The Real West Michigan

ICYMI S1|EP 13-16 with Scott Hays, Brent Case, Crystal Barnett and Sam VerMerris

• Eldon Palmer

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Discover why Grand Rapids is quickly becoming a business haven as Brent Case from the Right Place reveals the secrets behind employee retention and local business expansion in West Michigan. Learn about the strategic advantages like workforce availability and cost of living that make this region a hotspot for companies. But that's not all: filmmaker Sam VerMerris takes us on a behind-the-scenes journey of perseverance in the world of short films, sharing the grit required to complete creative projects despite overwhelming odds. 

Uncover the transformative power of resilience through Crystal Barnett's heartfelt story of overcoming addiction, founding a sober living facility for single mothers, and the emotional journey of regaining custody of her children. Hear Scott Hayes' insightful perspective on optimizing talent through behavioral assessments and how understanding these dynamics has been pivotal in his career. This episode is a rich tapestry of inspiring tales and invaluable lessons from a diverse group of professionals, each bringing a unique perspective on overcoming life's challenges and achieving personal growth.

Video Podcast available here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRealWestMichigan

THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY: THE PALMER GROUP real estate team. The Palmer Group is an energetic team within 616 REALTY led by Eldon Palmer with over 20 years of experience helping people navigate the home buying and selling process in West Michigan. To support the channel and all of our guests, contact Eldon@ThePalmer.Group, drop a COMMENT, SHARE, LIKE or SUBSCRIBE to this podcast.

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Eldon Palmer:

Welcome to this episode, which is a compilation of highlights and best moments and key takeaways from four episodes that we've recorded here previously. We want to give you a taste test and a sample, so enjoy these recaps and check out the full episodes. All right, in this episode we have Brent Case with the Right Place. Brent has been working for the Right Place, which brings businesses here to West Michigan, but what I learned in this episode is that 85% of their job is actually helping with employee retention and expanding local businesses. So enjoy Brent's story in our conversation as he discusses how he's grown up in a small town to traveling to big cities and eventually ending up here in West Michigan. Hear what he finds special about West Michigan and some of the valuable lessons he's learned.

Brent Case:

So you hear every now and again about companies closing down and laying off, and our whole mission is to try to avoid all that and help them expand, help them stay ahead of the curve and technologies to remain competitive. We provide training on creating an environment, a work environment where they can retain their employees, help their employees upskill. So it's pretty diverse on what we're doing. So we, in addition to doing what we call business retention, we have a talent team at the right place, where that's their primary goal is to bring in new talent. So to recruit them, get those boomerangs coming back from Chicago or wherever they might have left, get them to come back. That's called Hello West Michigan. Okay, we have a diversity, equity and an inclusion arm in the right place trying to help those employers. There's some big ones out there that employ thousands of people that have a very diverse workforce. How do you manage that and make it a place where people want to work, you know, for many years, and reduce the turnover rate?

Eldon Palmer:

What was their? You know what are their primary reasons for that. For choosing here I mean healthy. We have the, you know, fruit industry and some other agriculture.

Brent Case:

Well, number one is workforce. Okay, because there are so many food production companies here. You know they can, can. If they have the right culture, have the right pay levels and benefits, they can bring people in from existing food manufacturers. That makes sense. Talent and workforce availability was number one. Um, really, though they were looking at Chicago and New Jersey and so just on pricing, or in the price of land taxes, right, you know, the cost of doing business here in Grand Rapids is much lower than both of both Chicago and New Jersey.

Eldon Palmer:

For sure, yeah. Cost of living, cost of work, for all of that stuff, yeah, and then our ace in the hole was their CEO.

Brent Case:

So he had left Astita Foods and was doing some consulting and they reached out to him to help them find the right location for SnackCraft. And I say they, it's the Greek owners of the company, but also a private equity firm out of the UK. So they got with. His name is joe riley and uh, he's like. You know, you can put it in chicago, you can put it in jersey, but it'd be a lot smarter to put it here in grand rapids.

Brent Case:

So we basically gave um joe all the supporting data, um on the cost, on the workforce, the availability of, you know, raw materials yeah um, we, we here in west michigan, we have access to, you know, fruits, vegetables, flour, wheat grain, all the all the stuff that you need, right? So just proximity to the supply chain was important too. But um, yeah, joe was our ace in the hole.

Eldon Palmer:

Great having that relationship. You know, again, China shows those relationships paying off.

Brent Case:

Yeah, definitely. Joe had worked with the right place at his previous employer so he knew to call us.

Eldon Palmer:

Nice, yeah, good deal. Hey, welcome to Clips from episode 14 with Sam Bermarez, who actually is behind the engineering booth right now and such a wonderful, talented person. Sam has made some short films. He talks about his process, some of his recent award-winning short film, and I think you'll enjoy it. So if you enjoy filmmaking creativity, check out episode 14 with Sam and this clip here. So, like, what are some of the takeaways that you learned from this project, from the struggles and, um, just going through it?

Sam VerMerris:

uh, the most important one is just perseverance. Yeah, a lot of times that one scene you were talking about from the little movie I showed you when we first met we never finished that project because it was like a continuation almost of the mcdiver that we started. Okay, it was going to be like a longer form and we started shooting that whole thing twice and we got to like a midpoint and then we just never finished it, sure, and it was with that same group of guys. So I was like we're gonna finish this. And it was hard because you know people are busy in the weather.

Sam VerMerris:

It's like at some point we're not gonna have have snow anymore. And then how it's going to be weird to finish it, like are we going to come back next winter? And like I don't think that's going to happen. So just like pushing everybody to like do it and like galvanizing people to be motivated to do it, especially when it's like a snow day, it's like I don't want to go out and like freeze my toes off, just so being a like a people person and leading people to do that, um was a very important skill that I still have yet to develop yeah, great lesson, all right.

Eldon Palmer:

This episode clip is with scott hayes. Scott is a behavioral assessment and talent optimizer. Scott tells his story about wrestling shoplifters in his early career, getting tackled and stabbed, and he also moves on to expand about how he helps businesses optimize their talent through behavioral assessment programs. Super interesting. If you like behavioral psychology, this is an awesome episode and enjoy this clip.

Scott Hays:

And where I'm seeing companies pivot to now is, now that we have these people, how do we keep them? That's a really big deal, right? Well, if I know how you are behaviorally wired, I can, as a leader, I can give you what you need in order to be and feel successful to where you're like that scott guy. I really like him, like he's a great boss, and that's where we prescribe to what we call the platinum rule versus the golden rule when it comes to management. And everybody knows the golden rule right, do unto others as I'd want them to do unto me. Right, doesn't work anymore. We've kind of done it to ourselves, right we? So we've given people trophies just for participating, um, so we've done it to ourselves.

Scott Hays:

We prescribed what we call the platinum rule, which is doing to others as they need, because you need something different from me, who needs something different from every other person? And again, this is where we tailor our approach to our people. So we have a better cohesive environment where everybody um works well together and there's good morale, employee engagement, just a better team team environment. For me, it's just exciting helping companies and organizations build a like a tighter team dynamic and one of the tools, cool tools that we have in the system is what we call a one-on-one relationship guide, and it's where we can put two people up against each other, so like I can put me and you in there and we can see where we're, where we have strengths together, where we have cautions and and also tips on how to preserve that relationship.

Scott Hays:

Yeah, it's super interesting to me when we get into like where there's we're working for the same company, and which always gets me is like we're working for the same company. Why are we butting heads? Yeah usually what it is is that we're a miss on one or more of our drives okay, does that make?

Scott Hays:

sense. Yeah, oh for sure. So the easiest relationships that you're ever going to have are when people are behaviorally wired just like you. They just get you, they just understand. You's just easier. I could throw you into a room of a hundred different people and you will naturally start to gravitate towards the people who are like you. I could see that. It just flows. It's just easy. You don't have to explain yourself, just feels right. The most difficult relationships that you're ever going to have are when people are behaviorally wired opposite you yeah, I mean, I've seen you can just tell when you start talking to people.

Eldon Palmer:

You work in a room in a networking thing and it's just like, oh man, I'm moving over here because it's not comfortable. At the same time I may have a friend that, yeah, they're, they're same and I would traditionally call that personality. But it's much of you know, it's too narrow or it's not a good term in my my view. I know a lot of people call them personality tests over the years. But I think they they do different things and so they might put you in a block um of you know some of the traditional ones with the quadrants, but sure, um, you can definitely, especially once you're aware of it.

Eldon Palmer:

Yeah, if you, if you've never been made of aware of this kind of thing, then it's easy to just wonder. But it's been so helpful for me in my career to kind of understand some of these behavioral things and and understand that, okay, I might have to mirror, match this person a little bit. Not my natural, yeah, but to get through here, we're going to have match this person a little bit Not my natural conversation, but to get through here, we're going to have to, like, speak a little bit more of their language, which isn't necessarily comfortable.

Eldon Palmer:

But, most of the time, if I'm given a choice, I'm going to end up wandering around and find somebody that I just connect with differently, or similarly it feels right.

Eldon Palmer:

Welcome to this episode with Crystal Barnett. Crystal Barnett shares her story of struggling through addiction, losing her children, gaining them back, growing up in the inner city of Grand Rapids and how she moved on to start A Mother's Touch, which is sober living for single moms. She has a home with multiple rooms and a whole system set up for helping these moms recover, manage their children and get back into the workforce. She's looking to expand and she just has a wonderful story about all of this. So check out A Mother's Touch and check out the clips from this episode.

Crystal Barnett:

Change for me was when I had my last baby, my baby girl. I don't know why, I don't know what made this child a little different. Maybe it was just time, I don't know, but when I had my last baby she was I was. By that time I was involved with Child Protective Services for a second time. So the first time I did reunify with my kids. They didn't remove them that time, okay. But this last time, for the second time around, I had tested positive, my baby tested positive when I gave birth and I didn't have a bed for her to come home in. And as a result of that, um, cps came back into my life again. Um, we were able to get her a bassinet, but I couldn't stop using and so at that time and this again, this was the second time around same CPS worker wanted to work with me. The same judge and team legal team wanted to work with me again because I had had about a year of sobriety and I relapsed.

Crystal Barnett:

And so now they're back in my life, right. And so they wanted to work with me again. And so now they're back in my life, right? And so they wanted to work with me again. And the devastating part for me was when the judge told me I could not see my children Until I was able to show and prove myself.

Crystal Barnett:

At this time it was my son and my baby girl. And I said but, judge, you know we go to the same church. She said well, you're gonna have to go to another church. I couldn't see my children unless they it had to be supervised, but the judge had it. For the first two months I couldn't see them, period. She told me it was this is about you either you get it for you or you won't get it. And that was really hard. So when I, when I came to that's how I phrased it in the treatment center, somewhere along there, a deeper surrender happened and I came to this crossroad like crystal either you're gonna do what's required of you to get your children back or you're going to continue to repeat the same old pattern. Because my pattern was I would get out of jail or get out of treatment and go back into the environment that I knew which was the you know, yeah the environment's everything, in that sense it's all about environment.

Crystal Barnett:

You know, the difference was again to me. I believe that it was a god thing, because when I went into treatment this last time, the workers that I was working with had helped me. I had a little bitty apartment for, you know, for me and the two kids at the time. I had never had that getting out of treatment before. Okay, but the agencies that I was working for made sure my rent was paid, you know, for when I, when I get out of treatment and it was a, at that time it was a four month treatment for me, um, and I did aftercare, um, aftercare groups, which was intensive outpatient groups, uh, which was a step down from residential treatment, okay, so they kept the light, they kept the apartment, my rent going.

Crystal Barnett:

So this time I had an apartment to go to when I got out of treatment. Now, granted, I didn't have no electricity right and so I didn't have lights. When I got in, the treatment center told me that I could stay there until I was able to get them on, but I felt, you know, no, I go and I deal with the darkness. You know, my kids still couldn't come yet, you know, by that time I was seeing them for two hours a week, supervised still, you know. And so to answer, that was devastating for me and I had a fight in me that I didn't have before.

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