Culture Lessons for Building a High Performance Team - Focus Lab

Company: Focus Lab

Owner(s): Erik Reagan, Bill Kenney, & Will Straughn

Year Started: 2010

Employees: 26 – 50

In this episode of An Agency Story, Russel Dubree sits down with Erik Reagan, co-founder of Focus Lab, to discuss how intentional culture isn’t just a feel-good concept, it’s a key driver of business success.

Erik shares how Focus Lab went from an unstructured team to a culture-first agency, where values aren’t just words on a wall but integrated into daily operations. From the creative patch ceremony that recognizes team excellence to the power of learning out loud, Erik breaks down actionable strategies any agency owner can use to build a workplace that inspires performance, engagement, and growth.

If you’re looking for proven ways to create a culture that fuels success, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.

Russel: 0:41

What if I told you that culture isn't just about happy employees. It's the key ingredient to high performance, engaged teams, and long term success. Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I'm your host Russel. In today's episode, I sit down with Eric Reagan from Focus Lab out of Savannah, Georgia to uncover how he built a culture that doesn't just retain talent, but inspires peak performance. From core values that actually mean something to creative recognition systems that fuel motivation, this conversation is packed with insights every agency owner needs to hear if you've ever wondered how to turn culture into a competitive advantage, stick around. This episode is for you. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Erik Reagan with Focus Lab and Built On Purpose. Thank you so much for joining today, Erik.

Erik: 1:31

Pleasure being here, thank you.

Russel: 1:32

I'm excited to get to today's conversation. Want to definitely hear about the agency you've built, but and then get to a topic that, uh, is just really passionate, uh, for, for myself and for you as well. If you don't mind, start us off. What does Focus Lab do and who do you do it for?

Erik: 1:48

Focus Lab is a B2B brand agency. We started about 13 years ago and, uh, we primarily serve kind of B2B tech, uh, companies. Most of them are in some form of growth stage in their, in their business. We also started a second, smaller agency kind of within the same organization, but it's a separate brand called Odi, O D I, and that's doing somewhat similar things for earlier stage businesses. Still B2B in tech, and that's our audience that we serve. We just work on the branding foundation for these organizations, the verbal, the visual things, um, and try to equip them really well as they then start to try and change some things about their marketing approach and how they're positioned and, and how they communicate with customers and others out there. We're about 13 years old and we've evolved over that time, but that's how I would describe us, uh, right now and how we've kind of planted our flag.

Russel: 2:38

Lovely. How did you come up with the name?

Erik: 2:40

Oh, man, what a question. I met my co-founder, Bill Kenney, in 2006, and he was doing freelance work under the name Ideal Design. I was doing freelance work, development work. He was doing mostly design. I was just going by my name, basically. When we met, I didn't have a name. I just kind of decided once we decided to kind of work on things together, we were just going to be Ideal Design. To make it feel more official, we added the word Firm, so he became Ideal Design Firm. We were basically two guys with day jobs who had a side hustle trying to build an agency. For about three years, we, the way that I talk about is we kind of co-freelanced, uh, with a, a desire to start an agency full-time someday. But no, no real plan or even understanding of how to do that. We just figured, okay, let's get more clients and then someday we'll be able to do this as our only job. In 2010, we got to that point. We reached the point where we had enough income in the business to both of us just go full time. A few months after that, we decided we didn't really care for the name, Ideal Design Firm. We wanted to name it something different that took the word design out, partially because we had a ton of development or code work that we were doing. We started to explore words and we landed on the word Focus. We love the word Focus. We've never run a business. We had no experience in trademark, naming companies. We didn't know any of this stuff. We just kind of thought we could register a name of Focus, like LLC or something. It didn't take us long to figure out that that's not the case. We would not be able to do that. Then we just started to look for a small second word. It's as boring as that. We just said, all right, well, what's a word we can tag onto the end of the word Focus that we do like? And we landed on Lab. We got a name change to Focus Lab LLC and when it comes to names, you got to get that domain name, right? You got to get your dot com. That also played into the decision. Focuslab.com was available. We said, okay, this is a good thing. We registered the new name and that was kind of the origin of where the name came from. The really sad part of the story is we went to register the domain about 30 days later. It was gone.

Russel: 4:44

Oh, wow.

Erik: 4:44

So to this day, we still do not own Focuslab.com. But, uh, that's where Focus Lab came from.

Russel: 4:50

Wow. It is funny, just the, the, the naming process and the, and the journey it goes through. I think we went through the same thing. We had Design in our name in the early days and, and then we got tired of the word Design and then, and then our new iteration we, you add the random adjective of media and what does that mean? We figure it out eventually, it sounds like.

Erik: 5:09

That's right.

Russel: 5:09

What was young Erik doing? What forged your path to before you were, before you actually started your agency?

Erik: 5:14

Young Erik got interested in writing code. Cause that's really the, the thing that I was bringing to the table with the agency was writing code. I got involved in, in that just cause my dad saw this developing, this budding kind of, um, market and industry of websites. He said, hey, you might be interested in this code stuff. At this point, this is 1996 or so. He just handed me a book on HTML and showed me how to build and test things with notepad and browsers. I was hooked. I thought it was loads of fun. That was kind of just a hobby, you know, as a, as a kid. Then into um, I don't know what year this would be but somewhere in high school, college age I ended up with quite a few friends who were in bands or if they were solo musicians they needed a website. They knew that I liked to tinker with the stuff so they would start coming to me. Hey, can you help me with a website? I would make them a website and um, that itself eventually got to a point where somebody was paying me for a website, uh, pretty much nothing, but still paying me. That I think kind of gave me a little glimpse of what was possible, uh, and kind of taking a hobby into a potential career. I'll leave a lot of the boring pieces out or maybe the pieces we don't have time for. But it's, it's stayed a hobby for quite some time and, uh, then it became really part of a career trajectory. I worked at a couple of places where I was a developer on staff, um, but really only for a few years, uh, cause I'd met my business partner, Bill or my future business partner, Bill, and met someone who had an equal interest in being good at a craft and being able to make it what keeps food on the table, what keeps lights on. Very little practical experience in building or running a business, even marginal experience in being employed. But we started, started the business. Started as a hobby. Dad was kind of the catalyst and just, um, playing around over the years. Grew it to a point where people were willing to pay me to do the stuff.

Russel: 7:07

Hobby turned career. Love those stories. As much as I would love to focus on your entire agency journey, we have other topics we want to get to, but, but maybe just for the folks at home, if you can just give the highlights of from when you started the agency to where you're at today, and then we'll, we'll get into the good topic of culture.

Erik: 7:24

Officially, we say we started in 2010 because that's when Bill and I were doing it full time. We use 2010 as sort of our birthday, if you will. It was me and it was Bill and we were just doing what we could. It didn't take too long for us to have more work than we could do on our own. Within about a year, we had a couple of people helping as contractors. Go forward another year, we were maybe five people. It was maybe three years in or so we were at maybe eight or nine people. Somewhere in there, we kind of had our first million dollar year, which we were just blown away by. I want to say around 2014, 2015, we were 15 people. We hit our first big bad season, had some layoffs. That was hard to learn from and navigate. Another two or so years go by and we're up to about 18, 19, 20 people, uh, doing a few million dollars a year, I think. It was probably around that time where my personal interest actually started to shift away from code and into culture and team building kind of stuff. Last year we got into the mid 30s, uh in headcount. Hands down, my favorite part of all of this is the people stuff. It's the culture stuff. For maybe five years now, I haven't really done any code, definitely any code for a client projects anymore. Then we even stopped offering that as a service as we defined who we as an agency are. That's been a little bit more about the evolution around the size and even some of the services, how I connect to them.

Russel: 8:41

There's gotta be a billion stories in beneath that, but we'll maybe just focus on the culture piece. Obviously something you're passionate about, again, share that same passion with you. Was that something that was evident to you when you started adding your first few team members back in the day?

Erik: 8:56

I went back and was reading through old kind of journal entries of my own, uh, from when we were getting ready to start the business. This was maybe six years ago or so. I was just revisiting the past, some things I'd written down in the 2010, 2009 timeframe. And I had written kind of my hope, my desire to build a business that was a great place to work and that contributed back to the community that I'm from and living in. That being said, the first few years, I don't think I was thinking much about that. In fact, I'm pretty sure I wasn't at all. I was just trying to make sure that we did have income coming in.

Russel: 9:32

Kept the lights on, yeah.

Erik: 9:32

Exactly. Not even just for us, but even now the contractors or the first employees. Those first few years, I'm pretty sure I was just almost distinctly focused on sales and code. Sure, I felt like, I feel like I was treating people well and creating a decent work environment, but it wasn't really intentional. It was just kind of how it was working out. It was probably five or so years in where I started to realize that, you know, I've enjoyed building websites for a long time, but I'm starting to get a glimpse of what it's like to build a team and to build a company. I like the way it feels. Pausing to really notice that is what I think kind of set me in this newer direction to focus more on culture.

Russel: 10:09

Yes. I think a lot of, a lot of owners start out, and I think we were the same way, I had this idea, it was like, yeah, I want it to be the fun, great place to work, but I don't think I understood of how you actually manufacture that. I think it was more, on my part, at least and I think I run into some others like, that'll just happen if you just. It'll just happen and, and it, and clearly it doesn't work that way. That's actually how, uh, culture can certainly run amok in my own experience. When you think back, was there a critical moment or, or, uh, something hit you in the face where that became a thing? Was it just more of a, just a pure evolution of thought process?

Erik: 10:40

I can't pinpoint a moment. I think it was a series of small things that eventually I kind of turned around and looked backwards and went, wow, this is, this is a really great place. Actually, I'm also willing to bet there's probably some comments from employees that helped me start to see that because I've worked with amazing, phenomenal people. You can probably relate to this, when you get positive feedback from an employee that it is a great place to work or that they appreciate, you know, this aspect of the culture or that benefit or this mindset or whatever, that stuff is, is, um, it's just fuel. It's pure fuel for me to just keep doing that type of work. I think it was a series of small things that, that builds up into some, some type of snowball rather than a distinct moment for me.

Russel: 11:24

Yes. Sharing in my own example of, I think at first, our hiring practices were so bad in the beginning. It was like, we might get three or four people to apply and I was like, all right, who's the best of that small group, uh, that applied through Munster or CareerBuilder or whatever we were doing. The mindset shift for us was when I finally, we took the time to really search out and seek, you know, someone we, we felt really strongly about, hey, they're, they're good and qualified and waited for that person. Once I saw the difference of how effectively they worked, it's like, like buying a nice new car. It's like, oh man, I want to create someplace where, you know, this, this person that works really well doesn't ever want to leave and, and start to answer those questions. Thinking back to when, when you kind of, early part of this evolution, what were some of the initial initiatives you started doing that, you know, where you were getting some of that positive feedback from and, and how that evolved?

Erik: 12:11

One of the first things that comes to mind is, is there was a very physical milestone where we moved from one office space to another. Just a little bit more context to this, I live right outside of Savannah, Georgia, Southeast Georgia. I'm born and raised in Savannah. We had an office in the downtown Savannah area and from the very first hires that we did, we've, we went from me and Bill in one space and place in Savannah to having at least one other person from a remote off, the home office location. Almost from our beginning, we've had a hybrid or fully remote kind of model. We're fully remote today. We went from a small like 220 square foot office to a like 10x in size office in the same building. That's a big change in space. When we made that change, we decided that it maybe was a good time to really get serious about capturing, defining, shaping some core values for our business. We didn't call them core values at the time, we called them core standards. We had nine of them that we developed and wrote some language for. Given the nature of our work, we, we had somebody on staff who was a great writer and interviewer. These came from interviews from somebody on our team, able to talk with me, with Bill, and then create just great language to describe and bring them to life. These core standards I'd say is, is one of the things that, you know, uh, it was an early kind of mile marker for me in getting intentional about our culture and they were received really well by our team. They became great tools to use with each other. A great shared language that we could reference. The word standard was really helpful for us because we wanted to be holding one another to good standards, to high standards. We received great feedback on that. To this day still receive really good feedback from our team and from our clients about our use of our integration of, uh, core values in our, in our business.

Russel: 14:02

Are you sure we didn't run the same business or is, are we just discovering that basically?

Erik: 14:06

Are we from different universes and like this multiverse out there?

Russel: 14:09

Went through the exact same exercise and at least have the comparison point in my younger naive days. I sat down and I created all these things and I said, this is what they are. It was not even close to what we are. But several years later, once we'd gone down this path, I took exactly what you're saying. I took the journalistic approach and said, let me just observe and then I'll write what we are. Not what those were aspirational, what we wanted to be. It kind of had the exact same effect. Once you had those in place, um, and kind of had those out there and you said it came in this common language and vernacular, what kind of things did you do to support them? How did they actually live out in the business?

Erik: 14:43

Man, we've had a lot of fun with this topic over the years. We try to bring our values into our literally daily work. I'm going to pick a few examples, but we have a lot of examples.

Russel: 14:54

I bet.

Erik: 14:55

One of my favorites is that at some point at this, I don't remember what year this would have been, let's call it five, six years ago, we created, we wanted to create something that felt like, swag-like. Branded stuff that's for the company, but something that we never sent to anybody else. You absolutely had to work here to receive it. The reason for that is we developed or designed and created a lot of fun swag elements that we'd take to conferences and send to people, uh, as a surprise over time. But we wanted to take, um, the time to create something that only people at Focus Lab would ever receive. What that resulted in was a set of, uh, patches. Literal patches that you could iron on to something. We're a brand agency and so we've got some phenomenal designers. We've designed some really awesome patches and a set of them center around our core values. Team members can nominate one another for these core values patches, and if you've earned it already, you can actually level up and earn higher levels of the same kind of core value. This system, it became a way that there was almost like a ceremony. We literally call it a patch ceremony. A ceremony around a person receiving recognition for how they live out the value. That's one of my favorite things that we've, we've added to the mix that brings these values to the forefront, brings them to life. If I go to almost the other end of the spectrum, the small, easy, fast side of the spectrum, we give each other kudos and praise all the time. One of the things that we do is in, we use Slack, like a lot of agencies. In Slack, we have a little mechanism where people can give each other shout outs and tie them to values at the same time. That's part of the daily side. We see that stuff pretty regularly. The fact that we tie values to it on purpose is, again, yet another way that we can keep the values in the forefront. Because really, that's, that's where VetCore values for any organization actually become valuable, is if they're just part of the daily language.

Russel: 16:47

Beautiful. I can't lie and say there's not a little bit of jealousy, tinge in the whole patch thing. I think I had a similar idea at one time and whatever reason, can't remember why I just never kind of brought it to fruition. I imagine there might even be some people out there thinking that's a little, that's a little corny or cheesy. But I'm like, no, that's, that's really cool. There's a reason why motorcycle gangs are so tight.

Erik: 17:07

Seriously. It's something that people on our team also get a lot of excitement and pride out of when they can be part of creating the patch itself. We don't just have this patch that's a visual product, but we also have very intentionally written short descriptions about each patch. So when you receive one, we have these small little like, I don't know, two and a half by five inch sort of cards that the patch is attached to, but it includes some language that describes what this patch is for. I know that if if folks are just listening to the audio they won't see this but for the video folks on the, i'll hold one up real quick. This says sauce and this is our first level of sauce patch. Sauce, I can explain If you'd like, but it's just basically our word for customer experience. The level one sauce patch is ketchup. This is designed as like a ketchup splat with just the word sauce written across it and some other supporting language. But, um, if you join a video call with somebody from our team, I think maybe one in three, maybe one in two people on the call, will have patches somewhere in the background because they're proud. They received this as a nomination by one of their peers to recognize something that they were, uh, thriving in or excelling at, or even displaying when it was hard. One of our values is lead with courage. They put them on display. They're proud of them. We're proud of them. It's a big deal.

Russel: 18:23

I was going to ask where, where do, where do people keep them? I didn't know if you had the actual cut vest or not.

Erik: 18:28

No vests yet.

Russel: 18:29

No vests? Okay. Maybe the next iteration. Just knowing you and, and again, someone focused on culture, I can't imagine that how you grow and develop and teach and kind of nurture employee growth and development wasn't a critical part of, uh, your, your journey in that as well. Can you speak to some of the things you might've done on that front?

Erik: 18:47

When it comes to developing, growing individually, my thought is that first that we just got to lead by example. If I have any hope or expectation that people on my team are investing time to develop themselves, I need to be putting that on display for myself. I need to be doing that kind of work. We try to talk about what it looks like for us to be growing, developing. There's a phrase that I like to use personally, uh, which is to just learn out loud. The spirit of that is, first off that if you, if you learn in a group setting, you're probably going to teach people as you learn. But also there's like a, there's almost an exponential growth that can happen, and then there's the little bit of inspiration that can happen almost as a little bit of a side effect where somebody might see that and say, you know, I've been, I've been thinking about figuring out if or how AI could fit into my workflow and I've just been putting it off because I'm maybe a little too reluctant. Maybe I should look into that. Or I've been, I've been thinking about sort of managing conflict and client calls better, but I haven't really taken the time to do that yet. I've seen so and so over there work on something. Maybe I should work on something too. There's that aspect of it as well. And then there's the very practical side, where we want to provide money and time to team members to invest in themselves. We try to lead by example in our own individual growth, and then we also try to prompt it and create space for it, uh, as well. We have a few spots where we tend to teach lessons, if you will. Some of them are directly tied to core values, actually. And then others are maybe feel kind of one off or random, but can be applicable to anybody at the team, no matter, no matter what seat you sit in.

Russel: 20:17

Again, similar universes here. We gave people the personal development budget that they could pretty much use towards anything that was, you know, you could say is growing, growing and learning, whether that was actually related to their, their role, or even sometimes outside of we had a very total person concepts. Another thing that I think of, I don't know if you had a construct, uh, similar to this, we called it Lifeblue University, that was the name of our business. Started out just kind of like a round table by the fire, just let's chat about things, but then it evolved into this, um, once a week we'd bring in lunch, we'd bring in speakers related to the field. We'd bring in nutritionists, we'd bring in financial experts to talk about how to, you know, set up your will or just all kinds of things like that. It was really fascinating just to even see a construct like that evolve. But in your own journey, is there something that you can think of that, it kind of started out just as a little spark? And then it's like, what it's become today is, just something you can really sit back and be proud of?

Erik: 21:08

There are probably multiple things. One of them, man, it's been a number of years since I was the one to initiate one of these, but we occasionally will just do like book clubs. It doesn't mean that everybody on the company's doing them. That would actually be a little much if you know, 30 some odd people are trying to talk about a book in a small period of time. Somewhere in 2015 or so I think, the first book that we, that we read as a group was probably, if i'm remembering correctly, it was a Brené Brown book. Daring Greatly I think is the first one we did. I think later we did Dare to Lead in another setting, but just getting together and discussing a book like that. I love to read. I love to talk about what I'm reading. That's actually one of the things I try to do on purpose so that I retain what I'm reading, the value of the things that stuck out to me that were valuable in that moment. I brought that to work with me. I asked others, hey, does anybody want to get together and read a book? Just to kind of talk about it? The interest was good. The conversations were great. Then we got busy and, you know, maybe demand picked up or something and it became difficult to almost give ourselves permission to slow down and discuss a good book. We kind of had an ebb and flow to this aspect, but there was the first few years of it where it was just somebody in like a leadership role would need to initiate that. That's not really the case anymore. This year we've had four or five books that people have gone through and anybody on the team can kind of prompt that opportunity and say, hey, I've been thinking about reading this book over here. Anybody want to read it with me? Next thing you know, we've got five or six people meeting each week and just talking through a book that is sometimes obviously related to our work, but in most cases not obviously, but certainly related to people and how we can use ideas from a book in work, outside of work. That's been kind of fun for me. Especially the past maybe 12 months or so seeing four or five of those groups get together and I've had zero involvement. It's just been fun to, to see that happen and I'm not saying that all of them happened because I did something necessarily, but, um, that's the first example that comes to mind when you ask that.

Russel: 23:07

You may have started the spark, but, uh, people carried the, the fire or the torch, um, after that. Very cool. We had a book club as well, but we didn't continue ours. That is a regret of mine. I probably have 8 billion more questions, but, uh, I don't think, um, I don't think anybody, maybe they'd want to listen to an eight hour podcast episode. A few things left I want to, want to pick your brain about. Talk to me about a mistake that you made in your journey when it relates to culture that, that was a hard lesson to learn.

Erik: 23:32

Which one to choose? It's tricky, right now. The mistakes that are closest to my heart as things that I care about learning from are ones that I actually can't share because there's a confidence level to them. I got to keep certain details in confidence and even just sharing little pieces would be enough for at least a couple dozen people to go, oh, I know what he's talking about and I didn't know that part. The mistake I would like to highlight is part of my own learning journey, part of my own professional development, going back to that theme. I got to a point where I wanted to just learn to tell stories better. I wanted to learn to be a better presenter, a better, like, visionary voice to a company. I started to practice. What does it mean to, to deliver a message through the vehicle of a story? How can I use that with my team? How can I use it to cast a better vision of where I feel like we can go and we'll go? We had, uh, a retreat in Tennessee or North Carolina? I don't remember. I think we were in North Carolina. We're on a retreat and, uh, at this point, maybe 20 or so of us, it was a week long and we were starting this retreat with what was supposed to be a really great kind of like vision casting speech and unveiling some new things to the team. Our team was in a bit of a transition of anyways so it felt like just a good opportunity to infuse some energy into the culture for where we're headed. I did not prepare for it very well. The content was not that big of a deal, but it involves some changes. I've never really gone through any change management at this point so I prepared enough to feel okay about it myself. But the changes that we shared, that I shared, cause I was basically the one on stage. It was basically in a big Airbnb living room. Wasn't a stage but everybody was sitting down except me so that was the stage. I shared these things, had some slides, kind of showed what was going on, the decisions we were making and the direction we were heading and it didn't go at all the way I hoped it would. Now in the moment, people on average were like cool. This is great. Sounds good. But I knew once I was done that night that it just didn't land the way I, I wanted it to. Russel, I kid you not, I wanted to drive home that night. I felt that bad It sucked for me and then even a few days into the retreat, I'm catching wind of some things. I'm like, yeah, confirmation. It did not land the way I wanted it to. This is not cool. Now the retreat was still really fun. A lot of us really had a really great time. There were good things coming out of that time, but that aspect of it definitely goes into my mistake category, my mistake experience. John Maxwell says that, uh, he kind of has a little contrarian view on the statement that experience is the best teacher. He says, no, experience is not the best teacher. Evaluated experience is the best teacher. I was committed to evaluating. What did I miss? What did I do wrong? I had a conference I was speaking at the next week and I was sharing this experience with a close friend, somebody I know I can share details with and know he's going to stay just between the two of us. For the maybe 10 to 12 months leading up to that retreat, I kept having great friends recommend a book to me that I was like, I have a long list of books I want to read. I imagine you might as well. That book just kind of like sat somewhere in the list in like this vague spot, not priority, just kind of like, I'll get to it. I'm sitting there telling my friend about how poorly this experience was or how it went and he said, hey, have you ever, uh, read this book? And he he named it and I'm like, oh my gosh I've been hearing that title for a year. Please don't tell me that it would have prevented what I just did. The book was Traction by Geno Wickman. That led us to Implementing entrepreneurial operating system or EOS, and that failure or mistake on my end became the catalyst for one of the best things we've ever done in our business, which is to implement EOS. That's a story of itself to, it kind of sets up a whole other story, but, um, yeah, that was a, that was a memorable one for me.

Russel: 27:24

Thank you for sharing that. Sounds like a less than fun moment, but, um, sounds like it also, you were able to turn that into quite a meaningful moment as well. That's all we can do in this game. Obviously there's, I think some owners that, you know, for whatever reason, however their evolution, maybe it's their personality, this, this, you know, either comes naturally to them or gets forged naturally to them in the course of their businesses, it's just a hurdle you have to solve. For those that are maybe not quite there yet in their journey, or, or maybe it doesn't come as naturally, how do you sell or convey the importance of what culture is to maybe someone that's still in that, maybe survival money focused route?

Erik: 27:58

There's a, a short phrase that I will steal cause I can't remember the author's name to give him credit. Otherwise they call it borrowing. Going back even a few decades, you've got somebody like Peter Drucker saying the phrase that at this point is classic, which is culture eats strategy for breakfast. Good grief was that man ahead of his time with that statement. We didn't have a lot of measurable ways to prove that's the case, but at this point, we've actually got plenty of research that even just proves that a healthy culture has a tangible impact. But there's a small phrase that I really like. I really wish I could remember the author's name, but just searching the title will, will find the answer. The book that he wrote is called Culture Wins and his just simple premise in the whole book is that the statement applies no matter if it's a good culture or a bad culture. If you've got a good culture, it's going to win over and then he kind of gives some examples like Drucker White say strategy, but he also says if you have a bad culture, it's going to win over a good strategy. Your culture is going to win. You might want to make it good. There's plenty of research, it doesn't take long to find some pretty decent evidence to show the, the bottom line impact of a healthy work environment, of a healthy work culture. We've we said culture a lot. I'm not talking about the, the cheesy stereotypical things like games.

Russel: 29:10

Ping pong tables.

Erik: 29:11

Games at work, weird perks that sound cool. We're talking about what is it like to work here? That's the culture. Russel, you described earlier, this feeling of wanting to build a place, um, where people don't necessarily want to go somewhere else. That resonates a lot with me, um, because when I think about creating a strong culture, I kind of want one of the outcomes to be that it's really hard to leave and not because people are tied to it or like, or like tethered in some way, but that it's just hard to decide to go somewhere else. Even if that somewhere else is a really great offer or opportunity. Talking to people who have those cultures can also be a helpful. If you're not sure if it's worth the hassle, just talking to people who, who say that, you know, culture means something to their team.

Russel: 29:55

Beautifully put. I do some speaking around culture as well and I really quantify it as, yeah, that culture eats strategy for lunch, and then to break that down even a step further, that culture is beyond just the fun stuff, like you mentioned. That culture is the accumulation of all the behaviors in the business and those can be positive behaviors or those can be negative behaviors. And if you can tip the tide to more positive behaviors, then you're, you know, you're on at least the winning path. That's a great way to quantify all that, so thank you for sharing that. Have you come across or, or implemented anything that measures, uh, in terms of culture and where you can not just feel good about it, but you can actually say, hey, you know, we, we are what we want to be, or at least down that path and, and can actually quantify that in some way?

Erik: 30:36

We have a few things that we do on our own. We have a couple of things we've recently explored that involve outside parties. One of the very simple things that we do, this might sound kind of weird to a number of listeners. We have a weekly all hands meeting and about half of that agenda or time is actually just set up to be an open mic moment or opportunity where anybody can just grab the mic. Usually they're giving somebody a high five or they're sharing a win of their own. That's weekly and it's tracked. We literally count it. We count how many people received a high five. A specific high five. Not a broad, vague, like, hey, good job. A specific high five. This might sound a little weird, but we, we literally measure that weekly, and watch it ebb and flow with seasons. We view that as one, just one small measurement of how are things right now? We also use, uh, some software. There's multiple tools out here like this, but we use, uh, something called Lattice, where one of the pieces of the software is that every single week, our team fills out a weekly report. How was your week? We ask some specific questions, but there's one question that's numeric in its answer, and it's basically a temp check on how you doing? One through five, five being the best, one being terrible, and we measure that too. We track the changes and, um, those are pretty straightforward, but weekly pulse checks on how are things in general. For those to be helpful, you have to have a certain type of culture. You can't just, like, do that anywhere. You also have to be cautious to not water it down or almost manipulate it in a way, because that's, some places if you do this in the wrong place, you know, I could see a leadership team trying to convince people to rate the week better or, you know, give high fives because we're counting them. I think that most of our team is aware that we count these things, but we don't make a show of it. Only about five or six people even look at the numbers, uh, from the high fives. They're just genuine. It has to work in your workplace, but those are a few things we've done internally. Externally, we've, we've just recently worked with some of the, the organizations that actually come in and do surveys of your staff and give you a grade, basically. A really common one is the, the organization called Great Places to Work. We did one of their surveys for the first time this year. There's some investment in that because it's pretty extensive. That was a really cool one. I didn't really know what to expect out of that this year. I'll admit I was, I went into it thinking that they were just a business where they, we would be paying them to put a badge on our website. I had a pretty kind of cynical view of what it was. But it was, it was genuinely a good survey with good questions with valuable insights. I was excited to see that, with no kind of persuasion or influence, every single person at our company answered those questions in such a great way. Literally 100 percent of our team said that this is a great place to work. And if you go through the Great Places to Work website, you can kind of click through and see the scores, the ratings of different companies. And a hundred's, not super common. I took a lot of, uh, just joy in, in seeing the fruit of that and also seeing an external measurement, uh, of how things are.

Russel: 33:32

There's so many things you mentioned there that I just want to just go down all those rabbit holes. I think we found the same as, we used the Best Places to Work, uh, those types of surveys. I can't lie and say I didn't love the, the, the credibility to it. But I think there's the key word that you said that it was coming from a place of genuineness. I almost have to say that I feel like that's not a subtle notion that culture has to be genuine. You can't manipulate culture. You can't force it or you're going to, you're going to, you're going to go down an equally terrifying or, uh, uh, oppositely terrifying path. If that's the case, I don't know if you have any other thoughts on that, but I do think that's a very important thing.

Erik: 34:07

Yeah, I mean, I'll give the, the tweet sized thought on it. There's a term that I've been bouncing around in my brain. I have yet to put pen to paper on it, but, um, it maybe comes from because we're a branding agency. But I think that there's almost like a level of brand integrity that applies here, because if your values as a company, the ones that you talk about externally, if they're not lived out internally, then there's an integrity problem there. A culture that is purely a facade is, um, because it's really just marketing. Disingenuous marketing at that.

Russel: 34:36

I think if people can understand that, hey, if you're not genuine in your approach to this, you're, you're going to fail, so however you need to start, be genuine. Thank you for sharing that. We're going to have to wrap up here, but, um, one, one question I certainly want to get to is you've, you're, you're kind of in a, uh, an interesting spot in your career and you've got a pretty cool thing you're, you're in the works of creating and moving on to. If you don't mind sharing, sharing a little bit about that?

Erik: 34:59

For sure. Part of the work I've done within Focus Lab over the years has led me to just a hunger, a desire to find ways to help other companies with similar things with regards to kind of their culture, their, their environment. Somewhere along the way, I started to think of, what would it be like to actually own a second business where that team just did this type of work? Started a second company, and that one's called Built on Purpose. It was just born out of kind of this simple, but I think kind of powerful notion that people, people deserve to enjoy going to work. That's the gist there. The work that we're doing with Built on Purpose does center a lot around culture, but also around personal growth and development. There's coaching involved. There's kind of leadership development and training. Then there's sort of just the consultative side of working with leadership teams to help them create good cultures. The hard sell on it is that that's slow work. It's not something that you can do quickly. It's also not something that you can pay somebody outside to completely do for you. They can help identify and unearth things, but the work is still yours as an agency owner or as an entrepreneur. Built on Purpose is, is just a resource for entrepreneurs and owners who want to invest in themselves and their teams to make a place that is hard to leave. That's the short version of Built on Purpose and I'll be, you know, talking more about it as time goes by.

Russel: 36:14

Love it. Very excited for you and that venture. I hope that is a billion dollar business because if it is, the world will actually be, uh, an entirely better place. Good luck to you and congrats on the new venture. Last big question for you, Erik. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?

Erik: 36:30

I don't know yet. I love the question.

Russel: 36:33

That is the first, uh, that, but, but might be the most genuine answer.

Erik: 36:37

I love the question. It's something I've pondered myself. I'm rereading Grit by Angela Duckworth right now. I read it a few years ago, loved it and I'm now going through it with another group. She mentions in it, this idea of whether grit is just innate or if it's something you develop. Her answer is is basically like, yes, it's both. I kind of suspect that entrepreneurialism is maybe a little bit of both. Maybe there's a bit of both in, in, in the answer, but, uh, but I don't know.

Russel: 37:03

All right. You come back to us when, when you think you've solidified an answer, but that's, that's probably, maybe one of the best answers yet is who knows? If people want to know more about Focus Lab and Built on Purpose and your own journey, where can they go?

Erik: 37:15

Builtonpurposehq.com. Couldn't get the builtonpurpose.com

Russel: 37:18

I felt the pain in that statement.

Erik: 37:20

You did. I had to make sure it was felt because it is felt for me and I try to be transparent. Builtonpurposehq.com and then focuslab.agency are the two websites. You can find all of our social media things on both of those websites.

Russel: 37:32

Awesome. There you have it, folks, you know where to go to. Man, Erik, great conversation. I wish, again, could continue it for the rest of the day here, but I'm sure my wife wants me to, to get onto other things as well. So many fascinating insights, um, and I'm so happy to see, you know, how that's impacted your journey and the fact that you're going to share it with others. Thank you so much for sharing all that and taking the time to be on the show today.

Erik: 37:53

Man, thanks for having me, Russel. I've enjoyed the show. I've listened to some episodes and that's just a honor to be part of it so thanks for asking me.

38:02

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.

Erik: 38:38

Before I really set off my sights on an agency as a career path, I actually had my sights set on music. I come from a family of musicians. My parents taught music. My grandmother is a professional pianist. I went to college for music education and when I was in late high school, I started to work at churches doing music in one way or another. I was around maybe 19 years old and I was basically like the person at the front doing the leading of the music in the church service there's this song, it's an old hymn. It's called I Have Decided to Follow Jesus. It's one of the, like, simplest songs with lyric, lyrically out there. You're basically singing the same sentence over and over, and then you change the sentence and you sing that one over and over, you change the sentence, you sing that one. It's very, very straightforward. One of the sentences is, um, the cross before me and the world behind me and I'm leading this congregation and music and on the microphone as the leader I say the, the cross behind me, the world before me. The message is like a complete 180 there and I don't realize, I don't know in the moment because of, of, I can't really see everybody. I don't know if anybody really noticed what happened or if it was just me. Then in the same set of music, so we had multiple songs in a set. The same set, I'm playing an electric guitar, and we are in a moment that's very just chill, very calm, and I have an electric guitar with some effects pedals, and I hit the wrong pedal. Instead of it being this nice, relaxed tone on my guitar, it was basically like a overdrive, like rock sound. It just filled the room through the speakers and I was just like, this is not my day. Today's just not been it. I don't think I'll ever forget that experience. Really, what I found is I was, I thought a lot more about that than anybody else in that room was bothered by. It was way, in my head way bigger of an issue than it became but I was like, how did I swing this? Both of these things in one small set of music? Anyways, uh, like I said, some of my musician friends will probably empathize with that experience. Some of my church musician friends will probably empathize even more with it, uh, and then maybe some people won't, won't, uh, won't really understand how to feel that, but man, I was, I was definitely embarrassed.

Russel: 40:45

I bet. It sounds like, you know, kind of a, I don't know if the word's a metaphor, analogy or just similar scenario, like a leadership experience. You just had it in this, in this music scene. I thought it was going to be more like I had this, this flash of back to the future come to mind of like, you know, when he finishes his rock performance and everybody's kind of like, what? But as you said, you know, people certainly weren't thinking about it as much as you.