Connect a Greater Purpose to Your Work to Attract Great People!

 keywords

leadership, generosity, business culture, community service, giving back, employee engagement, customer relations, personal development, John Maxwell, Proverbs


 summary

In this episode of the Off the Ladder Podcast, Branden Sewell discusses the importance of generosity in leadership and business. He emphasizes that giving to others not only enriches the lives of those receiving but also enhances the giver's attitude and overall success. Through personal anecdotes and real-life examples, he illustrates how acts of kindness can create a positive impact on employees, customers, and the community. Branden encourages business owners to foster a culture of generosity, highlighting the challenges and rewards that come with it.


 takeaways

Giving to others has a profound positive impact.
Generosity is not about how much you have, but what you do with it.
Creating generational wealth can be a form of generosity.
Modeling generosity can inspire employees and create a positive culture.
Acts of kindness can significantly impact customers' lives.
Not everything in business needs a dollar sign attached.
Generosity can help build a mission-driven company culture.
Gratitude is essential in the giving process.
Entitlement can be a challenge in generous acts.
Generosity should be a strategic part of business planning.


Titles

The Power of Generosity in Leadership
Building a Generous Business Culture
Giving Back: The Heart of Leadership


 sound bites

"Giving is the highest level of living."
"Generosity is a form of selflessness."
"Not everything has a dollar sign on it."
"Show gratitude for acts of generosity."
"Generosity is a gift, it is a strength."
"Your team will be blessed by generosity."


Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Generosity in Leadership
02:54 The Impact of Giving on Personal and Professional Life
06:03 Real-Life Examples of Generosity in Business
08:57 Creating a Culture of Generosity
12:11 Challenges and Rewards of Generosity

Grow Your Business with Jobber
Sign up for a 14-day free trial or get a special discount when you sign up!

Get More Reviews w/ NiceJob
NiceJob Automates Your Review Requests!

The Perfect Payroll Solution
Gusto is a powerful and user friendly payroll provider. With Gusto you can integrate with Jobber and

Maximize Marketing Dollars w/ CallRail
Attach call tracking numbers to all your marketing campaigns and track their success!

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Branden Sewell (00:01.442)
Good morning, everybody. I'm Brandon Sewell. I'm the owner of SealPro Painting and the host of the Off the Ladder Podcast. Welcome to today's episode. We are here to help home service business owners learn so that they can lead well and ultimately live life off of the ladder. We've been doing these short episodes, and I've been diving into a daily devotional episode.

it's called Leadership Promises for Every Day by John Maxwell. let's go ahead and jump into today's topic. It says, Give yourself away, speak up for the people who have no voice, for the rights of all the down and outers, speak out for justice, stand up for the poor and destitute. Proverbs thirty one, eight through nine in the message bible.

John Maxwell writes, Nothing has such a positive impact on a person as giving to others. And people who have a giving spirit are some of the most positive people I know. That's because giving is the highest level of living. They focus their time and energy on what they can give to others rather than what they can get from them. And the more a person gives, the better his attitude.

Most unsuccessful people don't understand this concept. They believe that how much people give and their attitude about it are based on how much they have, but that's not true. I know many people who have very little but are tremendous givers, and I know people who have been blessed with money, good families, and wonderful careers who are stingy and suspicious of others. In life, it's not

what you have that makes a difference. It's what you do with what you have. And that is based completely on attitude. It's a good reminder. And honestly, I would probably be a lot more successful financially, if you want to call that success, if I wasn't as giving. And you know, it's like I I sometimes I ask myself or

Branden Sewell (02:24.89)
I'll I've even talked to pastors about this before. I was like, can you can you kind of like give to a fault? Right. So you have to you know, as men we're called to take care of our families. there's even scripture that says that a wise man stores up an inheritance for his children and his children's children. And you know, I think if we put that into the right frame of mind, if we are

taking care of our families. If we are saving up generational wealth, that is a form of generosity because we could just, you know,

Spend all of our money frivolously on meaningless things, but to save it and to invest it and to create generational wealth, and and thinking of like your children and their children is a form of generosity and selflessness. so I do think that that is important. now, what I would say on the business side of things, I think that we can model this for our

employees in a couple of different ways. I think one way is we can give to and be a part of, you know, organizations that are already giving back in some way that have a mission that we align with. so we could give towards those organizations. two, I think we can give of our time and our resources

Towards organizations who are giving back or making a difference in our communities. and then I think lastly, we can actually give to our employees and make a difference in their lives. what I and actually I'll add on a fourth one. we can give to customers because I think when our employees see our generosity towards customers or those in our community, that can make an impact as well.

Branden Sewell (04:36.258)
So like you know, a a good example of some of these is like this past year, we had a mission to be more generous. So like on Thanksgiving, myself as well as my team, we we prepared meals or you know, food items to go into meals that were packaged and given to the homeless on Thanksgiving. you know, we're

for Christmas. we gave towards a project that helped to fund giving towards into our community for Christmas gifts. we we also quite frequently try to be generous towards customers. I think the most recent recent e example of this and you know it's not always you know something

extremely extravagant, but it's the impact that it makes on even in an individual's life life. you know, this past week, I was going to do a estimate. it was for a gentleman who had called in and we knew there was something going on medically because we could hear that he talked with I'm not sure what you would call it. It's like one of those things that picks up the the vibration of your

vocal cords, I believe, to help help the person speak. I mean it kind of sounds like a robot. and so anyway, we we knew there was something going on medically. he had caught it and said all he needed was a trailer painted. we weren't really sure exactly what that meant. If it was like a mobile home or like a you know, it turns out that it was like a fifth wheel, kind of a small fifth wheel.

And so anyway, I go out there to bid the job and I'm looking around at what the gentleman needs painted. I see he's got this metal cook condition and it just hit me in my heart. And I was like, I can't charge this guy to paint this. I'm either going to send my guys here to do it, or I'm gonna see if my guys are willing to come and and do it for s as side work for really cheap.

Branden Sewell (07:02.742)
I reached out to my team, ran it by them, and my guys, they volunteered to come and do the work for free for this gentleman. and I gave them the whole backstory. You know, I said, Hey guys, look, I this is the situation. I don't feel like I can charge this guy like what we would have to charge them to do it through the business to be profitable. It's just not worth it. and like

hit the the budget and everything that he has. It's just it's not something that we could take on. we're either gonna have to do this for free or extremely cheap. my guys understand our culture and our values. So I had someone's, you know, jump right on it and say, I'll volunteer, I'll go do it. let's take care of this guy. So they go, they meet with him and the guy is just in tears, you know, in gratitude.

that we would do this for him and help him out. So, you know, it's just little things like that. We've had customers in the past where you know, I had a lady one time we were doing some painting for and she had us do some work, but then it got it came to my attention that she had cancer and she asked us to quote some other work and I said, look, ma'am, I said, I really appreciate you wanting to use us for additional work. but we're gonna do it for you for free. so we painted the inside of her home for free.

you know, and those are little moments where I get to show my team, my employees that hey, look, not everything has a dollar sign on it. Not everything has to be we don't we don't always have to charge. and sometimes we need to look beyond that. We need to see someone's humanity and just have compassion and empathy. And that's a really powerful thing. And I think people

they want to be part of something bigger than themselves, right? So if you look at our line of work and you know if if you just look at it as just a painting company, that could feel kind of like empty and meaningless. But when you say we are a painting company that is on mission to make a positive impact, and we do that by serving one another with excellence, our customers with excellence, and our community with excellence.

Branden Sewell (09:25.478)
we do that with values of excellence, compassion, humility, and optimism. Those I just wrapped up what our our values are, what our mission is as a company. and that's what we do, right? And so now these guys are a part of this company that has a mission, has a purpose that's bigger than just putting pain on surfaces, right? It's a we do it with a heart of

making a difference in people's lives. And you know, and we do that. We know that we can do that by how we serve people, right? If we can if you know people have an experience where you know, they deal with a company who doesn't show up, doesn't do what they say they're gonna do, is trying to rip them off all those different things, that can be a negative experience for a a person's life, right?

But if we show up and we show like, hey, we care, we we're we're you know, led with compassion and empathy in what we do, then I think that makes a big, big difference. And so we give in those ways because I want my team to see that and be a part of it. Now, if you're a homeowner

or a home service business owner and you're listening to this and everything has a dollar sign on it, you know, I would say evaluate that. yes, you have to make money, yes, you have to be profitable, but think about what message you're sending to your team, to the customers that you serve in your community when you have that approach or that attitude. I would challenge you to just

Be generous to not see a dollar sign on everything and see what that does for your company culture, see what it does for your employees. And you know, I will say this, it's not always easy because here's the thing is what you will have to battle a little bit in the midst of that giving is entitlement, right? So whether that's entitlement from customers or entitlement from your community or entitlement from your employees.

Branden Sewell (11:43.482)
like you don't have to give, right? You don't have to be generous. You're doing it because you want to. And I think if if employees or customers or your community just assume like that's a given, like, I expect this from them, well and there's no gratitude shown, then that's that's toxic, right? But if if you're if you give, right, and

There's a sense of gratitude in return. I I think that's healthy. I would also say, I think I covered this in another episode, give freely and without expecting anything in return from the person the people that you're giving to, whether that's employees, you know, customers, communities, organizations. the only thing that I would say is just hopefully you get shown gratitude. That doesn't have to be in the form of like,

a a monetary gift or anything like that. It's just like say thank you, right? Show you appreciate the act of generosity. I kind of say, like, if I give to you and then you don't show gratitude, that just I make a mental note, like, hey, I'm not gonna give to this person anymore because I gave when I didn't have to. They either treated me negatively, or dish treated me without gratitude. And I'm like, okay, yeah.

I'm not going to give to this person because it's only gonna feed into a sense of entitlement or say that okay, hey, it's okay to to act that way or treat somebody that way. so anyway, I think that being generous should be part of your strategy as a business owner and it is a gift, it is a strength. you will be more blessed to do that and your team's gonna be blessed.

It's just very fruitful. So I hope you guys got something out of this episode today. the goal is to keep these 15 minutes or less. So we're getting close to that. So I'm gonna bring this to a close. I hope that this was beneficial. If it was, please send it to somebody else so that they can join the community, listen to the podcast. please rate and review the show. if you want to, you can tune in on Wednesday morning.

Branden Sewell (14:09.3)
We drop a longer episode. We also do guest interviews too. So I'm in the process of trying to line up some new guests for this new season. and if you guys have guest suggestions or if there's topics you would like for me to cover that would help you, please reach out and let me know. And thank you so much for being a part of this community. I will see you next time on the next episode of the Off the Ladder Podcast.