Combating “The Great Resignation” by Adapting to Modern Workplace Trends

number one is don't necessarily think that it's all about money. And then if you just pay more and more money, then you're just going to keep getting people because ultimately the person that comes to you solely because it's maximum money is going to be the first person that leaves you because they find money somewhere else.
So it's a little stopgap to give people more money, but it's not sustainable because then you're just going to kill your profit. And you have to find other avenues to stand out than just paying people more dollars.
So number one is find ways where there's performance incentives rather than just like straight dollars that you could give to people and say, hey, if you achieve this, you can make X amount of dollars, but find ways of being creative. It doesn't only have to be salespeople that get performance incentives.
It could be, hey, our business will profit share and we'll give a percentage of the profit. So we're all kind of marching to the same drum and trying to drive the same success.
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.
All right, guys, welcome back to the home service expert. I'm your host, Tommy Mello.
And today I have David Siegel with me. He is an expert in strategic planning, process improvement, business development, entrepreneurship, and brand marketing.
He's

located in New York, New York. He's the CEO of Meetup.
He's also a professor at Columbia. He also was the CEO at Investopedia.
So Meetup, former CEO of Investopedia. He has over 20 years of experience of technology and digital media, executive leading organizations through innovation, product development,

rapid revenue growth, and digital traffic acceleration.

He hosts the podcast, Keep Connected, which is dedicated to the power of the community.

David's book, Decide and Conquer, lays out the framework of decision-making for leaders

that can use to ensure organizational and personal success.

Congratulations on your new book, David.

Thank you.

It's a labor of love.

Just gave birth to a park.

Very exciting.

Yeah.

Tell me a little bit about the decision-making process.

And I want to go over a lot of your history, what you're doing now and why.

You know, this is a lot of home service businesses, why they should be listening.

So I'll let you kind of take the floor.

Tell us about your life, your book, your teaching at Columbia, the past, where you're going, and how this applies to home service. Woo! Okay.
I'll start off with, I started my career in human resources, which is pretty not common for someone to go from human resources to becoming a CEO. And in reality, though, in human resources, what are the things you focus on?

Focus on hiring great people. You're focusing on building management processes.
You focus on training people. You focus on building the right structure and processes to help people to succeed.
And if you're a small, medium-sized business owner, who you hire, focusing on who and then what you do is just of tremendous importance. So I really subscribe to the first who then what concept that Jim Collins had talked about in Good to Great.
Yep. I think for anyone in this home improvement space, that's kind of startup number one is to figure that out.
The second thing that I'm a huge subscriber in of is Eric Rice's lean startup approach and building a minimum viable product. It's oftentimes, if you're in the home service industry, you're a service provider.
And it's very important to do a A-plus level job at all times. But it's also important to innovate and try new things.
Sometimes there's a fear of trying something new, trying a different approach, trying a different technology, a different product, because you're afraid that it'll lead to a mistake. But the reality is then you're not going to be able to grow.
You're not going to be able to learn. You're not going to be able to kind of get better.
And it's just so important to make those mistakes, to fess up to a mistake,

to acknowledge potentially that we need to fix something and we need to address it. But by finding ways to learn from experiences you had, it's very important.
And in the book, of course, I talk about tons and tons of different mistakes that I made throughout my career and how you learn from those mistakes. And now I could go on and on about lots of different other topics, but let's just say that the other principle that I talk about a lot when it comes to decision-making is the importance of disagreement, the importance of surrounding yourself by people who disagree with you, who have a different approach than you do.
And not just having like the beer test, which is like, do I want to have a beer with this person, be the basis for who I want to hire, but having people that take a totally different perspective than you might have. And that leads to tension and no one in home improvement or any small, medium-sized business or any practitioner likes tension.
But through that tension, a lot of times better decisions get made because then you have someone that might disagree with you just like when handling decisions around your one's kids or one's family that disagreement is actually helpful in making smarter decisions i completely agree with you and i will say that i've always hired people that are opposite than me one of the things we try to do is private equity companies really do this well is you do personality profile whether it, whether it's the predictive index, disk assessments, there's probably 20 of them that I've taken. Lots and lots of good stuff.
There's the color one. And also when the tests do well and you get people that are on different spectrums of the quadrant, what happens is it really evens up the playing field.
And what a lot of times you'll find is when investors, whether it's private capital comes in, private equity comes in, capital venture organizations, what happens is they'll find the weakness in your company and then they'll add that and it'll blow up. It'll go leaps and bounds.
And all I ask is when people want to come with me is that you've done your diligence. You've done your research.
Don't disagree without an answer. Don't come to me and say, this doesn't work without doing your research because as a CEO or a president or whatever, an owner, a founder, well, let's brainstorm together and find out why.
We don't have time for that, especially when we hit a certain size, you know? So I would say I agree with that wholeheartedly. And disagreement's good as long as we don't live in that field.
There's a great book called Fierce Conversations. And I was in an interview with a guy last week, actually, that was a business assessment for home services.
He interviewed 2,000 companies. And he said, there's three facts that I'll tell you what make a great company.
They know the future, meaning they've got a plan, they've got a budget, they see exactly their KPIs, where they need to be with standard operating procedures, what goals they need to hit by when, conversion rates, average tickets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Number two, they're a magnet for great employees.
And number three, this one's huge, is they have the ability to have really tough conversations. And sometimes that big dude with the beard with all the tats doesn't have the tough conversations.
So I think you make a great point. Let's dive into that a little bit because a lot of people aren't willing to do that.
And a lot of them think they're going to lose their best guys if they do or their best DSRs or whoever. I would love to.
So one of the principles as well around decision-making that I like to talk about a lot, exactly directly to what you said, Tommy, there's a difference between being kind and being nice. People think it's not nice to give constructive feedback.
It's not nice to fire someone if they need to move on to do something else. And they're right.
It may not be nice. It might make someone feel bad.
But your goal as a leader is not to avoid confrontation. It's not to avoid having people feel bad.
The goal is to be kind to people. And the kindest thing you could do to someone is to give them constructive feedback, is to tell them, here's the thing that you need to focus on.
And here's the implication. If you don't, providing that clarity is helpful for people because then they understand where they're at.
And too often people shy away from that. So one of our big principles at Meetup and generally is just trust and transparency.
Be as transparent and honest as you can. And ultimately better decisions get made because oftentimes people make a poor decision because they don't have the information in front of them to make the decision.
And if you're as transparent as you can be and you help other people to know as much information as you know, then ultimately you're going to make smarter decisions around it. So find a way to understand that the kindest thing you could do is sometimes to make someone feel uncomfortable, just like you said.
Well, there's a good balance there, but I don't really love decisions by committee either to a certain extent because it's slow and i hate slow listen i'm on a speedboat here and there's a lot of people that it's like oh my god if somebody comes to me and says we'll get to you next month on that i'm like i need that by the end of the day because that's bullshit so how do you stop from getting into everything being well see what everybody thinks. I mean, look, what's the way to fast track that bullshit? Okay.
I love it. Okay.
So democracy is one of the worst forms of leadership. It's wimpy.
It's wimpy leadership. Let's take a vote about what we should do.
No, it's not about taking a vote. You're a leader.
You need to make a decision. You need to get informed quickly.
You need to make a decision. So how do you do things? So number one is I'm a deep believer in forcing mechanisms, saying basically, hey, X person, you have 24 hours to get back to me with a decision.
If I don't get a decision from you within 24 hours, then I'm going to make the decision. I'd rather you make this decision, but you have 24 hours to make it.
So forcing a certain time period of when a decision needs to get made is very important because inertia is real. And people are just afraid of making decisions.
There's a quote by Teddy Roosevelt that gets exactly what you said, which is the best decision is a good decision. The second best decision is a bad decision.
And the worst decision is no decision. And people don't appreciate the fact that when you're not making a decision, it's actually making a decision.
And usually it's making the wrong decision, the worst decision is making a bad decision to do that. So things you need to do, forcing mechanisms, giving timeframes for decisions, saying that you're going to end up making a decision if someone doesn't do so.
Yep. All of those are really important.
And just recognizing the fact that time is money and time is precious. And a lot of times you lose out on opportunities by not making quick decisions.
So speed of decision-making is very critical towards future success. You know, when I was in my MBA, I probably learned enough to get nothing.
I literally learned how to network, but there was one thing I'll tell you. I learned about Robert Chardini, which I was really a big fan of it, the book influence and the psychological stuff he teaches on sales.
But I also learned the speed of implementation is the key. People that sit down stuff, they marinate and it just doesn't move quick.
Here's the one thing I find, David, is they don't control their calendar. They don't know how to prioritize.
And they suck at delegation. They're horrible at it.
So those three things, they say, man, I worked my ass off today. I put in 12 hours.
That's actually a negative. Well, yeah, because they didn't get anything done.
Yeah, people champion the fact they're working really hard. Well, the reason why you're working so hard is because you're so disorganized, like you said, and you're not effectively delegating.
So the things aren't getting done the right way. So it's not about working hard.
It's about understanding that you should be spending your time doing the most important things, which is moving the company faster. And that's how good options and good opportunities happen.
I agree with you completely. So you've run, um, you know, a vestopedia, a massive company, meet meetup.com what do you say with someone when the deadlines just are like no do you be proactive and set the deadlines for them or do you let them kind of report to you and say you need to do better because steve jobs best question was i think we can do better than this what can we do and he just kept asking asking asking he let them come to the answers that approach.
Yeah, no, the Socratic method, I frequently will say, when will you be able to get this done by? And oftentimes I'm surprised that they give a date that's actually faster than I would have even given. And sometimes I'll say, you know what, actually, why don't you give it to me the day after that? Because I want to be able to have in my back pocket sometimes where I need to say, Hey, I need you this tomorrow.
So I want to be as balanced as I can. And they're like, Oh, thank you for the extra time.
So I always ask it. And then if they give me a date, that's like, I'll get back to you in three weeks.
I'm like, okay, let me give you the context and the why of why we need to get this earlier. If you don't provide the why, then you're not going to end up getting aligned on why it's so important.
So if you say to someone, the reason why we need to get this done now is because we have a cashflow issue. The reason why we need to get this done now is because they're going to bid this out to another contractor shortly.
Give the why, and then you're on the same page. And then oftentimes good things happen.
It's that people don't have what I like to call asymmetrical access to information. Some people have access to certain information.
Other people don't have access to that information. Give the why, and then usually you're going to actually be a lot more aligned.
So, L.A.B. put these together, and I did a couple of things to them, but here's what needs to get done, and you write it out.
Here's why it needs to get done. Here's what you have available to get it done.
Here's the priority. Here's the date it needs to be done by.
Here's the schedule that we're going to check up on the progress. Here's the consequences and awards if it does.
Here's the opportunity to give feedback. And you got to sign up on it.
And each of us get a copy. Boom.
And I want you to repeat it back to me too, so I know you understand it. But when you have to sign on it, people are like, wait a minute.
What am I signing here? It's so weird when they got to sign a name with a pen instead a docu sign. I love that.
First of all, I love that. The other thing, similar to what you said in the signing, is documenting these things on a piece of paper.
Too often times, people have a conversation saying all the stuff that you just said. It's like a conversation.
And you know what happens after the conversation? Both people remember completely different things. Exactly.
There's no substantiation for it. So what's so important, the documentation of what we just agreed upon in a conversation

is critical because then afterwards you go back and be like, dude, I just wrote this

email to you.

It said exactly what we said.

You had an opportunity to say that's not what we said, but you didn't.

So it just forces alignment.

And it's amazing to me how frequently when you don't have that documentation or that

physical signing, there's total misalignment. And the two people remember completely different things in a conversation.
Very important. You know, right now, the company's growing.
We're really headed for some big, big, big numbers in the hundreds of millions. And I never had formal training to be a CEO.
I'm learning a lot more about financials. I'm learning about people coming to me with solutions.
I used to be the problem solver. I was the firefighter, the problem solver.
And with your experience being a CEO, if you had to prioritize three things as you grew and you started to build the right team, the right CFO, COO, CMO, the head of HR, when you built your team, and I think that's probably the core, right? Building the right team around you, especially hiring for your weaknesses. What are some of the core things that you would say? And I don't care if it's three or five things, but what would you say you've learned over the years to really be the best you could be? Yeah.
Number one, by far, is what I'm going to say is culture. Building the company culture of what you want the company to represent and how it makes decisions and type of people that you hire and the type of way that you do business and the service that you're providing needs to be priority number one for any CEO and for any leader.
Are we a culture that takes risks and that moves quickly? Are we a culture that is going to be more thoughtful, take much longer time, and possibly make fewer mistakes?

Are we a culture that rewards people that are going to ask for forgiveness later on?

Or are we a culture that says, what the hell are you doing?

Why'd you go out of your bounds and go back to what your job is supposed to be?

You need to figure out what the culture is.

And you need to actually, we talk about documentation, document what the core values are.

It sounds like business speaky,

but it's just works of that culture that you represent,

which would be what you are

and what you ultimately want to be.

So for example, we have six values at Meetup

and we embed those values.

It's just some freaking thing on a wall,

like a Walmart wall or whatever it is.

Every single thing that we do,

when we recruit people,

we evaluate them relative to the values. When we review people on an annual basis for compensation, we review people relative to those values.
We provide feedback. We give awards out to people based on different values that we have.
We have a step-up award. One of our values is stepping up and doing things that aren't part of your job as a value.
And if someone then steps up, does something that's not part of their job and makes a mistake, we don't say, what the hell are you doing? We say, you know what? That's one of our values. We recognize that there's some risk in doing so and risk comes reward.
And we recognize that. And we see that it's two sides of the same coin.
We're not going to just penalize you for the negative outcome. We're going to reward you for having made that effort in the first place.
You know, it's interesting because I've got a consultant that comes in and we used to write people up and he's like, if they make a mistake, you write them up. And I think our leadership was like, yeah.
And he talked about a company he went that made these things called power blankets. And he said, we award people to find mistakes.
We award people to find holes. We literally give them gift cards if they make a mistake and come up with a solution for it.
And our productivity went up 700% the first year when we did that. Isn't that nuts? It's beautiful.
It's beautiful because the role of a company, a startup in particular, is learning and maximizing your learnings as much as possible. If you're afraid to make mistakes, you're afraid to take action, you're not going to learn and you're not going to get better.
The goal is to grow, provide better and better services, better and better products. And that comes from being bold and taking risks.
And that inevitable result of that is making those mistakes. So you want to reward that.
And an example I'll give you actually, in the early days of Facebook, Martin Zuckerberg hired an intern. The intern took a specific, just put some code in, found there was a hole in the system and it took Facebook down.
Now, normally a state would be like, what the hell are you doing? You're fired. Get out of here.
Instead, he said, thank you for finding the problem that we had in our code. Because if you hadn't done that, someone else would have.
And that mistake was incredibly valuable to actually making Facebook a lot more secure. So while it's painful and those things suck when they happen, oftentimes they're very good opportunities because someone else will make the same mistake.
And now they can learn from those mistakes from other people too. You know, every time I find out, it's crazy when you really get into the numbers and you say, oh my gosh, if we did this differently, we could be saving $80 per door.
I get excited. I go, that changes the future.
The past is done. If we find a big mistake, I'm like, let's fix it.
There was a hole in the boat. It's patched now.
Some of the people go, oh my God, how much money did we lose? lose they can't sleep and they're just thinking they live in the past and it's just not the way to live so talk to me about we work a little bit we work sure they had a lot of different people coming to him from the home services industry that's for sure different buildings so we work hired me as the first outside ceo for thisup, that I'm the leader of. And I had some really interesting experiences interviewing with Adam Neumann.
When you read the books or you see We Crash, which is the new Apple show that came out or any other documentaries, a lot of it is true. A lot of it's true around his personality, his charisma, his decision-making processes.
And it was a crazy culture to be a part of. It was a culture that prioritized growth over customer service.
It was a culture that provided growth at all costs. And ultimately, it was kind of like a house of cards, quote unquote, where a $47 billion valuation ended up shrinking to the 5 billion valuation that it has right now.
85% plus decrease in value for WeWork than when it originally started. And it was very much at cultural odds with Meetup as well.
They were about growth, growth, growth. We were about building a mission and doing something that for us was curing the loneliness epidemic and helping people to build community at Meetup.
And WeWork was really just about driving revenue growth as fast as possible. So it was a serious culture clash.
You know, it's interesting. That's what happened with Boeing.
You know, they were just trying to buy as many chairs back and raise the stock. And what happened was, is they weren't able to engineer to compete with the Airbus.
And so what they did is they took they took the 747 or whatever and they put the engines closer and built an algorithm in the nose that it keeps keeping the nose down and hence the casualties so i love aggressive growth and i'm a growth guy i love having people around me that pump the brakes that i trust exactly that's why you have to surround yourself by those people and have people that do pump the brakes. You have to build growth with stable infrastructure.
You have to build infrastructure and build process and build support. People hate that because it sounds so bureaucratic and who the hell wants to be part of process.
But you know what? If you don't have that infrastructure and process and you try to keep growing, it leads to chaos and it leads to failing and wasting and losing a lot of money. You know, I hate learning the deep part of like a CRM because I'm like, I want to see the new stuff and I'm going to pretend like I'm a 10 year old 3.0 B average student.
I'm not, I don't know anything about this. I want to look at it and figure it out.
And if I can't figure it out in less than a half an hour, then you failed because here's the deal. I'm not going to write a pivot table.
I read a lot of books, but here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stay out of it, out of the deep stuff.
And I want to be able to look at it and just go, okay, this makes sense. The training makes sense.
It's easy. It's the old Michael Gerber e-myth, keep it simple, Simon, and just keep it super relative that if I look, when I look at all my reports, we looked at a report, I got a new CFO.
We looked at a report last week and I said, man, this is genius stuff. I said, can you put it in a bar chart? I just put least the greatest and then make sure I can click on the ones that are losing so I can get a more in depth.
And he goes, yeah, but it's pretty self-explanatory. I go, yeah, but I want a 10 year old.
I want to be able to look at it and go, oh, these are not doing good. These are congratulations.
Let's dig in here. Then let's dig in.
Let's dig in. Let's peel the onion a few times.
And I think he's probably like, well, you're a smart enough guy. Figure it out.
And I'm like, no, I want to make sure that everybody, it's just this most simple, torn down. If a young dude walks in, just he goes, oh, they're losing.
They're winning. Let's look into this.
Yeah. Green, red, green, red, yellow.
Yes. It's so important.
And that's an example where you're building the reporting and you're building these processes and operations to enable you to grow. Because if you don't know the greens, the yellows, and the red, how do you know what to focus on as you keep growing? So it's exactly the right thing to be doing, to build that infrastructure.
And a lot of founders are like, who the hell wants to do that? That's boring. You know what? If success is boring to you, then don't do it.
That's how important it is.

Well, McDonald's is simple. I love the movie The Founders with Ray Kroc, where they're just

sitting there trying to figure out, okay, you got three pickles, and then you got just enough

to put the secret sauce. Everything they did was just super simple.
And it's the vanilla that

creates the success. Very rare do you come up with a Tesla, right? There's a lot of R&D.
I think people think they need to be so different than everybody. What you need to do is get the system so dialed in to where, right now we're working on a training program.
And I said, I want to take two guys for the whole customer experience, the whole journey, And I want to separate them into the separate rooms.

And I'm going to take a video camera.

And I want to watch how they're standing, their eye contact,

when they laugh, when they play with the dog,

what they looked at, what they said,

exactly to the T to the phrase.

And I want it to be identical.

And I want to watch them and feel like it's a mirror.

And they said, well, don't you want them to make it their own?

And I said, hell no, don't make it your own.

Yes, you talk to customers.

Maybe you want to talk about kids or Harley. You can make that piece your own chitter-chatter side talk.
And that's when you become friends. But to say, make this your own and use your own words, these words work.
They're guaranteed to work. You never say contract.
You say agreement. Yeah.
Expect what you inspect. Well, I guess it could go both ways, but isn't it inspect what you expect? Yeah, I say you should expect to happen what you actually are inspecting.
So expect what you inspect, right?

If you inspect it, then you should expect that it's going to happen. If you don't inspect it, if you don't know the details, don't expect it's going to happen because it ain't going to happen.
Yes.

So totally.

So you're building that process is really, really important and making sure that there's

reporting around it.

And that's not sexy, but that's what you got to do in order to scale. And the thing that I like to think about is imagine I'm not there.
I want to provide as little value as possible. I want to be as unimportant.
If there's a great process and there's a way of doing something, then I don't need to be in the details. I don't need to be looking at everything because the process then takes care of it and the process takes care of it.
So I like to think, how can I make myself as unnecessary as possible? And that's usually a good basis for leadership because a leader who's constantly having to be necessary and intervene and intervene, they may not have the right people. They may not have the right processes.
They may not have the right infrastructure. Or they might just be a control freak.
This is everybody's drum except for me. No one wants to work for someone like that either.
I think you talked to Good to Gray, but built to last, he talks about those leaders that say, when I'm gone, watch how bad this place is going to be. Yeah.
Yeah. That's not the leader that you want to be.
Exactly.

You know,

I always tell people you're lucky if you have a building like a restaurant because you can manage within the walls.

But for me,

home service is tough.

So some of the things I look at is net promoter score,

secret shoppers,

gamification.

And what happens is we really do measure a lot of things.

And at what point do we have people are like,

watch these KPIs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've got four monitors here, but when they're looking and it's like, holy crap, I think maybe five KPIs is where you want to be.
What do you think the perfect amount should be? It goes down to simplicity. Like you said, people die more of indigestion than starvation.
Meaning you have too much information that you have access to. And you just see it.
It's just a host of like just vomit on a screen. And you don't know what the hell to do with it.
So yeah, I am a deep believer. So as our company, we're a big complex company.
We only have three KPIs. We have three objectives and that's it.
That's what we focus on. And you just got to pull it back and peel it back and peel it back.
Now for each one of them, there's ways of understanding it better and digging into it further for each one of them and breaking it apart. But you want to have as few KPIs as possible.
Yeah. Three to five is the ideal number.
But if you're looking at a dashboard with like 60 different things on them, that's not really helpful because some things are always going to be red, some things are green. And your job as a leader is to know these are the things that I should really be caring about.
And these are things that are a lot less important. By the way, you mentioned net promoter score.
Net promoter score oftentimes should be one of them. There's been too many different studies that has shown the power of a net promoter score.
And simply asking the question of, would you refer us to a friend is shown to be one of the best bases for future success. Yeah, I think the net promoter score is probably a little bit over a lot of the 5 million and under, maybe even 10 million and under home service companies.
I tell them, you know what sucks about most software is we got to choose between getting the net promoter score or getting a review. You don't want to ask the customer to get the net promoter score, then ask them to do a review.
So it's like, I want both. So you got to pay attention.
And hopefully you've got some type of full circle loop that shows you the review you get. And hopefully if they're a five-star, you see a promoter's a nine or a 10.
Unfortunately, reviews are five-star. So really the only promoter would be a five-star.
A four-star would be an eight. So they're just kind of neutral.
It's pretty interesting to think about that. Yeah.
So you do one and then the other, and then that way you can hopefully potentially get both. You know what? I like that idea.
I like alternating up. So, you know, we've got this thing called the great resignation going on.
It's like, I think the culture is what's been driving our success. The fact that we don't look for trained people, we bring people in.
We hire for attitude. There's an ideal team player.
We look for three things. We've got all these core values, but the ideal team player is hungry, humble, and they're smart with people smart.
They don't need to be like a genius mentally. But right now it's a tough time with the pandemic just kind of ending here.
And just there's so many more people hiring than there are people working. What's the deal? What do we do? Okay, so number one is don't necessarily think that it's all about money.
And then if you just pay more and more money, then you're just going to keep getting people. Because ultimately the person that comes to you solely because it's maximum money is going to be the first person that leaves you because they find money somewhere else.
So it's a little stopgap to give people more money, but it's not sustainable because then you're just going to kill your profit. And you have to find other avenues to stand out than just paying people more dollars.
So number one is find ways where there's performance incentives rather than just like straight dollars that you could give to people and say, hey, if you achieve this, you can make X amount of dollars, but find ways of being creative. It doesn't only have to be salespeople that get performance incentives.
It could be our business will profit share and we'll give a percentage of the profit. So we're all kind of marching to the same drum and trying to drive the same success.
So find creative ways of getting people excited. Talk about the training that you have in the organization.
You have to have the compensation. I'm not saying compensation doesn't matter.
I'm just saying that if it's all about compensation, then that person is going to leave quickly as well. You have to have other things surrounding it.
And, you know, four and a half million people are quitting their jobs every single month in the United States right now. The Great Resignation is real and it's really hard to keep good people because of that because there's so many opportunities for them.
So actually, one thing that we've done at Meetup, which is kind of crazy, but I'll share it with others here, is called the stay interview.

We will actually interview someone and say, what is going to keep you here for the next six to 12 months? People are afraid to do that because we don't want to put in their heads that like, oh, maybe I should leave. Everyone's already thinking maybe I should leave.
So get over it. Like 87% of people I heard they they would take another offer.
They're not extremely happy. Exactly.
So have that stay interview and say, okay. And sometimes you're giving them an opportunity to share.
Oh, you know what? I am unsatisfied with working conditions. I'm unsatisfied with the days that I'm working.
Whatever the issue happens to be, because people are oftentimes reluctant to share that they're unhappy until they're like, bye, I'm leaving. Like, damn it.
I wish you just told me beforehand. So create an environment where you're getting to the challenges that people are having first before they just walk out the door and it's too late.
Here's what I say. You remember foil when you were in school? I did.
First, outer, and the last. Yeah, exactly.
There's an order of operations here. And I think most people are saying that are listening is, i'm not interviewing my people because they know they all want to leave so first things first is build the culture people say i can't afford that i say you ever heard of bisquick you know how to make pancakes do you know how to make just just buy somebody some coffee stop at dunkin donuts just tell them you appreciate it you know there's five love languages of the office space or whatever it is.
And I've got a bunch of copies. And it's interesting, just acknowledging people, having an employee of the month, smiling.
There's this video I saw. When you go to a restaurant, you go get your ticket validated.
So this video came out 13 years ago called Validated. And this guy standing there, there's a mile long and they're like, what? aren't even doing business there because he'd say that's a great suit that makes you look sharp and so everybody's going there to get validated and he'd stamp their ticket and it's so crazy these simple things like validation smiling an opportunity to move up in the company picnics you know we hired a dream manager have you ever heard of a dream manager i did not so our dream manager is working right now with 62 people and her job her full-time job is to work with these people to help right now she's working on 100 dreams there's 12 different subjects they need to come up with 100 dreams and our goal is to help them accomplish their dreams wow oh it's a book and that is definitely a i've never heard of that that is awesome but it speaks to like you're not just shoving money down them you're helping them to get to the career goals that they want helping them to get to things that they aspire to and help them to learn more about themselves in terms of understanding their dreams that's what's going to retain people what are your dreams they don't think about their dreams you know this dream manager book let me just give you a little synopsis i want to dive deep dive and ask you a bunch more questions, but there's this janitorial service.

And this one happened to be mostly Hispanic workers.

And the guy said, man, we're losing people every single month.

Like, it's horrible.

We got to figure this out.

So the manager said, I got an idea.

Let's put on a survey.

Let's find out what our people want.

Let's find out why they're quitting.

And they, of course, thought it was the pay.

The number one problem was the workers had a hard time getting to work. So they started a really nice carpool service.
That was a big solution. Number two, they said, what else? They were like, holy crap, this is working.
The attrition rates were just getting better and better as far as not losing people. And so they said, what else can we do? And then they found out these people wanted to learn English you know they said we'd love to have an opportunity to learn english so they started teaching english and then they said we want our kids to come learn english and have an opportunity to learn these things well all of a sudden this thing turned into a whole program called the dream manager and you know i think a lot of us and i always refer to everybody that works under me as my co-workers i think lot of the coworkers here, they don't have the opportunity to dream.
They stopped dreaming a long time ago. They were dreaming to be an astronaut or a doctor or something.
They lost their imagination. And it's as simple as who's somebody special to you.
When's the last time you thought about going fishing with them for a three-day weekend? And when you could bring people back to say, listen, I know David, I know this is tough. We're putting a lot of stress on you.
So here's the deal. We'll give you the day off, but I want you to really think about some of these things we're working on together because my goal as your coach is to get you this trip with your dad.
It's to put your kids in this private school. It's to do exactly what you dreamt of.
And we're on the same page together. So here's what I'm going to do.
If you got a will, I'm going to find a way to make it happen for you. Do you think that helps motivate you a little bit more? I mean, that is beautiful.
And the key thing that you said, many different things said, but the one that resonated the most with me is understanding that many people have different dreams. And your job as a manager is to understand what the goal is and what the dream is of each of those people.
And then try to find a way to be on the same side of the table with your arm proverbially around that person, not on the opposite sides. You're on the same side or on the person.
We have the same goal together. I'm going to help you to accomplish that goal.
So I've got a whiteboard right here, you know, just sitting directly next to the person. Yes.
And let's just go through some of this. As opposed to like, so I don't take any meetings ever at a desk with the other person, the opposite.
I just, it's adversarial. It's adversarial.
I want to be on the same side of the person and say, the goal is we're on the same side to accomplish this together. And it just breaks down everything, all defensiveness.
Because what happens is people get defensive all the time. You want to break that defensiveness down and say, we're together to accomplish this.
And then great things happen. So what I like to do, David, is I like to have them present to me.
And this is something I've been really working on. And I'm really far from even coming close to even a novice at this.
But present to me where we were at last week, what we discussed,

where you're at, what you're working on. And let's go through what we discussed.
And you tell me,

because I've got the numbers. You've got the numbers.
I've got my own assumptions. And I hate

to assume. So let's go through these.
And then they'll tell you, I let you down. I know I need

to do a ride along with this person. And they're almost like, I had a guy 17th worth in the company.

That's what he said. hate to assume so let's go through these and then they'll tell you you know i let you down i know i need to do a ride along with this person and they're almost like i had a guy 17th worth in the company that's he texts me you know we're very competitive here so we can't we got a number by their name each month we change it because i'm embarrassed to even show up there he goes i'm so sorry i let you down i go dude i called him last night as i'm walking the dog i said you didn't let me down the fact is that you care enough to text me means a lot number two is let's do better i said well how many doors are you selling a week he goes at least one i said if you were at four doors a week and i said is there a mental block there for you and he goes well what if they don't need a door i go a lot of people don't need anything they want it i go i want nice things my hot water heater was giving me a little bit of a The guy said, Hey, it'll be $80 to fix.
But have you ever thought about a tankless? I said, I want that. Give me the tankless.
I mean, these people that say I don't sell anything nobody needs. And I'm like, whatever.
Well, it's a way to stay 17. That's the problem, right? But as you said, it sounds like he has the heart.
He doesn't necessarily have the capability yet and your job is to be a coach coach and coach them on how they could get to the next level and that's what people need that people need that and people do be held accountable to that coaching and if you see yourself as just a punisher you know that's not the way you see yourself as a coach to people you know that's a different positive you're 100 i think a manager and I think asshole, I think of the office, the coffee. Yeah.
So what are some of the tools used in your company for employee monitoring and analytics? Yeah, sure. So we're obsessed with our employee engagement survey that we do four times a year.
Many companies use employee engagement survey. Once a year, we do it four times a year.
And we treat our employees like our customers. And that's really important.
Just like you would do a customer survey and get customer feedback around a whole bunch of different dimensions around your product or service. We say our employees are our customers.
So we have a litany of different questions that we ask. And the key questions that we ask though, is similar actually to the net promoter score that we referenced earlier.
Do you see yourself working at this company in six to 12 months or not? You know, how strongly have you looked to interview? And it's all anonymous because we need to be anonymous because we need people to be as open and honest as possible. But what's cool is actually the technology that we use, which is something called Lattice, is our HR person.
And most people don't know about HR people, but we're actually able to see a comment that comes in that could be concerning or whatever. We don't know who it comes from, but allows us to respond to that comment back to the person.
People see the response, but we don't know who it is. And that way we can actually respond back to people anonymously.
And that helps people feel comfortable in sharing feedback. And then what we do is we say, okay, not one of the 20 themes or 30 themes, too many.
Keep it simple, right? What are the three most important themes that we're seeing across the company that we need to really address. So for us, it was burnout.
There's burnout because of the pandemic. It was burnout of people feeling just personal psychological challenges.
So we said, okay, we're going to give every, we're saving money in real estate because we don't have an office, et cetera, during this time. We're going to give every person $60 a month.
You can use it for yoga, use it for a massage, use it for Yankee tickets, whatever the heck you need to do to feel better. Use it for that.
And we want to invest in you. And we have all these different things that we do to help with people's wellness because the pandemic was really tough for so many different people.
So that was an example of an area that we invested in because of that survey that we've used. You know, hard times make strong people.
That's all I got to say. And I'll tell you what, I can't wipe your butt forever.
I'm kind of an asshole when it comes to this stuff because literally I know people went through a lot, but one of the questions that you probably ask is on a scale from one to 10, how good looking is the CEO? I get that all the time. And it's like 12 or 13.
It's like crazy. Yeah.
So decide and conquer 44 decisions that will make or break all leaders. Why did you decide to write it? Tell me a little bit.
I've got amazing questions here. And I want to get back to these because you wrote a book and this is your fourth podcast today.
Tell me a little bit about it. I've always been obsessed with decision-making.
If I think about what is one of the most important things in your personal life and also in your work life, it's like making smart decisions. And we make thousands of decisions like every single day.
People don't even realize how many decisions that they're making. And there's a quote that is just really powerful around making smart decisions, which we talked about earlier.
And I've been obsessed with it, but I didn't want to write one of these boring decision-making books because there's a million kind of boring textbooks out there. But then WeWork was such an insane experience of being part of Adam Neumann and being part of the crazy story of WeWork's kind of downfall and challenge and running Meetup when you couldn't actually meet up in person, which is exactly what we do as a business.
We have 100,000 meetup events a day and we couldn't do that during the pandemic. It made for such kind of great, crazy stories that a book kind of just came out of me.
And in two months, I wrote 75,000 words. 75,000 in two months.
Yeah. Two months, 75,000.
Just woke up at like five, five 30 before I would have started work, pounded it out. It was a total mess.
And then someone introduced me to a publisher. Normally people, they write like an introduction and they get a book agent and they pass around to a hundred different book agents.
And then the book agents goes to the publishers got to go around the system, forget the system, throw the system system in the garbage and instead just kind of create your opportunity for yourself. So I went to one publisher, a publisher read it, and it's like, damn, this is actually really entertaining.
And it's also really helpful in terms of some of these kind of principles around making smarter decisions. Things that we've talked about.
Things like how important disagreement is, how important it is to be bold in decision making, how important it is to be speedy when you're making decisions, how important it is to be honest because your reputation matters. And if you're dishonest, then people are going to know about it.
People will find out about it. There's a lot of transparency out there.
It's been a really meaningful experience. When you get a LinkedIn message in India saying, just read your book and here was why it was so helpful to me it's been a really meaningful experience.
When you get a LinkedIn message, you know, someone say in India saying, just write your book. And here was why it was so helpful to me.
It's like, you don't even know who these people are. It's pretty fun.
I'm glad I met you. And I'm glad you're on the podcast.
You know, one of the things that I realized about myself is I've got a president who, when we hire somebody, he has them interview me because I'm such a strong founder. I'm an entrepreneur.
I work weekends. I work nights.
I've got a lot of ideas. So he says, if you might want to meet Tommy before you take the job, because he's a little cuckoo, he's got high energy.
He's always in your face. And what I realized is when they interview me, they accept me and we get a great relationship because I tell you what's coming ahead of time.
And when they don't like that, he'll usually screen them out. He'll be like, this person is

like a nine to five or they're great. They're intelligent.
They're going to move the company

forward, but they're not you. Because I think you'd hit it nailed on the head.
I wrote it back

here. We're, we are risky.
We are moving quickly and we do make mistakes. But one of the things I

tell people, they go, why are you so successful? I go, well, two reasons. I take a lot of chances.

is key. We are moving quickly and we do make mistakes.
But one of the things I tell people, they go, why are you so successful? I go, well, two reasons. I take a lot of chances, calculated chances.
And number two, I'm the biggest failure you'll ever meet. I literally think I'm probably one of the biggest failures in life, but I don't make the same failure twice.
That's the key. Just keep learning from them, making those mistakes.
And the people are afraid. There's so much fear and anxiety out there.
And I know you don't like dealing with it. I don't like dealing with it.
But unfortunately, so many people are so fearful and just say to them, the problem is once you make a lot of mistakes like we have in failures, you're less fearful because you see what happened. It's okay.
We survive. We're thriving.
We're doing great. It's all okay.
Give it to me. I don't care.
Literally people are like, oh no, we no we're not ready yet i'm like how do you define ready you're never ready you're never and i gotta tell you i scare the shit out of people i go you know what let's compromise we'll go a little bit less strong as i'd like to but here's what's crazy is i see what's happening right now we're basically constructing the speed boat this battleship and it is different it's a battleship and a speed boat all in one and as it comes together as we're building and i'm like there's going to be a time that my life is just shaking hands and going to meeting people and buying as many companies as possible probably three to five a month and when that happens it turns into that's the hard part is do you take cultures? And first thing you want to do is tell them how they all won and how this is going to be amazing. And you get some testimonials, but when you're mixing that much and it's aggressive because I'm aggressive, I got to tell you, people think I'm nuts, but what do you do in that case? It's a really, really important question.
And here's my answer. I'll tell you a story.
The story is that a company acquired another company and the CEO stood up, you know, big charismatic CEO, just like you. And he stood up and he said, let me tell you all about the synergies of how this is going to happen and this is going to happen.
Let me tell you about how we're going to end up building the best products. he said look at all these great things that are going to happen after we acquire this company together and the person in the back raised their hand who has a question this question person back raised their hand and says does your medical benefits cover chiropractory or not the reality is is that after an acquisition there's whiff them what's in it for me people like care about it directly impacts their life.
So when you're going out there and you're going to acquire three companies, five companies, 10 companies, people only care about their self-interest of how is my day-to-day and my life going to change. And they could crystal clear with no ambiguity, here is what's going to be better.
And you know what? Here's some things that might not be as good. And I want you to have full clarity around that so that there's no surprises.
One of the most important principles in leadership management, especially as you keep moving up, is a no surprise philosophy. And because you're so blunt and you're so clear, you know how it's terrible and how frustrated you are when you're surprised by your people.
You want to avoid those surprises. So your job is also not to surprise others.
And that really helps a lot as a principal. You know, what I just took from that is an onboarding process of having one-on-ones and really doing the whip from the right way.
And you do that through questions. You know, one of the things I've always said is, really, tell me a little bit more about that, David.
And a lot of times the answers you'll find are superficial till you peel back the onion yeah help me to understand that help me understand and then why why is that so important oh okay so and why again just keep asking the whys and then you get to the answer and then you can help them build their dream like you said originally you have those one-on-ones it works now the is, you know, we do a lot of surveys, personality profiling, and they're not the right fit. What if you buy a company, and you should know this going in.
That's the key. But you might also just be buying, you know, let's just say I'm buying a $5 million company.
Most likely, the staff, and I don't mean to say this to be rude, but I will just be blunt. The staff is not a necessity of a company that size.
I'm trying to buy the workers, but I'm really buying the clientele. I'm taking the past clients out and I'm getting rid of a competitor and I'm making him decide to not compete.
So I'm not a good fire. I don't fire anybody.
In fact, I start shaking. And if you lie cheater still, I will fire the shit out of you.
But when it comes down to just somebody that's like, I just don't get it. And now I say, shame on us.
Shame on me, actually, because we hired some of my people here say we've got professional interviewers that get jobs. And I say, well, did we check the references? Did we have them do any tests? Did we go to dinner with them outside of work and see how their relationships are? Do we get them out of their comfort zone outside of the interview?

What's the best way to do that when you find somebody that's really, really good at interviewing and you don't want to hire the wrong people?

You don't want to make these mistakes.

Okay.

I love that question because I really can't wait for you to hear what I'm going to say

here.

Yes.

I hate references.

I never check references.

I think references are total bullshit.

And the reason for that is everyone could find two or three people that think highly of them. It doesn't mean anything.
So what do I do? All about back channeling. I back channel the hell out of everyone that I'm planning on potentially bringing in.
You go to social media, you look at who's connected, you will find people and you'll find people and you ask them, Hey, do you know X, Y, Z say no okay do you know anyone that would know this person and almost always the answer is yes can you connect me to that person that would know this person great and back channeling you get the truth you don't get some just saying positive things because they happen to have a hundred people that hate them and they're terrible they've had terrible jobs but they found three you know, that they can give nice references for. So I do zero reference checking and I do all back channeling.
Well, let me give you an example. So David, this is my favorite question.
So David, tomorrow I got an appointment with Adam at 2 PM. We've already connected.
Can you tell me exactly what he's going to be telling me about you when I ask him these three questions? And I love it because they go, wait already you've talked to you know and another thing for humility is that i never really used to like this question so i read this last book but you know tell me about something that you think you need to work on and if you're like most people let me tell you what you're gonna say david right i work too hard yes you know it tells me i just don't and you know really i think it's about tenacity. I never give up.
And sometimes I just need to give up. And it's like, oh my God.
What you really just think, if I had to answer that question, and I really thought a lot about this is sometimes I take on too much. Sometimes I lose focus.
Sometimes I don't prioritize accurately. Sometimes I don't find someone to bounce things off of, which I should like an accountability accountability partner one of the biggest weaknesses i have is i do need to create for example i have the trainer come to me because i know i'm an escape artist morning tommy is not the same as night tommy night tommy says early tommy will get up at 5 30 but morning time doesn't get up before 7 this morning i did because i had allergies so if you just were telling the truth about this stuff it just shows humility and i think that's what i'm trying to get and then i like to give examples too i was just like i give statements i say not only that but i'm going to give you an example of how i totally screwed up and let me give an example of that actually in the book i literally list example after example example of like enormous mistakes that i made and you know the feedback is wow, I can't believe you shared all these things.
That was courageous to me. I'm like, not courageous.
You actually look better if you're sharing the mistakes that you've made. That means that you've learned from those, like we've talked about earlier.
So it's so important to give those specific examples because then it really drives it home. And you know, when someone seems like they are impervious to mistakes, that's the person to be as afraid of as possible.
That means they don't have good self-reflection and they're not able to really learn and they're not able to ask for help. And asking for help is pretty important.
That's what smart is in that book, the ideal team player. So this is what you want to go by.
It's Decide and Conquer. And I think it's going to be an amazing book.
And I'm going to get you back on if you'll have me, if you'll let me, and go over it. So you got that.
Everybody go out and buy Decide and Conquer by David Siegel. And next, I always say, what's the best way to get ahold of you? What's the best channel? If someone wants to reach out, they want to know some stuff.
Yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I have 33,000 followers on LinkedIn.
So that's probably the best way. Send me a LinkedIn invite.
I'm happy to engage with you through that. You want to check out Meetup.
You can send me an email even because I like learning from everyone. David at meetup.com.
Pretty darn simple. So send me an email and you can find that.
And as I said, you get the book anywhere. The audio copy of the book is also a lot of fun for people that enjoy listening to books so thank you for the opportunity tommy i totally learned a lot from this conversation really appreciate it last thing two quick questions are there a few books you highly recommend i know you said good oh yeah oh my god okay here they go so the classic of classics which i guarantee you have read.
If not, I'll people that's it how to win friends and influence people del carnegie's book dude that was not planned everyone who's listening to this right now so i teach as i mentioned at columbia and i have five books that entrepreneurs have to read how to win friends and influence because one of them people are always like why don't you read that i don't need friends i'm like dude you don't understand when you are an entrepreneur you need to recruit investors you need to recruit people you need to sell product you need to be influencing people right left and center probably the most important book for you to read is how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie so anyway that's one the second is which i alluded to eric rice lean really, really important to understand how to take incremental approaches to being successful versus take giant home run swings and keep striking out and kind of a process around iteration learning. I love the hard thing about hard things that Ben Horowitz, for any leader, he went through a lot of challenges in kind of running his business.
It's a great seller, hard thing about hard things. And, you know, the late, great Tony Hsieh, who was the founder of Zappos, wrote a great book called Delivering Happiness about his experiences in leadership.
And I guess number five for me has to be my own book, Deciding Con. Yes, good job.
And here's how we're going to finish it. I know you're a busy man.
We talked about a lot of amazing things. I really, really appreciate you coming on.
I took a ton out of this. I know there's so many things out there that you're an expert on.
You teach at Columbia, for God's sakes. Maybe there's something that the audience needs to hear that we didn't address.
Maybe there's something you wanted to leave them with. Whatever it is, I want to give you the stage as much time as you need.
If you got to run, that's fine. Just make it under a minute if you got a few minutes.
But whatever topic, anything that you want to do, I'll have you finish this out. Oh, that's so nice of you.
Okay. Yeah.
There is something that I'm passionate about, which is my high school yearbook quote was the following. Sometimes in our pursuit of happiness, it's important to pause and just be happy.
And I think we all want to succeed, but it's also important to enjoy the process and not to keep saying, if I just get this in five years from now, I'm going to be happy. If I just get this in 10 years from now, I'm just going to be happy.
And suddenly you're 80 years old and just like, by the time I'm 90, I'm finally going to be happy. It's really important to do two things, to find joy and energy and and excitement, just like you have, and just like I have in our day to days.
And at the same time, set ourselves up for future success and not just kind of just finding joy without the future success. So what I would say is don't push off happiness today, find ways of making your day to day to be meaningful, pursue your your dreams like we talked about earlier and good things will end up ultimately happening david you are the man i am going to be in touch with you i promise i'll reach out to you when uh i'll knock out your book in the next week and i'm really really excited you know one of the things i was talking to the guy that booked it and he's like i think he's got a book and i'm like can you tell me that before next time so i can read it but i'll knock it out you can tell i'm a reader and i'd love to give you a quick buzz i don't know i would love that is it 39 31 does that get into you 39 31 the last four 39 31 what's what's that it's your phone number apparently oh so it's just five years yeah yeah that is yeah yeah 3931 i'm'm sorry like 3931 but uh not that that's great listen man you're a special kind of leader and i think i can learn a lot just by reading your book and i think anybody that's listening to this leaders are readers you should go out and get david's book and david once again i really really appreciate it thank you i'm so happy i'm excited to hear hear your feedback on the book.
Oh, by the way, I'm documenting it now. I'm going to make sure it's documented.
And then I'm expecting a text back within a week from today, just like you taught me to say. Done.
You put a deadline. I got to go put it on my calendar.
And that's the good job. Thanks, David.
Take care. I'll see you later.
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