in Eyes Wide Open here's who we are and they're not having some false expectations how has all of this affected you at higher better have you experienced this kind of difficult period with people sometimes coming and going uh as well I like to say we look very much like our clients we're we're entrepreneurial lead and and entrepreneurs can be a pain in the ass and I can be a pain in the ass we've got a lot of the same challenges our clients have including we hire some of the best people out there and so when uh when when other firms are desperate for talent they'll come raiding us and uh we' had a period there in the late 21 where we lost four or five people in a a very quick time period some we didn't mind losing but some we definitely did of course and uh we've been hit just like everybody else you lose our your vpf sales to a CEO gig it's hard hard to argue for him to take that opportunity but it definitely set us back that's not just about the money exactly exactly and I was very happy for him and and that's what we want I want people to be at at higher better and leave for something really special did you change the way you do things did you react in any way I'd be lying if I said oh no we're just stay the of course you know follow the trust the process you always feel like oh what's happening right sure um so we we have uh we've had to adjust this like our clients what do we do do we increase compensation across the board do we double down on our values and and who we are uh we've done a little bit of both we've definitely uh reassessed where we are compensation wise because because the the comp studies you did you know 6 months ago or out of date the the minute you print them so let's talk about your book uh it's called who's your mic and I have to say I really enjoyed reading it uh you and I share some instincts one of which is that I think neither one of us is a huge fan of business books in general you wrote I hate most business books um in the book what what what is it you hate about most business books you know there's a couple of things the biggest one is I I think most business books and I say most not all most business books have a great nugget of value and whoever wrote it says I've got to get this message out there my nugget is this but that's only 20 to 40 or 50 pages of a book right and unless you want to write a short story like who Moved My Cheese you you need 200 pages to to be able to sell a book and so there's a lot of stuff in there that you've read elsewhere some rhetoric some interesting stuff it's just fluff Y and so I I have a bunch of those books on on my nightstand problem for me is I've got add as an entrepreneur I don't know which 20% I'm supposed to read right you're not the only entrepreneur who feels that way exactly so that's part of it the other part is I think a lot of business books are are sunshine and rainbows you know uh my 12 steps to you know being a billionaire and having sex every day or you know follow my five steps and you'll be living on a beach like me and I just for me I want to hear not just the stories that are successful for you I call them the glory stories I want to hear the Gory stories tell me the that went wrong well you wrote that in the book don't just give me Glory stories I want the glory Stories the Messier the better the bigger the show the more powerful the lesson Amen brother so what prompted you to to write the book so I I I wrote this blog article five or six years ago called who's your Mike and I'll get into Mike here in a second when I tell that story to folks the the vigorous head nods the oh my gosh I've got one of those guys just the the story resonated and then I just over the last few years I've been thinking okay what other consistent themes do I see with employees that you have at your entrepreneurial company and quite a few of them showed up in the book there's a few that didn't quite make the book I called it my Cutting Room floor so there's some characters in the back that you can kind of look up and and see we should say this is how you organize the book you kind of go character by character um each one sort of an employee archetype and with offering uh explanations of what you've observed as well as suggestions on how to deal with each situation exactly my My Hope was that my stories that are you can glean from the book would help you the entrepreneur with your own challenges and and then there's we we have we call them intermissions but they're basically some advice sections where we do a little Q&A how can I assess my own situation but the way we wrote it Lauren and you mentioned I mentioned earlier I told the reader up front look you might only like 20% of this but I'm going to lay it out so you can tell which chapters apply to you just go read the five chapters that apply and skip the other you know the other 12 chap so tell us about Mike who's Mike and what why do you have a problem with him well I'll say first of all my friend's name Mike freaking hate me I'm not surprised yeah so here's a quick story uh so Mike was your fraternity brother in college you guys were best budged and you were thickest thieves in college you think he might have taken three hours of accounting but you don't really know but you know he's a smart dude that's got your back when you start your business in your garage a few years later Mike was right there with you nights and weekends is helping with all the administrative things that you either don't like or just don't know how to do things like ordering office supplies setting up your LLC setting up your bank account and so a couple years later you become a legit business move out of your garage and mik quits his day job and becomes your accountant still doing those back office administrative things but now he's taught himself QuickBooks and you trust him with your life and so you you reward his 100 hour weeks and his rolling up your sleeve getting stuff done mentality with the controller title and ultimately the CFO title now you look up you're you know five years later you're doing $20 million in Revenue Mike is hadn't taken a vacation in those five years he's still working 100 hour weeks he doesn't he hasn't built a team either because he doesn't know how or because he too cheap or because he's just in over his head and he's swimming he's trying to negotiate a $10 million line of credit with your bank maybe he's trying to negotiate a you know five or10 million merger agreement with your biggest competitor he's just so overwhelmed but he's so loyal he didn't want to tell you so the question is who's your mic every entrepreneur's got a mic whether it's Finance and Accounting like this example maybe it's sales marketing operations we all have or have had or will have a mic have you learned how to deal with this situation before it reaches the point where something really has to give is there a way to to help Mike grow with the business absolutely so so there's a lot of in the intermissions we ask a lot of questions like what do I do with my mic what this story says to me it doesn't mean Mike's a bad guy or has to go what it means is Mike is not the right person in that senior leadership role in finance for your organization as you look to try to go from 20 to $40 million but it it doesn't have to take until you get to $20 million right I mean this can this can happen much earlier in the process absolutely and so that's one of the challenges is when we're entrepreneurs we look at things we can do to reward Mike for his work effort one of the cheapest things we can give is a title and so before long Mike is your CFO but he's really a glorified accountant if at best maybe Mike's just a great guy that that that we trust but he sucks at accounting like Kurt right and he's been working those 100 hour weeks you mentioned he's your friend he's always been a friend he's been loyal he's maybe been the key person in building the business business to where it is to this point what do you do if there isn't another role for him first of all I would say Mike may have a role um it doesn't mean he has to go I ask a few questions is Mike an let's get rid of him he does not fit for the for the organization is he humble enough to realize that he's not the guy in that role going forward okay now we're starting to to get somewhere is he coachable could he be mentored to be the future CFO maybe some people would do that some people might bring in a CFO coach for example to help him get there the challenge with Mike in his existing role is you might still get to that 40 million or whatever that next level step is for you but with Mike not having a coach or not having done this before he's going to learn a lot of lessons the hard way and it's just going to inhibit your growth another uh thing you could do and I've seen this in many cases an example in the book maybe you put Mike back into a individual contributor role like a controller or VP finance and bring in a CFO over him and all all along the way you're honest with him and telling him here's the situation we need to go go fast we have a real Market opportunity in front of us I can't afford to learn all these lessons the hard way but I want you Mike to grow in your career so that when we're through this you're going to be a great CFO whether it's for us when we get to a certain point and we and we can do that or for your next opportunity I want you to grow as much as I want the company to grow how important is it to have an open convers ation with Mike when you first realize that this problem has arisen do you try to deal with it on your own or do you confronted head on well I'm a fan of of and by the way I'm not very good at this I am the best at avoiding some of those difficult conversations few people are very good at it and I'm try to be very clear in this in the book I make a ton of mistakes and and here's just a few of them um with this one I would really encourage you to have some open and honest dialogue with Mike and acknowledge look I realize we're throwing a lot at you you haven't taken a vacation in five years I see the the the efforts and the what you've given up to to make this happen by the way if it's a $2 million company he probably should have taken a vacation during those five years right I mean that was a mistake too that's exactly right on both ends the owner should have insisted exactly but have have that open onon this conversation and say look I'm I'm doing this learning all these things for the for the first time and I'm making mistakes I can't can't afford to have everybody in the organization you know making the same mistakes along the way I need to bring in some folks who have done this before and CFO is usually a great opportunity to do that where we can bring in somebody who's grown a business from 20 to 40 and and implemented all the systems you need in order to scale and again Mike May might be a great individual contributor in accy or maybe he's a great culture fit that could have some other other role we just need to be careful not to move him around into a bunch of roles where he fails at all of them and just becomes a answer in the organization and it really depends on his personality I mean some people can accept a different role and some people are humiliated by it and it's just not going to work exactly right you know and in those situations that means you have to have a really difficult conversation with somebody that you actually care about and who is a good person uh I can't tell you the number of times that yesterday's hero like Mike who was in the Foxhole with you making things happen uh becomes tomorrow's challenge or today's Challenge and it's just a reality of of growing a business and at some point the the leader might have to make a decision what's more important my relationship with Mike or the success of the business and all the other hundred employees that you might have having been through some of those conversations have you learned anything I mean it's never going to be easy it's never going to be fun um is there any way to make it as pleasant as it can be to tell somebody that it's over and it's not going to work man I I don't know that there's any great way Lauren I I think being authentic and and and being honest is the best approach I've made the mistake in the past of buying into the rhetoric of you have a conversation you need to have HR there and a lawyer and papers drawn up and some of that might be true but I sure uh I sure am not proud of myself from a couple conversations I had when I was an employee at at at Tatum all right let's talk about uh another type of employee you have a chapter about Harry The Hustler tell us about Harry and Harry's another great example that you see in almost every entrepreneurial company Harry is a sales guy and by the way not all these characters are guys we have a mix but Harry's a sales guy he he knew your product inside and out and he was the guy that really carried you in the early days while you were focusing on the product or maybe some other customers but but you counted on him to to drive sales and now you're 3 four five years down the road and you realize man I've got to grow and I I can't Harry's one person so I need to add you know several haries I need more Junior harri's but what you really need is to build a sales organization and so when you come to that realization say I need to build a sales process and I need a sales leader and so a lot of us do is we promote Harry the great sales guy into Harry the now sales leader or sales manager and those skills don't always align Harry might be very very good at at relationships and selling but he's not very good at Vision uh processes managing the last thing a real hair he wants to do is be looking over someone's call reports to make sure they're making the right right calls every week so it's just a different skill set and so what happens many times is Harry the great salesperson is now gone because he's in a management leadership role but certainly thereafter Harry's probably gone from that role too because he sucks at it or because he misses being the lead sales guy it's very true so he might go leave your organization for another one or you can perhaps talk him in come back into that individual contributor role without him seeing it as a demotion but more of a here's really where you're best fit now that's it's same thing with Mike it's hard if he's not humble and willing to have that conversation that maybe he's not the sales leader we're talking about a salesperson here TR humble I'm making light of it but it's a serious thing I mean I think salespeople are are different from other employees often times at many companies and part of it is the way they're compensated they're taught to think of themselves first uh rewarded for thinking of themselves first in many cases and maybe that's part of the issue here it is uh now what I I even have an example in the book where Harry is as a manager might make more base compensation but he might have less upside because he's no longer in a in a true sales capacity right what some companies try to do is merge the two Harry we'll have you continue to quote carry a bag or carry a quota while you're also leading but that's just right for for issues when a lead comes in does Harry keep the best ones because he's greedy or because he wants to make sure they're handled properly or it's it's just it can be a mess I've also heard of situations where Harry is allowed to or encouraged to remain the lead salesperson but is frustrated when someone else is brought in as a manager and isn't comfortable reporting to that person then that's that's also very true so what I've seen fail miserably is when someone brings in a sales leader without really having that conversation with Harry so it I think it still comes down to having an authentic conversation I I call it in the book I say trust respect and communication if you got those three things you can do a lot in fact there's a example in the book of a a client of ours who the one of the two Founders is Harry he is a the the great rainmaking business Dev guy when we envisioned with the client this sales leader he of course said I That should be me and he tried it for a few months and then we all had another come you know sit down session and said you know what this is not me uh and we convinced him and and really was the right move go be a great rain maker with the key accounts and with the industry leaders and and the stuff that you are so good at we're going to bring in a sales leader to work with you kind of as your partner you're not going to report to to him or her but you're going to work together maybe coach some of his salespeople as they go it was really a great win-win but it came down to that relationship that the two Founders had to make that happen just as an as side I'm curious have you ever uh experienced a situation where sales people are compensated uh on salary and not on commission I have and and usually they don't work there are some people who swear by it let me just mention this uh Lauren I think it's important to note a lot of the successes and challenges people have around people is is with the people themselves so the reason that might work is because you've got a very motivated person who has the innate skills and you know hardcore wiring to make it work it's not everybody across the board so sure perhaps the failures and challenges I've seen in the past is because we simply had the wrong person in the role one of the other things I like about this book is you're not just describing situations you're offering some guidance and how to do certain things you have a couple sections that you refer to as uh intermissions one is about how you assess your team tell us about that this is really one of my favorite parts and and is really I think so critical to companies who are growing we've worked with companies for so long who are so reactive in their hiring I need that I have an empty seat I need to fill it ASAP and and that's how the recruiting industry typically Works what we learned is we need to sure we need to move quick but we also really need to assess what we currently have what do we need long-term let's build a talent road map as opposed to just knee- jerking we like to ask our clients to Envision where they're going as an organization it might just be something as simple as Revenue you know use that 20 to $40 million number again what are the key initiatives that are going to drive that growth and then what does my team look like today do they have the ability to drive those initiatives and uh the the CFO that I've got today may not be my CFO in order to get to $40 million just as one example and so we we like to ask a few key questions of of the the people on that team that sound super simple but when you put them all together it's it's uh it's pretty powerful the first one is knowing today what what I know about my organization and where we're going would I enthusiastically rehire Mike for example in that role enthusiastically like I really he's the guy that's one question the other question is does Mike have the ability and the tools and the resources to get us to the next level I can imagine somebody confronting this and looking around the office and saying you know what there are a lot of people here who I would not enthusiastically rehire um have you dealt with that situation and and what do you do yeah I mean that's release the mic situation what do I do with mic well what if it's more than one in most entrepreneurial companies if you're really growing rapidly you're going to have more than one what I like to truly do is build a a an org chart with no names like if I'm going to start over and hypothetical I'm going to start over let's get a whiteboard let's figure out what our organization needs to look like what are the skill sets of those people on that org chart need to have and only then do we start thinking of names to put in boxes because if you think of names too quickly too early in that process you're going to get very emotionally driven and I've got to find a spot for Mike for example or for Lauren or for Kurt and so no names in boxes allows us to be a little less emotionally driven my two other questions by the way are as I said simple but powerful number one is what if I had a team of mik's how strong would I be if my entire team was nothing but Mike and some entrepreneurs like I'd love you know Harry The Hustler let's go and some people like oh crap I I would freaking panic and then the other one is is H what if Mike came into your office tomorrow morning and just quit on the spot how would you feel and some cases you're like well I'd be scared because I I I hate change and that's a quick emotional reaction but if you really dug down deep how would you feel if if that headache was gone and many times it's oh my God that would suck for a few weeks but it would be great in the long term your book goes through each of these situations and and there are many other uh types of employees that you deal with types of situations but then you you also have another intermission about how you uh build a great culture and I just wonder it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and just focus on these situations employee by employee situation by situation there's sometimes when you need to step back I think and assess the entire culture and ask you know what have you created here and are there things that need to change how do you mix those two thoughts you know I think uh now is a perfect time to be having those discussions if if five years ago I think a lot of talk around culture was the soft gooey stuff and we don't need that here or just give them a paycheck and and the reality is that both the pandemic and this great resignation we talked about before has made it it really TBL sticks we need to have a a great culture in order to uh not just attract um somebody on the front end but to continue to attract them to stay with you how do you get the word out what's the key step in establishing that culture with your existing Workforce but also with the people that you'd like to hire yeah I I think you're going to need some help and maybe it's an outside resource maybe it's a new hire maybe it's somebody internally but somebody who understands um the importance of of a great culture that can help you make it a reality and before you go and turn this over to your HR team um let me just warn you that's in fact one of my favorite chapters in the book is called HR Roa and the opening quote is uh I hate HR says you know Source every entrepreneur I've ever known why why do entrepreneurs hate HR well the quick version is HR the profession as a whole has has really been brought up to be task Masters to make sure that your payroll and benefits are are right which is absolutely Paramount and you've got to get it right or they get fired but we as entrepreneurs we know that's important but we really want this culture this great place to work this Mission Vision Values all this stuff we hear about that sounds so sexy but the person who is your best Taskmaster to do all the other stuff is not the right person usually to uh be your strategy partner on developing a great culture so that's just a word of warning but if you find the right person to help you execute on the on the great culture it really it's going to start with some reading there's better books than than my book on on pure culture building and it could be as simple as what do we stand for what are we trying to build and then keep asking yourself why are we doing this well why are we doing that and continue with the almost the sixy concept up from uh from Toyota But ultimately figure out why are we in business and why do we matter and that's the basic premise or basic core of the core value work the culture work so you also include in this book an intriguing epilogue that raises the issue what if you're the problem what if the entrepreneur is the problem how do you think about that Kurt well this is from 11 years in the recruiting industry where we can uh deliver the the best and brightest that unicorn so to speak that's going to make your business a a sing but if you are set in your ways and you don't want to be open to uh this this new concept or you don't want to have someone helping you you telling you what to do or helping you build your business oftentimes the the entrepreneur is the problem can't fire him or her exactly the reason it's analog is I initially had when I started out the process of writing the book I had about half and half half chapters around the employee and half around the the entrepreneur and we decided it was clearer cleaner to go do an employee book first but oftentimes we can bring the best and brightest to to work with you but if if you're so screwed up and you're so set in your entrepreneurial ways um they're going to leave you and and it's not because they didn't work out it's because you're a pain in the ass and many entrepreneurs uh fit this mode have you had conversations with those kinds of entrepreneurs and tried to open their eyes and and does it ever work do they ever hear what you're telling them it has worked it has worked and this is the same thing with your mic it comes down to your relationship with them but also their humility and if they're so egotistical that that their doesn't speak pardon my French uh they're not going to be you're not going to be able to have a rational conversation with them about it and we've had several of those but then there's others like yourself Lauren uh I like to think of myself and and many others that I know who are like thank you so much for putting the mirror in front of me now I can I can work on this I've heard things like this in the past from either from uh superiors or maybe maybe my employees or maybe my wife maybe my partner whatever and we can help them shine a light on it so they can get better and get stronger all right the book is called who's your Mike his business is called higher better my thanks to Kurt wilin Kurt I really appreciate you taking the time this has been a lot of fun man Lauren I love the discussion and again I love what you guys are doing with 21 hats I appreciate you saying that thanks so much wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n at21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcast follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by just through Baron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]